Weak passwords are so last decade

August 4, 2025

🔐 Weak passwords are so last decade: Every single one of your accounts needs its own unique password. No repeats! I know, it’s a pain. But it’s also the best way to keep hackers from turning one slipup into a full-blown disaster. Make your passwords 16+ characters, and mix in uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols. Or save yourself the headache and use the password manager I trust to keep everything locked down and organized. One click, and you’re safer online.

Tags: disaster, hackers, numbers, online, passwords

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Bank app settings that actually protect your money

ChatGPT

This is not the most exciting way to start a week. But it’s super important.

Let’s talk about your banking app. It does more than show your balance. With the right settings, it can protect your money, catch fraud fast and help you avoid nasty surprises.

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Why rich people swap homes (and how you can, too)

ChatGPT

Want to globe-trot like a baller but on a budget? Enter home swapping: the Airbnb alternative that doesn’t cost a mortgage payment per night. It’s just what it sounds like. You stay in someone’s house, they stay in yours, like Freaky Friday with better Wi-Fi.

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Teen taxi takeover: Waymo just dropped a self-driving car service (paywall link) for teens in Phoenix, with plans to expand. Kids ages 14 to 17 can summon robot cars to school, soccer or wherever else, no license needed. Parents are jazzed. “So like my dad’s Waymo can pick us up at 6 if your mom’s Waymo can drop us off at 10.”

2 eggs a day

Can help lower bad cholesterol with a big oval but. You also have to eat a low saturated fat diet. Think lean meats, low-fat dairy and plant-based proteins. The real villains? Butter, bacon and whatever else is deep-fried on your toast. Speaking of… A piece of toast and a hard-boiled egg walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve breakfast here.”

$250 per month

That’s what it’ll cost to access Google’s new Gemini 2.5 Deep Think AI. It’s their most advanced model yet, capable of exploring multiple ideas at once to find the best answer. Fun fact: This is the same model (well, a variation) that scored a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Hope it does taxes, too.

Robot slurs are here: People are officially calling AIs “clankers,” and somehow it stings. The term, lifted from Star Wars clone trooper banter, is being used to mock chatbots, robo-voices and overly excited AI techies. Other contenders: “prompstitute,” “bot-licker” and “clanker wanker.” Three guesses which one will end up on a protest sign first.

🧠 All roads lead to AI: Google’s new AI, Aeneas, is here to help historians make sense of old Latin carvings. This Rosetta stone with a GPU scans worn inscriptions, predicts missing words and even guesses where and when they were chiseled in. It’s open-source, trained on 150,000+ ancient texts and helped date 90% of test inscriptions better than humans. Pretty nifty.

One diet soda a day

Can increase your risk of type 2 diabetes by 38%. The kicker? That’s actually higher than regular sugary drinks, which come in at 23%. Why? Researchers think artificial sweeteners confuse the body and mess with gut bacteria and insulin response. So yeah, maybe not the healthier choice after all.

🧠 School is in session: OpenAI’s new tudy mode turns ChatGPT into that one friend who won’t tell you the ending of a movie “because you need to experience it.” It scaffolds info, checks if you’re actually learning, and gently refuses to do your homework unless you keep asking, in which case it’ll cave, just like us all.

$2.3 million

What it now takes to be considered “wealthy” in the U.S. That’s down from $2.5M last year. Still, unless you’ve got a trust fund or a crypto time machine, you’re probably just “comfortable.”