2026-04-24 05:14:35
Russ Choma, reporting for Mother Jones:
Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social.
Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump Media + Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, said on Tuesday night that Nunes would be replaced by another executive who formerly worked at Hulu. Nunes confirmed the move in a Truth Social post of his own.
The company, which is majority owned by Donald Trump, has seen its stock plummet 84 percent under Nunes’ leadership, from its debut price of $58 back in 2024. The current share price of around $9.80 is arguably still optimistic for a company that has lost $1.1 billion since it went public, and recorded just over $10.6 million in revenue in the same time.
Like a well-oiled Atlantic City casino.
When Trump Media was first announced as a concept, the Trump family said it would include: Truth Social, streaming television services to rival Netflix and Amazon and web-hosting that would rival Amazon’s AWS business. And all of it would be devoted to fighting the “woke” media and corporate culture that Trump said had blacklisted him following Jan. 6. Truth Social would be a redoubt for freedom of speech, the streaming services would have wholesome non-“woke” content that America craved and the web-hosting would provide a home for any company that dared to challenge Amazon’s alleged anti-free speech motivations.
I’m sure the rest of that has merely been delayed, temporarily, while Trump Media’s best and brightest minds continue working on the cell phone they started selling last summer but still haven’t shipped.
2026-04-24 04:13:49
Nilay Patel, in a terrific essay (and Decoder one-sider) at The Verge:
In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the Democrats generally. That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. Quinnipiac just found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm than good, while more than 80 percent of people were either very concerned or somewhat concerned about the technology. Only 35 percent of people were excited about it.
Poll after poll shows that Gen Z uses AI the most and has the most negative feelings about it. A recent Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already-bad 27 percent last year. At the same time, anger is growing: 31 percent of those Gen Z respondents said they feel angry about AI, up from 22 percent last year.
A good friend texted me a few weeks ago that “the phrase ‘software is eating the world’ sure hits differently now” than when Marc Andreessen coined the term back in 2011. (Patel, in fact, references Andreessen’s seminal essay.) That same friend texted me a link to this piece by Patel this morning.
Something is profoundly off in the computer industry when it comes to software broadly and AI specifically. It’s up for debate what exactly is off and what should be done about it, but the undeniable proof that something is profoundly off is the deep unpopularity surrounding everything related to AI. You can’t argue that the public always turns against groundbreaking technology. The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. I’d say in both of those cases, regular people were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.
You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.
So what is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of important companies have been built around maintaining those databases and providing access to them.
Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and riders. YouTube is a database of videos. The Verge’s website is a database of stories. You can go on and on and on. Once you start seeing the world as a bunch of databases, it’s a small jump to feeling like you can control everything if you can just control the data.
But that doesn’t always work.
“Software brain” is a good term — a tidy two-word encapsulation of a sprawling worldview that is currently very much in vogue. Take some time to read Patel’s whole piece carefully. It feels important, and it’s really well considered.
2026-04-24 03:36:15
Speaking of Chris Espinosa, this is pretty neat:
On September 1 I’ll join the elite club (members Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Mike Markkula, and Bill Fernandez) who have worked under a number of Apple CEOs ≥ our employee number:
Woz: 1 (Scott)
Jobs: 2 (Scott, Markkula)
Markkula: 3 (Scott, Sculley, Spindler)
Fernandez: 4 (Scott, Markkula, Sculley, Spindler)
Espinosa: 8 (Scott, Markkula, Sculley, Spindler, Amelio, Jobs, Cook, Ternus)
2026-04-24 01:53:58
Tom Warren, The Verge (gift link):
“Many of these employees have spent years, and in some cases, decades, shaping Microsoft into what it is today,” says Microsoft’s HR chief Amy Coleman in a memo seen by The Verge. “For those who may be considering their next chapter, we’re offering a one‑time Voluntary Retirement Program.” Microsoft says it applies to only a “small percentage of our US employees.”
US employees whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70 or more will be eligible for voluntary retirement, and Coleman says this will include “generous company support.” It’s not clear if this is a precursor to more layoffs at Microsoft, but it certainly looks like a method to avoid a bigger round of layoffs ahead of Microsoft’s new financial year in July.
70 combined years? My god, when did Microsoft get so, well, soft? I just read about a guy at Apple whose age plus years of employment will hit something like 114 later this year. If I weren’t so lazy I’d double check the exact number with a calculator, but whatever it’s up to today, he hit 70 combined years back around the time the first iMac came out.
2026-04-24 01:28:23
Rachel Metz, reporting for Bloomberg:
A small group of unauthorized users have accessed Anthropic PBC’s new Mythos AI model, a technology that the company says is so powerful it can enable dangerous cyberattacks, according to a person familiar with the matter and documentation viewed by Bloomberg News.
A handful of users in a private online forum gained access to Mythos on the same day that Anthropic first announced a plan to release the model to a limited number of companies for testing purposes, said the person, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. The group has been using Mythos regularly since then, though not for cybersecurity purposes, said the person, who corroborated the account with screenshots and a live demonstration of the model.
Jess Weatherbed, at The Verge (gift link):
The model was reportedly accessed illicitly on April 7th, the same day that Anthropic announced it was releasing Mythos to a limited number of companies for testing. The group that gained the unauthorized access has not been publicly identified, though Bloomberg reports that its members are part of a Discord channel that seeks out information about unreleased AI models. [...] Other unreleased Anthropic AI models have also been accessed by the group, according to Bloomberg.
So on the one hand, Anthropic itself is the one describing Mythos as a dangerous national security threat. On the other hand, their own security is so sloppy that rando hooligans on Discord have had access to Mythos since the day it was announced, and regularly access other unreleased Claude models. This, just weeks after Anthropic screwed up and accidentally exposed the entire source code to Claude Code.
If Mythos is as dangerous as Anthropic (including CEO Dario Amodei) claims, this is a colossal screw up. If a Discord group of AI enthusiasts has unauthorized access, why should we not assume that Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian intelligence agencies do too? And if this is no big deal, then Anthropic (and Amodei) are full of shit about how dangerous Mythos is. One way or the other it looks like a total clown show over there.
2026-04-23 03:38:55
Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. The hoodies are a new model from Bella Canvas, the manufacturer. Our previous hoodies were “heather gray” and the fabric was a blend of 50% polyester, 37.5% cotton, and 12.5% rayon. That model is being phased out. So we’ve switched to a new model that’s 85% cotton, 15% polyester, and a darker “heather black” color. The old ones were good, but the new ones feel even better.
