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To take a four-day class at Harvard. The course, Business of Entertainment, Media and Sports, is open to non-Harvard students and covers the economics of modern-day brands (paywall link) from Nike to MrBeast. Alumni include celebrities looking to build an empire, like Channing Tatum and LL Cool J. Oh, to be a fly on the wall.
Tags: brands, business, celebrities, entertainment, Link, media
Love watching courtTV and other true crime shows? Why not get paid for your entertainment?
How ironic: Security training company KnowBe4’s latest remote hire turned out to be a collection of North Korean hackers. When they mailed the “employee” a company-issued Mac to the guy’s phony home address (that was really a hacker farm), it was immediately loaded up with malware. How’d he get through HR screening? An AI-edited stock headshot — something they should’ve checked before hiring the guy.
AI for all: Meta just released Llama 3.1, the biggest open-source AI model yet. It can process a novel’s worth of text (128,000 pieces of info) in eight languages, write better computer code and solve more complex math problems. Try it on Meta AI with your Facebook or Instagram account. Outside the U.S.? Go to HuggingChat. (Bonus: Meta’s AI also generates amazing pics.)
No takebacks: After Google vowed to get rid of third-party cookies on Chrome, they basically said, “Just kidding.” Instead, you’ll get a “new experience in Chrome” that lets you “adjust” your cookie preferences. No word on how yet. Get ahead of it: Try Total Adblock for an ad-free experience.
🐶 Fool me twice: A Texas family fell for the same puppy scam twice on Facebook Marketplace. It cost them $20,000. The phony breeders lured them in with cute puppy pics, and then they asked for a deposit, transportation and vaccination expenses via gift card. It was all fake. Don’t send money until you see the goods (or pups) in person.
What a creep: Ava Kris Tyson will no longer co-host MrBeast’s mega-popular YouTube channel after allegedly sending risque messages to a minor. Tyson started chatting with the victim when they were 13 and she was 20, and she met up with them IRL when they turned 16. More sketchy posts keep coming out, too.
🚀 Streaming for science! A crew spent 378 days in a simulated Mars base, cut off from outside contact. How’d they pass the time? By watching a lot of TV. Turns out there’s a lot of downtime between experiments and farming your own food. They were probably binging “Friends” just to stay sane!
Your website is dead: Some 58.8% of U.S. Google searches never leave Google now. Worse? Nearly 30% of clicks go to Google’s own products, like YouTube, News and Images. I told you this would happen in November 2022. Btw, the guy who owns Milk.com wants $10 million for the domain. Good luck with that.
🚬 Let’s not vape around the bush: Swype is a disposable e-cig, fitness tracker and “dumbphone.” In other words, you can vape with it, but you can’t make calls. It syncs to your smartphone via Bluetooth and shows you notifications on a touchscreen. Hard pass.
💸 Amazon is losing billions on Echo devices: They sold ‘em way below cost, hoping users would shop more via Alexa. Plot twist: They didn’t. Folks like it for free apps and alarms instead. A paid Alexa tier (paywall link) is in the works to recoup costs. I doubt folks will bite. I won’t.
