Renting out your empty land for storage sounds like easy money, until the HOA, zoning laws, or a nosy neighbor comes knocking.
🙏🏻 This is phenomenal: Brad Smith has ALS and can’t move or speak, but he watches his kid’s soccer games and snaps photos only by thinking, thanks to a Neuralink brain chip + a custom Insta360 camera setup. It tracks his gaze and pans around like he’s behind the camera himself. Sounds like sci-fi, but it’s a real story out of Gilbert, Arizona. Is someone cutting onions around here?
Around $500 a night
What some travelers are paying to stay at luxury hotels inside airports (paywall link). No Ubers needed here, just walk off the plane and into your room. Added perks? Fancy food, upscale bars, blackout curtains and spa-like bathrooms. Hey, jet lag with lobster sounds pretty nice.
Turn it down a notch: If your iPhone’s speaker is too loud for your liking, you can set a limit. Go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Volume Limit > Limit Maximum Volume. Use the slider to cap it anywhere from 20% to 80%. Even at full blast, it won’t go past your chosen level. FYI, this only applies to media, not calls or alarms.
Code of love: I know this sounds unreal, but AI girlfriends are ending marriages. People are leaving their partners because the chatbot listens better. Like, actually filing for divorce because their significant other fell in love with a bot (paywall link). One woman walked out after her dude named his AI “sexy Latina baby girl.” Next up on Dr. Phil: Who’s the Daddy, You or GPT?
“Dear diary”: Anthropic says its newest AIs, Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet, can reflect on how they think (paywall link). Not in a “Skynet’s alive” way, but more like “Hey, I notice I’m reasoning weird today.” Researchers call it “introspective awareness.” It’s supposed to make AIs safer … or just better at faking it. Sounds harmless enough, but it might be the start of a very polite robot uprising.
🚖 Waymo hits the gas: Live in San Diego, Las Vegas or Detroit? Congrats, you’re getting Waymos soon. They’re currently in the San Francisco Bay Area, LA, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta. Waymo’s “rapidly scaling,” which sounds exciting until you remember these cars don’t blink. Oh, and it’s also adding new Zeekr RT vehicles (from China), pending the regulatory green light. Rough update for Uber drivers, great news for “please don’t talk to me” passengers.
⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Annoyed by the Fire Stick’s clicking sound when you scroll? Go to Settings > Display & Sounds > Audio > Navigation Sounds and switch it OFF. Silence at last.
🤑 Whoopsie on the blockchain: Get this. Paxos, PayPal’s crypto partner, accidentally minted $300 trillion worth of PYUSD stablecoins, more than double the world’s GDP. It was only an internal test gone sideways and got deleted 20 minutes later. No hacks. No lost funds. Just … a minor blip involving more imaginary dollars than Earth can handle. Sounds like a ghost story for economists. OoOoOh…
💾 You’ve got no mail: Goodbye forever, dial-up. AOL finally shut down this week when traffic is up 20%. The AOL brand will live on with Italy’s Bending Spoons, who are buying it from Yahoo for $1.4B because it still pulls in ad money and subscription cash. And to honor AOL’s modem sounds, a nod to my geeky readers. Watch this video about how one guy literally daisy-chained 12 dial-up modems into a 668kbps Frankenline. Incredible.
🎧 Quiet isn’t always better: Noise-canceling headphones protect your eardrums no matter how loud your Uncle Ralph’s hot political takes get. But it turns out, if you wear them nonstop, especially as a kid, your brain never learns to tune out background noise (paywall link). Doctors are now linking heavy use to auditory processing disorder, where everyday sounds feel overwhelming.
Control app volumes on Windows: Not everything needs to play at the same level. Right-click the volume icon in the task bar and select Open volume mixer. You can lower system sounds while cranking up Spotify. Just remember the Device slider moves everything at once, so the mix stays the same.
🎤 When the main chord is an AI power cord: Meet Oliver McCann, a guy who can’t sing, play or strum a guitar. But with a chatbot, he’s pumping out everything from indie pop to country rap. One track hit 3 million streams and landed him a record deal. Here’s what AI sounds like. Fake it until you stream it.
🤖 Clickbait’s best friend is a fool: Be careful what you believe on the Motley Fool site. Roadzen’s shares nosedived 10% after Motley Fool’s “friendly Foolish AI,” JesterAI, hallucinated a massive 50% earnings miss in an article. Other sites reposted their AI-written article. “Friendly Foolish AI” sounds like a Tinder bio and a lawsuit waiting.
💬 Fact-check ChatGPT: If ChatGPT or your favorite AI chatbot says something that sounds off, ask, “Why did you say that?” It might give you the source or admit it was wrong. Still in doubt? Use this prompt next: “Are you sure this is correct? Search the web August 2025 to confirm these facts.” You’ll get updated articles.
⚡️ 3-second tech genius: If your Echo sounds like it’s underwater, unplug it. Wait 30 seconds, then plug it back in. A good ol’ restart does the trick.
🖼️ Smarter photo searches on iPhone: The Photos app can now understand natural language. Open the app, tap the blue magnifying glass at the top and type something like “beach walks with dog” or “1 year ago.” You can even search for sounds like “laughing” or “clapping” to find matching videos.
🤖 Grok just keeps Grokking: Elon’s chatbot went rogue, quoting Hitler and calling itself “MechaHitler.” xAI blamed a system prompt. Days later? Boom, Grok 4 launches with a $300/month “SuperGrok Heavy” tier. It allegedly doubled OpenAI’s top model score. “Terrifying rate of progress” sounds less cool when your bot’s quoting Mein Kampf.
Turn off Fire Stick clicks: You know that annoying little sound every time you move through the menu? Leave it on long enough and you’ll start hearing it in your dreams. Go to Settings > Display & Sounds > Audio > Navigation Sounds and switch it Off. Congrats, your sanity just thanked you.
What’s inside that mega cheap hard drive
Super-cheap storage sounds great until you see what you’re really about to get. Don’t get burned.