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The meteoric rise in artificial intelligence and its usage in nearly every facet of our daily life is leaving a profound mark on the job market. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, more than 76,000 jobs were lost to automation, as AI-powered analytics platforms replaced junior data analysts. Nearly 40% of employers expect to cut staff in areas where AI can handle tasks, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025. Now, with the rise of generative AI’s successor, agentic AI, many in the tech industry fear that AI will soon claim coding and tech jobs. After all, if AI-powered coding assistants can write, debug, and refactor code in seconds, what use is there for human developers? But leaders inside OpenAI see the moment in almost opposite terms. Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead for Codex at OpenAI, argues that coding isn’t dying—it’s evolving. Rather than rendering developers obsolete, he believes AI is transforming coding by amplifying human strengths in creativity, reasoning, and problem-solving. “If you look at today’s AI tools, it’s clear they’re far from perfect. There’s still so much capacity in the world to absorb better, more powerful, and more delightful software,” Sottiaux says. These coding tools, he says, are radically reshaping the learning curve for young coders. “I see new graduates on my team picking up programming at a speed I haven’t witnessed before.” Developers are spending less time on line-by-line debugging, freeing them up to what should be built, how systems should be structured, and what kind of impact software can have in the world. OpenAI predicts that human roles will increasingly shift toward oversight and orchestration, with AI serving as both collaborator and accelerator: handling background work, surfacing errors early, and enabling engineers to explore ideas faster. OpenAI recently introduced an upgraded version of Codex, a specialized model designed for the long, messy work of coding and software development. Now powered by GPT-5, Codex can adapt its reasoning effort based on task complexity. It can breeze through a simple bug fix in seconds, or run for more than seven hours to reengineer an entire subsystem. “That balance between being fast on simple tasks and going deep on harder problems is a distinctive trait of GPT-5-Codex,” Sottiaux added. “The quality of its code reviews and its ability to think dynamically over longer periods are key differentiators. GPT-5-Codex also pushes further on code quality overall.” Now available in the Codex Responses API, and for use through Codex in various environments, including IDE extensions, terminal, web, and GitHub integrations, it can review an entire codebase, execute unit tests, validate dependencies, and even catch subtle vulnerabilities before they become production headaches. “Codex was built to work alongside developers, and humans still stay in control,” Sottiaux explains. “For newcomers, it’s a collaborator that can help explore languages like Rust, navigate codebases, and grasp core concepts much faster. For senior developers, it provides leverage at a higher level. By setting the right context, guardrails, and structure, they can take on more ambitious problems and ultimately achieve more impact than before.” OpenAI isn’t the only big player arguing that AI isn’t the IT job killer many feared. According to Google’s latest DORA: State of AI-assisted Software Development report, 90% of tech professionals now use AI in their workflows, highlighting a 14% jump from last year, for coding, testing, and security reviews. Likewise, Udemy, one of the world’s largest online learning platforms, reports that the rise of AI integrations within enterprises has sparked a surge in enrollment for AI-related courses. “Every minute, five to eight people sign up for a generative AI class on our platform,” Hugo Sarrazin, CEO of Udemy, tells Fast Company. “Designing code requires critical thinking, which is fundamentally a human trait. Of course, AI will generate a lot more software, but you still need analysis, judgment, and testing. That’s why it’s so important to teach the foundations of coding and development, whether or not someone ends up relying heavily on AI.” Coding as a foundation Skeptics often warn that due to AI-driven automation, coding roles will disappear,leaving fewer opportunities for junior developers to gain experience. That’s not how OpenAI sees it. “Some will use AI to go deep, building technical expertise at an accelerated pace,” Sottiaux says. “At OpenAI, more of the effort is shifting into code review and planning, while much of the coding itself is automated. Software engineering is about making an impact, and this shift allows us to create more in the same amount of time.” He added that coding literacy remains vital for training the next generation of engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs and stressed that the shift to AI-augmented development is a natural progression. In practice, many of OpenAI’s customers are actively deploying Codex in production. Popular language-learning app Duolingo, for example, uses it to review back-end Python code for the platform. In benchmark tests, the company found that Codex’s upgraded version was the only system able to catch subtle backward-compatibility issues and consistently flagged bugs that other automated reviewers overlooked. On a major software engineering test called SWE-bench Verified, GPT-5 Codex beat its predecessor by a wide margin. It solved more than half of the code-fixing challenges it was given, compared with about one-third for the earlier GPT 4.5 integrated model. For simple bugs, Codex used far fewer resources, cutting the workload by 94%. And when faced with tougher problems, it didn’t just work faster; it applied roughly twice the level of reasoning to reach a solution. Likewise, companies including Gap Inc., Vanta, and Virgin Atlantic are also using Codex for specific applications. “During planning and development, the Extension can be tuned to the right level of reasoning (the ability to solve problems), and its ability to utilize Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows the right tools to be called directly from engineers’ IDEs,” Richard Masters, VP Data & AI at Virgin Atlantic, said in a statement. Surviving the AI era The shifts suggest that coding is becoming just one part of a much larger transformation, as AI tools weave themselves into both work and daily life. Jan Chorowski, CTO at Pathway and a former deep learning researcher at Google who worked alongside Geoff Hinton at Google Brain, says coding is one of the few areas where AI is already delivering on its promise. While workflows are undeniably shifting as teams look to maximize productivity—“Who looks up Stack Overflow by hand these days?” he notes. Chorowski says that while AI enables a deep understanding of coding, from low-level machine tasks to grasping entire problem domains, it often falls short on the basic nuances that human developers handle instinctively. “The key differentiation we have today, as humans, is the ability to come up with new ideas that are well-grounded in a specific context. For developing software, the required context is particularly broad,” he explained. “AI lacks such contextualized judgement. Changing this is the challenge for the next decade. An important question is if AI tools will reach the deep understanding to be able to innovate and go beyond the capabilities of current Codex models.” OpenAI maintains that coding holds a unique place: it cultivates reasoning, the very skill on which AI itself depends. If that vision proves true, the story of coding will not be one of extinction but of expansion—into a future where software is crafted through the partnership of human creativity and machine intelligence. “There’s never been a better time to learn, especially for students and recent graduates,” says Sottiaux. “I’d recommend picking a coding agent and starting a couple of projects. You can even use ChatGPT to generate creative ideas for what to build. Then start learning, engage with curiosity, and treat the agent as a true collaborator.” View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. Maybe you tend to study the old-school way: sit down, break out a highlighter and pen combo, memorize your notes, and pray you retain it all until test time. There are certainly benefits to handwriting and highlighting your notes, but there are also some great apps out there that can help you study more effectively. Yes, your tech devices can certainly be a distraction, but why not let them help you instead? If you need to schedule your studying: My Study Life Credit: My Study Life My Study Life promises you’ll “never forget a class or assignment again” and offers schedulers, task to-do lists, and reminders to that end, plus a number of other features, like a focus timer that lets you tap into the productivity-enhancing power of the Pomodoro method. The app is available on iOS, Android, and your desktop browser so you can use it no matter where you are. The scheduler even works if you have your classes on alternating weeks. The free version of My Study Life works perfectly fine if all you need is the scheduling, but for $4.99 per month or $29.99 per year (after a free one-week trial), you can access additional features like grade tracking, widgets, and dark mode. Read my full review here. If you study best with flashcards: Quizlet Credit: Quizlet If you’re only using Quizlet for low-key cheating on your homework (and yes, your teacher probably already knows), you’re not maximizing its potential. Quizlet is a study tool that has been around a long time and works on iOS, Android, and your desktop browser. It helps you make flashcards and practice tests, plus offers games and various ways to study and review your materials. You can make your materials public to help other people in similar classes and, in turn, can search their public materials for ones that will help you, too—which is how most people come to be familiar with it, as students have uploaded thousands of quizzes over the years. Your flashcard sets and quizzes are customizable, so you can add notes, images, or audio if you need to. Flashcards are, indisputably, one of the best ways to learn, so let this app make it easier for you. It’s free to use, but if you upgrade ($7.99/month), you also get access to different question types and practice tests. Read my full review here. If you need to take notes on lectures: Otter Credit: Otter Otter, which has a pretty extensive free version, is a dictation program that takes notes for you. Commonly used by journalists or people who need to transcribe interviews, it’s also great for students whose professors give long lectures full of important info. I've used it in both scenarios for years. Once you assign a name to a certain speaker, the software will always recognize their voice going forward. You can highlight passages, edit the text in the event the software gets something wrong, and share transcripts with anyone, even if they don’t use Otter. With the free version, you can link it up with Zoom or Google Meet, too, so it’s helpful for online classes, and you can get 300 monthly transcription minutes (with 30 minutes per session) before having to upgrade to Pro for $8.33 per month. A recent update has added a "summary" feature that gives you a brief overview of main topics, which can help you more easily focus on what to study when you're reviewing the lecture later. If you take lots of notes: Notion Credit: Notion In an older version of this post, I declared Evernote the best note-taking and -organizing app, but then I tested and reviewed Notion, which I ultimately concluded is better in a head-to-head battle. Available on iOS, Android, and your web browser, Notion is an all-in-one app that can give you an assist wherever you are. It keeps notes, ideas, schedules, and more all in one place—and it's free. Its most useful feature is its pre-made templates, which can help you in school and beyond. You can choose between templates for life, work, or school, then browse ones called things like, "project roadmap," "finance tracker," and "assignment tracker with automations." On top of that, it organizes notes into notebooks and folders, making it ideal for jotting down key information in class. To create mind maps: Xmind Credit: Xmind A mind map is a hierarchical diagram that connects related concepts and makes it clear how they all tie into one another. You can use them for productivity, but they're also useful as study tools, especially if you like to visualize how materials and ideas fit together or are outlining a study plan using the chunking method. You can make them by hand on paper, but that's tedious. I recommend an app, instead. Specifically, I recommend Xmind, which speeds up the process of creating visual notes by giving you the tools to input arrows to branch off your main idea into related tasks and concepts. It comes pre-loaded with plenty of templates, so if graphic design isn't your passion, that's not a problem. A lot of its basic features are free, but you'll pay between $10 or $15 a month if you want more colors or the ability to add equations, links, tasks, and attachments to maps. Finally, I appreciate that it can be used via browser or app, making it easy to type into and rearrange your map. Read my full review here. My favorite: NotebookLM Credit: Google Finally, I can't review digital studying tools without mentioning Google's NotebookLM, a free AI resource that only pulls from materials you provide. I use it all the time. You create notebooks by uploading PDFs, URLs, or blocks of text, then use it like you would any chatbot, asking questions which the AI answers by reviewing the content you provided. Its answers contain links to the exact sections it found them in, so you can ask things like, "What does the author say about the history of the region?" Then, you'll get a summary, plus the link to where that information came from, so you can read it yourself. It makes sorting through a hefty amount of readings a cakewalk. It can also create a fake "podcast" for you to listen to. In those, two voices discuss the content of your notebook conversationally, just like real podcast hosts would. If you are an auditory learner, this is a game changer. Recent updates have enabled features that create quizzes and flashcards, too. It's available on iOS and Android, as well as your web browser. Read my full review here. View the full article

President Donald The President signed an executive order on Thursday declaring that his plan to sell Chinese-owned TikTok’s U.S. operations to U.S. and global investors will address the national security requirements in a 2024 law. The new U.S. company will be valued at around $14 billion, Vice President JD Vance said, putting a price tag on the popular short video app far below some analyst estimates. The President on Thursday delayed until January 20 enforcement of the law that bans the app unless its Chinese owners sell it amid efforts to extract TikTok’s U.S. assets from the global platform, line up American and other investors, and win approval from the Chinese government. The publication of the executive order shows The President is making progress on the sale of TikTok’s U.S. assets, but numerous details need to be fleshed out, including how the U.S. entity would use TikTok’s most important asset, its recommendation algorithm. “There was some resistance on the Chinese side, but the fundamental thing that we wanted to accomplish is that we wanted to keep TikTok operating, but we also wanted to make sure that we protected Americans’ data privacy as required by law,” Vance told reporters at an Oval Office briefing. The President’s order says the algorithm will be retrained and monitored by the U.S. company’s security partners, and operation of the algorithm will be under the control of the new joint venture. The President said Chinese President Xi Jinping had indicated approval of the plans. “I spoke with President Xi,” The President said. “We had a good talk, I told him what we were doing and he said go ahead with it.” China’s foreign ministry on Friday reiterated that the government “respects the will of enterprises and welcomes them to conduct business negotiations on the basis of market rules to reach solutions that comply with Chinese laws and regulations and achieve a balance of interests.” “We hope the U.S. will provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies investing in the United States,” ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told a press conference, without giving further details of the deal. TikTok did not immediately comment on The President’s action. The President has credited TikTok, which has 170 million U.S. users, with helping him win reelection last year. The President has 15 million followers on his personal TikTok account. The White House also launched an official TikTok account last month. “This is going to be American-operated all the way,” The President said. He said that Michael Dell, the founder, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies; Rupert Murdoch, the chairman emeritus of Fox News owner Fox Corp and newspaper publisher News Corp, and “probably four or five absolutely world-class investors” would be part of the deal. The White House did not discuss how it came up with the $14 billion valuation. TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, currently values itself at more than $330 billion, according to its new employee share buyback plan. TikTok contributes a small percentage of the company’s total revenue. According to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, TikTok was estimated to be worth $30 billion to $40 billion without the algorithm as of April 2025. Alan Rozenshtein, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said the executive order left unanswered questions, including whether ByteDance would still control the algorithm. “The problem is that the president has certified the deal, but he has not provided a lot of information on the algorithm,” he said. Chinese media on Friday also painted a different picture of the TikTok agreement, suggesting ByteDance would continue to play a major or operational role. ByteDance will set up a new U.S. company as part of the restructuring of TikTok’s U.S. operations, Chinese media outlet LatePost reported, citing sources. The new company to be set up by ByteDance will be responsible for e-commerce, branding operations and interconnection with international operations, the report said. The report also said the joint venture, as described by the White House and valued at $14 billion, would be responsible for U.S. digital security, safeguarding content and software as well as related local businesses. Another Chinese financial magazine, Caixin, also reported, citing people close to the deal, that ByteDance planned to set up a TikTok U.S. entity that will receive some revenue from the new TikTok joint venture. Both reports were taken down from their respective websites later on Friday. The White House and ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ORACLE AND OTHERS TO OWN TIKTOK IN THE U.S. A group of three investors, including Oracle and private-equity firm Silver Lake, will take a roughly 50% stake in TikTok U.S., two sources familiar with the deal said on Thursday. A group of existing shareholders in ByteDance will hold a roughly 30% stake, one of the sources said. Among ByteDance’s current investors are Susquehanna International Group, General Atlantic and KKR. Given intense investor interest in TikTok, the 50% stake may still shift, the source noted. Oracle and Silver Lake did not immediately respond to requests for comment. CNBC reported earlier, citing sources, that Abu Dhabi-based MGX, Oracle and Silver Lake are poised to be the main investors in TikTok U.S. with a combined 45% ownership. MGX did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the CNBC report. Republican House of Representatives lawmakers said they wanted to see more details of the deal to ensure it represented a clean break with China. “As the details are finalized, we must ensure this deal protects American users from the influence and surveillance of CCP-aligned groups,” said U.S. Representatives Brett Guthrie, Gus Bilirakis and Richard Hudson. The agreement on TikTok’s U.S. operations includes the appointment by ByteDance of one of seven board members for the new entity, with Americans holding the other six seats, a senior White House official said on Saturday. ByteDance would hold less than 20% in TikTok U.S. to comply with requirements set out in the 2024 law that ordered it shut down by January 2025 if ByteDance did not sell its U.S. assets. Additional reporting by Beijing newsroom and Brenda Goh —Jeff Mason, Dawn Chmielewski and David Shepardson, Reuters View the full article

Electoral Commission says it has found ‘no evidence of any other potential offences’View the full article

Fans of Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant will be disappointed to learn that the beloved restaurant and pub chain has abruptly closed all of its locations across multiple states. Here’s why and what you need to know about Iron Hill Brewery’s closure. What’s happened? Yesterday (Thursday, September 25), Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant made several announcements. Effective immediately, it was closing the doors to all its locations, the company revealed. Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant was founded nearly 30 years ago. Its first location opened in Newark, Delaware, in 1996. Since then, it had expanded to multiple states along the country’s eastern coast, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and South Carolina. According to Nation’s Restaurant News, Iron Hill Brewery had 19 locations as of the end of 2024. That same year, the company’s sales increased by 4% to $104.1 million. Yet the modest sales growth apparently wasn’t enough to keep Iron Hill Brewery going. Last week, the company announced it was closing three of its locations, including its original Newark location. At the time, an Iron Hill Brewery spokesperson told NRN that the three closures were “part of the company’s ongoing efforts to adapt to a changing business landscape while focusing on strengthening its long-term growth and success.” But just a week later, Iron Hill shocked customers and employees by announcing that its remaining 16 locations would be closing as well. Iron Hill Brewery notifies employees of bankruptcy via email On September 25, Iron Hill Brewery sent an email to employees notifying them that the business would be closing all locations for good. In the email, which was obtained by the website Breweries in PA and also shared on social media forums like Reddit, Iron Hill’s leadership said, “It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the closure of all our restaurant locations effective immediately.” The email went on to explain that it had made the “difficult decision to file for bankruptcy.” It cited “ongoing financial challenges” as the reason for its decision. The company went on to explain that it had been trying to secure new funding to keep the chain going, but presumably, that funding was not achieved. The same day of the email to employees, Iron Hill posted a brief notice on its website, letting customers know of the developments. USA Today reports that this same notice was posted to the doors of some of the shuttered Iron Hill restaurants. “After many wonderful years serving our communities, all Iron Hill locations have closed,” the notice read in part. “It has been our pleasure to serve you, and we are deeply grateful for your support, friendship, and loyalty over the years.” The notice ends by noting that the company “sincerely hope[s] to return in the future.” Full list of closed Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant locations With the three closures on September 18, and the additional 16 closures on September 25, Iron Hill Brewery has now closed all of its 19 locations. Here is the list of those locations: Delaware Newark Rehoboth Beach Wilmington Georgia Atlanta New Jersey Maple Shade Voorhees Pennsylvania Chestnut Hill Exton Hershey Huntingdon Valley Lancaster Lehigh Valley Media Newtown North Wales Philadelphia West Chester South Carolina Columbia Greenville A busy time for restaurant bankruptcies Unfortunately, Iron Hill Brewery isn’t the only restaurant chain that has announced bankruptcy recently. Since 2024, several established chains have announced bankruptcy plans, including Buca di Beppo, Hooters, Red Lobster, Roti, BurgerFi, and Tijuana Flats. Many of these bankruptcies have resulted in store closures. While each company will have different factors influencing its decision to file for bankruptcy, many restaurant chains have been experiencing similar problems in recent years, which often contribute to their bankruptcy. These problems include higher costs, inflationary pressures that lead diners to cut back on their discretionary spending, and foot traffic that has yet to recover to its pre-pandemic norms. View the full article

WhatsApp is stepping up its game in cross-language communication with the launch of a new message translation feature designed to enhance user connectivity. With over 3 billion users globally, the messaging platform is taking strides to simplify communication in a multicultural landscape—a significant boon for small business owners navigating the complexities of serving diverse clientele. Imagine chatting with an international customer or partner without the fear of miscommunication. With WhatsApp’s latest update, users can now translate messages within the app, creating smoother and more efficient interactions that bridge language barriers. This feature allows small businesses to expand their reach—targeting potential clients in markets they’ve previously found challenging to engage with due to language differences. To use the feature, small business owners can simply long-press a message in a chat and select “Translate.” Users have the option to choose their target language, facilitating real-time communication that can be saved for future reference. Notably, this functionality extends to 1:1 chats, group discussions, and Channel updates, allowing teams to collaborate more effectively. For Android users, there’s even more flexibility. They can enable automatic translation for an entire chat thread, meaning all incoming messages will be translated automatically. This capability is particularly useful for busy entrepreneurs who juggle multiple conversations, ensuring no message is lost in translation. In a world where privacy is paramount, WhatsApp has designed this translation feature with user security in mind. All translations take place directly on users’ devices, meaning that WhatsApp itself does not have visibility into translations, further solidifying user trust. Currently, the feature is gradually rolling out to both Android and iPhone users, initially offering translations in select languages. Android users can look forward to functionality in six languages—English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic—while iPhone users benefit from translations in over 19 languages. This broad language support opens avenues for business owners looking to connect with clients from varied linguistic backgrounds. Quotes from WhatsApp highlight the intent behind this new offering: “We hope this feature helps break down language barriers and allows users to connect more deeply.” For small businesses striving to establish a foothold in different markets, this enhancement could serve as a crucial tool. However, it’s essential for small business owners to consider potential challenges that accompany this new utility. While the convenience of instant translations is attractive, users should also be aware of the nuances that come with language translation. Automated translations may not always convey the intended tone or context, potentially leading to misunderstandings. Proper training on how to use the feature effectively and awareness of its limitations will be vital for maximizing its potential. Additionally, as the feature rolls out, users might face temporary hiccups in functionality or limited language options. Keeping an eye on updates from WhatsApp will be crucial in ensuring the best possible experience. In summary, WhatsApp’s introduction of message translations signifies a significant advancement for small businesses looking to deepen their communication and broaden their markets. By taking advantage of this tool, business owners can enhance customer engagement, improve team collaboration, and ultimately drive growth in an increasingly global economy. For further details on this new feature, visit the WhatsApp press release. Image via WhatsApp This article, "WhatsApp Introduces In-App Message Translation to Foster Global Communication" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

WhatsApp is stepping up its game in cross-language communication with the launch of a new message translation feature designed to enhance user connectivity. With over 3 billion users globally, the messaging platform is taking strides to simplify communication in a multicultural landscape—a significant boon for small business owners navigating the complexities of serving diverse clientele. Imagine chatting with an international customer or partner without the fear of miscommunication. With WhatsApp’s latest update, users can now translate messages within the app, creating smoother and more efficient interactions that bridge language barriers. This feature allows small businesses to expand their reach—targeting potential clients in markets they’ve previously found challenging to engage with due to language differences. To use the feature, small business owners can simply long-press a message in a chat and select “Translate.” Users have the option to choose their target language, facilitating real-time communication that can be saved for future reference. Notably, this functionality extends to 1:1 chats, group discussions, and Channel updates, allowing teams to collaborate more effectively. For Android users, there’s even more flexibility. They can enable automatic translation for an entire chat thread, meaning all incoming messages will be translated automatically. This capability is particularly useful for busy entrepreneurs who juggle multiple conversations, ensuring no message is lost in translation. In a world where privacy is paramount, WhatsApp has designed this translation feature with user security in mind. All translations take place directly on users’ devices, meaning that WhatsApp itself does not have visibility into translations, further solidifying user trust. Currently, the feature is gradually rolling out to both Android and iPhone users, initially offering translations in select languages. Android users can look forward to functionality in six languages—English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic—while iPhone users benefit from translations in over 19 languages. This broad language support opens avenues for business owners looking to connect with clients from varied linguistic backgrounds. Quotes from WhatsApp highlight the intent behind this new offering: “We hope this feature helps break down language barriers and allows users to connect more deeply.” For small businesses striving to establish a foothold in different markets, this enhancement could serve as a crucial tool. However, it’s essential for small business owners to consider potential challenges that accompany this new utility. While the convenience of instant translations is attractive, users should also be aware of the nuances that come with language translation. Automated translations may not always convey the intended tone or context, potentially leading to misunderstandings. Proper training on how to use the feature effectively and awareness of its limitations will be vital for maximizing its potential. Additionally, as the feature rolls out, users might face temporary hiccups in functionality or limited language options. Keeping an eye on updates from WhatsApp will be crucial in ensuring the best possible experience. In summary, WhatsApp’s introduction of message translations signifies a significant advancement for small businesses looking to deepen their communication and broaden their markets. By taking advantage of this tool, business owners can enhance customer engagement, improve team collaboration, and ultimately drive growth in an increasingly global economy. For further details on this new feature, visit the WhatsApp press release. Image via WhatsApp This article, "WhatsApp Introduces In-App Message Translation to Foster Global Communication" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. Studying can be as easy as sitting down and reading a chapter, but it shouldn't be. I do hate to break that to you, though I'm actually doing you a favor. Just absorbing huge blocks of content isn't necessarily helpful for remembering any of it. Before you do the work of studying, you have to get organized by sorting the content you need to absorb. Even organizing it, especially using the "chunking" method, will help you start to grasp and retain the materials, so by the time you're going through them, you'll be in a perfect position to lodge all that information in your memory. Chunking is a psychological trick that experts swear by. Here's how to master it for yourself. What is chunking?Here’s what the American Psychological Association says: Chunking is “the process by which the mind divides large pieces of information into smaller units (chunks) that are easier to retain in short-term memory. As a result of this recoding, one item in memory (e.g., a keyword or key idea) can stand for multiple other items (e.g., a short list of associated points).” Basically, your short-term memory has a specific capacity for how many units it can store and that capacity is pretty low, ranging from five to nine—but the units themselves can be as complex as you want. The APA says “the exact number of chunks remembered depends on the size of each chunk or the subunits contained within each chunk.” Each chunk is a collection of pieces of related information, like words, numbers, or phrases. The key here is they have to be related to each other, but not very related to the other chunks. Chunking is all about grouping related pieces of information so you can stay in that five-to-nine units frame. You probably already use chunking in your real life to remember things. Think of your phone number. You likely already sort it into your area code, those first three digits, and the final four digits. Remembering a string of 10 numbers is hard; remembering three “chunks” of smaller digits is less difficult. So how do you study in chunks?Look at the things you have to memorize and start grouping them loosely into categories based on how they’re related. This doesn’t have to be about content, either. If you have to memorize 20 words or concepts, you don’t have to group them by their meaning; you can group them by whether they sound similar, start with the same letter, or whatever you want. If you've ever used a mnemonic device to remember something like, say, the order of the planets, you've already made a "chunk" to study before. You can create your chunks with something as simple as a pencil and paper, listing the words or concepts together and skipping a few spaces between units. From here, you can make flashcard sets of each chunk or use the first letter of each phrase to create a mnemonic device. Try an acrostic, a phrase where the first letter of each word corresponds with the first letter of one of the things you need to remember. If you think better in terms of numbers, try grouping your words or concepts by how many letters are in them. The pencil-and-paper technique is helpful for entrenching words in your memory, since you retain things you write down a little better than those you type, but it's not that convenient or functional otherwise. I recommend using apps and digital programs to make this easier. For instance, use a mind-mapping app to sort out your chunks and make them easy to visualize. I always find that even seeing words grouped together and organized can help me remember them and the ways they relate to each other better. Xmind is my favorite app for this, but you can also use something like Canva, which I have absolutely done in a pinch. Next, you can even use an app to create your flashcards. Flashcards are one of the best and most time-tested methods for studying, but it's wildly unrealistic for you to carry a bunch of notecards around. These are my five favorite flashcard apps, which will enable you to keep all your study materials accessible on your phone wherever you are. I recommend making a new deck for every chunk you create so you can keep your groups separate in your mind. Once you've grasped all the content of your various chunks, try mixing some of the decks together and reviewing them in bigger batches. Known as interleaving, this technique will gradually help you make connections between different concepts, enhancing not only your recall of them, but your actual understanding. Just don't forget to start out by studying each set—or chunk—individually. Even though this doesn’t break down the amount of content, having them in groups with similar characteristics will help you remember it all together, and you’ll be surprised how much of the real material you retain. View the full article

The show-stealing star on the ‘privileges of living in fiction’, why character acting is a misnomer — and how Tom Holland is keeping him relevantView the full article

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Our new print issue features “How YouTube Ate TV,” an oral history of the video-sharing site’s impact on entertainment, culture, and business as told by dozens of eyewitnesses past and present. As we stitched sound bites together into a story, it became clear that our interviews had provided an embarrassment of riches. Indeed, we had too many great stories and insights to cram into one magazine article. So we expanded the online version of the article into five oral histories. Two are live on our site now, covering the company’s earliest days and acquisition by Google. Three more will roll out next week, bringing the story up to 2025—and, in the case of AI’s sweeping impact on the platform, beyond. One of the joys of working on this project with my colleagues and fellow interviewers, María José Gutiérrez Chávez, Yasmin Gagne, Steven Melendez, and David Salazar, was having an excuse to think back to what the web was like 20 years ago. It’s not just that YouTube was brand new and rapidly becoming a necessity of everyday life. At the time, the whole proposition of being able to easily watch videos on the internet at all was a novelty. The technology that made it—and sites like YouTube—possible at all was Macromedia’s Flash. By the time YouTube came along, Flash was more than a decade old. Initially known as FutureWave SmartSketch, it morphed from a drawing app for pen-based computers into a browser plug-in that allowed websites to offer more motion and interactivity than the early web could muster on its own. Flash jazzed up the internet without requiring much in the way of bandwidth or computing cycles—a critical virtue back in the days of pokey dial-up connections. A whole universe of Flash-enabled animations and games sprung up. Flash was so manifestly useful that Netscape and Microsoft bundled it with their browsers. Eventually, the plug-in added support for video playback, dramatically simplifying a process that had formerly required clunky software such as RealPlayer. Instead of video being something you watched in a separate app with its own interface, it could be rendered right inside sites. That’s why YouTube was so easy to use. It also permitted the fledgling site to make its videos embeddable on any web page, spreading them all over the internet. If you were online back then, you may recall all this. But I’m afraid Flash’s reputation was tarnished by what happened well after it helped YouTube become, well, YouTube. A couple of months after YouTube was founded, Adobe agreed to acquire Macromedia. Once Flash came into its portfolio, the software giant aggressively stuffed the plug-in with new features. What had begun as a complement to the plain-vanilla web became a platform unto itself. As Flash got more powerful, it lost its original spritely nature. Increasingly, it was a bloated resource hog—something you reluctantly allowed onto your computer because a sizable percentage of the web wouldn’t work without it. In 2011, I wrote about how Flash had mucked up my MacBook Air, and how much better the laptop worked with the plug-in disabled. Did I mention that Flash also had some pretty significant security issues? By the time I banished Flash from my Mac, the PC-centric web that had given us Flash in the first place was receding into history. Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010 had put browsers onto new classes of gadgets with smaller displays and touchscreen interfaces. But Apple didn’t give Adobe the kind of technical access it needed to put Flash on an iPhone or iPad. On those devices, Flash content showed up as empty boxes. In 2010, Steve Jobs published an open letter, “Thoughts on Flash,” that argued that Adobe’s software was rife with problems and Apple’s platforms were better off without it. Adobe—and a fair percentage of technology enthusiasts—saw Apple’s exclusion of Flash as being about locking out competition, not enhancing the user experience. Now, Google’s Android mobile operating system could run Flash. And for a time, makers of Android devices considered that a major advantage. BlackBerry, the maker of the PlayBook tablet, even ran TV commercials The Presidenteting Flash support as a defining feature. The only problem was that mobile Flash was awful. It taxed the devices of the period beyond their breaking point. Even if it had been more efficient, much of the world’s Flash content simply didn’t work well on a tiny touchscreen. In 2011, Adobe gave up on mobile Flash. Then a suite of open web technologies known as HTML5 largely replicated Flash’s features as part of web browsing’s basic functionality, no plug-in required. Many big sites started abandoning Flash, period. Adobe decided to wind down the technology in 2017 and stopped supporting it altogether in 2020. Today’s internet is entirely Flash-free. I don’t miss Flash in the sense of thinking we were better off when it was central to our computing lives or fantasizing about it coming back. Even in the days when Flash was quite pleasant, a single company bearing so much responsibility for how websites worked was never ideal. That became painfully clear when Adobe lost track of the values that had made Flash popular in the first place. When it finally died, I was able to reallocate the brain cells I’d dedicated to wrestling with it to happier pursuits. Nevertheless, it was nice to remember the days when Flash’s impact on the web was largely positive. As a startup, YouTube got a lot of things right, such as seeing its users as a community, not just a morass of eyeballs. But none of that would have mattered if the internet had still been stuck in the RealPlayer era. As Billy Biggs, a software engineer who’s been at Google and YouTube since 2006, put it when I spoke with him for our YouTube history, “Flash video is what made this all possible.” It was the right technology at the right time. That’s as much a part of its legacy as its later regrettable evolution and descent into obsolescence. You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company This interactive AI-generated podcast app from ex-Googlers blew my mind Huxe makes podcasts almost uncannily personal—and even lets you talk to their AI hosts. Read More → Inside Amazon’s ‘Iliad Flow,’ the deceptive UX at the center of its federal trial We unpack the FTC’s claims that Amazon used design to trick customers into buying—and keeping—a Prime subscription. Read More → A Facebook dating app hopes to be the cure for ‘swipe fatigue’ The AI-powered bot can even suggest pickup lines. Read More → AI tools aren’t making much of a difference for companies Chat GPT, Copilot, and their competitors are boosting productivity without moving the needle on profit and loss. Read More → 5 time-saving Outlook features you’re probably overlooking Once you know these gems, you can’t go back to not using them. 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Former Lib Dem leader brought up in Glasgow tenement was key figure in party’s success in 2000sView the full article

What’s the biggest company in the world? Apple? Amazon? Microsoft? No. It’s Nvidia, which in early August became the world’s first $4 trillion company, overtaking both Apple and Microsoft. Last week’s results were eagerly awaited by the world’s markets and actually helped push the S&P 500 and Dow Jones to all-time highs. By the end of August, Nvidia accounted for more than 8% of the S&P 500, the largest weighting for a single stock in the index’s history. Yet, Nvidia isn’t a household name. It doesn’t make the devices in your pocket or the apps you use every day. Nvidia makes chips. Excellent chips, yes, but not unique in the way we tend to assume a $4 trillion product must be. Its success is not just a product story; it’s also a brand story. B2B is often treated as B2C’s poor relation. When budgets are tight, brand is first to be stripped back, reduced to a logo refresh or a new color palette. Nvidia’s rise proves that’s a mistake. Its transformation from graphics chipmaker to the engine of the AI revolution shows how brand strategy can create enormous value. Here are six lessons B2B brands can take from Nvidia’s playbook. 1. More than a logo Nvidia’s brand identity hasn’t changed much since the 1990s. The typography has been updated, but the odd, retro eye-and-square graphic remains. Many organizations would have dropped it long ago, worried it looked dated or alienating. Nvidia’s decision to keep it reflects confidence in what the brand stands for and in the loyalty of its audience, especially the developers and gamers who value its heritage. Many B2B brands struggle here. A new CMO arrives and the instinct is to “refresh the logo.” These changes are often driven more by internal pressure than by real market insight. In doing so, companies risk eroding recognition and alienating the very customers that anchor their brand. Companies need to ask: What do our core users value from us? What signals show continuity and confidence? Consistency builds familiarity, and that in turn builds trust. 2. Own a story, not just a product Nvidia’s two main rivals, AMD and Intel, have longer histories and strong product reputations. Yet Intel is seen as legacy computing and AMD as fast and affordable, while Nvidia is synonymous with the future. This isn’t because Nvidia “started” AI, but because it positioned itself as the essential platform for enabling it, shifting from being a graphics processing unit manufacturer to the company powering the AI revolution, and framing its value in terms of possibility rather than price or speed. That positioning has contributed to a market cap 15 times AMD’s and 47 times Intel’s, despite smaller revenues. Many B2B firms struggle to look this far ahead. Brand vision often gets tied to short sales cycles and annual budgets. The challenge is to set an ambition that stretches beyond the next quarter. Microsoft did this successfully with its “cloud-first” pivot. Intel seemingly failed to capitalize on the AI growth wave, falling behind AMD and Nvidia. Although it is reportedly working hard on a comeback, will it be enough to make up for lost time? The lesson: don’t just describe what you make, own the bigger shift your products make possible. 3. Be more peacock Brands are regularly the victims of trends. The more established and reputationally safe they are the harder it is for them to stay connected to new audiences while remaining true to themselves. However, Nvidia has remained remarkably true to its central vision. It uses its core brand assets—the logo, the green—everywhere. This consistency reinforces recognition, particularly among its most loyal audience: a technically minded, brand-aware community that values the company’s history. Where some brands tone down their heritage as they grow, Nvidia has leaned into it. Salesforce and Slack have both succeeded by sticking with distinctive, even playful, visual identities in a category prone to beige “professionalism.” In contrast, many brands caught up in the 2018 “blanding” epidemic traded characterful logos and flourishes for neutral sans-serifs, diluting their identities in the process. Often B2B brands should have the courage to lean into the brand assets that make them distinctive and unique, rather than feeling they need to follow the latest trend. 4. Make the brand an experience Nvidia’s GTC (GPU Technology Conference) has been described as the “Super Bowl of AI”, stadium-scale events wrapped in the brand, bringing together developers, researchers, and business leaders. These conferences position Nvidia not just as a supplier of hardware but as the platform powering what’s next. Most B2B brands don’t think about experience in this way. “Customer experience” is often a trade show booth or a sales meeting. Yet experience is where brand comes to life: through service design, digital platforms, physical spaces, and above all, people. Not every business needs stadium events, but every B2B brand can look at the moments where clients interact with them and ask: does this experience reflect who we are? Does it build confidence? Deloitte is a good example here. Its investment in connected digital and service experiences has made it the highest-valued commercial services brand by Brand Finance. 5. Partner for relevance Nvidia’s partnerships—from Tesla to Disney Research to Google DeepMind—have put it at the center of conversations about robotics, art, graphics, and AI. Each collaboration reinforces the company’s relevance far beyond chips. B2B companies often fall into one of two traps: chasing partnerships haphazardly without alignment, or avoiding them altogether for fear of losing control. But the right partnerships extend credibility, and relevance. The lesson is to find partnerships that complement your brand’s value and purpose. Co-branded thought leadership, for example, can build credibility for both parties. Deloitte and Apple’s collaboration to accelerate enterprise mobility is a good example. The misstep comes when brands partner without clear alignment. 6. Build a human figurehead Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, has become a brand asset in his own right. Known for his leather jackets and unscripted keynote style, he’s built a following—even a nickname for his fans—which is unusual in the world of B2B hardware. His visibility has amplified Nvidia’s vision while keeping the brand rooted in the community that uses its products. Most B2B leaders aren’t visible in this way. Either they avoid the spotlight, or they show up only in highly scripted investor calls. Yet charismatic leaders can create strong brand momentum. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce uses his personal platform to advance the company’s narrative. Deloitte CEO Joseph Ucuzoglu has also become a recognizable voice on leadership and the future of work. For B2B brands, the takeaway isn’t to manufacture celebrity. It’s to encourage leaders to show up authentically, in ways that reflect the brand’s values and ambitions. Brand is the differentiator From the outside, many B2B products can look more alike than they really are: another chip, another service, another platform. That’s when brand becomes the differentiator. Nvidia’s rise to the top wasn’t just about cutting-edge engineering. It was about confidence: sticking with distinctive assets, claiming ownership of the future, showing up consistently, building meaningful experiences, partnering with intent, and amplifying it all through visible leadership. The lesson for B2B brands is simple. Don’t treat brand as decoration. Allow your brand to be vision-led. Nvidia shows that even in categories that seem invisible or interchangeable, brand confidence can drive both growth and value. 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For years, Mercedes-Benz has relied on touchscreens as the command center of its vehicles. Is it too hot? Tap the screen to set the AC temperature. Want to listen to the news? Tap. Defrost the rear window? Tap, tap, tap. While the automaker has retained some physical controls in its cars, its modern user experience is effectively built around the screen. But that’s about to change. Magnus Östberg, chief software officer for Mercedes-Benz, recently announced that the company would be centering future car design around physical controls instead of screens. “The data shows us physical buttons are better,” Östberg told Autocar at the Munich motor show. He says Mercedes will begin integrating more physical controls into its digitally focused cabins starting in 2026. Mercedes’ announcement is part of a bigger industry trend… with carmakers like Hyundai leading the charge to bring back knobs and buttons to its cars. Earlier this year, fellow German automaker Volkswagen, also announced plans to fix its touchscreen problem, saying that it was “taking a step back to move forward.” After more than a decade of car screens growing bigger and brighter, the auto industry finally seems to be acknowledging what drivers (and science!) has known all along: physical buttons are safer and more pleasant to use. Why automakers went crazy for screens You can partly blame Buick for this mess. The General Motors’ brand introduced the first 3-by-4-inch car touchscreen with the 1986 Buick Riviera. It turned out that drivers found the design distracting and cumbersome, so Buick eventually cancelled it. Still, it serves as an early glimpse of how automakers would eventually come to think about integrating technology into the driver experience. Throughout the ’90s and early 2000s, automakers like BMW and Lexus began to integrate small, low-res screens into their cars to handle functions like navigation. But the touchscreen revolution didn’t happen in earnest until 2012 when Elon Musk installed cheap vertical 17-inch displays in his Model S. The sleek, tech-forward design intrigued other automakers, who realized they could cut costs by reducing the number of expensive physical controls in their cars. And sure enough, lots of car companies followed suit. Throughout the 2010s, touchscreens became the default mode of interaction for carmakers across the price spectrum. But screens were not without their problems. Tesla’s reliance on electronic controls has lead to some high profile issues. The screens themselves started failing, leading to a 158,000-vehicle recall for the company. Drivers, meanwhile, didn’t seem to like touchscreens all that much, and science didn’t either. Evidence began mounting that touchscreens, despite their perceived convenience, were actually not all that helpful. In 2022, Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare conducted a comprehensive study of 11 modern touchscreen-equipped cars. It found that physical controls dramatically outperform digital interfaces for driver tasks. Its testing revealed that a 17-year-old Volvo V70 with only physical controls allowed drivers to complete essential tasks in just 10 seconds, while modern cars with touchscreens took anywhere from 23.5 seconds to a disastrous 44.9 seconds to accomplish the same functions. But going back to physical controls is not just about convenience—it’s about safety. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says any distraction that requires drivers to look away from the road even for a second is a potential accident. Touchscreens, by nature, require drivers to take their eyes off the road to navigate through multiple menu layers in order to perform simple tasks that once required an easy-to-find single physical button press or dial twist. As design expert Amber Case says, “Because buttons are not fixed to specific locations, screens inhibit muscle memory and findability. Touchscreens compete for attention with the driving process, adding to the dangers of distracted driving.” Back to basics All this has lead automakers to reconsider their devotion to the screen. In early 2025, Volkswagen announced a significant policy shift, with the company committing to restore physical controls for essential functions across all future models. Design chief Andreas Mindt acknowledged publicly that the company’s touchscreen-heavy strategy had failed users. He said that cars are not phones, so they require a different interface. Hyundai also reversed direction in late 2024, when they reintroduced physical controls with its Ioniq 5. It came after a 2023 epiphany, when its internal testing revealed driver frustration with capacitive controls during critical moments. The Korean automaker’s research showed that touch-only interfaces create anxiety when drivers need immediate access to vehicle functions. “I think it’s great,” designer Chris Kernaghan told Fast Company at the time. “I’m not dismissing touchscreens in cars entirely, [but] there are certain critical controls that are better suited to good old-fashioned buttons and knobs. As a designer, I’m all about tactile feedback whenever possible. It just feels natural to push a button and get an immediate response. You don’t get that same sense of control with touchscreens.” Manufacturers like Toyota, Honda, and Nissan maintained hybrid approaches throughout the touchscreen boom, preserving tactile controls alongside digital displays rather than eliminating buttons entirely. Chinese brands also offer hybrid a touchscreen-physical button UX, although some, like the Xiaomi SU7, provide it with an optional full physical control system that attaches magnetically to the dashboard, under the main display. Trend spotting If I were a cynic (and I am), I would say that Mercedes took these steps mostly because there seems to be a reversal to this useless fad. Plus, regulatory pressure is mounting: Europe’s safety testing organization will penalize vehicles starting in 2026 if they lack physical controls for essential safety systems including climate, signals, emergency features, and driver-assistance functions. But Östberg explained that the company’s real-world usage data—revealed by its own cars’ electronics—pointed out that something needed to change. A Mercedes spokesperson told Fast Company that consumer feedback played a role in the shift: “We’ve listened closely to customer feedback and analyzed real-world usage data from our software-defined vehicles. Physical controls offer superior usability and comfort for many drivers.” The spokesperson added, “The rollers and these physical buttons are very important for certain age groups and certain populations.” This may be true, but it’s a strange way to frame a decision that is ultimately about making cars safer for everyone. A solution in progress The solution Mercedes has chosen starts with a redesigned steering wheel featuring “a host of rockers, rollers, and buttons” that will become standard across all Mercedes models going forward. This wheel will be fitted to all car models already on sale, with implementation beginning early next year. Mercedes tells me that the manufacturer is reintroducing tactile elements like a rocker for the limiter and Distronic (its cruise control system) and a roller for volume control. These will all be on the steering wheel. The picture of the wheel shows a lot of buttons crammed in its horizontal axis, like an oversize PlayStation gamepad—a bit complicated, but definitely better than using the display. Is this the solution to the problem? I always found these types of button-heavy wheel designs problematic. In theory, not having to take your hands away from the steering wheel is good. In practice, I find myself looking down to make sure I’m clicking the right button. Or missing the target if I don’t look. When asked about usability testing for the new GLC wheel controls, Mercedes told me the new steering wheel had undergone “extensive testing” as part of its development process, though no specific details about the results were provided. It’s interesting timing for the announcement. Mercedes has just fitted its new GLC SUV model with what is allegedly the biggest screen ever put in a production car: a 39.1-inch display called an MBUX Hyperscreen. It spans the entire dashboard width. As Mercedes-Benz design chief Gorden Wagener acknowledged to Autocar, the company has “reached a point where you cannot make the screen much bigger.” Perhaps the industry’s screen-enlargement race has finally reached its logically absurd conclusion. Mercedes plans to add more physical controls elsewhere in future cabins, though Östberg indicated this will likely be limited to SUVs because “in larger cars we have more freedom to package” and buyers of those vehicles “care more about buttons.” When asked about expanding changes beyond the steering wheel, the Mercedes spokesperson told me the company doesn’t disclose details of future portfolios but continually evaluates “customer needs and preferences.” Maybe this is indicative that the company is still trying to balance cost considerations with user experience, rather than committing fully to what its own data shows works best. Perhaps it’s FOMO, as the Chinese industry seems to be fully committed to displays everywhere and companies like BYD are poised to dominate the global car industry. In fact, Östberg hinted that different wheel designs might be used depending on location, explaining that “while Europeans like buttons, Asian drivers prefer more touchscreen and voice controls.” This market-specific strategy suggests Mercedes is prioritizing regional preferences over the safety and usability benefits its own data has uncovered. Can AI fix it? At the same time, Mercedes says it is investing heavily in voice command technology, with Östberg noting that voice command usage in the CLA has “tripled” among Mercedes drivers, calling the increase “phenomenal.” This AI integration could represent the future solution to the buttons-versus-screens dilemma. If voice recognition becomes really good rather than the current Larry David level of accuracy, drivers might eventually interact with their cars through natural conversation. This mirrors the prediction of usability expert Jakob Nielsen, who believes that user interfaces will eventually disappear entirely as AI anticipates user needs. In such a future, the current debate about buttons and screens might be irrelevant. Back in the real world, however, things need to change. More manufacturers should embrace the return to physical controls, even if it will cost them more to make those cars because of the complex electronics that rolling wheels and buttons require. Mercedes deserves credit for acknowledging the touchscreen problem like its VW colleagues have done and attempting to address a real problem with data-driven solutions. But there is still a way to go before we can say automakers are truly prioritizing drivers’ best interests. What will the cars of the future look like? Right now, the industry seems to be hedging its bets. View the full article

Danish developer and US private capital group discuss deal for Hornsea 3 wind farm View the full article

EV sales just hit a new record in the U.S.: This month, they’re on track to make up 12.2% of new car sales, according to J.D. Power and Associates. Meanwhile, gas car sales dropped compared to the same month last year. Buyers are racing to get new electric vehicles before the $7,500 federal tax credit goes away on September 30. When the The President administration pushed to eliminate the credit in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, it inadvertently helped nudge some consumers to switch to EVs earlier that they otherwise might have. “There’s nothing like a deadline to get people paying attention,” says Josh Boone, executive director of Veloz, a nonprofit focused on electrifying transportation. The organization has seen a surge of traffic on its digital platform that helps consumers choose an EV. The end of the credit also helped temporarily push EV prices down. In August, the average transaction cost for an EV was $44,908—a little less than the average gas vehicle, at $45,521. That’s because manufacturers added generous incentives to help sell cars before the deadline. The tax credit has been in place since 2008, under the Bush administration. Now that it’s disappearing, EV sales are likely to plummet next quarter. Automakers are slowing production and canceling some models. But electric cars aren’t dead in the U.S., and sales are still likely to grow next year. How much does the tax credit matter? Even though the end of the incentive has spurred sales, the tax credit generally hasn’t been the deciding factor for most buyers, says Loren McDonald, who runs an EV data and analysis firm called Chargeonomics. “I’ve always believed that its importance has been overplayed,” he says. “For most people, it was more of a discount than it was an actual incentive to get people over the hump.” Most people using the tax credit have had higher incomes, and probably could have afforded the vehicles on their own. That’s still the case now. “For a lot of people, if they’re considering the difference of a $50 or $100 a month payment, it’s like ‘I can deal with that,’ he says. “What it means is that people with lower income brackets still aren’t interested.” In a recent survey with Morning Consult, analysts at Cox Automotive found that 65% of respondents who were in the market for a new EV said they would still consider an EV without the tax credit. “I thought that was a good data point to show that it’s important, but not for everyone,” says Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox. The number of affordable EVs keeps growing As EV production scales up and battery costs fall, that helps push cost down. The number of more affordable models is growing. The next-generation Chevy Bolt will enter production later this year. The new Nissan Leaf will start at just under $30,000, with a 300-mile range. Slate Auto, a startup backed by Jeff Bezos, will release an electric truck in the mid-$20,000s next year. (With the tax credit in place, it would have been less than $20k.) Toyota is releasing a new electric C-HR next year. Volvo has said that its new crossover, the EX60, is aiming to get as close as possible to price parity with gas cars. In China, it’s worth noting, EVs are already cheaper than gas cars without subsidies. Plug-in vehicles now make up more than half of new sales in China, with battery electric vehicles alone representing one-third of the market. Technology continues to improve. CATL, the largest EV battery manufacturer, plans to soon release new sodium-ion packs that cost $40 per kilowatt-hour, 20% less than its current lithium iorn phosphate batteries (which are already cheaper than standard lithium-ion batteries). Automakers are increasingly adopting platforms that support multiple EV models, boosting economies of scale. All of this will help, although automakers are also facing headwinds from tariffs. If you consider the total cost of ownership, many EVs are already less expensive than equivalent gas vehicles. They need less maintenance, and charging is cheaper than buying gas. Still, that’s harder to communicate than the sticker price. “The auto industry needs to start educating buyers to be more like fleet buyers, which is they get out their Excel spreadsheet and they calculate the total cost of ownership of the truck over the lifetime,” says McDonald. “They need to do this with electric vehicles. The problem is, if you’re also selling gas vehicles, you’re basically selling against your own cars. And that’s always been one of the problems with the legacy automakers: if they go too far in selling how great EVs are, they’re basically saying, sorry, [gas cars] aren’t that good.” The number of used EVs is also continuing to grow—1.1 million EVs were leased over the last few years and will soon be available for resale. The upfront cost of a used EV is already typically comparable (or cheaper) than an equivalent gas car. Those sales have also been surging. Some state and utility incentives are also still available. All of this means that even without the tax credit, the cost of EVs may not necessarily be a large barrier. Charging infrastructure is also improving, and the average range of an EV is already big enough that range anxiety isn’t the challenge that it used to be. Automakers will need to get better at marketing As the tax credit goes away, automakers may have to rethink marketing. McDonald argues that car brands have overrelied on incentives and rebates from the government and utilities. “They’ve focused on all these incentives—not that it’s a really great car, and it doesn’t require maintenance, and it’s fast, and convenient,” he says. “My hope is that they’re going to do a better job marketing and targeting.” One automaker he recently spoke with said that the brand is now beginning to target likely buyers, such as suburban families with a large garage and income. “They’re finally waking up and realized that doing Super Bowl ads is a waste of time,” he says. “What you really need to do is target the people who are considering a Tesla, and get them to buy yours.” Automakers may continue to offer strong incentives next quarter to help offset the loss of the tax credit. “I think they’ll step in and offer more now,” says Tyson Jominy, senior vice president of data & analytics at J.D. Power. (GM declined to comment on its plans for this story, and Rivian said that it is still working through its incentive plans.) Sales are likely to drop, and then rebound in 2026 EV sales will probably fall steeply in the fourth quarter, and likely the first quarter of 2026. That’s both because some sales that would have happened then happened early, and because other sales will be lost because the tax credit is no longer available. But they’re expected to pick up again later in 2026. The same pattern has happened in other countries that phased out EV tax credits. In Germany, for example, the share of EV sales temporarily spiked to 22% just before the German subsidy went away at the end of 2023. At the beginning of 2024, they dropped by more than half. But sales then started to rebound, and by this summer, had grown to 16.8% of the market. In Canada, a federal EV incentive was paused at the beginning of 2025. Sales spiked beforehand, dropped, and are now starting to grow again. JD Power expects that EV sales for this year will be around 9% of the total car market, similar to last year, and will grow in 2026 as new models arrive. Long term, analysts still expect steep growth over the rest of the decade, despite changes in policy. “As we go throughout [2026], and certainly as we head toward the end of decade, we are still bullish on EVs overall,” says Jominy. “We do expect there to be a lot of new launches and expect the technology to continue to improve and evolve.” View the full article

It’s not really possible to cleanly pin down the setting of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Written by Michael Chabon and published in 2000, the story takes place in Brooklyn, in Prague, on the battlefields of World War II, on the top of the Empire State Building, and in the imaginary universe of a superhero comic book. The breadth of locations—physical and metaphysical—make for a rollicking read. But when New York’s Met Opera decided to stage an opera version of the book, that globe-crossing, reality-bending narrative presented some very tangible challenges. “It’s a big sweeping novel, so it requires an enormous canvas and a lot of locations,” says Bartlett Sher, director of the opera version of the book, which has just opened the Met’s 2025–2026 season. “We started workshopping it a couple of years ago, and I realized I can’t do this in the normal way.” To make those leaps in the real time span of a live opera performance, Sher and his team had to take a novel and highly complex approach to its production design. The Met tapped 59, a multidisciplinary stage and experience design studio, to design the sets, lighting, and, crucially, video elements that reveal a narrative that takes place on multiple continents and within the pages of comic books. The story follows two Jewish cousins at the outset of World War II who create a comic book hero whose stories are intended to urge Americans to join the fight against the Nazis. Their comic becomes a hit, but their lives are thrown into chaos as the war unfolds, taking the audience from New York to Prague to the minds of comic book creators. Part of the experiential design agency Journey, 59 developed a production design approach that embraced the story’s location hopping. “The worlds start to be really musically distinct and really visually distinct, and then everything starts to collide together throughout the course of the piece,” says Jenny Melville, principal design director at 59. “It was quite clear early on that particularly the comic book world was going to have a major visual component to the whole design.” Melville has worked on operas and stage plays around the world, and 59 has developed video elements for productions like the Broadway version of the Netflix series Stranger Things and the Met Opera’s 2024 staging of Aida. Melville says that as more and more performances integrate video elements, production designers have to strike a careful balance. “Video design in opera is very much supportive material, an augmentation to the scenic design,” Melville says. “But it’s really critical to never overshadow the live performance on stage.” For The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay opera, video took on an outsized role, especially for scenes involving the creation of the comic book and stories from within its pages. “There are these moments where, really unusually for an opera, the singers stop singing and the video moments take over,” Melville says. That’s partially a function of the narrative, which revolves around the creation of a superhero comic. The impracticality of having the audience watch actors imagining superheroes and drawing comics on stage led to the integration of vivid animated sequences projected on the set. The opera’s modernist score, by composer Mason Bates, also creates moments for the video elements to come into the foreground. The music juggles between the somberness of Europe in World War II, the jazziness of New York City in the 1930s, and a comic book world represented by electronic music. “Because there are these electronic music sections, it’s a really clear divide when we’re a supporting act, which is actually like 90% of the time,” Melville says. The abundance of video elements in the opera presents its own set of technical challenges, especially when it comes to making sure the video synchs up with the musicians in the band pit and the singers on stage. “The timing changes every night, because of course the conductor and the orchestra and all the singers have to just do what feels right in the moment,” says Melville. “We’ve had to break all of our cue structures down into very, very specific time sequences.” “We worked very cleverly and carefully to make it work,” says Sher. “And that was fun, but it wasn’t easy.” The hard work on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay opera may pay dividends later on. Sher and 59 are already working together on another production, a musical version of the film La La Land, that is going to rely on a similar level of video integration. “Everything we’ve absorbed on this experience is only going to help redouble our efforts when it comes to that experience,” he says. View the full article

Becoming a chartered financial analyst (CFA)—a certification that requires thousands of hours of professional experience, as well as taking a very rigorous exam; Investopedia calls it “one of the most respected designations in finance”—is no easy feat. That is, until now. Two years ago, AI models could only pass the first two sections of the prestigious, three-part exam. The essay section, however, had it stumped. And yet, in a new study from New York University’s Stern School of Business and GoodFin, an AI-powered wealth management platform, advanced AI like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude Opus passed the exam with flying colors. What would’ve taken a human 1,000 hours of studying over multiple years took AI a matter of minutes. Just two years ago, analysts were saying that it would never be able to pass the exam. It’s a sign of how advanced the technology has become, and once again fuels discussion about how AI could replace even the most challenging jobs. But Anna Joo Fee, founder and CEO of GoodFin, which contributed to the research but did not fund it, told CNBC, “There are things like context and intent that are hard for the machine to assess right now. That’s where a human shines, in understanding your body language and cues.” That didn’t stop social media from having all sorts of reactions. One LinkedIn user called the news both an “impressive milestone” and “a little eye opening.” They wrote in a comment: “It doesn’t replace the human side of financial advising, but it does raise big questions about how the role of advisors and analysts will evolve in the near future.” “AI passing the CFA in minutes while humans cry over flashcards for years? At this point, the calculator deserves a corner office,” another joked. On the r/CFA subreddit, however, many were actually unimpressed. “Isn’t that like taking an open book exam? Unless your AI has memory problems,” one wrote. “Study: ‘water is wet’.” While it may not be surprising to some, the study does make plain the rapid pace of change in AI’s capabilities in just a few short years. “Right now, most of the conversation about work is about chasing the latest signal of what AI can do at work. It’s a messy, noisy, often contradictory conversation because AI is change that keeps changing,” chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, Aneesh Raman, wrote in a post. He encouraged: “This new era is about the mind not the machine. Focus on the mind—yours, your teams, your organizations, your societies—and so many opportunities will unfold in the coming years. It’s not the robots that are coming. The humans are coming!” A finance professional at PwC agreed. “AI won’t replace finance professionals—but finance professionals using AI will replace those who don’t,” she wrote. Her advice is to be selective about the tools you adopt, prioritize use cases, and prepare to “work alongside AI.” For now, though, this most recent headline is yet more fearmongering about the arrival of an omniscient entity plucking jobs from under our feet and kicking entire industries to the curb. “It’s just another test a machine can pass faster, cheaper, and without breaking a sweat. Let’s be real. This is bigger than finance,” another LinkedIn user wrote. “This is a warning shot for every ‘thinking’ job we thought was future-proof.” View the full article

Artificial intelligence is infiltrating every corner of professional sports, from scouting and injury prevention to scheduling. Now, it looks like golf has its most sophisticated AI adoption yet, and it’s happening in the bag of Bryson DeChambeau, the sport’s most notorious tinkerer. “We’re building an AI golf coach,” DeChambeau says. “Essentially, it will be a golf coach that, based on data, will be able to tell you exactly what you’re doing, how to practice, and how to improve your game. We can take a golf swing, compile the information, upload it, and within a minute, it will give me what’s different from my gold standard set of swings.” The setup is deceptively simple: a smartphone on a tripod gathering data via video, paired with Google’s Gemini AI to interpret said data. Combined, they create a swing coach so intuitive that DeChambeau uses it even moments before teeing off in a tournament. “The mental game is something I’ve always struggled with,” he says. “But whenever I become a little more confident and comfortable with my feel, my mental game goes extremely positive. And this assistant has helped me become a lot more confident with my golf swing.” AI + AI = Coach DeChambeau’s coaching system starts with SportsBox, an AI-powered 3D biomechanical analysis app that analyzes over 30 key points on the body, club, and ball per golf swing. It measures everything from rotational range of motion to kinematic sequencing—the precise order in which different body parts accelerate and decelerate through the swing. This data is then processed by Gemini AI to turn those measurements into actionable coaching insights. Think of SportsBox as the measuring tool, Gemini as the AI coach agent, and Google Cloud as the platform hosting it all. The system starts by building and maintaining a database of DeChambeau’s optimal swings from recent years to create his “gold standard” set. So, when he hits a poor shot, the AI immediately measures that shot against his gold standard set and ranks the factors most likely contributing to the miss. “We can take a golf swing, then upload it, and within a minute, it will give me what’s different from my gold standard set of swings,” he says. “It will give me a rundown list of the top [deviations] that are correlating to whatever’s causing me to miss.” According to Granville Valentine, managing director of AI go-to-market at Google Cloud, it’s Gemini’s multimodal capabilities that bring the SportsBox data to life, creating the interactive coaching agent. “Gemini is very differentiated on multimodality—the ability to ingest the combination of video, audio, text, and voice, and even livestreaming some of those capabilities into the model,” he says. “The combination of really deep video understanding plus core reasoning comes out in differentiated coaching guidance.” The devil’s in the details The granular nature of DeChambeau’s AI coaching reveals just how sophisticated modern sports analytics has become. The system uses Z-scores—statistical measurements showing how many standard deviations a movement is from the mean of a data set—to identify exactly where problems occur. Previously, DeChambeau would capture swing data but wait hours or days for analysis. With this technology, he gets feedback within a minute, allowing for real-time adjustments before a round. “We were going through [the data] by hand in an Excel spreadsheet,” he says. “It was a manual process, very difficult. So you’re talking about months and months of trying to study the golf swing, now done in minutes.” The data is also surprisingly precise. “Let’s say it’s a radial deviation at P6,” DeChambeau says. “That’s too much, meaning I’ve got too much wrist hinge, which makes the club come more outside in. So it’s very specific.” For us non-DeChambeaus who got lost at “radial deviation” and checked out at “P6,” that’s where Gemini comes to the rescue. The AI’s ability to adapt its communication style allows users to train it to explain complex biomechanical concepts in terms appropriate for any skill level. Like other large language models, you can ask it questions, such as what specific terms mean, and as your understanding grows, it will adapt to give you more granular, technical data, meeting each golfer where he or she is at. Old dog, new tricks When he began using this technology earlier this year, DeChambeau found one of his fundamental beliefs about his swing challenged. For years, he says, he thought he needed to stay more centered over the ball—more on top of it—when hitting his driver. The AI consistently told him otherwise, saying he was too on top of the ball. “It told me to keep swaying my chest just a bit back on the backstroke to get my center mass more behind the golf ball so I can allow the club to release through the impact more,” he says. “So that just blew my mind at how precise this assistant is. It was kind of a kick-in-the-butt moment of, wait, you gotta start trusting this thing.” Eventually, he realized the AI’s objectivity as its strength. “It’s unbiased,” he says. “It doesn’t tell you what it thinks you should do. It’s literally based on what you do when you’re doing your best, and keeps you in check with that.” Democratizing elite-level instruction The rapid evolution of AI coaching technology suggests we’re witnessing the early stages of a broader transformation in sports training. Valentine points to each new release of Gemini, which shows consistent step-function improvements in spatial awareness and reasoning capabilities. “With each subsequent release, breakthroughs are happening,” he says, comparing Gemini’s current moment to the early days of Waymo self-driving cars, which needed time to become trustworthy enough for widespread adoption. “That level of trust—that level of breakthrough in the model itself—is now kicking over to a place where humans have the confidence to rely on this as a coach relative to a human coach.” Still, Valentine says, the ultimate goal is not to replace human coaches, but to democratize access to elite-level instruction. “I don’t think the objective is to get rid of coaches,” he says. “I think it’s to deliver access to those folks who don’t have access to coaches. There are lots of folks in the world who would probably be very well served to have access to coaching, it just hasn’t been available to them.” At the PGA Tour level, DeChambeau believes there are further use cases for the tool, and that widespread adoption is inevitable once other players experience the results he’s seen. “When these [other golfers] see what the capabilities are, they’ll immediately latch onto it,” he says. “Because it’s not about some theoretical idea. It’s about what works best for them as an individual. I can’t wait for a day when it’s a full-on coach, club fitter, you name it. We’re just at the beginning.” View the full article

Following the The President administration’s cuts to foreign aid, two-thirds of Mercy Corps’ U.S.-funded programs have been rescinded. CEO Tjada D’Oyen McKenna shares how she’s leading her team amid immense pressure—scrambling to find new ways to help those in need, even as she resorts to layoffs to keep the business afloat. McKenna reveals what she’s hearing from her team of aid workers on the ground in Gaza, and why she isn’t running away from burnout but embracing it. Like many business leaders experiencing political or economic volatility right now, McKenna is faced with a complex conundrum: fight, flight, or freeze. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. U.S. government funding accounted for half of your funding, right? Exactly. About two thirds of your programs were rescinded. I mean, it’s like an existential crisis, a true existential crisis for the organization. So what did you do? I mean, you faced a slew of urgent decisions. They were urgent decisions, and I have to say it was very clumsy, right? Usually when you work with the government, there are definitions for every single thing, so very specific definition for stop or very specific definition for freeze. And in this case, the guidance wasn’t there. When they said we had to stop doing everything, our first concern was safety for people. If I have people in a remote area of a country or in charge of delivering food to a school feeding program next day, that community didn’t understand that we weren’t showing up the next day, and they certainly didn’t understand it was because the U.S. government told us not to, but we had to go to work. Once it was clear what was going to be cut or what wasn’t going to be cut, we had to go about shutting down those programs across 40 different countries, lots of different labor laws to that. We consolidated some of our regions, we closed some country offices. We just got to work to say, “If the funding wasn’t there for that program, we’ll shut it down in the most responsible way possible and we’ll keep moving and then address what we have to do with the U.S. government to see what we can preserve, make sure our other funders are okay, and still be prepared in case if another hurricane or earthquake had hit during that period, we still had to be prepared to respond.” I mean, the irony is your organization is all about responding to crisis when it emerges and now the crisis becomes you. And in some ways in some of these communities you’re sort of creating the crisis because they’ve become used to having you there. Yes, yes, yes. And I worried a lot about staff safety, particularly in remote places where we were a source of survival for people where we provided access to food, and that continued to plague me. We’d hear reports from colleagues of government officials trying to stop their country director to make sure everyone got paid before they left. And my staff in Sudan, almost all of them are displaced from their homes themselves. So they’re working for us in temporary shelters, still going through the same problems that everyone else is going through. And so this was a weird situation where our organization was the one that had to be the emergency patient, but we also knew . . . You almost felt guilty for feeling bad because people have it so much worse than you do. There were a lot of weird mental gymnastics that were happening for all of us. We’re now months in, past that initial shock. How much do you look at 2025 today as an inflection point, sort of a new normal for USAID orgs like Mercy Corps? Are you kind of holding your breath in a way in hopes that, “A next administration maybe will reinstate things?” No, we know nothing’s going back to the way it was, but we don’t know exactly what that looks like going forward. The other thing that was surreal is there was this demonization of aid or demonization of aid agencies. A lot of misinformation about the work we were doing and how we were doing it. And then there’s the third and fourth effect. So in a lot of places, we rely on UN airplanes to get in and out of certain areas, and so a lot of UN organizations we’re also facing the same U.S. cuts that we were. So we are still digging out of the aftermath. We know the world is fundamentally changed, and right now we are trying to embrace that and move into the future while also knowing the future’s still quite uncertain. I have to ask you about Gaza. There are all the reports about famine in Gaza where you’ve had teams on the ground. Your Mideast director was on this show in October of 2023 soon after Hamas’s October 7th attack as the initial Israeli military action was underway. Are your teams still active on the ground there now? What are they seeing and what might our listeners be missing in the news reports that they’re getting? We have about 35 staff that are still on the ground living and working in Gaza. We’ve had about 1,300 trucks stuck at a border that have not been able to get in. We’ve had some food in those trucks expire in that time period. And even without those trucks, our teams on the ground we’re working with water desalination plants and supplying clean water to people. It’s so dire right now. Our own team members are hungry. They are worried about where their next meal is coming from. We have a staff member that is able to go in and out, and she talks about the weight loss that she’s seen in her colleagues. About a million people are under evacuation orders in Gaza City. A lot of them, this is the fourth, fifth time they’ve moved. And what’s different lately, which really concerns us, is that sense of hope is really eroded. I think people feel like they’ve been just left. This is as tough as it’s ever been, and our own staff are fighting for their own survival. We talk about the lack of food, but 95% of households there just don’t have enough water. And so someone said, “A choice you’re making every day is, do I wash my hands? Do I drink a glass of water? Do I bathe the kids? The little water I have, what do I do with it?” And we just can’t imagine. It’s just been horrific and to feel so powerless, especially when we know there are trucks waiting across the border that could get in. There are people like us that are really eager to do the work, like my staff who are looking for food themselves, who want to get out and do things, and we just know it’s political will that’s stopping that. I spoke to another humanitarian aid leader recently off the record, who shared that starting years ago, they chose not to provide services in Gaza because they were worried and believed that Hamas would inevitably infiltrate their efforts. And obviously this is what the Israeli government or military at least is kind of saying, did you have worries about that? Does that matter when you’re trying to just feed people? Gaza has always been one of the most difficult places in the world to work. I mean, we all are under U.S. anti-terrorism laws. Our staff are vetted. We check the names, we check the lists because the risk of having a staff member be a part of Hamas is too great to bear. We have not seen mass aid diversion from Hamas. That just has not been our experience, and most of our colleagues have not experienced that either. So that has been talked about as a threat. You do see looting, you do see hungry people, crowds of hungry people swarming to every truck and you see children and people throwing themselves in front of trucks. The way to address people stealing aid or making food valuable is to flood the zone with food, and then it’s not as valuable. I think more importantly, there have been anonymous Israeli defense forces in COGAT, which is the border authority officials saying that they’ve seen no mass aid diversion. U.S. government reports, internal former USAID audit reports said they have no evidence of mass diversion of aid. So we work in difficult environments and we all take vetting very seriously, but we know how to do this. We know how to work in these environments. View the full article

It’s Sunday night. Before kids, this was the time to nurse a mimosa hangover and zone out to The Sopranos. Now? It’s a very different playbook. Sunday evenings feel less like a gentle exhale from the weekend and more like staging a Broadway play with a cast that hasn’t rehearsed and refuses to put on pants. You are simultaneously the chef, chauffeur, hairdresser, homework coach, and emotional support animal. For parents, the Sunday Scaries don’t whisper “your inbox is waiting.” They shout: Did you wash the soccer uniform? Are there enough snacks for afterschool? Is the social studies project due tomorrow or Wednesday? Ugh! Did I RSVP for that birthday party? The stress creeps up way before the Monday morning alarm. Workweek Ericka already has 15 Google Meets scheduled, but Mom Ericka must also make sure small humans leave the house with a full water bottle, completed homework, and hair appears combed. And unlike our carefree twenties, we can’t just order Pad Thai at 10 p.m. and call it dinner for two days. The case for Sunday systems Here’s the encouraging news: you don’t have to live in perpetual scramble mode. Research consistently shows that people who plan and structure their weeks report lower stress and greater well-being. Weekly planning reduces rumination. In a field experiment, people who sketched out their week in advance reported fewer 2 a.m. spirals about forgotten tasks and felt more engaged during the day. Routines stabilize mental health. Psychologists link chaotic home routines to worse parental well-being, especially during school transitions. Planning boosts control. Other studies show that planning is correlated with a greater sense of progress and competence—the feeling that you’re steering the ship instead of clinging to the side in rough seas. Of course, let’s be clear: folding laundry does not spark joy. It’s possible that people who are naturally calmer are also more inclined to plan. But the evidence leans in a direction every parent instinctively knows: structure is sanity. How to survive (without spiraling) The trick isn’t to banish the Sunday Scaries—you won’t, unless you invent a time machine or outsource your children. The goal is to outmaneuver them with rituals that make Monday feel less like an ambush. Hold a Family Staff Meeting Yes, it sounds corporate but it works. Ten minutes where everyone lays out the week: who needs poster board, who has soccer practice, who’s on snack duty. Cookies as bribes are encouraged. Do Laundry Like It’s Gospel Uniforms, tights, hoodies, and beloved blankies must be washed and folded by 7 p.m. Otherwise, you’ll discover the only clean option is a Halloween cape on Wednesday morning. Play Fridge Tetris Stock the fridge like a level of Tetris: cheese sticks where you can grab them, sandwich fixings prepped, carrots visible so you can feel virtuous (even if no one eats them). With a system in place, you can turn Sunday night from a slow-motion panic spiral into something approaching serenity. Because Monday morning will still bring tears over the wrong-colored water bottle, but if the bags are packed, the laundry is folded, and the fridge is stocked, you will survive with a little more calm, and maybe even brushed hair. View the full article

I was one of the millions of people who lost someone to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the nonstop news about the “new normal,” my grief felt invisible. I took shallow solace in my phone and turned to social media to numb me from the reality that I now lived in: a world without my dad. One day, while mindlessly scrolling, I came across the r/Squishmallow subreddit, where a girl had posted her collection of more than 100 round plush toys. They were called Squishmallows—round stuffed animals invented in 2017 that have become one of the most popular toy lines in the world, with more than 100 million sold each year. I was hypnotized. I expected that my dive into the Squishmallow phenomenon would be the usual two-hour rabbit hole, but spending time in that community was the first joy I’d felt in months. After scrolling through endless photos of Squishmallow hauls, I worked up the courage to post. I asked if there was a cardinal Squishmallow, since that bird was my dad’s symbol for his own father. I was bombarded with compassion; even though cardinal Squishmallows were rare at the time, someone sent me theirs for free. That single act of generosity started my collection. Stumbling into the Squishmallow world But alongside kindness and joy, I encountered a darker side of the community: resellers. Finding the most coveted Squishmallows could turn into a fierce competition. This wasn’t just my personal frustration. As a doctoral candidate in marketing, I wanted to understand how communities like this function when outsiders exploit their passion for profit. That became the focus of my dissertation—the first study to examine resellers’ psychological and emotional impact on brand communities. That research—which my colleagues and I published in one of the field’s top journals—echoed what I had lived through as a collector: Resellers are one of the most consistent sources of pain for members of brand communities. For example, when I heard that my local Hot Topic would be selling two Reshmas, the coveted strawberry cow Squishmallow, I, like any rational adult, found myself outside of a mall at 6:30 in the morning. When the doors finally opened at 11 a.m., I sprinted to the storefront—only to find that I had been beaten by some people who had dressed as mall employees to sneak in early. I left devastated and cowless. Later that day, I saw the same people gloating in local Squishmallow Facebook groups, trying to resell the cow for more than 10 times the retail price. I was heartbroken and angry; I swore I’d never collect again. And I wasn’t the only one to feel that way: Across social media, you’ll find countless collectors venting about resellers. What is a brand community? I didn’t know it then, but I had joined my first brand community: a group of consumers who form strong, meaningful connections through their shared admiration of a product. Brand communities range from giant online hubs with more than 100,000 members to tiny local groups that host trading parties in empty lots. You might be in a brand community without realizing it. These communities can be created by a company—like Harley-Davidson, Lego, and Hot Wheels—or emerge organically from fans, like the Facebook group “Walt Disney World Tips and Tricks.” And they aren’t just about buying and selling. They’re creative ecosystems, full of posts showing collections, inventive displays, and even goodbye messages when someone “rehomes” an item to another loving collector. Community members help each other solve problems, share leads on hard-to-find items, and sometimes even mail strangers a plush toy because they know it will make them smile. But while collectors use these communities to exchange information, so do resellers. The reseller paradox: A shared enemy can unite a community Resellers are outsiders who buy the most sought-after items and flip them online for a profit. They scout inventory tips, track hot products, and plan their shelf-clearing strategies accordingly. And they infuriate collectors like me. Nothing sours the thrill of the hunt faster than seeing a shelf cleared by someone who only wants to use your sacred collectibles for profit. After feeling emotional pain myself, I wanted to understand why resellers bothered me so much, and what they meant for the communities that had become my lifeline. That frustration became the spark for my research. What I found surprised me. As a collector, nothing frustrates me more than to say: According to my research, resellers paradoxically strengthen brand communities. Yes, you read that right. Resellers help communities, but not because they try to help members acquire their desired items. In fact, my findings indicate that resellers inflict heartbreak on community members—which was in line with what I saw and experienced. Resellers help brand communities because they create a common enemy that the community can rally against. When resellers grab all the stock from a store shelf, collectors turn to each other. They vent. They strategize. They share tips on where to find certain items, offer to pick up extras for strangers, and organize trades to help each other avoid inflated resale prices. Ironically, the people causing the most frustration also increase community engagement. Brand communities are real communities These communities reminded me that you are never truly alone in your darkest moments. Joining a niche community, whether for sneakers, trading cards, cars or even Squishmallows, can enrich your life far beyond the products themselves. It wasn’t the Squishmallows that helped me heal from loss; it was the connection that lived in threads, comments, and group chats. I even came to appreciate the “villains” of the community—resellers—for their role in bringing people together. Although I still think I deserve that strawberry cow more than they did. Danielle Hass is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Marketing at West Virginia University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

Almost as soon as the first iPad was announced, a range of competitors sprung up in an attempt to become the “iPad killer.” Devices like the Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry PlayBook, and HP TouchPad all put another spin on the formula but couldn’t come close to the iPad’s blend of performance and App Store dominance. Android tablets are still around today, of course, but most manufacturers don’t push them too hard. They’re all fine at doing tablet things like watching videos, and they’re all worse than the iPad when it comes to the app ecosystem. In recent years I’ve used some great hardware from Xiaomi in particular that I still wouldn’t outright recommend over an iPad. Xiaomi’s latest, though, is straight-up better than its Apple equivalent. The Xiaomi Pad Mini feels like an exercise in picking low-hanging fruit: in this case, the iPad mini. Apple’s smallest tablet is often neglected and rarely updated, leaving several open goals for competitors. In this case, Xiaomi has turned in a better design with better performance, and critically in a form factor where Apple’s software advantages are less relevant. Added ports This tablet isn’t going to stun anyone with its originality—it pretty much looks like an iPad mini. It does have one neat trick, though, by placing USB-C ports along both the bottom edge and one of the sides you can easily charge it in a dock or while using it for video. (Apple apparently considered the same idea for the original iPad before deciding against it.) The Xiaomi Pad Mini runs on a MediaTek Dimensity 9400 processor, the chipmaker’s current top-end mobile system on a chip (SoC) and one that’s at least in the same ballpark as the two-year-old A17 Pro in the iPad mini, if not faster. Performance is excellent, and Xiaomi also offers up to 12GB of RAM while the iPad mini is stuck on 8GB. Superior screen The screen is where Xiaomi really pulls away from Apple. This is an 8.8-inch 3008-by-1880-pixel LCD with a 16:10 aspect ratio; the difference in size to the 8.3-inch iPad mini is mostly that the Xiaomi has thinner bezels and is slightly wider in landscape. Critically, it refreshes at up to 165Hz while the iPad mini is still stuck on 60Hz, which is very jarring for anyone who’s gotten used to the much smoother frame rates on the iPhone and almost every Android phone in recent years. That was the main reason I sold my own iPad mini a while back. HyperOS, which is Xiaomi’s custom version of Android, looks and works similarly to iOS, but Apple actually moved in the direction of its system of multitasking and resizing windows with this year’s iPadOS 26. While Android apps still can’t compete with the iPad in terms of quantity or quality, how much productivity are you planning to get out of an 8-inch tablet in the first place? Like a really big phone The Xiaomi Pad Mini handles simple multitasking with ease, and its aspect ratio is well-suited for most Android apps. Since you can hold it in one hand and the screen is relatively tall, apps like Instagram work fine in portrait orientation—it’s basically like using a really big phone. The aspect ratio is also better suited to most video content than the 3:2 iPad mini, meaning you’ll get a bigger picture with smaller black borders. Overall, this is a great tablet for watching videos, reading ebooks, scrolling social media, and browsing the web. You know, tablet things. It handles all of these tasks at least as well as the iPad mini unless you have a need for a very specific iPad app. A caveat There is one slightly bizarre caveat, which is the lack of any true biometric authentication. You can use your face to unlock the tablet through the selfie camera, which works better than it used to and didn’t get fooled when I tried to use a picture of my face, but that’s still not as secure as a fingerprint reader and doesn’t work in the dark. That could be a deal-breaker for many. Touch ID isn’t exactly a great experience on the iPad mini, but surely a fingerprint scanner would have been a low-cost, worthwhile inclusion here for convenience and peace of mind. Still, I can put up with sometimes needing to enter a PIN in exchange for all the ways that this is simply a better product. I would rather use this than the iPad it’s competing with, which is the first time I’ve ever been able to say that about an Android tablet. And that’s before I even mention the pricing, which starts at $429 for a model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The iPad mini, on the other hand, costs $499 for 8GB of RAM and half the amount of storage; the 256GB model is $599. It’s not like Apple isn’t capable of making the iPad mini better value for the money—it just doesn’t particularly care to. This is what can happen when companies keep outdated devices on shelves at high prices. Mini tablets clearly aren’t the most critical product category in the world, but for the first time in a long while, Apple doesn’t make the best one. View the full article

According to a recent study conducted by the global consulting firm, EY, 97% of respondents reported that it is important for companies to act with integrity. Many companies tout integrity as a core principle of their organizations in an attempt to reassure customers, employees, and the wider public that their organization “plays by the rules.” By some estimates, integrity is ranked as one of the most cited corporate core values, with over 80% of companies listing integrity as a core value. But simply including integrity on your list of core values and mounting that list on a plaque on a wall (as many companies do) won’t positively influence your culture unless your core values are fully embraced and lived by employees each and every day. After all, Enron was once the darling of corporate America and a supposedly stellar business success story—until news broke that Enron had engaged in what would turn out to be one of the biggest accounting scandals in U.S. history. Here’s why listing “integrity” as a core value and getting employees to live with integrity in the workplace can pose a challenge—even for companies with the best of intentions. A few years ago, the CEO and chairperson of a large financial institution were caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar, engaged in what could be described, at best, as questionable behavior. When the media asked the chairperson if what she and the CEO had done was aligned with the company’s core value of integrity, the chairperson replied, “Integrity means different things to different people.” The media and the public were outraged by the response. But, y’know what? The chairperson was right! Integrity does mean different things to different people when it comes to business practices. Here are three steps to take if you want to build a company where everyone understands exactly what integrity means to the organization and exactly how to demonstrate integrity in the workplace. 1. Define what integrity means for your company An organization’s perspective on the topic of integrity most often comes from the leadership of that organization, and their various versions of integrity are often reflected in corporate policies. For instance, ice cream chain Ben and Jerry’s version of integrity is reflected in their policy to only use fair trade–certified ingredients, ensuring that farmers along their supply chain are paid a fair price for their products. Chipmakers like Intel demonstrate their version of integrity by avoiding using “conflict minerals” that are mined under conditions that could be considered to be abuses of human rights. The Body Shop demonstrates its version of integrity by committing to never testing its products on animals. Some companies whose very business models, products, services, or waste may be viewed by others as causing harm to the communities in which they operate try to demonstrate integrity by engaging in acts of restitution. For instance, timber company Hampton Lumber plants three trees for every tree it harvests. Outdoor clothing company Patagonia, known not only for the quality of its products, but also for its efforts to minimize damage to the environment, donates 1% of revenue to environmental groups. (Despite these actions, some critics insist that the acts of restitution pale in comparison to the destruction caused by the companies and even accuse these companies of “greenwashing”—a deceptive practice designed to paint organizations as being more environmentally conscious than they are.) But, demonstrating “boardroom integrity” through corporate policies isn’t enough to qualify a company as being one that acts with integrity. Companies also need to demonstrate integrity at the grassroots level. It makes little sense to list “integrity” as a company core value unless that commitment to integrity permeates every corner of the organization on an individual, team or departmental level. 2. Clarify what integrity means for your employees So, since integrity may mean different things to different people, how can a company’s employees truly commit to integrity as a core value? There’s no easy answer to that question, but one way to stay within the boundaries of ethical behavior is to use “the social media test” where you instruct your employees to ask themselves, “would I be comfortable if this behavior, action, or decision were to be reported on social media (or in the newspaper) for everyone to see?” If the answer is “no” to this litmus test, then deep down in their hearts, they probably recognize that whatever they are considering probably isn’t aligned with the principle of integrity. Another way to clarify to your employees how to act with integrity in the workplace is to articulate clear behavioral expectations expressed not in abstract concepts but in clear, crisp, and concise language, using what I refer to as the “even if” principle to make it crystal clear that your organization values integrity over the potential short-term benefits of acting unethically. For instance, members of your organization’s sales department might be told: “Integrity means never misrepresenting a product to close a deal, even if it means losing a sale.” Consultants that provide services on an hourly rate to clients might be instructed to never overestimate or bill clients for time not spent on the account—even if that means not hitting monthly billing targets. Quality control managers at a company that manufacture parts may be told in no uncertain terms to never ship faulty products—even if a customer might never notice the defects. 3. Take Accountability Seriously Next, it’s important to hold employees (especially leadership) accountable for these standards. One way to hold people accountable is through the use of independent oversight—such as an empowered board of directors, ethics committees, or external auditors. To be effective, these bodies must have the authority to investigate ethical concerns, insist on transparency, reward employees for acting with integrity, and apply consequences to those who violate their company’s standards for acting with integrity. Most importantly, these bodies must not be influenced by internal politics and should not be able to be fired on the whims of the leadership team who they are holding accountable. Ideally, these oversight bodies should be proactive, with audits that identify potential conflicts early enough to prevent ethical mischief. Another way to hold leaders accountable is to create a culture where employees at all levels feel safe reporting ethical concerns without fear of reprisal. Anonymous reporting and whistleblowing channels can help identify problems that leadership might otherwise miss—or worse, knowingly condone. The desire to operate a company that acts with integrity is a noble one—but, as we have seen, one that is fraught with challenges—particularly because acting with integrity means different things to different people. No wonder research shows that just 23% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they can apply their organization’s values to their work every day! If you want your organization to be one in which employees can apply integrity to their work every day, follow the three steps above. Define what living with integrity means for your organization, drill down to the employee level and remove any ambiguity about how employees can live with integrity, and hold everyone in your organization (especially the leadership team) accountable for living with integrity. Once you’ve done this, you will be in a much better position to lead with integrity, maintain your reputation in the marketplace, and navigate complex ethical challenges. View the full article

The latest wave of tech layoffs doesn’t have to be a step backward—it can be a launchpad. If you’ve spent years shipping products, debugging systems, and partnering with go-to-market teams, you already have what many founders don’t: domain insight and a network. Pair that with AI “employees,” (role-specific software agents trained on your company’s data that can perform defined tasks like drafting on-brand content, qualifying leads, and updating CRMs) and your severance becomes seed capital for a lean, scalable company. What’s different now is that the traditional barriers to starting a business have collapsed. The math is transformative: What once required $500,000 in annual salaries can now be achieved for less than $500 a month. Beyond cost, there’s leverage—those complex migrations you managed, the customer insights you unearthed, the systems you architected—that’s IP AI can now operationalize at scale. The most successful builders aren’t just venture-backed startups—they’re experienced operators who realized AI employees can handle everything from customer research to financial analysis, all trained on their specific expertise and methods. Former Google engineers, Meta product managers, and Amazon developers are spinning up businesses with the capacity of a 10-person startup, run solo. Take Todd Krise, who launched Mercenary Marketing after two decades in agencies and now teaches others to run lean, AI-powered businesses without traditional overhead. Or Jenna Ahern of Guardian Owl Digital, who is transforming a decade-old agency into an AI-first marketing firm. Tech professionals have a unique edge here: You understand system architecture, data flows, and automation logic, and you know what “good” looks like from UX to code quality—knowledge that becomes exponentially more valuable when deployed through AI agents working 24/7. While I didn’t lose my job, I did choose to leave my job at TikTok when changing in‑office requirements and a fading work‑life balance told me it was time to rethink my path. I realized companies were being asked to deliver more with leaner teams, and AI was finally capable of helping. I started Parallel AI soon after with a simple goal to turn anxiety about headcount into AI tools that could help teams automate content, sales workflows, and operations without burning out. Building is messy and setbacks happen, even now. The steps below aim to reduce risk and improve your odds. Start with a real problem Write one sentence that states the outcome a buyer wants. Test it with 10 buyer conversations before you build. Ask: What have you tried? What did it cost? What would make this a “yes” in 30 days? A former marketing agency leader, Todd Krise, mapped out how artificial intelligence could replace the bloated, outdated agency model he worked in before launching Mercenary Marketing. He pressure-tested the plan with real clients and deadlines at the start of 2025 to prove that the systems, prices, and deliverables worked before he scaled. If you cannot find 10 people who would pay, change the outcome and try again. What to prioritize in the first 30 to 90 days Aim to land two or three paid pilots and validate one repeatable way to get customers. Divide your runway into two or three time blocks (for example, 30, 60, and 90 days) with clear milestones. Sell clear outcomes you can deliver in two to six weeks. Use them to confirm the right customers, the right price, and the value you create. Create a simple brand: Think a clear one‑line promise, a basic landing page, and two or three proof pieces (short case example, short demonstration, testimonial). Building trust matters more than polish. Measurement: Pick one main goal (revenue or active pilots) to focus on, and three early signs (qualified talks each week, proposals sent, share of proposals that become sales). Careful spending: Cap monthly spending, and pay yourself a modest paycheck. Platform choice: Prefer a measurable, custom AI agent platform over many single‑purpose tools. Fewer vendors means lower cost, less setup, and a clearer view of what works. How to land and execute your first paid pilot Define a tight offer Who: one target customer with a clear problem (for example, software companies that sell to businesses but have a weak sales outreach, or agencies that need brand‑safe content in larger amounts). What: a named pilot (for example, “30‑Day Artificial Intelligence Sales Outreach Boost” or “Content in Context Sprint”) with three to five deliverables and success measures. Why now: a clear trigger (new product launch, missed sales target, hiring freeze, a backlog of content). Use your own relationships to find your first pilot clients Use a short, specific outreach Subject or opener: “Quick pilot to achieve [outcome] in 30 days” Body (three lines): We help [customer type] achieve [outcome] without [main headache]. Proposed four‑week pilot: [deliverables] → success = [measure]. Price: [$X], 50% upfront, applied to ongoing work if it delivers. Worth a 20‑minute fit call next week? If not you, who is best? Include one proof point, a short case example, a short demonstration clip, or a measured personal example. Reduce friction Apply the pilot fee to a monthly agreement or offer a partial refund if success measures are not met. Keep paperwork simple with a one‑page work plan with clear data rules and weekly cadence. Make onboarding quick with a startup checklist, access you will need, and a day‑one plan. Execute to convert Measure everything! Record starting levels, send weekly updates with a simple measures checklist, and deliver early quick wins. At your mid‑point review show progress, confirm success measures, and discuss the follow‑on now. During the final week, present a short results deck and a one‑page decision plan with a yes or no choice and a start date for the monthly agreement. This is the moment to turn your experience into a scalable business with artificial intelligence on your terms. View the full article

And cash allocations historically low. Is that scary?View the full article