🤡 Chinese factories are trolling Americans: On TikTok, they’re telling us to cut out the middleman and get brand-name products straight from the source, like Birkenstocks for $10 instead of $165. Follow the link to AliExpress, and you’ll see these are cheap knockoffs. You saved $150 only to lose all feeling in your arches by noon.
100% critics’ score for Netflix’s new comedy series
That’s the critics’ score for Netflix’s new comedy series North of North. It follows a young Inuk mom who moves back to her small hometown after leaving her husband. It’s like Gilmore Girls meets snow meets 9,000 percent more gossip. The trailer looks pretty good.
6 hours
Per day with family. That’s part of a scientific formula for the perfect day (paywall link). You should also spend two hours with friends, two hours exercising and one hour eating and drinking. Work? Keep it under six hours, and screen time under one. It might not be realistic, but hey, life’s supposed to be about balance, right?
🏡 Safe & sound: Protecting your home takes more than just locking the front door. I trust SimpliSafe, the award-winning security system that’s actually easy to set up and use. Don’t wait for a break-in to get serious about your family’s safety.
🧠 OpenAI’s new models: The recently released o3 and o4-mini aren’t your typical chatbots. They’re trained to think deeply and come up with their own experiments. So, perfect for science, tech, engineering and math. The kicker? It might cost $20,000 a month!
$7 billion
What Universal’s new theme park in Florida cost to build. This one’s a little different, with fewer roller coasters and more immersive worlds using augmented reality. When it opens in May, you’ll be able to see Harry Potter and How to Train Your Dragon brought to life. The kicker? Entry is $139 (paywall link). Uh, Daniel Radcliffe better greet me at the gate.
💔 Tinder swindler alert: A Portland woman lost over $40,000 after falling for a scammer she met on the app. They talked for a week before he asked for money, saying he had no family to help, sealing the con with a fake photo of himself in a hospital bed. Tinder’s basically a financial thriller with worse dialogue than a Lifetime movie.
☠️ Windows update gone wild: Microsoft confirmed this week that updates since March have been crashing some Windows 11 devices with a terrifying 0x18B SECURE_KERNEL_ERROR. For those not versed in digital Hogwarts spells, that’s a full stop blue screen of death. And yes, it kicks in right after the update + restart combo. Oof.
🧑⚖️ Zuck tried to settle with mucho bucks: Mark Zuckerberg thought he could pay his way out of a government antitrust trial over Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC wanted $30B; Zuckerberg offered $450M and good vibes. The FTC said: lol, no. Meta argues that TikTok is the real threat now, not Instagram.