Taegan Goddard, quoting the Financial Times last week:

The Pentagon said President Trump’s Iran war has cost the United States at least $25 billion, driven primarily by the military’s use of munitions, the Financial Times reports.

The New York Times had an interesting piece trying to put that number in context (gift link):

$25 billion is similar to:

• The annual budget of NASA.
• Spending on military aid to Israel after Oct. 7.
• Spending by U.S.A.I.D. before it was disbanded.
• The cost to expand Obamacare subsidies for one year.

These are all comparisons to other aspects of the U.S. federal budget. It’s interesting also to use this in comparison with the current moment in tech:

• OpenAI’s latest valuation of $852 billion (I love the 2) equals 34 Iran Wars.
• Anthropic’s $380 billion valuation equals 15 Iran Wars.
• Apple’s current four-year U.S. manufacturing commitment of “more than $500 billion” equals 20 Iran Wars.
• Google expects to spend between $91–93 billion in capital expenditures this calendar year, mostly related to AI infrastructure. That’s a little over 3 Iran Wars this year.
• Larry Ellison currently has a net worth of $220 billion. That’s just short of 9 Iran Wars. But since the start of the war on February 28, his net worth has grown $46 billion. That’s about 2 Iran Wars during the time of the actual Iran War thus far.

You might think it counterintuitive that a movement obsessed with software would be spearheading a severe decline in the design quality of software, but in Patel’s definition, there’s no concept of software as art, as a practice, as a craft. Software brain is purely an obsession with software as a medium in and of itself. A means with no consideration for the end.

David Smith, “Six Years Perfecting Maps on watchOS”:

I love going on wilderness adventures. I am rarely happier than when I am far off into the mountains without a soul in sight. As a result, I have spent a lot of time learning how to safely explore and navigate when I’m away from civilization. The most important habit I’ve found for not getting lost is to be very regular in checking your location as you go, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to have a map on my wrist.

For more than six years I’ve been working towards creating the best possible mapping experience on the Apple Watch. With yesterday’s launch of Pedometer++ 8, I feel like this design journey has reached a meaningful destination. I would contend that Pedometer++’s watchOS mapping support is the absolute best available on the App Store.

So I wanted to walk through the journey it took to get here.

“I love going on wilderness adventures” is how you start a post about an app update. Or at least my type of update to my type of app. I don’t have any desire for maps on my watch, but reading this makes me want it anyway. Enthusiasm is contagious. (See also: the Pedometer++ blog, and Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels.)

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Chess Peace — a new iOS game by Sam Shepherd — is my kind of logic puzzle. Each puzzle is a board with a few unplaced chess pieces. To solve you need to place all the pieces so that none of them attack each other. There’s a timer if you care, but I don’t. (And you can hide the clock.) Clever name too: the pieces need to be ... at peace with each other. You can download Chess Peace and try it out free of charge, and it’s just a one-time payment of $7 to unlock everything. Great simple premise, really well implemented.