2026-04-03 04:12:07
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 otherwise.
One of the few was Gavin Miller, a research scientist in Apple’s Graphics Group, who worked with Hoffert to crack the problem of software compression and decompression, otherwise known as codec.
Gavin Miller, research scientist: We went for a lunchtime walk, and by the end of it, we had generalized the model to include constant color blocks and 2-bit per-pixel interpolating blocks. This allowed us to trade off quantization artifacts in large flat areas for more detail in textured areas. The result was an increase in quality and performance that helped to make the codec practical for really small video sizes.
Just a typical lunchtime walk-and-talk.
Fun anecdote from 1990:
He asked Peppel to create a product plan that he could announce at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on May 7th. That day, Casey took to the stage and announced QuickTime to a stunned audience, saying, “Apple intends to develop real-time software compression/decompression technology that will run on today’s modular Macintosh systems. A system-wide time coding to allow synchronization of sound, animation, and other time-critical processes.”
Casey explained that Apple’s new multimedia architecture would be delivered by the end of the year. He did not say that QuickTime had no budget, staff, or offices.
Worthington: We were dumbfounded.
Konstantin Othmer, QuickDraw engineer: I was standing next to Bruce Leak, and asked him, “What the heck was that?” He said he had no idea.
QuickTime actually shipped by WWDC 1991, teaching Apple the important lesson that anything they announce at WWDC, no matter how premature, will ship as promised.
2026-04-03 03:37:10
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.
2026-04-03 02:58:50
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 applications. TBPN will report to Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, and will help with company communications and marketing outside of the show.
“They’ve helped many brands market online and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed me,” Simo wrote in the memo.
But TBPN will remain editorially independent, retaining control over its programming, editorial decisions, guest selection and production schedule, OpenAI said.
Yes, I’m sure they’ll remain totally independent. You know, like The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos, and CBS News under David Ellison. Many news and commentary publications have remained steadfastly independent while reporting to the head of PR for a company they ostensibly cover.
2026-04-03 02:42:39
StepSecurity:
If you have installed [email protected] or [email protected], assume your system is compromised.
There are zero lines of malicious code inside
axiositself, and that’s exactly what makes this attack so dangerous. Both poisoned releases inject a fake dependency,[email protected], a package never imported anywhere in theaxiossource, whose sole purpose is to run apostinstallscript that deploys a cross-platform remote access trojan. The dropper contacts a live command-and-control server, delivers separate second-stage payloads for macOS, Windows, and Linux, then erases itself and replaces its ownpackage.jsonwith a clean decoy. A developer who inspects theirnode_modulesfolder after the fact will find no indication anything went wrong.This was not opportunistic. It was precision. The malicious dependency was staged 18 hours in advance. Three payloads were pre-built for three operating systems. Both release branches were poisoned within 39 minutes of each other. Every artifact was designed to self-destruct. Within two seconds of
npm install, the malware was already calling home to the attacker’s server before npm had even finished resolving dependencies. This is among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm package.
Could be my bigotry against JavaScript speaking, but I find it unsurprising that this happened to the same framework that this and this happened to.
2026-04-03 02:12:11
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-resolution copy hosted on Reddit is seemingly the only free-to-watch copy of it available. (If you can find — or make — a better version, let me know.) If you have a Peacock account, you can watch it in much higher quality in their SNL archive: Season 16, Episode 16, starting at 7:30, just after host Jeremy Irons’s monologue. (It rolls right into a good “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey”.)
We just recorded tomorrow’s episode of Dithering, and Ben asked me my favorite Apple commercial of all time. I was tempted to say this one, despite the fact that it isn’t real. The best parodies are the ones that hew the closest to the truth of their subject, that exaggerate the least. And the message of “McIntosh Jr.” is, at its heart, the actual purpose of the Macintosh, and of Apple writ large. Computers that enable you to do your best work. Bicycles for the mind. And, yes, the power to crush the other kids. That’s what drew me and Siracusa to Apple computers, and keeps us drawn to them today.
2026-04-03 00:53:02
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.
