I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It. “I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life.”
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
‘Sordid and Small’
Matteo Wong, covering Musk v. Altman for The Atlantic (gift link):
Musk is asking that Altman be removed from OpenAI’s board, that
the company convert back to a nonprofit, and for the return of
allegedly “ill-gotten gains” — some $150 billion — which Musk
says would go t...
A Georgia teen diagnosed with a rare cancer used his...
A Georgia teen diagnosed with a rare cancer used his Make-A-Wish gift to help the homeless in his community. “I got out of my version of heck, and I want to help others who are in a similar situation, their own version.”
The intelligence of LLMs is “a function of the...
The intelligence of LLMs is “a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested”, and their widespread use will lead to a thinning of that complexity, “undermining the conditions for its own advancement”. (And ours.)
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
OpenAI Trial Starts With Two Very Different Tales of a Company’s Early Years
Cade Metz and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times from the Ronald V. Dellums U.S. Courthouse in Oakland (gift link):
On the first day of testimony in a landmark trial between Elon
Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, two notably different tales were
offered of how Open...
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Asian Mothers, Bad Feelings: Notes on An All-conquering Stereotype
"A certain image of the tiger mom— strict, cold and demanding—is ubiquitous in popular culture. Why?"
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Playing With Fire
Jer Crane, in an article earlier this week posted on Twitter/X:
I’m Jer Crane, founder of PocketOS. We build software that
rental businesses — primarily car rental operators — use to
run their entire operations: reservations, payments, customer
management, vehicle tracki...
Teaser trailer for season four of Ted Lasso . Looks like...
Teaser trailer for season four of Ted Lasso. Looks like he & Coach Beard are back in the UK to coach AFC Richmond’s women’s team. Premieres Aug 5 on Apple TV.
Longreads
• Krista Stevens
Up In Smoke
"I woke up one day to the realization that I had written ten good pages of a book that was due in five months."
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Spell Your Name with NASA’s Earthly Alphabet of Aerial Images
Landsat, a NASA and USGS program, has documented the surface of Earth from space since 1972.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Spell Your Name with NASA’s Earthly Alphabet of Aerial Images appeared first on Colossal.
Longreads
• Brendan Fitzgerald
Shall We Play a Game?
"Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement."
Longreads
• Adam Dalva
Was It Worth It?
Next Saturday: Forkalyst live at Haus Spilles, Düsseldorf!
Next event: Forkalyst Live on May 2, 2026, 19:00 at Haus Spilles, Düsseldorf.
Happening this coming Saturday!
Live Concert: @ Spilles, Düsseldorf. 02.05.2026 18:30h
02.05.2026 18:30h: Spilles, Düsseldorf. With Swift Exit and SoilentX. AK €5.
King Charles praises NATO in address to US Congress
President Trump has called the bond between the US and the UK a friendship "unlike any other on Earth" at a state dinner attended by King Charles and Queen Camilla. Earlier in a historic address speech to Congress, King Charles praised NATO and said the UK-US partnership was...
Daring Fireball
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
[Sponsor] WorkOS: Go From ‘We Don’t Support SSO’ to Enterprise Ready in a Weekend
workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q22026
Every B2B company hits the same inflection point — enterprise customers show up and they need SSO, directory sync, audit logs, and role-based access before they’ll move forward. Most teams lose months building that infrastructure. It doesn’t have to be that way.
With WorkOS you get all of it. One platform for auth, identity, and security. Infrastructure for teams that ship fast and stay fast.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity already chose WorkOS over building it themselves.
Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter…
Citation Needed
• Molly White
No new trial for Sam Bankman-Fried
The former CEO of FTX has essentially no realistic avenues left to avoid his 25-year prison sentence
Remembering Roberto Clemente’s 3000th Hit
This story by Kevin Guilfoile about his aging father (who worked for the Pirates and the Baseball Hall of Fame) and the mystery of what happened to the bat that Roberto Clemente got his 3,000th hit with is one of my favorite things that I’ve read over the past few months.
...
Quoting OpenAI Codex base_instructions
Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query.
— OpenAI Codex base_instructions, for GPT-5.5
Tags: openai, ai, llms, system-prompts, prompt-engineering, codex-cli, generative-ai, gpt