Mentioned in today’s edition: Sam Altman, Apple M5 MacBook Pros, Meta, DownDetector, Life360, Twiggy Forrest, Bitcoin and Ubuntu. Plus, deals on LG OLED TVs, AMD CPUs and Audio Technica speakers.

"Monitoring the situation" is the latest trend of how people online are engaging with the Iran conflict. In the first 24 hours of strikes, $750 million was bet on ""prediction markets"" about whether Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be removed from office and when it would happen (Reuters). One guy nearly won $800k (NPR). Now people are creating dashboards for so-called open source intelligence so they can firehose as much data as they can into their faces (SitDeck). Taking this a step further, some people are integrating betting and, you guessed it, AI agents (X)

The Sizzle: This whole "monitoring the situation" meme feels like an acceleration of our ravenous cultural hunger, maybe even an addiction, for more information. Whether it's our own biometric data via wearables, running Tweetdeck with a million feeds (RIP) to sourcing satellite data of Tehran, it's increasingly normalised to always be looking to know more and faster (Garbage Day's Ryan Broderick linked it to the COVID days of infection counts). But what's the point of all of this? "Monitoring the situation" doesn't mean anything if you can't make sense of it. If anything, more data = more noise, less meaning. I don't know if you've noticed this desire — I've definitely noticed it in myself — but it doesn't seem like there's ever enough data to make people happy.  It feels a lot like information gooning; a constant chase of a pay-off that never comes. 

I’m reluctant to be like "no one wants to dang work these days", but there's a through line between drop-shipping, crypto, gambling, AI agents, all of this — it's the idea that there's some hack, some new thing, some edge that's going to liberate us from the darkening reality of modern life. Naturally, none of these trends are actually about making something, it's just about finding an edge in the madness. So, we keep telling ourselves that the way to free ourselves is to keep logged in, keep scrolling, keep collecting data, keep monitoring the situation... 

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As part of its upgrade week, Apple's revved up its MacBook Pros with its latest silicon chips, faster storage and a price bump (Engadget). Its refreshed 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros have the new M5 Pro and M5 Max (Apple). For those whose eyes glaze over when you see someone mention core numbers or "Fusion Architecture" (you can geek out at Ars Technica if that's you), the TL;DR is: these will be workhorses for locally running LLMs. Or anything else. Which is funny considering Apple is so far behind on generative AI. Also, Apple appears to have leaked the name of its forthcoming budget MacBook, the Neo (MacRumours).

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Downdetector and Ookla's Speedtest have been sold to consulting company Accenture in a deal worth $1.7 billion (Reuters). Ziff Davis, which is mostly an online publisher that runs websites like Mashable, is selling off its "Connectivity division" which includes the outage checker and internet speed testing services. This division also includes some other properties like a crowdsourced mobile network tracker called RootMetrics — heh — and Wi-Fi heat mapping tool Ekahau. This seems like a lot of money but, with Facebook going down today, maybe it's worth every penny.  

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Australia:

Rest of World:

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Looking for meaning in your life? Wanting to contribute to total sum of all human knowledge? Well, Number Research is calling on you to help with its mission to find ALL the numbers. All you have to do is go to their website, type in a number, and it will tell you if it’s new or how many it has been entered already.

BTW this is just phase one. Once the project maps all the positive integers, the project's coordinators say, we'll move on to the negative ones. 

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Electronics

Computing

Mobile

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