Are scammers using infidelity to manipulate you?

September 13, 2024

“Your spouse is cheating on you.” That’s the shocking line behind a new sextortion scam. The message includes a link claiming to offer “proof,” but it’s a trap to get you to click. Plus, Gen Z is moving away from Google, and strange science wins big at the Ig Nobel awards.

Tags: audio, Cheating, download, Gen Z, Google, infidelity, Link, message, moving, offer, open, Plus, scam, scammers, science, sextortion, spouse

Will we merge with AI by 2050?

ChatGPT launched in November 2022. I’ll never forget the thought that hit me after a few minutes of playing around with it: This is going to change every single thing.

Less than two years later, yep, it has. Website traffic is in the tank, Google is panicking and the web as we know it has changed already. Now imagine what’s coming in the next five, 10 or 20 years.

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🚀 A giant step: On the morning of Sept. 12, 2024, the Polaris Dawn mission made history. Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and an engineer floated 435 miles above Earth, making them the first private astronauts to complete a spacewalk. Isaacman spent 12 minutes outside the spacecraft, relying on SpaceX’s new spacesuit for oxygen. Here’s the video. It’s incredible.

SpaceX performs historic first spacewalk with Polaris Dawn crew

SpaceX pulled off its first spacewalk in the early hours of Thursday morning, Sept. 12. The marquee event of the private Polaris Dawn mission went smoothly, with two of the crew members stepping outside of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, “Resilience.” It’s the first time civilians, rather than government astronauts, have performed a spacewalk.

$1,100 dog stroller

For sale in South Korea, where the human birth rate is 0.72. That’s the lowest in the world (paywall link) and one-third of what’s needed to maintain their population. Dog stroller sales just outpaced sales of baby strollers for the first time in the country, and the Airbuggy is a hot commodity. The government there is stork-raving mad.

🍿 Grab the popcorn: If you watch YouTube on your smart TV, you’ll soon see ads when you pause a video. The video shrinks to the left and a sponsored ad column takes over the right side. To remove the ad, either resume playback or hit the “Dismiss” button. YouTube is also testing longer, unskippable ads. You can escape them with YouTube Premium, but that’ll cost you $13.99 a month.

75% memory boost

For older folks who mixed up their mental exercises. Just like with food, a “diet” of only a couple of things is less effective than a diet with a variety of foods. This study used different exercises for working memory — aka our ability to remember information while performing other tasks.

🍔 I’m not lovin’ it: McDonald’s new self-serve kiosks accept cash and won’t complain if your order is annoying. They say no jobs will be cut and cashiers will move to roles like delivering food. For now, the kiosks are optional and in less than 2% of locations, but expect more soon.

AI chatbots are politically biased: Researchers ran 11 standard political questionnaires through 24 different AI bots, including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Most leaned left-of-center because they were fed more left-leaning training data, not right-leaning. Developers have a huge influence on what their models “think.”

17% worse

Test results for kids who used AI as a study assistant. Students were split into three groups: One working through practice problems on their own, one using ChatGPT and one in which ChatGPT worked like a tutor. The kids who used AI all scored worse on their exams, likely because they used the bot as a crutch instead of truly learning.

2 years

Time since becoming the Prince of Wales that Prince William began using the Duolingo app to learn Welsh. Makes me wonder why he didn’t learn it before that happened. Bore da! (That’s “Good morning” in Welsh.) Go ahead and try to pronounce this 58-letter Welsh town’s name: lanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch.