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We may earn a commission from links on this page. Spring hasn’t really been as big of an online shopping season, comparatively speaking: We've got Prime Day during the summer, October Prime Day and Black Friday during the fall, and a bunch of holiday sales during winter. But that might be changing with the recent Big Spring Sale from Amazon, in its second year. Target has decided to compete for your money as well with a Circle Week event, coming later this month. What is Target's Circle Week?Circle Week is Target’s name for its biggest sale, which used to happen once a year but, much to the dismay of Target workers, now happens multiple times a year. Usually, you’ll see one when other major retailers have big sale events as well like Christmas or October Prime Day. When is Circle Week?This upcoming Circle Week will be from March 23 to March 29. Do you need to be a member to shop for Target Circle Week?Unlike Amazon's Big Spring Sale, you will need to be a Circle member to take part in the sale, but unlike being a Prime Member, membership is free. You can sign up on the Target app or Target.com. What deals can I find during Target Circle Week?Mainly spring items, but sale categories broadly include apparel, patio furniture, home essentials, beauty products, grocery items, toys, books, movies, and music. You can shop in person or online, and there will be a "Deal of the Day" for every day of the event. If you want early access to the deals, you can join Target Circle 360, which starts at $10.99 per month. Here is a bit more detail from Target's press release: 30% off tees, tanks, shorts and dresses for the family 30% off patio furniture and accessories 25% off select Pillowfort, teen bedding and decor 25% off Threshold and Casaluna bedding 20% off Brightroom plastic storage bins and closet organization Up to 40% off kitchen and floorcare essentials including Instant Pot, Ninja and Shark appliances Up to 30% off select LEGO Save up to $200 on select Apple devices Does the competition also offer sales?Amazon’s Big Spring Sale will be taking place from Wednesday, March 20 through Monday, March 25. But Walmart and Best Buy will also have competing sales. View the full article

In an unpredictable labor market, where job gains in January fell below expectations and the future remains uncertain, one thing is clear: Employers can’t afford to rest on their laurels. While the economy has remained relatively strong, shifts in the job market have been historically inevitable, and companies must constantly evaluate their operations to ensure they’re attracting and retaining the best talent. One area that employers should pay close attention to: employee benefits. Surprisingly, small businesses—often perceived as lacking the resources to offer substantial perks—are quietly leading the charge in providing the kinds of benefits that employees value most. Small businesses are stepping up to meet workers’ needs, and it’s not just about flashy perks like wellness programs or flexible work arrangements. Traditional benefits, particularly retirement plans like 401(k)s, have emerged as crucial factors in attracting top talent and securing long-term employee satisfaction, according to Guideline research. While it’s easy to focus on the more visible, short-term perks that have become synonymous with modern work culture, many employees are prioritizing long-term financial stability over immediate rewards. As workers grow older, their anxiety about financial security in retirement naturally may only increase. This economic uncertainty has become a driving factor in employee decision making. Our Guideline research shows that a stunning 93% of employees say that retirement benefits, such as a 401(k), influence their decision to join a company. More tellingly, half of employees surveyed said they would turn down a job offer from a company that did not offer a retirement benefit. For businesses, this shift in worker priorities presents a clear opportunity—and a possible call to action. Small businesses are going the extra mile Small businesses, often without the same resources as larger companies, have begun to recognize the growing importance of retirement benefits. In fact, the same research revealed that 70% of employers feel offering employees retirement benefits helped them with recruiting and hiring talent. And they’re not just offering 401(k) plans, but making them as impactful as possible. For example, nearly 80% of businesses that offer a 401(k) plan through Guideline provide employer matching. Our research shows that these contributions can increase employee participation in 401(k) plans by 9%, further cementing their value as part of an overall benefits strategy. No matter the size of your business, it may not be enough to just offer the basics when it comes to employee benefits. Employers can help employees bridge the retirement savings gap. After all, the lack of access to retirement plans or the absence of a company match may disproportionately affect those who need help saving the most—especially in a climate where wages have stagnated for many workers. Providing access to a 401(k) plan and offering employer matching are key ways businesses can fulfill their role in helping employees plan for a comfortable retirement. Small businesses are spurring the 401(k) boom The numbers speak for themselves: over 15,000 businesses signed up for a Guideline 401(k) plan just last year. Of these new signed plans, 92% of them were customers who previously hadn’t offered a retirement saving option. This surge in interest signals a clear shift in mindset—a recognition that long-term financial security is just as important, if not more so, than the short-term perks that have become trendy. Small businesses are recognizing the changing needs of workers and stepping up to meet this demand. As more businesses recognize the impact of robust retirement benefits, it’s clear that this trend is more than just a passing phase—it’s a fundamental shift in how employers view their responsibilities to employees. Workers today are no longer looking for a job that simply offers them a paycheck and a handful of perks. They’re looking for long-term stability and the opportunity to build a secure future for themselves and their families. To put this into perspective, last year, nearly 85% of employees who received access to retirement savings through Guideline participated in their plans, and on average, contributed close to 7% of their paycheck. Small businesses, by offering meaningful benefits like 401(k) plans with employer contributions, are not just meeting these demands—they’re helping to shape the future of employee benefits. While large employers may have the resources to provide a broad array of perks, it’s the small businesses that are truly leading the charge in addressing the real concerns that employees have about their futures. This shift toward offering substantial retirement benefits isn’t just good for employees—it can be good for businesses as well. By helping to ensure their workers can retire with dignity and financial security, small businesses are investing in their most valuable asset: their people. In today’s labor market, the companies that prioritize long-term stability and employee well-being can undoubtedly stand out. The time is now for businesses, large and small, to rethink how they approach employee benefits. It’s no longer enough to offer just the basics. Employees are looking for more, and small businesses are proving they have what it takes to deliver. The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Ever since I retired my G-Shock in 2015, I’ve been using fitness smartwatches, and some way or another, they’ve all been Garmins—some were passed down from family members and others were gifts. If you’ve never owned a Garmin watch and want to try one out, the best budget Garmin for runners is down to its lowest price ever, according to price tracking tools. You can get the Garmin Forerunner 55 for $149.99 (originally $199.99). Garmin Forerunner 55 Memory Storage: 32 MB, Connectivity: Bluetooth, GPS: Built-in, Screen Size: 1.04 In $149.99 at Amazon $199.99 Save $50.00 Get Deal Get Deal $149.99 at Amazon $199.99 Save $50.00 As Senior Health Editor Beth Skwarecki said in her intensive search for the best fitness watches for runners, the Garmin Forerunner 55 is the best budget choice you can make, especially at this new record-low price. You get some features that have historically only been found in the premium versions, like the Respiration Rate Tracker feature, which tracks your breathing rate. The battery life is up to two weeks when it’s in standby mode and 20 hours when using GPS tracking. You can use the Daily Suggested Workouts to suggest how to train to reach your running goals. If you like to run on tracks, you can choose which lane you’re in with Track Mode, which gives you exact pacing for much better accuracy, snapping your times at 100 meter intervals. Based on those numbers, you can also see the Race Predictor, which tells you how you’d fare in a marathon and other race lengths using your VO2 max and other metrics. There's also Recovery Hours which suggests how long you should wait until you do another intense workout. View the full article

Perhaps the surest sign that artificial intelligence really is taking over the world will come the day it wins your favorite March Madness bracket pool. The day could be coming soon. In an experiment that a) was bound to happen, b) might actually make us all look smarter and c) should probably also scare the daylights out of everyone, a successful CEO-turned-disruptor is running a $1 million March Madness bracket challenge that pits his AI programmers’ picks against those belonging to one of the world’s best-known sports gamblers. “We’re not a crystal ball,” says Alan Levy, whose platform, 4C Predictions, is running this challenge. “But it’s going to start to get very, very creepy. In 2025, we’re making a million-dollar bet with a professional sports bettor, and the reason we feel confident to do that is because data, we feel, will beat humans.” Levy isn’t the only one leveraging AI to help people succeed in America’s favorite pick ’em pool — one that’s become even more lucrative over the past seven years, after a Supreme Court ruling led to the spread of legalized sports betting to 38 states. ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, is hawking its services to help bracket fillers more easily find stats and identify trends. Not surprisingly, it makes no promises. “With upsets, momentum shifts, and basketball’s inherent unpredictability, consistently creating a perfect bracket may still come down to luck,” said Leah Anise, a spokesperson for OpenAI. Also making no promises, but trying his hardest, is Sheldon Jacobson, the computer science professor at Illinois who has been trying to build a better bracket through science for years; he might have been AI before AI. “Nobody predicts the weather,” he explained in an interview back in 2018. “They forecast it using chances and odds.” $1 million on the line in AI vs. Sean Perry showdown Levy’s angle is he’s willing to wager $1 million that the AI bracket his company produces can beat that of professional gambler Sean Perry. Among Perry’s claims to fame was his refusal to accept a four-way split in a pot worth $9.3 million in an NFL survivor pool two years ago. The next week, his pick, the Broncos, lost to New England and he ended up with nothing. But Perry has wagered and won millions over his career, using heaps of analytics, data and insider information to try to find an edge that, for decades, has been proprietary to casinos and legal sports books, giving them an advantage that allows them to build all those massive hotels. Levy says his ultimate goal is to bring that advantage to the average Joe — either the weekly football bettor who doesn’t have access to reams of data, or the March Madness bracket filler who goes by feel or what team’s mascot he likes best. “The massive thesis is that the average person are playing games that they can never win, they’re trading stocks where they can never win, they’re trading crypto where they can never win,” Levy said. “4C gives people the chance to empower themselves. It’s a great equalizer. It’s going to level the playing field for everyone.” But can AI predict the completely unexpected? It’s one thing to find an edge, quite another to take out every element of chance — every halfcourt game-winner, every 4-point-a-game scorer who goes off for 25, every questionable call by a ref, every St. Peter’s, Yale, FAU or UMBC that rises up and wins for reasons nobody quite understands. For those who fear AI is leading the world to bad places, Levy reassures us that when it comes to sports, at least, the human element is always the final decider — and humans can do funny and unexpected things. That’s one of many reasons that, according to the NCAA, there’s a 1 in 120.2 billion chance of a fan with good knowledge of college basketball going 63 for 63 in picking the games. It’s one of many reasons that almost everyone has a story about their 8-year-old niece walking away with the pot because she was the only one who picked George Mason, or North Carolina State, or VCU, to make the Final Four. “You can’t take the element of fun and luck out of it,” Levy said. “Having said that, as AI develops, it’s going to get creepier and creepier and the predictions are going to get more and more accurate, and it’s all around data sets.” Levy suggests AI is no three-headed monster, but rather, an advanced version of “Moneyball” — the classic book-turned-movie that followed Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane’s groundbreaking quest to leverage data to build a winning team. Now, it’s all about putting all that data on steroids, trying to minimize the impact of luck and glass slippers, and building a winning bracket. “We’ve got to understand that this technology is meant to augment us,” Levy said. “It’s meant to make our lives better. So, let’s encourage people to use it, and even if it’s creepy, at least it’s creepy on our side.” The AI’s side in this one: Houston to win it all. Perry, the gambler, is going with Duke. —Eddie Pells, AP national writer View the full article

The Hearth Helper offered a way for Hearth Display users to text or email customer service to upload a list of events on their behalf, like bulk uploading a school calendar worth of events. But as of March 19, the feature has also been integrated into the Hearth mobile app. Hearth Display, the modern family management tool that functions as a shared digital calendar and to-do list tracker, used to include a feature called "Hearth Helper" directly in the 27-inch tablet. When I reviewed the Hearth Display to see if the device was worth the hype (and the $699 price tag, often on sale for $599), I found the feature odd. You might assume that the "Helper" would be a direct line to customer service support, but pressing the "Helper" option only offered a pop-up giving users a phone number and email address if they wanted AI to bulk upload a list of events. You could send the Helper a picture of your kid's school calendar, for example, and the AI would import the data onto your Hearth calendar. I thought little of the feature since then—personally, the last thing I would want is for AI to bulk upload something like a school calendar and clog my calendar—but when Hearth moved the feature into the mobile app, I became curious again. Where to find Hearth Helper in the mobile appTo use the Hearth Helper in the mobile app, start by updating the Hearth app on your device. You may not even be able to use your Hearth app without having this latest update: When I opened the app, a full-screen notification prompted me to update to the latest version. It was the first time I was ever forced to update the app; in the past, I manually updated the app for bug fixes and newer features, like the ability to update Routines directly from my phone or to add custom to-do lists. Credit: Jordan Calhoun / Lifehacker After updating the app, the Hearth Helper can be found as a chat box icon on the top-right of the screen, next to the notification bell. It's an intuitive spot for a "Helper" feature, and much better placed than before: Prior to this latest update, Hearth Helper had a prominent tab on the Hearth Display right next to the Calendar, Lists, and Routines menus. Since the update, my Hearth Display tablet pushed a pop-up announcement that read, "Hearth Helper has moved!" with an explanation that their AI calendar companion now lives on the app. Credit: Jordan Calhoun / Lifehacker How to use Hearth HelperTesting the new mobile-based Hearth Helper was straightforward enough: The AI prompt gives examples of the types of wording you can use to have calendar events created for you, or you can simply press the camera icon to take a picture of a schedule or upload one that you already have saved on your phone. I was mostly curious how long it would take to process a request. Here's how the Hearth Helper looks when you click the icon on the mobile app: Credit: Jordan Calhoun / Lifehacker When I asked Hearth Helper to create a basic appointment, it took under a minute for the AI to send me a "Pending Event" for approval. It comes with the option to "Accept All" or "Reject All" for users who submitted multiple events, or a basic thumbs up or thumbs down for each pending event. Credit: Jordan Calhoun / Lifehacker To give it a more complicated task, I downloaded a PDF of the New York City Department of Education 2024-2025 School Year Calendar to see how long it would take to upload a full calendar. Then I realized the Hearth Helper can't upload PDFs. I took a picture of my screen instead—not a screenshot, but a lazy, grainy photo of my laptop screen that I took from my phone camera—which included eight events across two months. Surprisingly, it still took under a minute for the events to process, and the AI sent me a list of Pending Events that were formatted much better than I expected. Of course, though, if I actually wanted a full calendar of events then I would need to send multiple pictures to span the year. There are a few notable limitations of the Hearth Helper though, which include: You can't upload Lists (like to-do or grocery lists) or Routines with the Hearth Helper. You need to stick with basic pictures: Hearth Helper can't upload from URLs, Word docs, Google sheets, or other formats like those. Hearth Helper is fully run by AI. If you need help with something from a real person, you should contact support@hearthdisplay.com. Is using Hearth Helper worth it? Candidly, I never expected to use the Hearth Helper for its intended purpose. One of the problems that I mention in my initial review is that I feel the premise of the Hearth Helper is pretty shaky. Call me old fashioned, but I want a "helper" to answer my customer service questions, preferably by a human, instead of bulk uploading events that I could do myself in my preferred formats. I tend to be nit-picky about calendar organization and event formats, and I assume most people who use an expensive family management device to run their home are too. But looking at these results from the Hearth Helper bulk uploader, I may have changed my mind for two reasons. Credit: Jordan Calhoun / Lifehacker First, the events are accurate and consistently formatted; and second, the list of imported events are clickable and easy to manually edit or outright reject. My main concern was uploading an overwhelming list of poorly formatted clutter into my calendar, but that seems like less of a concern than I thought: I can just bulk upload calendars that serve as optional event suggestions that I can edit, thumbs up to approve, or thumbs down to reject. Overall, it does feel like this latest update to the Hearth Display will mean faster event management and fewer manual steps, and the Hearth Helper will be useful at back-to-school time, during planning for a new year, or whenever my kids join a new extracurricular or club. View the full article

Typing with a keyboard is second-nature to most of us at this point. Typing on a game controller, however, is not. For as long as I've played games, I've loathed having to slowly hover my on-screen cursor over each key with a joystick. It just isn't fun. It seems Microsoft agrees with the challenges of game controller to keyboard inputs—especially when using a typical on-screen keyboard design for PC. As a result, the company is planning to roll out an on-screen keyboard designed for use with an Xbox controller with an upcoming version of Windows. This should, in theory, make interacting with Windows much easier when you're locked into your controller, and away from your mouse and (physical) keyboard. As reported by The Verge, the new on-screen keyboard has shortcuts that incorporate the buttons on your Xbox controller. As you can see from the screenshot below, "X" activates backspace, "Y" activates the space bar, the menu button activates "enter," the left trigger activates the "&123" menu, the screen share icon actives the microphone, the left button actives the left arrow, the right button activates the right arrow, and clicking in the left stick activates caps lock. Microsoft also notes that the keys in this mode have been aligned vertically, which it believes will support "better controller navigation patterns." Players can be the judge when this rolls out in full, but I imagine it'll be easier that dragging the cursor around the horizontally-aligned design of the existing on-screen keyboard. In fact, the overall experience is likely similar to the on-screen keyboard Xbox players are already used to—if you're coming from Microsoft's console. Credit: Microsoft How to try Microsoft's new Xbox on-screen keyboardMicrosoft added the new on-screen keyboard to the Windows 11 Release Preview Channel. That means PC users will be able to experience it whenever Microsoft drops the next official update for Windows 11. However, you don't have to wait until the official update if you really want to try out this keyboard today. You can enroll your PC in the Windows Insider program to try out early builds of upcoming versions of Windows. This is, essentially, a beta program, which I don't tend to recommend users install on their main devices. However, if you're going to enroll in the Insider program, the Release Preview Channel is the most stable option to choose, as Microsoft seeds the version of Windows the intend to release to the general public—as long as no Insiders discover any device-breaking bugs that need to be addressed. View the full article

Headlines over real estate sales policies, as well as economic upheaval, are having a negative impact on how insiders are seeing the market today. View the full article

MANDAN, N.D. (AP) — A North Dakota jury on Wednesday found Greenpeace liable for defamation and other claims brought by a pipeline company in connection with protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline. The nine-person jury awarded Dallas-based Energy Transfer and its subsidiary Dakota Access hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The lawsuit had accused Netherlands-based Greenpeace International, Greenpeace USA, and funding arm Greenpeace Fund Inc. of defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy, and other acts. When asked if Greenpeace plans to appeal, Senior Legal Adviser Deepa Padmanabha said, “We know that this fight is not over” and said the organization’s work “is never going stop.” “That’s the really important message today, and we’re just walking out and we’re going to get together and figure out what our next steps are,” Padmanabha said. The organization said it plans to appeal the decision. Energy Transfer called the verdict a “win” for residents of Mandan, North Dakota, and across the state. “While we are pleased that Greenpeace has been held accountable for their actions against us, this win is really for the people of Mandan and throughout North Dakota who had to live through the daily harassment and disruptions caused by the protesters who were funded and trained by Greenpeace,” the company said in a statement to The Associated Press. The company, who previously said the lawsuit was about Greenpeace not following the law and not free speech, also called the verdict a win for “Americans who understand the difference between the right to free speech and breaking the law.” The case reaches back to protests in 2016 and 2017 against the Dakota Access oil pipeline and its Missouri River crossing upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation. For years the tribe has opposed the line as a risk to its water supply. The multistate pipeline has been transporting oil since mid-2017. Plaintiffs’ attorney Trey Cox has said Greenpeace carried out a scheme to stop the pipeline’s construction. During opening statements, he alleged Greenpeace paid outsiders to come into the area and protest, sent blockade supplies, organized or led protester trainings, and made untrue statements about the project to stop it. Attorneys for the Greenpeace entities said there is no evidence to the claims, that Greenpeace employees had little or no involvement in the protests and the organizations had nothing to do with Energy Transfer’s delays in construction or refinancing. Greenpeace representatives have said the lawsuit is a critical test of First Amendment free speech and protest rights and could threaten the organization’s future. — Jack Dura, Associated Press View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. You can now pre-order a brand-new Pebble Watch, which is a sentence that will confuse a lot of people and excite others. Pebble was one of the first smartwatches, launching even before the first Apple Watch. We wrote about it here on Lifehacker in 2013. Now it’s back in two versions, running $149 and $225, both expected to ship later this year. Some quick background on PebblePebble was an early smartwatch brand whose devices featured an e-ink display (like the kind you might see on an e-book reader). Its Kickstarter launches broke records for the platform. I had heard that the Pebble Time was the most successful Kickstarter project ever at the time of its launch, so I checked Kickstarter’s list of its 12 most funded projects to see if it still holds that title. Pebble’s three generations hold the #2, #6, and #12 spots. People loved this watch. And they continued to love it, even after the company was bought by Fitbit in 2016. A project called Rebble did its best to maintain the old watches’ functionality over the years, providing app store updates and replacing some of the old cloud services. As the years went by, it got harder and harder to keep using Pebble watches. Both the Android and iPhone apps disappeared from phones’ official app stores, and “how to set up a new Pebble” guides got more complicated, but some users persisted. Google now owns Fitbit and Pebble users managed to successfully lobby Google to open-source the Pebble OS, opening the doors to new Pebble watches. Who is making the new Pebble watches, and why? Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky is leading this project. He wrote: “I've tried pretty much every other smartwatch on Earth, yet I still wear my Pebble every day—nothing else matches its features and long battery life. I really, really, really hoped someone else would create a proper replacement, but no one has stepped up, and my stash of old Pebbles is dwindling!” In an AMA on the Pebble subreddit, Migicovsky mentioned several times that the team is small and that they’re trying not to bite off more than they can chew. Since the OS is now open source, several questions about features were met with answers like “No, but that sounds like a nice feature for someone to add to the open source PebbleOS!” The new watches aren’t going to be sold under the Pebble name, though, since Google still owns that trademark. They are called the Core Time 2 and the Core 2 Duo. A redditor asked what is “duo” about it, and Migicovsky replied: “Du-over 😉” The Core 2 Duo ($149) is “like Pebble 2, but better”The Core 2 Duo will have a black-and-white screen and a plastic (polycarbonate) frame in either black or white, and is expected to start shipping in July. Its look and feel are intended to be just like the old Pebble 2, although some of the internals are upgraded and it has more durable buttons. Other specs include the following (I’ve bolded differences from the Core Time 2): 1.2-inch, always-on e-paper screen 30-day battery life A microphone and speaker, although voice calls won’t be natively supported IPX8 water resistance (the 8 typically means the device can go at least 3 meters underwater, but the X indicates that it isn’t tested for dust resistance) Step tracking and sleep tracking Physical buttons 22-millimeter standard watch strap Bluetooth connectivity No wifi or cellular connectivity No GPS No NFC payments (“Too hard to do as a small company, sorry.”) No heart rate monitor This model has a barometer and compass, where the Core Time 2 does not. The Core Time 2 ($225) is “like Pebble Time 2, but better”The Core Time 2 is larger than the Core 2 Duo and will have a color touchscreen and a metal frame. Not only is the screen bigger than its sibling, it’s also “53% bigger and [has] 88% more pixels” than its predecessor the Pebble Time 2. It’s expected to ship in December 2025. The Core Time 2 has almost all the features of the Core 2 Duo listed above, except that it will not have the compass and barometer (those were included in the Core 2 Duo as a favor to a friend, Migicovsky said in the AMA). On the bright side, it will have a heart rate monitor. 1.6-inch, always-on e-paper screen 64-color display Touchscreen 30-day battery life A microphone and speaker, although voice calls won’t be natively supported IPX8 water resistance (same as Core 2 Duo) Step tracking and sleep tracking Physical buttons 22-millimeter standard watch strap Bluetooth connectivity No wifi or cellular connectivity No GPS No NFC payments No barometer and compass This model has a heart rate monitor, where the Core 2 Duo does not. You can find full specs for both watches here. Note that while the watches will not have GPS, Migicovsky noted that developers could choose to use phone GPS for mapping or fitness purposes. This is a common approach for minimalist wearables, including Whoop and some Fitbits. Your old Pebble charger will work, but so will a modern USB-C cableMigicovsky noted in the AMA that the new watches will use the same charger as previous Pebble watches. (“Take that, everyone who said I should throw out my box of 10-year-old chargers,” said one redditor.) The charger that ships with the new watches will be a connector that plugs into a USB-C cable, so you’ll still need to bring that connector with you when you travel, but you won’t need to carry a whole special charging cable. This is the same approach that Coros took for its Pace Pro, and I even bought a similar style of charging adapter for my Garmin watch—it’s a convenient format. The company intends to stick around, but isn’t making any promises about future productsIn response to questions about other colors, features, or future products, Migicovsky repeatedly said they were going to focus on what they were able to do for now. He isn’t making any promises about when more units will be available to order, so if you want to be sure of getting one of the new watches, it makes sense to pre-order now. The new watches’ operating systems will be open source, and developers are invited to add the features they’d like to see. There is a Discord to organize efforts, and Migicovsky linked to it, saying: “All development is happening on the discord (https://discordapp.com/invite/aRUAYFN) and github (https://github.com/pebble-dev/pebble-firmware).” “We're a gadget company," Migicovsky said. "We make cool gadgets that we ourselves want and then sell them. No plans to make them for a wider audience.” But he also added: “The goal is sustainability—the company is designed to potentially last forever.” View the full article

Chancellor will rely on a spending squeeze to try to ensure she complies with her fiscal rulesView the full article

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is honing in on infant formula in his food safety review. RFK Jr. says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will further test formula brands for heavy metals after some concerning results from Consumer Reports (CR) were released earlier this week. “The FDA will use all resources and authorities at its disposal to make sure infant formula products are safe and wholesome for the families and children who rely on them,” Kennedy said in a statement. HHS is calling the plan “Operation Stork Speed.” On Tuesday, CR revealed the results of testing on 41 types of powdered formula, from major labels such as Enfamil and Similac to smaller startups like Bobbie. Brands were tested for heavy metals including arsenic, lead, BPA, acrylamide, and PFAS. Per the report, the results were “concerning” with “about half of the samples” that were tested containing “potentially harmful levels of at least one contaminant.” However, the formula wasn’t heavy-metal-ridden across the board. The report noted that the “other half of the samples showed low or no levels of concerning chemicals—showing that there are many good options on the market.” The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry rates arsenic as the most toxic substance in the environment. When it came to the formula with the highest level of the substance, Abbott Nutrition’s EleCare Hypoallergenic took the top slot. The formula had 19.7 parts per billion (ppb). The second highest level was found in Similac Alimentum at 15.1 ppb (also made by Abbott). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) limits arsenic in municipal drinking water to 10 ppb. Abbott told CR in a statement, per the report, that the company had questions about CR’s methodology, and noted that heavy metals are found in the natural environment and may therefore show up in “trace amounts” in any food products, and even in breast milk. “We look forward to working with the secretary, the FDA, and the scientific and medical communities to continue to make infant formulas even closer to breast milk and support the aims of Operation Stork Speed,” Scott Stoffel, divisional vice president of external communications and public affairs at Abbott, told Axios in a statement. While RFK Jr. campaigned on some heavily controversial ideas, such as vaccine scepticism, health officials seem to be greeting the investigation into infant formula warmly. “It’s very encouraging to see the FDA issue this announcement immediately after Consumer Reports shared our findings about contaminants in infant formula,” said Brian Ronholm, head of food policy for CR. “We look forward to seeing the details of how they intend to implement the plan, and we hope the FDA is provided adequate resources and staffing to actually follow through on their promises.” As it stands, it’s tough for parents to know which brand of formula to choose. That’s especially true because some of the most well-known brands seemed to be the ones with the highest rates of heavy metals. Four main formula companies—Nestlé, Abbott, Perrigo, and Reckitt—dominate the market, though in recent years some smaller startups, such as MyHeart and Bobbie, have emerged. In 2022, after a major formula recall kicked off a formula shortage, the newer brands hoped to help meet demand and create more natural formulas. Bobbie was listed in the new reports “best” formulas, and MyHeart was listed in the “good” category. View the full article

A new survey from Paychex reveals that small businesses across the U.S. are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance productivity, revenue, and workforce development. According to the study, which surveyed over 1,000 business owners and HR leaders, 72% of small businesses have a positive outlook on AI, despite ongoing concerns about data accuracy, security, and privacy. Among businesses currently using AI, 66% reported increased productivity as a key benefit. Additional advantages cited by respondents included cost savings (44%), revenue growth (40%), improved recruiting (35%), higher employee satisfaction (34%), and enhanced customer acquisition (34%). The study also found that 82% of respondents believe AI is helpful to their business, and 76% expect it to have a moderate to significant impact over the next five years. Currently, 65% of surveyed businesses report using AI, with its adoption most prevalent in customer support (64%), finance and accounting (42%), and HR functions (50%). “AI allows a business to punch way above its weight,” said Beaumont Vance, Paychex senior vice president of data, analytics, and AI. “It’s a particularly great equalizer for small- and medium-sized businesses in an increasingly competitive landscape. Understanding and embracing AI’s full potential can boost efficiency, enhance decision-making, and deliver tangible ROI.” Despite its benefits, the survey highlights challenges associated with AI implementation. One in five (18%) respondents reported difficulties due to poor data quality, and 53% stated that having accurate data would improve their trust in AI tools. Data security and privacy concerns also remain significant. According to the survey, 54% of businesses cited data privacy and security as major obstacles to AI adoption. Among them, 45% expressed concerns about how technology companies use their data, while 17% indicated they do not trust technology companies with their data. Looking ahead, 72% of small businesses plan to invest at least $1,000 in AI within the next year, with human resources emerging as the top investment area. The survey found that 53% of respondents plan to direct AI investments toward HR functions, including recruiting (44%), onboarding (41%), and employee retention (32%). These findings underscore the growing role of AI in human resources, from talent acquisition to long-term employee development. The Paychex survey was conducted online between February 7 and 17, 2025, with responses collected from 1,129 business owners and HR leaders. The results were not weighted. Image: Paychex This article, "Paychex Survey Finds AI Adoption Gaining Traction Among Small Businesses" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

A new survey from Paychex reveals that small businesses across the U.S. are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance productivity, revenue, and workforce development. According to the study, which surveyed over 1,000 business owners and HR leaders, 72% of small businesses have a positive outlook on AI, despite ongoing concerns about data accuracy, security, and privacy. Among businesses currently using AI, 66% reported increased productivity as a key benefit. Additional advantages cited by respondents included cost savings (44%), revenue growth (40%), improved recruiting (35%), higher employee satisfaction (34%), and enhanced customer acquisition (34%). The study also found that 82% of respondents believe AI is helpful to their business, and 76% expect it to have a moderate to significant impact over the next five years. Currently, 65% of surveyed businesses report using AI, with its adoption most prevalent in customer support (64%), finance and accounting (42%), and HR functions (50%). “AI allows a business to punch way above its weight,” said Beaumont Vance, Paychex senior vice president of data, analytics, and AI. “It’s a particularly great equalizer for small- and medium-sized businesses in an increasingly competitive landscape. Understanding and embracing AI’s full potential can boost efficiency, enhance decision-making, and deliver tangible ROI.” Despite its benefits, the survey highlights challenges associated with AI implementation. One in five (18%) respondents reported difficulties due to poor data quality, and 53% stated that having accurate data would improve their trust in AI tools. Data security and privacy concerns also remain significant. According to the survey, 54% of businesses cited data privacy and security as major obstacles to AI adoption. Among them, 45% expressed concerns about how technology companies use their data, while 17% indicated they do not trust technology companies with their data. Looking ahead, 72% of small businesses plan to invest at least $1,000 in AI within the next year, with human resources emerging as the top investment area. The survey found that 53% of respondents plan to direct AI investments toward HR functions, including recruiting (44%), onboarding (41%), and employee retention (32%). These findings underscore the growing role of AI in human resources, from talent acquisition to long-term employee development. The Paychex survey was conducted online between February 7 and 17, 2025, with responses collected from 1,129 business owners and HR leaders. The results were not weighted. Image: Paychex This article, "Paychex Survey Finds AI Adoption Gaining Traction Among Small Businesses" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

After the Federal Reserve moved to slow the pace of quantitative tightening, the Fed chair floated the idea of continuing to allow mortgage-backed securities to roll off its books even after the central bank has met its monetary policy objectives in reducing its balance sheet. View the full article

The climate tech sector is at a crossroads. We have the tools we need to fight climate change, but the real challenge is scaling and deploying them. This is where “climate-curious” outsiders play a crucial role. At Epic Cleantec, a company I cofounded to tackle water scarcity through innovative reuse technology, none of us came from an environmental background. That outside perspective turned out to be a huge advantage. When I began this journey, I didn’t know much about water. I wasn’t a trained environmental or civil engineer, which meant I never even learned about how things were traditionally done. This lack of traditional expertise freed us from being tied down by how things were “supposed” to work, allowing us to find fresh solutions to persistent problems. My path to climate tech was anything but linear. I had flirted with a wide range of disparate career paths spanning veterinarian, chef, club promoter, historian, political lobbyist, and lawyer. I even briefly entertained becoming a rabbi, until my own rabbi convinced me not to take that path. Unsurprisingly, I often faced skepticism at conferences and industry events, where our company’s unconventional approach was met with doubt. But here’s the key takeaway: Solving the climate crisis isn’t just about creating new technology. It’s about turning these innovations into practical, widespread solutions. That’s where operational know-how comes in—something outsiders often bring to the table. People who’ve run businesses, managed complex regulations, and scaled global operations have the experience to make climate solutions a reality. Why climate tech needs outsiders The climate tech industry has largely been driven by environmental scientists and policymakers. But solving the climate crisis calls for more than just scientific advances—it requires major business transformation. To truly deploy climate solutions on a global scale, we need the same expertise that turned industries like fintech, e-commerce, and cloud computing into giants. Investors get it. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink predicts the next wave of unicorns will come from climate tech. But to build these companies, we need more than passion. We need professionals who understand scaling—product managers who can push out software, operations experts who can optimize supply chains, and strategists who know how to drive rapid market adoption. The idea that climate tech needs deep environmental knowledge is a misconception. What’s truly needed are professionals who know how to turn great ideas into sustainable, scalable businesses, all while navigating complex regulations. The future of climate impact depends on commercial success. The solutions are ready, they just need deployment A lot of the technology needed to curb emissions and build climate resilience is already here. From energy storage to electrification, water reuse to regenerative agriculture, many solutions are ready to go. So, the challenge isn’t really about innovation; it’s about implementation. Just look at how SaaS and fintech industries scaled quickly by leveraging automation, networks, and efficient capital use. If we applied those same strategies to climate tech, we could meet our climate goals much faster. Imagine applying the lessons learned during the rapid growth of ride-sharing or cloud services to solar energy, battery tech, or industrial decarbonization. Climate tech isn’t just about better tech; it’s about changing systems. It requires navigating complex regulations, aligning with ever-changing corporate sustainability goals, and getting entrenched industries on board. Outsiders who have scaled companies in heavily regulated fields like healthcare, finance, and transportation are particularly equipped to drive this change. A crucial moment for climate tech Climate tech isn’t a niche anymore—it’s becoming one of the most exciting frontiers of innovation. As more professionals from traditional tech and business sectors seek out purpose-driven careers, climate tech offers a unique blend of meaning and market opportunity. The influx of outsiders isn’t just helpful, it’s essential. For climate tech to thrive, we need to embrace professionals with diverse and wide-reaching expertise. Industry leaders must actively recruit people with transferable skills, and investors must see the value in teams that blend technical knowledge with business acumen. Solving the climate crisis isn’t just about inventing new technologies—it’s about getting them into the world at scale, fast. The opportunity is huge, but the urgency is even greater. To meet global climate goals, we must think outside the box and bring in the people who are ready to challenge the norms. For those “climate-curious,” there’s never been a better time to dive in because climate tech isn’t just the future of innovation, it’s the future of business. The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more. View the full article

When Amazon stopped letting us download copies of our Kindle books last month, I began looking for ways to preserve e-books and audiobooks that I've paid for. Buying from Amazon really limits those options thanks to DRM (Digital Rights Management), which is designed to prevent piracy, but ends up having far bigger consequences on digital goods like e-books. Eliminating DRM effectively removes Amazon's control over what you do with your e-books. If Amazon were to go DRM-free, you'd be able read Kindle e-books on any e-book reader or app that you like. Amazon wouldn't be able to easily track your reading habits and you'd be free to keep an offline backup of all of your purchased content. That's what makes the idea of bypassing DRM appealing to so many. Given the choice, I'd love to buy audiobooks on Audible and use apps such as Bound or Prologue to listen to them. I think these apps are superior audiobook players and are better at library management than Audible's apps. It'd also be a chance for me to escape Amazon's ability to track my listening habits. Sadly, those options don't exist today. What Amazon's terms of service allow you to doOnce you pay for an e-book on Amazon, it has been licensed, not sold to you, according to the company's terms of service. This gives the company a lot of leeway in deciding what you do with a purchased e-book. The terms of service explicitly forbid bypassing the DRM and reading it on devices or apps that Kindle doesn't officially support. This isn't just an Amazon problem. Janet Vertesi, a sociology professor at Princeton University, told me via email that buying a book through big tech doesn't grant you ownership of your copy. "You are not in charge of how you access or read that [e-book]. It is like the difference between Spotify playlists and having a home music library. You pay money to own the [e-book], but because Amazon owns everything about the delivery pipeline and the Kindle necessary to read the purchase, you don't get to exert any choice." Similarly, Audible classifies a sale as the purchase of a license, and goes on to say that you should download the audiobook immediately after purchasing, as the company cannot guarantee that content will be available to redownload in the future. To make matters worse, Amazon forbids you from bypassing DRM on the audiobook files. "The more we buy into these closed garden ecosystems, the fewer choices we have…they can and do use this power to subdue alternatives, eliminate competition, and maintain monopoly, among other things," Vertesi told me. She runs Opt Out Project, a blog dedicated to helping people find alternatives to products and services made by big tech firms. The legalities involved in bypassing DRMBypassing DRM is illegal in the US, thanks to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), but it may be legal in other regions. The DMCA, among other things, makes it difficult to create a legal backup of the digital media you own. I reached out to Cory Doctorow, an author and vocal DRM critic, to learn more about this subject. In an email, he explained the complexities involved in understanding where the boundary lies here. "It isn't a copyright infringement to move a book from one device you own to another ([aka 'format shifting']). However, in 1998, the US Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which created a new kind of copyright—a copyright that protects DRM itself," Doctorow wrote. "Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony (punishable by a [five]-year prison sentence and a [$500,000] fine) to give someone a "circumvention device" that defeats an "access control" for a copyrighted work. This law applies even if you don't violate copyright. "Say I tell you that you have my permission to move a book I wrote (and am thus the copyright holder for) from your Kindle to another device. If the Kindle book has DRM, you're still not allowed to move it. The fact that I am the copyright holder has no impact on whether Amazon—a company that didn't create or invest in my book—can prevent you from moving that book outside of its walled garden...In fact, if I supply you with a tool to remove DRM (like some versions of Calibre), then I commit a felony and Amazon can have me sent to prison for five years for giving you a tool to move my book from the Kindle app to a rival app like Kobo," he wrote. When you download a Kindle e-book, it's available in the AZW format, and audiobooks from Audible use the proprietary AAX format. If you download these to your computer, that is format shifting, but it may be illegal if you had to circumvent DRM to do it. Doctorow added, "that means that even though copyright law says you can format shift your books, music, videos, games, [etc.], DMCA 1201 (a "paracopyright law") makes this an imprisonable felony if you have to break DRM first." The tools that let you bypass DRM The Calibre app allows you to read and manage DRM-free e-books you've purchased. Credit: Pranay Parab Calibre offers a way to take your e-books out of digital walled gardens. It lets you download purchased books off your Kindle, convert those to any format you like, and to read them on any app or device. For Audible, that tool is Libation, a free and open-source app that backs up your audiobook library. I contacted Robert McRackan, the developer of Libation, to understand how the app works, and why it was developed. McRackan wrote, "…what apps like Libation do is a service to the community that I believe in. It's also in [direct] contradiction to Audible's terms of service…" Free tools like these continue to work only because the developers are able to dedicate time to keeping them up-to-date, and because Amazon hasn't decided to go after them. If that changes, it could be game over for these apps. I can't offer guidance on downloading these apps and using them to remove DRM for your e-books. But they do exist, and, as of this article, they appear to work. There's a world beyond Amazon for digital booksIf you're truly interested in owning your digital media, you should consider looking beyond Amazon for digital book purchases. There are many alternatives to the Kindle store and to Audible, and some of them offer DRM-free e-books and audiobooks. When I asked Vertesi and Doctorow about DRM-free storefronts for books, they pointed me to Bookshop.org (which has DRM-free options for e-books), Tor Books (which is entirely DRM-free) and Libro.fm (for DRM-free audiobooks). While Libro.fm is totally DRM-free and has a collection that's good enough to rival that of Audible, the picture outside of Amazon isn't always rosy. Doctorow wrote, "Even great [e-book] stores like Bookshop.org are pressured by the big publishers to put DRM on most of the books they sell." Similarly, Audible is known to push authors into signing deals that offer better royalties if they keep their audiobooks exclusive to the service. In case your favorite book is a part of such a deal, your only choice is either buy it through Audible, or try to purchase a DRM-free e-book and use text-to-speech tools to have an AI-generated voice read it to you. This is a hacky way to convert any book into an audiobook, and it doesn't come anywhere close to the skills of a great narrator, but it's a DRM-free option. If your favorite e-book is an Amazon exclusive, you can get it via your local library. Of course, you could always buy it physically: Paper is DRM-free, after all. However, without changing the DMCA, we can't expect to see real, lasting change in this space. Doctorow said as much to me: "What we really need to do is get rid of DMCA 1201, that law that makes it a crime to format shift your media...it's the same law that stops farmers from fixing their tractors, blocks independent mechanics from fixing your car, stops rivals from setting up alternative app stores for phones and games consoles...this law is a menace!" View the full article

Central bank also lifts inflation projection as chair Jay Powell warns of tariff impactView the full article

Leftovers can be challenging. Occasionally, you’ll have a meal so good that you actually look forward to scarfing it down cold the next day, but that's not always the case. I usually have bits and bobs of leftovers—things I didn't care for in the first place, or stray ingredients I can’t seem to get rid of. My curse however, is that I hate (hate!) tossing edible food. So over the years, I’ve gotten better at reworking leftovers, and you can too. Here are my favorite ways to repurpose leftovers into incredible new meals. Recipes for using leftoversI run into two types of leftovers: leftover meals and leftover single ingredients. Let’s start with leftover meals. This section is how I like to transform prior dinners or lunches—like sausage and peppers or chicken salad— to give them a new life. Leftovers as pizza toppings Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Do I have a borderline problem with eating personal pizzas? Who’s to say. But that continual experience has given me the confidence to say leftovers make for great pizza toppings. If pizzerias can put chopped chicken cutlets and penne on their pizza, so can you. Here’s how I like to pizza my leftovers. All you need is a ball of thawed pizza dough from the grocery store and a bit of cheese to act as your “glue.” Egg roll ‘emWhat do the stray container of leftover brisket, the green curry chicken from three days ago, and the sausage and peppers from Sunday have in common? They’d all be great with a crispy egg roll shell wrapped around them. Egg rolling your leftovers is extremely simple with a pack of premade wrappers that you can buy from the refrigerated aisle of your grocery store. Once you’ve secured your delicious leftovers in the center, deep fry or air fry them for a wonderful lunch or dinner. Stack leftovers into a lasagnaIt helps to think of leftover food as a component that needs a new vehicle to carry it, like pizza dough or an egg roll wrapper. Pasta noodles are a versatile main ingredient too. While you could toss your leftovers with spaghetti, turning it all into a stacked lasagna is more impressive, and personally I think it’s more appetizing. While I’m using Thanksgiving leftovers here, you certainly aren’t limited to that. Boil the pasta noodles and use them to sandwich each layer of leftovers, like thinly sliced meatloaf, creamed spinach, or vegan steamed dumplings. (It’s okay to layer carbs with carbs.) Make a delightful brunch casserole Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Casseroles are always a wondrous mish-mash of ingredients. What makes them sliceable is the addition of some sort of flavorful binder, like eggs or cheese. I added a few eggs, a torn up English muffin, and shredded cheddar to the leftovers of my seven-layer dip recipe and baked it for about 20 minutes at 350°F to make this absolutely scrumptious casserole. You can casserole anything from leftover waffles to rice and beans with this method. Risotto your leftoversI showed you how to fake risotto with leftover rice, but you can also throw your leftovers into risotto. Risotto is another one of those helpful carbs that act as a vehicle for your once-fresh food. Though this recipe is geared toward Thanksgiving leftovers, the concept stands for any leftover protein and veg. Make your risotto as usual and just after you ladle in the last bit of stock, drop in your chopped leftovers to warm up in the pot. Build a satisfying sandwichSandwiches are like old episodes of your favorite show—it’s your back-up when you don’t know what to watch (or eat, in this case). A leftovers sandwich is the solution when you can’t figure out what to do with that massive casserole from your cousin’s brunch party. Since leftovers can be irregularly shaped (as opposed to sliced deli meats), I suggest grabbing large slices of bread and potentially leaving them untoasted. Then the soft texture can hug and hold onto the fillings better. Here are some ways you can tweak a sandwich to make it even more delightful. Make the best oatmeal of your life Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann For the longest time, I thought I hated oatmeal. It turns out, I was just not adding enough fun stuff to it. Oats are bland, which makes them a terrible main event, but a great supporting act for other bolder ingredients. Your leftover dishes from the week are already cooked and full of flavor. Simply make a batch of savory oatmeal and nestle your chicken parmesan, Thai gaeng keow-wan curry, or vegetable korma into the bowl with it. Here's my recipe for spicy, savory oatmeal with herbs and kimchi. Recipes for common leftover ingredientsThis section is devoted to my most common leftover ingredients. These are things that maybe haven’t made it into a full meal yet—like raw celery or cooked leftover rice—but they’re living their last moments in my fridge. I’ll lean on these recipes to keep them from becoming trash. The many iterations of leftover rice Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann There was a year or two that I would order Chinese food take-out frequently, and end up with tubs of extra rice stacked up in my freezer. A day of reckoning would come once a month when I would have to figure something out, or I’d have no freezer space. So I have more than one way to use up leftover rice. This crispy rice cake, this fake risotto, and this comforting rice salad are all good to have in mind. The problem with celeryCelery is one of those ingredients that will haunt your crisper drawer for 100 years. I’m not even exaggerating, it actually grows more stalks while it's in there. Its only charm is how crunchy it is, so I wouldn’t recommend egg rolling it or putting it on pizza. My solution for unused stalks is to make this salad which relies on thin, diagonal slices to maintain crunch but reduce “stringiness.” The vinaigrette adds much needed flavor, the Thai chili wakes up your palate, and the hard boiled eggs create a more satiating dish. Leftover pie crustWhether it's store-bought pie crust sitting in your freezer or you never got around to using the other half of that double-crust pie dough recipe, there's no reason to let that flaky pastry go to waste. Use it to make a filling quiche and mix in any leftover vegetables you might have in the fridge. Avoiding eggs to save money? That's fine, use this recipe to make a lazy pot pie with your leftover crust and a can of creamy chicken soup. Extra hard boiled eggs Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Boiled eggs make a great on-the-run snack, so I’ll often cook up a bunch at the beginning of the week and keep them in the fridge. But some weeks will wrap up and I’ll have a few that I never got to. Unless I feel like crushing three or four cold eggs, so instead I’ll make a yam kai dao salad. Shallow frying the hard-cooked eggs give them an appealing crispy-chewy exterior and the lime and fish sauce dressing creates a flavor profile you’ll look forward to eating again with next week’s eggs. Cold plain pastaI find it infuriating that the “proper” serving of dry pasta is two ounces. I would like to eat a pound of it but alas, I have been shamed by society, so I’ll begrudgingly put the supposed extra in a container for the next day. With this clever trick, I now look forward to leftover pasta. This works for both plain boiled pasta or pasta that has a light coating of sauce. Add butter to a frying pan and tip the cold carbs into the melted butter. Stir and loosen the pasta as it warms up and then let it fry so it gets crispy and brown on the bottom. Serve it immediately to enjoy the new crunchy-soft texture of your stir-fry-revived pasta. That half-can of coconut milkKind of like the cup of puréed pumpkin I didn’t need for a recipe, I’ll occasionally end up with an unused portion of coconut milk in my fridge. I don’t particularly like it in my coffee, but that flavorful, fatty gift from nature cannot be wasted. Although you can freeze it, I decided the best way to use it up would be to capitalize on its inherent richness and make it into a luxurious coconut pudding for one. This simple recipe uses a cherry compote to top it off but you could substitute another fruit, jam, or go without and let the silky coconut speak for itself. View the full article

Buying a car is a hellish experience. Aside from the cost (nearly $50,000 for an average new car these days!) there’s the exhausting battle of wills you must engage in. No matter how well you prepare, walking into a dealership sometimes feels like walking into a battle, because everyone there is trying to take advantage of you—even if you know exactly what car you want. Unless you’re paying cash, the trickiest part of the car-buying experience isn’t dealing with the salesperson. It’s dealing with the finance people. The finance manager at your typical car dealership is often the highest-paid person there—and for good reason. They’re the ones who really work the angles to ensure the dealer gets as much money out of you as possible. They have a long list of subtle tricks they use to get you to sign a contract that might not be the best deal you could get—or even the deal you thought you were getting. Here are the tricks you should look out for after the salesperson hands you over to the finance people. Drawing your attention to the wrong numberCar salespeople are forever trying to do one basic thing when you’re financing a new car: Focus on the wrong number. The number they typically want you to pay attention to is the monthly payment. They’ll ask you what your budget is, then feel you out to see how high you can actually go, then work backward from there to come up with a deal that hits that monthly number but gets them the most profit over the long term. Common tricks include the infamous Four Square, where the salesperson jots down numbers, talks fast, crosses stuff out, and guides you to see that monthly payment and nothing else. Even if you defeat the Four Square and negotiate an out-the-door price on the car and a financing deal you can live with, that monthly number can still haunt you. One trick to watch out for is a monthly number that’s just slightly off what you expected—it’s close to what you negotiated, but not exactly right. That means it’s time to go through that contract with a fine-toothed comb, because something’s been altered. They may have added fees or something else into the total price, and when it’s amortized over several years the extra payment is small and they simply hope you won’t notice. Messing with the trade-in valueIf you’re trading in a vehicle as part of your transaction, the salesperson might proudly inform you that they’re going to value that trade-in at the same amount you owe on it. Which is great—as long as it’s true. What the finance guy might do is value the trade-in at a lower amount, then roll the extra money owed into the overall principle of the loan—and since they get incentives to write loans, the bigger the better (for them). This is probably illegal in your area, but that doesn’t stop them from making an “honest mistake” sometimes. Add-ons that increase the price unexpectedlyYou’ve negotiated your deal and you feel pretty good about the price you got for the car and the terms you’re getting for the financing. Then you sit down with the finance person and suddenly the price and payments are higher—because a long list of features and options you assumed were included in the price were not, actually, included. Now you have to choose between paying more for the car you thought you were getting, or starting the process over to get less car than you want. Interest rate markupsIf you finance your car purchase through the dealership, you should still look for financing elsewhere, if only to know what the available rates are. Because dealerships often mark up their interest rates to make the deal better for themselves. They call their lender and get a rate of, say, 6% for your car deal. But when they present the financing numbers the rate is 8% because the finance folks have marked up the rate—the dealer gets to keep that extra 2% charged on the loan. Always ask if the rate in the contract is the dealer’s “buy rate” or if they’re packed on some extra points without telling you. "Yo-yo-ing" This is a lot less fun than it sounds. It works like this: You negotiate the deal and buy the car. You take the car home. You love the car. Then a few days later the dealer calls and tells you that your financing was denied, so you have to come back in and re-negotiate the deal. Often, if you inspect the paperwork the finance people handed you, you’ll find fine print that states the sale isn’t final and that the dealer has the right to cancel the sale if they need to. They’re banking on a version of the sunk-costs fallacy to drive you to negotiate against yourself and pay more for the car. All you can do to defend against this is to get outside financing and read your paperwork carefully. Look for language that allows the dealer to cancel the sale—keywords like “conditional” or “not final” are often hints about this. If you see anything you’re not certain about, ask directly—and if you don’t like the answer, walk away. Bundling multiple negotiations into oneBuying a new car isn’t one simple transaction—you’re probably doing two or three separate things in parallel. You’re trading in a car—essentially negotiating a sale price for your old vehicle; you’re negotiating a price on a new vehicle; and you’re negotiating financing terms. What finance people at dealerships love to do is bundle those negotiations into one huge, messy deal. This way, if you push back on one aspect of the deal they can just make up for it in another. For example, let’s say you decide you’re not getting enough value for your trade-in and you push to get $500 more for it. The dealer reluctantly agrees—and adjusts your financing terms to claw back that $500. The more confusing and interconnected the bundle is, the harder it is for you to figure out if you’re getting what you actually want. The only real defense is to insist on separating these negotiations so you can see clearly what each one looks like. Adding "standard" things without askingSometimes you sit down with the finance folks and suddenly the price you negotiated is higher in the paperwork—because they’ve gone ahead and added “standard” stuff like gap insurance (covering the value of your car if you total the car and your insurance doesn’t cover the remaining debt on the loan) or extended warranties. They’ll often argue that the price you negotiated is still in effect—it’s the cost of the car, not the extra services. They’ll also often imply that these are required fees of some sort instead of add-ons. Gap insurance and warranties might be a good idea—but you should be aware of their costs before you’re presented with a contract. And dealers will sometimes add these in even if you already have your own insurance—which is almost certainly going to be a better deal for you overall. View the full article

The speedy progress of AI development continues to dominate headlines, but the latest story to hit the news cycle is more bad press than good press: It turns out that Google's latest Gemini 2.0 Flash image editor is rather adept at automatically removing watermarks from images. Google pushed out the experimental native image generation capabilities a few days ago, promoting its capabilities in terms of combining images and text, editing images through conversational prompts, and improving its "world understanding" to give users AI-generated pictures that are more realistic overall. As TechCrunch reports, the newly upgraded tool was quickly put to one specific and rather nefarious use: Removing watermarks from proprietary images. You can find evidence of it on Reddit and X; while the watermark removal isn't perfect—the AI is only imagining the pixels that replace what's covered by the watermark, after all—it definitely leaves you with a usable image, one free of any copyright or authorship labels. It isn't exactly ironic that an AI tool should wind up being so capable at circumventing basic copyright protections. Gemini and other generative AI models have been trained on vast amounts of copyrighted text, images, and video, often without permission or recompense—something the AI companies are reluctant to talk about, unless it's to argue that this qualifies as fair use. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Though the idea of using an AI trained on scraped copyrighted works to steal an image someone else owns is galling, there are a few caveats worth mentioning. For a start, these new Gemini tools are only available to developers for the time being, and are still labeled as experimental—no doubt Google is going to make tweaks before general users get their hands on them. It's also worth noting that other shady watermark removal tools are already all over the web, even if none of them is not quite as smart as this and other advanced AI-powered versions would likely be. Still, it highlights the nefarious ways AI tools can be deployed, even as they're being relentlessly pushed out to businesses and consumers, and underlines the need for stringent guardrails. ChatGPT and Claude AI models are two that will refuse explicit requests to remove watermarks, and no doubt Google will add the same blocks to Gemini after all the negative coverage. The limits of AI image editingAs noted above, the watermark removal capabilities of Gemini can currently only be accessed through developer-facing tools, including AI Studio and the Gemini API. However, I also wanted to give it a go using the latest models available through the Gemini Advanced tools available to anyone paying $20 a month. I took screenshots of several copyrighted and watermarked images from Shutterstock (after first sifting through all the AI-generated results the site offered me), opened and resaved it in Photoshop (after dismissing all the pop-ups asking me to try Photoshop's latest AI tools), and then let Gemini get to work. Gemini gave me a pretty good approximation of the original image. Credit: Shutterstock / Gemini Most of the time, Gemini refused to get involved with watermark removal at all—telling me it wasn't capable of editing images, or explaining that it's "essential to respect copyright laws"—but it was happy to produce variations on the originals, watermark-free, and based on its training on copyrighted material. While these variations often weren't all that much like the originals, in one case it gave me a very close copy of a composite rocket ship photo, and in another it directed me to some watermark removal tools on the web—thanks, Gemini! Of course, you can also start from scratch and just describe a watermarked image you're hoping to emulate. ChatGPT didn't really understand the watermark removal assignment. Credit: Shutterstock / ChatGPT ChatGPT, meanwhile, did accept requests to remove watermarks, but then produced something completely different (and rather odd). Image editing is already available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, but as I've noted before, it's definitely not yet up to the level of a human Photoshop expert. The debate over copyright, fair use, and AI safety guardrails will continue, even as upgrade after upgrade makes these AI tools more advanced (even if they're not particularly useful). One issue the likes of Google and OpenAI may need to start worrying about is where they'll get fresh training data for their models, once they put all the flesh-and-blood creatives out of business. View the full article

There’s a lot of momentum around women’s sports right now, as ad spending doubled in 2024 and the largest dedicated female sports fund recently announced it has expanded from $150 million to $250 million. While these leaps and bounds are notable, more progress is needed to ensure this isn’t a fleeting moment—but rather the beginning of transformative change. Of course, more money always helps, too. “Women’s sports is skyrocketing and it’s because we are more visible, more than ever, right now,” Stef Strack, founder and CEO of Voice in Sport, said during a panel discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “Investors are looking at women’s sports as a growth opportunity, not a charity, and that is a really key moment.” Deals flow to professional volleyball And investors are putting a lot of money behind women’s sports. League One Volleyball (LOVB), a new professional women’s league with teams in six cities, raised $160 million through investors, according to Rosie Spaulding, the league’s president, which also has a youth-to-pro ecosystem with 60 youth clubs across 23 states. What’s more, to have a brand like Adidas partner with LOVB for a multimillion-dollar, multiyear deal is a sign of change, she said. “When we first started League One Volleyball, I thought women’s sports were on the rise back in 2020,” Spaulding said. “I think now we can all say that they’re on fire.” Another “really, really awesome” development is that professional athletes are able to build a brand and benefit from sponsorship deals from more brands that are interested in partnering with women in sports, added Logan Eggleston, who plays on the LOVB Austin team in the league’s inaugural season. She’s a partner with CELSIUS, maker of energy drinks, and that’s an added benefit to making a living playing the sport she loves. “I didn’t know that professional volleyball was a thing when I was younger,” Eggleston said. “To be able to show those young athletes what they can potentially be one day, and then also provide resources and mentorship for them, is so incredible.” A long way to go But all three panelists noted that more change is needed—from the level of investment to media attention to addressing pay inequity to policy changes (and enforcement) around Title IX to an improved focus on the athlete experience. “We’ve seen a ton of momentum, but right now we still have so much more progress to make,” Strack said. “There’s a lot of discrimination built into the current system, so we have to look fundamentally at everything in the ecosystem and think about, how do we reengineer it?” Strack rattled off various stats that show that more change is needed, including: only 10% of sports sponsorship dollars go to women athletes, no women landed in the top 100 list of highest-paid athletes, and that 93% of schools at the collegiate level aren’t complying with Title IX, the federal civil rights law prohibiting discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities. “We have to think about what do we do at the grassroots level, what do we do at the professional level, and then what do we do on the federal policy side to really change things for girls and women in sports,” Strack told the audience. Even more basic changes matter, Spaulding added, like giving women’s sports prime time slots or providing uniforms that actually fit women or fan gear that’s made for women. “Yes, there’s been more media, more investment through media, through private equity, through partnerships, et cetera,” she said. “But there’s a long way to go, and it’s all in the details.” Why fan support matters And buy-in from the fans is also important, Eggleston said. “They need to show up for women’s sports, they need to learn about the sports, educate themselves on the sports, get to know the athletes, the players that they’re getting to watch.” And while equal pay would be “amazing,” Eggleston said if more female athletes become household names like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese have in women’s basketball, that also moves the needle—and particularly if young boys grow up with female athletes as their favorite players. “That would be so cool to see,” said Eggleston, who said she’s already experiencing the “perfect time” to be an athlete in women’s sports. “It’s so cool to be starting a league right now when the momentum is really, really just being driven forward. And I just can’t even imagine what’s going to be happening in the next five years.” View the full article

The lender says its technology will supercharge scale, preventing a potential hiring and firing spree which doomed it after the recent refinance boom. View the full article

Quick: Send me a large file. Even today, decades after a famous comic about this exact problem, it's not necessarily simple. Messaging services don't allow truly huge files; neither do most email providers. You could stick the file in a cloud storage space, sure, but only if you're paying for enough storage space and not using that space for anything else at the moment. Isn't there some way to send a file directly, without using up any cloud space? There is. File.pizza is a web service that allows you to directly share a file from your computer with another device—no cloud storage or app needed. FilePizza isn't the only application like this. There's p2pfileshare.com and sharedrop.io, to name a couple. FilePizza stands out because of the simplicity—just share a file and copy the URL—and because it has a unique URL. The name of the application, while silly, has a crucial advantage: It's easy to remember. You can, on any computer, open a browser and type the url "file.pizza" to start sharing a file. Just drag the file onto the browser window, set a password if you want, then click Start. Credit: Justin Pot You now have a bunch of ways to share the file. There's a QR code, which is handy if you're trying to get a file onto a mobile device. There are also links you can copy and paste into a text. Credit: Justin Pot You might have noticed that I haven't blurred the QR code or the link above. There's a reason for that: These links only work as long as the computer is on and the browser window offering the file is open. Without a cloud service, it's on your device to share the file with whoever might download it. Close the tab, and the file is gone. That has downsides, obviously, but the upside is that you don't have to worry about the file being shared in the long term. This is a tool for one-time transfers. The person who opens the link will see the name of a file and a button to download it. When they click the button a direct connection is established. Credit: Justin Pot The speed of the download, obviously, is going to depend on your internet connection. If you've got a decent upload speed, though, this won't be an issue. And it works extremely well if you're on the same wifi network. Give it a shot the next time you need to send a file directly. View the full article

The number can be tailored to suit the occasionView the full article

Technology Transformation Services (TTS), a high-tech consulting group housed within the General Services Administration (GSA), is tasked with helping agencies modernize their internal systems and public-facing websites. In the past, the group has had the resources and personnel to create innovative new solutions: for example, building Login.gov, a single sign-on system for secure access to government services, along with Cloud.gov, the government’s cloud hosting environment. But now, with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the helm, the group faces a rapidly shrinking headcount and mandate, says a source within the GSA. Two DOGE operatives—GSA acting administrator Stephen Ehikian and TTS director Thomas Shedd—held a “demo day” last Friday where TTS technologists demonstrated the projects they’re working on to the larger organization, says a source within the GSA who spoke on a condition of anonymity. The source says Shedd has been evangelizing to TTS staffers that “shipping and delivery” of projects is the only focus of the group, echoing a common tech industry ethos. Shedd earlier commented that he believed the deep tech talent and government experience within TTS would be very useful in bringing new efficiency to the government. Shedd, who worked as a software engineer at Tesla for eight years before joining Musk’s DOGE, told staffers that he “needs wins” to demonstrate TTS’s value to DOGE leadership, the source says. Last week Shedd held an all-hands in which he read a statement saying that DOGE still intends to cut TTS staff by at least half. TTS staffers have been forced into an uneasy “waiting for the other shoe to drop” mode, according to the GSA source. “Blanket cuts across an organization rarely lead to increased efficiency,” says Kate Green, a former U.S. Digital Service engineer. “When you cut people in large groups, institutional knowledge is lost, those left have to rethink how they work, and there’s a significant loss in trust. This isn’t a recipe for quick wins.” Meanwhile, Shedd and Ehikian have kept TTS staffers busy continually submitting project status reports. But they are not setting new agendas or redirecting the efforts of TTS’s technologists. “The only agenda they really are driving is cutting costs for the most part,” the source says. “We haven’t received any clear guidance on what the goals of the organization are supposed to be after all the cuts—or even what they can be with so many cuts past the bone to the marrow,” the GSA source says. TTS’s scope will likely narrow to a handful of statutorily required projects, including Login.gov; FedRAMP, which standardizes cloud security for federal agencies, and Cloud.gov, a hosting environment for government digital services.. But the line between essential and nonessential projects has yet to be defined or explained, the source says. “The uncertainty around the products that will remain active is making it very difficult for organizations that depend on TTS products to be able to plan,” Green says. “For instance, state governments and other agencies that use login.gov are very concerned about how the product will evolve and they have data privacy concerns.” DOGE already completely eliminated one technology group under TTS, 18F, firing about 70 people including engineers, designers, and procurement specialists. The move was announced during the early morning hours of Saturday, March 1. (DOGE didn’t respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.) The federal government struggles to adopt more efficient technologies partly because of a risk-averse culture, and partly because of layers of policies and regulations that must be satisfied. A charitable interpretation is that DOGE has in mind a “destroy to create” approach to modernizing government systems. But, based on the group’s actions so far, and on the fact that its presidential mandate expires on July 4, 2026, it seems more likely that DOGE’s real agenda is just the “destroy” part. In other words Musk is trying to do the same thing to government that he did with his takeover of Twitter. “Maybe that’s fine in private industry where the tools that you’re working with are Twitter or Tesla and the impact to the public is not as great and lives are not lost,” says Itir Cole, a U.S. Digital Service staffer who recently left the government rather than becoming part of DOGE. “But when you do this for a federal program, if it fails at any point there could be lives lost.” View the full article