Why does a chocolatier build a railroad? For Milton S. Hershey, it was a logical response to a sugar shortage brought on by World War I. The Hershey Chocolate Co. was by then a chocolate-making powerhouse, having refined the automation and mass production of its products, including the eponymous Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar and the bite-size Hershey’s Kiss. To satisfy its many customers, the company needed a steady supply of sugar. Plus, it wanted a way to circumvent the American Sugar Refining Co., also known as the Sugar Trust, which had a virtual monopoly on sugar processing in the United States.

Why Did Hershey Build an Electric Railroad in Cuba?

Beginning in 1916, Hershey looked to Cuba to secure his sugar supply. According to historian Thomas R. Winpenny, the chocolate magnate had a “personal infatuation” with the lush, beautiful island. What’s more, U.S. business interests there were protected by a treaty known as the Platt Amendment, which made Cuba a satellite state of the United States.

Like many industrialists of the day, Hershey believed in vertical integration, and the company’s Cuban operation eventually expanded to include five sugar plantations, five modern sugar mills, a refinery, several company towns, and an oil-fired power plant with three substations to run it all.

A 1943 rail pass entitled the holder to travel on all ordinary passenger trains of the Hershey Electric Railway. Hershey Community Archives

The company also built a railroad. To maximize the sugar yield, the cane needed to be ground promptly after being cut, and the rail system offered an efficient means of transporting the cane to the mills, and ensured that the mills operated around the clock during the harvest. By 1920, one of Hershey’s three main sites was processing 135,000 tonnes of cane, yielding 14.4 million kilograms of sugar.

Initially, the Hershey Cuban Railway consisted of a single 56-kilometer-long standard gauge track on which ran seven steam locomotives that burned coal or oil. But due to the high cost of the imported fuel and the inefficiency of the locomotives, Hershey began electrifying the line in 1920. Although it was the first electrified train in Cuba, rail lines in Europe and the United States were already being electrified.

In addition to powering the various Hershey entities, the generating station supplied Matanzas and the smaller towns with electricity. F.W. Peters of General Electric’s Railway and Traction Engineering Department published a detailed account of the system in the April 1920 General Electric Review.

Hershey’s Company Towns

The company town of Central Hershey became the headquarters for Hershey’s Cuba operations. (“Central” is the Cuban term for a mill and the surrounding settlement.) It sat on a plateau overlooking the port of Santa Cruz del Norte, about halfway between Havana and Matanzas in the heart of Cuba’s sugarcane region.

Hershey imported the industrial utopian model he had established in Hershey, Penn., which was itself inspired by Richard and George Cadbury’s Bournville Village outside Birmingham, England.

The chocolate magnate Milton S. Hershey had a “personal infatuation” with Cuba.Underwood Archives/Getty Images

In Cuba as in Pennsylvania, Hershey’s factory complex was complemented by comfortable homes for his workers and their families, as well as swimming pools, baseball fields, and affordable medical clinics staffed with doctors, nurses, and dentists. Managers had access to a golf course and country club in Central Hershey. Schools provided free education for workers’ children.

Milton Hershey himself had very little formal education, and so in 1909 he and his wife, Catherine, established the Hershey Industrial School in Hershey, Penn. There, white, male orphans received an education until they were 18 years old. Now known as the Milton Hershey School, the school has broadened its admission criteria considerably over the years.

Hershey duplicated this concept in the Cuban company town of Central Rosario, founding the Hershey Agricultural School. The first students were children whose parents had died in a horrific 1923 train accident on the Hershey Electric Railway. The high-speed, head-on collision between two trains killed 25 people and injured 50 more.

Milton Hershey was a generous philanthropist, and by most accounts he truly cared for his employees and their welfare, and yet his early 20th-century paternalism was not without fault. He was a fierce opponent of union activity, and any hard-won pay increases for workers often came at the expense of profit-sharing benefits. Like other U.S. businessmen in Cuba, Hershey employed migrant seasonal labor from neighboring Caribbean islands, undercutting the wages of local workers. Historians are still wrangling with how to capture the long-lasting effects of U.S. economic imperialism on Cuba.

Can the Hershey Electric Railway Be Revived?

Hershey continued to acquire new sugar plantations in Cuba throughout the 1920s, eventually owning about 24,300 hectares and leasing another 12,000 hectares. In 1946, a year after Milton Hershey’s death and amid growing political uncertainty on the island, the company sold its Cuban interests to the Cuban Atlantic Sugar Co. In addition to Hershey’s sugar operations, the sale included a peanut oil plant, four electric plants, and 404 km of railroad track plus locomotives and train cars.

Service on the Hershey Electric Railway in Cuba continued into at least the 2010s but became increasingly sporadic, with aging equipment like this car at the Central Hershey station. Hershey Community Archives

The Central Hershey sugar refinery continued to operate even after the Cuban Revolution but eventually closed in 2002. Passenger service, meanwhile, continued on the Hershey Electric Railway, albeit sporadically: By 2012, there were only two trips a day between Havana and Matanzas. This video, from 2013, gives a good sense of the route:

A colleague of mine who studies Cuban history told me that in his travels to the country over almost 30 years, he has never been able to ride the Hershey electric train. It was always out of service or had restricted service due to the island’s chronic electricity shortages, which have only gotten worse in recent years. I’ve been trying to find out if any part of the line is still operating. If you happen to know, please add a comment below.

Cuba’s frequent power outages make it difficult to operate the Hershey Electric Railway. In this 2009 photo, passengers await the restoration of electricity so they can continue their journey.Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images

A 2024 analysis of the economic potential and challenges of reactivating Cuba’s Hershey Electric Railway noted that an electric railway could be a hedge against climate change and geopolitical factors. But it also acknowledged that frequent power outages and damaged infrastructure argue against reactivating the electrified railway, and it favored the diesel engines used on most of Cuba’s rail network.

Cuba has been mostly off-limits to U.S. tourists for my entire life, but it was one of my grandmother’s favorite vacation spots. I would love to imagine a future where political ties are restored, the power grid is stabilized, and the Hershey Electric Railway is reopened to the Cuban public and to curious visitors like me.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the May 2026 print issue as “This Chocolate Empire Ran on Electric Rails.”

If there’s one thing the gaming industry loves more than hype cycles, it’s a good ol’ value shake-up. And right now, Xbox Game Pass is right in the middle of one. Microsoft has officially cut prices across Game Pass tiers, making the service easier on the wallet at a time when subscription fatigue is very, very real. But, as always, there’s a twist. And it’s a big one.

The price drop that comes with a twist

Let’s get the numbers out of the way first, because they’re genuinely compelling. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate has dropped from $29.99 to $22.99 per month, while PC Game Pass now costs $13.99 instead of $16.49. That’s not pocket change. Over a year, that’s a noticeable saving, especially for players juggling multiple subscriptions.

But here’s the catch. New entries from Call of Duty are no longer launching day one on the service. Instead, they’ll arrive much later, roughly a year after release. Just to be clear, older Call of Duty titles aren’t going anywhere, so the back catalog remains intact. What’s gone is the instant access to one of gaming’s biggest annual releases, which, let’s be honest, was a huge part of Game Pass’s flex.

The community is… conflicted

The reaction? Exactly as chaotic as expected. There’s a sizable chunk of genuinely relieved players. You see, not everyone subscribes to Game Pass for Call of Duty, and for those users, this feels like getting a discount without losing anything meaningful. If COD wasn’t part of the weekly rotation anyway, the lower price is a straight-up win.

Then there’s the other side. For a lot of players, Game Pass built its reputation on the idea of “pay once, play everything day one.” Losing a flagship franchise from that promise feels like a crack in the foundation. It’s not just about Call of Duty; it’s about what this could mean going forward.

Microsoft just lowered Game Pass prices while quietly removing Call of Duty Day One launches.

They’re charging you less for a worse product and calling it ‘a response to feedback’.

Don’t fall for the trap.

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It’s a downgrade disguised as marketing. pic.twitter.com/xn7dFQmcvw

— Yorch Torch Games (@YorchTorchGames) April 21, 2026

And then comes the third wave of takes, arguably the most interesting. Some fans are now asking if Microsoft should go even further and start trimming other bundled perks like EA Play or Fortnite Crew to reduce prices even more.

The thinking is simple. If removing one expensive piece lowers the cost, why not customize the whole thing?

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Why Microsoft drew the line here

Here’s where the conversation shifts from emotional to practical. Call of Duty isn’t just another title in a catalog. It’s a yearly blockbuster with a massive, loyal player base that often buys the game regardless of subscriptions. That creates a strange value mismatch. Either players were going to pay for it anyway, or they didn’t care about it much in the first place.

Xbox gave up more than $300 million in sales of Call of Duty on consoles and PCs last year – Bloomberg

From Microsoft’s perspective, that makes it an incredibly expensive inclusion with limited upside. Worse, it likely eats into direct sales, turning what should be a revenue driver into a cost center. And while some fans are calling for more cuts, like removing EA Play, it’s not so simple. Game Pass thrives on being an all-in-one ecosystem. Start unbundling too much, and it risks turning into a fragmented, pick-and-pay service that loses its identity.

With Microsoft even exploring bundling services like Netflix into Game Pass, stripping away more perks would start to chip away at its whole “all-in-one” appeal. At that point, it’s not a powerhouse bundle anymore; it’s just a menu with items missing.

The End of “Too Good to Be True”?

For years, Xbox Game Pass felt like a cheat code. Day-one AAA games, a massive library, and a price that almost didn’t make sense. But eventually, reality caught up. Keeping a giant like Call of Duty in that mix from day one was always going to be expensive, and more importantly, unsustainable.

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And honestly, this change feels like Microsoft finally admitting that. Instead of hiking prices even further, they’ve trimmed one of the costliest perks and made the service more accessible again. It’s not perfect, and sure, some fans will miss the old days, but this feels less like a downgrade and more like a smart reset. Not as flashy, but a lot more built to last.

Summary: Bloomberg frames Apple’s CEO transition as a bet on “Jobs-era decisiveness,” with John Ternus expected to centralise decision-making and move faster on AI, where Apple’s models trail year-old competitors and the Siri overhaul has been delayed three times since 2024. He inherits a product roadmap spanning a foldable iPhone, smart glasses, and a HomePad, plus a supply chain shifting to India under tariff pressure, EUR 500 million in EU DMA fines, and a Vision Pro whose sales plunged 95%, while no major analyst downgraded the stock and the closest historical parallel is Nadella’s transformation of Microsoft.

Bloomberg’s framing of the Apple CEO transition, published the morning after the announcement, was pointed: the company is betting that John Ternus will bring back “Jobs-era decisiveness.” The implication is that Tim Cook’s consensus-driven leadership style, which produced $416 billion in annual revenue and a $4 trillion market capitalisation, was nonetheless too slow for a moment that demands faster and harder choices about artificial intelligence, product strategy, and a supply chain under geopolitical pressure. Ternus is expected to take a more centralised approach as a singular decision-maker, and Bloomberg reports he had already overhauled the hardware engineering organisation in early April around a new AI platform designed to accelerate product development.

The reorganisation is already visible. Johny Srouji, now chief hardware officer, has split the combined hardware group into five divisions: hardware engineering under Tom Marieb, silicon under Sri Santhanam, advanced technologies under Zongjian Chen, platform architecture under Tim Millet, and project management under Donny Nordhues. The structure concentrates technical leadership while giving Ternus a flatter reporting chain than Cook maintained. Bloomberg also notes that Ternus “opposed” both the Vision Pro headset and the cancelled autonomous car project “to varying degrees,” a detail that suggests sharper product instincts about what not to ship.

The AI deficit

The most urgent challenge Ternus inherits is an AI strategy that has fallen visibly behind. Apple’s server-based model is rated behind OpenAI’s year-old GPT-4o. Human raters preferred Meta’s Llama 4 Scout over Apple’s cloud model in image analysis tests. The company’s on-device models run at approximately 150 billion parameters. The custom Gemini model Apple licensed from Google under a deal announced in January, estimated at roughly $1 billion per year, is a 1.2-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts architecture, eight times larger than what Apple built internally.

The Siri overhaul that was supposed to demonstrate Apple’s AI competence has been delayed repeatedly. Originally targeted for iOS 18 in 2024, it was pushed to spring 2025, then to spring 2026, then partially to iOS 27 in September 2026. Apple switched from a first-generation architecture to a deeper end-to-end rebuild after finding the original version could not reach the quality level required, forcing engineers to effectively start again. The Gemini-powered version is expected to reach 1.5 billion daily Siri users through iOS 26.4, but the delays have already postponed the HomePad smart home hub, which depends on the upgraded assistant, from spring to autumn.

Ternus’s own framing of the AI challenge is patient. “I think Apple Intelligence is going to continue to grow, and it’ll just make things you do better and easier,” he told Tom’s Guide this month. “If we’re doing it right, people won’t even really notice or think about it.” The philosophy is coherent, but consumers have not been convinced that AI features justify new hardware purchases, and the gap between Apple’s capabilities and those of its competitors continues to widen. Gene Munster, the longtime Apple analyst now at Deepwater Asset Management, said Ternus has “an opportunity to supercharge AAPL’s multiple by changing the narrative, which is the biggest opportunity in big tech.” He expects “big hires under Ternus from AI-focused firms like Anthropic and OpenAI.”

The product roadmap

The hardware pipeline for 2026 and 2027 is the most ambitious Apple has attempted in years, and it falls squarely within Ternus’s domain of expertise. A foldable iPhone is expected alongside the iPhone 18 Pro in September, with a book-style design and an internal display roughly the size of an iPad mini at a higher price point than existing models. Apple is testing at least four frame designs for AI smart glasses targeting mass production in late 2026 or early 2027, with projected shipments of three to five million units in the launch year. The glasses will not be standalone devices: they rely on a connected iPhone for processing, meaning their success depends on the Siri overhaul that has already been delayed three times.

The M5 generation of Apple Silicon is rolling out across the Mac lineup. The Vision Pro, which shipped roughly 390,000 units in its launch year before sales plunged 95% to an estimated 80,000 to 90,000 units in 2025, is being deprioritised. Apple cut its marketing spend on the headset by up to 95% and is shifting engineering resources toward the smart glasses projects. The $2 billion acquisition of Q.ai, the Israeli silent speech AI startup, signals the kind of sensor-driven, ambient AI that lightweight wearables could eventually enable.

Supply chain under pressure

The tariff environment has improved but remains volatile. The Supreme Court ruled in February that Trump’s IEEPA-based reciprocal tariffs were unconstitutional, potentially triggering more than $175 billion in refunds to importers. Trump immediately imposed a 10% blanket tariff under Section 122 with no product exemptions. Apple imports more than $100 billion worth of goods from China annually and is accelerating plans to shift all US-bound iPhone production to India by the end of this year, which requires doubling its current Indian manufacturing capacity.

The regulatory burden in the EU continues to expand. The European Commission fined Apple EUR 500 million for DMA anti-steering violations in April 2025 and gave the company 60 days to comply. The Coalition for App Fairness has accused Apple of “persistent non-compliance” six months later. Interoperability requirements are forcing Apple to open APIs for NFC, default browser and app settings, and messaging, while Apple Intelligence itself remains unavailable in the EU due to the same DMA constraints that have complicated its China rollout. Repeat violations carry fines of up to 10% of global revenue.

In China, Apple holds 18.9% market share behind Huawei’s 20%, but grew faster than any competitor in the first quarter with 33% year-over-year gains driven by iPhone 17 pricing and government subsidies. The structural challenge is that Huawei’s domestic supply chain insulates it from the global DRAM shortage that is constraining Apple’s production, while Chinese competitors are integrating domestic AI capabilities that Apple cannot match in the market due to regulatory restrictions on Apple Intelligence.

What Wall Street expects

No major firm downgraded Apple or cut price targets following the announcement. Wedbush, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Melius, and Evercore all reiterated their ratings, with targets ranging from $325 to $350. BofA said “the timing of the leadership transition suggests near-term results are extremely resilient.” Evercore said the appointment “makes sense given Apple’s history of leadership rooted in the core hardware business.” Morgan Stanley said any AI strategy shift under Ternus “is likely to be long-term,” suggesting Apple will avoid the aggressive AI spending seen at competitors.

The stock fell just over 1% on the first trading day, a reaction analysts attributed to timing surprise rather than fundamental concern. Raymond James offered the most measured assessment: the transition is “incrementally positive for product innovation” but “introduces heightened execution risk at a critical juncture.”

The closest historical parallel is Satya Nadella’s appointment at Microsoft in 2014. Nadella inherited a company that was not failing but was stagnating strategically, and led a platform transition to cloud that tripled its market capitalisation in five years. Ternus inherits a company at or near peak financial performance but facing an equally fundamental question about its position in AI. The difference is that Nadella was a cloud and services leader taking Microsoft into cloud and services. Ternus is a hardware leader being asked to solve a software and AI problem. Whether that mismatch is a vulnerability or an asset, whether the person who builds the devices is best positioned to determine what intelligence runs on them, is the bet Apple’s board has made. The next 12 months, starting with WWDC on 8 June, will reveal whether it was the right one.

Itanium was once meant to be the next step in computing, to compete with the likes of IBM, Sun and DEC, but also for Intel to have an architecture that couldn’t be taken from it, as the PC was from IBM by its clones. Today, however, Itanium is a relic of the past. [Asianometry] tells us the story of Itanium.

By the ’90s, servers were an established market dominated by RISC architectures and Unix-like operating systems. Intel wanted to compete in this market, due in part to worries of losing control over x86. So, when Hewlett Packard came to Intel in late ’93, Intel eventually agreed to collaborate on a new project in EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing).

The project initially called PA-WW (later IA-64 and Itanium), was also a radical approach to ILP (Instruction-Level Parallelism). As HP engineers saw RISC architectures potentially hitting performance limits in the future, the idea was a compromise between fully compiler-driven VLIW and the fully hardware-driven superscalar and out-of-order computers.

The collaboration between Intel and HP did not go without problems, however. Internal politics, both between HP and Intel disagreeing about design choices and Intel’s Itanium and x86 teams internally competing who was making the new big product, were early signs of trouble. The x86 team’s work eventually came to be the Pentium Pro, which was now catching up with the fastest RISC architectures.

In the mean time, Itanium had been delayed once and twice, due to Intel underestimating the true scale of the project and the fabrication technology required. The mounting delays eventually caused a release in 2003, 4 years late. And the competition wasn’t waiting in the mean time. New RISC chips were still being released year after year, eating in to what would have been Itanium’s performance advantage.

In an ironic twist, Itanium’s attempt to dislodge x86 actually solidified it. AMD realized that Intel had made a mistake; software developers would not want to recompile for a completely different architecture. And so, yet more competition began in the form of AMD’s 64-bit extension to x86, the specification written by the legendary Jim Keller. And, while sales numbers were lower than projected, AMD had still won; more AMD64 chips were being sold than Itanium ones.

In the end, Itanium died a slow death due to delays and increasing competition. With it, AMD made a major change to x86, the first time Intel was on the back foot in the x86 race, eventually leading to their adoption of AMD64 (now called x86-64) with some minor changes. By the time Itanium 2 launched, the writing was on the wall: Itanium had failed to capture the market.

History often rhymes, and so does the story of Itanium to that of VLIW; an architecture perhaps too ambitious for its own good.

Die shots of an Intel Itanium processor courtesy of [der8auer].

Dr. Semiconductor transformed an ordinary garden shed into a facility for the assembly of actual working memory chips. He had already set up the air filters and controls a few months before to maintain dust levels low enough to allow for careful operations.

The materials needed began with silicon wafers, which served as the operation’s base. Each one was broken down into tiny pieces with highly exact cuts following natural crystal lines, just to prepare them ready for what was to come. The wafers were then cleaned with acetone and isopropanol to remove any surface imperfections that might cause problems later. Once they were thoroughly cleaned, they were placed in a furnace set to 1,100 degrees Celsius. An oxide layer began to grow on the surface and increased to a thickness of approximately 3,300 angstroms, since this insulating barrier serves as the foundation for all subsequent transistors and capacitors.

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To begin creating the circuit layout, a slurry of photoresist and liftoff resist was spun evenly across the oxide. The appropriate pattern masks were then applied, allowing ultraviolet light to reveal the necessary locations. The photoresist that was exposed to UV light was then scraped away, revealing clear pathways to the silicon beneath, where the circuitry will be created. Then dry etching was used to cut out the paths all the way through the silicon.

The areas were then converted into conductors by doping them; all that was required was to lay a phosphorus-rich glass on top, then heat and anneal it at high temperatures, and all of the phosphorus atoms ended up in the silicon. This constructed the routes that each transistor need to function. Following that, a second round of resist coating and ultraviolet patterning specified the transistor gates and capacitor plates. This time, another oxide layer began to form in similar locations, but it was thinner, measuring around 20 nanometers, and the furnace temperature was slightly lower, at 950 degrees Celsius. This oxide layer was more limited in the amount of charge it could carry.

The next step was using hydrofluoric acid to create microscopic holes in the oxide where the metal would eventually be bonded. Next, a thin, uniform layer of metal was formed using a technique called sputtering. When the resist was removed with a solvent bath, the metal gates, contacts, and capacitor caps remained in their respective placements. That was it; the 5by4 array was built and placed on the wafer, with transistor gates smaller than a micron and each cell measuring a mere micrometer across.

Probes made contact with the finished cells to begin the first tests, and when a small voltage was supplied to the gate, the transistor flashed on and off exactly as it should. A capacitor was charged to 3 volts and then held for around 2 milliseconds before slowly leaking away. The fact that it didn’t carry that charge for very long meant that the cells needed to be updated far more frequently than the memory inside a standard computer, but the basic principle worked perfectly. Data entered and exited through the transistor switch, just as it does with DRAM in principle.
[Source]

The incoming CEO said he was ‘lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs’ and to have had Tim Cook as a mentor.

Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple’s CEO after 15 years in the role. The company has announced John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, as his successor. Company shares went up marginally following the announcement.

Starting 1 September, Cook will assume the role of chairperson of Apple’s board. Ternus will be joining the board.

The new CEO’s position will be taken over by Johny Srouji, whose current role as the senior vice president of hardware technologies will expand to absorb the Ternus’s responsibilities.

“Cook’s legacy will be defined by steady [and] disciplined operational stewardship … [yet] he has not overseen a step-change innovation that would reset Apple’s competitive position for the next two decades,” commented Forrester VP principal analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee.

“That’s where John Ternus comes in. Ternus is a hardware engineer, which signals that Apple will seek differentiation in its physical products even as it looks to reframe the device as a substrate for intelligent experiences.”

Chatterjee added: “But he must resist the temptation of incrementalism that has plagued Apple of late and escape the iPhone’s gravitational pull in his quest for the next disruptive form factor.”

The company is still reliant on the iPhone as it seeks its next growth engine.

Cook joined Apple in 1998 and became CEO in 2011. Under his leadership, Apple grew from a market value of around $350bn to more than $4trn. His tenure as CEO saw the introduction of the Apple Watch, AirPods, iCloud, Apple Pay and more.

Ternus, who joined Apple’s product design team in 2001, became vice president of hardware engineering in 2013. He joined the executive team in 2021, and had been widely viewed as next in line to succeed Cook.

The outgoing CEO is stepping down at a time when Apple, and many alike, face increasing supply chain issues, memory crunch, geopolitical tensions, AI adoption woes and regulatory pressure. But despite these factors, the company posted “record” earnings in the quarter past.

“John Ternus has the mind of an engineer [and] the soul of an innovator”, said Cook. “He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future.”

Ternus added: “Having spent almost my entire career at Apple, I have been lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs and to have had Tim Cook as my mentor.

“It has been a privilege to help shape the products and experiences that have changed so much of how we interact with the world and with one another.”

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The Individual Contributor–Manager Fork: It’s Not a Promotion. It’s a Profession Change.

When I was promoted to engineering manager of a mid-sized team at Clorox, I thought I had made it.

More money. More stock. More visibility. More proximity to senior leadership. From the outside, and on paper, it was clearly a promotion.

I had often heard the phrase, “Management isn’t a promotion. It’s a job switch.” I brushed it off as cliché advice engineers tell each other to sound wise.

It turns out both things were true. It was a promotion. It was also an entirely different job.

And I was nowhere near ready for what that meant.

A Shift in Priorities

There’s surprisingly little training for new managers. As engineers, we’re highly technical and used to mastering complex systems. Many of us assume managing people will be easier than distributed systems. Or we assume it’s just “more meetings.”

Both assumptions are wrong.

Yes, I had more meetings. But what changed most wasn’t my calendar, it was how my impact was measured. As an individual contributor, my output was visible. Code shipped. Features delivered. Bugs fixed.

As a manager, my impact became indirect. It flowed through other people.

That shift was disorienting.

So I fell back into my comfort zone. I started writing more code. I tried to be the strongest engineer on the team. It felt productive and measurable.

It was also a mistake.

By trying to be the number one engineer, I was neglecting my actual job. I wasn’t supporting senior engineers. I wasn’t unblocking systemic problems. I wasn’t building career paths. I was competing with the very people I was supposed to enable.

Management is about amplification.

Learning to Redefine Impact

The turning point came when I began each week with a simple question:

What is the single most impactful thing I can do right now?

Often, it wasn’t code. It was writing a document that clarified direction. It was fixing a broken process with a single point of failure. It was redistributing ownership so that knowledge wasn’t concentrated in one person.

I started deliberately removing myself from implementation work. I committed to writing almost no code. That forced trust. It also revealed gaps in the system that I could address at the right level: through coaching, documentation, hiring, or process changes.

Another major shift was taking one-on-one meetings seriously.

Many engineers dislike one-on-ones. They can feel awkward or devolve into status updates. I scheduled them every other week and approached them with a mix of tactical alignment and human check-in.

I rarely started with engineering questions. Instead:

• Are you happy with the work you’re doing?
• Do you feel stretched or stagnant?
• What’s frustrating you right now?

Burnout doesn’t show up in Jira tickets. Neither does quiet disengagement.

Those conversations helped me anticipate turnover, redistribute workload, and build trust.

I also spent more time thinking about career ladders. Was I giving my team the kind of work that would help them grow? Was I hoarding high-visibility projects? Was I clear about what senior-level impact looked like?

That work felt less tangible than code, but it moved the needle far more.

Why I Went Back to IC

Ultimately, I returned to the individual contributor track.

Part of it was practical: I was laid off from my management role, and the market rewarded senior IC roles more strongly at the time. But if I’m honest, the deeper reason was simpler.

I love writing code.

I enjoy improving systems and helping people, but the part of my day that energized me most was still building. Management required relinquishing that. You can’t be absorbed in technical implementation and deeply people-focused at the same time. Something has to give.

Personally, I don’t need to climb the corporate ladder to feel successful. And you might not have to. Many organizations offer technical leadership tracks that are truly in parity with management when it comes to salary bands. Staff and principal engineers steer strategy without managing people.

If you want to remain deeply technical, you should think very carefully before moving into people management. It requires surrendering control over implementation and focusing on alignment, growth, and long-range planning. If you don’t genuinely care about those things, you won’t just be unhappy, you’ll make your team unhappy.

A Simple Test Before You Choose

Before taking a management role, ask yourself:

• Do I get energy from solving people-problems every day?
• Am I comfortable measuring impact indirectly?
• Would I be satisfied if I rarely wrote production code again?
• Do I want leverage or craft?

There’s no right answer.

The IC/manager fork isn’t about prestige. It’s about what kind of work you want your days to consist of.

Choose based on energy, not ego.

—Brian

Stanford University’s AI Index is out for 2026, tracking trends and noble developments in artificial intelligence. This year, China has taken a notable lead in AI model releases and industrial robotics compared to previous years. AIs are rapidly reaching benchmarks and achieving high levels of compute, but public trust in AI and confidence in government regulation of AI is mixed.

Read more here.

Much like large language models have learned from existing texts, new AI physics models are being trained on simulation results. This results in “large physics models” that can simulate situations in transportation, aerospace, or semiconductor engineering much faster than traditional physics simulations. Using new AI physics models “can be anywhere between 10,000 to close to a million times faster,” says Jacomo Corbo, CEO and co-founder of PhysicsX.

Read more here.

Kyle McGinley is an IEEE Student Member pursuing a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering at Temple University. Joining IEEE helped him to develop the skills necessary for real-world teams. “In school, they don’t teach you how to communicate with people. They only teach you how to remember stuff,” he says.

Read more here.

Michael Jackson is once again back in the cultural conversation. New movie Michael, starring Jaafar Jackson — Michael’s own nephew — in the leading role, lands in theaters this week, following the singer’s life and career from The Jackson 5 to the peak of his solo career.

Michael | Official Trailer – YouTube

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However, this isn’t the be-all and end-all of Jackson’s story, particularly considering the singer’s untimely death weeks before his 2009 This Is It tour was supposed to start.

A previously undocumented data-wiping malware dubbed Lotus was used last year in targeted attacks against energy and utilities organizations in Venezuela.

The malware was uploaded to a publicly available platform in mid-December from a machine in Venezuela and has been analyzed by researchers at Kaspersky.

Before the cripling stage, the attacker relies on two batch scripts that prepare the system for the final payload by weakening defenses and obstructing normal operations.

According to the researchers, the Lotus data-wiping malware is designed to completely destroy compromised systems by overwriting physical drives and eliminating recovery options.

“The wiper removes recovery mechanisms, overwrites the content of physical drives, and systematically deletes files across affected volumes, ultimately leaving the system in an unrecoverable state,” Kaspersky says in a report today.

Given the timing, the observed activity aligns with geopolitical tensions in the region, which culminated this year on January 3 with the capture of Venezuela’s then-president, Nicolás Maduro.

Around mid-December 2025, the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) suffered a cyberattack that disabled its delivery systems. The organization blamed the United States for the incident.

It should be noted that there is no public evidence indicating that PDVSA’s systems were wiped in the attack or details about the nature of the attack.

Preliminary activity

Kaspersky’s report notes that the attacks begin with the execution of a batch script (OhSyncNow.bat) that disables the Windows ‘UI0Detect’ service, and performs an XML file check to coordinate execution across domain-joined systems.

A second-stage script (notesreg.bat) is executed when certain conditions are met. It enumerates users, disables accounts via password changes, logs off active sessions, disables all network interfaces, and deactivates cached logins.

The malicious code then enumerates drives and runs ‘diskpart clean all’ to overwrite them with zeros. It also uses ‘robocopy’ to overwrite directory contents, Kaspersky found.

In the next phase, it calculates the free space and uses ‘fsutil’ to create a file that fills the disk, making it harder to restore the wiped data.

After preparing the environment for data destruction and performing some wiping actions itself, the batch script decrypts and executes the Lotus wiper as the final payload.

Lotus wiper deployment

The Lotus wiper operates at a lower level, interacting with disks via IOCTL calls, retrieving the disk geometry, clearing USN journal entries, wiping restore points, and overwriting physical sectors, not just logical volumes.

The malware performs multiple actions, summarized as follows:

• Enables all privileges in its token to gain administrative-level access.
• Deletes all Windows restore points using the Windows System Restore API.
• Wipes physical drives by retrieving disk geometry and overwriting all sectors with zeroes.
• Clears the USN journal to remove traces of file system activity.
• Deletes files by zeroing their contents, renaming them randomly, and removing them (or scheduling deletion on reboot if locked).
• Repeats cycles of drive wiping and restore point deletion multiple times.
• Updates disk properties using IOCTL_DISK_UPDATE_PROPERTIES after the final wipe.

Kaspersky suggests that system administrators should monitor for NETLOGON share changes, UI0Detect manipulation, mass account changes, and disabling of network interfaces, which are all precursor activities.

They say that unexpected usage of ‘diskpart,’ ‘robocopy,’ and ‘fsutil’ is also a red flag.

A general recommendation against wipers and ransomware is to maintain regular offline backups whose restorability is frequently validated.

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Claim Your Spot

The Apple Watch‘s blood oxygen sensor has been at the center of what feels like a never-ending tennis match of legal back-and-forth.

In 2020, the Apple Watch Series 6 launched with the sensor that measures your blood’s oxygen saturation (SpO2), which is how much oxygen red blood cells pick up from your lungs and transport to the rest of your body. That same year, global medical technology company Masimo filed a lawsuit claiming that Apple’s sensor infringed its patents. In 2023, the US International Trade Commission sided with Masimo and imposed an import ban on Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 models.

However, on Friday, the ITC declined Masimo’s request for another import ban on the Apple Watch and said it wouldn’t review a preliminary ruling finding that the redesigned Apple Watch doesn’t infringe Masimo’s patents. This is a major win for Apple. 

Unless Masimo decides to appeal the decision, Apple can bring blood oxygen monitoring back to its devices. 

But based on the history of this case, it may not be the end of this match. 

The history of Apple’s blood oxygen ban

The ITC became involved in the Masimo and Apple legal battle in 2021, and in January 2023, it upheld that Apple violated Masimo’s patents. Then, in December 2023, the ITC banned Apple from importing its watches, including the Series 9 and Ultra 2, into the US. 

To avoid the ban, Apple disabled blood oxygen sensing on its devices. 

Ahead of the Apple Watch Series 11 launch, Apple reintroduced blood oxygen sensing in August 2025, which was approved by the US Customs and Border Protection. It got around the ban by using a paired iPhone to display blood oxygen levels instead of the Apple Watch. Masimo sued US Customs over this decision. 

In November 2025, a jury for the US District Court for the Central District of California found that Apple infringed one of Masimo’s patents and awarded the company $634 million in damages. Apple told AppleInsider that it plans to appeal, claiming that the patent expired in 2022.

Though the ITC has rejected another ban on Apple’s blood oxygen feature and declined Masimo’s request to review the ruling in Apple’s favor, Masimo may continue the battle, especially given its November win, after which the company released a statement saying, “We remain committed to defending our IP [intellectual property] rights moving forward.”

An Apple representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Masimo declined to comment.

In the meantime, if your curiosity gets the best of you, you could always purchase a pulse oximeter. It’s a device that estimates your blood oxygen level by measuring the light that passes through your finger. No messy legal battles involved.