From an article in The New Yorker about a bookstore that only sells signed books:

Even before he learned to love to read, Reiss the retail genius recognized what every real reader knows: a book is not just its contents but also, and inseparably, a special kind of object, a portal of sorts between people and places and ideas.

I’m still surprised that Mozilla shut down Pocket. Lots of competition in the bookmarking / read-later space, but that’s because it’s such an important complement to a web browser. I think the organization should’ve refocused around 2-3 great web things that work with Firefox.

Good post by Victoria Song at The Verge about distrust of smart glasses:

Meta’s glasses are great because they’re discreet. That discretion is also unnerving because it means they’re perfect monitoring tools. I’ve written this many times, but wearing modern smart glasses often makes me feel like I’m a spy. It doesn’t matter if the Ray-Ban Meta glasses have a privacy indicator light.

I’m curious how Apple (without Meta’s poor reputation on privacy) is going to handle this. Not sure it can be solved. In the future, there might be places that have signs like “take your smart glasses off”.

Got a preview from @vincent of something new coming up for Micro.blog Studio subscribers. Can’t wait to share it. It looks so good. 🎙️

CNN: “Supreme Court rules that Trump’s sweeping emergency tariffs are illegal.” A much-needed check on Trump’s power. Next up is the midterms. 🇺🇸

Downtown view from the Long Center. Just went to see Macbeth. 🎭

There’s a new proposed lexicon for Markdown-based content in AT Proto. I could support this. The problem is that currently there’s no good way to have multiple formats, and I think HTML is still the richest, most complete way to represent blog posts.

Ceiling skylight.

Hannah Aubry writes on the Mastodon blog about community initiatives including experiments to change how new users sign up:

At first, we’re planning to recommend the closest geographic server in the correct language based on data surfaced by the app store, so it will only be available initially on the Android and iOS apps. We may also experiment with other logic for recommending a server, including random distribution.

I don’t believe this will help. In fact, it might make users more confused. My proposal remains to move away from email-like user handles.

Hearing from multiple people now (including my son!) who have gone back to buying music. Spotify burnout. I still have a huge collection of iTunes purchases and ripped CDs, just sitting there.

When I found out Current was going to ship this week, I postponed making a video preview of my own RSS reader because it would feel like I was interfering with Current’s release. Now the tables have turned. Current is so popular that I just need to stay out of its way or I’ll get overshadowed. 🤪

Last year I was often expecting unexpected calls, from doctors and nurses, so I turned off “silence unknown callers”. I’ve now officially had enough of the spam interruptions. Enabled it again. ☎️

Bono on today’s release of Songs of Ash:

The songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year. These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. They are songs of defiance and dismay…

Always happy for new U2 songs. Listening now. 🎶

Guy Kawasaki blogs one of the more thoughtful takes on Facebook’s “move fast and break things”:

Today, what you break tends to matter. Systems are bigger, platforms are interconnected, and the consequences of failure travel farther and faster than they used to. What once felt like harmless iteration can now trigger lasting damage.

Started watching Lonesome Dove tonight. Don’t think I’ve seen it since it first came out, but I remember it having an impact. Still would like to read the book one day. 📺

The redesigned AT Proto site looks great. It even has a neat live firehose view.

A couple days ago I quietly made a rule for myself that I would not blog about AI at all this week. Halfway breaking it with a link to this AI-adjacent report from Mark Gurman about new Apple devices:

The pendant would essentially serve as an always-on camera for the smartphone that also includes a microphone for Siri input. Some Apple employees call it the “eyes and ears” of the phone.

Always listening is already a step too far for most people. Always filming? Apple’s strength is privacy, but on-device models don’t seem cut out for this right now. Will be fascinating to watch.

Thinking lately about the friends I grew up with but haven’t seen in years or decades. I’d like to reach out to a few of them. We all get so busy with everyday life that the important things sometimes slip away, indefinitely postponed.