2026-04-08 00:52:44
“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, which means truth in Russian.
“The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company. We’re driving a really big technological shift.” — Fidji Simo, 2026
Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, explained this to OpenAI staff as to why OpenAI had just bought TBPN. Different century. Same logic to explain an emerging new socioeconomic order, a new post-revolution reality.
A confident company doesn’t need to blow $150 million on a YouTube show just to keep the press coverage positive.
Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only update at Stratechery:
At the same time, I’ve previously wondered if OpenAI might be like Twitter, another text-centric company that fell backwards into a huge market and never developed into a functional business because of it; if Twitter is a clown car that fell into a gold mine, OpenAI might be the short bus at the end of the rainbow. There’s supposed to be a pot of gold there, but it never quite seems to materialize, the colors are fading, and worst of all there just isn’t much evidence that anyone knows what they are doing or that there is any sort of overarching plan. Ads are bad, until they’re the plan; Meta execs are hired en masse, and the ads that launch are low-effort keyword-driven offerings; Apple is a partner until Jony Ive is hired, but he’s still doing projects for Ferrari; meanwhile, Anthropic is focused on the enterprise and shipping, Google is encroaching, and the answer to that is to buy a podcast? What is going on here?
2026-04-08 00:44:06
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.
2026-04-08 00:34:14
Just lovely data visualization work from Sheets.works — a consulting firm that specializes in, I swear, Google Sheets.
2026-04-07 03:15:05
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.
2026-04-07 03:04:54
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 source — almost 2,000 TypeScript files and more than 512,000 lines of code.
Security researcher Chaofan Shou was the first to publicly point it out on X, with a link to an archive containing the files. The codebase was then put in a public GitHub repository, and it has been forked tens of thousands of times.
Anthropic publicly acknowledged the mistake in a statement to VentureBeat and other outlets, which reads:
Earlier today, a Claude Code release included some internal source code. No sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed. This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. We’re rolling out measures to prevent this from happening again.
Not exactly confidence inspiring, given how incredibly sensitive much of the material users give Claude and Claude Code access to. To say the least, it undermines the message that companies should trust their source code to Claude Code when Anthropic accidentally leaked their own source code.
2026-04-07 00:39:26
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.
