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Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter…

Nick Heer: I was going to write about how this stuff should have been tried with people who actually use Adobe’s apps in a high-pressure environment, but I am sure it was and, also, it does not matter. Wichary has it right. These are fundamental principles of user interf...

Chess Peace — a new iOS game by Sam Shepherd — is my kind of logic puzzle. Each puzzle is a board with a few unplaced chess pieces. To solve you need to place all the pieces so that none of them attack each other. There’s a timer if you care, but I don’t. Clever name too: the pieces need to be ... at peace with each other. You can download Chess Peace and try it out free of charge, and it’s just a one-time payment of $7 to unlock everything. Great simple premise, really well implemented.

Link: chesspeace.app/

Paul Thurrott:

I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus. But l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an early draft of an introductory chapter that may or my not be called “On writing.” We’ll see.

It’s odd how things turn out in life. Thurrott’s and my careers are almost uniquely parallel, but have seldom intersected. This book would have been a very surprising outcome to me, if you’d told me about it 20 years ago. Sort of a fun outcome, though, and I must admit to being curious what comes of it.

Link: thurrott.com/paul/334577/the-markdown-book-on-writing?utm…

Speaking of companies with valuable minority stakes in AI companies, there’s one thing that stuck in my craw about the blockbuster Ronan Farrow / Andrew Marantz investigative piece on Sam Altman and OpenAI last month for The New Yorker. It didn’t come up during Nilay Patel’s...

The New York Times, back in March last year (gift link): To win the artificial intelligence race, Google not only has developed its own technologies, but has also pumped money into prominent A.I. start-ups. And to preserve its competitive edge, Google has kept its owners...

Jeremy Provost, on the blog for Think Tap Work, his mobile app development company: iOS App Store search is no longer about relevance. It’s about ad inventory. With Apple’s introduction of a second search ad, for any query where we weren’t #1, we’ve effectively moved dow...

Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice) on his blog Tokyo Paladin: For decades, Japan’s Oreos weren’t made by Nabisco at all. They were produced domestically by Yamazaki Biscuits, under a licensing arrangement with what eventually became Mondelez International. This was, b...

Marcin Wichary at Unsung: I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software — because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to. I know I brought up that an existing power user bas...

Sam Sabin, writing for Axios one year ago: Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming corporate networks in the next year, the company’s top security leader told Axios in an interview this week. [...] Virtual employees could be the next AI innovation...

Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote: But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...

Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote: But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...

Press release last week: SightMD, a leading ophthalmology practice in the greater New England area, today announced a historic milestone in surgical innovation. Dr. Eric Rosenberg, DO, MSE, has become the first surgeon in the world to successfully perform cataract surger...

Bryan Hoch, reporting for MLB.com:

A colorful personality who engaged and entertained fans with a distinct conversational style, Sterling called 5,426 regular-season Yankees games and 225 more in the postseason from 1989 until his retirement in 2024. After initially stepping away from the microphone in April of that year, Sterling returned to call selected games late in the ’24 season, including each contest of the World Series.

At the time of his initial retirement, Sterling said that he considered himself to be “a very blessed human being,” noting that he had lived out a childhood dream of broadcasting on the radio for more than 64 years.

“It’s your medium. You do what you want,” Sterling once said. “You have to paint the picture, which I love doing.”

That’s baseball, Suzyn.

Link: mlb.com/news/john-sterling-passes-away

Gil Durán, posting on Bluesky:

It’s official! I’m permanently banned from X for tweeting “TLDR: Fascism.” (appeal denied)

“TLDR: Fascism” was Durán’s two-word response to this 1,000-word essay from Palantir describing their vision for a “Technological Republic”. (Alternative link to essay if you don’t want to visit x.com.)

Getting perma-banned from Twitter/X by Elon Musk gives Durán a nice Streisand-effect boost to promote his upcoming new book, The Nerd Reich. If the book is even half as good as its title it should be a bestseller.

Link: bsky.app/profile/gilduran.com/post/3mky5taqg3222

I don’t want to spoil any of this story from David Gelphman, which he wrote back in 2013, but which I only came across this week had read so long ago I’d forgotten it. Go read it. But before you do, one bit of context you should keep in mind is that the original iPad was unveiled at a special Apple event on 27 January 2010, but it didn’t ship until early April. Gelphman’s story takes place in that interregnum.

Link: davidgelphman.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/2-letters-from-steve…

A follow-up point to Friday’s post about Meta unceremoniously shitcanning its entire contract with Sama, the Kenyan contractor that employed over 1,100 contractors to serve as Mechanical Turks for Meta’s AI efforts, after a few of the contractors told investigative reporters...

Regarding my earlier post about the cleverness of Tim Cook’s solution to Apple’s dilemma regarding how to apply for, and accept, a potential tariff refund check without drawing the ire of Donald “Tariff Is My Favorite Word” Trump, at least one reader asked why Tim Cook comm...

Remember the appalling but utterly-unsurprising story two months ago where a team of investigative reporters in Sweden uncovered a company in Kenya contracted by Meta to review video content captured by Meta’s “smart” glasses? They spoke to some of the workers, who told tale...

One more from Jason Snell, from his analysis of Apple’s quarterly results: During a complicated question from J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee about product margins, Parekh unusually half-answered the question and then stopped and “turned it over to Tim” so that Cook...

MG Siegler returns to the show to discuss Apple’s announcement that Tim Cook is stepping aside (into the role of executive chairman) and John Ternus will become CEO.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/04/30/ep-446

Uwa Ede-Osifo, reporting for The Guardian: On any given day, Los Angeles’s Hollywood Boulevard teems with tourists and street performers clustered near the area’s many landmarks. But in recent months, the strip has been set abuzz for a new reason. Throngs of mostly adol...

Apple Newsroom: “Today Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever, with revenue of $111.2 billion and double-digit growth across every geographic segment,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone achieved a March quarter revenue record, fueled by such extraordinary...

Juli Clover, writing at MacRumors under the rather incendiary headline “Apple Has Given Up on the Vision Pro After M5 Refresh Flop”: Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple ...

600 words from Hartley Charlton at MacRumors expounding upon a wacko post on Weibo suggesting that Apple is debating dropping MagSafe from all iPhones (which post, translated to English, is only 70-some words). Given that last year’s 16e didn’t have MagSafe and this year’s 17e does, you don’t need a pseudonymous Chinese weatherman to know which way the MagSafe wind is blowing in Cupertino.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/04/29/apple-questioning-iphone-magsafe/

Brilliant statue, hilarious intro video. The greatest artist of our age.

Link: instagram.com/reel/DXwf7pis6KT/

Max Harrison-Caldwell, reporting for The San Francisco Standard: In 2024, the port — which manages the Oakland airport — changed the name from Oakland International Airport to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport, hoping to entice travelers by emphasizing the ...

Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting on Musk v. Altman from the courtroom in Oakland (gift link): Today the first witness was sworn in in Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk. I was surprised by how flat he seemed. This is not the first time I’ve seen Musk in court. During his defamation ...

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...

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...