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In terms of selecting the best MP4 clip editor for beginners, it is crucial to take into account ease of use, features, and compatibility with your devices. With various options available, you might find that some editors offer intuitive interfaces and helpful tools that cater to novice users. As you explore these options, you’ll want to weigh the benefits of both free and paid software. Comprehending what each editor provides can greatly influence your editing experience. What will you choose? Key Takeaways CyberLink PowerDirector is an excellent choice for beginners, featuring an intuitive interface and AI improvements for simplified editing. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, making it versatile for various devices. The software offers a free trial and subscription starting at $19.99 per month, providing access to advanced features. Key features include trimming, splitting, and merging clips, essential for basic editing tasks. Regular practice and utilizing built-in tutorials enhance learning and confidence in video editing. Best Overall MP4 Clip Editor for Beginners When you’re looking for the best overall MP4 clip editor as a beginner, CyberLink PowerDirector is a top choice that combines ease of use with strong editing capabilities. This software supports both Windows and iOS and Android, making it versatile for different users. If you’re unsure how to cut MP4 video, the intuitive interface provides crucial editing tools, including AI improvements that simplify the process. Although there’s a mild learning curve, helpful pop-ups will guide you, ensuring a smoother experience. You can start with a free trial and later subscribe for $19.99 per month, allowing you to explore its features without immediate commitment. CyberLink PowerDirector truly caters to beginners and advanced users alike. Top Free MP4 Editing Software For beginners seeking free MP4 editing software, several excellent options stand out, each offering unique features to improve your editing experience. HitFilm Express provides professional-grade tools, including visual effects and tutorials to help you learn quickly. Kdenlive is an open-source editor with an intuitive interface, perfect for both novices and experienced users, supporting various formats, including MP4. Clipchamp offers a browser-based solution that simplifies MP4 editing with crucial tools and templates for social media. Adobe Premiere Rush allows for quick edits and easy sharing, whereas iMovie is a user-friendly option for Apple users, featuring tools like green-screen effects. All these programs can teach you how to trim MP4 files efficiently and effectively. Best MP4 Editing Software for Mac Users Editing MP4 clips on a Mac can be a smooth experience, thanks to a variety of software options customized for different skill levels. iMovie stands out as a free, user-friendly choice that comes pre-installed on all Mac devices, allowing you to easily trim, add changes, and apply effects to your videos. For those seeking a more advanced option, Final Cut Pro offers strong editing capabilities and 4K support, though it requires a higher investment and a learning curve. Adobe Premiere Elements provides a solid foundation for beginners with its intuitive interface. Movavi Video Editor and Filmora from Wondershare likewise cater to novice editors, making it simple to learn how to clip an MP4 video with drag-and-drop features and various templates. Best MP4 Editing Software for Social Media Content When you’re creating social media content, choosing the right MP4 editing software can make all the difference. Look for user-friendly platforms that offer crucial editing tools and seamless integration with social media channels, ensuring your videos not just look great but additionally get shared easily. Options like Clipchamp, Filmora, and Adobe Premiere Rush provide features customized for social media, making it simpler for you to produce engaging clips. User-Friendly Interface Features A user-friendly interface is vital for anyone looking to create social media content quickly and efficiently, especially for beginners. Software options like Clipchamp and iMovie offer drag-and-drop functionality, making it easy for you to import and arrange clips without needing extensive technical skills. Many of these editors include pre-built templates and guided workflows, streamlining your video creation process. Simplified toolsets focus on fundamental functions such as trimming, splitting, and adding text or music, allowing you to produce polished videos without delay. Compatibility with various platforms, like Adobe Premiere Rush and InShot, improves accessibility for editing on the go. Plus, features like “Easy Mode” in Wondershare Filmora simplify tasks, ensuring that even those unfamiliar with editing can make effective use of a video trimmer download. Essential Editing Tools Creating engaging social media content not just relies on a user-friendly interface but also on having the right tools at your disposal. Important editing tools include intuitive software like Apple iMovie and Filmora, which simplify the editing process for beginners. You can find customizable templates in editors like Clipchamp and InVideo, allowing you to create professional-looking videos quickly. A cut video trimmer is vital for refining your footage, ensuring that only the best clips make the final cut. Moreover, programs like Adobe Premiere Rush offer cross-platform compatibility, making it easy to edit on-the-go. With built-in libraries of royalty-free music and sound effects, you can improve your videos’ audio quality without extra resources, ensuring they’re ready for social media. Social Media Integration Options To effectively engage audiences on social media, integrating your video editing software with popular platforms is essential. Many video editing tools, like CyberLink PowerDirector and Clipchamp, feature built-in templates designed for engaging social media content, allowing you to produce eye-catching videos quickly. Editors such as Adobe Premiere Rush and InVideo enable seamless sharing directly to various platforms, simplifying the upload process. In addition, tools like Clipchamp offer AI-enhanced auto-captioning and text-to-speech features, enhancing accessibility for your audience. Filmora provides social media export presets that adjust videos to the ideal resolution for Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Moreover, many MP4 editing software options include integration with stock asset libraries, making it easy to add trending music and visuals that resonate with viewers. Essential Features to Look for in MP4 Editors When choosing an MP4 editor, you’ll want to prioritize a user-friendly interface that makes maneuvering the software straightforward. This is crucial, especially for beginners who need easy access to key editing tools like trimming and merging. Moreover, look for features that improve your editing experience, such as built-in templates and a wide range of editing options to support various projects. User-Friendly Interface A user-friendly interface is crucial for anyone looking to edit MP4 clips efficiently, especially beginners. When choosing an mp4 clip editor, you should consider the following features to simplify your editing experience: Intuitive design: Look for clear icons and drag-and-drop functionality for easy navigation. Basic editing tools: Make sure it includes trimming, splitting, and merging capabilities without a steep learning curve. Tutorials and support: Access to helpful resources can assist you in overcoming initial challenges. Templates and wizards: These features streamline the editing process, making project completion quicker. Essential Editing Tools Choosing the right MP4 clip editor involves comprehending the core tools that will make your editing process smooth and efficient. Look for features like trimming, splitting, merging, and adding text overlays, as they’re fundamental for basic MP4 editing tasks. An intuitive user interface will help you navigate easily, making it simple to learn how to cut an MP4 without frustration. It’s also vital that your editor supports various video formats and offers built-in templates and effects to improve creativity. Finally, verify compatibility with your operating system for seamless use. Fundamental Features Description Trimming Cut unwanted sections of video Splitting Divide video into separate clips Merging Combine multiple clips into one Text Overlays Add captions or titles to videos Templates Use pre-designed layouts for efficiency Comparing Paid vs. Free MP4 Editing Options Even though many beginners may feel overwhelmed by the choice between paid and free MP4 editing options, comprehending the key differences can simplify the decision-making process. Here’s a quick comparison: Cost: Free MP4 editing software options like HitFilm Express and Kdenlive are budget-friendly, whereas paid options like CyberLink PowerDirector start at around $19.99 per month. Features: Paid software offers advanced editing tools, whereas free options might’ve limitations like watermarks or lower export resolutions. Support: Free editors often come with community support, whereas paid software provides dedicated customer support. Quality: Paid software typically delivers higher export quality and faster rendering speeds, making it suitable for more complex projects. Starting with free tools lets you build skills without financial risk, allowing for a smoother shift to paid software later. Tips for Getting Started With MP4 Editing Getting started with MP4 editing can feel intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Begin with user-friendly software like Apple iMovie or Clipchamp, which offer intuitive interfaces and helpful templates. Familiarize yourself with basic functions such as trimming, splitting, and merging clips, as these are crucial when learning how to shorten MP4 video. Take advantage of built-in tutorials and online resources to improve your editing skills. Experiment with adding effects, transitions, and audio tracks to see how they elevate your videos. Regular practice with different content types, like social media clips or personal vlogs, will help you build confidence and develop your unique editing style over time. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Best MP4 Video Editor? When choosing the best MP4 video editor, consider your needs and skill level. CyberLink PowerDirector offers a user-friendly experience with fast rendering, whereas iMovie is great for Apple users looking for a cost-free option. Wondershare Filmora features an “Easy Mode” for drag-and-drop editing, and Adobe Premiere Rush simplifies the process with templates. Movavi Video Editor balances affordability with useful features, making it accessible for various editing tasks. Evaluate these options based on your preferences. How to Easily Edit an MP4 Video? To easily edit an MP4 video, start by choosing user-friendly software like iMovie or Filmora. These programs let you trim, split, and merge clips effortlessly. Use drag-and-drop features for a smooth experience. Explore built-in templates and effects for quick improvements, and verify your editor supports 4K resolution if necessary. Finally, check out tutorials online to better understand the tools, making your editing process more efficient and effective. Which Editor Is Best for Beginners? When choosing an editor for beginners, it’s crucial to contemplate user-friendliness and features. Apple iMovie’s integration with Apple devices and basic editing tools makes it a solid choice. Filmora’s drag-and-drop interface is intuitive, whereas CyberLink PowerDirector offers an extensive suite with fast rendering. Adobe Premiere Rush simplifies sharing on social media, and Movavi Video Editor provides vital tools with a one-time payment. Each option caters well to novice editors aiming for quality results. What Is the Simple MP4 Editor for Windows 10? For simple MP4 editing on Windows 10, you can use the Photos app. It allows you to trim, split, and combine videos easily, making it accessible for anyone without prior experience. You can likewise extract still images from video frames and add basic music or text overlays. Although it has limited features, it’s pre-installed on all Windows 10 devices, providing a straightforward solution for quick edits. For more advanced needs, consider third-party software. Conclusion In summary, choosing the right MP4 clip editor is crucial for beginners looking to develop their video editing skills. CyberLink PowerDirector stands out with its intuitive interface and AI features, making it a great starting point. Furthermore, free software options can provide valuable experience without financial commitment. By comprehending the fundamental features and evaluating both paid and free options, you can confidently begin your editing path and create engaging content customized to your needs. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Best MP4 Clip Editor for Beginners?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

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It’s been a tumultuous year for U.S. stock markets. Investors have had their nerves rattled twice this year by government-related events—President The President’s Liberation Day tariffs in the spring, followed by the longest U.S. government shutdown in history this fall. That’s on top of an economy already hit hard by inflation and declining consumer confidence. Yet despite this, there have still been several high-profile and successful initial public offerings throughout the year—especially in the AI and fintech spaces. And now, an IPO this week is set to dwarf all others that have come before it this year. Here’s what you need to know about Medline’s initial public offering. What is Medline? Medline is a maker of medical supplies. The company is based in Northfield, Illinois, and was originally founded in 1966 by brothers Jim and John Mills. According to the company’s S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Medline makes approximately 335,000 different medical and surgical products—everything from wheelchairs to masks and scalpels. It manufactures this extraordinary portfolio of products at 33 global facilities and has customers in more than 100 countries. As of the end of 2024, Medline employed more than 43,000 workers worldwide. For the nine months that ended on September 27, Medline reported $20.6 billion in net sales so far this year. Its net income for the nine-month period was $977 million. For the same period a year earlier, Medline reported $18.7 billion in net sales and net income of $911 million. Medline has a history of public offerings and private equity Despite its IPO this week, this isn’t the first time Medline has publicly listed its stock. As Reuters reported, Medline originally went public in 1972. But just five years later, in 1977, the Mills brothers took the company private again. The company grew massively over the next several decades, ultimately attracting the attention of private equity. As noted by the Financial Times, a group of private equity investors, including Blackstone, Carlyle, and Hellman & Friedman’s, acquired a majority stake in the medical supply maker in 2021 for a staggering $34 billion. At the time, it was the largest leveraged buyout since the 2008 financial crisis. And despite Medline’s IPO this week, this isn’t the first time in 2025 that Medline was expected to go public. The company had been considering an IPO earlier in 2025, but then The President’s Liberation Day tariffs hit. Medline was one of the companies that stood to be hit hardest by tariffs, as the majority of its products are made in Asian nations that faced some of the steepest tariffs. Despite this earlier delay, Medline will once again become a publicly traded company after 48 years. When is Medline’s IPO? Medline priced its shares on Tuesday. It expects to list its shares today: Wednesday, December 17, 2025. What is Medline’s stock ticker? Medline’s shares will trade under the stock ticker “MDLN.” What exchange will Medline’s shares trade on? Medline shares will trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. What is the IPO share price of MDLN? The initial public offering price for MDLN stock is $29 per share. That’s at the higher end of the IPO share price range of $26 to $30 per share that was expected. How many MDLN shares are available in its IPO? Medline’s press release states that 216,034,482 shares of its Class A common stock were available in its IPO. How much will Medline raise in its IPO? Medline raised $6.26 billion in its IPO. According to Reuters, this makes Mediline’s IPO 2025’s biggest first-time share sale globally. How much is Medline worth? At its $29 IPO price, Medline is now valued at around $39 billion. Medline surpasses other IPO giants this year Medline’s $6.26 billion IPO haul makes it the biggest IPO of 2025. As noted by the Financial Times, the offering comes in above the $5.3 billion that Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology raised in May. Medline’s $6.26 billion debut also dwarfs the largest U.S. IPO of the year, which was liquefied natural gas producer Venture Global (NYSE: VG). Venture Global raised $1.75 billion in that offering. View the full article

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So many great productivity hacks come from the Japanese manufacturing industry. The 5S technique helps you keep your workspace clean so you can get more done, kaizen helps you improve the processes and workflow of your job, and kanban helps you schedule your tasks in the most efficient way. These are helpful even if you’re not working within the famed Toyota Production System; they’re adaptable to fit all kinds of work scenarios, which is similarly true for the 3 Ms that originated there, too. The 3 Ms are kinds of waste you should identify and eliminate to keep your work running smoothly. Once you learn how to identify and get rid of them, you can be even more productive, whether you're using kanban, kaizen, or anything else. What are the 3 Ms?Lean process thinking, or lean manufacturing, is a production method that seeks to save time within the production process. The 5S technique is en elemental part of lean thinking, as are the 3 Ms. They are "muda," "mura," and "muri," and they all refer to kinds of wasteful practices that slow you down and keep you from being productive. By identifying and eliminating them, you can streamline everything you need to do. To get them to work in your daily life, you need to adapt them a little, but once you get in the habit of recognizing where things are getting held up and making the appropriate changes, you’ll be breezing through your work. Identifying and eliminating the 3 MsHere’s what each of the three Ms is all about: Muda translates from Japanese to mean “futility” or “uselessness.” It’s anything that doesn’t add value to the work you’re doing and it comes in two forms: Type 1 is non-value-added activities in your process that are still necessary for your end result, like safety checks, which don’t give the producers of physical goods any kind of financial reward, but do have a benefit for customers and eliminate financial risk for producers. You can’t really avoid Type 1, but you should focus on identifying and eliminating Type 2: Activities that add no value to the process or the end result. Mura is any kind of unevenness in your operation. Anything that isn’t uniform, regular, or scheduled is mura. Too much mura will result in muda. For instance, if you’re working on a bunch of tasks for a project at your job and your coworker is only working on one or two, it’s actually wasteful because you’ll be waiting around on them to keep moving forward with yours. Muri is any overburden on a tool or person. It can result from mura, as in the example above, but can also spring from overutilization. For your purposes, think of it referring to you. When you’re overwhelmed and overworked or lack resources, you’re not as productive. That’s muri. To eliminate muda, identify which unnecessary steps you’re taking in your work. Familiarize yourself with kaizen here, as it’s a process designed to get you to work efficiently. If you find that you’re often doing unnecessary tasks that don’t have much value in the end, like changing the colors and fonts on a presentation deck that’s already completed or constantly tweaking your emails before sending, consider that you might be giving yourself too much time to do them. Parkinson’s Law says that the more time you have to do something, the longer you’ll draw it out and complicate it. Reduce the amount of time you give yourself to complete certain tasks so the pressure of getting it done helps you focus only on the elements that are absolutely necessary. To eliminate mura, start tracking the process of your work and identify what’s holding you up. Is it waiting on client emails? Is it waiting for a coworker to finish their section of a project? Is it spending too much time in meetings and not enough time actually working? Is it a bad scheduling technique on your end? It might take a few weeks of diligent time tracking, but eventually, the pattern will emerge. If you’re spending too much time waiting on client emails, develop a system whereby you send emails with questions for the next day’s work during the afternoon, giving them time to respond by the time you need to do it, for instance. If it’s your own poor scheduling, start making better to-do lists using kanban or the 1-3-5 method, which reduces your daily tasks to just nine and has you focus on the most essential ones in order of importance. Finally, to eliminate muri, assess your own burden at work. If you’re missing deadlines, feeling overwhelmed, not being given the right amount of resources, or having too much piled on you, you need to streamline what you’re working on so you don’t completely burn out. Try using the ABCDE method to give a ranking to all of your responsibilities. The A tasks are the most important, followed by the B tasks, but you’ll feel less overwhelmed once you realize the C tasks are optional, D stands for delegate, and E stands for eliminate. Delegate tasks to someone else if you’re overburdened—and don’t do unnecessary ones at all. Some burdens, like meetings, are unavoidable, but when possible, schedule yourself at least one day a week where you have no meetings. Remember to take regular breaks to stay productive, utilizing a method like the time-tested Pomodoro technique. If that method isn't working for you, try the MIT—or most important thing—technique, which helps you reframe your perception of your to-dos around the impact they'll have, not the amount of resources they'll take. Playing around with different approaches is a little time-consuming and might seem like its own kind of waste, but it's necessary to find a system that works for you. Training yourself to recognize and eliminate these different kinds of waste will streamline your work, reduce your burden, and keep things running more smoothly so you can actually be productive, whether you’re building a Camry or a new investor spreadsheet. View the full article

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In late October, dozens of federal law enforcement officers flooded Canal street, a busy thoroughfare in Manhattan, arresting street vendors. Some officers donned full military uniforms; some wore plain clothes, baseball caps, and neck gaiters pulled over their faces. All were equipped with tactical vests of various styles and with a medley of identifying patches—“HSI,” “Customs and Border Patrol,” “Federal Agent,” or, simply, “Police.” They wore markers of power and authority, but with little consistency across them. As news of the raid unfolded, the NYPD released a statement on X saying it had no involvement with the operation. So who, exactly, were all the people with “Police” emblazoned on their chests? Every decade has its era-defining garments. Think spaghetti strap dresses in the 1990s, low-rise jeans in the 2000s, and athleisure in the 2010s. This year, one garment felt suddenly ubiquitous: the tactical vest. And it’s not just law enforcement wearing this gear; there’s a growing consumer market for body armor and garments that resemble them. They’ve gone from technical gear designed for professionals to normalized accessories. Moreover, these objects have seeped into fitness in the form of weighted vests that are made by the same companies who produce tactical gear. Their form factor has become a chilling symbol of a political climate defined by fear. How the plate carrier mainstreamed These vests, also known as plate carriers, are military equipment designed to protect the people who wear them from bullets and other ballistics. They’re garments with removable ceramic, steel, and composite plates, and are outfitted with nylon loops and Velcro that enables wearers to attach gear and accessories, a system known as MOLLE, an acronym for “modular lightweight load-carrying equipment. What began as specialized garments created for active combat has been steadily infiltrating our cities for decades. The vests became more prevalent after the expansion of the 1033 program, which authorized the free transfer of surplus military equipment to local law enforcement for the War on Drugs in the 1980s and 1990s and counterterrorism post-9/11. One interesting part of the business of these garments is that until the War on Terror, tactical clothing wasn’t something military actively stocked in the same way as guns and ammunition, explains Charles W. McFarlane, a military fashion historian and author of the Substack Combat Threads. While body armor had been used since WWII, it took decades to create something that was protective but didn’t interfere with movement. Patrol troops in Vietnam, for example, didn’t regularly wear it because it was heavy, cumbersome, and trapped heat; however, troops in defense positions and on unarmored convoys did. After Kevlar was invented, in 1965, protective vests became lighter and easier to wear as designers integrated the material into gear. In the 1980s, the U.S. army began issuing kevlar vests to some troops in the Middle East, Panama, and Grenada. Then in the 1990s, Army Rangers in Somalia wore vests with a combination of Kevlar and a hard plate. In 1999, the military began issuing what most closely resembles the tactical vests of today, with removable plate inserts and the MOLLE system on the outside. But it wasn’t until 2003 that all soldiers received “one suit of body armor” as a matter of policy. McFarlane notes that the CIA paramilitary officers who led Operation Jawbreaker, the agency’s highly secretive first mission to Afghanistan in 2001, bought their gear at REI. “They look like they’re dads on a fishing trip,” McFarlane says. As a new market for this gear opened, private companies began to develop specialty products that they sold to the military and the public, too. Brands like Crye Precision, 5.11 Tactical, and Safariland provide gear to the government and consumers. According to Research and Markets, the military PPE market—a category that includes body armor, tactical vests, and combat helmets among other products—is expected to see an annual growth rate of 8.2%, rising from $19.4 billion in 2024 to $29 billion in 2029. “This stuff has just become so much more available, and if you wanted to buy a plate carrier that is standard issue for the military or one that is used by Special Forces, you can go to the same companies and buy it, with some exceptions,” McFarlane says. There are few sales restrictions on tactical gear. At the federal level, it’s illegal for people with felony convictions to buy plate carriers or body armor, but sellers say enforcement is lax. Some states have stricter rules, like New York, which passed a law in 2022 barring sales to anyone who isn’t in law enforcement or the military. McFarlane links the growing consumer market for this gear to gun culture. “Men who are in their thirties, who grew up watching the global war and terror on TV and also probably played a lot of video games like Battlefield or Call of Duty, and it’s like, ‘Oh, I can own a version of that gun in real life.’ I got the gun. I kind of want the gear now too, and I think it builds out from there. It’s like collecting action figures.” Incidentally, 5.11 Tactical, which makes plate carriers and weighted fitness vests, partnered with EA Games on Battlefield 6 to design more realistic combat uniforms and “bring an unparalleled level of authenticity to players,” said Kyle Peterson, Senior Director of Brand for Battlefield in a news release; co-branded merchandise is also part of the deal. An ununiform uniform Tactical vests are evasive objects. Because immigration enforcement agents often wear civilian clothing, the tactical vest becomes a stand-in for a governmental authority. Remove the vest and you’ve got a pretty ordinary looking guy, which presents a problem since militias and vigilante groups have adopted the same attire. There’s not much visual difference between a January 6th rioter, far right protesters, ICE agents, or a Call of Duty fanatic. Sometimes, the visual uncertainty has had dangerous consequences. The FBI recently issued a warning about people impersonating ICE in order to commit violent crimes. Naureen Shah, the Director of Government Affairs, Equality Division at the American Civil Liberties Union, says that the menacing attire that makes it difficult to identify agents erodes public trust and opens the door to civil rights abuses. “The The President Administration wants us not to know who [the agent] is because it wants to intimidate the public,” Shah says. “We don’t know if it’s ICE or the FBI or the ATF or the DEA or the National Guard. You really don’t know who’s behind that vest. I think that’s calculated chaos designed to instill fear, not just in immigrant communities, but in all of us.” ICE has a long history of impersonating local police officers, a practice known as “ruses,” in order to gain access to spaces and information without furnishing a warrant. This includes wearing tactical gear that says “Police” and covering up badges that say ICE. Meanwhile, attorney generals in New York and Minnesota recently wrote a letter to congress urging them to pass a law that requires ICE agents to wear agency-identifying insignia and prohibits identity-concealing masks. In 2020, the ACLU filed a lawsuit in Southern California to stop this deceptive practice; in August a settlement was reached that requires ICE field officers in Los Angeles to have visible ICE identifiers whenever they use the phrase “Police” on their uniforms. “If you’re going to be policing the public, then you wear a uniform for that sense of accountability to the public,” Shah says. The morale of the story The use of military gear, like the tactical vest, in law enforcement represents its own type of psychology—one that projects power instead of the safety and competence that a police officer’s uniform was designed to do. This distinction is apparent in the ways ICE agents decorate their vests. The same Velcro that brings functionality tactical vests also makes it easier to add flair, or what would be considered a “morale patch.” As McFarlane explains, the military has been using morale patches since WWI, but they had to be stitched on before the velcro, courtesy of the MOLLE system on tactical vests, became common. Patches with a Superman logo, the Punisher, and slogan from Deadpool have been spotted on tactical vests. The Punisher logo, in particular, has become a co-opted symbol by far right groups. The superhero theme is telling. “The way it’s presented in these stories is that they operate outside of the law, but to a higher purpose,” McFarlane says. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been tracking the DHS’ use of hate symbols, which has included white nationalist and anti-immigrant imagery and language within recruitment ads. ICE is currently on a hiring spree—it plans to hire 10,000 agents by 2026—and it makes sense that the cohort who responded to those messages would wear those symbols as literal badges of honor. “Since the beginning of the second The President administration, several top DHS leaders and immigration advisers were drawn directly from hate groups making up the organized anti-immigrant movement. Agents sporting patches with hard-right emblems follow this disturbing trend,” says Travis McAdam, the manager of research and analysis in the Intelligence Project at SPLC. McAdam notes that the organization has seen an increase in ICE and other federal agents attaching patches to their tactical gear with iconography favored by hard-right movements. “One example is the Punisher symbol that’s long been a favorite of Three Percent militias, which feature it widely in their logos and merchandise,” he says. “While it’s used outside this antigovernment context, agents adopting it is consistent with the Department of Homeland Security’s use of hard-right imagery and language to both recruit employees and celebrate the arrest of Black and Brown people.” (Incidentally, DHS made Dean Cain, an actor who played Superman an honorary ICE officer this year.) McFarlane is not impressed with the comic book nods. “I think it shows a lack of discipline,” he says. “That’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t really fly in the U.S. military. You’re not going to see someone with a Superman patch—or at least they’re going to have the sense to take it off when there’s a camera or superior around.” These tactical vests, as well as the words, phrases, and iconography that appear on them, reveal a shocking dissonance between the people wearing them and the situations they are in: sledgehammering through the car windowing of an asylum seeker, arresting a pregnant citizen, and slamming a senior to the ground. Who really needs protection in these situations? One Columbia psychologist has developed a theory called “enclothed cognition,” which argues that what we wear affects the way we think and behave. Military-coded garments evoke a combat-ready sensibility and the fact that menacing vests are ubiquitous is frightening. “We’re not supposed to have federal officials who are designed to terrify people,” Shah says. “That’s not supposed to happen in a functioning democracy.” View the full article

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As autonomous AI agents increasingly browse, compare prices, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers, one challenge is becoming unavoidable for merchants: trust. On Wednesday, Akamai Technologies announced a strategic collaboration with Visa aimed at addressing that problem. The partnership integrates Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai’s behavioral intelligence, allowing merchants to authenticate AI agents, link them to real consumers, and block malicious bot traffic before it ever reaches sensitive systems. The move comes as agent-driven traffic floods the internet. According to Akamai’s 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report, AI-powered bot traffic surged more than 300% over the past year, with the commerce industry alone seeing more than 25 billion AI bot requests in a two-month period. “We all continue to be excited about the proliferation of agentic AI use cases,” said Patrick Sullivan, CTO of security strategy at Akamai. “We’re seeing billions upon billions of requests coming from agentic AI use cases.” When AI becomes the intermediary For decades, digital commerce has been built around a simple assumption: A human is on the other end of the transaction. Agentic commerce breaks that model. Instead of navigating a merchant’s site directly, consumers increasingly rely on software to search, compare, and sometimes buy on their behalf. For instance, whereas previously buying a new suitcase might involve exploring a dozen retailer’s sites, soon you might have AI do the legwork for you. That shift introduces a new intermediary—one that can be helpful, harmful, or fraudulent. “There’s a new entity that’s now sitting in between the merchant and the consumer,” said Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s global head of growth. “Things could go wrong.” From a consumer standpoint, that raises questions about refunds, disputes, and chargebacks. Whose fault is it if you asked for a black bag and received a dark blue one by mistake? From a merchant perspective, it creates uncertainty around intent, legitimacy, and risk. “If you’re a merchant, and you’re thinking about your website, there are a lot of changes coming your way,” Sullivan said. “You built your website originally in the era where there was going to be a human on the other end.” Now, discovery may happen through an AI-powered chat interface. Browsing may be conducted by an autonomous agent. Even the browser itself may be software acting on behalf of a user. “We need to make sure that it’s still on behalf of the right human and it’s not a fraudster taking advantage of some new evolution in technology,” Sullivan said. Proving both the agent and the human At the center of the Visa–Akamai partnership is a dual-identity problem: verifying not just who the human is, but who the agent acting for them is. “It’s important for us to always know who the human is,” Sullivan said. “But then, as we see these agentic use cases emerge, it’s important for us to get signal from Visa of who that agent is in that interaction.” Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol provides authentication signals indicating whether an agent is authorized and whether it intends to browse or pay. Akamai reads and reinforces those signals using behavioral intelligence, often before traffic reaches a merchant’s core systems. “You’re going to see traffic before it ever reaches a merchant system,” Sullivan said. “That allows us to build a trusted user profile so we can understand that Jim is actually Jim.” Because Akamai sees end users repeatedly across the internet—shopping, banking, reading news—it can establish consistency and spot anomalies early in the transaction flow. “That allows us to very, very early in the transaction reduce attempts at fraud and impersonation,” Sullivan said. Scale changes the threat model The surge in AI-driven traffic has raised concerns about whether volume itself becomes a security risk. Sullivan argues scale cuts both ways. “We’ve seen AI bot traffic surge 300 plus percent this year,” he said. “But while the numbers are in the billions, that’s still sort of a rounding error for the overall traffic that we see.” Still, Sullivan expects automation to accelerate abuse over time. “Anything that can be automated, it’s just so much more profitable for attackers,” he said. “If you can automate your attack, you can pull off more attacks.” That’s why both companies emphasize operating at global scale. Visa processes transactions across nearly 200 markets, while Akamai manages traffic and bots at internet-wide levels. “These are two companies that operate at massive scale,” Sullivan said. “It’s companies like ours that we think will stand up to the pace of these automated processes.” Why merchants matter most While consumers may benefit immediately from smoother discovery and purchasing, Birwadker said the heaviest lift lies with merchants adapting their infrastructure. “A large amount of change really lies on the acceptance side, on the merchant side,” Birwadker said. “Their infrastructure needs to keep up with all the changes that are happening.” Merchants will need to decide what information agents can access, how pricing and inventory are exposed, and how loyalty and personalization work when an AI, not a browser, is driving the interaction. “This is just keeping up with changes to consumer behavior,” Sullivan said. “They’re having an AI agent do something on their behalf.” A compatibility play for the future Neither Visa nor Akamai claims to know exactly what agentic commerce will look like three years from now. But both frame Trusted Agent Protocol as a compatibility layer—one that allows commerce infrastructure to evolve without losing control. “Our goal is just to make sure that our ecosystem remains compatible with the agentic world,” Birwadker said. “It’s more about compatibility than about almost anything else.” As AI agents move from novelty to necessity, that trust layer may determine whether merchants embrace agentic commerce—or shut it out altogether. View the full article

There is a strange gravitational pull in the AI ecosystem right now. Every founder wants to raise a monster round. A $50 million seed. A $200 million Series A. The kind of fundraise that makes headlines, melts your inbox, and gets your parents to finally understand you have a real job. I’ve raised both kinds of rounds. A $12 million one that looked incredible in TechCrunch. And recently, an intentionally small but oversubscribed pre-seed for my new company, Empromptu.ai, where investors fought for allocation like we were handing out Taylor Swift tickets. Having lived on both sides, here is the truth no one in AI land wants to say out loud: A mega round might be the fastest way to screw up your company. The perfection problem When I raised $12 million at my last startup, CodeSee.io, I thought I was winning. Fewer than 30 Black women have ever raised that much venture capital. I thought big money meant big validation. And yes, years later, it was validating. CodeSee.io was Cursor before Cursor was cool. But what people forget is that everything had to be perfect. Perfect product, perfect engineering, perfect marketing, perfect sales, perfect timing. You are signing up for perfection with capital that large. And the second you fall short, the clock starts ticking on the next round, your runway, and your team’s morale. Here is what no one tells you until you are already living inside the pressure cooker. A mega round is a contract with the future, not a celebration of the present. You are promising you will grow like a weed even while the world is chaos. In AI especially, half the market is noise and the other half is vaporware. You are still finding product-market-something, but your fundraising number tells the world you are already at product-market-fit. Now your job is not to build truth. It is to build momentum. Markets change, timing changes, and your optimism doesn’t pay your investors back. Big rounds push you toward optics instead of output. You start building for the board instead of the customer. The louder the round, the more deafening the expectations that follow. Before chasing a headline-sized round, you need to ask yourself hard questions: Based on your actual GTM engine—not the one you hope to have—how much return can you realistically deliver? Do you have the sales pipeline, category dynamics, and team structure to grow 10 times or even 20 times the capital you want to raise? If an external shock hits—an economic downturn, an AI bubble burst, or a sudden shift in whatever latest metrics investors care about—does your business have the frameworks and adaptability to survive it and still justify your valuation? Raising the stakes Most founders don’t run these numbers honestly. We romanticize optimism. But fundraising is not about what you believe your company could be worth—it’s about whether you have the machinery to make that valuation real in the harshest version of the future. A mega round multiplies every assumption you make. Every risk. Every blind spot. And ego makes it even harder. Getting told your company is worth $50 million at the idea stage is intoxicating. It’s human nature to want to believe the flattering version of your story. But the best founders know how to put their ego on the shelf long enough to look at their business objectively. Investors don’t care how good the number feels; they care whether you can return their fund. Most importantly: AI is changing too fast for giant commitments. Today’s hype cycle is tomorrow’s graveyard. You do not want to be the founder forced to keep shipping an outdated strategy because that is what you raised money for. Momentum is a blessing only if you are pointed in the right direction. If you are not, it becomes an anchor. With Empromptu, we kept the round intentionally small and tight, at least for now. We chose discipline over dopamine. And here is the secret: Small money gives you big freedom. You can pivot. Experiment. Say no. Build weird things. Build the right things. Build your company instead of your investor’s portfolio theory. Raising less does not mean thinking smaller. It means thinking smarter. You do not need a mega round. You need real progress, real customers, and real clarity. And if you still want the $100 million round, at least go in with your eyes open. Sometimes the most powerful thing a founder can do is grow at the speed of understanding instead of the speed of capital. View the full article

Drop of 2.4% in year to October takes cost of average dwelling in UK capital to £547,299View the full article

At one time or another, we’ve all sat next to someone interesting on a plane or a train, making small talk that sometimes leads to long-winded conversations about life, the world, even personal struggles or accomplishments. It’s been said it’s easier to talk to a stranger . . . but could these random, chance chats lead to networking opportunities? To be clear, vacation provides crucial time to unplug, relax, spend time with family and friends and is vital in maintaining work-life balance—so no one is saying you should treat your holiday like a business conference. (Not least any travel companions you may have.) But the trick is, should you recognize when a conversation on a beach, boat or beyond could be moving in a direction related to your skills, experience or care . . . it might lead to surprising, beneficial results, says Ronald Placone, associate teaching professor emeritus of management communication at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “There are always opportunities to network,” he says. “Sometimes they emerge when least expected.” Whether it’s at the airport bar flying home for the holidays, or at a tropical resort as you seek warmer temps this winter . . . the thing you could find instead is someone who could help you out down the road. Fast Company asked three business experts about how to keep in touch with interesting folks you meet on your travels. The magic of the vacation dynamic You never know who you’re going to meet when you’re in a new environment. You may cross paths with an industry leader, a fellow professional in your field, or even a recruiter while enjoying your mai tai by the pool, or while killing time in the Amtrak café car. This random meeting could facilitate a conversation. “You may be more relaxed, less scripted, and come across as more genuine” in such contexts, adds Placone. “Even when you’re unplugging, casual conversations often touch on what we do professionally,” says Kara Ayers, senior vice president of talent at Xplor Technologies, an Atlanta-based SaaS and payments company. She calls potential benefits to these meetings to be “tremendous.” After all, referrals fill many positions and often make solid hires. Sharing your skills and success with someone in a vacation context is more casual, and not as performative as it would be in a mixer or at a formal work event. Chatting with potential contacts on vacation feels refreshing because it’s unbiased and pressure-free, Ayers says. And if you love what you do, encounters like these with someone like-minded in the wild may remind you of that. “For example, during a recent vacation, I had a simple discussion with another HR professional which evolved into an exchange of best practices for managing global benefits,” she shares, an encounter she calls “enlightening and valuable.” Nowadays, with the rise of digital nomads, greater remote work opportunities domestically and abroad and even more expats in the workforce—it could very well be a real possibility that your next holiday sees you cross paths with a potential future colleague. But “don’t push it,” adds Placone. Reading the room The absolute key to vacation-networking, and why it even unfolds in the first place, is that it’s casual and organic. If the stranger you strike up small talk with in the hotel lounge reveals they work in the same field as you, go with the flow without an agenda. Not everyone wants to talk about work while their OOO message is on back home, especially when so many U.S. workers report feeling guilty for going on vacation to begin with. A big part of doing this right is being able to accurately pick up vibes. Avoid the all-time rookie mistake, of course, of trying to chat to your neighbor on public transportation once they put their headphones in—that’s the universal traveler’s signal for “stop talking to me.” “If an airplane seatmate pulls out their computer or tablet and either starts working or watching a show, that’s another signal,” says Ruth Sherman, a communications coach, media trainer, and consultant in Greenwich, Connecticut. “You might be okay with talking to strangers on your vacay, but others” might not be. And of course, if the individual is with other people, make sure the conversation is inclusive for everyone to participate, Ayers adds. “If they seem uninterested, pivot the conversation back to other topics,” advises Ayers. Listen and be engaged with the other individual and their interests. In this setting, the chat is “not self-promotion,” she says. Be authentic and enjoy the serendipitous meeting for what it is: an unplanned encounter with a friendly stranger who shares interests, or a similar life context when it comes to career. And if things feel right, approach the topic about staying in touch. ‘Let’s connect’ Many people want to be 100% disengaged from anything that even reminds them of work while on vacation. It’s okay to acknowledge that now is not the time to have networking-type conversations. (Good form, even.) But you could always mention that you’d value a future opportunity to reconnect and talk shop when you’re back online. “Ask about how to best to communicate with that individual in the future,” if they’re open to it, Placone says. Many people do not carry business cards these days, so Ayers recommends offering to connect on LinkedIn. “This is low pressure and a great way to stay connected,” she adds. Other vacation-goers opt for the Instagram follow when they hit it off with fellow travelers. If that feels right, do that, even if you do hope for a potential professional relationship down the line. Networking on vacation is about doing what feels right, easy and authentic. “You are not pitching someone or showing them that you are the best candidate” for a hypothetical role, Ayers says. “You are sharing stories and experience.” Maybe that’s trading war stories from earlier jobs, hot takes on buzzy industry news in the headlines, or just bonding with someone similar on a human level in a comfortable, low-stakes environment. “That authenticity builds trust and makes the interaction more memorable,” Ayers says. And in a labor market as fraught as this one, a genuine bond in a surprising setting might be the unexpected boon your career needs. View the full article

The USS Enterprise was an impossible dream rendered in fiber glass. Designed for Star Trek, it looked like a creation straight out of creator Gene Roddenberry’s imagination: Twin nacelles—those long, gleaming engine pods held by elegant pylons—extended from a central saucer holding the engines that allowed Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. Bones, and the rest of the crew to travel across the cosmos. Inside those nacelles, the show’s creators imagined, lay the secret that made those trips possible: a warp drive that could crease spacetime itself, folding the universe in front of the ship while unfurling it behind, allowing faster-than-light travel not through speed but through geometry. For decades, physicists dismissed it as beautiful nonsense—a prop master’s fever dream. But now the math has caught up to the dream. Harold “Sonny” White—a mechanical engineer and applied physicist who worked on warp drive concepts at NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory—has published a peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious Classical and Quantum Gravity that proposes a new design for a warp drive that happens to look a lot like the Enterprise. White told the science and tech publication The Debrief that “the resemblance to the twin nacelles of [Star Trek’s] USS Enterprise is not merely aesthetic, but reflects a potential convergence between physical requirements and engineering design, where science-fiction architectures hint at practical pathways for real warp-capable configurations.” In other words: When White and his research colleagues came up with a design that could bend spacetime but also keep a crew safe inside the ship, the optimal geometry that emerged was twin engine pods arranged around a central habitable zone. That’s the Enterprise. Perhaps it’s because there are only so many ways physics allows you to arrange exotic energy efficiently. Star Trek‘s production designers, working on pure intuition and ’60s aesthetics, accidentally landed on a rare optimal solution. It’s as if someone sketched the ideal car design in 1920 without knowing anything about aerodynamics, and a century later, physics said: “Actually, you were right.” USS EnterpriseStar Trek: The Next Generation The warp drive According to White and his colleagues, the original mathematical model for a warp drive envisioned a spacecraft encased in a continuous, donut-shaped ring of negative energy, a bizarre form of matter that works like gravity in reverse, pushing space apart rather than pulling it together. Physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed this model in 1994 after watching Star Trek episodes and wondering if the science could actually work. This theoretical geometry could effectively move an object faster than light by deforming the space around it, but his idea came with headache-inducing problems for any engineer trying to build it. White’s breakthrough was simpler. Instead of trying to make Alcubierre’s donut-shaped design work, he asked a different question: What if you broke the energy ring into separate tubes, like engine pods, arranged around the ship? That small geometric shift—from one continuous ring to multiple discrete cylinders—changes everything about how the physics plays out inside the bubbles. The math suddenly became manageable. The interior could remain flat and safe. The dangerous forces could be confined to the nacelles, away from the crew. “The results of this study suggest a new class of warp bubble geometries,” White explains. By organizing the exotic matter into these specific pods, engineers could theoretically maintain a completely flat, calm interior for the ship while the external geometry handles the violent warping of space.​ But this research doesn’t mean we are going to be kirking and spocking all the way to the Crab Nebula any time soon. Faster-than-light travel remains a theoretical—but possible—way to travel across the cosmos that depends on many factors, like producing the fuel necessary to make it happen. If it ever happens, it will be generations away. White’s paper, however, provides a mathematical blueprint for practical design and engineering. Once built, his proposed design will result in something that looks like every nerd’s favorite spaceship. Warp Field Physics White’s math dictates that to keep the ship’s internal clock synchronized with the outside world and avoid ripping the pilot apart, the most efficient structure involves arranging these energy tubes around the craft—exactly like the twin nacelles of the USS Enterprise. Interior-flat cylindrical nacelle warp bubbles: derivation and comparison with Alcubierre model “I knew it should be possible to construct warp bubbles based on a nacelle-like topology,” White says, noting that the new geometry allows for structures that act as modular propulsion units rather than a single, unmanageable energy field.​ USS EnterpriseStar Trek: The Original Series Humanity’s hallucinations This phenomenon of fiction functioning as a crystal ball/R&D lab for reality has pervaded civilization’s progress since Jules Verne’s predictions of moon trips and nuclear submarines. Take Ryan McClelland, a research engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who found himself staring at the screen during the pandemic, watching The Expanse, a series that imagines a realistic scenario for humanity spread throughout our solar system. “They have these huge structures in space, and it got me thinking . . . we are not gonna get there the way we are doing things now,” McClelland told me in a interview from 2023. That sci-fi binge-watch led to Evolved Structures, a project where McClelland uses generative AI to hallucinate spacecraft parts that look unnervingly organic—as if they were extracted from an extraterrestrial ship secretly stored in an Area 51 hangar. The AI, unburdened by human preconceptions of what a bracket should look like, designs twisted, bone-like metal forms that are a third lighter than human designs but just as strong.​ McClelland believes it is the only way that we can mass manufacture the future of space colonization. The translation from page to pad is often even more direct. NASA engineer Les Johnson became obsessed with the idea of laser sails after reading the novel The Mote in God’s Eye written by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven in 1974, which describes a sail that uses photons as a thrust force to move a spaceship over vast distances at extremely high speeds. It made him become an engineer. “I had an opportunity to get involved in a project that was looking at different types of propulsion, and this is one that I added to the mix to consider,” he told me during an interview for a story on how he and his team designed the largest solar sail ever created. “Now the technology is here—we can build these things. And that’s been on again, off again part of what I’ve worked on for the last 20 years.” The list of fictional technologies that are now mundane reality is so long that it is actually exhausting. Sometimes they take a handful of years to become real. Other times decades pass between the dream and the device. In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke published a technical paper proposing geostationary satellites to relay communications; 19 years later, NASA’s Syncom 3 broadcast the Tokyo Olympics to the U.S., fulfilling the prophecy. Clarke was also to theorize solar sails in his 1964 story “Sunjammer.” Way earlier, in 1933, H.G. Wells imagined video calls on glass screens in The Shape of Things to Come; it took 87 years until the Zoom era made us sick of them. Warp Field Physics It’s not the first time this has happened with Star Trek. Saying that the series shaped humanity as we know it today is not an exaggeration. It introduced ideas that, many decades later, resulted in designs and technologies that have moved humanity forward. Not just automatic doors, but mobile phones, touchscreen tablets and interfaces, voice-activated AI assistants, medical scanning devices, and virtual reality. Star Trek didn’t just predict the future—it became the blueprint engineers actually followed to design it. Clearly, there’s a pattern here of dreaming up the impossible, putting it on a screen or in a book to entertain ourselves, and then, slowly but surely, our math and our machines evolve until they catch up to the fantasy. It feels like we are not just observing the universe; we are designing it to match the stories we tell ourselves, proving that the most powerful force in physics might just be a good writer’s deadline. Some scientists think we all may be part of a cosmic simulation in some alien computer. Perhaps we are all giant AI, like in Asimov’s short story “The Last Question.” Whatever the case is, the fact is that humanity seems to have a peculiar knack for reverse-engineering its own hallucinations. View the full article

The idea of the “Queen Bee” has been buzzing around corporate life for decades. You’ve heard the story: A woman finally breaks into senior leadership, only to turn around and block other women from rising behind her. She is territorial, icy, maybe even hostile. She has clawed her way to the top, the logic goes, and she intends to stay there alone. It is a vivid image, and that is precisely why it has survived. It gives managers a neat explanation for gender inequity: maybe women just don’t support each other. Maybe the problem isn’t the system; maybe it’s . . . women. But that explanation falls apart the moment you look closely. A zero-sum world The term “Queen Bee” was coined by Graham Staines and his colleagues in a 1973 article in Psychology Today. The researchers observed a small number of senior women who appeared to distance themselves from other women in heavily male-dominated environments. Even in the original study, the behavior wasn’t framed as spite. It was framed as adaptation. These women were navigating environments where there was room for exactly one of them to succeed. In a zero-sum world, survival strategies look a lot like coldness. In the 50 years since, the corporate world managed to turn a situational observation into a personality diagnosis. Yet the newest research makes one thing clear: the Queen Bee stereotype says very little about women, and a great deal about the cultures they are operating in. One of the striking pieces of recent evidence comes from a 2024 study published in the Journal of Business Ethics. It examined what happens when women leaders distance themselves from other women. The surprising finding wasn’t that distancing happens; it was who pays the price when it does. Female subordinates showed lower feelings of belonging, lower leadership ambition, and higher intentions to leave. Male subordinates, by contrast, were unaffected. In other words, when the culture pressures a woman leader to “blend in” with the dominant group, the cost is absorbed by the women below her. The researchers are clear: the distancing originates not from rivalry, but from discrimination. Women who experience bias early in their careers often learn that aligning with the dominant (often male) culture is the safest path forward. That alignment can look like toughness, or hyper-competence, or refusing to mentor junior women because they’ve been taught that visibility is dangerous. It is armor, not malice. When identity becomes a liability A broader 2024 literature review goes further, arguing that the term “Queen Bee” has become so misapplied that it obscures more than it reveals. The recommended term is “self-group distancing,” which describes how members of any underrepresented group may behave when identity becomes a liability. The behavior is well documented among racial minorities, first-generation professionals, LGBTQ+ employees—anyone who feels they have something to lose by being too closely associated with their own group. It is not a “woman problem.” It is a scarcity problem. And the scarcity is real. When leaders tell me about a “Queen Bee,” I often ask a single question: “How many women are in the room where decisions are made?” The answer is almost always the same: one, or maybe two. In those environments, it is hardly surprising that some women feel pressure to prove they are different from the stereotype of women as emotional, inexperienced, or not leadership material. Distancing becomes a way to signal, “I am not like them.” It is not pretty, but it is predictable. What is rarely acknowledged is how differently these dynamics play out when women are no longer tokens. Studies of global organizations show that when women hold multiple senior roles, sponsorship of women increases, not decreases. In firms with women CEOs, the next generation of senior women is larger. Leadership pipelines are healthier. And the Queen Bee patterns that managers fear become almost nonexistent. Put simply: when women stop being “the only one,” the motivation to distance evaporates. ‘Too soft’ To understand how this works on the ground, consider the experience of a leader. Early in her career, she worked under a woman who had a reputation for being harsh. Colleagues whispered that she was a classic Queen Bee. My client recalls thinking the same, until she learned that this leader had repeatedly been told she was “too soft” and “not decisive enough,” feedback her male peers never received. She had built a leadership style around eliminating any sign that could be read as feminine. Her high standards weren’t meant to sabotage other women; they were meant to make sure no one questioned their competence. This is the part managers often misinterpret. Behaviors that look like ice can actually be fear. Behaviors that look like competitiveness can be self-protection. When conflict between women appears, people leap to the Queen Bee label. The story we tell changes the behavior we see. For managers who want a healthier culture, the task is not to root out Queen Bees. It is to remove the conditions that create them. That starts with representation. When there are enough women in senior roles, solidarity becomes easier than distance. But it also requires clearer evaluation systems, because vague criteria give stereotypes room to breathe. It requires rewarding sponsorship and collaboration, not just individual performance, because people invest in what gets recognized. And it requires noticing the small signals in daily life: who gets interrupted, who gets invited to meetings, whose mistakes are scrutinized. If you believe a senior woman is acting like a Queen Bee, the first question to ask is: What in this culture made distancing feel necessary? When leaders approach it this way, they stop treating women’s behavior as a problem to fix and begin treating the culture as a system to redesign. The Queen Bee myth persists because it is simple. But workplaces are not simple, and people certainly are not. The truth is far less dramatic and far more useful: When the hive is hostile, bees protect themselves. When the hive is healthy, they support each other. That means the Queen Bee is not your warning sign about women. She is your warning sign about the workplace. View the full article

The lawsuit is the latest scrutiny over personnel moves this year at the companies under the purview of U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte. View the full article

Contract roles can feel like the perfect job setup: flexible hours, work-from-home perks, and a way to break into your dream company. For some, they also serve as a temporary solution until a more permanent position comes along. Yet sometimes when freelancers decide to transition to a full-time gig, their contract history can potentially come back to bite them—even when it shouldn’t. In a job interview, employers might ask: Can you work effectively on a team? Can you take direction from a manager? Will you think about your work long term? Or they might not ask at all, but they’ll still wonder. To be clear: Freelancing or contract work is work, of course. But if full-time employment is your goal, knowing how to address these concerns does matter in a job interview. Don’t assume First, in a job interview—no matter which side of the table you’re sitting on—it’s essential not to make assumptions. “It’s important for hiring managers to be aware of assumptions they might have. Instead of assuming, ask very direct questions,” says Phoebe Gavin, a career and leadership coach. Don’t just assume they can’t work a 9-to-5, or that they’re not willing to commit to a company long term. If you’re a job seeker, when applying for roles and in interviews, get ahead of assumptions by addressing them head-on. If the employer is looking for a collaborative team member, share examples of how you’ve worked effectively with others in the past. The hiring manager “may genuinely not be aware of how collaborative freelance or contract work can be. So for the person who’s being interviewed, don’t make any assumptions about what they know about your work,” Gavin says. Can you work on a team? Freelancers often work more independently, but that doesn’t mean you prefer to, or that you work entirely alone. After all, you probably send your work off to someone for review. If you thrive in a team environment—or even miss being part of a team—say so. When working as a freelancer, there may have been “times when your work has required working with multiple parties and collaborating with teams. Even if it was temporary for a particular project, make it really clear that that’s something you have experience with,” Gavin says. Highlight specific examples from past projects where you successfully collaborated with others, showing that you can contribute effectively on a team. Career coach Patrice Williams Lindo recommends saying something like: “I rebrand quickly into the team’s operating model. That means understanding how decisions get made, who owns what, and where my work fits into the broader system. I don’t operate in silos. I network intentionally across stakeholders so my work lands cleanly, on time, and without creating friction. Independence, for me, means high trust, not high isolation.” Can you take direction? When looking for a new job, remember that you’ll most likely have a manager. If you’re thinking, I don’t really need a manager; I can do the work without you managing me, that mindset can create challenges with the person providing direction. Showing that you can take direction demonstrates adaptability and immediately makes you a stronger candidate. Williams Lindo suggests saying something like: “I don’t need micromanagement, but I do respect structure, accountability, and feedback. My goal is to deliver in a way that strengthens leadership credibility, not competes with it.” Can you think beyond the project at hand? Freelancers usually focus on the work in front of them and don’t always have to think about long-term impact, but in a full-time role, you’re expected to see the bigger picture. If that’s something you do already, make sure you say that. For example, if you like to promote your work after it’s published, that’s something worth highlighting. Williams Lindo suggests saying, “Even when my engagement is project-based, my mindset is enterprise-level. I document decisions, build repeatable processes, and leave behind clarity—not just deliverables. I’m always thinking about how my work ladders up to longer-term outcomes, because recognition comes from impact, not just execution.” Contract roles can help you land a full-time position if you want one. By addressing assumptions up front and showing that you can collaborate, take direction, and think beyond individual projects, you signal that you’re ready to thrive in a full-time role. Freelance experience is real work, and it matters. When presented strategically, it can showcase your impact and position you as a strong candidate for permanent opportunities. View the full article

Whenever I tell people I’m an auctioneer, there are inevitably two follow up questions: First: “Do you talk really fast like those guys on TV?” followed by a cartoonish imitation, complete with an imaginary microphone and a pseudo Southern accent. Second: “What’s the most expensive thing you’ve ever sold?” After two decades of auctioneering, the answer is usually “something in the many millions.” I typically just name the last item I sold for over a million dollars. Whether someone pictures a fast talking cattle auction or a refined British gentleman selling Picassos in black tie, auctioneers are assumed to do one thing: talk. A lot. Which is why most people are shocked to learn that the most powerful tool I like to use on stage isn’t my voice at all. It’s silence. When I’m onstage in front of 500 people, yes, fast, energetic bidding can electrify a room. But in auctioneering, as in negotiation, the person who is comfortable with silence holds the advantage. Think about the last time you negotiated anything. The one who jumps to fill every uncomfortable silence often reveals the most. The one who sits in the quiet controls the pace. Lessons learned After years in the boardroom and on stage, here are the top three lessons I’ve learned about how silence can capture the attention of any room: 1. When a room is talking, don’t talk over it. Own the moment. If a crowd won’t quiet down, talking louder rarely works. Instead, I smile and say, “I’ll wait until the room is quiet enough to hear me.” The shift is immediate. People realize they’re missing something or they are being rude, and they stop. Once they’ve realized I’m willing to wait for them to stop talking before I’ll start again the dynamic is shifted, and now they are paying attention. 2. Make your point, then stop talking. Many times when I am onstage with a new crowd I will ask the audience where I should start the bidding. Instead of throwing out a number that could intimidate half the room, I will say to the audience “who wants to start the bidding?” When the person raises their hand I’ll ask “where are we starting the bidding tonight?” and then I simply wait . . . 9 out of 10 times the person will come in at a higher level simply because they don’t know where I plan to start and want to be sure they don’t announce a low bid. You’ll be amazed how often the other side rushes to fill the space, usually revealing exactly what you need to know. 3. Silence raises more money than any speech ever could. During the paddle raise portion of a charity auction paddle raise, I’m not offering a vacation home or a puppy. I’m simply asking for donations. When I begin at the highest level, say, $25,000 the room gets very still. People shift in their chairs. They look at each other. They wait. But more importantly, I wait. And sometimes I’ll throw in a joke to show them how at ease I am in the silence “I’ll wait just long enough until it starts to get really uncomfortable” and then I smile and wait a little longer. Inevitably someone will raise their hand simply to break the tension. It’s no concern for me; I will wait all night. That’s the power of silence: It moves people to act. The next time you are in an important meeting, giving a speech, or presenting on stage, remember the power of silence and use it to your advantage. View the full article

“Season’s greetings” aren’t as cheery when it’s a season of layoffs. November marked the eighth time this year that job cuts were up over the same period the year before, according to research from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. To make matters worse, hiring in November was down 35% from 2024, marking the lowest year-to-date total since 2010. News about the current labor market can be unnerving—even more so when layoffs are hitting your company. Being prepared can help make it less so. And one group of people knows more about that than most. A page out of the prepper book The word prepper may bring to mind images of shows like Doomsday Preppers, in which people stockpile food, water, weapons, and supplies in anticipation of apocalyptic events. However, most preppers are simply people who want to have some basic essentials or plan in place just in case. In fact, the last Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Preparedness Report found that more than half of U.S. adults (55%) had taken 3 or more of the 12 preparedness steps, like making a plan, gathering supplies, and securing documents. It’s not that different from preparing for a layoff, says organizational psychologist Melissa Doman. “Going through an unexpected layoff is a form of a temporary ‘doomsday’ for some people. They didn’t expect it, they can’t control it, and they don’t know how long it’s going to last,” she says. If you’re worried about an impending layoff, try preparing like a prepper. Know what you have When layoff rumors start circulating, “if you start making plans as soon as the whispers begin, or before if possible, you’ll be in a much better position,” says Michael McAuliffe, president and CEO of Family Credit Management, a nonprofit credit counseling agency. Personal finance expert LaChelle Johnson agrees, advising, “Figure out exactly what you have in terms of cash on hand, liquid assets, and even funds you may have access to in an emergency that you can withdraw from, like retirement accounts or investment accounts.” Maximize income and benefits In 2018, Michelle Arellano Martin had what she thought was her dream job. Then, she got a surprise. “I had just completed a huge project—garnered some incredible awards for my work—and then my position was eliminated,” she says. If she had it to do over again, she says she would have applied for unemployment benefits immediately, because the first payment took several weeks to arrive. She also advises negotiating for the best severance package you can. After her second layoff, she was able to negotiate an additional three months of severance pay. This, in part, helped her launch her business, sustainable travel site Travara. Talent strategist Brittany Dolin, CEO of the Pocketbook Agency recruitment firm, advises reviewing an expected severance package and how benefits like health insurance last after a layoff. You may also look for benefits that can give you immediate value, such as flexible spending account balances available to you. Johnson also suggests looking for items that you might be able to sell if necessary—everything from future concert tickets to that bread maker you always wanted to use but never opened. She also advises thinking about side hustles (but be sure you understand their impact on unemployment benefits). Slash spending When Johnson was laid off years ago, she and her husband had car loans, private school bills, credit card balances, and a big mortgage. The couple decided to make serious changes, like moving in with his parents for a year, to protect what they had and get out of debt. “I just felt like we were maxed out from wall to wall,” she recalls. Johnson advises taking a close look at spending and eliminating what you don’t need: Cut subscriptions. Pause gym memberships. Plan meals, and eat at home. Look for cheaper housing options. Follow frugal living communities on Reddit or other social media for more ideas on cutting expenses. You may pick up some good habits and find room in your budget to beef up your emergency fund over time, she says. Get your support team lined up Three of the 12 disaster preparation actions FEMA recommends involve identifying people you need for help and communication during emergencies. Similarly, Doman says you need to identify your support team if you suspect you’re facing something as stressful as a layoff. Don’t just default to your best friend or a family member. Instead, she says, think about the people who are going to let you feel your emotions and, when you’re ready, devise an action plan if the layoff comes to pass. “You don’t want someone who’s just going to brush off your emotions or give you a lot of toxic positivity,” she says. In fact, she adds, “You may need more than one person.” Reach out to these trusted individuals and let them know what’s going on so they can support you—and perhaps even help you network to find a new job. Keep a schedule If the layoff does come to pass, you may need to wallow a bit. Doman says it’s okay to take a “duvet day” to lie in bed and watch television if you need it. But don’t do that for too long, she adds. “Keep structure in your day—get up at a set time, work on some tasks to find a new job, get some fresh air, talk to a friend,” she says. Dolin agrees. Fear can be paralyzing, and if a layoff is pending or just happened, it’s time to buckle down and do your best “to stay employable in an unpredictable market,” she says. “Preparation does not equal panic.” View the full article

For the past two years, I’ve written predictions for how AI will continue to change the media industry and the business of news in the coming year. Prognosticating is a risky business even at the most tranquil of times, and media’s AI era is anything but: bots are multiplying, newsrooms are shrinking, and new business models always seem to be still developing. Last year, four of the five predictions I made came true, those being the spread of audio experiences like NotebookLM’s audio overviews, a greater emphasis on content licensing, more “legit” AI-generated content, and publishers doing more with their own summarization and chatbots. I should have probably known my one strike was going to be agents—that was such a buzzword last year that I couldn’t avoid including it, but it turns out there were significant barriers keeping agents outside the mainstream (data privacy and complexity being the main ones). This time, the task is even more challenging. Many trends, like AI adoption in newsrooms, are further along, which you would think makes their effects easier to predict. But the reality is that the most impactful things happen when those trends slam into realities, such as Cloudflare taking a hard stance against AI ingesting publisher content without compensation or consequence. Who saw that coming? With all that in mind, here are my predictions for how AI’s presence in media will evolve in the next year: 1. The copyright issue gets worse before it gets better Despite an ever-growing set of lawsuits, the copyright issue is still largely unresolved. Publishers want compensation for how their content is ingested and used by AI companies, which continue to claim fair use. Sure, there are more licensing deals between the two sides, but the fundamental tension remains. What’s changed is that more publishers have woken up to what they see as the predations of the AI industry, and they’ve gotten more aggressive at blocking AI crawlers. That prevents AI engines from bringing users the best, most up-to-date data, which makes them less competitive. This, however, doesn’t apply to Google, because it uses the same crawler for search and AI, and no publisher in their right mind would ever block Google Search. That gives Google a competitive advantage at a time where OpenAI just went into “code red” for fear of falling behind. Similarly, Perplexity is now the target for legal action from both News Corp. and The New York Times for how it summarizes their content. For any AI company in a race with Google, it’s hard to see how they can balance respecting copyright with staying competitive. If even the tremendously successful OpenAI sees the threat as existential, it’s hard to see how any of them wouldn’t see the copyright issue as secondary. My expectation: Not only will AI companies avoid making moves that broadly support content providers (such as enabling them to block user agents)—they may even become more brazen about ignoring safeguards like the Robots Exclusion Protocol. 2. AI focus in newsrooms shifts to product and revenue When The New York Times opened the doors for AI use by its staff, it was an indicator that newsrooms were becoming more comfortable with using AI to improve efficiency with things like transcription and social media management. Similarly, the launch of more sophisticated AI-infused products like Times AI Agent—which turns the publication’s vast archive into a grounded, AI-ready corpus—signals a shift toward AI products that could potentially improve the bottom line. Whether that opens up real revenue is unclear, and the road is certainly longer and bumpier than deploying an AI headline writer (Politico recently got into hot water with its newsroom union over an AI tool for its lucrative Politico Pro division), but the potential rewards are great enough that we’re sure to see more publishers go this route. 3. PR’s lean renaissance The era of “go direct” PR led many to postulate that the whole industry might face a steep decline, if not become entirely obsolete. However, AI has revived PR for a new era: Since AI engines look for credibility across domains and platforms, the ability to get a story cited widely, even on lesser-known sites, is newly valuable. However, AI is also forcing the industry to rethink the basics—even more than the media. Since much of PR work involves content, and it doesn’t have the same audience relationship that has kept almost all journalism authentically human, there’s intense pressure on the client side to leverage AI in content generation to cut costs. That all translates into a strengthened PR industry, but one that’s by necessity smarter and leaner than before. 4. Authenticity reasserts itself When generative AI first arrived, there was existential dread that big chunks of journalism would end up being authored by AI. While AI has secured a place in many newsrooms, that prediction largely hasn’t come to pass. That’s not because AI isn’t capable of researching, analyzing, and writing stories, but because AI authorship alters the audience relationship. In other words, human authenticity is back in style. AI can still be an accelerant here, helping more publications adopt video formats like the Times “explain the news” vertical shorts. With AI reducing the cost of production, the choice of expanding to a new platform will have more to do with audience opportunity, as it should be. 5. Continued prioritization of owned audience Just because we’re likely not going to Google Zero, doesn’t mean media properties can relax. A world of “Google Smaller” still means publishers will need to keep divesting from strategies dependent on SEO traffic, and direct their energies toward building and nurturing direct, habitual audience relationships through proprietary apps and formats with traditionally higher engagement, like newsletters and live events. The bad news: the more who do, the harder it will be to stand out. It may still be early days for AI, but we’re well past the point of no return. More and more people are using it for information discovery (34%, up from 18% a year ago, per the Reuters Institute) and journalists continue to adopt AI as part of their workflows (more than half now use it at least once a week). The industry is clearly adapting to the new AI reality, and whether or not we get clearer answers to the big questions around copyright and business models, 2026 might be the year the media’s AI survival manual gets written. View the full article

Is Reddit like other social media platforms? That’s the question before the High Court of Australia in light of the country’s under-16s social media ban. Last week, Reddit filed a lawsuit in Australia’s highest court seeking to overturn the country’s recently enacted social media ban for children. The San Francisco-based firm claims the law is unconstitutional because it infringes on Australia’s implied freedom of political communication. The lawsuit follows a case filed last month by Sydney-based rights group Digital Freedom Project. Reddit is also asking the High Court to rule that even if the legislation is valid, that Reddit is not like other social media platforms. The Australian eSafety Commissioner’s website provides a list of criteria for social media platforms subjected to the age restrictions, as well as a flow chart to help companies work out whether their platforms fall under the scope. The regulatory agency lists the platforms that fall under its age restrictions as Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, and YouTube. Sites that will not be subject to age restrictions are Discord, GitHub, Google Classroom, LEGO Play, Messenger, Pinterest, Roblox, Steam and Steam Chat, WhatsApp, and YouTube Kids. In documents filed in the High Court, Reddit argues it does not satisfy the first criteria of having “the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of enabling online social interaction between two or more end-users.” Reddit brought up definitions of the word social in its filing to make its case that its users mostly do not interact “in a social manner.” Reddit says that for an interaction to be social, it has to happen “because of a particular user’s relationship with or interest in another user as a person; indeed, in most cases the identity of a user on Reddit is not even known to other users.” The same could be said for other social platforms. The company said it does not promote real-time presence, friend requests, or activity feeds that drive ongoing engagement. Instead, it “operates as a collection of public fora arranged by subject.” Reddit says it merely “enables online interactions about the content that users post on the site. It facilitates knowledge sharing from one user to other users.” In a post accompanying the filing, Reddit admin LastBluejay said they are complying with the law and they are notably not against child safety measures or regulations, or trying to retain young users for business reasons. They wrote that the law carries “some serious privacy and political expression issues for everyone on the internet.” Platforms now face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32.9 million) if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove the accounts of those under the minimum age. View the full article

Cloudflare has often been described as some version of “the most important internet company you’ve never heard of.” But for the better part of 2025, cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince has been trying to change that. The company’s core business is to improve the performance and enhance the security of websites and online applications, protecting against malicious actors and routing web traffic through its data centers to optimize performance. “Six billion people pass through our network every single month,” Prince says. If Cloudflare is doing its job well, no one notices. But in July, Prince declared “Content Independence Day,” a broadside against the AI companies that, in his view, were unfairly scraping content to the detriment of the media industry. Cloudflare enabled clients that signed up for its “pay per crawl” service to block AI crawlers from accessing their content unless the companies—Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc.—paid for the privilege. This was catnip to the media, Fast Company included, which immediately started paying a lot more attention to Cloudflare. “I think this is the most interesting question over the next five years,” Prince says. “What is the future business model of the internet going to be?” Prince has a personal interest in this question. He was the editor of his school newspaper at Trinity College (the Connecticut one, not Dublin) and, in 2023, he and his wife purchased the Park Record, his hometown newspaper in Park City, Utah. “I appreciate the hard work of our journalistic team, who’s showing up at city council meetings, covering local politics. There has to be a business model to support that work,” he says. “That work is critically important if we’re going to have a functioning society.” This interview has been edited and condensed. Before Cloudflare, you cofounded Unspam Technologies, an email spam-checker service, and the open-source Project Honey Pot, which tracks and identifies spammers and malicious bots. There’s a common thread to your companies. They’re all about preventing something bad from happening, from spam to cyberattacks to unauthorized data scraping. What would a psychiatrist say about this? I guess I have a superhero fetish or something. You’re a protector. A protector, yeah. I went to law school, and so a lot of the ideas start with: Where is there a failure in society? And if we solve that problem in some way, we’ll be able to turn that into a business. And that’s worked, really. It didn’t work as well with the first spam company [Unspam], but at Cloudflare, it’s really driven everything that we’ve done. Amber Hakim What was your original mission for Cloudflare and how has it changed? Cloudflare started about 15 years ago, when [cofounder and COO] Michelle [Zatlyn] and I were business students. When people would ask us what our mission was, we’d say, “Our mission is to take advantage of this interesting market opportunity, make some money, and impress our parents.” Which is, I think, if anyone’s being honest, kind of why almost everything starts. We knew that in order to build out the network to service large customers, we needed data and we needed ways to build the models to figure out who the good guys were, who the bad guys were, and [how] to stop them. We had the bright idea that we would offer a free version of the service. We thought startups and individual developers would be the ones who would sign up. That’s not what happened at first. What happened was that every civil society organization, every nonprofit, every humanitarian organization signed up because they had small budgets but big security problems. So one day we realized that everyone who was doing some sort of good around the internet was relying on us. I remember going to lunch with a bunch of our engineers, and one of them said, “This is the first job where I feel like I’m actually helping build a better internet.” That resonated, and that phrase kept coming up. Finally someone said, “That’s Cloudflare’s mission: to help build a better internet.” And that’s what stuck. Cloudflare experienced a significant outage in mid-November after a routine infrastructure update. You corrected that problem within a few hours, but how do you mitigate these risks moving forward? Does the rise of AI affect the risk of these kinds of incidents? Any outage is unacceptable given Cloudflare’s role in supporting a large portion of the Internet, and we take full responsibility. We’re implementing additional safeguards to help prevent similar incidents in the future. Past outages have always led us to build new, more resilient systems. We’ll also remain transparent, as we’ve always been in these situations; we published a postmortem within about 12 hours to share what happened and what we’re learning. As the internet evolves, including the rise of AI, we continually assess new risks to ensure our systems remain resilient. Outages and bugs can happen—that’s the nature of software—but our customers’ trust is our top priority. Over the years, you’ve come under pressure to deny service to sites that are associated with hate speech and harassment, raising questions about Cloudflare’s role in content moderation. As you look ahead to the midterms and the 250th anniversary of America next year and then the national election in 2028, what concerns you most when it comes to misinformation and disinformation in the AI age? I think it’s funny that I’m sort of known as the content moderation guy. We’re 15 years old, and we’ve had basically three incidents [the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer and extremist forums 8chan and Kiwi Farms]. Essentially, 6 billion people pass through our network every single month. That’s the entire online population. That’s the scale that we have, and we have a responsibility to those people. So the question is, When you have that responsibility, what do you do? People have written about this for a long time. I actually went and dusted off a bunch of my philosophy books from college. Aristotle writes a lot about how governments build trust. We’re not a government, but we operate at a scale that would be inconceivable to Aristotle, and at some level have the same challenges around that. Fundamentally, Aristotle argued that there are three things you need for trust: transparency, consistency, and account­ability. Transparency: You need to know what the rules are. Consistency: The same rules should be applied the same way all the time. And then accountability: The people who apply the rules should be responsible to the rules themselves. In answer to your question, there’ve been a couple of big AI companies that have invited me to be on their boards. I’ve always said no, but I engage with them; 80% of the big AI companies are Cloudflare customers, so we have a relationship with them. I think they’re doing the right thing, and they’re going a million miles an hour. And, I mean, it’s so exciting. But we have to stop and think about: How do you build trust? I think I’m the largest nonacademic buyer of Aristotle’s Politics on Amazon. I’ve sent signed copies to every AI executive I’ve met, saying, “I know you don’t have a lot of time, but take the time to read this.” Let’s talk about how AI is eroding the traditional information ecosystem and what Cloudflare is trying to do about it. Twenty-seven years ago, a fateful thing happened: Google launched and did two things. One, it built a better search engine. Even more importantly, it built the first business model and monetization model for the internet. It helps generate traffic, and then it provides you the tools to make that traffic profitable. That has funded the growth of the vast majority of the internet. We’ve gone through some platform shifts along the way. We went to social, but social was still driven by traffic. What’s going on right now—that I think people don’t completely understand—is we’re going through another platform shift. It’s a bigger platform shift than we’ve ever seen before, which is that the way you’re going to consume information is through AI. With a search engine, you did a search, it returned 10 blue links, and then the search wasn’t over. Google was a treasure map, which generated traffic to Fast Company or whoever; behind that treasure map, you could monetize it. But we know that’s not the end state because sci-fi tells us it’s not, and sci-fi often predicts the future pretty well. If you think about any movie that has a helpful robot in it, if you say, “I would like a recipe for chocolate chip cookies,” the robot doesn’t come back and say, “Here are 10 links, go follow ’em and maybe you’ll find a nice recipe.” It says, “Here’s the recipe.” And that’s exactly what ChatGPT, Anthropic, and increasingly Google with AI Overviews are doing. And make no mistake: For 95% of users, 95% of the time, that’s a better user interface. That user interface is going to win and is going to be the new platform by which we consume information. Which is quite a problem for any entity—not just the media—that wants to be found on the internet. Right. Instead of going and generating traffic, following a treasure map, and getting to Fast Company, now you’re reading a derivative that’s been summarized and maybe combined with other sources, taking the Fast Company information and putting it in this new ChatGPT interface. And that’s a problem because the entire internet has been built on traffic, and that traffic is going away. So no matter what, as the interface of the internet changes, the business model of the internet is going to change. You have a solution for this: the pay-per-crawl model. This business proposition theoretically enables those content providers to continue to provide that content, and be compensated for it, in a way that won’t compromise this new and—I agree—better user experience. How would this work? I’m optimistic because both sides need each other. There are really three things you need to be an AI company, two of which are very expensive and one of which has largely been free. The two things that are expensive are going to get cheaper and cheaper, and the thing that has been free is going to be what differentiates AI companies, which they’re going to be willing to pay more for. So, what are the three things? The first is chips, GPUs, but it’s silicon, right? There’s never been a time in history where a silicon shortage doesn’t turn into a silicon glut. There’s a bunch of sand in the world. GPUs will increasingly become commodities, the same way that CPUs and all other silicon have. The second is talent. Five years ago, if you were getting a PhD in AI, you were kind of a laughingstock. It was thought of as this dead industry that was hot in the ’70s and ’80s, and then it became the place where the sort of weird computer science professor went and promised that tomorrow AI was coming. Well, it turns out they were right. They just had the time frame wrong. But now it’s gone from this backwater to every university spinning up a department. I don’t think there will be a glut of AI researchers, but I think the days of billion-dollar salaries at Meta—that won’t last forever because the education markets are efficient. The last bit is content. In almost all these cases, unique content ends up being the thing that differentiates media over time. YouTube, for example, started out as a technology play. It could deliver streaming video cheaper, faster than everybody else, and that’s why it won. As the rest of the industry caught up with the technology, YouTube had to differentiate. First it was discoverability with search, now it’s with unique content that you can only get on YouTube. I think the AI companies are going to be very, very similar, which means they’re going to need that information that only you [media companies] have. So the key—if you’re a media company today—is to stop the free buffet: Only you have the review of the hot restaurant in Tuscaloosa, which is unique content that’s going to be incredibly precious and incredibly essential. So step one is to say: “We’re not going to give every AI company our content for free. We’re going to say, ‘You’re blocked.’” That’s what we at Cloudflare have been helping with. And then how the market develops after that, we have some ideas, but I’m not quite sure. What I’m confident in—and what the data so far bears out—is that the more unique, the more quirky, the more local your content is, the more valuable it is to AI companies, and the more likely it is that there’s going to be a healthy and sustainable marketplace that exists for you to be able to sell that content. I think that this can be pie-expanding and that we might be on the doorstep of a golden age of media. I love the optimism, and I want to believe it, for obvious reasons. To put a fine point on the mechanics of it, the publisher signs up; Cloudflare blocks the AI crawlers from accessing their content; the publisher sets the price for the AI company to access that content and get paid; and you guys get a cut. That’s pretty much how that works? We have a bunch of different theories of how this could work [over time]. It could be micropayments. That’s what you’ve described, where the publisher sets a price, and then whenever an agent or a crawler or scraper—those are all synonyms—tries to access that content, they pay a fraction of a penny or a few pennies. It could be something that’s closer to a Spotify model, where maybe all the AI companies contribute to a pool and that pool gets aggregated and then [distributed]. In Spotify’s case, it’s based on how many minutes get listened to. Exactly what the business model looks like, it’s going to take some time to mature. If you think about music, we ended up with Spotify, but in order to get to Spotify, we started with Napster, which was sort of anything goes, and then Steve Jobs steps onstage and launches iTunes, 99 cents a song, which was revolutionary at the time, but that wasn’t the business model that eventually won. The business model that eventually won was something closer to all you can eat for $10 a month. My hunch is that we’re not going to get the business model right the first time around, and it may not be Cloudflare that figures it out. There are lots of people who are thinking about this problem. But no matter what, we have to start with scarcity. We’ve got to close the spigot. And again, this isn’t just about media. The same challenges are coming for e-commerce companies, travel companies—anyone who sells anything online. I’ve been struck by how many of the people who are calling us are saying, “Hey, this is a real problem for us too.” Big financial institutions where they’re like, “No, no, no, the AI companies are disintermediating us as well, and they’re creating a problem where our research teams aren’t getting compensated as much.” I mean, what’s the future for a Booking.com in an AI-powered world? What’s the future for anyone who in the past aggregated a bunch of supply together? What is a brand? What is it worth if it’s just agents that are interacting and you don’t have humans that are there? What I think people don’t fully appreciate is that this is a more radical transformation than it was to go to mobile. Fundamentally, we’re going to have to reinvent how we interact and that’s going to impact everyone. Let’s close by going beyond the information ecosystem. Something I struggle with is how seriously to take the existential threat of AI—not to revenue models, but humanity itself. Very smart people argue very different ends of the spectrum, from the terrifying vision of Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose book on the dangers of a superhuman AI is called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, to the much more sanguine outlook of folks like Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist. Where do you fall on this spectrum? I’m on the more optimistic side. More on Yann’s side. But I will say that I feel like this is a distraction from the real problems [we’re facing now]. Is there going to be a Terminator moment? We’ve got a lot of stuff to figure out before that. Sure, we can have cocktail party conversations about whether this is going to end the world or lead to kind of a utopia. But don’t let that conversation distract from the more important, more immediate conversation, which is who’s going to pay journalists going forward? [Laughs] I agree: Nothing could be more important than that. View the full article

Many Americans are likely to see massive changes to their taxes in 2026, especially seniors. That’s largely due to President Donald The President’s so-called big, beautiful bill, a massive 940-page bill signed into law over the summer that includes an array of new tax write-offs but also fails to renew some previous deductions from the Biden administration. One change is a $6,000 deduction for seniors. Here’s what to know. Who qualifies for the new senior tax deduction? The President’s tax and spending law introduced a $6,000 deduction for qualifying seniors ages 65 and older, on top of the current additional standard deduction for seniors under existing law. Taxpayers must attain age 65 on or before the last day of the taxable year to be eligible. The $6,000 senior deduction (or $12,000 for a married couple where both spouses qualify) applies to an eligible individual earning up to $75,000 in modified adjusted gross income, or up to $150,000 for joint filers. It is available for both itemizing and non-itemizing taxpayers. Taxpayers must include the Social Security number of the qualifying individual(s) on the return, and file jointly if married, to claim the deduction. How does the deduction impact Social Security? The deduction is meant to offset upcoming federal taxes on Social Security payments. Older taxpayers could be taxed up to 85% based on their “combined income,” which is calculated based on a taxpayer’s adjusted gross income plus half of their Social Security benefits, according to CNBC. Anything else to know? According to the IRS, the deduction expires at the end of 2028, right before The President leaves office, making this a temporary deduction effective for tax years 2025 through 2028. View the full article

It’s rare that your esoteric, impossible-to-pronounce, decade-long research project becomes a technology so crucial to national security that the President of the United States calls it out from the White House. But that’s exactly what happened to Dr. Eric Wengrowski, the CEO of Steg AI. Wengrowski spent nearly a decade of his life advancing steganography, a deeply-technical method for tracking images as they travel through the machinery of the modern Internet, as the focus of his PHD at Rutgers University. After earning his degree, Wengrowki and a team of co-founders rolled his tech into a small startup. For several years, the company grew, but mostly toiled away in relative obscurity. Then, AI image generators exploded into the public’s consciousness. And for Wengrowki and Steg’s team, everything blew up. Durable Marks I met Wengrowski during the pandemic, when we both volunteered to help a media industry trade group rapidly pivot its yearly in-person conference to a Zoom format. For years, I only knew Wengrowski as a cheerful, highly-intelligent floating head in my video chat window. I even interviewed him for my YouTube channel from the COVID-safe confines of our respective home offices. When I finally met him in person in San Francisco in 2023, I discovered that he’s actually a towering 6 feet 3 inches tall. It was one of those iconic pandemic professional meet-cute moments people joke about, where you find that someone you’ve virtually “known” for years looks totally different in person. What wasn’t different about Wengrowski in real life was his intense interest and passion for his chosen field. Steganography (pronounced STEG-an-ography, like the “Steg” in “stegasaurus”) is a technique for embedding an invisible code into the pixels of an image. Basically, a complex algorithm subtly changes selected pixels in a way that’s invisible to human perception. Images look no different after being marked with a steganographic watermark than they did before. Yet, when special software looks at the marked image, the unique code embedded in its pixels comes through clearly to the software’s computerized eyes. The presence of that code lets companies like Steg track a marked image back to its source with extremely high accuracy. Crucially, because the code is embedded directly into the image’s pixels, it’s also nearly impossible to remove. Bad actors can easily crop out a physical watermark from an image’s pixels, or use a tool like Photoshop to scrub data from the image’s IPTC or EXIF metadata fields. In contrast, because steganographic watermarks live directly in the visual part of the image itself, they travel with the image no matter where it goes. And they survive the most common image-related funny business that nefarious people might try to use to remove them. All steganographic watermarks can survive things that amateur image thieves might try, like aggressive cropping, or even the common practice of taking a screenshot of an image in order to stealthily steal it. But Steg’s tech goes even further, Wengrowski told me in an interview. If for example you load an image watermarked by the company’s tech on your computer screen, take out your phone, and photograph the physical screen, the company’s watermarks will survive in the new image on your phone. Your nefarious copy will remain traceable to the original with Steg’s tech. AI Explodes Everything When Wengrowski originally developed Steg’s technology, he knew it was cool. And he had a hunch that it was useful for something. But exactly what that “something” might involve wasn’t originally clear. In the early days, Steg slowly grew by helping companies with legal compliance and image protection. Steg would embed its watermarks in copyrighted images, for example, and then trace where those images ended up. If someone stole and used a copyrighted image without permission, Steg’s embedded watermarks could be used to prove the theft and could help lead to a legal settlement. The company also worked to safeguard things like pre-release images of a new product. If a company sent top-secret images of a new phone (marked with Steg’s tech) to a supplier, for example, and those photos suddenly ended up as a leak in TechCrunch, the company could trace the embedded watermark and know who to blame. That was enough for Steg to grow slowly and steadily improve its tech. Then, in 2022, everything changed. All at once, OpenAI released its Davinci image generation model (remember the avocado chairs?), Midjourney rolled out its then world-beating image generation tech, and Google leaned into image generation within its Bard and later Gemini AI models. Almost overnight, the world was awash in AI images. And very quickly, they became so realistic that everyday people had trouble knowing what was real and what was AI generated. This presented a huge problem for AI companies. They wanted to release their tech far and wide. But they fretted about the potential societal (and legal) consequences if their images were used for deepfakes to deceive people, or even to sway elections. And more broadly, anyone with an interest in the veracity of images suddenly had a huge problem knowing what was real and what was AI-generated. Everything from news reporting to war crimes tribunals rely on imagery as evidence. What happens when that imagery can be quickly and cheaply spun up by an AI algorithm? Yes, AI companies can physically watermark their images (such as by adding a little Gemini star in the lower right), or embed “Generated by AI” markers in their images’ metadata. But again, removing those markers is child’s play for even the least sophisticated scammers. With AI image generators storming the world, the origins and veracity of every image online was suddenly called into question. Thank You, Mr. President That led to a bizarre situation for any deeply technical person pursuing their random, highly-specific passion in relative obscurity. On October 30, 2023, Wengrowki woke to find that then-president Joe Biden had issued an executive order specifically calling out AI watermarking tech, highlighting it as a crucial factor in national security, and ordering all Federal agencies to use it. Specifically, Biden’s order mandated “embedding information” that is “difficult to remove, into outputs created by AI — including into outputs such as photos, videos, audio clips, or text — for the purposes of verifying the authenticity of the output or the identity or characteristics of its provenance, modifications, or conveyance.” The order also specifically called for the rapid development of “science-back standards and techniques for…labeling synthetic content, such as using watermarking.” Biden framed this as mission critical–the term “national security” appears 36 times in his executive order. Basically, Biden was mandating the use of tech like steganography, and specifically calling it out from the White House. When that happened, Wengrowski told me, everything went crazy. Since the order–and the corresponding growth of AI imagery more broadly–Steg’s revenue has increased 500%. Moreover, protecting the integrity of images appears bipartisan–Wengrowski told me that AI watermarking has been embraced by both the Biden and The President administrations. In an extremely tight AI job market where top researchers can command eight-figure salaries, Steg now employs five machine learning PHDs devoted to improving its technologies. Although Wengrowski couldn’t share his customer list on the record, I can vouch for the fact that it’s wildly impressive. While keeping its legal compliance and image tracing side alive, Steg has expanded aggressively into the world of cybersecurity and AI image watermarking. For AI companies that want to ply their trade without ruining humanity’s trust in visual media, Steg’s tech is a lifeline. Companies can embed a steganographic watermark directly into AI images the moment they’re generated. For the life of an image, the code travels with it, even if it’s reposted, edited or altered. If that image is used as a deepfake or used to manipulate or harass people, the company that created it can quickly read the embedded steganographic watermark in its pixels, definitively label it as a fake, and quickly dispel any damage the image might cause. If you’ve created an AI image in the last year, you’ve almost certainly used steganography without even knowing it. Most major AI image generation companies now use the tech. Many use Steg’s. And in a world where AI images are so good that they easily fool most detectors (and even trained forensic image analysts), many companies see steganography as the only bulwark against AI’s total destruction of any truth still left in the visual world. A Wild Ride For Steg and for Wengrowski personally, it’s been a wild ride. Right as Biden issued his order, Wengrowski became a father, and now juggles the everyday struggles and joys of a young parent with the rigors of such things as constant travel and testifying in state legislatures. The rise of AI imagery has also revealed some counterintuitive challenges. When Steg first launched, Wengrowski told me, he expected that people would yearn for a technology that could prove whether an image was real or fake. In reality, he was surprised by how little people care. Many people are fine with seeing AI generated content, as long as it’s funny, informative or otherwise engaging. Whether or not it’s properly labeled as AI matters very little to them. More pointedly, it matters very little to the social media platforms that disseminate the content, too. Again, though, for the companies who create that content–and who face legal and reputational risk if their tech runs awry–it matters an awful lot. Wengrowski tells me that Steg is continuing to improve its tech, making its watermarks even harder to beat. The company is also entering the emerging field of “poisoning.” New software that Wengrowki showed me invisibly alters images in ways that trip up common deepfake algorithms. If someone tries to turn the “poisoned” image into a deepfake, it comes out garbled and illegible. The tech works both when images are used for training deepfake models, and when a bad actor tries to create a deepfake of a specific person. The idea is that an influencer, for example, could upload “poisoned” images of themselves to their social media. The images would look normal to human users. But if someone tried to deepfake the influencer, the poisoned images would thwart them. Wengrowki told me he’s especially excited to use the tech to help protect young influencers and teens in general, who are often targeted in abhorrent cyberbullying attacks involving explicit deepfakes. More broadly, though, Wengrowski’s story is an inspiring one for anyone grinding away on an as-yet unproven technology, convinced of its value but unsure whether the world will ever see their work. Reflecting on Steg’s success, Wengrowski acknowledged that “It’s probably best to start a business with a clear plan and an understanding of product/market fit.” But in his words, “There’s also something to be said for knowing a technology is cool, continually improving it even if you have no idea where that will lead, and just trusting that eventually it will have some value for the world.” In Steg’s case, that’s indeed been a winning formula. View the full article

Figure strengthens case for BoE rate cut this weekView the full article