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Meta has gone after AI in the same way they went after the metaverse, by splashing money around and rushing to build products fast. They’re spending tens of billions building out data centers and related AI infrastructure. They’re tossing out incredible compensation packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars to top AI researchers.

Facebook is now the cultural symbol for useless slop and disinformation, while ‘that’s so Reels’ is now a common insult for terrible shortform video content - and you get the first theory of Meta. It’s a laughable company whose core business is increasingly uncool, a company in decline, a company that falls flat on its face any time it tries to change things up.

Call Meta uncool all you’d like, metrics are up across the board. They’re getting higher user engagement, higher user counts, and they’re selling more ads at a higher price-per-ad. The numbers are up in virtually every way on every platform - Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and even Threads.

They can afford to make huge bets on speculative new technologies because they have more money than they know how to spend. Why not spend all that money on the metaverse or on AI? What else are they going to do with it? Zuckerberg still controls the company and he’d prefer to invest in new technology rather than just pay himself fat dividends. This is the second theory of Meta - a unbelievably successful company whose core business is booming and who spends a lot of money on speculative investments simply because they can.

It’s like when safe area insets appeared in iOS 11: it wasn’t clear why you needed them until the iPhone X came along with a notch and a home indicator. And then it changed everything.

There has also been an emphasis on “concentricity”. It’s an impossible thing to achieve and an easy target for ridicule. But it’s another case where Apple wants to take control of the UI elements that intersect with the physical hardware. All of this makes me think that Apple is close to introducing devices where the screen disappears seamlessly into the physical edge. Something where flexible OLED blurs the distinction between pixels and bezel. A new “wraparound” screen with safe area insets on the vertical edges of the device, just like we saw with the horizontal edges on iPhone X.

Other challenges, like infusing your own branding into an app with clear buttons will be easier to reason about once the reality of the hardware drops. Until then, stay away from the edges and wait for Apple to reveal the real reason for Liquid Glass.

Whilst it’s not exactly the same concept, I really felt the virtues of slow method thinking whilst reading Katalin Kariko's memoir on her research in developing the mRNA vaccine. The main thing that stood out to me was her slow methodical-ness in cleaning, preparing and thinking about experiments.

Being slow ‘forces’ me to think about strategy a lot because I need to make the best use of my time. This works well because science is so vast, and so strategy is important.

Writing to me feels more suited towards slow, patient thinkers. You have to shuffle words around many times before you get what you want to say.

We are being ravaged by diseases of despair. We don’t eat well. Our sedentary lifestyles are bad for physical and mental health. But we don’t talk nearly enough about the successes of public health and the advancements of science, which have largely been pushed by agencies, doctors, and research Kennedy and the Trump administration are now attacking. Our food, though more processed, is less contaminated thanks to FDA regulation. Infant mortality has plummeted. Cancer deaths have dropped 34% since 1991. Death rates from childhood leukemia are down six-fold since 1950. Vaccines for measles, polio, hepatitis B, and HPV have saved millions of lives. Smallpox was eliminated. Measles cases are down 99% (despite some recent outbreaks). U.S. life expectancy rose in the 20th century by over 30 years. Cardiovascular disease mortality has fallen about 75% from the 1950s. Even the maternal mortality rates in the U.S. may have been overstated, and new studies show our numbers are much more in line with other developed nations. HIV and AIDS deaths are down 54% since 2010 alone. Overdose deaths fell in 2024 by a whopping 27%. The list goes on and on and on. In short: We’re doing a lot of things right, and doing them in large part because of these agencies, scientific research, new drugs, new vaccines, and new treatment protocols. Quite obviously, these achievements are not enough to warrant burning the entire system down.

Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in a way that makes me sit up and listen. And I think that framing our work in this way lets us web designers explore exciting new possibilities. Instead of throwing a big carousel on the page and being done with it, thinking about making a website like an essay encourages us to focus on the tough questions. We need an introduction, we need to provide evidence for our statements, we need a conclusion, etc. This way we don’t have to get so caught up in the same old patterns that we’ve tried again and again in our work.

Everyone is tired of lifeless, humorless copywriting. They’ve seen all the animations, witnessed all the cool fonts, and in the face of all that stuff, they yawn. They yawn because it supports a bad argument, or more precisely, a bad essay; one that doesn’t charm the reader, or give them a reason to care.

Right now I see a lot of Swiss-style, minimalist portfolios. So the ones that stand out do something playful and different, whether that’s with animations, color, copy, type or layout.

Neglecting case studies. Dumping a bunch of images on a page and leaving it up to the user to guess what they’re looking at. Or, on the other extreme, writing case studies so long and boring I can’t make it past the first two sentences. "I want to understand your process, but I don’t need to know your user persona better than I know my own mother." It’s all about finding the perfect balance.

The person reading your case study is busy. They’ve probably looked at dozens of portfolios today. Respect their time. Write something that makes them smile. Tell a story, but get to the point. With our own portfolio, it’s easy to forget the design and web practices we know so well. Things like: People scan, they don’t read. They want captions, not chapters. They’ll exit fast unless you keep them wanting more.

Everybody goes to the theater in the U.K. because it’s accessible. Tickets are affordable. So many theaters are government subsidized, and there are all kinds of schemes where you get £5, £10, and £15 tickets. So there’s a kind of democracy to the whole thing. In New York, theaters are dependent on their subscribers, and everything is based around not losing them. Because without them, these buildings will shut down. The rent on a Broadway space is 10 times the rent of a West End space. The cheapest ticket you can get, even for Off Broadway, is $80. That means you go out for dinner, and you’re out close to $200 in a night. Nobody can afford it, and this makes it very exclusive. If you limit the audience to wealthy, older white people, it changes the type of play you can put on. Don’t get me wrong, the theater community in New York is beautiful—I absolutely love and adore it—but the commerce of it is just a different beast.

I think there’s a lot of pressure in the United States to become a famous person in a way that people in the U.K. don’t really give a shit about. You can work there and be a successful theater actor without having to have a big name. In the U.S., I felt like if I didn’t get some kind of TV visibility, those theater parts might dry up. Because they need to sell tickets, and famous people sell tickets.

Bill and Alec did such a nuanced job of writing a complicated female character who’s as nasty as the male characters on the Barry. But Sally’s not a bad person. She just learned the wrong survival skills. And her ideas of how to get ahead are bit misguided. We’re all so ready to forget that Barry literally kills people for a living and still root for him, and yet we’re challenged by an ambitious woman who has some irritating personality traits.

I wish more people asked about the crew. I wish more people asked about the designers, about the head of departments, about the cinematography, because when I think of the show, I think of you and those people. MYHA’LA: Yeah. LAWTEY: They’re entirely intrinsic to the show. Whatever people take in as an end product is built by them. We have the blessing and the curse of being the face of that, but it takes a village. We’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have some pretty special villages over the last five years. Mirna was one of those. We spoke about the hair at the start. I want to make sure that my hair doesn’t take away from her work. She was very much on top of my hair, but I said, “Is it okay if I just do it before I come in?” Just because I think there are very few opportunities to feel autonomy as an actor.

The sense of control that you have over what you’re doing often feels quite disconnected and sparse. To have the chance to try to claim some of that can make a real difference to your level of confidence in your work. Because ultimately, you’re going to give everything you have and then it will be taken away from you and made into something that is beyond your control. I heard this quote from this interview with Donald Sutherland recently where he was talking about Marlon Brando, who he knew very well, and he said, “I think it must be very trying when you’re that good and that exquisite, you put your body, yourself, your soul, your ideas in the hands of someone else and allow them to take it, cut it into little pieces, and create a character different from the character that you thought you were giving them. And you have to accept that. And if you accept that, then it’s an adult vocation.”

One key point that raises the stakes for the Pierpoint crew is that they’re all very young. (Eric is middle-aged, but let’s give him a pass.) Youth excuses some of their sexual and drug-induced follies. Youth can be blamed for some of their faux pas. Most important, their youth makes Industry a financial bildungsroman. These characters are growing, learning, becoming — their souls are on the line.

(The makeup artist who made Marisa Abela look so exhausted and miserable should win an award.) Whereas previous seasons might have found us in the pulsing party scene on the boat, now we’re zeroing in on Yasmin’s haggard, beaten visage. Even the show’s visual quality has darkened, with shots that feel slightly grainy and drab like something seen through tired eyes. It’s as if every frame is reminding us that the bankers are now adults. They have worked at this game for years. Their decisions carry weight, and their unresolved baggage is heavy on their shoulders.

Kenny also offers a foil to someone like Eric. Instead of continuing to feed his demons and climb the ladder that way, Kenny got help and became a nice guy. Now, he has become like Yasmin’s big brother and is the person who makes sure she gets to keep her job by going to bat for her when Eric starts making noise about firing her.

Without superior hardware, the Mac had to rely more on its software advantage, but throughout the Tim Cook era macOS has in large part become harder to use and less reliable. Most of the new features have been half-hearted ports from iOS rather than expanding its unique capabilities.

Mass shootings have an impact on the psyche of our society writ large that a lot of other gun violence does not. They are, in simple terms, effective acts of terrorism. They terrorize. When you report on these shootings, something quickly becomes very obvious: They don't just irreparably damage the lives of the victims, their families, and their friends; they also traumatize witnesses, responding law enforcement officers, doctors, nurses treating the injured, and the community as a whole. And that trauma spreads outward like a wave.

conservative columnist Noam Blum, who said pointedly and concisely something I believe with all my heart: “Nothing is monocausal. There are just parts of our society that are unfathomably broken and they occasionally intersect in unspeakably awful and evil ways.”

Here is a comedy that pines for the way things were without sacrificing any of the progress we’ve made to bring them back. A comedy that constantly uses the real world to set up its jokes, but seldom relies on it to deliver their punchlines — and tends to land some incredible haymakers whenever it does. A comedy that references everything from Elon Musk to racially motivated police violence without letting its virtues get in the way of its laughs, and even trots out the r-word in a scene that has the power to make activists and edgelords alike both cackle at the same joke (although the Elon stand-in is clearly meant to be the butt of it).

Where “Magnolia” embraced an organic messiness, “Weapons” unfolds in a series of rigid stanzas: We meet someone in crisis, they try and fail to self-medicate, they look for answers, weird shit happens, and the cycle starts all over again right when the craziness is about to reach fever pitch. Every round of the song inches a character that much closer to the heart of the mystery, and also to each other, but every round also clarifies the terrible loneliness they’ve been suffering all the while.

“Weapons” moves with such an off-kilter gait that “Punch-Drunk Love” seems like the more relevant PTA film. Its plunky score, its percussive energy, its open-hearted characters in desperate search for a vessel to contain their emotions…

what matters to “Weapons” is how they stack on top of each other like the floors of a house that’s been divided against itself. A house built by someone who can’t bear to be alone with their pain.

There was something freeing, I found, in having a conversation without the need to take turns, to soften my opinions, to protect someone else’s feelings. In that freedom, I gave the machine everything it needed to pick up on my phrasing.

Refusal training is especially inflexible for dual-use domains such as virology, where a benign request can be safely completed at a high level, but might enable a bad actor if completed in detail.

For GPT‑5, we introduced a new form of safety-training — safe completions — which teaches the model to give the most helpful answer where possible while still staying within safety boundaries. Sometimes, that may mean partially answering a user’s question or only answering at a high level.

Hawley uses limited sets—don’t expect the “Earth” to mean a lot of aliens wandering through a crowded mall—to significant effect, delivering a show that somehow feels both claustrophobic and sprawling at the same time. He introduces new alien lifeforms, including an unforgettable little monster that treats the eye like John Hurt’s stomach. Still, he never loses sight of the human and human variations at the center of his story. He’s constantly taking risks in terms of visual language, whether it’s double exposure, split diopter, canted angles, pacing shifts, or other tricks to amplify tension. It’s a show that’s consistently off-center in a manner that increases atmosphere, blending Hawley’s weird sense of humor with some of the most gnarly sci-fi imagery TV has ever seen.

the heart of the show to this viewer is something that the series has been exploring for a half-century: What happens when human beings are no longer the top of the predatory food chain? And, in subsequent films as well as here, what does it mean to be something in between human and alien? Wendy is not flesh and blood nor a robot; not a child or an adult. She’s nothing and everything at the same time.

You only have to read one or two of these answers to know exactly what’s up: the students just copy-pasted the output from a large language model, most likely ChatGPT. They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style. The prose rarely surpasses the sixth-grade book report, constantly repeating the prompt, presumably to prove that they’re staying on topic.

I’m not sure the marginal gains in the integrity of the class would be worth the hours spent litigating the issue.

I seriously dislike the experience of using a Mac with Liquid Glass. The UI has become the star, but the drunken star, blurry, illegible, and physically unstable. It makes making things way more of a struggle than it used to be. We had pretty good Mac UI, but Apple took the bad parts of it — the translucency and blurriness already there — and dialed it way up and called it content-centric. But it seems to me the opposite. Liquid Glass is Liquid-Glass-centric.

this is not the first time we’re going through a rough patch with Apple. I think of them as seasons — we had, for instance, terrible-keyboard season not so long ago. We were wondering if Apple would just stop making Macs altogether. But then that passed and we even got these wonderful Apple Silicon machines. Seasons end.

Embeddings are a cornerstone in the world of machine learning, transforming the way machines interpret and process complex data. At their core, embeddings are numerical representations of information — such as words, sentences, or images — mapped into a continuous vector space. In other words, they translate data into a language that machines can understand and process efficiently.

This approach is reminiscent of crafts such as carpentry, architecture, and clock-making, where practitioners often seamlessly merge creative and technical aspects of their work. In these fields, the union of art and engineering is generally perceived as a single craft. Similarly, the integration of design and programming in software development should be regarded as the craft of making modern software, emphasizing the synergy between the creative and technical aspects of the process.

all the cliches of bad managers apply internally as well: “My manager doesn’t listen to me, keeps making promises of me he can’t keep, drives me too hard, never gives me a break, doesn’t praise me when I DO get things done, infinitely critical, is somehow both paranoid and clueless, is no help at all, keeps increasing my workload…”

For anyone who's living a life they didn't fully say yes to in their deepest heart, who's doing a job they don't actually want to be doing, who's with someone they don't actually want to be with, who's just stuck in a set of circumstances that aren't a true expression of who they are—it's easy for that person to end up feeling victimized by the world. That creates a lot of resentment and hostility and anger. I think passivity and rage are different sides of the same coin: choosing not to be active or empowered in living your life and then being angry that you're not empowered. It's also something that comes up a lot when talking about cycles of addiction: seeing yourself as a victim.

What's so brilliant about Zach's writing is that there are these lines of dialogue that suggest whole histories and backstories: the relationship between Paul and his wife Donna and his ex Justine; Justine's past with the school and its students and their parents; Archer's relationship to his son. The movie never really gets into detail about these histories, but you can still feel how this world is so fleshed out in the margins