Not sure why they think this comparison is reassuring rather than terrifying.

I also have to say that Altman’s claims, today, that OpenAI employees were obsessed with COVID weeks ahead of the rest of the world feels more than a little like Donald Trump’s repeated false claim that he predicted, pre-9/11, that Osama bin Laden would attack the U.S.

Link: x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2041618671236469200?s=20

OpenAI, one week ago, in an unbylined post on the company blog: Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion. For comparison, here are the current market caps and 2025 annual profits for publ...

Om Malik: “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, ...

Live data with major airport delay times for North America. Available on the web — with a nice “TV Mode” too — and, of course, within the app.

Link: flighty.com/airports

Just lovely data visualization work from Sheets.works — a consulting firm that specializes in, I swear, Google Sheets.

Link: sheets.works/data-viz/every-iphone

Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the widest possible range of readers. We tested Zed with visually impaired patients at a French ophthalmology hospital and found that Zed Text outperformed Helvetica in terms of reading speed across all patient groups. Designed from scratch to perform different functions, it comes in two optical versions — Text and Display — with four variable axes and support for 547 languages, including endangered ones. It is available directly from the designers.

Link: typotheque.com/blog/zed-a-sans-for-the-needs-of-21century/…

Samual Axon, reporting last week for Ars Technica: Early this morning, Anthropic published version 2.1.88 of Claude Code npm package — but it was quickly discovered that package included a source map file, which could be used to access the entirety of Claude Code’s sourc...

Juli Clover, at MacRumors:

Apple has shared nine Little Finder Guy videos this week, and on TikTok, the thumbnails for the videos come together to make a Little Finder Guy mosaic on the Apple TikTok page.

I hope this doesn’t jinx the negotiations, but I’m working on getting Little Finder Guy as my guest for The Talk Show Live From WWDC this June.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/04/02/little-finder-guy-tiktok-youtube/

Donald Trump, sitting president of the United States, on his blog: Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Pra...

Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the very end of July. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. After that, the next opening remains the week starting July 27.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch — especially if you can act quick for next week’s opening. I’m also booking sponsorships for Q3 and Q4 2026, and over half of those weeks are already sold.

Link: daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

One more follow-up point after I spent two days using an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone. At some point late in the iOS 26 beta cycle last summer, it became obvious that Apple had sped up a bunch of system-level animations. Prime example: the animation when...

My thanks to Material Security for sponsoring this week at DF. Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time job.

Material Security unifies your cloud workspace, bringing detection and response for email, files, and accounts into one place. It’s security that actually works: augmenting the native gaps in Google and Microsoft without the usual enterprise bloat. Stop fighting fragmented consoles and start focusing on strategy. It’s time to simplify your SecOps.

See for yourself how Material scales.

Link: material.security/lp-cloud-office-security?utm_source=third…

Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica:

Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse for non-subscribed users, the complaint alleged. Their initial prompts are shared with “a URL through which the entire conversation may be accessed by third parties like Meta and Google.”

Disturbingly, the lawsuit alleged, chats are also shared with personally identifiable information (PII), even when users who want to stay anonymous opt to use Perplexity’s “Incognito Mode.” That mode, the lawsuit charged, is a “sham.”

Everything about Perplexity looks like a scam.

Link: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/perplexitys-incognito…

Jason Snell: Last December I complained that Apple was withholding iOS 18 security updates from iPhones capable of running iOS 26, leaving users who didn’t want to upgrade to Apple’s latest OS version yet in some security peril. Well, I have good news and bad news. The ...

John Voorhees, at MacStories:

It’s a new month and you know what that means: time for a roundup of everything coming to Apple TV and Apple Arcade for April 2026.

What’s still not coming: Jessica Chastain’s political thriller The Savant, originally set for September, but rescheduled for “at a later date” out of cowardice.

Apple’s “at a later date” is looking more and more like Trump’s “in two weeks”.

Link: macstories.net/news/coming-soon-whats-next-on-apple-tv-and…

John Buck at The Verge (gift link), excerpted from his great book, Inventing the Future: Steve Perlman: Almost everyone at Apple, and definitely everywhere else, assumed that multimedia would always require specialized hardware — and be expensive. A few of us thought oth...

Great roundup of links from Stephen Hackett:

The crew is made up of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen. They are now on their way to the moon, set to return in 10 days. Their rocket may be the product of a hugely-flawed program, but right now, that doesn’t matter. They are getting us closer to returning to the lunar surface than we’ve been in 50 years. That’s worth celebrating.

Link: 512pixels.net/2026/04/artemis-ii-crew-on-way-to-moon/

Katie Deighton, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; also on News+): OpenAI bought TBPN to encourage constructive conversation around the changes AI creates by helping the show grow, according to a memo sent by Fidji Simo, the OpenAI’s CEO of ...

StepSecurity: If you have installed axios@1.14.1 or axios@0.30.4, assume your system is compromised. There are zero lines of malicious code inside axios itself, and that’s exactly what makes this attack so dangerous. Both poisoned releases inject a fake dependency, plai...

Back in March 1991, Saturday Night Live ran what I consider the best Apple parody ad ever made: “McIntosh Jr.” Siracusa and I talked about it on The Talk Show this week, celebrating Apple’s 50th anniversary, so I looked it up for the show notes. Alas, this appallingly low-re...

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…

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...

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...

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…

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

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

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...