Article

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent ‘misleading data’ being shown to pilots [The Register]

HOLY SHIT!!!!

Dark Sky has a new home [Dark Sky blog]

First off, congratu-fucking-lations! Dark Sky is the best weather service available to consumers today, hands down. It is wonderful that the people who built Dark Sky are finally getting their pay day.

Second, I kickstarted this service! How crazy is that?!? I became a backer of Dark Sky on Kickstarter all the way back in October 2011 and now they are part of Apple. Say what you want about Kickstarter, but the $40 I spent supporting Dark Sky has paid for itself dozens of times over.

Third, this is horrible news. Dark Sky is such a great service partially because it is so open. They support Android and have a robust API which is used by countless different services and applications out there. For example, my home automation system receives weather information from Dark Sky. With Apple buying Dark Sky, they are shutting down the Android app almost immediately and turning off the API in the future. This means that Dark Sky will cease to be the ubiquitous weather service that it is today. Instead, Dark Sky will serve a tiny role within one of Apple’s poorly, weakly-featured designed apps, like the Weather app. Apple buying Dark Sky is essentially the death of Dark Sky for consumers. The Dark Sky app for iOS will continue to function for a while, but nothing about the Dark Sky service will be better in the future than it is today. RIP Dark Sky.

In the end, I suppose this is “progress”. No service lives forever and Dark Sky has had quite a good run. I’m crossing my fingers that in the future Dark Sky’s weather information will remain available to consumers in a format roughly similar to what we have today.

How The Virus Got Out [NY Times]

Why the Coronavirus Has Been So Successful [The Atlantic]

We’re Not Going Back To Normal [MIT Technology Review]

When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’? An Extremely Important Guide [Audubon]

The Smartest Guys in the Clubhouse: How the McKinsey-fied Astros cheated their way to a championship—and became a parable of American success [The New Republic]