Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

A makeup illusionist, a photography project, and an innovative DJ are among the winners of Instagram’s inaugural Rings awards. The award, whose recipients were announced on Thursday, celebrates 25 creators who, in the company’s words, “bring people together over creativity” and “aren’t afraid to take creative chances and do it their way.” Among the winners is Mimi Choi, known for turning her face into mind-bending works of art. Celebrating her win, she penned in an Instagram post: “Because of its visual nature, Instagram has really helped spread my work and jump-start my career, providing me with numerous different types of collaboration opportunities that I cou…

Even if you barely use AI, pretty soon you’ll be paying the price for it. Due to the demands of AI data centers, memory supplies are drying up for all kinds of devices, from phones and laptops to desktop PCs and game consoles. Three companies control nearly all the world’s DRAM production—Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix—and they’ve shifted production toward the type of RAM that those data centers run on. This comes at the expense of RAM for consumer electronics, resulting in a shortage that could last into 2028. It’s early days for the fallout, but what sounded like an abstract concern in 2025 is quickly becoming real, as electronics makers ra…

Large language models have started creating their own terms and mixing them into everyday speech. Experts call it ‘lexical seepage.’ View the full article

The Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women in Doha, Qatar, is the first mosque built for women. Architect Liz Diller designed the 50,000-square-foot complex to combine modern elements with traditional features. In addition to a prayer space, it also houses a library, classrooms, an event space, and café. The project is a winner of Fast Company’s 2025 Innovation by Design Awards. View the full article

Elon Musk’s foray into government has proven disastrous for his business life. Since taking up work for President Donald The Presidents’ so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk’s electric car company Tesla has seen sales slide and has become a target for protests. Now some believe that damage could be terminal and that Musk poses a risk to companies outside of his own. The Reputation Risk Index looks at reputational threats facing companies and organizations. It recently found that being associated with Musk posed the second biggest threat to companies, between the harmful or deceptive use of artificial intelligence and backtracking on DEI. The…

Artificial intelligence is infiltrating every corner of professional sports, from scouting and injury prevention to scheduling. Now, it looks like golf has its most sophisticated AI adoption yet, and it’s happening in the bag of Bryson DeChambeau, the sport’s most notorious tinkerer. “We’re building an AI golf coach,” DeChambeau says. “Essentially, it will be a golf coach that, based on data, will be able to tell you exactly what you’re doing, how to practice, and how to improve your game. We can take a golf swing, compile the information, upload it, and within a minute, it will give me what’s different from my gold standard set of swings.” The setup is decep…

Apple’s Tim Cook isn’t the only well-known tech CEO stepping away from the chief executive role this year. Now, the founder and CEO of Dropbox (Nasdaq: DBX), Drew Houston, has announced he is making a similar move at the company he is synonymous with. Here’s what you need to know about Houston’s departure from the chief executive role and how investors are reacting to the news. What happened? Today, Houston announced he will be retiring from the chief executive role at the cloud storage provider. Houston has been with Dropbox in the role since he founded the company in 2007. It’s hard to understate how revolutionary a cloud storage solution like Dropbox was 19 …

“I really want to see a mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space,” Elon Musk said last week when he announced his plan to go to the moon. “It’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.” He’s right. I want to see it too, although probably we will both be dead before his vision is realized. The lunar mass driver—essentially a cannon that uses magnetic power to accelerate an object—is a key component to launch the million satellites Musk wants to put in orbit around the Earth. But Musk wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea. Smarter people than him thought about this in the 1970s as the solution to a key problem for human exp…

Nobody wants to swipe anymore. Dating apps like Bumble and Tinder are scrambling to keep younger users engaged, and dealing with problems like bots on their platforms. But one brand is breaking the pattern and winning. Hinge’s “designed to be deleted” tagline signals its strategy: focus on meaningful connection, not endless swiping. The app can feel slower and even harder to use, leading to fewer matches but ultimately more dates. Now, the big question is whether Bumble and Tinder can pull off a similar shift toward quality over quantity. View the full article

My 2020 M1 MacBook Air still runs well, but conserving hard drive space as years of files, media, and software accumulate is a continual challenge. So I was miffed when I read security researcher Alexander Hanff’s May 4 report that Google Chrome has been automatically downloading an over-4GB AI model called Gemini Nano onto everyone’s computer, without asking for consent or providing notification. Chrome is not my main browser (I’m a Firefox diehard), and Gemini is not my main AI (that would be Claude). I’m paying a hefty hard-drive tax for something I don’t use. Simply deleting the file, called weights.bin, is useless. Chrome just downloads it again. And most of the adv…

Meta officially announced a sweeping round of layoffs today that will impact thousands of employees across the business, or about 10% of the company’s 78,000-person workforce. In a memo to employees today—obtained by Business Insider—Meta remained coy about the rationale for the layoffs, using the same language as in prior internal communications. “As previously shared, we have decided to reduce headcount as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” the company wrote in the memo, which was signed by “Meta Leadership” and offered no further explanation for the job cuts. It se…

Big Tech is on a spending spree, forecast to drop a staggering $650 billion on artificial intelligence (AI) in 2026 alone—and that’s just for Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. The companies are ramping up their investment in an increasingly competitive, high-stakes arms race, pouring hundreds of billions into massive data centers and semiconductors, in hopes of establishing a long-term strategic advantage in their quest to dominate the future of technology. With all four reporting earnings within the last week, Wall Street’s reaction may be an indication that investors are increasingly worried about the large spend, and relative payoffs, from the AI investments. …

Want to know how much you spent on Uber Eats this past year? If the answer is no, bad luck. Just days after Saturday Night Live dropped a satirical skit about an “Uber Eats wrapped,” Uber brought the feature to life with a year-end recap. Around this time each year, platforms from Spotify to YouTube start rolling out personalized recaps, breaking down how users spent their time over the past 12 months. The next logical step? A full accounting of every Uber trip taken and every guilt-ridden Uber Eats order placed this year. On Monday, the company launched its new year-in-review feature called “YOUBER,” which compiles users’ activity across both Uber and Uber E…

In 1998, five kids met in a cafe in Belgrade. Still in their 20s, they were, to all outward appearances, nothing special. They weren’t rich, or powerful; they didn’t hold important positions or have access to significant resources. Nevertheless, that day, they conceived a plan to overthrow their country’s brutal Milošević regime. The next day, six friends joined them and they became the 11 founders of the activist group Otpor. A year later, Otpor numbered a few hundred members and it seemed that Milošević would be the dictator for life. A year after that, Otpor had grown to 70,000 and the Bulldozer Revolution brought down the once-unshakable dictator. That’s how …

My earliest memory of travel insurance was the life insurance vending machines that used to populate airports up until the early 1980s. For those too young to remember this bizarre part of 20th century air travel, these kiosks offered very short-term life insurance policies that cost $2.50 (paid in quarters) for coverage of up to $62,500. Since these pre-travel policies were marketed to anxious flyers, it seemed clear the insurance companies were capitalizing on fear rather than offering a needed product. Over the intervening decades, I never revised my opinion of travel insurance. I’ve been lucky enough to never need travel insurance, but my family’s recent trip …

Every organization believes it’s in the productivity business. Every executive thinks faster, longer, more densely packed meetings equal better results. They’re wrong. The meetings that actually work—the ones where breakthroughs happen and teams leave energized rather than depleted—operate on a completely different logic. They’re designed around how human brains actually function, not how we wish they would. By helping organizations transform their cultures through my Move. Think. Rest. (MTR) framework, I’ve watched the same pattern emerge: Companies spend millions on the latest collaboration software and meeting tech, then squander the opportunity by applying the…

Your insurance needs change over time. The policies that work for a single, 20-something professional renting an apartment with three roommates may be completely wrong for the same person after marriage, babies, and a cozy mortgage in a good school district. If you’re struggling to determine how your coverage should change over time, the following guidelines can help. Auto insurance: Follow the bell curve Basic car insurance offers liability coverage, in case you cause an accident that injures a third party or damages their property. This is the kind of insurance that nearly every state in the nation requires drivers to carry. While liability coverage protects …

Big firms are fighting for talent and offering major perks to match. Here’s how you can position yourself to be in the middle of a bidding war. View the full article

If you’re finding yourself contemplating whether you can get an extension on this year’s tax return, you’re not alone. Forty percent of Americans still haven’t filed. There’s something almost perverse about the IRS placing tax day smack-dab in the middle of the loveliest month of the year. Want to enjoy the warm weather, cherry blossoms, and the sunshine reflecting off the pasty white skin of everyone venturing outside for the first time since last fall? Too bad! You have to excavate all of your financial decisions from the previous year while simultaneously trying to remember your math skills—or risk the wrath of an IRS agent named Spike. That’s why it’s somethi…

AI is already transforming how organizations operate, compete, and create value, and adoption is accelerating across industries. Businesses that are experimenting with AI and learning how to move from initial ideas to deployment are building the infrastructure to deliver value both now and in the future. Those that are waiting—for the technology to mature, for conditions to stabilize, for someone else to figure it out first—risk finding that a competitor has upended their market before they’ve even begun adapting to this new era. Given the current chaos in global markets and geopolitics, the temptation to avoid change and pursue a defensive strategy is strong. But it mus…

This month, Anthropic announced that it had built an AI model so powerful it couldn’t be released to the public. Claude Mythos had autonomously discovered thousands of critical security vulnerabilities across all major operating systems and web browsers. Anthropic chose to make the model available only to a consortium of technology companies, giving them an opportunity to patch vulnerabilities and strengthen defenses before models with similar capabilities inevitably fall into the hands of those who would exploit them. This development shines a light on the potential future dangers that the rapid evolution of AI models brings with it. These kinds of powerful models wi…

When I first ventured into self-employment a few years ago, I received a lot of advice from fellow freelance writers: Know your worth. Don’t take low-paying work. The advice was valid, as too much low-paying work is a recipe for burnout. But to the newly self-employed, I would say: Know your worth. And also, there are very valid reasons to take low-paying work, if it can help launch your business. You can open the right doors without selling yourself short. The project is good for your portfolio Potential clients will expect “proof” that your work is good—especially if it’s the type of work that can be displayed in a portfolio (design, video, writing, or…

The missed promotion. The botched presentation. The project that went sideways despite our best efforts. We’ve all been there, stuck in what I call failure’s funk: that heavy mix of shame, fear, and paralysis that keeps us replaying mistakes long after they’ve passed. In both life and work, this funk doesn’t just feel awful, it blocks learning. We’re so busy avoiding, denying, or criticizing ourselves that we miss the insight failure offers. We often hear that failure is life’s best teacher, but learning from it isn’t automatic. It doesn’t happen just because we failed; it happens because we do the inner work, reflecting, reframing, and choosing to respond differe…

Do you share your innermost thoughts with ChatGPT? You might want to think twice—or at least change your settings fast. View the full article