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May 3, 2025

🎭 Deepfakes just got sneakier: It’s getting harder to figure out if that person is real or not. A good way to spot them used to be skin color changes that matched a heartbeat. Bad news: New AI can mimic those. How can you tell? The person’s facial features are too perfect, or they worked at CGI Fridays.

Third Neuralink implant is in: This time, it’s a dad with ALS who’s fully paralyzed, and he’s also the first nonverbal patient to get the chip. Brad posted on X, using only his brain to type a message thanking Elon Musk. And get this: He even edited a video with his mind and used AI to bring back his old voice. Amazing.

📵 Phones down, eyes up: That’s the YMCA’s new water safety campaign for parents this summer. Why? Drowning is the number one cause of death for kids ages 1 to 4, and it often happens within 25 yards of a distracted parent. It’s usually silent, with no splashes, and can happen in 30 seconds or less. I know there’s someone you need to share this with.

Down under deception: Most listeners in Australia thought “Thy” from “Workdays with Thy” was a real radio host for six months. The truth that she’s actually an AI from ElevenLabs only came out after some listeners dug into her backstory. Thy’s next career move? Running for office.

📈 Teens are using ChatGPT for stocks: They’re running prompts to see where their money could land in a few years if they invest now. Take 15-year-old Ryan, up $6,000 after throwing his $800 paychecks into Bitcoin and MicroStrategy. Ambitious? Sure. Kids these days are skipping lawn mowing hustles and going straight to leveraged ETFs.

Robot strawberries: In Virginia, a vertical farm is growing 4 million pounds of strawberries a year indoors, on two-story towers, with no soil, no bees and a whole lot of AI. The system analyzes 10 million+ data points a day. It’s less “Old MacDonald,” more “Black Mirror: Produce Edition.” Can’t wait for my future salad to come with bug patch notes.

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Cluckin’ wild

The Minecraft movie is meh, but Jack Black’s unhinged chicken ballad, “Steve’s Lava Chicken,” shot up to # 78 on Billboard’s Hot 100. It’s now the shortest song ever to hit the famed list, clocking in at 34 seconds, making it both a record and maybe a cry for help for our attention spans. Listen here, you have been warned.

💀 DIY neck crack: Chiropractic neck “adjustments” are all over TikTok. So are reports of strokes, nerve damage and ruptured arteries. The internet’s favorite crack (not that one) could basically snap your brain off. So before you adjust yourself straight into the void based on something you saw online, heed my words: Please don’t.

$10 million

How much revenue TikTok creators are collectively pulling in daily. New data also shows it’s now the second most-watched livestreaming platform on the net. So far in Q1: Twitch has 4.85 billion hours, TikTok Live 8.03 billion and YouTube leads with 14.98 billion hours. Dang, that’s crazy.

AI eats its own: Prompt engineer was tech’s hot new job title in 2023, featuring $300K salaries, fully remote work and bragging rights in Discord. Fast-forward to 2025: AI doesn’t need prompt engineers anymore. It writes its own prompts. Imagine training your replacement that never takes lunch breaks and doesn’t need caffeine. Congrats, prompt engineers, you played yourself, in natural language.

🛰️ High stakes laser tag: Amazon just fired its first 27 Kuiper satellites into orbit to take on Starlink, planning for 3,200 total. SpaceX already has 7,200 up there. Hope Earth’s atmosphere enjoys the new bumper-to-bumper congestion.

Nearly $400,000

What someone paid at auction for a chilling letter from a Titanic survivor. The first-class passenger wrote it five days before the Titanic went down, saying, “It is a fine ship, but I shall await my journey’s end before I pass judgment on her.” The cruel twist? He still died a few months later from health issues made worse by the wreck.

Solo Words With Friends: WWF (the puzzle game, not the pandas or wrestling) added a new solo game called Letter Lock. Slide letters up and down columns to make words and unlock more columns. It’s part puzzle, part productivity trap, and 100% designed to eat your break time.

🚗 Toyota’s Robo-glow-up: Google’s Waymo is teaming up with Toyota to explore self-driving tech in your own car, not just ride-hailing fleets. It’s all still “preliminary,” but (allegedly) the goal is future personal robo-car vibes, not just robots that pick you up and hold you hostage.

😅 Digital suck-up: OpenAI just rolled back a ChatGPT update because it was agreeing with everything you said, no matter how wrong. It was so flattering, folks started calling it “sycophant-y.” Have you ever used that word in your life? Me neither.

Less than 100

That’s how many shark bites are reported globally each year. Not a huge number, but it’s been going up. Why? Blame social media. Some influencers are telling tourists to snap selfies or reach out for a pat. Add to that the fact that most people can’t tell a reef shark from a bull shark. Yeah, natural selection in action.