Some graphic design fun for the weekend: achingly gorgeous art pieces recreating vintage Pan Am luggage tags, by Ella Freire. I love them all. The colors, the type, the shapes — sublime.

(Via Dan Cederholm’s Studio Notes.)

Link: ellafreire.com/collections/pan-american-luggage-labels

For The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz go deep profiling Sam Altman under the mince-no-words headline “Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted?” 16,000+ words — roughly one-third the length of The Great Gatsby — very specifically investigating Altm...

This new museum in Utrecht (about 30–40 minutes south of Amsterdam) seems just astonishing. The rainbow wall of iMacs alone is incredible.

(Via Juli Clover.)

Link: applemuseum.nl/

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major bug: Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of ...

“thenickdude”, on Reddit: They’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed when you visit on their website. When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript: https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png If ...

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking of the president of the United States in a totally normal way:

I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime. And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I’ll say, “Thank you very much, I love you, sir.”

The phrase Blanche was looking for is “Thank you sir, may I have another.”

Link: politicalwire.com/2026/04/09/extra-bonus-quote-of-the-day…

Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team: Earlier today we announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new general-purpose language model. This model performs strongly across the board, but it is strikingly capable at computer security tasks. In response, we have launched Project Glasswing,...

Kottke:

This shot from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun is one of the most breathtaking astronomical photos I’ve ever seen. Holy shit.

Follow NASA on Flickr for more.

Update: In a follow-up post, Kottke has assembled a slew of great iPhone wallpapers from Artemis II photos, along with links to other collections, like Basic Apple Guy’s. Also, The Iconfactory has added a bunch of these images to their wonderful Wallaroo app (which is how I’ve switched to one on my own iPhone).

Update 2: Nils Streedain has made wallpapers for the Mac optimized for OLED displays (HEIC native format, pure #000 black background, etc.). Gorgeous.

Link: kottke.org/26/04/solar-eclipse-far-side-of-the-moon

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