June 8th 2026 - Interesting Finds
iPhone reduced birth rates
A natural experiment[0] done on female iPhone users from 2007-2011 found that the iPhone accounted for a 33-52% decline in fertility rates among women aged 15-44.
The experiment used data from ATT users, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone for the given years.
This correlates with another study[1] that found that starting in 2007 teens shifted their socializing to the smartphone. This led to a large reduction in teen fertility, as they would spend more time communicating digitally rather than in person.
Reference
[0] iPhone paper
Emacs set JavaScript indent level
Sometimes you're working on a project that has a different indentation level for JavaScript. You can use this:
(setq-default js-indent-level 2)
Vim reposition text on the screen (top, bottom, middle)
We can use the following commands to reposition the text around the cursor:
- zz - move text to middle of screen
- zt - move text to top of screen
- zb - move text to bottom of screen
MacOS play a sound (afplay)
To play a sound via the terminal we can use afplay:
afplay -t 0.25 "/System/Library/Sounds/Blow.aiff"
Send notifications on MacOS
To send notifications on MacOS we can use osascript:
osascript -e 'display notification "Your message" with title "The Title"'