The Midnight covers are *gorgeous*… my compliments to the chef

Cover of Patrick McGee's “Apple in China”

Unintentionally celebrating Apple's 50th anniversary today having just started “Apple in China” which so far is the best retelling of their history I've read in years.

Great thread about the source for Claude Code’s CLI being leaked due to a misconfiguration.

Includes analysis of the many ways that the code is a mess. The mess is so extreme that it's essentially its own coding pattern.

Much hilarity, starting April Fools' Eve: neuromatch.social/@jonny/11632...

RFS Civics graphic: Women belong in local office

This year, one of my favorite holidays—National Run for Office Day—has landed on the last day of Women's History Month.

For any women reading this who have considered public service, take this as your sign to make a first move today.

This quiz can help you get started: runforofficeday.com/quiz

One of my absolute favorite parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey… this sardonic reference as HAL is deactivated:

This was a big shift, having used a Mac since the original 128K (and an Apple ][+ before that). It would be five or six years before I returned to the Mac as things were getting useful again around OS X 10.3, though I still split my time between that, plus Windows and Linux, for several more years.

I would later sell the machine when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and killed of the clones, which at the time were far superior and radically cheaper than anything Apple offered at the time.

Power Computing machine upright in a box with foam stuck to the sides.

The machine would later make the trip with me to San Francisco after school to start my new job (with Netscape!)

An aspiring Duchamp from the moving company converted the machine's original shipping box into this wonderful post-Dadaist creation.

Spread from a MacWarehouse catalog from 1996, depicting several options from Mac compatible maker “Power Computing”

RIP Mac Pro (2006–2026)

My first Mac Pro was a Power Computing Power Tower Pro, purchased my senior year in college with every dollar I made during an internship the previous summer. The “world's fastest Mac” in 1996 (by quite a bit), coming in at 200 and 225 MHz…

Bravo! And congratulations… Really appreciate you and your work.

And before you say “who would use an LLM to generate a password!?” try a GitHub search: github.com/search?q=%22... (h/t @plz.bsky.social)

Vibe Password Generation: Predictable by Design - Irregular LLM-generated passwords appear strong, but are fundamentally insecure. Testing across GPT, Claude, and Gemini revealed highly predictable patterns: repeated passwords across runs, skewed character dis...

LLMs are really bad at generating passwords…!

I really enjoy these flaws that help explain how LLMs work, because they're so often mistaken for magic.

And seeing the flaw is much more convincing than trying to explain that these are just probability machines.

www.irregular.com/publications...

What growing up in an end-times church taught a science communicator about dispelling misinformation A passion for snakes opened a crack in the religious beliefs science communicator Paul Martin Jensen grew up with in a end-times Pentecostal church.

“When you have something important to say, it must be shared & institutions need to invest—what’s more important than science?” Yet science doesn’t place any premium on widely communicating its findings to the public, or perhaps even more importantly, its principles.
www.statnews.com/2026/03/24/p...

VW in talks with Israel’s Iron Dome maker to shift from cars to missile defence Plan with Rafael Advanced Defence Systems focuses on using carmaker’s Osnabrück plant to produce parts for air defence

Volkswagen's sales getting destroyed due to competition from China with inexpensive EVs. Instead of closing a plant, they're looking at building missile defense equipment for Israel.

Enough layers of scary for our present/future here to make a club sandwich:

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

>wakes up to find ‘I’ have acquired Raytheon, Sainsburys and General Motors
>am now at actual war with at least four countries
>bank leaving increasingly agitated voicemails
>not ideal for an Etsy sticker shop

The original Jaws poster, lovingly re-fashioned by Paul to depict a tiny rowboat and massive shark mouth heading upwards. The top reads ROWBOAT instead of JAWS. Get it? Ok ok it gave me a giggle.

Still working to get the right marketing message for Rowboat, but in the meantime, lots of updates this month: improved cell editing, map improvements, plus a fresh desktop release: rowboat.net

And for the superfans, all the gory details on the release page: docs.rowboat.net/releases/ 💪

This is so impressively unsettling—(most obviously) from its choices about what “happy” means, to the way that it takes your real facial expression and turns it into… a face you might make when you were lying about something? A sort of lie within a lie? Incredible.

At press time, it was not possible to conclusively determine whether that was, in fact, an acceptable outcome for the artist in question.

Someone asked Christoph Niemann to paint a garage… 💛

www.christophniemann.com/detail/garag...

The Onion's Exclusive Interview With Sam Altman While leading OpenAI, Sam Altman has weathered leaked internal memos, an attempt to oust him as CEO, and widespread skepticism about artificial intelligence’s role in society. The Onion sat down with ...

Q: Why did you decide to devote your life to AI?

A: I just saw so much suffering in the world that needed to be automated.

theonion.com/the-onions-e...

Peek in Pi Find any number inside the digits of π.

Nearly every 7 digit number can be found in the first 100M digits of pi.

Search for your favorites, or simply bask in the wonders of math and probability: www.benfry.com/pi/

Happy π day!

(which was weird, since I have never owned a Magic Link, nor any of the other devices that promised us agents in the 90s, but somehow it just appeared in my hand at that moment)

Was on a Zoom call last week where the phrase “agents didn’t exist—nobody had even thought of them—until a few months ago” was spoken with absolute confidence, as a response to someone wondering “will agents even work?”

I crawled through the screen and slapped him with my Sony Magic Link.

“The second-system effect (also second-system syndrome) is the tendency for a successful first system (often small and relatively elegant) to be followed by a second system that becomes over-engineered or bloated.”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-...

Palatino - Wikipedia

…and typographers. Without design copyrights in the US, we have Monotype creating (and Microsoft distributing) “Book Antiqua” which was a blatant knockoff of Palatino. Zapf resigned from ATypI over the hypocrisy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatin...

But that's just one of a million examples…

Thanks for the confirmation—I had seen that but was scared off by the “this probably won't work” message at the top of the post… But it's working! (For now.)

Nice to see you pop up on here—hope you're doing well!

In 30 years, it's been incredible to go from Netscape making everyone realize you can just publish frequent point release upgrades & fixes—to our current moment, where software & hardware companies have decided they own your device & it's ok to harass you into upgrades because it's better for them.

“Upgrade to macOS Tahoe” dialog box with buttons “Install Tonight” and “Not Fucking Ever”

There I fixed it

The NYT style guide

I have a new digital illustraion course live now! If interested - sign up here www.jamesgilleardacademy.com/beginnercourse