FeedCity

Pogue was my guest on The Talk Show a few weeks ago to talk about his new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, and the show was a lot of fun. But the book is so good, so comprehensive, so fun that it feels essential to link to it whilst we celebrate Apple’s 50th year. I’m a prin...

“ICE Tours VT provides guided bus tours to many of these facilities, where you will learn about the scope, scale, and history of DHS in Vermont. Think Hollywood star tours, but instead of celebrity mansions you get federal surveillance infrastructure.”

David Pogue, on his new blog at Substack: When the iPhone was about to go on sale in 2007, a thousand people lined up around the block at New York City’s Apple Store. I’d written a parody of “My Way,” with the crazy idea of filming a music video with the participation o...

The New York Times (gift link): Critics warn it still has many issues — its portico is too big, its stairs lead nowhere, its columns will block views from inside the ballroom. And that’s just the portico. This is a really good piece, with animated-as-you-scroll illust...

I just sent the March edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter:

• More agentic engineering patterns
• Streaming experts with MoE models on a Mac
• Model releases in March
• Vibe porting
• Supply chain attacks against PyPI and NPM
• Stuff I shipped
• What I'm using, March 2026 edition
• And a couple of museums

Here's a copy of the February newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

Nasa has said it's back in the business of sending astronauts to the Moon, after the Artemis II mission successfully blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. It said there had been a temporary loss of communications but all was now well, and the four astronauts on board w...

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a6

• The same model ID no longer needs to be repeated in both the default model and allowed models lists - setting it as a default model automatically adds it to the allowed models list. #6
• Improved documentation for Python API usage.

Tags: llm, datasette

Release: datasette-enrichments-llm 0.2a1

• The actor who triggers an enrichment is now passed to the llm.mode(... actor=actor) method. #3

Tags: enrichments, llm, datasette

Kalley Huang, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

As that happened, Apple laid off staff “again and again and again,” Mr. Espinosa said. His manager told him that he had been spared because he had worked for the company for so long that his severance package would be too expensive.

“I was wondering what I was going to do because I had no college degree and I had only worked at one company,” Mr. Espinosa said. Then he figured: “I was here when we turned the lights on. I might as well stick around until we turn the lights off.”

Lovely read.

Link: nytimes.com/2026/04/01/technology/apple-employee-50-years…

“LLM-generated passwords…appear strong, but are fundamentally insecure, because LLMs are designed to predict tokens – the opposite of securely and uniformly sampling random characters.”

Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa?

Sponsored by:

• Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits.
• Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together.
• Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/04/01/ep-445

This has been out in the world for a while, but I just ran across it the other day: Bloody Murder is an unreleased track recorded during the studio sessions for Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. It samples Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and it’s gooood. Available on YouTube and Soundcloud.

See also Dwells’ mashup of Everything In Its Right Place and N95.

Tags: Kendrick Lamar · music · Radiohead · remix · video

From Heatmap News & MIT, the Electricity Price Hub is “a new public data platform that provides monthly, utility-level estimates of residential electricity rates and bills across the United States going back to 2021…”

Lex Friedman (with an embedded video to prove it):

If you reverse the new Apple video that plays in “rewind,” it’s the Think Different ad music, pitched up.

Of course it is.

And, regarding that “◀︎◀︎ REW” button where the “REW” was set in bitmapped Chicago 12” but the “◀︎◀︎” was modern, Craig Hockenberry fixed it:

I pretended to be Susan Kare and fixed it, bottom is the original, top is my interpretation.

Link: hachyderm.io/@lexfri/116331181693278195

Lots of fun things I’ve never seen before in this 7-minute video. Best not to spoil them.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=74qPQt_5DdM

Scientists have genetically engineered tobacco plants to produce five psychedelic compounds, including psilocybin, DMT, and psychedelic compounds secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad.

By far the dumbest Internet Jackass Day “joke” I’ve seen so far is this one from the official New Jersey state account on Twitter/X, claiming that effective immediately, they’re lifting the statewide ban on self-service gasoline. For those of you who’ve never been there, I s...

Ryan D’Agostino, writing at Esquire (News+ link, in case Esquire stiffs you with their paywall): Cook was at Jobs’s house the day he died. As he drove back to the office to announce it to the employees and, in so doing, to the world, he felt a strange kind of shock — str...

I was thankful to read Marcin Wichary’s review of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything. I first heard about the book months and months ago; it sounded potentially interesting but I was afraid it was going to suffer from a now-familiar myopia of the “tech” old guard. Wi...