Kalley Huang and Erin Woo, reporting for The Information (via Ed Zitron, who summarized it on Bluesky): Meta Platforms over the past year asked Microsoft, Amazon and others to help pay the costs of training Meta’s flagship large language model, Llama, according to four p...

Just in case you haven’t had enough of me on various recent podcasts, I had the pleasure of joining hosts Dan Barbera and Hartley Charlton on The MacRumors Show, talking mostly about Apple Intelligence and the future of the Vision platform. Fun!

Link: macrumors.com/2025/04/18/the-macrumors-show-john-gruber…

Larry David, in a column for The New York Times:

He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car. Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night — and believe me, there were plenty.

I have been reliably informed that, having linked approvingly to Bill Maher’s “book report” on his dinner with Trump, I must also link to David’s report of dinner with Adolf.

Link: nytimes.com/2025/04/21/opinion/larry-david-hitler-dinner…

Radek Sienkiewicz:

If you pay attention to AI company branding, you’ll notice a pattern:

1. Circular shape (often with a gradient)
2. Central opening or focal point
3. Radiating elements from the center
4. Soft, organic curves

Sound familiar? It should, because it’s also an apt description of ... well, you know.

A butthole.

Link: velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes

Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Cat Zakrzewski, reporting for The Washington Post: As President Donald Trump’s enormous new tariffs on China rippled through global supply chains, Apple CEO Tim Cook went to work behind the scenes. Cook spoke to Commerce Secretary Howa...

Special guest Glenn Fleishman returns to the show for episode 420 on 4/20, but everyone’s sober, I swear. Topics include Trump’s dumb tariffs and Glenn’s smart new edition of his book Six Centuries of Type & Printing.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
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• Clic for Sonos: No lag. No hassle. Just Clic.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/04/20/ep-420

My thanks to Dekáf Coffee Roasters for sponsoring last week at DF. Dekáf started with a simple question over a late-night cup of decaf: why do coffee lovers who skip the caffeine have to skip the craft too? Dekáf believes those who drink coffee purely for its flavor are the...

CNN: A federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s request that it halt the next steps Judge Paula Xinis is seeking to take in the case concerning a migrant who was wrongly deported to El Salvador, with a strident warning about the rule of law and the possi...

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

I’ve got three openings left through the end of June:

• April 21–27 (next week)
• May 12–18
• May 26–June 1

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.

Link: daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

Kim Mackrael and Sam Schechner, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, had initially planned to announce cease-and-desist orders targeting the tech giants on Tuesday and had informed at least one of the compa...

Brian X. Chen, in a column at The New York Times headlined “Why a Tariff-Inflated $2,000 iPhone Is Nothing to Fear”: Don’t panic. Even if tariffs did cause the iPhone’s price to surge, we would have plenty of cheaper options, like buying last year’s phone model instead o...

Josh Kovensky, reporting for TPM: In a withering 46-page opinion on Wednesday, D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg laid out how he came to believe that the Trump administration was acting in bad faith during its Alien Enemies Act removals. Boasberg set the stage for potenti...

Dennis McLellan, writing for the Los Angeles Times (News+ link): Over the decades, according to his website, Martindale either hosted or produced 21 game shows, including “Words and Music,” “Trivial Pursuit,” “The Last Word” and “Debt.” “That’s a lot of shows,” he acknow...

Wes Davis, The Verge: During Meta’s antitrust trial today, lawyers representing Apple, Google, and Snap each expressed irritation with Meta over the slides it presented on Monday that The Verge found to contain easy-to-remove redactions. Attorneys for both Apple and Snap...

Dana Mattioli, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; also, here’s a News+ link): Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multip...

Jessica Lyons, reporting for The Register: US government funding for the world’s CVE program — the centralized Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database of product security flaws — ends Wednesday. The 25-year-old CVE program plays a huge role in vulnerability manage...

You will recall that in September 2022, Figma entered into an agreement for a $20 billion acquisition by Adobe, but abandoned the deal 15 months later.

Link: figma.com/blog/s1-confidential-submission/

Glenn Fleishman: The book Six Centuries of Type & Printing briskly tells the story of the evolution of type and printing, starting with early documented efforts and surviving artifacts from China and Korea, and introducing Gutenberg and his innovations. It then takes...

Samuel Axon, writing for Ars Technica: Some time ago, OpenAI added a feature called “Memory” that allowed a limited number of pieces of information to be retained and used for future responses. Users often had to specifically ask ChatGPT to remember something to trigger ...

Coffee has always been about bringing people together. For us, it started with a simple question over a late-night cup of decaf: why do coffee lovers who skip the caffeine have to skip the craft too?

At Dekáf, we believe those who drink coffee purely for its flavor are the true connoisseurs. While other roasters treat decaf as a side project, we’ve made it our entire mission. We’re dedicated to creating exceptional decaffeinated coffee that stands toe-to-toe with the world’s finest caffeinated beans.

9 single origins. 6 signature blends. You won’t believe it’s decaf. That’s the point.

30% off with code: DF

Link: dekaf.com/df

Seth Godin:

You can’t.

That’s because toddlers don’t understand what an argument is and aren’t interesting in having one.

Toddlers (which includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat earthers, folks committed to a specific agenda and radio talk show hosts) may indicate that they’d like to have an argument, but they’re actually engaging in connection, noise, play acting or a chance to earn status. It can be fun to be in opposition, to harangue or even to use power to change someone’s position.

Link: seths.blog/2025/04/how-to-win-an-argument-with-a-toddler/

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC. Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.

New features they launched just last month include:

• WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
• WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK)
• AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel.

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

Bill Maher personifies the difference between a liberal (which he is) and a leftist (which he isn’t). But he’s been a stridently vocal critic of Trump since long before Trump even ran for president. Maher was the first person on television to correctly predict that Trump, if...

Crackerjack essay by Chuck Wendig:

Maybe it’s like turbulence on an airplane, you think. Just a bumpy unpleasant awful experience you gotta get through. But when turbulence hits it’s not because the pilot is a guy who doesn’t “know planes,” when turbulence hits they don’t disappear the ninth row people out the airlock because they “look different” and are “probably causing the problem.” Planes don’t have airlocks, do they? Whatever. My brain is spray cheese.

Link: terribleminds.com/ramble/2025/04/09/what-it-feels-like…

Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Chris Whipple’s new book on the final years of Joe Biden’s presidency, under the headline “Did Aides Cover Up His Mental State — or Was It Group Delusion?” (News+ link): The president’s wobbly state should have been a flashing warnin...

Jamelle Bouie, writing at The New York Times (gift link): There is a hypothetical president with a hypothetically similar agenda who could answer these questions. This actual president cannot. He did not reason himself into his preoccupation with tariffs and can neither ...

Warren Buffett’s annual shareholders letters are always a must-read. The honesty, clarity, and striking humility of his prose stands out in a world where corporate communications — from companies of any size — tend to be bland and obfuscating. This year’s letter, published b...

Auzinea Bacon, CNN: Electronics imported to the United States will be exempt from President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, according to a US Customs and Border Protection notice posted late Friday. Smartphones, computer monitors and various electronic parts are among...

Reuters: China’s Anker, one of Amazon’s largest sellers offering products from power banks to phone cases, has raised prices on a fifth of its products on the U.S. platform since Thursday, in a sign that tariffs on Chinese goods are being passed on to U.S. shoppers. Som...

Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch has a summary on Bluesky of his co-bylined report for the Financial Times: Visitors from western Europe who stayed at least one night in the US fell by 17 per cent in March from a year ago, according to the International Trade A...