🚨 Fake animal rescues on TikTok and Facebook: Scammers are editing real videos of older creators to make it look like they’re asking for help. One clip shows a man saying he has a story to tell, then it cuts to text: “you stayed 8 seconds so I don’t have to shut down my cat shelter.” Don’t click that donation link.
Robot cars, human-size problems
ChatGPT
Robotaxis are silently (and sometimes awkwardly) roaming around Phoenix, San Francisco, Austin and wherever else humans dare let cars do improv in traffic. Waymo, Tesla and soon Amazon want you to ghost your Uber driver and jump headfirst into a future with no one behind the wheel.
Tempting? Sure. But should you? Well…
🧠 Waymo: sensor show-off
Waymo is Google’s souped-up baby Jaguar. And it’s not just cute. It’s packing serious hardware: GPS, radar, lidar and 29 cameras. You’d think it could see into next Tuesday.
In Phoenix, you can summon one with no driver. The doors unlock, you hop in, and off you go. Well, mostly.
Regulators have flagged 22 “incidents” ranging from boo-boos with barriers to cases of being directionally defeated by construction cones. One time, two women were straight-up trapped inside a car when the doors wouldn’t open. (Waymo Escape Room: now accepting reservations.)
Let’s not forget the recall: More than 1,200 vehicles were pulled after collisions with stationary objects.
Still, here’s the twist: Waymo’s crash rate is up to 80% lower than human drivers when it comes to injury-causing accidents. It’s safer, just not graceful. Think: clumsy nurse with steady hands.
⚡ Tesla: risk-taker
Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” robotaxis skip the radar, skip the lidar and go camera-only. It’s kind of like teaching your car to drive by binge-watching dashcam videos.
In Austin, they’re testing 10 driverless Teslas with remote watchers instead of safety drivers. They need to. There’s a video of one in Austin having a brain-fart moment when seeing cops on the side of the road.
FSD recently failed to stop for a child-size dummy next to a school bus … eight times. One drove onto train tracks. And yes, there’s at least one fatal pedestrian crash under federal investigation. I love innovation, but I’m not about to trust my life to a car that still needs a hall monitor.
How I stopped scammers cold
ChatGPT
“Kim, Lifelock has gotten so expensive. Do I even need it?” — Matt in Texas
I’ve been hearing this a lot, Matt. I agree, LifeLock is pricey. My bill was $239.88 a year. Now, I’m paying $62.64 a year, that’s a 74% savings! More about that later.
200 cookies
What the average American eats each year. A 50-state survey showed one in six Americans, or a little over 16%, eats dessert daily. That percentage is highest in Tennessee, at 25%. On average, sweets cravings hit hardest at 2:30 p.m. For the record, Newman-O’s are my favorite cookie.
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💸 Fortnite refund: The FTC is giving you another shot to claim part of a $245 million settlement over shady in-app purchases. You’re eligible if you played between January 2017 and September 2022 and were charged for items you didn’t want, got locked out after a charge dispute, or if your kid made purchases without you knowing. Submit your claim by July 9.
🎭 Who owns your face? Get this. Denmark’s rewriting copyright law to give people ownership over their face, voice and vibe. Yes, really. If a deepfake of you pops up without consent, you can make platforms take it down. It’s the first law of its kind in Europe, and the U.S. might want to take notes. This will be ID theft in 2035.
Almost 90%
That’s how much heart attacks have dropped since 1970, thanks to better meds and emergency care. The twist? With more people surviving, issues like heart failure and high blood pressure are becoming the silent killers. Add in obesity nearly tripling since the ’70s, and, well … hearts are still under serious pressure.
Playing God: Now, this is nuts. British scientists just kicked off a mega-funded plan to build human DNA from scratch. The goal? A fully synthetic chromosome (just 2% of the genome) for now. Cue the ethical dilemma of gene creation and editing. Some say it’s lifesaving science, others say it’s biotech’s Jurassic Park moment.
30%
That’s how much of Salesforce’s workload AI is already doing. Marc Benioff says bots are now answering customer questions and writing code like it’s no big deal. You know, just casually replacing a third of the org chart before lunch. The high-end estimate of Salesforce’s work done by AI? Nearly half (paywall link).
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🤔 AI’s dumbing us down: A study found that students using ChatGPT to write SAT essays showed lower brain activity and focus compared to those who didn’t. Over four months, they went from asking for some help to copy-pasting entire sections. Maybe the future shown in WALL-E isn’t that far off.
🍏 Apple owes you? Hurry up, sweet cakes. You’ve got until July 2 to claim your share of a $95 million settlement over Siri snooping accusations. If you owned a Siri device between 9/17/2014 and 12/31/2024, you could get up to $20 per device (max five). Look for an email titled “Lopez Voice Assistant Class Action Settlement” to submit a claim. Didn’t get one? Click New Claim. I’m getting $100.
🍑 Corporate glutes in crisis: TikTok has declared war on “office chair butt,” the slow flattening of your glutes from too much sitting. The formal diagnosis? Gluteal muscle group atrophy. Symptoms include sagging cheeks, back pain and a general vibe of “my body quit.” Now people are squatting between Zooms and lifting water jugs like resistance bands.
AI’s voice is yours now: This is wild. People are starting to speak like AI, even when they don’t realize it. Words like “delve” and “meticulous” have surged in usage post-ChatGPT, and researchers say this is just the beginning. Our speech is getting more structured, polished and kinda robotic.
🛠️ Hacker turned pitch guy: A Missouri man hacked a gym, dropped his membership to $1 and emailed the owner, offering “cybersecurity consulting” after proving he broke in. He also posted their camera feed on social. Not the sharpest guy. He now has plenty of time to work out in prison.
👀 A note about Google watching your texts: I told you about this yesterday, and the link worked for some people but not all. It’s surprisingly tricky to turn off Google’s Gemini AI text tracking. You’ve gotta manually yank its permissions. Think of it like breaking up with a clingy ex who still has a key. Head to gemini.google.com/apps and toggle the switch off for Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, etc. These might not pop up on your end, yet, but anticipate a rollout sometime before July 7.
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200 eggs
That’s how many new mozzies a single female mosquito can whip up in a puddle. One inch of water, one day, and boom, you’ve got a bloodthirsty startup. Time to dump those flowerpot saucers and treat your birdbath like each drop raises your tax bracket.
Fashion forward AI: Google’s new app Doppl lets you upload a body pic and then deepfakes you into different outfits. It also makes videos, in case you needed CGI proof that you can’t pull off cargo pants.
💻 RIP, blue screen of death: After nearly 40 years, Windows is ditching the classic BSOD error message. You know, the one with the frowning face and QR code? It’s being replaced with a black screen that shows the stop code and the system driver that caused the crash. The update rolls out later this summer.