FeedCity

Jason Snell, writing at Macworld, regarding joining the staff at MacUser back in 1993:

But as amazing and revelatory as the Mac was for me as a writer and editor of print and online publications, I rapidly discovered that the Apple of the period was a mess. My first day as a full-time employee, a copy editor popped his head over the cubicle wall and asked me if I had heard anything about layoffs. Welcome to the media, kid.

Link: macworld.com/article/3103792/thanks-for-the-wild-ride-apple…

Well, I’m back from my west coast trip, but I came home totally sick, the SSL cert for KDO wasn’t automatically renewed¹ so the site was down for several hours this morning, and my car has decided it’s suddenly out of brake fluid? Oh and I haven’t even seen Project Hail Mary yet. (I know, right?!??!??!!!)

*sigh*

I know when I’m beaten. It’s gonna be KDO Lite for a few more days while I get my life in order. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves…

1. A missed checklist item from when the site moved servers a few months ago.↩

Representatives from more than 40 countries took part in a virtual summit on Thursday to discuss the Strait of Hormuz crisis. French President Emmanuel Macron says using force to open the vital shipping lane is "unrealistic", and criticises the US for its mixed messages on the war. Also: a 200-year old discovery off the coast of Denmark, the latest on the Artemis II Moon mission. Plus: the blind man running a marathon with the help of strangers talking through his glasses.

60 Minutes published a short clip of a 2003 Dan Rather interview with Steve Jobs, and it’s a good one. Seems apt both regarding Apple’s continued success after Jobs’s death, and a refutation of the personality cult in The White House.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=vydmUCGQnyI

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