Serious question: who still goes on the App Store, and why? Personally, I haven’t searched for anything there except once out of boredom in 5 year

It's literally the only way to download apps.

A platform that doesn't let you simply install a desired package without being shown ads is kind of crazy but it's basically industry standard for everything that's not Linux.

He/She meant _searching_ for apps for a functionality in App Store is a sure way to get gobbledygooky apps. He/She probably searches them on $SEARCH_ENGINE and uses the AppStore just for the download.

Ah, so using a different advertisement platform instead of this one.

Let me put this another way: if you want to manually kick off app updates, you literally have to see ads. App Store > Today tab (the default view) has ads. Then you hit your profile button to escape the ad center and there is your app update interface.

This has been normalized by basically all commercial OS platforms, but imagine how insanely negatively received it would be if apt upgrade or brew upgrade displayed ads before your packages downloaded.

Apple even shows ads for stuff like Apple Music/TV+/Fitness/News+ free trials in the settings pane.

And people give Microsoft shit for having ads in their platform...at least they don't show you ads in Windows Update!

>but imagine how insanely negatively received it would be if apt upgrade

So what already happens when you ssh into an Ubuntu server to run apt upgrade to manually update it. It turns out people don't care that much.

I think they do care. In the gaming community, Ubuntu has gone from about 40% to 10% marketshare since 2018.

https://youtu.be/Pwt216nn0zE

Now, you might say this is because of the influence of SteamOS, but I think you’d be hard pressed to argue that Ubuntu has been getting more popular overall.

Linux users have a choice while iOS and Android users essentially don’t.

I am talking in relation server market share since the ad is targeted towards people running servers.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Ubuntu server has lost marketshare to other Linux distributions, but I don’t know that I have any way to verify it.

$SEARCH_ENGINE engine is nowadays copilot or chatgpt, both ad-free if you use a simple ad-blocker.

ChatGPT just announced ads, right? AI chat will be even harder to ad block than search engines. It won’t be a simple matter of blocking ad domains.

For how long? Months?

4 years, 11 months, and 3 days. Guaranteed. So not an issue right now.

Web search engines' advertising can be hidden with an ad blockier. The App Store? Not so much. Its search is completely unusable anyway, even when you give it the exact app name you want.

Apple's enshittification is real, and accelerating.

> It's literally the only way to download apps.

Is it? I don't think I've ever downloaded anything from Apple's app store. Hmm. What have I got? Chrome. Installed from website. GIMP. Installed from website. LibreOffice. Installed from website. VSCode. Installed from website. VLC. Installed from website. Zoom. Installed from website. Homebrew. Installed by using a command from a website. And then, a bunch of stuff installed from brew.

It is on iOS and iPadOS which is obviously what I was talking about.

Oh. Sorry. It honestly didn't even occur to me :-) I don't use those devices.

Other than all the scammy & microtransaction BS for the kids I’m always confused about this as well. I can count on one hand how many “new” apps I’ve installed in 2025 - one - the Bambu app for talking to the 3D printer.

I’ve got my banking apps, business apps, Strava, etc. the same now, for years. It would take a monumental effort from Apple for me to feel like “cruising” the App store, the idea is so patently ridiculous to me, I actually LOL’d thinking about it. Literally any other portable device is better to play games on - Switch, Steamdeck, 3DS, Atari Lynx, etc.

I have Apple Arcade as well (included with something else), I can’t even remember the last time I could be bothered to scroll that…

If Apple thinks more ads is a solution to some of their problems, things must be way worse than imagined over there.

It's bit less convenient, but I have access to a vps and a dns with a custom domain.

I can create any subdomain I want and tunnel the connexion to any port on my computer.

=> I can spinup a new subdomain in seconds, no data leakage, url that doesn't change, and it's cost nothing.

Whatever works for you best :)

Have a look to the cursor website. Everything dark gray on dark background. I’m unable to use it without an extension to change color…

On Mac, the app size when installed is 3.5GB!?? How can we get such a size?

I have:

- Affinity Designer 2 — 2.88 GB

- Affinity Photo 2 — 2.81 GB

+ publisher (don't have it)

So... smaller than both of them :)

thank you iterm2 team to continue to try things !

I give it a try this morning. I can't decide if I'm confortable with it or no.

Having multiple webpage combined with your front and back process traces is nice.

You can move to each panel with the same shortcuts like a sort of simplified linux tile manager within a terminal on mac.

It's also a good idea to interact less with the weird liquid glass redesign.

MCP parameter serialization fails consistently on consecutive function calls in both Claude Code and Claude Desktop, making MCP tools effectively unusable for any workflow requiring multiple parameter-based calls. I feel like someone ripped out part of my brain and then asked me to debug with what’s left.

And don't forget to do :

`workspaces = true`

in your config, to limit your history to the current git repo.

Thank you very much atuin team. Can't work without atuin installed.

So many constraints on computers in the 80s. But so much fun trying to get close to what we had in our heads!

Big nostalgia for that era. Everything was limited, but everything seemed possible.

What got me into computers was:

A = 1; B = 5; C = A+B : C= 6

But:

A = "firstname"; B = "lastname"; C = A+B : C="firstnamelastname".

I dont know why but I still remember the revelation.

Thank you for this release. I believe your library is a key component to unlocking the potential of LLMs without the limitations/restricitions of existing clients.

Since you released version 0.26 alpha, I’ve been trying to create a plugin to interact with a some MCP server, but it’s a bit too challenging for me. So far, I’ve managed to connect and dynamically retrieve and use tools, but I’m not yet able to pass parameters.

Yeah I had a bit of an experiment with MCP this morning, to see if I could get a quick plugin demo out for it. It's a bit tricky! The official mcp Python library really wants you to run asyncio and connect to the server and introspect the available tools.

Hi Simon!

I'm a heavy user of the llm tool, so as soon as I saw your post, I started tinkering with MCP.

I’ve just published an alpha version that works with stdio-based MCP servers (tested with @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem) - https://github.com/Virtuslab/llm-tools-mcp. Very early stage, so please make sure to use with --ta option (Manually approve every tool execution).

The code is still messy and there are a couple of TODOs in the README.md, but I plan to work on it full-time until the end of the week.

Some questions:

Where do you think mcp.json should be stored? Also, it might be a bit inconvenient to specify tools one by one with -T. Do you think adding a --all-tools flag or supporting glob patterns like -T name-prefix* in llm would be a good idea?

OK this looks like a very promising start!

You're using function-based tools at the moment, hence why you have to register each one individually.

The alternative to doing that is to use what I call a "toolbox", described here: https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/python-api.html#python-ap...

Those get you two things you need:

1. A single class can have multiple tool methods in it, you just have to specify it once 2. Toolboxes can take configuration

With a Toolbox, your plugin could work like this:

  llm -T 'MCP("path/to/mcp.json")' ...

You might even be able to design it such that you don't need a mcp.json at all, and everything gets passed to that constructor.

There's one catch: currently you would have to dynamically create the class with methods for each tool, which is possible in Python but a bit messy. I have an open issue to make that better here: https://github.com/simonw/llm/issues/1111

Thanks for feedback!

Ah, I saw "llm.Toolbox" but I thought it's just for plugin developer convenience.

I'll take a look at the issue you posted (#1111). Maybe I can contribute somehow :).

Nice. The only downside, is that I can spend so much time looking at this system where something seems to emerge, but not quite ...

Try looking at this system - lots of "lifeforms" emerge with several interesting behaviours https://lisyarus.github.io/webgpu/particle-life.html?particl...