Last year, MACK Books published Architecture from Below, which anthologized writings by the French Brazilian architect, theorist, and painter Sérgio Ferro. (Douglas Spencer reviewed it for AN.) Now, MACK follows with Design and the Building Site and Complementary Essays, the second in the trilogy of books dedicated to Ferro’s scholarship. The following excerpt of the author’s 2023 preface to the English edition, which preserves its British phrasing, captures Ferro’s realization about the working conditions of construction sites in Brasília. The sentiment is likely relatable even today for young architects as they discover how drawings become buildings. Design and the Building Site and Complementary Essays will be released on May 22. If I remember correctly, it was in 1958 or 1959, when Rodrigo and I were second- or third year architecture students at FAUUSP, that my father, the real estate developer Armando Simone Pereira, commissioned us to design two large office buildings and eleven shops in Brasilia, which was then under construction. Of course, we were not adequately prepared for such an undertaking. Fortunately, Oscar Niemeyer and his team, who were responsible for overseeing the construction of the capital, had drawn up a detailed document determining the essential characteristics of all the private sector buildings. We followed these prescriptions to the letter, which saved us from disaster. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine the degree to which the construction of Brasilia inspired enthusiasm and professional pride in the country’s architects. And in the national imagination, the city’s establishment in the supposedly unpopulated hinterland evoked a re-founding of Brazil. Up until that point, the occupation of our immense territory had been reduced to a collection of arborescent communication routes, generally converging upon some river, following it up to the Atlantic Ocean. Through its ports, agricultural or extractive commodities produced by enslaved peoples or their substitutes passed towards the metropolises; goods were exchanged in the metropolises for more elaborate products, which took the opposite route. Our national identity was summed up in a few symbols, such as the anthem or the flag, and this scattering of paths pointing overseas. Brasilia would radically change this situation, or so we believed. It would create a central hub where the internal communication routes could converge, linking together hithertoseparate junctions, stimulating trade and economic progress in the country’s interior. It was as if, for the first time, we were taking care of ourselves. At the nucleus of this centripetal movement, architecture would embody the renaissance. And at the naval of the nucleus, the symbolic mandala of this utopia: the cathedral. Rodrigo and I got caught up in the euphoria. And perhaps more so than our colleagues, because we were taking part in the adventure with ‘our’ designs. The reality was very different — but we did not know that yet. At that time, architects in Brazil were responsible for verifying that the construction was in line with the design. We had already monitored some of our first building sites. But the construction company in charge of them, Osmar Souza e Silva’s CENPLA, specialized in the building sites of modernist architects from the so-called Escola Paulista led by Vilanova Artigas (which we aspired to be a part of, like the pretentious students we were). Osmar was very attentive to his clients and his workers, who formed a supportive and helpful team. He was even more careful with us, because he knew how inexperienced we were. I believe that the CENPLA was particularly important in São Paulo modernism: with its congeniality, it facilitated experimentation, but for the same reason, it deceived novices like us about the reality of other building sites. Consequently, Rodrigo and I travelled to Brasilia several times to check that the constructions followed ‘our’ designs and to resolve any issues. From the very first trip, our little bubble burst. Our building sites, like all the others in the future capital, bore no relation to Osmar’s. They were more like a branch of hell. A huge, muddy wasteland, in which a few cranes, pile drivers, tractors, and excavators dotted the mound of scaffolding occupied by thousands of skinny, seemingly exhausted wretches, who were nevertheless driven on by the shouts of master builders and foremen, in turn pressured by the imminence of the fateful inauguration date. Surrounding or huddled underneath the marquees of buildings under construction, entire families, equally skeletal and ragged, were waiting for some accident or death to open up a vacancy. In contact only with the master builders, and under close surveillance so we would not speak to the workers, we were not allowed to see what comrades who had worked on these sites later told us in prison: suicide abounded; escape was known to be futile in the unpopulated surroundings with no viable roads; fatal accidents were often caused by weakness due to chronic diarrhoea, brought on by rotten food that came from far away; outright theft took place in the calculation of wages and expenses in the contractor’s grocery store; camps were surrounded by law enforcement. I repeat this anecdote yet again not to invoke the benevolence of potential readers, but rather to point out the conditions that, in my opinion, allowed two students (Flávio Império joined us a little later) still in their professional infancy to quickly adopt positions that were contrary to the usual stance of architects. As the project was more Oscar Niemeyer’s than it was our own, we did not have the same emotional attachment that is understandably engendered between real authors and their designs. We had not yet been imbued with the charm and aura of the métier. And the only building sites we had visited thus far, Osmar’s, were incomparable to those we discovered in Brasilia. In short, our youthfulness and unpreparedness up against an unbearable situation made us react almost immediately to the profession’s satisfied doxa. Unprepared and young perhaps, but already with Marx by our side. Rodrigo and I joined the student cell of the Brazilian Communist Party during our first year at university. In itself, this did not help us much: the Party’s Marxism, revised in the interests of the USSR, was pitiful. Even high-level leaders rarely went beyond the first chapter of Capital. But at the end of the 1950s, the effervescence of the years to come was already nascent:  […] this extraordinary revival […] the rediscovery of Marxism and the great dialectical texts and traditions in the 1960s: an excitement that identifies a forgotten or repressed moment of the past as the new and subversive, and learns the dialectical grammar of a Hegel or an Adorno, a Marx or a Lukács, like a foreign language that has resources unavailable in our own. And what is more: the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, the war in Vietnam, guerrilla warfare of all kinds, national liberation movements, and a rare libertarian disposition in contemporary history, totally averse to fanaticism and respect for ideological apparatuses of (any) state or institution. Going against the grain was almost the norm. We were of course no more than contemporaries of our time. We were soon able to position ourselves from chapters 13, 14, and 15 of Capital, but only because we could constantly cross-reference Marx with our observations from well-contrasted building sites and do our own experimenting. As soon as we identified construction as manufacture, for example, thanks to the willingness and even encouragement of two friends and clients, Boris Fausto and Bernardo Issler, I was able to test both types of manufacture — organic and heterogeneous — on similar-sized projects taking place simultaneously, in order to find out which would be most convenient for the situation in Brazil, particularly in São Paulo. Despite the scientific shortcomings of these tests, they sufficed for us to select organic manufacture. Arquitetura Nova had defined its line of practice, studies, and research. There were other sources that were central to our theory and practice. Flávio Império was one of the founders of the Teatro de Arena, undoubtedly the vanguard of popular, militant theatre in Brazil. He won practically every set design award. He brought us his marvelous findings in spatial condensation and malleability, and in the creative diversion of techniques and material—appropriate devices for an underdeveloped country. This is what helped us pave the way to reformulating the reigning design paradigms.  We had to do what Flávio had done in the theatre: thoroughly rethink how to be an architect. Upend the perspective. The way we were taught was to start from a desired result; then others would take care of getting there, no matter how. We, on the other hand, set out to go down to the building site and accompany those carrying out the labor itself, those who actually build, the formally subsumed workers in manufacture who are increasingly deprived of the knowledge and know-how presupposed by this kind of subsumption. We should have been fostering the reconstitution of this knowledge and know-how—not so as to fulfil this assumption, but in order to reinvigorate the other side of this assumption according to Marx: the historical rebellion of the manufacture worker, especially the construction worker. We had to rekindle the demand that fueled this rebellion: total self-determination, and not just that of the manual operation as such. Our aim was above all political and ethical. Aesthetics only mattered by way of what it included—ethics. Instead of estética, we wrote est ética [this is ethics]. We wanted to make building sites into nests for the return of revolutionary syndicalism, which we ourselves had yet to discover. Sérgio Ferro, born in Brazil in 1938, studied architecture at FAUUSP, São Paulo. In the 1960s, he joined the Brazilian communist party and started, along with Rodrigo Lefevre and Flávio Império, the collective known as Arquitetura Nova. After being arrested by the military dictatorship that took power in Brazil in 1964, he moved to France as an exile. As a painter and a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble, where he founded the Dessin/Chantier laboratory, he engaged in extensive research which resulted in several publications, exhibitions, and awards in Brazil and in France, including the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1992. Following his retirement from teaching, Ferro continues to research, write, and paint.

When Anna Ginsburg opened her talk at OFFF Barcelona with her showreel, it landed like a punch to the heart and gut all at once. Immense, emotional, awesome. That three-word review wasn't just for the reel – it set the tone for a talk that was unflinchingly honest, joyously weird, and brimming with creative intensity. Anna began her career making music videos, which she admitted were a kind of creative scaffolding: "I didn't yet know what I wanted to say about the world, so I used music as a skeleton to hang visuals on." It gave her the freedom to experiment visually and technically with rotoscoping, stop motion and shooting live-action. It was an opportunity to be playful and have fun until she had something pressing to say. Then, Anna began to move into more meaningful territory, blending narrative and aesthetic experimentation. Alongside music videos, she became increasingly drawn to animated documentaries. "It's a powerful and overlooked genre," she explained. "When it's just voice recordings and not video, people are more candid. You're protecting your subject, so they're more honest." Talking genitals and creative liberation: The making of Private Parts A formative moment in Anna's personal and creative life occurred when she saw the artwork 'The Great Wall of Vagina' by Jamie McCartney at the age of 19. It followed an awkward teenage discovery years earlier when, after finally achieving her first orgasm (post-Cruel Intentions viewing), she proudly shared the news with friends and was met with horror. "Boys got high-fived. Girls got shamed." That gap between female pleasure and cultural discomfort became the starting point for Private Parts, her now-famous animated short about masturbation and sexual equality. It began as a personal experiment, sketching vulvas in her studio, imagining what their facial expressions might be. Then, she started interviewing friends about their experiences and animating vulvas to match their voices. When It's Nice That and Channel 4 emailed her looking for submissions for a late-night slot, Anna shared a clip of two vulvas in casual conversation, and they were immediately sold. With a shoestring budget of £2,000 and a five-week deadline, she rallied 11 illustrators to help bring the film to life. "I set up a Dropbox, and talking genitals started flooding in from the four corners of the world while I was sitting in my bedroom at my mum's," she laughed. One standout moment came from an Amsterdam-based designer who created a CGI Rubik's Cube vagina, then took two weeks off work to spray paint 100 versions of it. The result of what started as a passion project is an iconic, hilarious, and touching film that still resonates ten years on. From humour to heartbreak: What Is Beauty The talk shifted gear when Anna began to speak about her younger sister's anorexia. In 2017, during her sister's third hospitalisation, Anna found herself questioning the roots of beauty ideals, particularly in Western culture. Witnessing her sister's pain reframed how she saw her own body. This sparked a deep dive into beauty through the ages, from the Venus of Willendorf, a 28,000-year-old fertility goddess, to the Versace supermodels of the 1990s and the surgically sculpted Kardashians of today. "You realise the pace of the change in beauty ideals," she says. "If you revisit the skeletal female bodies which defined the super skinny era of the 2000s and compare it to the enhanced curves of today, you realise that trying to keep up is not only futile; it's extremely dangerous." She also explored the disturbing trend of dismemberment in advertising – shots taken where the heads are intentionally out of frame – and the impact this has on self-perception. Her response was What Is Beauty, released in 2018 on International Women's Day and her sister's birthday. The short film went viral, amassing over 20 million views. "It was a love letter to her," Anna said. "Because it didn't have English dialogue, it travelled globally. The simplicity made it resonate." And despite its runaway success, it brought her zero income. "Then I made the worst advert for a bank the world has ever seen," she joked. "I made money, but it broke my creative spirit." Enter the Hag: Animation, myth and millennial angst OFFF attendees were also treated to the world-exclusive first look at Hag, Anna's new animated short, three years in the making. It's her most ambitious and most personal project yet. Made with the support of the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding, Has is a 16-minute fantasy set in a surreal version of Peckham. The main character is a childless, single, disillusioned woman with snakes for hair. "I had just broken up with a lockdown boyfriend after struggling with doubts for nearly 2 years,"' she reveals. "The next day, I was at a baby shower surrounded by friends with rings and babies who recoiled at my touch. I was surrounded by flies, and a dog was doing a poo right next to me. I just felt like a hag." Drawing on Greek mythology, Anna reimagines Medusa not as a jealous monster but as a feminist figure of rage, autonomy and misinterpretation. "I didn't know she was a rape victim until I started researching," she told me after the talk. "The story of Athena cursing her out of jealousy is such a tired trope. What if it was solidarity? What if the snakes were power?" In Hag, the character initially fights with her snakes – violently clipping them back in shame and battling with them – but by the end, they align. She embraces her monstrous self. "It's a metaphor for learning to love the parts of yourself you've been told are wrong," Anna said. "That journey is universal." Making the personal political (and funny) Telling a story so autobiographical wasn't easy. "It's exposing," Anna admitted. "My past work dealt with issues in the world. This one is about how I feel in the world." Even her ex-boyfriend plays himself. "Luckily, he's funny and cool about it. Otherwise, it would've been a disaster." She did worry about dramatising the baby shower scene too much. "None of those women were horrible in real life, but for the film, we needed to crank up the emotional tension," she says. "I just wanted to show that societal pressures make women feel monstrous whether they decide to conform or not. This is not a battle between hags and non-hags. These feelings affect us all." Co-writing the script with her dear friend and writer Miranda Latimer really helped. "It felt less exposing as we'd both lived versions of the same thing. Collaboration is liberating and makes me feel safer when being so honest," Anna explains. Sisterhood, generations and the pressure to conform It was very clear from our chat that Anna's younger sisters are a recurring thread throughout her work. "They've helped me understand the world through a Gen Z lens," she said. "Stalking my youngest sister on Instagram was how I noticed the way girls crop their faces or hide behind scribbles. It's dehumanising." That intergenerational awareness fuels many of her ideas. "I definitely wouldn't have made What Is Beauty without Maya. Seeing what she was going through just unlocked something." She's also keenly aware of the gender gap in healthcare. "So many women I know are living with pain, going years without a diagnosis. It's infuriating. If I get asked to work on anything to do with women's health, I'll say yes." Medusa, millennials, and the meaning of self-love One of Hag's most biting commentaries is about millennial self-care culture. "There's a scene in the character's bedroom – it's got a faded Dumbledore poster, self-help books, a flashing 'Namaste' sign. It's a shrine to the broken millennial." She laughs: "Self-love became a commodity. An expensive candle, a jade roller, and an oil burner from Muji. Like, really? That's it?" Her film pokes at the performative of wellness while still holding space for genuine vulnerability. This same self-awareness informs her reflections on generational shifts. "Gen Z is going through the same thing, just with a different flavour. It's all about skincare routines now – 11 steps for a 14-year-old. It's wild." Feminism with fangs (and a sense of humour) Anna's feminism is open, intersectional, and laced with humour. "My mum's a lesbian and a Child Protection lawyer who helped to make rape within marriage illegal in the UK," she shared. "She sometimes jokes that my work is a bit basic. But I'm OK with that – I think there's space for approachable feminism, too." Importantly, she wants to bring everyone into the conversation. "It means so much when men come up to me after talks. I don't want to alienate anyone. These stories are about people, not just women." What's Next? Hag will officially premiere later this year, and it's likely to resonate far and wide. It's raw, mythic, funny and furious – and thoroughly modern. As Anna put it: "I've been experiencing external pressure and internal longing while making this film. So I'm basically becoming a hag while making Hag." As far as metamorphoses go, that's one we'll happily watch unfold.

The rebrand of Brussels Airlines doesn't touch the logo, colours, or name. It focused more on elevating the brand from the inside out, resulting in a deeper transformation that prioritises feeling rather than just form. In collaboration with WeWantMore, the airline has introduced a new identity system that spans brand touchpoints, reshaping perception through subtle changes rather than grand declarations. The result is a brand that finally feels like the airline it has always claimed to be: warm, refined, personal, and unmistakably Belgian. Back in 2021, the airline refreshed its visual identity in the wake of COVID, but while the fleet was repainted and the brand technically modernised, the core experience still felt corporate and distant. "We knew resistance to the brief was futile," says Sebastian Greffe, creative director at WeWantMore. "The rebrand was still fresh, and the CEO had personally signed off on the current logo." With the visual foundations off-limits, the studio focused on atmosphere. Anchored in the essence of "You're in good company," the new concept – "Small details. A world of difference." – frames the brand through a lens of considered hospitality. That idea comes to life in subtle but strategic ways: a single "focus dot" that leads the eye across layouts, a bespoke typeface inspired by the golden era of aviation, and a richer, warmer palette that complements rather than competes. "Those tight constraints became our greatest asset," says Sebastian. "With no room for superficial changes, we had to dig deeper, crafting an identity that hinged entirely on thoughtful details and meaningful experiences." Photography, for instance, avoids the usual stock tropes. Instead, it captures quiet moments: a smile exchanged with cabin crew, a view out the window, a handwritten note left in a lounge. The dot, used sparingly and always with purpose, reinforces this focus-led approach, while the brand's tone of voice trades promotional polish for a more honest, conversational cadence. One of the most distinctive design moves was the creation of Cirrus Sans, a custom typeface channelling the golden age of aviation through a Belgian lens. With geometric capitals and warm, humanist lowercase forms, it bridges nostalgia and clarity. In business communications, it pairs with the elegant Mackinac serif, which adds a soft touch of luxury to elevated materials. The type system transitions smoothly from crisp, all-caps headlines to more relaxed body copy, striking a balance between professionalism and personality. That balance is central to the whole project. Brussels Airlines wanted to evoke the feeling of a boutique hotel in the sky, not extravagant luxury but thoughtful hospitality. "It's not about gold trim or mood lighting," explains Sebastian. "It's about Stella Artois served properly. Neuhaus chocolates waiting at your seat. Indirect warm lighting instead of fluorescents." From lounges to livery, the new identity works across a broad ecosystem, extending into unexpected places. Meanwhile, motion principles inspired by flight dynamics add energy to digital assets, and the cabin interiors have been subtly refined through the use of warm materials and tactile finishes – a process closely guided by Priestman Goode. Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the rebrand is its restraint. There is no new, shouty symbol, no palette overhaul, and no fanfare. What has changed is the way the brand feels. "Flying has become something accessible, and some say it's lost a bit of its magic," says Sebastian. "But Brussels Airlines consistently ranks as one of the most hospitable. We just had to help them show that." The refreshed identity has already helped shift Brussels Airlines' positioning in a competitive sector, particularly against tour operators whose branding can often be perceived as interchangeable. Subtle typographic cues, considered materials, and the deliberate use of space all work together to convey a sense of quality without drawing attention to it. From a broader industry perspective, the project also hints at the future of airline branding. As travel becomes more intentional and emotionally driven, brand identities are under pressure to do more than decorate. They need to create a connection. "The industry is moving away from superficial glamour," says Sebastian. "Travellers want more than efficiency. They want sincerity, depth, and a sense of place." Brussels Airlines now delivers just that, not through spectacle but through quiet confidence: a red dot, a kind word, or a handwritten note.

A Microsoft employee has managed to circumvent a block instituted earlier this week that limited mentions of “Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “Genocide” in email subject lines or in the body of a message. Nisreen Jaradat, a senior tech support engineer at Microsoft, emailed thousands of employees on May 23rd with the subject line: “You can’t get rid of us.”“As a Palestinian worker, I am fed up with the way our people have been treated by this company,” the note, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, reads. “I am sending this email as a message to Microsoft leaders: the cost of trying to silence all voices that dare to humanize Palestinians is far higher than simply listening to the concerns of your employees.”It’s not immediately clear how Jaradat got around the block. The email calls on Microsoft employees to sign a petition by the No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA) group, which urges Microsoft to end its contracts with the Israeli government. NOAA is behind several high-profile protest actions in recent weeks, and Jaradat, a member, also encourages colleagues to join the group in different capacities. Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw directed The Verge to a previous statement it shared when the block was initially reported, saying that mass emailing colleagues “about any topic not related to work is not appropriate,” and that the company has “taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in.”NOAA organizer Hossam Nasr called Microsoft’s decision to block words “particularly egregious.”“Microsoft keeps telling its workers to go through the appropriate channels, and yet time and time again, those who speak up in ‘appropriate channels’ from viva engage posts to HR tickets are silenced or ignored,” Nasr said in a statement. “What Microsoft is really telling us is: make it convenient for us to ignore you. Nisreen’s email summarizes it: they cannot get rid of us. We will continue protesting in all ways big and small until our demands are met.”Microsoft put this email block into place the same week as its Build developer conference, during which current and former Microsoft employees, as well as hundreds of others, have been protesting against the company’s contracts with the Israeli government. Microsoft employee Joe Lopez disrupted Build’s opening keynote on May 19th and then sent an email to thousands of Microsoft employees. The company fired him the same day.A Palestinian tech worker then disrupted Microsoft’s CoreAI head during his presentation at Build on May 20th. The next day, two former Microsoft employees disrupted a Build session, and a Microsoft executive inadvertently revealed internal messages regarding Walmart’s use of AI moments later. There were also protests outside the conference venue on multiple days this week.This week’s protests and emails come just days after Microsoft acknowledged its cloud and AI contracts with Israel, but it claimed that an internal and external review had found “no evidence” that its tools were used to “target or harm people” in Gaza.Read the full email below:Yesterday, Microsoft chose to utterly and completely discriminate against an entire nation, an entire people, and an entire community by blocking all employees from sending any outbound email containing the words “Palestine”, “Gaza”, “genocide”, or “apartheid”. Microsoft leaders justified this blatant censorship by saying it was to prevent you from receiving emails like the email that you are reading right now. Even though Microsoft SLT are aware that this “short term solution” is easily bypassable, as this email clearly proves, Microsoft still doubled down, insisted on not rolling back the policy, and decided to continue targeting and repressing their Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and allied workers. They refused to revoke this censorship tactic, despite its potential illegality, dozens of employees expressing how racist of a decision it was, and even leaders admitting they see how it can be perceived as discriminatory and targeted. This further proves how little Microsoft values Palestinian lives and Palestinian suffering.As a Palestinian worker, I am fed up with the way our people have been treated by this company. I am sending this email as a message to Microsoft leaders: the cost of trying to silence all voices that dare to humanize Palestinians is far higher than simply listening to the concerns of your employees. Had this useless and discriminatory policy been revoked, as I tried to request numerous times through so-called “proper channels”[1][2], I would not be sending you all this email.Despite claiming to have “heard concerns from our employees and the public regarding Microsoft technologies used by the Israeli military to target civilians or cause harm in the conflict in Gaza” in a statement riddled with lies, admissions, and absurd justifications, Microsoft has shown that they are utterly uninterested in hearing what we have to say.Microsoft claims that they “provide many avenues for all voices to be heard”. However, whenever we try to discuss anything substantial about divesting from genocide in the “approved channels”, workers are retaliated against, doxxed, or silenced. Microsoft has deleted relevant employee questions in AMAs with executives and shut down Viva Engage posts in dedicated channels for asking SLT questions. Managers have warned outspoken directs to stay quiet and have even openly retaliated against them. When my community tries to flag issues and concerns to HR/GER/WIT, we have been met with racist outcomes with double standards. Throughout all this, Microsoft has sent a clear message to their employees: There are no proper channels at Microsoft to express your concerns, disagreements, or even questions about how Microsoft is using your labor to kill Palestinian babies.Over this past week, Microsoft has shown their true face, brutalizing, detaining, firing, pepper spraying, threatening and insulting workers and former workers protesting at Microsoft Build. This email censorship is simply the latest example in a long list of recent extreme and outrageous escalations by Microsoft against my community. Enough is enough.It has become clear that Microsoft will not listen to us out of the goodness of their hearts.Microsoft will not change their stance just because it is the moral or even legal thing to do. Microsoft will only divest from genocide once it becomes more expensive for them to kill Palestinians than not. Right now, Microsoft makes a lot of money from genocide-profiteering, so we must make support for genocide even more expensive.The situation in Palestine is more urgent by the minute. More and more Palestinians are being killed of starvation under the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)‘s bombing campaign, invasion, and siege that has martyred an estimated 400,000 Palestinians. The IOF have kidnapped over 16,000 Palestinians and placed them in torture and rape camps. 1.93 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced, and over 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced in the West Bank.While a hostile work environment is difficult, it cannot compare to the horrors taking place in Palestine - horrors that we as Microsoft employees are complicit in. These futile attempts to silence our community, while painful at times, are evidence that the pressure we are applying is working. This is not the time for baby steps or gradual progress. Starving infants cannot wait any longer. We, as a company of over 200,000 employees, are providing the technological backbone for Israel’s genocidal war machine in Palestinian. We, as employees of this company, have a responsibility to end our employer’s complicity in this AI-assisted genocide! Now is the time to escalate against Microsoft and end this Microsoft-powered genocide!I am calling on every employee of conscience to:Sign No Azure for Apartheid’s petition calling for a termination of all Microsoft contracts with the Israeli military and government: https://noaa.cc/petitionStrongly consider whether you want to stay in the company and fight for change from within, or if you want to leave and stop contributing labor to genocide.If you choose to leave Microsoft to no longer be complicit in genocide, do not go quietly. The No Azure for Apartheid campaign is ready to help you make an impact on your way out for Palestine, and we will also do our best to provide you support before leaving. Reach out to us expressing your interest to leave here.If you choose to stay, continue to fight from the inside to end Microsoft’s, and your own, complicity in war crimes, join the No Azure for Apartheid campaign. If you are worried about being public with your affiliation, rest assured that as a worker-led grassroots movement, we have members with all levels of anonymity and risk level. Some of our members are publicly visible and will even publicly confront our war-criminal executives, such as Satya Nadella, Mustafa Suleyman, and Jay Parikh at major Microsoft events like the 50th Anniversary celebration and Microsoft Build. Other members choose to stay completely anonymous and still contribute to the critical work of the campaign. There is room for everyone: https://noaa.cc/joinWhile I do understand that as Microsoft employees, we cannot fully boycott Microsoft, most of us can focus on the priority targets set by the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement, which recently set Microsoft as a priority target. The main target of the boycott is Microsoft Gaming, especially X-Box. We can also encourage our friends and family to boycott Microsoft where possible.To Microsoft Senior Leadership team specifically:You cannot silence Palestine.You cannot silence Gaza.You cannot hide your involvement in genocide and apartheid.Fre e PalestineNisreen JaradatSee More:

I think we, as engineers and designers, have a lot to gain by stepping outside of our worlds. That’s why in previous pieces I’ve been drawn towards architecture, newspapers, and the occasional polymath. Today, we stumble blindly into the world of philosophy. Bear with me. I think there’s something to it. In 1974, the American philosopher Robert M. Pirsig published a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A flowing blend of autobiography, road trip diary, and philosophical musings, the book’s ‘chautauqua’ is an interplay between art, science, and self. Its outlook on life has stuck with me since I read it. The book often feels prescient, at times surreal to read given it’s now 50 years old. Pirsig’s reflections on arts vs. sciences, subjective vs. objective, and systems vs. people translate seamlessly to the digital age. There are lessons there that I think are useful when trying to navigate — and build — the web. Those lessons are what this piece is about. I feel obliged at this point to echo Pirsig and say that what follows should in no way be associated with the great body of factual information about Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual in terms of web development, either. Buddha In The Machine Zen is written in stages. It sets a scene before making its central case. That backdrop is important, so I will mirror it here. The book opens with the start of a motorcycle road trip undertaken by Pirsig and his son. It’s a winding journey that takes them most of the way across the United States. Despite the trip being in part characterized as a flight from the machine, from the industrial ‘death force’, Pirsig takes great pains to emphasize that technology is not inherently bad or destructive. Treating it as such actually prevents us from finding ways in which machinery and nature can be harmonious. Granted, at its worst, the technological world does feel like a death force. In the book’s 1970s backdrop, it manifests as things like efficiency, profit, optimization, automation, growth — the kinds of words that, when we read them listed together, a part of our soul wants to curl up in the fetal position. In modern tech, those same forces apply. We might add things like engagement and tracking to them. Taken to the extreme, these forces contribute to the web feeling like a deeply inhuman place. Something cold, calculating, and relentless, yet without a fire in its belly. Impersonal, mechanical, inhuman. Faced with these forces, the impulse is often to recoil. To shut our laptops and wander into the woods. However, there is a big difference between clearing one’s head and burying it in the sand. Pirsig argues that “Flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating.” To throw our hands up and step away from tech is to concede to the power of its more sinister forces. “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.”— Robert M. Pirsig Before we can concern ourselves with questions about what we might do, we must try our best to marshal how we might be. We take our heads and hearts with us wherever we go. If we characterize ourselves as powerless pawns, then that is what we will be. Where design and development are concerned, that means residing in the technology without losing our sense of self — or power. Technology is only as good or evil, as useful or as futile, as the people shaping it. Be it the internet or artificial intelligence, to direct blame or ire at the technology itself is to absolve ourselves of the responsibility to use it better. It is better not to demean oneself, I think. So, with the Godhead in mind, to business. Classical And Romantic A core concern of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the tension between the arts and sciences. The two worlds have a long, rich history of squabbling and dysfunction. There is often mutual distrust, suspicion, and even hostility. This, again, is self-defeating. Hatred of technology is a symptom of it. “A classical understanding sees the world primarily as the underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.”— Robert M. Pirsig If we were to characterize the two as bickering siblings, familiar adjectives might start to appear: Classical Romantic Dull Frivolous Awkward Irrational Ugly Erratic Mechanical Untrustworthy Cold Fleeting Anyone in the world of web design and development will have come up against these kinds of standoffs. Tensions arise between testing and intuition, best practices and innovation, structure and fluidity. Is design about following rules or breaking them? Treating such questions as binary is a fallacy. In doing so, we place ourselves in adversarial positions, whatever we consider ourselves to be. The best work comes from these worlds working together — from recognising they are bound. Steve Jobs was a famous advocate of this. “Technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”— Steve Jobs Whatever you may feel about Jobs himself, I think this sentiment is watertight. No one field holds all the keys. Leonardo da Vinci was a shining example of doing away with this needless siloing of worlds. He was a student of light, anatomy, art, architecture, everything and anything that interested him. And they complemented each other. Excellence is a question of harmony. Is a motorcycle a romantic or classical artifact? Is it a machine or a symbol? A series of parts or a whole? It’s all these things and more. To say otherwise does a disservice to the motorcycle and deprives us of its full beauty. Just by reframing the relationship in this way, the kinds of adjectives that come to mind naturally shift toward more harmonious territory. Classical Romantic Organized Vibrant Scaleable Evocative Reliable Playful Efficient Fun Replicable Expressive And, of course, when we try thinking this way, the distinction itself starts feeling fuzzier. There is so much that they share. Pirsig posits that the division between the subjective and objective is one of the great missteps of the Greeks, one that has been embraced wholeheartedly by the West in the millennia since. That doesn’t have to be the lens, though. Perhaps monism, not dualism, is the way. In a sense, technology marks the ultimate interplay between the arts and the sciences, the classical and the romantic. It is the human condition brought to you with ones and zeros. To separate those parts of it is to tear apart the thing itself. The same is true of the web. Is it romantic or classical? Art or science? Structured or anarchic? It is all those things and more. Engineering at its best is where all these apparent contradictions meet and become one. What is this place? Well, that brings us to a core concept of Pirsig’s book: Quality. Quality The central concern of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the ‘Metaphysics of Quality’. Pirsig argues that ‘Quality’ is where subjective and objective experience meet. Quality is at the knife edge of experience. “Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.”— Robert M. Pirsig Pirsig's writings overlap a lot with Taoism and Eastern philosophy, to the extent that he likens Quality to the Tao. Quality is similarly undefinable, with Pirsig himself making a point of not defining it. Like the Tao, Plato’s Form of the Good, or the ‘good taste’ to which GitHub cofounder Scott Chacon recently attributed the platform’s success, it simply is. Despite its nebulous nature, Quality is something we recognise when we see it. Any given problem or question has an infinite number of potential solutions, but we are drawn to the best ones as water flows toward the sea. When in a hostile environment, we withdraw from it, responding to a lack of Quality around us. We are drawn to Quality, to the point at which subjective and objective, romantic and classical, meet. There is no map, there isn’t a bullet point list of instructions for finding it, but we know it when we’re there. A Quality Web So, what does all this look like in a web context? How can we recognize and pursue Quality for its own sake and resist the forces that pull us away from it? There are a lot of ways in which the web is not what we’d call a Quality environment. When we use social media sites with algorithms designed around provocation rather than communication, when we’re assailed with ads to such an extent that content feels (and often is) secondary, and when AI-generated slop replaces artisanal craft, something feels off. We feel the absence of Quality. Here are a few habits that I think work in the service of more Quality on the web. Seek To Understand How Things Work I’m more guilty than anyone of diving into projects without taking time to step back and assess what I’m actually dealing with. As you can probably guess from the title, a decent amount of time in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is spent with the author as he tinkers with his motorcycle. Keeping it tuned up and in good repair makes it work better, of course, but the practice has deeper, more understated value, too. It lends itself to understanding. To maintain a motorcycle, one must have some idea of how it works. To take an engine apart and put it back together, one must know what each piece does and how it connects. For Pirsig, this process becomes almost meditative, offering perspective and clarity. The same is true of code. Rushing to the quick fix, be it due to deadlines or lethargy, will, at best, lead to a shoddy result and, in all likelihood, make things worse. “Black boxes” are as much a choice not to learn as they are something innately mysterious or unknowable. One of the reasons the web feels so ominous at times is that we don’t know how it works. Why am I being recommended this? Why are ads about ivory backscratchers following me everywhere? The inner workings of web tracking or AI models may not always be available, but just about any concept can be understood in principle. So, in concrete terms: Read the documentation, for the love of god.Sometimes we don’t understand how things work because the manual’s bad; more often, it’s because we haven’t looked at it. Follow pipelines from their start to their finish.How does data get from point A to point Z? What functions does it pass through, and how do they work? Do health work.Changing the oil in a motorcycle and bumping project dependencies amount to the same thing: a caring and long-term outlook. Shiny new gizmos are cool, but old ones that still run like a dream are beautiful. Always be studying.We are all works in progress, and clinging on to the way things were won’t make the brave new world go away. Be open to things you don’t know, and try not to treat those areas with suspicion. Bound up with this is nurturing a love for what might easily be mischaracterized as the ‘boring’ bits. Motorcycles are for road trips, and code powers products and services, but understanding how they work and tending to their inner workings will bring greater benefits in the long run. Reframe The Questions Much of the time, our work is understandably organized in terms of goals. OKRs, metrics, milestones, and the like help keep things organized and stuff happening. We shouldn’t get too hung up on them, though. Looking at the things we do in terms of Quality helps us reframe the process. The highest Quality solution isn’t always the same as the solution that performed best in A/B tests. The Dark Side of the Moon doesn’t exist because of focus groups. The test screenings for Se7en were dreadful. Reducing any given task to a single metric — or even a handful of metrics — hamstrings the entire process. Rory Sutherland suggests much the same thing in Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? when he talks about looking at things as open-ended questions rather than reducing them to binary metrics to be optimized. Instead of fixating on making trains faster, wouldn’t it be more useful to ask, How do we improve their Quality? Challenge metrics. Good ones — which is to say, Quality ones — can handle the scrutiny. The bad ones deserve to crumble. Either way, you’re doing the world a service. With any given action you take on a website — from button design to database choices — ask yourself, Does this improve the Quality of what I’m working on? Not the bottom line. Not the conversion rate. Not egos. The Quality. Quality pulls us away from dark patterns and towards the delightful. The will to Quality is itself a paradigm shift. Aspiring to Quality removes a lot of noise from what is often a deafening environment. It may make things that once seemed big appear small. Seek To Wed Art With Science (And Whatever Else Fits The Bill) None of the above is to say that rules, best practices, conventions, and the like don’t have their place or are antithetical to Quality. They aren’t. To think otherwise is to slip into the kind of dualities Pirsig rails against in Zen. In a lot of ways, the main underlying theme in my What X Can Teach Us About Web Design pieces over the years has been how connected seemingly disparate worlds are. Yes, Vitruvius’s 1st-century tenets about architecture are useful to web design. Yes, newspapers can teach us much about grid systems and organising content. And yes, a piece of philosophical fiction from the 1970s holds many lessons about how to meet the challenges of artificial intelligence. Do not close your work off from atypical companions. Stuck on a highly technical problem? Perhaps a piece of children’s literature will help you to make the complicated simple. Designing a new homepage for your website? Look at some architecture. The best outcomes are harmonies of seemingly disparate worlds. Cling to nothing and throw nothing away. Make Time For Doing Nothing Here’s the rub. Just as Quality itself cannot be defined, the way to attain it is also not reducible to a neat bullet point list. Neither waterfall, agile or any other management framework holds the keys. If we are serious about putting Buddha in the machine, then we must allow ourselves time and space to not do things. Distancing ourselves from the myriad distractions of modern life puts us in states where the drift toward Quality is almost inevitable. In the absence of distracting forces, that’s where we head. Get away from the screen.We all have those moments where the solution to a problem appears as if out of nowhere. We may be on a walk or doing chores, then pop! Work on side projects.I’m not naive. I know some work environments are hostile to anything that doesn’t look like relentless delivery. Pet projects are ideal spaces for you to breathe. They’re yours, and you don’t have to justify them to anyone. As I go into more detail in “An Ode to Side Project Time,” there is immense good in non-doing, in letting the water clear. There is so much urgency, so much of the time. Stepping away from that is vital not just for well-being, but actually leads to better quality work too. From time to time, let go of your sense of urgency. Spirit Of Play Despite appearances, the web remains a deeply human experiment. The very best and very worst of our souls spill out into this place. It only makes sense, therefore, to think of the web — and how we shape it — in spiritual terms. We can’t leave those questions at the door. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has a lot to offer the modern web. It’s not a manifesto or a way of life, but it articulates an outlook on technology, art, and the self that many of us recognise on a deep, fundamental level. For anyone even vaguely intrigued by what’s been written here, I suggest reading the book. It’s much better than this article. Be inspired. So much of the web is beautiful. The highest-rated Awwwards profiles are just a fraction of the amazing things being made every day. Allow yourself to be delighted. Aspire to be delightful. Find things you care about and make them the highest form of themselves you can. And always do so in a spirit of play. We can carry those sentiments to the web. Do away with artificial divides between arts and science and bring out the best in both. Nurture a taste for Quality and let it guide the things you design and engineer. Allow yourself space for the water to clear in defiance of the myriad forces that would have you do otherwise. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in a social media feed or the inner machinations of cloud computing as at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha, which is to demean oneself. Other Resources Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi Tao Te Ching “The Creative Act” by Rick Rubin “Robert Pirsig & His Metaphysics of Quality” by Anthony McWatt “Dark Patterns in UX: How to Identify and Avoid Unethical Design Practices” by Daria Zaytseva Further Reading on Smashing Magazine “Three Approaches To Amplify Your Design Projects,” Olivia De Alba “AI’s Transformative Impact On Web Design: Supercharging Productivity Across The Industry,” Paul Boag “How A Bottom-Up Design Approach Enhances Site Accessibility,” Eleanor Hecks “How Accessibility Standards Can Empower Better Chart Visual Design,” Kent Eisenhuth

When pricing your interior design services, competitive does not mean equal. Rather than basing your fees on those of your peers, what you charge should reflect the specific metrics of your business. There is a lot of industry noise around pricing, so avoiding non-credentialed, unaccountable, and clickbait-peddling Instagram “experts” is crucial. Instead, follow this data- and market-driven guide to set your interior design studio’s optimal pricing, one that will maximize your revenue and profitability.Define your business’s purposeIn an industry where designers can have drastically different whys, clarify yours. For instance, your business may be the primary means of supporting your household while another designer whose work you admire, and who is operating in your region with similar clients, is doing this “for fun.” Perhaps that designer is billing at an artificially low rate and giving their clients trade pricing with no markups. Your reasons are very different—and you’re not going to be able to compete with that model. It’s futile and expensive to try.Join NowAD PRO members enjoy exclusive benefits. Get a year of unlimited access for $25 $20 per month.ArrowIgnore your peersWhat another studio charges is irrelevant to what you can charge. Some lesser-known studios can get away with charging incredibly high fees, while very well-known studios might experience a lower maximum price threshold. Identify what price the market will bear for your unique interior design services. When studios set prices based on others they deem to be competitors, they are very often leaving money on the table and undervaluing their own services.Don’t reverse-engineer your feeSome studios run through the time-intensive exercise of using their own historical financials to calculate their desired net income or profit and then reverse-engineer pricing that will accommodate their net income target. This approach is flawed. By calculating the least amount of money you can charge, you are once again potentially leaving heaps of dollars on the table. In many cases, the market price of your interior design services can be significantly more than the price you will get by backing into a target net income figure or net margin percentage.Given all these dynamics, never speculate on pricing. Take a data-driven approach, like the one we’ve developed over the last ten years, to maximize your studio’s revenue.To maximize revenue and profit…Bill hourlyFor residential projects, hourly billable professional fees alongside a furniture, fixtures, and equipment markup is the pricing model that maximizes revenue, profitability, and client acquisition, when positioned correctly. When diligent about tracking their time, 99% of studios make more money than they otherwise would by charging flat fees. There are rare instances when a studio can charge stratospheric flat fees and the market will bear it, but these are edge cases.What You’re Getting Wrong With Your Interior Design ContractBusiness advisor Seth Kaplowitz on optimizing your interior design contractWrite a client-friendly contractWhen a studio moves to hourly billing, their contract terms become more client-friendly and drive up their client conversion rate. Conversely, a flat-fee-based contract tends to have a lot of limitations and restrictions that can turn off potential clients. For example, a flat fee contract often stipulates a list of services where additional fees apply. If your client wants value engineering, more than one design concept, or additional specifications for procured items, it costs extra. A flat fee contract can introduce friction and ultimately prevent a client from signing and moving forward. The goal is to eliminate this friction.Taking a “billable hours plus procurement fees” pricing approach, you can reverse-engineer the approximate price per square foot of decorating, design, and full renovation projects for a studio. By defining price per square foot by project type alongside average timeline, your clients are armed with the ability to calculate the approximate cost of the project themselves (while protecting your studio’s revenue and profitability). This approach gives the client the confidence and feeling of control they need to sign a contract.Test pricing elasticityAfter identifying the approximate price per square foot by project type for your studio, test its limits. Push pricing up and closely watch the client conversion rate. Focus on qualified inbound traffic—leads and referrals from architects, contractors, or past clients—and disregard the subset of unqualified leads from Instagram, which can generally be classified as shoppers, not buyers. Then calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of qualified inbound leads by the number of leads that signed a contract. If this rate is above a desired threshold, there is room to raise prices. They can continue to rise until the conversion rate drops below that threshold, at which point you’ve maximized your pricing. This exercise relates exclusively to a studio’s unique demand curve and what the market will pay for its unique interior design services, avoiding unhelpful peer comparisons.Reanalyze your current approachIf you’re a studio principal, look at the following data sets:

Smitch The Unshakable Resolve of "this guy are sick" Member Apr 21, 2022 4,752 New ‘Marathon’ Info: Bungie Morale, Launch Worries And Changing Plans After a rough playtest and now plagiarism confirmation, Bungie is changing some Marathon plans and internally, things are bad. www.forbes.com Chaos has engulfed Bungie after an artist, ANTIREAL, came forward to accuse Bungie of ripping off her 2017 work as its upcoming extraction shooter Marathon was starting to take shape as early as 2018. Bungie admitted to the plagiarism, supposedly the work of one ex-artist, and promised to make things right, but the story gained traction among gaming outlets and reaction streamers alike, and it's poisoned the previous positive conversation about the aesthetic of the game. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I've spoken to some current and former employees about Bungie's excuse for the art theft, studio morale, the possibility of a delay and some very real changes when it comes to the upcoming presentation and playtesting of the game. Here's what I've learned: The public explanation for the art theft, one ex-employee taking things in 2020, is the same one being given internally at Bungie among the rank and file. Sony and Bungie legal are now sorting through this and there is unlikely to be any much new information as all of this continues to unfold. It is not clear how long an "audit" will take of the assets to remove or find any more plagiarism, as it's an expansive enough process to have Bungie not even show any footage at all in its recent livestream. Morale is in "free-fall" across all departments, and "the vibes have never been worse." Everyone has the same concerns about what happens to Bungie as a studio if Marathon bombs, which is something they absolutely cannot afford. There are not even hints or jokes about a delay from the September release date internally. With that said, it is entirely possible, if not likely, those conversations are happening privately between higher-up Sony and Bungie leadership. It's unclear what the plan is to launch the game in a "now actively hostile environment" just a few months from now, or how to turn that around. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Some changes to future plans had been made even before this new plagiarism development. Mainly as a reaction to gameplay footage and now the Closed Alpha. At the start of this month Bungie pulled the plug on its main Marathon marketing plan which was going to have a new trailer in June along with the launch of pre-orders. The whole campaign needs to be reworked now. A heavily marketed Public Beta in August may be changed into a "roadmap of public playtests" with no actual details set yet. This would align with Bungie's stated multiple opportunities to play before launch, rather than just the upcoming Beta. Marathon was originally pitched by higher-up "good old boy" Bungie leadership and as far back as five years ago devs were telling them what would and wouldn't work and were often ignored. Many have said previously that it needed to have some sort of PvE component. Click to expand... Click to shrink...   Crossing Eden Member Oct 26, 2017 58,458 It's a shame what has happened to Bungie. Since their inception every single one of their titles has had development woes and issues and that shadow has been steadily catching up to them since they left Halo, most especially when it comes to their tech debt and how much of a hinderance that must be for production. It's so strange because when you actually play Bungie games there are often few signs of the dev issues but now it's like, "Hey btw if you get this game you're gonna be pretty lost because they removed the intro campaign."  Last edited: Yesterday at 11:04 AM Maelstrom Member Apr 22, 2025 95 This sucks, for everyone. I hope their studio will be stronger after this.   Red Kong XIX Member Oct 11, 2020 13,234 They probably have to delay it.   maze001 Member Sep 18, 2024 628 Crazy thing is even if they delay 6 months that means Arc Raiders and Tarkov (Steam release) will be out by then and it will put Marathon closer to GTA6 and maybe Fairgames release dates so it may end up even worse for them.   Jagi Member May 6, 2025 43 Whatever it may be, the livestream yesterday made it insanely difficult for Sony and Bungie lawyers to create a narrative of their own. Its all in 4K: the accusation, the admittance, even the trial was online yesterday. If they could've saved face, yesterday stripped them naked of all absolution.  Vourlis Member Aug 14, 2022 5,836 United States Sometimes it's just amazing that anything gets made, ever.   MANTRA Member Feb 21, 2024 1,113 maze001 said: Crazy thing is even if they delay 6 months that means Arc Raiders and Tarkov (Steam release) will be out by then and it will put Marathon closer to GTA6 and maybe Fairgames release dates so it may end up even worse for them. Click to expand... Click to shrink... *If* the delay results in a better product I think thats a worthy trade-off imo. Miyamoto quote etc.   Mini-Me Member Oct 25, 2017 1,126 I genuinely don't know what they do with this. Any delays would need to be significant enough to add and/or re-tool a lot of content to make it more exciting and more than just a basic ass extraction game but then that puts it closer to something like GTA (unless they delay by a year or more which seems unlikely). Not delaying seems like a death sentence. Not delaying and launching it instead as an early access title or something like that also seems futile. The entire thing seems doomed to fail, especially as public sentiment online nowadays is so, so hard to turn around.   Gamer @ Heart Member Oct 26, 2017 11,418 Red Kong XIX said: They probably have to delay it. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Unless they have a magical way of generating hundreds of millions in revenue the rest of the fiscal year, then that means Bungie leadership will likely get pushed out by Sony. They have metrics to meet to stay whatever ridiculous floundering semi independent status they are in. Which is probably a good thing  IDontBeatGames ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice Member Oct 29, 2017 21,030 New York MANTRA said: *If* the delay results in a better product I think thats a worthy trade-off imo. Miyamoto quote etc. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I don't disagree but I do wonder if this entire fiasco ends up sticking around Marathon like a bad cloud even if it gets delayed a few months, meaning like, I wonder if folks will choose to not actively support it even if the game is delayed a few months and gets fixed due to all of this.   ianpm31 Member Oct 27, 2017 7,397 Probably getting delayed. I don't understand Bungie at all. Just make Destiny 3 along with a single player co op project like the halo days.  Man Called Aerodynamics Member Oct 29, 2017 8,315 Everyone has the same concerns about what happens to Bungie as a studio if Marathon bombs, which is something they absolutely cannot afford. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I just don't understand how a big studio with so much history and talent gets to a place where they're betting the entire farm on this one risky project.  Truant Member Oct 28, 2017 6,914 If they play this right this might be just what this game needs.   maze001 Member Sep 18, 2024 628 Mini-Me said: I genuinely don't know what they do with this. Any delays would need to be significant enough to add and/or re-tool a lot of content to make it more exciting and more than just a basic ass extraction game but then that puts it closer to something like GTA (unless they delay by a year or more which seems unlikely). Not delaying seems like a death sentence. Not delaying and launching it instead as an early access title or something like that also seems futile. The entire thing seems doomed to fail, especially as public sentiment online nowadays is so, so hard to turn around. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Yeah, given a lot of the feedback I've heard it doesn't seem like a September > March delay would give them enough time to spice the game up beyond super basic extraction shooter. They would definitely need more time than that.   Lowrys Member Oct 25, 2017 14,650 London Jagi said: Whatever it may be, the livestream yesterday made it insanely difficult for Sony and Bungie lawyers to create a narrative of their own. Its all in 4K: the accusation, the admittance, even the trial was online yesterday. If they could've saved face, yesterday stripped them naked of all absolution. Click to expand... Click to shrink... What trial?   ElFly Member Oct 27, 2017 3,719 ianpm31 said: Probably getting delayed. I don't understand Bungie at all. Just make Destiny 3 along with a single player co op project like the halo days. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I think the cost of developing Destiny 2 constantly has scared them of single player or PvE elements it's why Marathon is strongly oriented towards PvP, cause making campaigns or tons of maps for one story event or animating NPCs is expensive. Meanwhile people are still playing Counterstrike. They want that level of non production. Maybe they can put new guns into it constantly, that's one thing they've learned to do predictably at Destiny. But that seems to be the level of investment they want to put in.  Mini-Me Member Oct 25, 2017 1,126 maze001 said: Yeah, given a lot of the feedback I've heard it doesn't seem like a Sept > March delay would give them enough time to spice the game up beyond super basic extraction shooter. They would definitely need more time than that. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Yeah I put about 8 hours into the alpha and the game just does not have much of anything going on. It feels akin to something like DMZ in COD or whatever the Battlefield extraction mode was in that it's a mostly fine but very simple extraction mode that's part of a larger package of multiplayer and single player offerings. Except in Marathon's case that's it, that's all they have. I don't think 3 extra months fixes anything. I don't even think 6 months fixes anything.   theSoularian Member Oct 25, 2017 3,942 ianpm31 said: Probably getting delayed. I don't understand Bungie at all. Just make Destiny 3 along with a single player co op project like the halo days. Click to expand... Click to shrink... If only it was that simple. A Destiny 3 would be years away.  Chumunga64 Member Jun 22, 2018 17,133 Sony should have really noticed the red flags when Microsoft, during the time they were buying everyone didn't even entertain the thought of buying the studio that gave them the franchise that prevented the xbox brand from being dead on arrival   wellpapp Member Aug 21, 2018 528 Gothenburg My gut feeling says it's going to bomb in Sony's eyes regardless.   Risev "This guy are sick" Member Oct 27, 2017 3,889 theSoularian said: If only it was that simple. A Destiny 3 would be years away. Click to expand... Click to shrink... If they started right now? It would take 5 years minimum most likely. But the wish would be that they would have started working on a Destiny 3 years ago, just like they did Destiny 2. I just don't understand why they didn't take Destiny through that same few steps. Those were Destiny's best and most successful years.  Zok310 Member Oct 25, 2017 6,019 Gamer @ Heart said: Unless they have a magical way of generating hundreds of millions in revenue the rest of the fiscal year, then that means Bungie leadership will likely get pushed out by Sony. They have metrics to meet to stay whatever ridiculous floundering semi independent status they are in. Which is probably a good thing Click to expand... Click to shrink... They got that covered with the Destiny stans, just drop a "new strike" that we already paid for into D2 and 1 billion dollars overnight.   DieH@rd Member Oct 26, 2017 12,012 Hopefully they'll pull through, D2 is great to play but it's hard to attract new players due to large amount of expansions, vaulting, and complicated UI/progression. I still play it regularly, and the upcoming expansions sound interesting. Marathon looks nice, but I'm mostly solo player...  Dekuman Member Oct 27, 2017 20,993 Sony throwing good money after bad. The whole live service push has been a boondoggle. Wiping off years of PS profits off the books.  Mr.Deadshot Member Oct 27, 2017 23,141 These mega studios need to get a grip. They need to make smaller scale games with a clear vision and focus. They can expand on that. And they fore sure need to steer away from chasing the "forever" game bullshit. Right now it feels like Marathon will be delayed for 6-12 months and then bomb anyway. It would be nice if Bungie could salvage the art and make a true Marathon 4 but we all know that won't happen in nowadays industry.  Audiblee Member Mar 14, 2025 1,461 It was in trouble before the theft was discovered. Reaction to the alpha was mid at best.   Smokey Member Oct 25, 2017 4,471 Chumunga64 said: Sony should have really noticed the red flags when Microsoft, during the time they were buying everyone didn't even entertain the thought of buying the studio that gave them the franchise that prevented the xbox brand from being dead on arrival Click to expand... Click to shrink... They did entertain it though. The only reason they didn't is because Bungie wanted to "independently publish and creatively develop our games", which MS wasn't willing to do iirc  GameAddict411 Member Oct 26, 2017 10,093 I just don't see a happy ending for the studio and the victims in the end will be all the devs. We all know all the shitty executives will get golden parachutes.   super-famicom Avenger Oct 26, 2017 30,483 Man Called Aerodynamics said: I just don't understand how a big studio with so much history and talent gets to a place where they're betting the entire farm on this one risky project. Click to expand... Click to shrink... It's not the same Bungie that existed 15+ years ago. Upper management changed, along with what they valued and wanted to focus on. Other employees changed too.  Sydle Member Oct 27, 2017 4,576 It's crazy to me that they didn't start on Destiny 3. If the formula was tuned a bit, I feel like it has an incredibly high shot of being another cash cow. Chumunga64 said: Sony should have really noticed the red flags when Microsoft, during the time they were buying everyone didn't even entertain the thought of buying the studio that gave them the franchise that prevented the xbox brand from being dead on arrival Click to expand... Click to shrink... Isn't the rumor that Microsoft was in talks, but thought the asking price was too high? With the Xbox division's increasing focus on their studios having to each be financially healthy I'm not sure Bungie would have been better off at MS. AAA development is so insanely expensive now that it demands to be run like any other business with a ton of cash at stake. Ultimately, it seems like Bungie leadership needs a shakeup.  Jarmel The Jackrabbit Always Wins Member Oct 25, 2017 22,658 New York Mini-Me said: Yeah I put about 8 hours into the alpha and the game just does not have much of anything going on. It feels akin to something like DMZ in COD or whatever the Battlefield extraction mode was in that it's a mostly fine but very simple extraction mode that's part of a larger package of multiplayer and single player offerings. Except in Marathon's case that's it, that's all they have. I don't think 3 extra months fixes anything. I don't even think 6 months fixes anything. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I'm thinking full year delay.   Billfisto Member Oct 30, 2017 17,859 Canada I'm livid that they tacked the Marathon name onto this for basically no reason and now it's absolutely poisoning it. We're never going to get a "proper" Marathon sequel because this entire ill-advised excursion has made the name so toxic that they'll never be able to justify using it again to the money people, even if they wanted to.  Tobor Died as he lived: wrong about Doritos Member Oct 25, 2017 34,006 A new actual Marathon game, or even a full remake, would have been a big deal and had lots of people talking about Bungie being back. But no, let's do an extraction shooter.  Killer Member Oct 27, 2017 2,961 Bungie's fate hang on Marathon. That really grim. People from the other thread said if it bombed Bungie will be fine   Kyuuji The Favonius Fox Member Nov 8, 2017 38,287 Whole situation is shit. It was troubling enough following the feedback from the alpha but art theft at the scale found, in a game sold and hyped on its aesthetic, is a disaster. I don't know how you get back to good will on that, let alone in 4 months. Obviously it has to start with making the situation with Antireal right, but past that it still feels like a mammoth task with where general sentiment is at after it all. This is as someone who loved the alpha and was completely sold on the game. I still can't get my head around not having had Destiny 3 being developed in the background to baton-pass to following the conclusion of The Final Shape.  DieH@rd Member Oct 26, 2017 12,012 Sydle said: It's crazy to me that they didn't start on Destiny 3. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Destiny 2 was a mandate from Activision, but IMO, that was just just another in a row of expansions. I don't think D3 is coming, but they need better way to onboard new players.  Steamy Manatee ▲ Legend ▲ Member Oct 18, 2022 2,949 Bungie's legal team is in deep trouble to say the least. They will have to audit every single texture in the game in probably less than two weeks while getting absolutely railed by Sony management who will intervene and reprimand them. Direction at Bungie should definitely use this is a (great) excuse to delay the game. But also if the marketing plan is being reworked from scratch mid-May, I think this means the game is definitely getting delayed. Either way, I feel so bad for the team. I know the feeling of working on something you just know it's not going to work out well. The odds of success were stacked against them, now it feels like it is almost impossible unless they delay to Q1 2026 before GTA VI  Last edited: Yesterday at 11:35 AM 03-AALIYAH Member Jul 21, 2023 1,367 ianpm31 said: I don't understand Bungie at all. Just make Destiny 3 along with a single player co op project like the halo days. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Not an expert, but I don't understand why they didn't choose to pursue that option years ago as Destiny seems to still have a large fanbase ?   DrScruffleton Member Oct 26, 2017 14,856 How do you release, let alone on time, after the art situation? Just try to pay off the artist as quickly as possible?   artsi Member Oct 26, 2017 3,368 Finland I hope I'm wrong but my feeling is that Bungie is done already. This game will be the final nail in the coffin.   Mifec Member Oct 25, 2017 19,347 Smokey said: They did entertain it though. The only reason they didn't is because Bungie wanted to "independently publish and creatively develop our games", which MS wasn't willing to do iirc Click to expand... Click to shrink... They would only pay 2bil max and wanted exclusivity was the rumor yeah. Well once this flops and they're reassigned there goes the exclusivity too.  ElFly Member Oct 27, 2017 3,719 Killer said: Bungie's fate hang on Marathon. That really grim. People from the other thread said if it bombed Bungie will be fine Click to expand... Click to shrink... to be fair, they always say this to make the employees work extra hours and then they fire them anyway  Bardeh Member Jun 15, 2018 3,827 I'm amazed that a studio the size and pedigree of Bungie, after 5+ years of development, isn't more confident in the direction of this project. The bones and foundation should be absolutely rock solid by now. They should be immutable. These final months should be 'betas' that are stress tests and marketing tools (like ARC Raiders recent test was, to huge success) to build up to release as final tweaks and bugfixes are made. Instead the feedback from the Alpha seems to have shaken them and thrown things into disarray, even before the plagiarism shitshow made things even worse. It really looks like the whole project has been absolutely terribly managed, and a whole lot of money and time spent on something that still doesn't quite know what it wants to be. Things aren't looking good.  Man Called Aerodynamics Member Oct 29, 2017 8,315 Jarmel said: I'm thinking full year delay. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Perfect, it can release once Arc Raiders is already well entrenched.   Mini-Me Member Oct 25, 2017 1,126 Jarmel said: I'm thinking full year delay. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Mhm, they need a lot of time to get away from the discourse and add in a ton of extra content. But a year is a massive delay and I doubt it gets that   Lampa Member Feb 13, 2018 4,003 I dunno, I don't think they can delay it. They probably should, but at some point a product has to come out from Bungie and we know they have a lot of them in development, They have to start making money, Destiny certainly won't be carrying all those projects in development anymore.   Jarmel The Jackrabbit Always Wins Member Oct 25, 2017 22,658 New York Man Called Aerodynamics said: Perfect, it can release once Arc Raiders is already well entrenched. Click to expand... Click to shrink... If they can't outshine Arc Raiders then they were cooked anyway. It's not like they're first to market regardless and Tarkov is the market leader. Mini-Me said: Mhm, they need a lot of time to get away from the discourse and add in a ton of extra content. But a year is a massive delay and I doubt it gets that Click to expand... Click to shrink... 6 months pushes it right into GTA. 9 is possibly but GTA Online might be really ramping around then. It's not how much time the game needs but GTA looming in the background.   Lampa Member Feb 13, 2018 4,003 Bardeh said: I'm amazed that a studio the size and pedigree of Bungie, after 5+ years of development, isn't more confident in the direction of this project Click to expand... Click to shrink... It was rebooted last year or so, when they replaced the director and some other top people on the project.   IMCaprica Member Aug 1, 2019 10,982 Should we have taken it as a sign that the project that was reported on as being the studio's favorite (Gummy Bears) was the one that got that team spun-out into their own PlayStation studio away from Bungie? Billfisto said: I'm livid that they tacked the Marathon name onto this for basically no reason and now it's absolutely poisoning it. We're never going to get a "proper" Marathon sequel because this entire ill-advised excursion has made the name so toxic that they'll never be able to justify using it again to the money people, even if they wanted to. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Tobor said: A new actual Marathon game, or even a full remake, would have been a big deal and had lots of people talking about Bungie being back. But no, let's do an extraction shooter. Click to expand... Click to shrink... What would honest expectations for that game be, given that Bungie as a studio hasn't made a game like that in 15 years?  

resistance is futile A peer’s promise can help kids pass the marshmallow test Younger children were slightly more likely to successfully delay gratification than older children. Jennifer Ouellette – May 15, 2025 9:46 am | 0 For decades, Walter Mischel's "marshmallow test" was viewed as a key predictor for children's future success, but reality is a bit more nuanced. Credit: Igniter Media For decades, Walter Mischel's "marshmallow test" was viewed as a key predictor for children's future success, but reality is a bit more nuanced. Credit: Igniter Media Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more You've probably heard of the infamous "marshmallow test," in which young children are asked to wait to eat a yummy marshmallow placed in front of them while left alone in a room for 10 to 15 minutes. If they successfully do so, they get a second marshmallow; if not, they don't. The test has become a useful paradigm for scientists interested in studying the various factors that might influence one's ability to delay gratification, thereby promoting social cooperation. According to a paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, one factor is trust: If children are paired in a marshmallow test and one promises not to eat their treat for the specified time, the other is much more likely to also refrain from eating it. As previously reported, psychologist Walter Mischel's landmark behavioral study involved 600 kids between the ages of four and six, all culled from Stanford University's Bing Nursery School. He would give each child a marshmallow and give them the option of eating it immediately if they chose. But if they could wait 15 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow as a reward. Then Mischel would leave the room, and a hidden video camera would tape what happened next. Some kids just ate the marshmallow right away. Others found a handy distraction: covering their eyes, kicking the desk, or poking at the marshmallow with their fingers. Some smelled it, licked it, or took tiny nibbles around the edges. Roughly one-third of the kids held out long enough to earn a second marshmallow. Several years later, Mischel noticed a strong correlation between the success of some of those kids later in life (better grades, higher self-confidence) and their ability to delay gratification in nursery school. Mischel's follow-up study confirmed the correlation. Mischel himself cautioned against over-interpreting the results, emphasizing that children who simply can't hold out for that second marshmallow are not necessarily doomed to a life of failure. A more nuanced picture was offered in a 2018 study that replicated the marshmallow test with preschoolers. It found the same correlation between later achievement and the ability to resist temptation in preschool, but that correlation was much less significant after the researchers factored in such aspects as family background, home environment, and so forth. Attentiveness might be yet another contributing factor, according to a 2019 paper. There have also been several studies examining the effects of social interdependence and similar social contexts on children's ability to delay gratification, using variations of the marshmallow test paradigm. For instance, in 2020, a team of German researchers adapted the classic experimental setup using Oreos and vanilla cookies with German and Kenyan schoolchildren, respectively. If both children waited to eat their treat, they received a second cookie as a reward; if one did not wait, neither child received a second cookie. They found that the kids were more likely to delay gratification when they depended on each other, compared to the standard marshmallow test. An online paradigm Rebecca Koomen, a psychologist now at the University of Manchester, co-authored the 2020 study as well as this latest one, which sought to build on those findings. Koomen et al. structured their experiments similarly, this time recruiting 66 UK children, ages five to six, as subjects. They focused on how promising a partner not to eat a favorite treat could inspire sufficient trust to delay gratification, compared to the social risk of one or both partners breaking that promise. Any parent could tell you that children of this age are really big on the importance of promises, and science largely concurs; a promise has been shown to enhance interdependent cooperation in this age group. Koomen and her Manchester colleagues added an extra twist: They conducted their version of the marshmallow test online to test the effectiveness compared to lab-based versions of the experiment. (Prior results from similar online studies have been mixed.) "Given face-to-face testing restrictions during the COVID pandemic, this, to our knowledge, represents the first cooperative marshmallow study to be conducted online, thereby adding to the growing body of literature concerning the validity of remote testing methods," they wrote. The type of treat was chosen by each child's parents, ensuring it was a favorite: chocolate, candy, biscuits, and marshmallows, mostly, although three kids loved potato chips, fruit, and nuts, respectively. Parents were asked to set up the experiment in a quiet room with minimal potential distractions, outfitted with a webcam to monitor the experiment. Each child was shown a video of a "confederate child" who either clearly promised not to eat the treat or more ambiguously suggested they might succumb and eat their treat. (The confederate child refrained from eating the treat in both conditions, although the participant child did not know that.) Then the scientist running the experiment would leave the Zoom meeting for an undisclosed period of time, after telling the child that if both of them resisted eating the treat (including licking or nibbling at it), they would each receive a second one; if one of them failed, neither would be rewarded. Children could not see or communicate with their paired confederates for the duration of the experiment. The scientist returned after ten minutes to see if the child had managed to delay gratification. Once the experiment had ended, the team actually did reward the participant child regardless of the outcome, "to end the study on a positive note." The results were controlled for unavoidable accidental distractions, so the paper includes the results from both the full dataset of all 68 participants and a subset of 48 children, excluding those who experienced some type of disruption during the ten-minute experiment. In both cases, children whose confederate clearly promised not to eat their treat waited longer to eat their treat compared to the more ambiguous "social risk" condition. And younger children were slightly more likely to successfully delay gratification than older children, although this result was not statistically significant. The authors suggest this small difference may be due to the fact that older children are more likely to have experienced broken promises, thereby learning "that commitments are not always fulfilled." Of course, there are always caveats. For instance, while specific demographic data was not collected, all the children had predominantly white middle-class backgrounds, so the results reflect how typical children in northern England behave in such situations. The authors would like to see their online experiment repeated cross-culturally in the future. And the limitation of one-way communication "likely prevented partners from establishing common ground, namely their mutual commitment to fulfilling their respective roles, which is thought to be a key principle of interdependence," the authors wrote. DOI: Royal Society Open Science, 2025. 10.1098/rsos.250392  (About DOIs). Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 0 Comments

Apple Card launched nearly six years ago, and in some ways it still feels odd that the iPhone maker offers its own credit card. But here are three Apple Card features that help make it my no-brainer favorite to this day. #1: Monthly installments for Apple products Apple Card automatically offers the chance to pay for new Apple products over time, completely interest free. It’s quick and easy to choose Apple Card Monthly Installments during the Apple Store checkout process, and you get benefits like: 3% Daily Cash on your purchase, all up front 0% interest, usually for 12 months Seamless trade-in experience to lower payments If you buy Apple products every so often, this could be reason alone to get an Apple Card. As someone who writes about Apple for a living, my Apple Card Monthly Installments option gets a lot of use. #2: Savings account One of Apple Card’s most recent additions is the option of a built-in savings account. The aptly named ‘Apple Card Savings Account’ launched in 2023 as an optional add-on for Apple Card users. I love this feature for two main reasons: You can set your Daily Cash to automatically get added to savings And the high-yield APY is very compelling On this last point, Apple’s savings APY is currently 3.75%, which is significantly higher than bank accounts offer and in line with other top credit cards. Several cards that offer competitive APY come with a drawback for me though: they really want to push you toward investment. Apple doesn’t offer investing tools, so it doesn’t stress that angle. #3: Apple Maps places for transactions I try to stay on top of my spending and make sure to review transactions fairly often. And in that regular scan of transactions for my family, there are of course times when I don’t recognize a vendor for a particular charge. When this happens with other credit cards, they don’t offer much help. Usually tapping to view the transaction’s extra details is futile because so little information is provided. But with Apple Card, there’s a handy Apple Maps place listing built right in. Typically the header image and map thumbnail are enough to help me remember the transaction. But if not, tapping the map brings up the full Apple Maps place listing with more details. Maps integration can go a long way toward taking the mystery out of unknown transactions. Apple Card features: wrap-up There are plenty of other reasons I find Apple Card compelling, like its elegant UI, clear communication on potential interest charges, and 2% Daily Cash on all Apple Pay transactions. But the three features above help elevate Apple Card above other options for me, and keep it in regular use in my household. What are your favorite Apple Card features? Let us know in the comments. Best iPhone accessories Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Some software updates pack in a number of features and changes, while others fundamentally overhaul the experience of using the device in question. iOS 18.5 is neither: This is a minor update, but that's to be expected. WWDC is next month, where Apple will almost assuredly announce iOS 19.But iOS 18.5 isn't an empty update. Once you install it on your iPhone, you will notice some changes—and some of the changes you don't notice are the most important of all. Here's everything that's new in the latest iOS update:An easy way to disable contact photos in MailWith iOS 18.2, Apple upgraded the Mail app. For some, the changes made the Mail app more organized and efficient to use. For others, it was bloated and confusing. Contact photos didn't help. The idea is that if you have a contact photo for a sender, it'll appear in the left side of the message in your inbox. However, if you don't have such a photo, Mail will use an image from Apple's stock library. Taste is subjective, but, frankly, these stock icons just don't look good. Luckily, you can disable them, but you'd never know that unless you're someone who loves diving through your Settings app. iOS 18.5 fixes that with an easy option right in the Mail app itself. Lifehacker's Khamosh Pathak explained the change in more depth here. It just got more difficult to bypass Screen Time settingsApple's Screen Time feature is a great tool for parents—and, I can only image, a pain for kids. Parents can set a passcode to lock Screen Time settings, and ensure that kids can't access aspects of their iPhone their parents don't want them to. Of course, passcodes are an infamously futile restriction, as savvy kids will always figure out how to break in. While Apple's isn't reinventing the passcode wheel with iOS 18.5, it is making Screen Time a bit more secure. Once you update, you'll receive a notification whenever the Screen Time passcode is used on a child's device. That won't stop your kids from figuring out your Screen Time passcode, but it will nip their fun in the bud pretty quickly.I imagine the kids will figure out some workaround to this feature in the future. But, for now, you have an additional tool to help ensure the restrictions stay in place. A new "Pride Harmony" wallpaper Credit: Apple In anticipation of Pride Month, Apple is rolling out a new "Pride Harmony" wallpaper for its various devices. The wallpaper features colors of the rainbow that adjust their positions as you move, lock, or unlock your iPhone or iPad. Apple also has a new Pride Edition Sport Band, which features a similar color scheme. Apple says its goal with the Pride Harmony design is to "celebrate the strength and beauty of LGBTQ+ communities around the world." It's easy to be cynical about corporate pride, but considering the times we live in, it's cool to see Apple continuing to be as openly supportive of the LGBTQ+ community as it has been in recent years. (Tim Cook's donations aside.)"Buy with iPhone" now available on third-party devicesWhen you buy something on the Apple TV's TV app (say that three times fast), you have the option to approve that purchase with your iPhone. With iOS 18.5, that feature is coming to the TV app on non-Apple devices. That way, you don't need to make the purchase on the TV app of another Apple device before being able to watch on your third-party device. Carrier-provided satellite features are now available on the iPhone 13 seriesSince 2023, Apple has officially supported satellite communications for all iPhones starting with the 14 series. If you're out without cell services, you can connect to a satellite to reach out to the authorities for help—or even just text a friend. Following this latest update, however, iPhone 13 users will be able to take advantage of satellite features as well. Apple Vision Pro app gets a bug fixThe update also fixes an issue with the Apple Vision Pro app, where the app may sometimes display a black screen. Security updatesiOS 18.5's sleeper feature is the security boost it provides your iPhone. In all, the update patches over 30 bugs. Luckily, Apple isn't aware of any exploits for these vulnerabilities, which means hackers have likely not used these flaws to target iPhone users. That said, the safest course of action is to update your iPhone as soon as possible, in case someone does figure out how to use these flaws against you. Plus, there are some non-hacking vulnerabilities here you should patch. FaceTime's mute button, for example, might not actually work, which should be more than enough reason to update to iOS 18.5. (Be careful when talking smack while on a FaceTime call.)You can see the full list of updates here.