What's on Your Mind?

Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has opinions of its own, and it’s not afraid to share them. “It should be a sparring partner with you,” says Joel Lewenstein, Anthropic’s design chief. “It shouldn’t take your thoughts verbatim. It should push back.” Perhaps this is predictable from a product carrying the slogan “keep thinking.” But Claude’s quirky (and, at times, passive-aggressive) personality sets it apart from the competition. That’s on purpose, Lewenstein explains. “I find that to be a truly astonishing experience where I’m like, ‘Oh, you are not a sort of slavish executor of my vision. We are coproducing this outcome together.’ I think that’s really powerf…

While companies cram artificial intelligence features you never asked for into their apps, Domino’s seems to have found a valid use case for the technology: more accurate tracking of when your pizza will be ready. When Domino’s launched its pizza tracker in 2008, it was a marvel of UX. The tracker gave customers a lens into when their pizza would be ready through a simple interface that lit up as the pizza progressed from ordered to baked to delivered. The tool turned Domino’s into a tech company, and inspired industries (and governments) to adopt the same UX for their own needs. Now, Domino’s made the biggest update to its pizza tracker in years. The new tracke…

At last, Seedance 2.0 is now available in the U.S. This extraordinary generative video AI model made by TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance is capable of creating high-definition video so realistic that it’s shattering our visual truth into a billion pieces. But hey, who cares? If we are going down in flames as a species, let’s have fun putting dumb videos together. I’ll tell you how to do it in this short guide on how to make Seedance 2.0 videos. Time to roll up for a Magical Mystery Tour. Step up right this way! Signing up for Higgsfield To use Seedance 2.0, you first need to sign up for Higgsfield. This platform is essentially a unified digital wor…

When a fake wedding announcement featuring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson popped up in a late-year print issue The Boston Globe, it looked like a star-studded romcom was underway. But “The Drama,” indie studio A24’s latest film, has stirred controversy, and most audiences don’t know what its about. The film’s trailers, the first of which was dropped just a day after the wedding announcement, revealed a somewhat vague plot line—Zendaya and Pattinson play Emma and Charlie, a couple grappling with the aftermaths of a confession as they ready for their wedding. Speculation on the film’s big twist ignited a flurry of conspiracies and theories online, ranging from mere c…

For the record, this is not a sponsored post. I’m just frugal, and I like to travel as lightly as possible. Every piece of tech in my tightly packed bag needs to earn its keep by doing at least two jobs. As such, I’m a sucker for anything that can serve more than one purpose and does so on the cheap. Anker happens to make a lot of that type of stuff. If you’ve bought an aftermarket charger or power bank in the last decade, you’ve probably seen the name. I’ve found their gear to be equal parts reliable and budget-friendly in an age where buying off-brand tech accessories is a total crapshoot. So, if you’re ready to ditch the dead weight, here are three inexpens…

It’s sometime after midnight on a Monday morning when Zach unlocks his phone and starts scrolling for something to bet on. He’s 26, tucked into his childhood bed at his parents’ house in Washington, D.C. He moved back in after a stint in Las Vegas that didn’t go as planned. The NFL is done for the night. The NBA’s late games have wrapped. Mainstream sports are fast asleep. In FanDuel’s live betting tab, he finds a women’s tennis tournament streaming from somewhere in Southeast Asia. Two unranked, unknown teenagers, one boasting a 0–1 career record. Empty arena, no ball boys. Between points, the players jog to the fence to retrieve the ball themselves. He puts mone…

Employees are jostling to level up their AI skills, and, according to a new report, also using AI to help them learn more, whether it’s asking for extra help to clarify concepts and solve problems, or picking up new skills. The report uses results from a survey conducted by Fractl on behalf of the The American College of Education (ACE). The survey included more than 1,000 U.S. workers who use AI tools as part of their day to day. Somewhat unsurprisingly, a large percentage of workers are using AI to improve their skills. Sixty-three percent of workers said that they used AI to learn skills they didn’t get formal training on from their employer. However, 65% of wo…

Rare earth minerals are so ubiquitous and critical to much of today’s technology, that tonight’s dinner might not have made it to the table without them. And according to USA Rare Earth CEO Barbara Humpton, for decades, the world has sat back and let China become the sole supplier of these minerals, even as the country has used its dominance in this market as a geopolitical game piece. “We believe it’s time to take the game piece off the board,” Humpton said at last month’s World Changing Ideas Summit, cohosted by Fast Company and Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. USA Rare Earth is wholly dedicated to bringing rare earth metals mining to the U.S., and c…