The have’s and the have yachts

Lost my appetite: Viral posts on X claim celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Hanks and Robert De Niro are being banned from restaurants. The posts started as satire on Facebook, and now people are sharing “facts.” Don’t be one of them.

Are getting laid off at Intel. After reporting $1.6 billion in quarterly losses, Intel is axing 15% of its workforce by the end of this year. So, what the heck is going on? Microsoft and Apple both ditched Intel chips in their newest laptops.

All talk, no show tunes: Three major labels are suing AI music company Suno for training its model on copyrighted songs. Suno’s defense? “Yep, we did it.” Suno says it’s “fair use” to use protected songs in their back-end tech to create something completely new. Now, that’s an interesting defense.

🧎‍♀️ This is bolo-knee: In videos with tens of millions of views, TikTokkers say the most comfortable way to sit on a plane is with your knees up to your chest and your feet on the edge of the seat, with the seatbelt fastened around your feet. This is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons — mostly because it could catapult you forward in severe turbulence.

Delta lost $500 million in the CrowdStrike Windows outage: It took down 8.5 million PCs. Delta CEO Ed Bastian said, “When was the last time you heard about a big outage at Apple?” Ouch. Insider secret: Apple gives developers much lower access to their key internal framework so it’s unlikely a single update could do big damage.

💳 Don’t fall for it: Scammers pretending to be bank employees are phoning and texting with fake account fraud warnings. They’ll tell you to cut up your credit cards, leaving the chip inside intact. They then send someone to pick it up. With just that chip, they duplicate your card. A friend of mine started chanting in Latin the last time a scammer called. The man screamed, “No, don’t put a curse on my family!”

📚 Spilling the tea: An upcoming book claims billionaire Bill Gates was like a “kid in a candy store” with interns — so much so that Microsoft banned them from being alone with him. Another hot rumor: Bill was allowed one weekend a year at his ex-girlfriend’s place while still married to his now ex-wife, Melinda. Gates’ reps say it’s all bologna from anonymous sources.

Actual mind control: Scientists did it using an external magnetic field. They can manipulate nanoparticle-activated “switches” in the brain to do things like boost a mouse’s appetite by 100%. Someday, it could treat human neurological disorders … or, you know, anything else.