2026-03-21 00:46:01
Bluesky:
In April 2025, Bluesky raised $100 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Knight Foundation and True Ventures. In the months since, we’ve focused on scaling our team to meet the rapid growth of both the AT Protocol (atproto) and Bluesky app. We’re excited to share more as we move into a new era of leadership and further growth.
This raise was led by Bluesky founder Jay Graber, who recently transitioned to Chief Innovation Officer to focus on building the future of open social infrastructure.
I didn’t post about Graber’s stepping aside as CEO earlier this month because I didn’t make much of it. I’ve been bullish on Bluesky since its inception, but I haven’t been thrilled by it of late. I don’t think it’s gotten any worse, but its growth has stalled, leaving it in the limbo between ghost town and boom town. For many products/services/businesses/publications, a sustained popularity that’s less than booming is fine. Niches can work, or thrive even. Daring Fireball is clearly a niche publication. But for social networks, two decades of evidence suggests that anything less than booming is a problem.
But what the hell are we to make of a $100 million funding round that wasn’t announced for 11 months? Is this commonplace, and I just somehow never before took note of a company keeping a large funding round secret for a year? Or is this as weird as I’m thinking it is?
2026-03-20 23:38:27
Quiche Browser is a rather astonishing app from the one-man indie developer Greg de J./Quiche Industries. (What a killer domain name that is.) Quiche Browser is a very robust, exquisitely designed, stunningly handsome web browser exclusively for iPhone. Just iPhone — although an iPad version is currently in beta. I switched to it as my default iPhone web browser last summer, thinking I’d only stick with it for a day or two before going back to Safari, and I wound up sticking with it for a few weeks. I did go back to Safari, but it was a remarkably close call. So close that, today, I’m going to give it another try. (And I was so enamored during my month-long affair with Quiche that I gladly subscribed to Quiche Plus for $27/year to support such a remarkable app.)
Out of the box, every single aspect of Quiche Browser’s UI and feature set is designed with obvious thought and care. But it also supports a rich array of settings to tweak the design. You can customize the appearance style of the toolbar, the location of the toolbar, the buttons on the toolbar. Quiche brings to iOS something very much akin to AppKit’s Customize Toolbar from the Mac, but if anything, what Quiche implements is more customizable. The typography throughout the app is exquisite. It doesn’t support Safari extensions but it has its own built-in content blocker. And, of course, it has built-in support for Kagi, the world’s best search engine.
What got me thinking about Quiche Browser again today was this tweet on Mastodon from the developer:
One of the many reasons I made Quiche Browser was to get a per-website JavaScript kill switch in my toolbar.
But these days I’m even tempted to disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it only where needed.
A simple one-tap “JS” button you can toggle on any website. I missed this button when I was test-driving Quiche a few months ago. Every browser should have this button. It’s almost unbelievable how much it improves so many websites.
That “JS” button alone isn’t why you should check out Quiche. It’s the whole thing. It’s just so thoughtful. So utterly modern in its appearance and features, but old-school in its hyperfocus on serving you, the user, through craftsmanship.
2026-03-20 05:09:32
Jeff Johnson, linking to my “Your Frustration Is the Product” piece:
My browser extension StopTheMadness Pro stops autoplaying videos and hides Sign in with Google on all sites. It also hides sticky videos and notification requests on many sites.
For more extreme measures, try my Safari extension StopTheScript. It kills JavaScript dead on websites you select. For example, from the blog post, it makes The Guardian readable.
These are both great extensions, and I have both installed for use in Safari on all my devices. StopTheScript is a bit peculiar, by nature of how it does what it does, but Johnson has a great illustrated tutorial for it and a good blog post explaining which sites he uses it on and why.
Over on the Chrome/Chromium side, there’s a very slick extension called Quick JavaScript Switcher. It’s free, but the developer (Maxime Le Breton) asks for a 5€ donation. QJS adds a simple JS on/off switch to the toolbar.
A lot of stuff doesn’t load when you just completely disable JavaScript for a site. You might be surprised just how much of that stuff is shit you don’t want or won’t miss.
Or, you can go the other way, give in, stop fighting the man, and install OnlyAds — an extension that hides everything on a website except the ads.
2026-03-20 05:01:52
Javier C. Hernández, reporting for The New York Times:
He was responding to a question about why Japan and other allies had received no advance notice of the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran.
“We didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise,” he said. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right?”
There was some laughter from the officials and journalists gathered in the room. “You believe in surprise, I think, much more so than us,” he added.
As Trump sinks further into dementia and his presidency slides further into disarray, his administration, in a sick way, gets funnier and funnier.
2026-03-20 04:09:27
Anne Applebaum, writing for The Atlantic (gift link):
Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European officials that “if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” In February 2025, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he had no right to expect support either, because “you don’t have any cards.” Trump ridiculed Canada as the “51st state” and referred to both the present and previous Canadian prime ministers as “governor.” He claimed, incorrectly, that allied troops in Afghanistan “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines,” causing huge offense to the families of soldiers who died fighting after NATO invoked Article 5 of the organization’s treaty, on behalf of the United States, the only time it has done so. He called the British “our once-great ally,” after they refused to participate in the initial assault on Iran; when they discussed sending some aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf conflict earlier this month, he ridiculed the idea on social media: “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
Meanwhile, Irina Slav at Oilprice.com writes that oil — which was trading around $60 per barrel before the war — might soon be headed to $150–200 per barrel. $200! Energy Common Sense reports “This is now a multi-month, likely rest-of-year story of elevated prices and elevated risk.” Axios reports that most Americans will soon be paying over $4/gallon for gasoline, but I walked by Center City Philly’s lone gas station at lunch, and regular gas remains under $4 and premium under $5 — both with an entire one-tenth of one cent to spare.
Although President Donald Trump says he has “destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military Capability”, the 0% that remains is playing havoc with the global economy by choking off 10-15% of its oil supply.
This whole dumb fiasco might go down as the canonical example for the phrase “hoist with his own petard”. You just hate to see it.
2026-03-20 03:15:59
Mark Simonson:
Just by coincidence, I discovered a copy of U&lc magazine in the graphics classroom. U&lc was published by ITC, the International Typeface Corporation, a typeface publisher, and the designer and editor was the legendary Herb Lubalin. I’d never seen such beautiful typography and design. It was a motherlode for an aspiring typophile like me. [...]
I decided right then that someday, somehow, I wanted to design typefaces.
