Watched: Klara and the Sun. Beautiful. It lives up to the book. 🍿

We are so used to the App Store model that I don’t think we pause enough to note that app distribution is actually clunky and slow now. In 1996 it was faster for me to do a Mac app build, copy it to a floppy disk, and drive to a friend’s house with it than it is to ship an iOS app in 2026.

Looking over Block’s voice model Dessa, this aside in the announcement post made me laugh:

LLMs need an insane amount of text. Dessa learned language from hundreds of times fewer words (in fairness, LLMs also have to learn C++ and whatever the hell Angular is).

Marco Arment blogs about community and his break from Mastodon:

My break from Mastodon has been a relief in some ways, as I’ve felt increasing divergence between what I wanted and what I was getting from it, but I didn’t know where else to go.

The social web is fragmented now. There’s no longer an obvious “quit Twitter and go to Mastodon” answer like there used to be. The solution is more blogs, of course!

I don’t usually enjoy flying, and we had a couple hours of delays because of everyone arriving for F1, but it’s still amazing to have coffee and breakfast with family in NYC and then the same night be back in Austin for the Spurs / Rockets game. 🏀

Nice post by Jason Snell on the iPod’s 25th anniversary. Amazing that it has been that long. I had the original iPod at launch and it really was a special device. On how quickly the iPod was developed, Jason blogs:

Not every product can, or should, be made at a breakneck pace. But Apple should have the ability to shift into that higher gear from time to time, when the opportunity arises. I’m not sure today’s Apple is wired that way, and maybe remembering how quickly the iPod came to fruition could serve as a little bit of a prod for Apple to work on getting that capability back.

Michael Tsai has a rundown of links about the Mastodon 5 design, closing with this:

My first choice would be to see more people blogging on their own sites. But having longer and richer posts on Mastodon would be preferable to many of the alternatives. I still wish it supported RSS for my timeline and replies.

If only there was a social network that actually prioritized blogging and had RSS feeds for the timeline, mentions, and everything else. I’m quite biased but there really isn’t anything else like it.

Midnight was great. Love a musical that leaves you stunned at intermission, with no idea what to expect next. 🎭

The Met Cloisters.

168th street station.