Now, a $1,999 MacBook Pro can have a monthly payment of $38.99 over 36 months.

$38.99 * 36 = $1403.64. That doesn’t seem right.

Macrumors has a more detailed analysis (different device in their example):

If you return the iPhone 17 Pro and simply move on from the Apple Upgrade program, then your total cost to own the device would be $551.88 after 12 months, plus sales tax if applicable. While that is less than paying $1,099 upfront, the catch is that you are no longer in possession of the device after your lease ends and cannot resell it or trade it in.

Seems like it’s just designed to keep people buying new hardware regularly.

Not a lot of reporting in it yet, but I see an article from 404 media. Maybe I’ll donate to them instead.

Find this reference on Reddit.

I think I’ll stop my donations. Nothing gets executives’ attention like dropping revenue. I read a lot of exec responses to employee dissatisfaction at other big tech companies that basically said ‘too bad if a bunch of you are unhappy, the company is doing great so we’re right, you can leave.’

But only if you shared the generated link on some crawlable page? Or did they leak a list of share links so crawlers found them? The latter seems much more serious, and I can’t tell which it was from reading a couple articles.

Yeah, I can already find more bugs than can be fixed on schedule just by looking in the Jira backlog.

I learned Ansible for this purpose, so all the modified configs live in a git repo. I still get lazy and modify some things directly (looking at you Minecraft plugins) but a lot of it is pretty easy to set up via IaC.

Many of the most practical uses I’ve heard for AI are cleaning up messes AI caused.

In a potentially more ominous development, SpaceX, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, and the University of Southern California have in separate legal actions challenged the constitutionality of the NLRB

Nuts, didn’t realize Trader Joe’s was on the evil list.

Lots of useful examples in the article though, thanks for sharing.

The landing page doesn’t really show any of the cool stuff.

While these fines may seem exorbitant, it is worrying that the financial impact of such punishments rarely acts as a deterrent to these large technology companies, whose market capitalisation runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Yeah. We need the equivalent of the giant “stop work” stickers that get plastered on a building’s front door when construction doesn’t have a permit. Otherwise it’s just another operating cost to pass along to VCs/users.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security denied Polestar an authorization under the current Connected Vehicle Rule to sell cars in the U.S. from model year 2027 on. That’s because Polestar is a subsidiary of Geely, a Chinese automaker. Ironically, Polestar’s sister brand, also owned by Geely, Volvo, was granted the authorization in May.

What’s the Connected Vehicle Rule? From the Bureau of Industry and Security (is that a thing?):

On January 14, 2025, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) issued a rule restricting the import and sale of certain connected vehicles and related hardware/software linked to China or Russia. BIS determined these transactions pose national security risks, as companies from these countries may be compelled to share data or allow remote access to connected vehicles in the United States.

So, the reported ban seems capricious, but I wouldn’t mind one solution: stop making cars connected. The key fob uses its local protocol for lock/unlock and remote start, my phone uses bluetooth for charge controls and status, and there’s a scren that uses Android Auto. Car companies stop trying to write UX and network stacks.

And because SMS 2FA is actually opening a common attack vector. I have yet to find a credit union I qualify for that uses TOTP or Yibikey.

When they compared cartilage from young and old mice, they found that levels of 15-PGDH approximately doubled with age. To test the idea, researchers treated older mice with a small molecule drug that blocks 15-PGDH activity. [And cartilage regrew.]

Sounds very promising! I couldn’t figure out the peer-reviewed-ness status.

Slate’ service partner blurb at least has some sound bites related to ease of repair. But aren’t they also a ‘our car only has 3 parts’ company?

Does deleting the root post nuke the whole thread?

The foundation of the system is its visual model, which Cheng trained on a custom mosquito dataset. To do that, he relied on a DSLR camera with a high-magnification zoom lens, capturing detailed images of mosquitoes for training data.

So, machine vision model. Cooler project, less clicky title.

Cheap materials like pieces of the IKEA furniture my neighbors are throwing away?

But my company hasn’t had their mandatory all-employee multi day AI training from contractors yet!

In the UK, a group of Meta employees has started organizing a drive for unionization with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a branch of the Communication Workers Union.

Alright! Not holding my breath (will they just close the UK office?), but wishing them luck.