Numlock News: June 26, 2025 • Laser Weeders, Sphere, F1
By Walt Hickey
The Gap
What The Gap has accomplished by simply continuing to exist is nothing short of astounding, given the generally short lifespan of middlebrow fashion labels in the history of American trends. The first Gap was opened in 1969 in San Francisco and was actually cool at the time. It managed to hold on to some element of youth culture for a few decades, at least until lower-cost rivals began to undermine their business. Gap solved this by launching its own competition, specifically lower-priced Old Navy, to compete, and it worked. The Old Navy brand is still pulling in $8.4 billion in annual sales, well over Gap’s $3.3 billion. Since then, they’ve rolled up a few rivals like Banana Republic and Athleta. Even the main Gap brand is still moving product amid the rise in fast fashion and dropshipped rivals.
Amanda Mull and Lily Meier, Bloomberg
Fic
The writers who publish fanfiction works inspired by their favorite stories have discovered that they, too, have had their efforts sucked up and used to train generative AI systems, and they’re pretty mad about it. In April, a user scraped 12.6 million works from the repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) and uploaded that dataset to Hugging Face, prompting furious reactions from the community. In the world of fanfiction, the copyright protection of the characters is only honored by not exploiting their transformative works for financial gain. Given the ultimately mercenary use of generative AI, this data scraping has caused quite a stir. That said, moving forward whenever I am in connection with some some cheap customer service chatbot, at least I know that at least some small strand of it has read some truly eye-watering Scum Villain's Self-Saving System crack fics. We can bond over this.
Med-Tail
When the pandemic and e-commerce-driven retail apocalypse struck the world (leaving vacant strip mall locations scattered across this great country in an extinction-level event), a new creature evolved to fill the niche that those doomed Pier 1 Imports once inhabited: medical facilities. The mini-mall outpatient facility is one of the most in-demand retail areas, with leasing up 15 percent nationally in the fourth quarter of last year, filling 19 million square feet of new leasing activity. Office space at hospitals and health systems is very expensive, so some of the less intensive procedures are now being situated off-campus. This is one reason why 80 percent of medical facilities under construction are not adjacent to a hospital. Just 15 years ago, the number of healthcare workers working in hospitals and at outpatient buildings was about even; today, 6.8 million work from outpatient buildings and just 5.5 million are at hospitals.
The Wizard And Eye
A version of The Wizard of Oz has been adapted for Sphere, the massive immersive 4D spherical 18,000-seat venue in Las Vegas that surrounds audiences with a colossal LED screen. In the past, it has hosted acts like U2 and Dead & Company. Now, the venue is hosting an adaptation of the 1939 film, opening at the end of August. The entire musical track has been re-recorded for the Sphere adaptation, which involved an 80-piece orchestra redoing the sound and score to the 1939 film. I can only assume the entire thing is put on for the benefit of the guy selling tabs of acid out front of the Venetian.
CarPlay
Apple is angling to roll out CarPlay Ultra, which will be a new iteration of its CarPlay system that more efficiently locks your phone in with your car. I confess that as a New Yorker, I have absolutely no idea what this is or does, only that it scares and confuses me whenever I get a rental car. However, it’s evidently very popular: 98 percent of new cars come with CarPlay, according to Apple. Americans use the feature 600 million times per day, with McKinsey finding that 85 percent of car owners prefer it (or a similar service) over their built-in system. The CarPlay Ultra salvo has proven controversial for just that reason. Even though Apple announced 14 car brands in 2022 that had committed to installing CarPlay Ultra into their consoles, there are still lots of holdouts, not the least of which were the likes of General Motors, Hyundai, Volvo and more. They would prefer you use their system and aren’t in the business of handing over their entertainment console to Apple. New resistance has emerged from Mercedes-Benz and Audi, which claim that despite Apple asserting they’d be in the CarPlay Ultra group, they actually had no plans to bring it to their vehicles.
Kana Inagaki and Michael Acton, Financial Times
Lasers
Commercial laser weeders are being used in agriculture on the West Coast of the United States, costing about $1.5 million each. These are large machines that pass over crops, take photos, identify weeds with onboard computers and then kill them with a laser. The systems have been calibrated for West Coast weeds, soils and crops, but a new study tested their efficacy on the East Coast for peas, beets and spinach to positive effect. The alternative — herbicides — can be costly and lower crop yields. The lasers did well in the trial, reducing weed cover by 45 percent and density by up to 66 percent, resulting in 97 percent less weed biomass by the end of the season compared to untreated controls. Even better, crop stunting was less than 1 percent, and crop biomass increased up to 30 percent when laser weeding replaced herbicide use.
Krishna Ramanujan, Cornell University
F1
Apple’s new movie F1 releases this weekend, and despite the terrible SEO, it’s projected to bring in $50 million to $60 million in revenue in its opening weekend. However, other projections estimate F1 earning much lower — $35 million to $40 million start — and with a budget of $200 million, it needs to get some momentum internationally (which is where most of the F1 fans are anyway) to win. During opening weekend, the movie is projected to make $75 million from the 77 international markets. It’s impossible not to root for the success of this movie, if only because if it’s a hit, I want to see what the devil they call the sequel. F1 2? F2? Maybe F1 II? Perhaps they imitate another racing franchise and do 2 F 2 1. After all, Apple is very good at naming product iterations, maybe it’ll be F1 (2nd gen) or F1 Shuffle or F1 (Late 2027) or just do a throwback and call it The F1 ][.
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F1 Shuffle 🤣🤣🤣
I get my periodic MRIs done at a place in a strip mall. It’s great after some cosmetic issues at the start.
And, one of these days, I’ll hit the restaurant a few places down….it smells good.