writing Archives

It’s a new year

🥳 So try something new! These all sound like a blast to combat the post-holiday blues.

This pickle kit lets you ferment and pickle anything your heart desires. My favorite? Red onions, yum!
Crotchet a cute little dinosaur with a crotchet kit for beginners ($25). The step-by-step video tutorials are so helpful.
Want to get into podcasts (ahem, like mine)? You need a nice set of earbuds like these* that sound great, have a 32-hour battery life and are a fraction of the price of AirPods.
This cocktail codex (52% off) shows you the fundamentals of drinkmaking and how to make every kind of cocktail. It even gives substitutes if you’re missing any ingredients!
Try your hand at calligraphy with this workbook for beginners (29% off, $20).
An indoor herb garden kit (19% off) lets you grow your own herbs and veggies. It comes with a bunch of different pre-seeded pods that make it easy.

We may earn a commission from purchases, but our recommendations are always objective.

Stop writing checks

Still paying bills with checks? Here’s why you need to switch over to electronic payments, in one minute.

Look at me, I’m the coder now: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says coding is dead, long live “vibe coding,” which is basically sweet-talking a chatbot into writing software for you. You don’t need Python if you’ve got polite vibes and ChatGPT. Congrats, your great aunt just launched an e-commerce site from her iPad.

$97.4 billion

What Elon Musk offered to buy OpenAI yesterday. He’s in a battle with Sam Altman, who wants OpenAI to turn a profit. Altman responded to Musk on X, writing, “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Ouch.

📱 Seeing double: Need to check your notes while writing an email? Android lets you use two apps at once. Go to Recent Apps, press and hold the first app you want, then choose Split screen. Tap your second app, and a black bar will separate them. Done? Drag the black bar to the app you want to close.

AI vs. cancer: AI just helped design a new breast cancer treatment … with zero cancer drugs. Using high-cholesterol and anti-booze meds, GPT-4 suggested combos, and some worked better than standard care. Yes, it spit out actual useful science instead of writing a bad screenplay. GPT is slowly turning into Dr. House without the Vicodin.

Mamma Mia!, with chatbots: ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus is writing a new musical with the help of AI. He’s fully embracing the tech, saying it’s like having another songwriter in the room with endless ideas. Dancing Queens, meet Data Kings.

👨‍💻 Keep calm and Java on: Engineers say AI is pushing them to work harder and faster. Teams are shrinking, but expectations aren’t. Code that used to take weeks now has to be done in days. And with AI writing full programs instead of just suggesting lines of code? Yeah, junior devs’ glory days are over.

🤖 OpenAI is retiring GPT-4 from ChatGPT: Slated to be fully replaced by April 30 by the current default model, GPT-4o, because, well, 4o is just better. It’s stronger at writing, coding, problem-solving and conversational flow. Farewell, GPT-4. We’ll remember your weird poem phase. More models are on the way; we’ll soon see a family of GPT-4.1s and a new o3 “reasoning” bot.

Echowriting: That’s teaching AI to sound like you. Feed in a piece of writing (an email, a blog post, a text, whatever) and say, “This is my writing. I want you to analyze it, so you can sound more like me in the future.”

Grok needs a tutor: Elon Musk is hiring thousands to train the xAI chatbot. You don’t need a degree, but it’s a plus if you have a knack for writing and speak more than one language. Most jobs are temporary full-time and pay $35 to $65 an hour. Check them out here.

4 free alternatives to Microsoft Word

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Looking for a word processor? In this one-minute podcast, I’ll share four free programs that can get you writing in no time.