Eric Adams is the gift that keeps on giving. I thought we were only going to get four years of crazy, but he keeps doing insane things! From NYMag:

The Albanian Daily News reports that the former mayor has officially been granted Albanian citizenship and issued an Albanian passport. According to the outlet, Adams's new citizenship was approved by special decree by Albanian president Bajram Begaj.

An SNL skit couldn’t do it any better.

"New York is the Albania of America. We have one of the largest Albanian populations, and many times the Albanian New Yorkers have asked me to come and visit the country. So now this is an opportunity to do so," Adams said.

The world’s biggest chimp clan has erupted into a civil war. From The Sun:

The once-peaceful group split into a deadly schism in 2015 and began to unleash lethal attacks on one another, mostly targeting adult males and infants.

Since 2018, one side has killed 28 members of the other.

The attacks are co-ordinated and vicious, according to ape expert Aaron Sandel, lead author of the study.

Good thing this can only happen in the anima kingdom…

They are considered to be our closest relatives, sharing about 98% of their DNA with humans.

The New Yorker article on Sam Altman confirms a lot of the stories that have been swirling around Silicon Valley since Sam's peculiar time as the head of YCombinator.

By 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman’s behavior that they approached Graham to complain. Graham and Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C. founder, apparently had a frank conversation with Altman. Afterward, Graham started telling people that although Altman had agreed to leave the company, he was resisting in practice. Altman told some Y.C. partners that he would resign as president but become chairman instead. In May, 2019, a blog post announcing that Y.C. had a new president came with an asterisk: “Sam is transitioning to Chairman of YC.” A few months later, the post was edited to read “Sam Altman stepped away from any formal position at YC”; after that, the phrase was removed entirely. Nevertheless, as recently as 2021, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing listed Altman as the chairman of Y Combinator. (Altman says that he wasn’t aware of this until much later.)

Altman has maintained over the years, both in public and in recent depositions, that he was never fired from Y.C., and he told us that he did not resist leaving. Graham has tweeted that “we didn’t want him to leave, just to choose” between Y.C. and OpenAI. In a statement, Graham told us, “We didn’t have the legal power to fire anyone. All we could do was apply moral pressure.” In private, though, he has been unambiguous that Altman was removed because of Y.C. partners’ mistrust. This account of Altman’s time at Y Combinator is based on discussions with several Y.C. founders and partners, in addition to contemporaneous materials, all of which indicate that the parting was not entirely mutual. On one occasion, Graham told Y.C. colleagues that, prior to his removal, “Sam had been lying to us all the time.”

I've only the briefest of interactions with him during my time at YC, but I was left with a similarly bad taste in my mouth. One day I'll tell that story.

April Fool's jokes truly are the bottom of the barrel in comedy. This is a "holiday" that should die to spare us all the suffering it causes.

A bottle of 1945 Domaine Romanee Conti Romanee Conti went for $650k at Acker, the auction house that sold Rudy Kuriawan’s wines. The 1945 is acclaimed because the pre-phylloxera vines were ripped up immediately following the harvest. Only 600 bottles were produced.

Funny how they keep finding new bottles to sell.

David Sacks is out as the Crypto and AI “Czar”. Bitcoin is down 36% since Trump was inaugurated and 44% from all-time-highs. From CNBC:

Venture capitalist David Sacks is stepping aside from his role as artificial intelligence and crypto czar for President Donald Trump.

Sacks told Bloomberg on Thursday that he has “used up” his 130 days as a special government employee and is joining the President’s Council of Advisers on Science & Technology.

There is no longer a Mac you can tinker with. It's been a long slow death. From 9to5Mac:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Netflix is now $27/month for the 4K video feed (which should be standard in 2026). From MacRumors:

Netflix is increasing its prices, with all plans set to get $1 to $2 more expensive. The ad-supported plan is now $8.99 per month, up from $7.99/month, while the Standard plan is $19.99 per month, up from $17.99 per month. Netflix's most expensive Premium plan is $26.99 per month, up from $24.99 per month. Extra member add-on pricing is also increasing by $1.

Netflix is junk food entertainment. Designed for a Wall-E generation of content consumers. There is very little of lasting value on the network.

But beyond that, $27 is a bad deal. You can buy movies off iTunes for $5-$10/each. That's 3-5 movies a month you can buy and still come out ahead, even if you only watch them once.

The world of engineering excellence has flattened. We used to pay 10x engineers a premium. Now, Claude Code can produce 1000s of times more code than a 10x engineer with a fraction of the error rate. Everyone can produce great code now--from seasoned veterans to product managers with no code experience.

New York is at its most magical when you can walk to the West Village and back in a t-shirt without breaking a sweat. It’s a glorious 57 and sunny on the first day of Spring 2026.

Bloomberg reports on how much Paris has changed in a decade for metro riders, bikers, and pedestrians.

Honking horns and screeching tires used to be a cliched scene-setting device for writers describing Paris. Those sounds no longer define a city where cars have taken a back seat. Visitors will discover that it’s a dramatically different place than a decade ago: lines of bikes and throngs of pedestrians where lanes were once jammed with cars, greenery encroaching on former pavement, summer swimming in the once-grimy Seine river — and a corresponding drop in air and water pollution.

It’s a paradise NYC could have—if it wanted it.

A fine parody (I hope) in Gothamist today:

Kips Bay, Turtle Bay, Murray Hill, Midtown East. Whatever you call that general area, there’s a decent chance you think it’s boring.

Everything seems to be either a doctor’s office, a bank branch or a parking garage. Much of the architecture is made of anodyne postwar steel. (I.M. Pei’s brutalist Kips Bay Towers is a cool exception.) If you’re into culture, there’s a big AMC with IMAX. There are frozen yogurt shops. You get it.

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