It’s been over half a decade since I first urged the meat-axing of notifications on your devices. I continue to feel strongly that turning off notifications and badges is one of the best changes you can make to enable a healthier relationship with technology. As I wrote in 2020:

The artificial urgency device notifications create is unnecessary, and probably unhealthy. Very few notifications are actually time-sensitive, yet far too many of us let our phones take us out of the moment needlessly.

Recently, Terry Godier published an excellent piece called “Phantom Obligation”, whose title is defined as “the guilt you feel for something no one asked you to do”. Badges on app icons on your phone are a prime example, with their widespread abuse resulting in countless such phantom obligations.

The notification badge took email’s unread count and made it universal. Any app could now claim urgency. A game wanting you to collect coins wore the same badge as a message from your mother.

Different messages have very different levels of importance, but badges have no granularity. Given that, the best move is to disable them almost everywhere.

Soon after Sebastian Heyneman left a suspicious-looking hardware device unattended at the World Economic Forum, he found himself in a very fancy jail. Eventually, he was asked to explain the device.

I say, “Look, I’m not a very good hardware engineer, but I’m a great user of AI.” I was one of the top users of [AI coding tool] Cursor last year. I did 43,000 agent runs and generated 25 billion tokens.

We open my machine. Chris and I go line by line through the code. I don’t know the language that the code was written in because it was written in AI, so Chris actually explained the code to me.

Not even knowing what coding language the software was written in is perhaps the most horrifying part of this.

On Wednesday, Amazon announced they’d be laying off about 16,000 workers. That’s not great. Also bad? They sent employees an email a day prior which accidentally spilled the beans prematurely.

The email sent on Tuesday signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS, wrongly said that impacted employees in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they lost their jobs. In Slack messages viewed by Reuters, AWS employees who received the email said the Wednesday meeting was almost immediately canceled. Amazon referred in the email to the layoffs as “Project Dawn.”

I’m sure that was a fun 24 hours for everyone at Amazon.

“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Aubrey wrote in the email, reviewed by Reuters. “These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success.”

The decisions may have been made thoughtfully, but the announcement sure wasn’t.

Over at The Nation, Kate Wagner has a wonderful indictment of those businesses which have participated in The Line, Saudi Arabia’s preposterous mega-project.

For nearly five years, we beleaguered souls in the design world have had to endure innumerable press releases and puff pieces about whatever zany shit was going on out in the Saudi Arabian desert. This included the Line’s supposed sustainability efforts (oh, the oil-funded irony), such as indoor gardens and wind farms, plus a number of gravity-defying proposals that, to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of physics, sounded more like pulpy sci-fi gags (most notoriously, an upside-down skyscraper poised like a keystone over an artificial marina full of stagnant water).

Wagner is piggybacking on the Financial Times report previously linked back in November, which details how the project is failing. Calling out all those who sold themselves out to participate, however, is worthwhile.

After a full year of congestion pricing in New York City, the New York Times has a detailed analysis, and the results are almost uniformly positive. There are fewer vehicles, traffic moves faster, transit ridership is up, and roads are safer and quieter.

Speaking of smart animals, meet Veronika, the Austrian cow who uses tools to scratch itches:

Veronika appears to use different tools for different purposes:

If it were her back or another tough area that warranted a good scratch, she would use the bristle end of a broom.

When a softer touch was needed, such as on her sensitive underbelly, she would use the smooth handle end.

Imagine what she could do with a Swiss Army knife.

It’s rude for humans to eavesdrop, but I’ll allow it for dogs.