From crayon to canvas

Safe Wi-Fi anywhere: Using public Wi-Fi is risky no matter where you go. It doesn’t make a difference if you stay at a five-star luxury hotel, have lunch at your hometown diner or you’re at the airport. The easy way to protect yourself? Turn on a VPN.

The nightly fee Hawaii’s tacking onto a $300 hotel stay, for climate karma points. It’s barely the price of a sad airport coffee, but multiplied by millions of tourists, it adds up, with some estimates as high as $100 million annually. Hawaii just became the first U.S. state to hit tourists with a climate tax: a 0.75% hike.  Mahalo.

Extra fast-food visits happen in LA County each year. Why? Sitting in traffic makes people way more likely to hit the drive-thru than the grocery store. Makes sense when the average American spends 37 minutes prepping food, and fast food takes under five. So much for that salad plan.

The speed of the world’s first supersonic artillery shell, the Sceptre TRBM 155HG. It can hit targets up to 100 miles away with 5-meter accuracy. That puts it well outside the reach of most jamming systems. How? AI, sensors and GPS help it correct its path mid-flight. It’s like Call of Duty, but real.

That’s how many you used to check for free on Southwest. Now? That’ll be $80, unless you’ve got status or a branded credit card (paywall link). The “bags fly free” era has been unceremoniously grounded. I’ll never forget when I was on a Southwest Airlines flight. A hard landing was quite jarring. As we pulled up to the gate, our flight attendant announced, “Well, folks, that wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t the captain’s fault, but it was definitely the asphalt.”

How long Anthropic’s new AI model Claude Opus 4 can work without needing new prompts. It’s built to handle big tasks, kind of like giving a coworker a goal and letting them run with it. The twist? Anthropic says it’s not replacing jobs, just automating the boring stuff. Cool cool, tell that to the boss.

That was the average price for a starter home in 2024, and you’d need to earn over $100K a year to afford it. Why so much? Land, permits and labor aren’t cheap, and building materials have gone through the roof. Oh, and you’re getting even less for more. In Colorado Springs, new homes have shrunk by 14% in size (paywall link).

Of the images on Adobe Stock are AI-generated. That’s over 300 million in just three years. For comparison, it took 20 years to hit that number with real photos. The downside? Adobe is now limiting uploads and rejecting more files. Not great news if you’re a human with a camera.

🤳 Am I hot or not? That’s what people are asking ChatGPT. They upload photos, ask for an honest opinion, then get glow-up advice (think skin care routines or makeup tips). Kinda sketchy now that ChatGPT has a shopping feature that recommends products. AI meets e-commerce. Its advice could be influenced by ads, not what’s actually best for you.

✍️ Faulty AI detectors: More students are being accused of using tools like ChatGPT when they didn’t. Like Leigh, who got a zero on her assignment after Turnitin said it was bot-written (paywall link). She appealed, but now records herself working. Others even track their keystrokes to avoid false positives. What a mess.