Favorites: Jobs Revisions and Retaliation, Apple’s Angle Error
August 8, 2025 – mRNA projects lose federal funding, NIMBYs equate apartments with genocide, and fur farming disappearing
Just... absolutely ridiculous situation around Apple's new drive icons. What were they thinking. There is no vanishing point. The angle on the front doesn't make sense. If you actually tilted a drive like that, the front would look totally different. If you can't tell what's going on in the picture, the leftmost is what it used to look like, the middle is the beta, and the rightmost is this designer's proposal of what it should look like.
It seems very likely that there will be additional traffic deaths in Boston because of this decision.
And here's California, where the amount is even larger (for now, Texas is growing super fast). This is happening faster than solar did.
Longer Reads
• Explanation of why gathering timely jobs statistics is really hard, and you should expect there to be corrections published months later. (src)(cached)
• Thread about how Ukrainians airlifted an electric bike with a heavy lift drone to a comrade stuck behind enemy lines so he could get home. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– CEO of Impulse talking about what appliance they might get into next, considering microwaves. (src)(cached)
– Check out Frame of Reference, an article/scavenger hunt about the history of Mac settings UIs. You probably don’t want to try this in a mobile browser, you need a full computer. No further spoilers. Make sure to give it time to fully load. (src)
– Article about the new single room occupancy buildings that are springing up in LA because of their byzantine zoning code. (src)(cached)
– Ukraine’s incredible drone manufacturing output is at least partially coming from 3D printers. Most scaling up makerspace tech instead of moving to injection molding. (src)(cached)
– NIMBYs show up to oppose new apartments, equate the new homes with genocide (src)(cached)
– "The mission impossible movies get a lot funnier if you imagine the “IMF” that employs Tom Cruise is the International Monetary Fund" (src)
– Noah Smith had an article I found useful that investigates whether AI Capex is big enough yet that a potential collapse could hit the entire economy. (src)(cached)
– Fur farming is just completely collapsing, seems like a good outcome. (src)(cached)
– "Environmental Review" does essentially nothing to protect the environment like the Clean Air Act does. Environmental Review just exists (cached) to be used to block projects for other reasons. (src)(cached)
– Cell phone bans in school help improve test outcomes, especially among the lower-achieving students. (src)(cached)
– Interesting perspective: "A disconcerting number of high status people upended their worldviews because other people did not affirm that status in the way they thought appropriate." and this is happening more often because being on social media is a good way to be a magnet for negativity. (src)(cached)
– Some surprising good news: teen suicide and depression rates peaked in 2017 and have been on the decline since. (src)(cached)
– Not the hugest deal, but one commenter points out how unusual it is in the modern era for a head of state to visit the front lines as much as Zelenskyy does. (src)(cached)
– Great idea for an LLM benchmark: playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon on Wikipedia. Here's the article about it. (src)(cached)
– Trump is canceling all federal funding for the 22 active mRNA initiatives. Particularly ironic because mRNA and Project Warpspeed were probably the clearest wins of his first term. We were literally in the midst (cached) of developing vaccines for cancer (src)(cached)
– Trump admin is planning to use the FAA to block private development of new wind turbines on private land. Here's details (cached) on the hundreds of billions of dollars of wind turbine projects at risk (src)(cached)
– Tim Cook gives the President a gift of a plaque with an apple logo on it set in a gold base. I’m pretty sure it’s not solid gold (Cook doesn’t appear to strain to hold it ) although I couldn’t actually find confirmation of that anywhere. Anyway, Apple absolutely giving the user what he wants in terms of product on this one. (src)(cached). I tried to get ChatGPT to investigate whether it’s solid gold, and it’s initial reaction is that Cook would never give the president solid gold because of “bad optics”, and “it’s way over the gift limit”. It’s training cutoff was mid 2024, sweet summer child.
– Seems bad that the people heading some of the major democratic-aligned polling organizations don’t believe in polling. (src)(cached)
– "New FBI data shows that both violent crime and property crime are at their lowest level since the 1960s” but the media disproportionately covers crime, so most Americans aren’t aware of the decrease" (src)
– From his excellent recent article on why he's not too worried about superintelligence, Tim Lee responds to the argument that companies or governments might be forced to let AI take over or risk being out-competed: if you ask software engineers at banks or healthcare companies and ask them what stops them from moving faster, the answer is risk aversion among leadership, resulting in slower decisions. There are changes they could implement _now_ to gain a competitive edge, but they mostly choose not to. (src)(cached)