What's on Your Mind?

The annual Lyrid meteor shower is back, reaching its peak on Tuesday evening and at predawn on Wednesday. On average, 10 to 20 meteors are produced per hour during a Lyrid shower. But, in some rare occasions “outbursts” can occur, with up to 100 meteors produced in an hour. According to the American Meteor Society, Lyrids will be mostly visible in the Northern hemisphere at dawn, although limited availability will also be available to those in the Southern Hemisphere. The Lyrid shower is among the oldest recorded meteor showers, dating back as far as 2,700 years. The meteor shower is visible when Earth travels through the path of Comet Thatcher, rendering a t…

Nearly two out of three American adults have used an AI-powered search tool in the past six months. But here’s the stat that should keep every product builder up at night: only 15% say they trust the results “a lot.” That gap between adoption and trust is the defining challenge for the next era of AI search. Consumers are showing up, but they are questioning the results. As product builders, we have to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: Are we building experiences that earn and deserve consumer trust? The Walled Garden Problem Yelp partnered with Morning Consult to survey more than 2,200 U.S. adults on how they use and perceive AI-powered search. The fin…

I have been thinking about a question that nobody in enterprise software seems to want to sit with: why can the most advanced AI models in the world solve Olympiad-level mathematics but fail to reliably extract a total from an invoice? This is not an academic exercise for me. I have been building automation software for twenty years. My company has processed billions of documents for some of the largest enterprises in the world. Yes, I have a stake in this answer. But twenty years of watching models work on real enterprise data, not benchmarks, gives you a different view than turning a model in a lab. And when those real-world models cannot get the simple stuff right,…

You can now book haircuts, doctors’ appointments, and food deliveries through Yelp. The business search and review platform has rolled out integrations with providers including DoorDash, Zocdoc, and Vagaro, letting users book appointments and order food directly from a Yelp listing or through the AI-powered Yelp Assistant. Users could already request quotes from businesses ranging from home and auto repair professionals to beauty experts. The Yelp Assistant is also getting its own tab in the app, as the company aims to become a destination not just for its hundreds of millions of user-contributed reviews but for answering questions about local businesses and booking their…

Power has a way of narrowing progress—and the narrowing follows a pattern. Early in my career, a senior colleague took credit for ideas and work I had shared while onboarding him to the team. It wasn’t subtle: same thinking, same framework, different owner. When I raised it, I was told to assume good intentions. When I pushed for accountability, I was told I was being “testy.” The behavior was never examined. The outcome was never corrected. I have since seen the same logic repeat across organizations: good intent is treated as a substitute for accountability. This is not a rare story. This is a system caught in the act. Women now earn the majority of college …

As inflation causes prices to rise, there is a cost that disproportionately impacts women—the “egg freezing tax.” In 2023, over 40,000 women froze their eggs—a safe, proven way to invest in more control over the timing of one’s family—which has grown in popularity for many reasons: general declines in fertility rates, delayed family building, and increasing numbers of women choosing to become a single mom by choice. Despite having founded three companies, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done was freeze my eggs. In my early thirties, while building my first startup in San Francisco, my nights were a blur of teaching myself to self-inject and tracking complex medica…

Starting today, McDonald’s U.S. customers will finally have access to the newest McValue platform, an updated menu that the burger chain has touted as offering more flexibility and better deals. Don’t be surprised if your next trip to the drive-thru isn’t meaningfully cheaper as a result. Announced earlier this month, the new menu offers an array of breakfast, lunch, and dinner items for under $3. While that’s an attractive price point to be sure, it’s not quite as attractive to some customers as what was on offer with the original McValue menu when it was introduced last year. That menu, you might recall, allowed customers to add various items for just $1 i…

A judge is expected to sentence OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma to forfeit $225 million to the Justice Department on Tuesday, clearing the way for the company to finalize a settlement of thousands of lawsuits it faces over its role in the opioid crisis. The penalty was agreed to in a 2020 pact to resolve federal civil and criminal probes it was facing. If the judge signs off, other penalties will not be collected in return for Purdue settling the other lawsuits. After years of legal twists and turns, the settlement was approved by another judge last year and could take effect May 1. It requires members of the Sackler family who own the company to pay up to $7 billion to s…

Picture this: You’re at the gate, shoes pinching after a long walk through the terminal, and you know you packed your flats. They’re right there, somewhere in your carry-on. But getting to them means hoisting the bag onto a bench, unzipping the clamshell, and watching your carefully packed clothes threaten to spill out onto the airport floor. By the time you’ve wrestled the bag back together, your flight is boarding. It’s a scenario that has played out in airports for decades—because for all the advances in materials and wheels and tracking technology, the fundamental architecture of the carry-on suitcase has barely changed. Open from the middle, split in half, dig ar…

A new streaming service is betting that comedy doesn’t need to be a category; it can be the whole platform. On May 5, comedy distribution company 800 Pound Gorilla Media will launch Gorilla Comedy+. The boutique streaming service will feature a 250-plus-title library of stand-up specials, including new sets from Patton Oswalt, Pete Holmes, Emmy Blotnick, Jourdain Fisher, and Nish Kumar, alongside the company’s existing catalog. Gorilla Comedy+ is partnering with Cineverse, using its AI-powered Matchpoint platform to build apps across devices. The service will handle distribution and onboarding, while Cineverse’s tech stack will also enable interactive features layered…

For investors hurtling toward retirement, sitting tight with stocks has been the path of least resistance in recent years. Stocks, especially U.S. names, have soundly outperformed bonds. However, recent events should serve as a wake-up call to take some risk off the table and give bonds a closer look. Stocks have recently encountered some volatility but they’re still near all-time highs. That provides pre-retirees and retirees with an opportune time to scale back equity exposure and plow the proceeds into safer assets like cash and high-quality bonds. The benefits of de-risking The key benefit that bonds confer to a retirement-decumulation portfolio is their lower…

A researcher revealed that the vibe-coding platform Lovable exposed users’ chat histories with AI models to other users accessing the platform through an API (application programming interface). X user @weezerOSINT, reported the exposure in a post on Monday. “I made a Lovable account today and was able to access another user’s source code, database credentials, AI chat histories, and customer data are all readable by any free account,” the researcher wrote. The post included a screenshot of another Lovable user’s project code and chats, along with an unresolved ticket for the bug that allegedly caused the data leak. Lovable has a mass data breach affecting every …

For 30 days, a drum roller compacted dirt on a 30-acre airport extension in Austin, Texas, without a human behind the wheel. According to the contractor, Dynamic Site Solutions, the machine dropped daily downtime from six hours to under one hour, nearly doubling its productive hours on site while registering zero accidents thanks to a safety system that is designed to avoid any ‘Wile E. Coyote tries to catch the Roadrunner with an ACME steam roller’ outcome. The technology behind it is an aftermarket robotic brain built by Crewline—a four-person startup headed by CEO Frederik Filz-Reiterdank and CTO Mohamed Sadek—that can be installed on an existing steamroller in ab…

What comes to mind when you think of sports sunglasses? Maybe it’s rec spec goggles or big, mirrored cycling sunglasses. While these glasses are fine for action, they’re not exactly what you’d call stylish. Warby Parker is looking to change that with the launch of Warby Parker Sport, a collection of performance sunglasses starting at $195. “I’m really proud of where we ended up where these are glasses that have all of the great function of great sports glasses, but something where you’re not going to look back in 10 years and think, why was I wearing this crazy shield on my face?” Warby Parker co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal tells Fast Company. The l…

If you’re planning to visit your local Social Security Administration (SSA) office in the near future, be aware that a number of locations across the United States are currently closed for in-person services. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? The Social Security Administration has offices across the United States and around the world in U.S. territories. Most of the time, those SSA offices are open to the public for those who need in-person services. Yet currently, a number of SSA offices are marked as closed for in-person services or just closed entirely, according to a current list of office closings and emergencies on the SSA website. …

If you’ve been building consumer hardware for any real amount of time, you know the pattern. Most of these shifts start the same way. The sensor exists, but it’s stuck in clinical settings where it’s expensive, awkward, and not something anyone would realistically use day to day. At some point, someone figures out how to shrink it down enough to fit into a real product, and a few companies take an early shot at turning it into something people actually want. Early on, it’s easy to dismiss. It looks niche, maybe even like a gimmick. But adoption starts to build, usually more gradually than people expect at first. Then it picks up, and within a product cycle or two,…

Plug-in solar is on the way, and it could cut your electric bills. A growing number of states are poised to pass bills supporting the panels, which are designed for DIY installation: Hang one out a window or set it on a deck, plug it into a regular outlet, and power starts flowing back into your home. A new calculator helps you estimate how much you can save on power bills, using your zip code to estimate how much sunshine you get and how much you’re paying for electricity now. The tech could be especially useful in cities like New York, where renters have steep electric bills and don’t have roofs to install traditional solar panel systems. “A huge percent of…

The job market is tough right now. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job openings have been trending down, and are currently below pre-pandemic levels. In a hypercompetitive economy, people entering the workforce are facing fewer opportunities than just a few years ago. And for the 1 in 3 American adults with a justice-involved past, or any interaction with the criminal justice system as a defendant, their record is another obstacle in an already challenging job search. April marks Fair Chance Month, an annual opportunity to spotlight reentry programs, resources, and skills-training for formerly incarcerated people. Yet, as the conversation around second ch…

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

The North Face’s new collection is designed to make camping more accessible for everyone—and it starts with reconsidering the small details that designers often overlook. The Universal Collection is a five-piece set of gear, including a sleeping bag, tent, backpack, slippers, and hat. It was designed in collaboration with ski mountaineer Vasu Sojitra and rock climber Maureen Beck, both of whom are athlete collaborators with The North Face and advocates for the disability community. According to Luke Matthews, design manager of technical equipment for the North Face, the concept for the Universal Collection arose after his team noticed a common complaint from c…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Zillow economists just published their updated 12-month forecast, projecting that U.S. home prices—as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index—will shift +0.0% between March 2026 and March 2027. That’s a mild downward revision from its 12-month forecast published last month (+0.5%). U.S. home prices, as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index, are currently up +0.8% year-over-year. Zillow’s latest 12-month outlook (+0.0%) expects national home prices to remain near that subdued pace. As long as national home price growth remains below U.S. income …