What's on Your Mind?

Uber is facing internal staff unrest as it attempts to implement a three-day-per-week return to office (RTO) mandate and stricter sabbatical eligibility. An all-hands meeting late last month descended into acrimony as staff flooded the online meeting chat with queries about why the mandate was being enacted. “How is five years of service not a tenured employee? Especially when burnout is rampant in the org,” read one message that was reviewed by CNBC. Following the meeting, Nikki Krishnamurthy, Uber’s chief people officer, issued a memo saying staff had “crossed an acceptable line” during the call. It’s unclear if there has been any disciplinary action to date. …

A study has confirmed what we all suspected: “K” is officially the worst text you can send. It might look harmless enough, but this single letter has the power to shut down a conversation and leave the recipient spiraling. According to a study published in the Journal of Mobile Communication, “K” was ranked as the most negatively received response in digital conversations—worse than being left on read or even a passive-aggressive “sure.” The study found that the single-letter reply often signals emotional distance, passive-aggressiveness, or outright disinterest. Despite its brevity, “K” carries surprising emotional weight. Adding an extra letter—making it “kk”—so…

SoundCloud is facing backlash after creators took to social media to complain upon discovering that the music-sharing platform uses uploaded music to train its AI systems. According to SoundCloud’s terms of use, unless a separate agreement states otherwise, users “explicitly agree that your Content may be used to inform, train, develop or serve as input to artificial intelligence or machine intelligence technologies or services as part of and for providing the services.” These terms appear to have been added to SoundCloud’s website in February 2024. Futurism was the first to report on artists’ concerns. Musical duo The Flight brought attention to the terms thi…

May has only just begun, but already, it has not been a good month for the tech industry in terms of layoffs. Since the month started, several prominent names in technology have announced layoffs, some involving a significant number of workers. Here are the companies involved in the latest round of tech layoffs Panasonic Holdings The iconic Japanese electronics giant, founded over a century ago, announced on May 9 that it would eliminate 10,000 jobs. That reduction equates to about 4% of Panasonic’s total workforce, reports Bloomberg. According to Panasonic CEO Yuki Kusumi, the cuts are to better prepare the electronics maker for the next few decades. The compa…

Planes at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport were briefly left flying blind overnight as the airport experienced another radar outage – the second incident in less than two weeks. The most recent radar outage, first reported by ABC news, occurred just before 4 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday and lasted for a minute and a half. “There was a telecommunications outage that impacted communications and radar display at Philadelphia TRACON Area C, which guides aircraft in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport airspace,” an Federal Aviation Administration spokesperson confirmed in a statement provided to Fast Company. Why New York area planes are…

San Francisco Bay Area residents woke up to some bad news for their Friday commute. Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, the region’s main commuter rail system, which connects San Francisco’s peninsula with the East and South Bay, systematically shut down due to a “computer networking problem” affecting train control. The agency announced it was closing all 50 stations at 4:24 a.m. on Friday morning, the East Bay Times reported. As of this writing on Friday morning, BART said that train service had resumed, although passengers should expect “major delays.” “Technicians are on site trying to get to the bottom of the situation, but right now, that is the infor…

The Soviet Union launched over a dozen probes to Venus—most successfully. But one never made it past Earth’s orbit and has, in fact, stayed there since 1972. Now, over 50 years later, the one-meter-large Kosmos 482 is coming home, albeit a bit haphazardly. The 1,091-pound craft, also known as Kosmos 482 and Venera 8, is predicted to reach reentry within nine hours of 1:54 a.m. ET on May 10, according to the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS). In other words, this could be late afternoon today or sometime tomorrow morning. If you think the when is varied, wait until you hear about the where. Aerospace, the American nonprofit resea…

As a woman in the United States, turning 21 means beginning a lifelong journey of getting a pap spear every three years. It’s not a pleasant experience. You’ll lie down with your legs in stirrups, while your doctor inserts a speculum inside your vagina. Then, she or he will take a sample from your cervix with a hard plastic device to figure out if you have any trace of HPV (the human papillomavirus), a sexually transmitted infection that can cause cervical cancer, or cancerous and precancerous cells. Starting today, however, there’s an easier solution. Teal Health, a woman’s health company founded in 2020, has developed a new product that allows you to take a sam…

Since 1974, William Stout Architectural Books in San Francisco’s Jackson Square has been one of the city’s most iconic destinations for its seemingly endless stock of art, design, and architecture books. As the store was approaching its 50th year in business with a fresh owner, the Eames Institute for Infinite Curiosity, it discovered a problem: It had run out of stickers to label its books. Then it discovered another problem—it didn’t have a formalized logo to print more. But as luck would have it, a fairly competent design firm resided just across the street that offered to help: LoveFrom. “It’s a store we loved. And if we didn’t get to design [their brand], it would ha…

Apple could owe you part of a class action lawsuit settlement centered around the company’s voice assistant, Siri. The settlement was reached in January, and Apple agreed to set aside $95 million to pay people who allegedly had their conversations or queries recorded after unintentionally activating Siri. Here’s what you need to know about the settlement, key dates, and how to determine whether you can participate in the $95 million payout. What is the settlement about? Back in 2014, Apple added a “Hey, Siri” hotword command that, when spoken, automatically triggers Siri on a compatible Apple device to listen to what is being said. The feature was meant to be u…

From his first moments on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo XIV gave three important clues about what kind of leader of the 1.4-billion-member Catholic Church he will be. Leo, formerly U.S. Cardinal Robert Prevost, was elected by the world’s cardinals on Thursday as the new pope on the second day of the conclave to choose a successor to Pope Francis, who died last month. He is the first pope from the United States, but holds dual citizenship in Peru, where he was a missionary for decades before becoming a cardinal. Leo’s first clue was his choice of name. Popes often use this choice to send their first major signal about the priorities of their new…

As recently as 2021, Figma was a one-product company. That product was Figma Design, the dominant tool for creating app and web interfaces. The company’s subsequent addition of offerings such as FigJam (whiteboarding) and Figma Slides (presentations) was hardly a frenzied land grab. But the announcements Figma made this week at its Config conference in San Francisco cover so much ground that my impulse was to interpret them as a massive, sprawling new attempt to take on . . . well, almost everybody. Figma Make turns prompts into AI-generated code? Shades of GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and numerous other AI programming tools. Figma Sites provides features for construct…

Uncertainty has become a defining feature of life today, a reality that challenges workplace leaders to adapt rapidly, make decisions with limited information, and foster stability amid constant and sometimes highly erratic change. At the same time, this uncertainty directly affects employees, making it incumbent upon leaders to provide the support and direction their teams need to successfully navigate an unpredictable world with both resilience and clarity. It goes without saying that the role of a leader has grown increasingly more complex, requiring us to instill stability, foster adaptability, and maintain focus without being overwhelmed by the relentless pac…

After a two-year battle with regulators, a federal judge ruled in late December to block the merger of grocery behemoths Kroger and Albertsons. The deal fell apart after facing significant pushback—and a lawsuit—from the Federal Trade Commission under the Biden administration, in part over concerns that unionized grocery workers would have less leverage to negotiate wage increases and respond to layoffs following a merger. Those concerns were not unfounded: The overwhelming majority of grocery workers (92%) are frontline staff in nonsupervisory positions, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—and as industry leaders, Kroger and Albertsons employ 28% o…