Goodbye, gentle parenting: “FAFO parenting” is going viral, and no, it’s not a Montessori method. Think: tough love (paywall link) with a code of conduct. Short for “F– Around and Find Out,” FAFO (pronounced “faff-oh”) favors natural consequences over endless negotiations with participation trophies. Kids act up, they have to straighten up or else. Nope, there’s no belt hanging on the doorknob.
Four payments and a data leak
ChatGPT
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) apps are everywhere. See something shiny? Tap tap, and BAM, you own it in four “easy” payments. Zero interest, no credit card shame spiral. What a dream, right?
But here’s what they’re not telling you: While you’re breaking up your payments, they’re also breaking up your data and sharing it with companies you’ve never heard of.
These apps aren’t just making money from your shopping habits. They’re making money selling data about you.
🕵️♀️ Tracking so much of you
Let’s talk specifics. Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay, Sezzle, Zip and Uplift are among the biggest BNPL players in the U.S. Nearly all of them are collecting an alarming amount of your personal data.
We’re talking names, email addresses, phone numbers, exact location (yes, GPS-level), your purchase history, credit score and even your browsing habits. Afterpay alone collects 20 different types of data. Klarna isn’t far behind, and they reportedly grab your in-app messages. What? Let that sink in.
Sezzle and Zip have been found collecting your web activity outside the app. That’s right, they’re watching what you do online beyond just the purchases you make through them.
It doesn’t stop there. Afterpay shares your data with 17 third parties. That’s 17 more chances for your information to be lost, leaked or sold again. Some of these companies have had data breaches in the past. Once your info is floating around out there, it’s nearly impossible to wrangle it back.
🧹 Clean up on Aisle Privacy
This is why I always tell you about Incogni. It’s a tool that goes to bat for you, scrubbing your personal info from all the shady data brokers and people-search sites.
You sign up once, and Incogni sends out legal removal requests on your behalf. No chasing, no paperwork, no headaches.
Since I signed up for Incogni, they’ve made over 1,400 data removal requests for me. It keeps working in the background and gives you updates, so you can see your data being wiped from shady sites. It’s one of the smartest things you can do if you care about your privacy (and you should).
How to save important voicemails
ChatGPT
There’s one voicemail I’ll never delete.
It’s from my mom. She’s been gone for almost four years, but every so often, I play it back. It’s nothing dramatic, just her voice asking if I could buy her a gallon of milk on my way home. (In her Brooklyn accent, “Kim, make sure it’s 2%, not the fatty whole milk please.”)
79%
That’s how much traffic a top-ranked site can lose when it’s bumped below an AI summary. New AI Overviews are less “helpful assistant” and more “content pickpocket.” Why click a link when the robot already did the reading for you? At this point, calling it “search” is generous; it’s more like passive-aggressive copy/paste.
TV turning off on its own fix: If it’s like clockwork, it might be a setting you didn’t mean to enable. On most smart TVs, go to Settings > General and look for something like Sleep Timer, then turn it off. Still happening? It could be a bug. Try Settings > Support > Software Update.
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🔍 Tour de Fraud? Cycling officials are now X-raying sweaty bikes for secret motors. Tadej Pogacar’s winning ride once got flagged, alongside seven others. Mechanical doping (like riding a stealth-mode eBike) is the new fear (paywall link). One guy’s whole job is catching battery-powered frauds at the finish line. What happened to good old-fashioned steroids?
Venmo the government: Yep, a viral post on X says you can actually Venmo the U.S. Treasury to help pay off the $36.7 trillion national debt. But before you get generous, know it’s growing by $55,000 a second. To cover it all, every person in the U.S. would need to chip in around $100,000. Yikes.
🤖 AI gone wrong: A Florida man was arrested after facial recognition tech said he matched a suspect trying to lure a 12-year-old at a restaurant. The system gave a 93% confidence score, two witnesses ID’d him from a photo lineup, and that was enough to put him in cuffs. But nope, it was a false positive. Case dropped.
🚨 Jury duty scam: An Arizona woman lost nearly $50,000 after a fake cop called, telling her she missed jury duty. The scammer said she had to pay citations and a bond to avoid jail until she could meet with a judge. This one’s spreading in every state. PSA: Police will never ask for money over the phone.
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😠 Stop Netflix trailer spoilers: They can ruin everything the second you open the app, so turn ’em off. On a web browser, click your profile picture (top right) > Manage Profiles > select your profile > Playback settings > and uncheck Autoplay previews while browsing on all devices > then hit Save. You’re welcome.
📖 New Kindle on the block: Amazon just dropped the Kindle Colorsoft ($250). It’s $30 less than the fancier Signature Edition with wireless charging, an auto-dimming light and more storage. Perfect if you only need the basics in crisp color. Pro tip: Trade in your old Kindle and save up to 20% off.
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700+
How many emails Mark Cuban reads and replies to every single day. No assistant. No Slack. Just three phones and an email trail stretching back to the ’90s. Meetings? Pass. He’d rather crush his inbox than lose an hour to a “quick sync.” Bonus: Gmail’s auto-replies do 20% of the heavy lifting.
Texts from the sky: T-Mobile just launched T-Satellite, a Starlink-powered service that lets you text (and alert 911) when you’re somewhere too remote for regular bars. It costs $10/month, works with over 60 phones and covers most of the U.S. You’ll need clear skies and an eSIM-enabled device. It’s not fast, but neither are rescue helicopters.
245.76 TB
The size of Kioxia’s new SSD. And it fits in one device. It’s made for AI and data center workloads where raw capacity beats flashy speed. Think: massive training datasets, not movie marathons. It sacrifices performance to keep signal integrity in check, but it’s perfect if your job is “store the internet.”
🐓 Suspicious poultry alert: A Reddit user asked ChatGPT how to get rid of a 160-pound dead chicken. GPT tried to stay helpful (“Call animal disposal”) but couldn’t ignore the details: “Are you sure this is a chicken?” It’s the latest in a trend of viral “cursed prompts” that test AI’s limits.
Blue screen, black soul: Remember the Windows blue screen of death? It just went goth. The QR code? Gone. The frowny face? Dead. Instead, you get a sleek black screen and a new Wi-Fi-powered quick machine recovery feature that can resuscitate your dead PC like digital CPR.
🕳️ Divine rug pull: A Denver pastor and his wife convinced their church to invest $3.4M into a holy crypto scheme allegedly blessed by God. Spoiler: God did not 10x those returns. Now they’re facing 40 felony charges, including racketeering and securities fraud, and the coin is worth about as much as one prayer in the blockchain void.
$1.5 billion
What Paramount+ is coughing up for the streaming rights to South Park. Trey Parker and Matt Stone just pulled off the media heist of the decade: five years, $300 million a year. And yes, it’s still a cartoon about poop jokes.