Gotta close my rings: Fitness influencers are all over a new “hack” for more accurate step tracking: Strapping a smartwatch to your ankle instead of your wrist. One woman tried it with a 10-minute jaunt around Target. On her wrist, the watch recorded 91 steps; on her ankle, 835 steps. If you try it, know you’re losing out on features like heart rate and CO2 tracking. Another downside is you look like a prisoner with an ankle monitor.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman are fighting like kids on the playground
By The Royal Society, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=152333860; By TechCrunch - TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 - Day 2, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=127902290
It feels like forever ago. The first time I tried ChatGPT, I knew it would change everything. Back in 2022, images of people had seven fingers and every other thing a chatbot spit out was nonsense. I asked Google’s Gemini for a Bible verse and it told me no because the Bible was a copyrighted work. Yikes.
At first, few of us seriously considered AI taking over our jobs, rewriting history or even creating wars. But the tech kept advancing, and then came DeepSeek, an AI model from Communist China. Suddenly, the stakes felt even higher.
In the middle of all this, we have Elon Musk and Sam Altman fighting like two kids on the playground. Before you send me a note asking why I’m talking about politics … don’t.
This is what’s happening in the world and you need to know about it. If it comes up in conversation, you’ll have an educated opinion.
These two go way back
In 2015, Altman was a 30-year-old Stanford dropout who sold his first company for $43.3 million. Musk was already a billionaire, and his companies were churning out Teslas, rocket ships and the first Starlink satellites.
That year, Musk and Altman got together with nine other folks interested in artificial intelligence to start OpenAI. Three years later, in 2018, Musk put in an offer to take over OpenAI and it was rejected. He then left to start his own AI efforts at Tesla.
Fast-forward to 2022, when OpenAI changed the world with ChatGPT. Musk wasn’t about to be left behind; he launched his own AI, Grok, about a year later. It hasn’t gotten nearly the buzz ChatGPT has.
Last year, Musk sued Altman and OpenAI (more on that below). He withdrew the suit and then refiled it a few months later. They’ve been bickering for years.
Now it’s in the global spotlight
Earlier this week, Musk and a group of investors made a $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI.
Altman fired back on X, offering to buy Twitter (X’s former name) for $9.74 billion, knowing fully well Musk paid $44 billion for the platform, whose value has since plummeted. Ouch. Musk called him a “swindler” for that one.
'Forever chemicals' are everywhere in our tech and almost impossible to avoid
© Dzmitry Auramchik | Dreamstime.com, © Zimmytws | Dreamstime.com, © Stevendalewhite | Dreamstime.com
The term “forever chemicals” is floating around more than ever. If you’re wondering why folks are so worried about them, the clue’s in the name.
These substances stick around for a long, long time, and it’s not clear how safe they are. They’re also everywhere, from your phone and smartwatch tech to carpets to nail polish.
32 minutes
For what scientists call the perfect hard-boiled egg. Periodic cooking alternates between hot and cold water every two minutes to achieve cooked whites and creamy yolks. If I had 32 minutes, I wouldn’t be eating a hard-boiled egg. I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon today. I’ll let you know.
📸 “Time to take a selfie”: That’s probably not a wise thought after stealing $300,000 in blinged-out jewelry. But that’s exactly what the guys who broke into Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow’s house did. The three Chilean men are linked to other athlete break-ins. Around this time last year, Chilean gangs targeted my house.
Update your PC: Like, now! This month’s Patch Tuesday update fixes four zero-day vulnerabilities and 55 other issues. Go to Start > Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update and hit Check for updates. By the way, you can update your iPhone to 18.3. It’s all good.
81.7TB
Of pirated books used to train Meta’s AI, Llama. The dirty details came out in court docs. Writers are suing Meta for feeding their (stolen) work into the AI. I’m no lawyer, but it sure sounds shady to me.
Assume any photo you post can be traced: This tech is something else. GeoSpy analyzes every single pixel, background object, shadow and landmark in your photos to identify the exact spot it was taken. Within seconds, they can pass that along to the government, police or anyone else willing to pay. The old way of tracking using the photo’s metadata is over.
👔 From hoodies to high-end: Remember when tech CEOs’ unofficial uniforms were T-shirts and dorky sneakers? Now, Mark Zuckerberg rocks a $895,000 watch and Jeff Bezos is at fashion shows in leather and sunglasses. It’s not just that they grew up; tech drives our economy, and the billionaires in charge aren’t hiding their wealth anymore. In 1999, when Bezos was already a billionaire, he was driving a 1997 Honda Accord. Those days are long gone!
I 🫶 this: Apple’s new $250 Powerbeats Pro 2 earbuds have built-in heart rate monitoring that kicks in when you start working out. Whoa, no more clicking buttons on a watch to track a run? Its battery life is good, too, at 45 hours with the charging case and 10 more hours if you turn off noise cancellation.
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Not backing down: Plastic surgeon Elisabeth Potter went public about UnitedHealthcare calling her mid-surgery to deny a breast cancer patient’s hospital stay. After her post went viral, she got a letter from UnitedHealthcare’s big-time lawyers demanding a retraction and an apology. In a post on X, Potter said, “I will continue to speak up for my patients because they deserve better.” Good for her.
🎈 American tech spying on Americans: It turns out the 200-foot-tall Chinese spy balloon shot down two years ago was packed with U.S. tech from at least five American companies, including Iridium Communications, Texas Instruments, Omega Engineering, Amphenol All Sensors and Onsemi. China claims it was a weather research airship that accidentally strayed into U.S. territory. Yeah, right.
12 times
As massive as Jupiter. That’s the size of an exoplanet spotted by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft. Some context: Jupiter is equal to about 318 Earths, so this thing is huge. The exoplanet, Gaia 4b, is 244 light-years away and 64% as big as the sun. A year there? About 570 Earth days.
$50,000
Cost to remove saggy skin. People who lose a ton of weight on GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy are booking “360-degree” body lifts (paywall link). Lower-body procedures are up by 28% and upper-body surgeries have spiked by 86%. Most new patients are in their 20s and 30s. I just have no appetite for this.
🎣 Gone phishing: I’ve done this with my team. It’s just smart. More companies are phishing their own employees to see how easily they fall for scams. Some are scary, like fake Ebola outbreaks, and others are just plain mean, like a “lost puppy” in the parking lot (paywall link). A weak link can cost you your entire company, so you need to know who needs cybersecurity training.
On the tip of my tongue: Researchers are developing a lickable lollipop that lets you “taste” in virtual reality games. It’s packed with small gel pouches that mix with your saliva to create flavors like salt, sugar, cherry and even milk. (Ew.) An electrical current triggers the flavors, and the voltage controls how much you get. That means game designers can mix and match for custom tastes.
🧬 Evolution ain’t finished: Scientists think we’ll look a lot different in 1,000 years. Theories include darker skin, better-looking faces from selective dating, smaller brains, freakishly long arms, shorter statures, and big eyes made for low gravity and dim light. Oh, and let’s not forget the biohacking and cybernetic upgrades. Here are a few pics.
819 million
Hours wasted on reCAPTCHA. Choosing images (like which ones have a bike or a bridge) stopped bots years ago, but now they’re useless. So, why do they still exist? When you interact with the boxes, Google gets access to your browsing data to sell to advertisers. They’ve collected $6.1 billion just by making you click. Sneaky dogs.
Heads-up, fellow pet owners: Microchipping company Save This Life shut down, so your furry friend’s chip might not be registered anymore. If you’re unsure, take them to a vet or shelter to get scanned. If a number pops up, you should be good to go. Plug it into the AAHA lookup tool to double-check. If the chip is invalid, ask your vet for an alternative.
💻 The nerd in me loves this: The world’s fastest supercomputer just went online at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The $600 million El Capitan is powered by 44,544 AMD chips. Its job is to secure the U.S. nuclear stockpile, run national security research and crunch other classified tasks. How fast is it? Its peak performance is 2.746 exaflops. That’s about 69 million times faster than a top-of-the-line MacBook.