👋 Good morning. If you’ve found it difficult to express yourself via iMessage lately, fret not — Apple is dropping eight new emoji this spring. The new symbols will include ballet dancers, a distorted face with its eyes bulging out, a trombone, sasquatch, an orca whale, a cartoon fight cloud, a landslide, and a treasure chest. Let’s hope the treasure chest gets used often and the landslide and sasquatch… not so much?
STARTING UP
A startup tries to stop lightning before it strikes
❌ The problem: In Canada’s 2023 fire season, lightning sparked almost 60% of wildfires, which accounted for 93% of the total area burned. As conditions get hotter and drier, preventing lightning could be a key way to fight fires.
💡 The pitch: Vancouver-based Skyward Wildfire claims it can stop lightning in its tracks. The startup seeds clouds with materials that neutralize electrical charges in an attempt to stop cloud-to-ground lightning strikes before they hit forests. While it might sound like the stuff of sci-fi, it’s not the first time this approach has been used: US government agencies tried seeding clouds with metallic chaff in the early 1960s.
🚀 The outlook: If lightning suppression works, it could one day be a helpful tool to lessen wildfire risk during extreme weather. But questions around the effectiveness and environmental impacts of the practice are swirling faster than the next storm.
NEWS FLASH
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A fancier Uber: If Uber Black doesn’t meet your needs, Uber is launching Uber Elite, featuring pro chauffeurs, new luxury vehicles, and free chargers, water, mints, and hand sanitizer. However, it's invite-only and you can currently only book one in San Francisco, LA, and NYC.
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Sun all the time: Reflect Orbital, a California startup that wants to use space mirrors to divert sunlight to the Earth at night, is awaiting regulatory approval to test its tech. It could light solar and agricultural farms, public events, and more, but astronomers (and probably vampires) are not fans.
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A safer way: Gestala, a Chinese startup developing a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) has already raised $21.6m, which it will use for R&D and hiring. Gestala plans to use ultrasound, which could bypass the need for brain surgery.
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For fediverse fans: AltStore PAL is now the first app marketplace in the fediverse. It offers an alternative app store for iOS users, and lets developers communicate across fediverse apps including Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads.
NEWSLETTER GOALS
Which AI tool should you use for coding?
We scrutinized these tools for speed. Ease of setup. The learning curve. Model quality. Use cases. And also, secretly, what my high school track coach once called “the intangibles.”
But why not test-drive both yourself? OpenAI Codex and Claude Code are two of the hottest tools available, and AI expert Matt Wolfe just dropped six tips for choosing your assistant.
THE BIG IDEA
Welcome to the post-resume job market
AI probably hasn’t killed off your profession quite yet, but there’s still good reason to worry about that grim prospect, especially for white-collar workers.
- Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar work. Microsoft’s AI chief, who raised the stakes to include pros at every level, is giving it 18 months.
But while the tech has made only a modest dent in the job market thus far, it’s already delivered a fatal blow to the traditional job hunt: The resume is dead.
Perfect on paper? Big whoop
Today, anyone can whip up a sparkling resume or cheat through tests and interviews with the help of AI, which has made hiring a bit of a smoke-and-mirrors game and CVs irrelevant.
To cut through the slop, employers are opting for alternative ways to evaluate applicants who can actually walk the walk, per Business Insider.
Some are relying more heavily on their personal networks to find “known talent,” which one recruiting exec told The Times is “like gold dust nowadays,” or prioritizing a candidate’s enthusiasm (AKA the “why us?” question).
Another method is skill-based hiring, which 70% of employees now use, according to a recent survey.
- Ecommerce platform Gumroad, for example, asks engineering candidates to explain what they’ve built and why they want to work there via email; then, if selected, to participate in a four-to-six-week paid work trial to suss out their skills in real-time.
Where does that leave job hunters?
The resume’s death might be bad news for job seekers who’ve tended to rest on their laurels (sorry, middling Ivy Leaguers and Big Tech alum), but could be good news for qualified candidates who aren’t necessarily perfect on paper.
Either way, don’t expect it to make securing a job any easier.
- Ultimately, it’s just another AI-generated problem that today’s workplace hopefuls, who are already facing the worst job market in over a decade — one filled with ghost jobs, biased AI hiring systems, and interviews conducted by bots — will have to solve.
- Within a sea of applicants, including fake ones (you can blame AI for that, too), prospective employees will still have to get creative to stand out.
One idea? You could try Venmoing your future boss, which apparently worked for at least one guy.
And if all else fails, well, it might not matter in 18 months' time, anyway.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
No experience and no idea where to start? You can still launch that business. Maybe even a $1m/year business at age 50.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
How much you could save on tickets to the Seattle Opera by using the code “TIMOTHEE.” The opera company promoted the special discount on Instagram this week in response to actor Timothee Chalamet’s comment that “no one cares about” ballet and opera — which, based on the backlash and conversation it’s generated, apparently isn’t true.
The viral post racked up 125k+ likes and 6k+ shares, turning the diss into a successful marketing stunt that’s inspired several other ballet and opera institutions to clap back with their own discounts. Bravo.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1781, astronomer William Herschel discovered Uranus, the first planet to be discovered using a telescope.
🍞 That’s interesting: The hidden meaning of food across Shakespeare’s work.
🍸 How to: make your own amaro.
🚀 That’s cool: Panoramas of various ships from “Star Trek.”
🐱 Aww: A thief.
SHOWER THOUGHT
In an apocalyptic scenario, wild hogs would be a much bigger threat than most people realize. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Good on paper" Friedman.
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