Link: Reed Jobs Shares a Medical Story
Reed Jobs‘s Fight Against Cancer ↗ — An excerpt from the Sabrina Halper Show (via X)
I’m struck by his curiosity and wonder. Just like his dad. Wow.
Links
Short posts pointing to things from around the web.
Link: Down to the Second
Eclipses should be celebrations of science, not pseudoscience ↗ — John Gruber, Daring Fireball
Wednesday’s eclipse will cross Greenland, Iceland, and Spain — and astronomers called the exact time and path years ago, to the second. Gruber wrote this in 2024, and it’s aged into something sharper than he probably intended. Two years on, we’re not just tolerating pseudoscience as harmless — we’re watching institutions built on evidence get gutted by cranks, grifters, and zealots, who all get airtime and coverage as if they’re offering an equally valid take.
The eclipse is a good reminder of what happens when you do the math: you get the right answer, on time, every time.
Link: New in iOS 27 DB 5
Everything New in iOS 27 Beta 5 ↗ — Julie Clover, MacRumors
Good roundup of everything new in today's developer beta. This is shaping up to be a much-needed quality-of-life update. Hopefully, our long national nightmare of software quality issues in Cupertino is over. Though it's still too early to call.
Link: Summer Vibes Radio
Poolsuite describes itself as "the ultra-summer internet radio station, playing an infinity pool of summer sounds 24/7. Swimwear optional." That undersells it. What actually happens is that you open the site and a vintage computer boots up in your browser — startup chime, pixel fonts, the works — as if a Macintosh from 1986 had spent its entire life on vacation. Then the music starts, and it is somehow always the exact right amount of summer.
It costs nothing. It asks nothing. Its a lovingly overbuilt machine for feeling slightly better.
Link: The Instruments Were the Point
Welcome to the Age of Diarrhea ↗ — Peter Shamshiri, String in a Maze
Shamshiri's piece is about the four-month cyclospora outbreak, and it does the necessary work of tracing the funding cuts, the optional reporting, the White House sitting on Taylor Farms' recall deadline while naming only Taco Bell. But the line that stuck with me is the one that isn't about blame at all:
You'll see the illness, but you won't know its source.
A crank got put in charge of health policy and now people are sick. But cranks come and go. What Shamshiri is describing is the dismantling of the machinery that lets a society notice things about itself.
We know measles cases have exploded — more since 2025 than in the previous twenty-five years combined. We know that because someone built the thing that counts measles. That number isn't a fact of nature sitting out in the world waiting to be observed. It's the output of a surveillance system, staffed and funded, that has to be maintained the way a bridge has to be maintained. Take away the counting and the cases don't stop. They just stop being a number. They become a feeling. A bad season. Something going around.
A problem can be argued about. A mystery can only be endured. And an administration that would rather be endured than argued with has an obvious interest in converting the first thing into the second — not by lying, exactly, but by defunding the instruments that make lying necessary.
Which is why anti-transparency isn't a side effect of this politics. It's load-bearing. Shamshiri points at Clarence Thomas spending decades arguing that disclosure laws are unconstitutional, worried that transparency invites "reprisals" from an angry public. Reprisals meaning: people finding out, and then having opinions about it.
Worth reading in full.