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.

Back before the Duo announcement, I blogged:

"I still think what I’d really want is a foldable iPad mini with no outer screen."

I’m only halfway through John Gruber’s review, and I’m even more convinced that’s what I want:

"The outer device is, by far, the worst iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a miserable fat little thing. The inner device is a splendid, joyful, beautiful tablet, with a UI that out-iPads the iPad."

Never seen this before. Iced coffee in a bag at 787 Coffee. I guess handy for keeping it tightly closed, but pretty awkward for everything else. ☕️

I’m not totally surprised that Stratechery is getting an exclusive sponsor, but I am kind of amazed that Andrew Sharp will be flying in so often to record in person:

"I am extremely excited to announce that, starting this week, Sharp Tech will become a video podcast, recorded live and in-person. Over the past couple of months I have been building a small video studio in my home, and Andrew will be flying to Wisconsin every week (when possible) to make what I strongly believe will be a better product."

Sharp Tech has become one of my favorite podcasts. Always good.

Not sure what to make of the WSJ’s report on Anthropic’s draft IPO prospectus:

"The company is on the hook to pay around $450 billion in cloud computing agreements over the next seven to ten years. The bulk of these deals are noncancelable."

Not great. They probably should’ve built data centers a year ago like OpenAI did. I don’t believe AI is a bubble, but this IPO makes it feel like it, and a lot of companies will fail.

Joanna Stern reviews the Duo, finding “bugs and general wonkiness throughout iOS on the Duo”, but overall sees the potential in it. Also a cool machine to test durability by folding it thousands of times.

The Bookmarks → Links tab in Micro.blog Premium is practically unknown, but so useful. It archives a copy of everything you link to! HTML, CSS, everything. Really useful to find things later. Here’s a screenshot from my account.

I missed that Foursquare was sold recently. Former CEO Dennis Crowley has a good blog post reflecting on the company:

"I was heartbroken by this ending. There are so many people who put so much time and energy and passion and love into building Foursquare – the company, the products, the brand, the culture."

I’m still using Swarm. Micro.blog can import Foursquare data into your blog, but Swarm export barely works. Time to rebuild all of this on open standards.

We got to see A Few Good Men last night, starring Bradley Whitford and Tom Blyth. So great. Watched the movie just last week, but our daughters hadn’t seen it so it was all new. 🎭

I love the feeling of one minute after arriving in NYC, looking around and thinking, “Yeah, this is the city where things happen.” Almost wish I was in my 20s again so I could experience it with the anything is possible perspective of a full life ahead. Although at 50, I’m still quite the optimist.

Ben Thompson’s daily update today about “thin vs. thick” AI continues to sound right to me:

"… you can envision a world where compute is no longer scarce, and very cheap models in the cloud are also good enough; it’s hard even then to see local inference penciling out economically. That’s why the true case for this setup may ultimately depend not on free as in beer but free as in speech…"

Cloud AI is going to be best for most people. Local AI is great not because of cost but for control.

Yet more views from the train, earlier today going across a bay on the Hudson River. 🚂

Stopped for a while in Albany. 🚂

Mohawk River in Schenectady. 🚂

In other Anthropic news today, I’ve been thinking about this bill that Anthropic proposed where it’s not a show-stopper if only 50 people might be killed or seriously injured:

"The bill would let the government block a model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people, according to the report."

It’s weird to even put a number on this. But also, if gun manufacturers had to meet a similar standard before putting semi-automatic rifles on the market, the world would be a better place.

Anthropic announces a new public benefit fund, beyond what the existing b-corp can do:

"The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways: for example, we might explore large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations."

A little mysterious. I wonder what they have in mind (or if they know).

There’s a fun site that keeps track of Codex resets. OpenAI is in the middle of a nutty 28-day challenge to ship new features every day or give resets. Feels like a “bank error in your favor” every few days.

Crossing into Wisconsin. 🚂