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The price of Bitcoin has declined dramatically in recent weeks, and cryptocurrency investors are more fearful than ever. In the past 24 hours, the crypto king dipped to the $60,000 range—a low it has not seen since October 2024. While Bitcoin has now recovered slightly to around $66,000, many analysts and investors still think the token may not have bottomed out yet. Here’s what you need to know about Bitcoin’s continued fall, and how low things might go. Why is Bitcoin falling? Like most cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC) has been steadily falling almost since the year began. As Fast Company previously reported, there were two main drivers for this fall. The first is increased geopolitical uncertainty. Since the year began, America attacked Venezuela, threatened to take Greenland by force from one of its most important European allies, and is now in a standoff with Iran. Military conflict almost always affects markets, but until it happens, no one can predict by how much or in what direction. That uncertainty generally leads investors to pull their money from relatively risky assets, like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and park it in safe havens, like gold or the U.S. dollar (USD). The second recent driver was President The President’s announcement, in late January, the he has selected Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve chair. The news caused the U.S. dollar to spike, making it more valuable. And since cryptocurrencies are priced in dollars, the same amount of dollars could buy more crypto, thereby impacting the value of the digital tokens. In recent days, other factors have pushed Bitcoin down to levels not seen in well over a year. Those factors include a bearish run in tech stocks. When tech stocks decline, crypto tends to follow suit. Additionally, there have been significant forced liquidations of Bitcoin in recent days. These selloffs happen automatically when Bitcoin hits a certain price level. These automated selloffs can prompt other investors to sell their shares, too, before the price drops any further. In short, Bitcoin isn’t dropping for any one reason. There are numerous factors working against it right now. Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency that is falling Without a doubt, Bitcoin is having a bad day. Over the past 24 hours, the token fell as low as $60,074.80. That represented a more than 50% decline from its all-time high of $126,198.07 in October. At its current price of around $66,378, Bitcoin has now lost more than 42% of its value in the past six months alone. But Bitcoin isn’t the only crypto that has suffered a major crash. As Fast Company reported yesterday, XRP has been getting hammered as of late. In the past six months, the popular token has lost more than 54% of its value. Other popular tokens, including Ethereum, BNB, and Solana, have also seen incredible drops during the same period. Crypto greed and fear index hits all-time low In the wake of this recent crypto crash, it should be no surprise that the majority of cryptocurrency investors are experiencing significant dread at this time. Indeed, CoinMarketCap’s Crypto Fear and Greed Index has now reached an all-time low. The index measures investor sentiment in the crypto market. An index value of 80-100 indicates that investors are experiencing “extreme greed,” which often manifests as surging crypto prices. Meanwhile, 60-80 represents “greed,” 40-60 “neutral,” and 20-40 “fear. Today, the index has fallen to 5 on the scale, which puts it in the 0-20 range, which means investors are experiencing “extreme fear.” A rating of 5 is an all-time low for the index, and is 50% lower than its previous all-time low of 10 during a crypto selloff in November 2025. Where is the bottom for Bitcoin? While no one can predict what Bitcoin or any asset will do in the future, what everyone wants to know now is whether Bitcoin has hit its floor or if things are going to get worse. Crypto-watchers with more positive inclinations might point out that while Bitcoin fell to the $60,000 range in the past 24 hours, it did not fall through that barrier. And the coin has now recovered about 10% of its 24-hour low. Bitcoin is currently trading at $66,378 at the time of this writing. However, there are plenty of analysts who think Bitcoin may not have hit the bottom yet. On February 1, Galaxy Asset Management sent a memo to investors warning that the token could trade in the $56,000 to $58,000 in the near term. Meanwhile, 10x Research’s CEO, Markus Thielen, today told CNBC International that Bitcoin could drop to as low as $50,000. If that’s the case, today’s fall is far from the bottom for Bitcoin. View the full article

This week, we covered the first core update of 2026, the February 2026 Discover core update. Meanwhile, there is an ongoing super-heated and volatile Google search rankings. Google has nothing to share about the recent unconfirmed ranking updates...View the full article

This Sunday will see the Seattle Seahawks face off against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX. The game will also mark the conclusion of the tenth football season featuring Next Gen Stats, the analytics system that delivers detailed data about every game to coaches and broadcasters through a partnership with Amazon Web Services. Next Gen Stats began in 2015, when the National Football League deployed RFID chips in player shoulder pads and even in the football itself, enabling the league to capture location data multiple times per second through sensors installed throughout stadiums. It has since become a mainstay of football broadcasts and training sessions, delivering granular insights to a sport that previously could track only a fraction of the complex movements of 22 players and the ball across the field. “Next Gen Stats is part of the vernacular now,” says Julie Souza, AWS’s global head of sports. Bringing data to the gridiron Behind the scenes, dozens of machine learning models—the same kinds of systems AWS offers to process business data—translate the raw numbers generated by the sensors into understandable stats in real time. With the recent addition of 4K cameras to NFL venues, the system can now capture not just player position on the field but the precise position of shoulders, elbows, knees, and hands, generating 29 data points per player 60 times per second. That data is processed by in-stadium AWS servers in roughly 700 milliseconds, then sent to the cloud to feed machine learning models that run in under 100 milliseconds. The result is analytics delivered to broadcasters within about a second, shorter than the NFL’s typical broadcast delay. Announcers are equipped with dashboards that surface key stats, along with AI systems that allow them to ask natural-language questions based on new and historical data, Souza says, such as, “When was the last time this particular play happened, or that you know, this metric was achieved?” The data is also increasingly used to inform player coaching and off-the-field training, as well as rule changes designed to make the game safer. AWS helped the NFL run thousands of simulated football seasons that informed the Dynamic Kickoff rule, introduced in the 2025 season. The change helped boost returned kickoffs while reducing the play’s historically elevated concussion rate. “What’s amazing about that is everything that we had modeled for them is what has panned out from the results,” Souza says. Analytic dashboards also help teams identify players at risk of injury, allowing coaching and training staffs to intervene before injuries occur. Those changes in play and training led to roughly 700 fewer missed games by players last season, she says. More detailed stats can also help newer fans, including international audiences and younger viewers, understand the game more quickly. Richer player data has enabled new types of broadcasts as well, including animated versions of real games that appeal to families with children, and Amazon Prime Video’s Prime Vision with Next Gen Stats stream of Thursday Night Football. Features tested in the Prime Vision stream, such as highlighting players likely to blitz the quarterback, have since made their way into the main broadcast. “You can do all of these different versions of broadcast to serve different and specific audiences, but it’s all coming from that same set of data,” says Souza. A different kind of bowl game Next Gen Stats data is also used in the NFL’s annual Big Data Bowl, an analytics competition that invites contestants to develop new use cases for the league’s vast trove of data, and in some cases leads to jobs with the NFL or individual teams. Souza, who has served as a judge in the competition, says new judging criteria are being added to evaluate how proposed analytics could be conveyed to fans during a broadcast. The shift reflects a broader recognition that even as sports become more driven by data, storytelling remains central. “Everything we’re talking about right now is the science—the science, and the engineering, and the analytics, and the rigor, and the math,” she says. “It only matters if the art is there, and the art is the storytelling.” View the full article

There’s a dangerous misconception in B2B marketing that video is just a “brand awareness” play. We tend to bucket video into two extremes: The “viral” top-of-funnel asset that gets views but no leads. The dry bottom-of-funnel product demo that gets leads but no views. This binary thinking is breaking your pipeline. In my role at LinkedIn, I have access to a unique view of the B2B buying ecosystem. What the data shows is that the most successful companies don’t treat video as a tactic for one stage of the funnel. They treat it as a multiplier. When you integrate video strategy across the entire buying journey – connecting brand to demand – effectiveness multiplies, driving as many as 1.4x more leads. Here’s the strategic framework for building that system, backed by new data on how B2B buyers actually make decisions. The reality: The ‘first impression rose’ The window to influence a deal closes much earlier than most marketers realize. LinkedIn’s B2B Institute calls this the “first impression rose.” Like the reality TV show “The Bachelor,” if you don’t get a rose in the first ceremony, you’re unlikely to make it to the finale. Research from LinkedIn and Bain & Company found 86% of buyers already have their choices predetermined on “Day 1” of a buying cycle. Even more critically, 81% ultimately purchase from a vendor on that Day 1 list. If your video strategy waits until the buyer is “in-market” or “ready to buy” to show up, you’re fighting over the remaining 19% of the market. To win, you need to be on the shortlist before the RFP is even written. That requires a three-play strategy. Play 1: Reach and prime the ‘hidden’ buying committee The goal: Reach the people who can say ‘no’ Most video strategies target the “champion,” the person who uses the tool or service. But in B2B, the champion rarely holds the checkbook. Consider this scenario. You’ve spent months courting the VP of marketing. They love your solution. They’re ready to sign. But when they bring the contract to the procurement meeting, the CFO looks up and asks: “Who are they? Why haven’t I heard of them?” In that moment, the deal stalls. You’re suddenly competing on price because you have zero brand equity with the person controlling the budget. Our data shows you’re more than 20 times more likely to be bought when the entire buying group – not just the user – knows you on Day 1. The strategic shift: Cut-through creative To reach that broader group, you can’t just be present. You have to be memorable. You need reach and recall, both. LinkedIn data reveals exactly what “cut-through creative” looks like in the feed: Be bold: Video ads featuring bold, distinctive colors see a 15% increase in engagement. Be process-oriented: Messaging broken down into clear, visual steps drives 13% higher dwell times. The “Goldilocks” length: Short videos between 7-15 seconds are the sweet spot for driving brand lift – outperforming both very short (under 6 seconds) and long-form ads. The “Silent Movie” rule: Design for the eye, not the ear. 79% of LinkedIn’s audience scrolls with sound off. If your video relies on a talking head to explain the value prop in the first 5 seconds, you’ve lost 80% of the room. Use visual hooks and hard-coded captions to earn attention instantly. Dig deeper: 5 tips to make your B2B content more human Play 2: Educate and nudge by selling ‘buyability’ The goal: Mitigate personal and professional risk This is where most B2B content fails. We focus on selling capability (features, specs, speeds, feeds) and rarely focus on buyability (how safe it is to buy us). When a B2B buyer is shortlisting vendors, they’re navigating career risk. Our research with Bain & Company found the top five “emotional jobs” a buyer needs to fulfill. Only two were about product capability. The No. 1 emotional job (at 34%) was simply, “I felt I could defend the decision if it went wrong.” The strategic shift: Market the safety net To drive consideration, your video content shouldn’t be a feature dump. It should be a safety net. What does that actually look like? Momentum is safety (the “buzz” effect) Buyers want to bet on a winner. Our data shows brands generate 10% more leads when they build momentum through “buzz.” You can manufacture this buzz through cultural coding. When brands reference pop culture, we see a 41% lift in engagement. When they leverage memes (yes, even in B2B), engagement can jump by 111%. It signals you’re relevant, human, and part of the current conversation. Authority builds trust (the “expert” effect) If momentum catches their eye, expertise wins their trust. But how you present that expertise matters. Video ads featuring executive experts see 53% higher engagement. When those experts are filmed on a conference stage, engagement lifts by 70%. Why? The setting implies authority. It signals, “This person is smart enough that other people paid to listen to them.” Consistency is credibility You can’t “burst” your way to trust. Brands that maintain an always-on presence see 10% more conversions than those that stop and start. Trust is a cumulative metric. Dig deeper: The future of B2B authority building in the AI search era Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Play 3: Convert and capture by removing friction The goal: Stop convincing, start helping By this stage, the buyer knows you (Play 1) and trusts you (Play 2). Don’t use your bottom-funnel video to “hard sell” them. Use it to remove the friction of the next step. Buyers at this stage feel three specific types of risk: Execution risk: “Will this actually work for us?” Decision risk: “What if I’m choosing wrong?” Effort risk: “How much work is implementation?” That’s why recommendations, relationships, and being relatable help close deals. The strategic shift: Answer the anxiety Your creative should directly answer those anxieties. Scale social proof – kill execution risk 90% of buyers say social proof is influential information. But don’t just post a logo. Use video to show the peer. When a buyer sees someone with their exact job title succeeding, decision risk evaporates. Activate your employees – kill decision risk People trust people more than logos. Startups that activate their employees see massive returns because it humanizes the brand. The stat that surprises most leaders. Just 3% of employees posting regularly can drive 20% more leads, per LinkedIn data. Show the humans who’ll answer the phone when things break. The conversion combo – kill effort risk Don’t leave them hanging with a generic “Learn More” button. We see 3x higher lead gen open rates when video ads are combined directly with lead gen forms. The video explains the value, the form captures the intent instantly. Short sales cycle (under 30 days): Use video and lead gen forms for speed. Long sales cycle: Retarget video viewers with message ads from a thought leader. Don’t ask for a sale; start a conversation. Dig deeper: LinkedIn’s new playbook taps creators as the future of B2B marketing It’s a flywheel, not a funnel If this strategy is so effective, why isn’t everyone doing it? The problem isn’t usually budget or talent. It’s structure. In most organizations, “brand” teams and “demand” teams operate in silos. Brand owns the top of the funnel (Play 1). Demand owns the bottom (Play 3). They fight over budget and rarely coordinate creative. This fragmentation kills the multiplier effect. When you break down those silos and run these plays as a single system, the data changes. Our modeling shows an integrated strategy drives 1.4x more leads than running brand and demand in isolation. It creates a flywheel: Your broad reach (Play 1) builds the retargeting pools. Your educational content (Play 2) warms up those audiences, lifting CTRs. Your conversion offers (Play 3) capture demand from buyers who are already sold, lowering your CPL. The brands that balance the funnel – investing in memory and action – are the ones that make the “Day 1” list. And the ones on that list are the ones that win the revenue. View the full article

This week’s SEO Pulse covers ranking volatility inside Discover, expanding AI ad inventory, and growing scrutiny of bot-facing content practices. The post Discover Core Update, AI Mode Ads & Crawl Policy – SEO Pulse appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

We saw Google test follow up questions below the AI Mode responses back in July. Now Google is testing follow up search suggestions, not necessarily in question format, at the bottom of some AI Mode results.View the full article

The Google Ads mixed campaign type experiment beta, which we covered the help document last month, seems to be going live for some advertisers. This feature allows advertisers to test multiple campaign types, budgets, and settings across campaigns in a single experiment.View the full article

We covered how horrific the AI-based Frankenstein recipes can be in Google Search, where it mashes up recipe steps from various publishers and acts like it is a real recipe from a source. Well, Bing had something similar but Jordi Ribas from Microsoft said they are "unshipping" the feature after the feedback was received. View the full article

This week's PPC Pulse recaps Microsoft’s push to rethink content compensation and Google’s latest changes to tagging standards and account protections. The post Microsoft’s Publisher Marketplace, Google Tag Update & Multi-Party Approvals – PPC Pulse appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

The co-founder of America’s biggest predictions market on the ‘wisdom of the crowds’, political polarisation — and the company’s adviser, Donald The President JrView the full article

Hello, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. “Programming, as it turns out, is just typing.” Talking at Cisco’s AI Summit in San Francisco on February 3, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made that pithy observation to sum up the phenomenon of people using AI coding tools to simply describe in plain language software they want to exist, with an algorithm doing the heavy lifting. The comment came during a wild, wide-ranging riff on how AI is changing the world, and Huang kept joking that his chatter might have been influenced by several glasses of wine. (Hey, he was the after-dinner speaker.) But even if alcohol-fueled poetic license was involved, the sentiment captured the present moment. The earliest evidence that AI could transform how people program computers came even before ChatGPT’s arrival, dating to when GitHub released the first version of its Copilot in 2021. At that point, AI was autocompleting snippets of code for humans rather than generating software from scratch. The progress has been radical since then, reflected in the boom for coding agents such as Cursor, Windsurf, Replit, and the industry’s current darling, Anthropic’s Claude Code. Along the way, the act of willing software into reality through AI got a name: vibe coding. At the Cisco event, Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen, and other Silicon Valley luminaries talked about the whole industry having arrived at a crucial juncture in the pivot to AI software generation. Anthropic’s chief product officer, Mike Krieger, whose boss, Dario Amodei, predicted last March that AI would be writing “essentially all of the code” within a year, suggested that’s in the neighborhood of coming true—at least at Anthropic: “Right now, for most products . . . it’s effectively 100%.” Along with potentially upending the entire tech industry, AI’s ability to write programs could have a powerful democratizing effect on how the world uses technology. For the past few decades, most people who use computers have been wholly dependent on software written by trained professionals. What happens when that trained professional might be an algorithm, available to the masses to create whatever pops into their minds? I’ve been exploring that question since last March, when I used Replit to bring my dream note-taking app to life. The experience was amazing enough that I put up with Replit’s many rough edges, including its iffy debugging skills, repeated introduction of security flaws, and sycophantic tendency to tell me my ideas were pure genius. Since then, I have had better luck with new and improved versions of the service. I’ve also dabbled with several other coding platforms with increasingly impressive results. But Claude Code, which I’ve been using recently to reimagine a game I wrote back in high school, is the most uncanny of them all. As a lark, I fed it my 1980s BASIC code, expecting it would have no clue what to do with something written in such an obsolete language. Instead, it roughed out a modern, web-native version in minutes. Since then, we—Claude Code and I—have been collaborating to improve the game and dress up its graphics. I say “we” because it truly feels like we’re working as a team. Claude builds out my ideas without me having to spell them out in excruciating detail, and sometimes comes up with ones of its own. Its ability to understand what I want the game to do, and why, can feel like it borders on the clairvoyant. When I’ve finished fooling around with the new version—soon—I’ll share it here so you can judge the results for yourself. (Full disclosure: I had one bizarre issue with Claude Code. For a few days, it labored under the mistaken understanding that some of my requests were examples of prompt injection—a nefarious third party issuing commands meant to interfere with the project—and kept assuring me that it was ignoring them. Despite that, it continued to code up a storm. I asked Anthropic what was going on, but the company hasn’t yet provided an explanation.) Quirks and all, I’m thoroughly enjoying making AI-generated software. But I do confess that it’s brought out my inner Edsger Dijkstra. A celebrated computer scientist and A.M. Turing Award winner, Dijkstra bristled at the notion that anyone should be able to create software. He maintained that proper programming required an especially deep understanding of mathematics. Mere mortals shouldn’t even try. In a 1975 essay, Dijkstra ripped into BASIC, the language I used to write the original version of my game. Created at Dartmouth in 1964 and initially intended for non-techie liberal arts majors, BASIC emphasized approachability over elegance. Instead of demanding too much from these neophytes, it was simple to learn and tolerated sloppy code. He hated it. As someone who once programmed a fair amount but allowed my skills to atrophy, I am nagged by the fear that vibe coding is a form of cheating. It feels too easy. I’m also bothered by the fact that I don’t fully understand the code Claude wrote, and in fact have barely glanced at it. In short, I haven’t been entirely comfortable with the prospect of software becoming something that anyone can make. Dijkstra, who died in 2002, isn’t around to chime in on Claude Code or other forms of vibe coding. I can’t imagine he’d be thrilled with them, though. In many cases, their algorithms seem to settle for the most expedient approach to a job, resulting in software that may be less than optimal even if it gets the job done. I cheerfully admit to being unqualified to judge Claude’s coding proficiency, but my high school programming buddy Charles, who went on to become a professional developer, took a peek and deemed some of its techniques “cringe-worthy.” Legitimate reasons exist to be skittish about the quality of vibe-coded software, particularly on the security front. Last week, an app called Moltbook—a social network for AI agents—made quite a splash. According to security firm Wiz, it also left its database of user information vulnerable to leaks, due to a misconfigured server. Vibe coding may have been to blame. My reluctance to be responsible for assuring other people’s privacy is the biggest reason why I haven’t shared any of the productivity apps I’ve vibe coded for myself. Presumably, software companies with human engineers in the loop—such as Nvidia and Anthropic—have charged them with vetting the robustness of AI’s handiwork. It’s tough to imagine the day coming when that isn’t essential. Still, I am slowly getting around to the belief that vibe coding is not an alternative to coding, but a legitimate form of it. Even the most gifted programmer typically needs help translating their work into something a computer can understand. Most of them rely on high-level programming languages that break tasks into the reduced set of low-level instructions a processor performs natively. Until now, those high-level languages have had names such as Python, JavaScript, Swift, and C++. Thanks to remarkable tools such as Claude Code, they can now have names like “English.” I’m looking forward to seeing what happens once the floodgates break wide open. 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 The real reasons Elon Musk merged xAI and SpaceX It’s all about this sci-fi fantasy. Read More → Anthropic takes aim at chatbot ads—with its own Super Bowl ad The company’s tongue-in-cheek spots highlight concerns about advertising inside AI assistants and provoke a sharp response from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Read More → How the Epstein files reignited the rich and powerful’s oldest grudges From Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman to Ben Shapiro and Steve Bannon, the latest Epstein disclosures are giving powerful rivals fresh material to settle old scores. Read More → Celebrating Cultures That Power Innovation Best Workplaces for Innovators celebrates cultures that empower employees to improve, build, and invent. Apply today to be recognized where ideas thrive and innovation drives impact. Apply Today → TikTok is fueling a SoulCycle comeback The boutique spin giant is riding a wave of 2016 nostalgia back into the spotlight, and Gen Zers are on board. Read More → This super simple tripod is designed for the modern age Manfrotto worked with Layer to design an easy-to-use tripod built for the new era of content creation. Read More → AI is about to invade the real world 2026 is the year the technology gets physical. Read More → View the full article

Organizational leaders are witnessing a steep and unprecedented rise in employee healthcare costs that is eroding bottom-line profitability. According to data from the Business Group on Health, these costs are projected to rise by 9% this year, representing a 62% increase since 2017. To put it in perspective, this represents an incremental hit of nearly $1 million to the bottom line for a midsize organization of 500 people. What CFOs are now confronting is a tipping point where the average total cost to insure an employee is nearing $20,000 annually. Notably, it is specifically mental health claims that are driving the spike. PwC’s 2026 Medical Trend report shows that inpatient mental health claims have jumped a staggering 80% in the last 24 months. For years, the corporate world has treated employee mental health as an imported problem—personal struggles that people bring with them into the workplace. But the evidence is now irrefutable that how employers manage their employees is having the greater impact and is often the leading driver of the strain. To be very clear, the way we work today has become a primary manufacturer of incremental stress, burnout, and mental health decline. The Smoking Gun: Work is the Cause Until now, the standard corporate response to employee mental health challenges has been to treat the symptoms rather than address the root causes. This means they’ve offered workers resilience training, yoga and exercise classes, and sleep and meditation apps—all band-aids on a structural wound. The evidence shows that mental health strain is no longer an outlier and is the predictable outcome of employee expectations that exceed the human ability to recover and sustain high levels of productivity. According to the Mental Health America (MHA) data, 84% of workers identified at least one workplace factor—not a personal one—that was actively harming their mental health. This suggests that for the vast majority of people, the mental health crisis isn’t bred at home; it’s being created at their desk. Here are three workplace leadership factors causing the most damage: A Deliberate Lack Of Boundaries: With technology allowing people the ability to remain connected to work at all hours, the clear line between when employees’ workdays start and end has been entirely erased. Not wanting to forfeit productivity, organizations have so far resisted giving people this clarity—and workplace managers too often exploit this by texting and e-mailing employees at odd hours and on weekends. Always being on and expected to respond prevents the human nervous system from ever truly recovering. People never get off the treadmill. The Erosion of Human Connection: A focus on efficiency—and doing more with less—increasingly means workplace leaders are stretched too thin to hold weekly check-in meetings with their teams. Companies are systematically replacing human-to-human coaching with AI systems, providing performance feedback via online dashboards and algorithmic scores. This is a biological disaster; it deprives the human nervous system of the context and connection required to feel safe. It also greatly undermines feelings of belonging, which is known to be the cornerstone of human well-being. The Micromanagement Surge: The rise of digital oversight is slowly creating a pervasive “surveillance culture” in our workplaces. In the 2024 American Psychological Association’s, “Work in America” survey, 43% of employees reported feeling “monitored” at work in some way, and those who felt monitored were significantly more likely to report poor mental health. The lack of trust makes people feel incapable of doing the job they were hired to do and whittles away at their self-esteem. Furthermore, this lack of agency strips away their sense of control, which is another primary driver of human well-being. The Managerial Squeeze The primary source of employee stress isn’t just their draining workloads, it is the person assigning them. The MHA report found that nearly 40% of employees explicitly name their manager as the top cause of their mental health issues. This is further validated by Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace Report, which found that managers report higher levels of daily stress and burnout than the people they lead—a “stress contagion” that inevitably flows downward to their teams. It’s clear that when managers are run thin by layoffs and executive pressure, they often default to transactional and impersonal styles that make people feel devalued and tipped into survival mode. And, whenever human beings feel unsafe—that their job is constantly on the line—they’re naturally more likely to break. In the big picture, research shows many workers feel that their bosses are simply not there for them; they don’t feel known and respected for who they are outside of work or valued for all they contribute. All of this means that workplace leaders have become stressors rather than stress relievers. The Remedies: A Redirection Of Time And Intention Facing both a financial and moral imperative to neutralize these stressors, organizations must now find the courage to sustainably pivot—moving away from what’s effectively been “wellness theater” and toward structural changes explicitly known to elevate employee well-being—and help restore mental health: Re-establish The On/Off Switch Even if companies choose against establishing a one-size-fits-all remedy, workplace leaders should set explicit “dark hours” (e.g., 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.) for their own teams so people can rejuvenate. This will demand that leaders model and respect those boundaries and remove any stigma currently attached to not responding to messages after work. Nothing says people can’t work beyond normal hours if they choose to. It’s the expectation of always needing to be on that is the real pain point. Foster Radical Belonging Human beings aren’t built to handle pressure alone, and feeling connected to one’s team is what supports resilience and personal thriving. Intentionally creating opportunities for employees to connect socially has become essential today. Leaders must also restore weekly check-ins (and coaching) with all direct reports and allow sufficient time to discuss each person’s well-being before focusing on work goals and performance. Look Out For People What people need to flourish are feelings of psychological and emotional safety. So, leaders should ask themselves, “Do my employees have work demands they can reasonably meet?” “Am I available enough to them as a resource and sounding board?” “Do my actions demonstrate that I care about each person on and support them individually? Do people feel they have a voice in how their work gets done and in many of the decisions I make?” The Heart of the Matter If we’re learning anything today, it’s that organizations cannot successfully scale productivity by subtracting humanity. The dramatic rise in healthcare costs and mental health claims reveals the illusion of this, and companies themselves are paying just as great a price as workers. In the end, the most effective mental health support a company can offer is a manager who treats their people humanely. View the full article

Representatives from both the Google Search and Bing Search teams are recommending against creating separate markdown (.md) pages for LLM purposes. The purpose is to serve one piece of content to the LLM and another piece of content to your users, which technically may be considered a form of cloaking and against Google’s policies. The question. Lily Ray asked on Bluesky: “Not sure if you can answer, but starting to hear a lot about creating separate markdown / JSON pages for LLMs and serving those URLs to bots.” Google’s response. John Mueller from Google responded saying: “I’m not aware of anything in that regard. In my POV, LLMs have trained on – read & parsed – normal web pages since the beginning, it seems a given that they have no problems dealing with HTML. Why would they want to see a page that no user sees? And, if they check for equivalence, why not use HTML?” Recently, John Mueller also called the idea stupid, saying: “Converting pages to markdown is such a stupid idea. Did you know LLMs can read images? WHY NOT TURN YOUR WHOLE SITE INTO AN IMAGE?” That is of course, converting your whole site to an MD file, which is a bit extreme, to say the least. I did collect a lot of John Mueller’s comments on this topic, over here. Bing’s response. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing responded saying: “Lily: really want to double crawl load? We’ll crawl anyway to check similarity. Non-user versions (crawlable AJAX and like) are often neglected, broken. Humans eyes help fixing people and bot-viewed content. We like Schema in pages. AI makes us great at understanding web pages. Less is more in SEO !” Why we care. Some of us like to look for shortcuts to perform well on search engines and now the new AI search engines and LLMs. Generally, shortcuts, if they work, only work for a limited time. Plus, these shortcuts can have an unexpected negative effect. As Lily Ray wrote on LinkedIn: “I’ve had concerns the entire time about managing duplicate content and serving different content to crawlers than to humans, which I understand might be useful for AI search but directly violates search engines’ longstanding policies about this (basically cloaking).” View the full article

Last week, Google updated the design for the Google Partner Portal for advertisers. Google said the new look makes it "simpler to understand your goals and to track all your points activity."View the full article

To fuel the debate in the SEO world of the topic of structured data and LLMs and AI engines, we are hearing that once again, AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity are not using structured data in any special way. View the full article

It looks like a standard shipping container. But a metal box at a London factory is aimed at solving one of the shipping industry’s biggest challenges: how to cut CO2 emissions on cargo ships. The tech, from a startup called Seabound, can capture as much as 95% of the CO2 emissions from the exhaust on ship. The company is now preparing to install a set of the containers on a cargo ship in its first commercial deployment after years of development and pilot tests. “The shipping industry is one of the last hard-to-abate sectors,” says 30-year-old CEO Alisha Fredriksson, who cofounded the company in 2021 after working as a consultant and seeing the need for a new solution in the space. Clean fuels like green methanol and green ammonia exist, but only in limited amounts. “We’re still in very scarce supply of these fuels, and they’re projected to be 2-3x more expensive than the conventional fuels,” she says. “And the industry faces competition from other industries that can typically pay more for them.” Cargo ships also last for decades, and ships in use now can’t easily switch to new fuels. As the industry slowly transitions—and in some cases begins to use other low-emission technology like wind power—the startup is working on the pollution problem of the tens of thousands of ships that are already on the ocean. Cargo ships emitted 973 million metric tons of CO2 in 2024, around 2.5% of global emissions. Turning ship pollution into solid rock Inside the company’s modular containers, there are millions of marble-size pellets of calcium hydroxide, also known as lime. The box sits near the engine and connects to the ship’s exhaust. As the exhaust flows through the lime, the CO2 reacts with the material to make limestone. Each pellet slightly changes color, from white to off-white, as it captures carbon and soot from the exhaust. One container can capture roughly a day’s worth of pollution as the ship travels, and to cover a full route, multiple modules are connected together. Once the ship reaches port, a standard crane offloads the containers of calcium carbonate, “effectively a fancy box of rocks,” says Fredriksson. The limestone can be sold as a building material. Or, the company can reverse the reaction—pulling the CO2 back out—so that it can be sequestered or used to make fuels or chemicals. In that scenario, the lime can be loaded back into the containers and sent back onto a ship to capture more CO2. Seabound’s first customer, Heidelberg Materials, will begin using the tech on a cement ship later this year. As the ship travels along the coast of Norway, the containers will capture CO2. Then the company will use the limestone in its kiln to make cement. (Heidelberg’s kilns also capture CO2, some of which will be permanently stored.) The startup’s basic carbon capture process, called calcium looping, is also in use by some direct air capture companies like Heirloom, which uses trays of crushed rocks to pull CO2 from the atmosphere. But by hooking up directly to an exhaust pipe, Seabound can capture CO2 more efficiently. Waste heat from the ship’s engines also helps the process work faster. Unlike expensive carbon capture technology at industrial facilities, the technology is simple enough that it can be relatively low-cost when it scales up, Fredriksson says. The company has calculated that it can also be one to two orders of magnitude cheaper than some other technology in development for carbon capture on ships. The total process does create some emissions before it’s in use, as the lime is made and transported. But Seabound plans to work with lower-carbon “green lime.” Initially, though the tech can capture 95% of the CO2 as it comes from the exhaust stack, the total capture efficiency of the whole process will be closer to 80%. Over time, it’s feasible for the process to cut emissions by 90%. Cleaning up today’s ships The startup, which has raised around £8.5 million ($11.6 million) in combined equity and grant funding from shipping companies and climate tech VCs, is working first with customers in Europe, where strict regulations are pushing the industry to quickly cut emissions. In the European Union, shipping is now fully subject to the EU’s emissions trading scheme, and a separate policy is ramping up fines for the emissions from fuel burned by ships. Shipping companies are also facing pressure from large customers, like Ikea, that have ambitious climate targets. Seabound plans to focus on shorter routes that stay within Europe, setting up operations at the ports where ships refuel. Later, it plans to expand to Asia. Though global policy progess was delayed in 2025, after the International Maritime Organization postponed a planned global carbon price for shipping under pressure from the The President administration, the IMO will be reconsidering the proposal later this year. There are around 60,000 cargo ships in use now globally. Adding the tech to all of them would obviously be a heavy lift, though the industry has made other changes in the past, including adding sulfur scrubbers that capture other pollution. There’s an argument that the new technology poses a moral hazard—companies might be slower to adopt zero-emission tech if they can use CO capture instead. But Fredriksson says that given the slow pace of alternative fuels and other solutions, carbon capture is necessary. “We started Seabound about four years ago now,” she says. “I think the future fuels feel just as far into the future as they did when I started the company.” If alternative fuels do become widely available, she says, the carbon capture tech could still be used to capture that exhaust. “Then we could do carbon negative shipping,” she says. View the full article

Maybe you’re not a hardcore football fan. Maybe you’re looking forward to the ads and the halftime show more than the actual Super Bowl LX game. You’re not alone—an estimated 40% of the more than 100 million U.S. Super Bowl audience consists of people who don’t normally follow football. But even if the names Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts don’t ring any bells (the starting quarterbacks of last year’s Super Bowl contenders, the Kansas City Chiefs and the victorious Philadelphia Eagles), a quick overview of this year’s big game may come in handy this weekend. Who’s playing The Seattle Seahawks will face the New England Patriots in Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium on Sunday, February 8, on NBC. Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30 pm ET. No, you’re not experiencing déjà vu These two teams played in Super Bowl XLIX eleven years ago, with the Patriots winning 28-24 in what was, at the time, the biggest Super Bowl 4th quarter comeback ever. Tom Brady led two touchdown drives to bring New England from 10 points down to take the lead, and Russell Wilson threw an interception to little-known Malcolm Butler on the goal line with less than 30 seconds left, sealing the Patriots’ fourth Super Bowl. Who are Super Bowl LX’s QB’s? New England is led by second year sensation Drake Maye, Seattle by Sam Darnold. Some key facts on Maye: He was the third overall draft choice in 2024 out of North Carolina. Just 23, Maye is set to become the second youngest quarterback to start a Super Bowl at 23 years and 162 days. (Dan Marino was just 23 years and 127 days when he started at QB for the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XIX following the 1984 season.) Maye’s brother Luke was a star player for the Tar Heels’ basketball team. In his second NFL season, Maye led the NFL in completion percentage, yards per pass attempt, passer rating, and various advanced metrics. He finished second in MVP voting (behind Matthew Stafford, quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams). Key facts on Darnold: At 28, Darnold is already playing for his fifth NFL team. He was considered a draft bust after flaming out with the New York Jets, who selected him third overall in the 2018 draft, and then struggling with the Carolina Panthers. He was a backup for San Francisco in 2023. Darnold became the starter at Minnesota in 2024 after rookie J.J. McCarthy suffered a season-ending injury and led the team to the playoffs. Darnold has been stellar for the Seahawks this year, including playing arguably his best game in the NFL in the NFC Championship win over the Rams, sealing a trip to Super Bowl LX for Seattle. Key facts about the two head coaches Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel has the chance to become the first person to win a Super Bowl as both player and head coach for the same franchise. He’s in his first season with the team, and orchestrated a turnaround from eight combined wins over the last two seasons to a 14-3 regular season and a trip to the Super Bowl. Vrabel was a star linebacker for New England during the first decade of the Brady-Belichick era, and participated in three Super Bowl championships. The NFL Coach of the Year as head coach of the Tennessee Titans in 2021, Vrabel was let go after 2023. Mike Macdonald is in his second season as head coach of the Seahawks. Just 38, he has the chance to be one of the youngest coaches to win the Big Game if his team comes out on top in Super Bowl LX. Regarded as a defensive savant, he was a longtime assistant for John Harbaugh with the Ravens, and also spent a season as Jim Harbaugh’s defensive coordinator at the University of Michigan. He then went back to the Ravens as their defensive coordinator before earning the head coaching job in Seattle. Other star players in the game Patriots veteran wide receiver Stefon Diggs has made four Pro Bowls in his career, all with New England’s division rival, the Buffalo Bills. He is perhaps most well-known for catching the Minneapolis Miracle to defeat the New Orleans Saints as a member of the Vikings in the 2018 NFL Playoffs. Diggs is currently in a romantic relationship with rapper Cardi B. The two welcomed a baby boy in November 2025. Diggs is also facing felony strangulation and misdemeanor assault charges stemming from an incident with his former private chef in December. On the defensive side of the ball, New England’s stars are defensive tackles Milton Williams—a big money free agent signing from last year’s Super Bowl champion Eagles—and Christian Barmore—who like Diggs is also currently facing assault charges—as well as third year cornerback Christian Gonzalez—a two-time All-Pro who intercepted Jarrett Stidham’s pass in the AFC Championship game to all but seal the win. Seattle wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba led the NFL in receiving yards this season as a 23-year-old. He burst onto the scene as part of a stacked Ohio State team a few years before entering the league. He’s flanked by Super Bowl LVI MVP Cooper Kupp, who left the Rams after eight seasons last offseason to join the Seahawks. The Seahawks have the league’s top scoring defense, allowing opponents just 17.2 points per game. The lineup features three second team All-Pro selections. Linebacker Ernest Jones, veteran defensive tackle Leonard Williams, and young superstar cornerback Devon Witherspoon all received those honors from the league, while 33-year-old defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence is also having a career resurgence, making the Pro Bowl. Who owns the teams? Under Robert Kraft’s ownership, the Patriots have been the most successful team in the NFL. A former season-ticket holder, Kraft bought the team, kept it in New England amidst challenges to move the franchise, and oversaw the entirety of the Brady-Belichick dynasty. This is the 12th Super Bowl appearance for the Patriots under Kraft’s ownership. The teams Big Game record going into SB LX is 6-5. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s sister, Jody Allen, has been the de facto owner of the Seahawks since Paul’s death in 2018. Reports emerged last week that Allen is looking to sell the team after the Super Bowl, but the ownership group refuted those reports. Why people are talking about the announcer One of his generation’s most popular announcers, 59-year-old Mike Tirico will make his Super Bowl play-by-play debut. He has hosted Super Bowl pregame and postgame coverage, as well as serving as NBC’s Olympics host, but will have his first opportunity to call the Big Game on Sunday. Former NFL wide receiver Cris Collinsworth is no stranger to calling the Super Bowl, as he’ll have his sixth opportunity to do Super Bowl color commentary. What about halftime? Fresh off his Album of the Year Grammy win, international sensation Bad Bunny will perform at halftime. Selection of the 31-year-old native Puerto Rican sparked some controversy within the MAGA crowd as he’s a vocal opponent of Donald The President and performs in Spanish. He has nearly 84 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Who is favored to win? The Seahawks are approximately 4.5 point favorites, meaning that sportsbooks expect Seattle to win by four or five points. For a modern Super Bowl, that’s a fairly big line. Nobody has been favored by more than that in a Super Bowl in over a decade, per Sportsoddshistory.com. What’s at stake? If Seattle wins, it will be the franchise’s second Super Bowl, and will avenge the loss in Super Bowl XLIX back in 2015, when the Patriots denied the Seahawks from winning two in a row. For New England, a win would mean an NFL record seventh Super Bowl, all coming within the last 25 years. View the full article

Lt Gen Vladimir Alekseyev taken to hospital after unknown assailant opens fire in residential buildingView the full article

February 1 was National Change Your Password Day, a well-intentioned reminder that, ironically, highlights everything wrong with how we think about security in 2026. Here’s the truth: if you spent the first day of the month dutifully changing “Summer2025!” to “Winter2026!” across your accounts, you didn’t make yourself safer. In fact, you might have made things worse. Decades of Bad Advice We’ve spent decades teaching people the wrong lessons about password security. Add a number. Throw in a special character. Change it every 90 days. These requirements were etched into our collective consciousness, repeated by IT departments, enforced by login forms, and internalized by millions of users who thought they were doing the right thing. Meanwhile, the actual threat landscape evolved in an entirely different direction. Today’s attackers aren’t sitting at keyboards manually typing password guesses. They’re running offline brute force attacks with dedicated GPU rigs that can attempt 100 billion passwords per second against hashing algorithms like MD5 or SHA-1. At that speed, your clever substitution of “@” for “a” buys you microseconds of additional security. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which sets the gold standard for cybersecurity guidance, understands the new reality. Their latest digital identity guidelines represent a fundamental shift in how we should think about password security, and it’s not what most people expect. Length Beats Complexity Every Time NIST’s guidance is refreshingly straightforward. Length matters far more than complexity. A password should be at least 15 characters, but those characters don’t need to be a cryptic jumble of symbols that you’ll inevitably forget (or worse, write on a sticky note). Instead, NIST endorses the concept of “passphrases” or multiple words strung together that are easy to remember but difficult to guess. “DontAskMeToChangeMyPassword” is more secure than “P@ssw0rd!” and infinitely easier to recall. Even more surprising to many, NIST no longer recommends requiring special characters or numbers, and they’ve abandoned the practice of forcing regular password changes. Why? Because these rules don’t make passwords more secure—they just make them harder for humans to manage, which leads to predictable workarounds that actually weaken security. Passwords Are the Problem, Not the Solution But here’s where NIST’s guidance gets really interesting. They acknowledge that even the strongest password is fundamentally insecure. Phishing attacks don’t care how long your password is. Data breaches expose credentials regardless of complexity. And with over 3,000 data breaches in 2025 alone, the question isn’t whether your password has been compromised—it’s how many times. NIST’s primary recommendation isn’t about crafting the perfect password. It’s about moving beyond passwords entirely. They emphasize multifactor authentication (MFA) as essential, not optional. They champion passkeys—cryptographic keys stored on your devices that can’t be phished, guessed, or stolen in database breaches. They endorse password managers that generate and store unique credentials for every account. Organizations are realizing that the password is the problem, not the solution. Passwordless authentication isn’t a futuristic concept anymore. It’s a practical necessity for companies serious about security and user experience. What You Should Actually Do If you must use passwords (and let’s be honest, you probably still need them for many accounts), follow NIST’s guidance. Make them long, use a password manager, and enable MFA everywhere it’s available. Better yet, embrace passkeys when offered—they’re more secure and more convenient than any password could ever be. But the real question isn’t “how do I create a better password?” It’s “why am I still relying on passwords at all?” Instead of changing your password on National Change Your Password Day, why not change your entire approach to authentication? View the full article

Cache of potentially embarrassing documents will be examined by committee investigating former minister’s appointment as US ambassadorView the full article

Our old homepage hero technically showed all the platforms we support — but it felt overly corporate. Like a feature list wearing a trench coat. So in early 2025, we redesigned our homepage as part of an overall website redesign. 0:00 /0:04 1× The previous homepage hero featured an animated headline that rotated through the various supported social media platforms. The previous hero featured an animated headline that rotated through Buffer's supported social media platforms. While it did the job, it didn't feel very "Buffer-y." We wanted to make a stronger first impression — something with more liveliness and delight. So, we got to work on designing and engineering a new homepage hero that we would validate with a simple A/B test. Developing the design conceptThe primary design goal with the new hero section was to still demonstrate how many social media platforms Buffer supports, but with some added fun and interest. Kate Baldrey, our incredibly talented marketing UX designer, came up with the idea of floating tiles arranged on a grid (a subtle nod to social grids) at various depths. These tiles would feature various social media platform icons, as well as emoji to evoke the experience of social media engagement. The new homepage hero design with interactive, floating social media icons and emoji arranged in a mirrored grid.With early design ideas in place, we immediately began engineering the real thing. Building the designWe heavily rely on designer-engineering pairing for all Buffer.com projects. This means that instead of formally creating high-fidelity designs in Figma, then handing them off to engineering to be built, we spend our time together on calls talking through design ideas, exploring approaches, working through challenges, and making refinements. This practice reduces temporary design artifacts and handoff, which saves a lot of time and results in higher quality work. To facilitate pairing, we have a live preview of the local development environment running from the start of the project. This gives us a shared, realtime URL of the work that updates on every code change and treats the final medium (the webpage) as the single source of truth. Breaking down the designThe new homepage hero design has a mirrored grid layout with floating tiles at various depths arranged around the headline and signup form.The hero section design features a number of “tiles” positioned on a grid behind the hero section content. Some of these tiles have emoji and add depth to the design by being smaller, less opaque, and slightly blurred to give the impression that they’re further away or underneath the other content. The remaining tiles have the icons of the various social media channels Buffer supports, including Bluesky, Facebook, Google Business Profile, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Pinterest, Threads, TikTok, X (Twitter), and YouTube. These tiles are larger, more opaque, and have no blur to appear closer to the viewer. The visual grid establishes “cells” that are the size of the channel tiles, and is centered within the hero section. Accessibility-first design and engineeringI follow a process I call accessibility-first design and engineering. This means our work begins with an accessible foundation that we preserve throughout the design and build process. For this hero section, the visual grid and tiles are decorative, so we hide them from assistive technology to avoid them from being announced to people who are trying to discover and interact with important content and features. This is achieved by wrapping the decorative design with aria-hidden=”true”. Next, this design features animation and interaction, which can cause discomfort for people with vestibular disorders or motion sensitivity. To avoid this, all animation is off by default, and we enable it only if we detect prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference in CSS and JavaScript. With this approach in place, we’re ready to start on the layout and animation. Achieving the grid layoutAchieving this layout proved to be an interesting challenge, as the grid needs to be responsive to all screen sizes by allowing us to position the tiles based on the available space. It also needs to have horizontal symmetry reflected from the center of the hero section. To pull this off, we actually create two separate CSS Grid containers, one for each horizontal half of the hero section, which we’ll refer to as the “leading” and “trailing” containers. Each of these containers will have auto columns and rows set to the size of the tiles. To make this easy to manage, we create a CSS custom property (variable): --_tile-size: 3rem; (the underscore prefix is a convention we use to indicate that this variable is private to this class and not a global variable/design token). This variable also allows us to change the tile size across breakpoints for responsive design. We can then use this variable in our CSS Grid: .decorationGrid { display: grid; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, var(--_tile-size)); grid-template-rows: repeat(auto-fill, var(--_tile-size)); }The repeat(auto-fill, var(--_tile-size)); declaration will create as many columns/rows as possible of a set size (in this case, our tile size). With these two CSS Grid containers, we have an issue: CSS Grid respects the page’s text direction. For English, the writing mode is “ltr” (left-to-right), but this varies by language and culture. Without mirroring, the left grid leaves an unwanted gap in the middle of the hero section design.This means that our “leading” grid has empty space on the right if it can’t perfectly fit additional columns. This empty space ends up in the middle of the hero section and makes the layout asymmetrical. To solve this, we can use the direction property in CSS. Because we’re using aria-hidden=”true” for this decorative visual content, it’s safe to change the direction without affecting actual text content. First, we’ll set direction: ltr; on the .decorationGrid to prevent the direction from changing if the page is translated. Next, we’ll set direction: rtl; on our leading grid, which allows the grid to start from the right edge and place empty space on the left. This creates the mirrored horizontal symmetry we need. With mirroring in place, the two grids start from the center and create a symmetrical responsive layout.Placing the tilesWith our symmetrical, auto-growing grid in place, we can place our tiles into dedicated cells. Since our grids are mirrored, this causes grid-column to be mirrored as well. With our leading grid, grid-column: 2; would place an item in the second column from the center of the hero section. To avoid confusion, we can create a --_column-from-center variable to use with our tiles: .tile { grid-column: var(--_column-from-center, 0); }This variable makes it easy to specify the desired column for each tile, and we can use grid-row as expected for the row position. Responsive designWe start mobile-first with our responsive design, and begin placing the tiles based on the available space. We hide many of the tiles by default, prioritizing the social media icons, and then carefully place the visible tiles to avoid interfering with the text content and email form in the hero. Responsive layout for the homepage hero with tiles arranged in various positions based on the available space.As the screen size increases, we simply add a new media query breakpoint in CSS, make more tiles visible, and rearrange them as space allows. Once we arrive at our largest breakpoint around 1344 pixels, all the tiles are visible and have a dedicated position that won’t change for larger screens. Animation and interactionAs we paired on the design and build, we discussed possible animations for the hero section and tiles. We arrived at the idea that the tiles would react to the cursor by being pulled towards it as the cursor moved across the hero section. To validate this idea and the technical approach, we first prototyped the animation and interaction for a single tile. 0:00 /0:07 1× The interactive prototype for a single cell demonstrates the cursor following behavior and animation properties. To achieve this, we defined an “activation zone”, or how close the cursor needs to be to a tile for the tile to start moving towards the cursor. When the cursor is within the activation zone, we then animate the tile towards the cursor using a spring animation. A spring animation mimics a physical spring in real life, which allows us to define parameters for how stiff or loose the animation feels, a max distance for the tile to travel, and how quickly the tile returns to its original position if the cursor leaves the activation zone. Prototyping this with a single tile allowed us to visualize and quickly tune these parameters until things felt right and we were confident the technical approach would work. With a single tile working, we componentized this functionality to apply it to the other tiles. With everything in place, we could enjoy the full animation across the hero section with everything moving and reacting gracefully. 0:00 /0:06 1× All tiles follow the cursor as it moves around the hero section, before reaching a maximum distance and returning to their original position. Considering non-cursor interactionBecause the animation relies on a cursor, it depends on a mouse, stylus, or similar input device. Luckily, the activation zone also works on click events, meaning taps on a touch screen will also activate the animation. For touch-screen devices, this allows people to discover the interaction when they tap on the email input or get started button. It’s also a fun, hidden detail that people might accidentally find at first. Creating the visual grid linesThe final detail we incorporated was grid lines that visually anchor the arrangement of the tiles. We needed the grid lines to match the tile size and scale gracefully with the responsive grid used for the tile layout. To achieve this, we created a repeating linear gradient background with some clever sizing tricks. The linear gradient creates a 1px line along the bottom and a single side of the background, which creates a square grid when repeated. It also makes use of the --_tile-size variable to ensure it’s the same dimension as the tiles: .decorationGridLinesLeading { /* 1px side and bottom grid lines */ background-image: linear-gradient(to left, var(--grid-color) 0.0625rem, transparent 0.0625rem), linear-gradient(to bottom, var(--grid-color) 0.0625rem, transparent 0.0625rem); /* Match the repeating background to the tile size */ background-size: var(--_tile-size) var(--_tile-size), var(--_tile-size) var(--_tile-size); /* Position the background in the top right (center of the hero section) */ background-position:, right top, right top; } The other half of the grid is mirrored, so we simply swap the left and right keywords. To finish things off, we wanted to fade the edges of the hero section grid to blend with the rest of the page. We can achieve this with additional linear gradients that go from transparent to the page’s background color: .decorationGridLinesLeading { /* Add top, side, and bottom fades */ background-image: linear-gradient(to top,var(--background-color) 0%, transparent 20%, transparent 80%, var(--background-color) 100%), linear-gradient(to right, var(--background-color) 0%, transparent 20%), linear-gradient(to left, var(--grid-color) 0.0625rem, transparent 0.0625rem), linear-gradient(to bottom, var(--grid-color) 0.0625rem, transparent 0.0625rem); /* Stretch the fades to 100% of the element's size */ background-size: 100% 100%, 100% 100%, var(--_tile-size) var(--_tile-size), var(--_tile-size) var(--_tile-size); background-position: initial, initial, right top, right top; }And with that in place, we have our completed hero section: 0:00 /0:04 1× The final homepage hero section with interactive tiles gracefully following the cursor. ResultsAs mentioned at the start of this article, we rolled out this new hero section design as part of an A/B test to validate the impact of the new design and interaction. After running the experiment for 2 weeks, we were thrilled to find the new design resulted in increased signups and even some celebrations on social media. Confident in our new direction, we rolled out the new homepage hero section to 100% of traffic. This project was a joy to work on in close collaboration with Kate, and pushed my design engineering skills further with many interesting layout, animation, and interaction challenges. This design remains in place today, but we always have new ideas cooking and will keep iterating from here. View the full article

The FHFA chief told Fox an offering could be done near term - but may not be - while a Treasury official addressed conservatorship questions at an FSOC hearing. View the full article

The secondary market regulator will formally publish its own rule on Feb. 6, after a comment period and without making changes to what it proposed in July. View the full article

The MAGA movement has always been partly about culture, but lately conservative politics have fully ventured into the entertainment realm. Between the theatrical release of the Melania documentary, the drastic and ongoing reshuffling of the offerings at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Kid Rock-headlined alternative to Bad Bunny’s upcoming Super Bowl halftime show, the cultural MAGA-verse has shifted from backlashes and boycotts to counterprogramming. The anti-halftime spectacle will provide an interesting temperature check of the impact of these efforts. “The All‑American Halftime Show,” organized by Turning Point USA, is billed as an explicitly conservative counterprogram to the official Apple-sponsored show featuring Latin phenom Bad Bunny. Kid Rock will be joined by mid-level country artists Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett. The show will be broadcast on Turning Point’s YouTube and social media accounts, as well as on several conservative networks such as OAN. “He’s said he’s having a dance party, wearing a dress, and singing in Spanish? Cool,” Kid Rock said in a press release. “We plan to play great songs for folks who love America.” A proud Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is, of course, American, but he performs mostly in Spanish and has been openly critical of the The President administration and ICE, making him a MAGA foe. So in a pop culture iteration of “alternative facts,” Turning Point and the MAGA-verse envision a world in which Kid Rock is a bigger attraction than the global superstar who was last year’s most-streamed artist on Spotify and just won the Grammy for best album on February 1. It seems delusional that Kid Rock can divert a significant audience from the year’s premier sports-cultural moment. What viewers it does gather will likely be motivated by anti-Bad Bunny spite. “We can’t wait to watch the incredible show they’re about to put on,” Turning Point boasted of its counter-lineup. “We know millions around the country will be watching too.” (Last year’s Super Bowl audience was around 127 million people; Animal Planet’s halftime-show alternative, the Puppy Bowl, attracted about 12.8 million viewers.) This counterprogramming strategy echoes a conservative tactic that long predates MAGA in the realm of information and persuasion. Rather than (or in addition to) complain about news sources they disagreed with, conservatives built their own alternatives, from Fox News and its newer, even more conservative rivals to popular radio talk shows and a slew of online media. No need to try to get your message through someone else’s media when you can just program your own content. Something like that strategy seems to have worked for first lady Melania The President, who doesn’t give a lot of interviews but is the subject of the documentary Melania, the contents of which she essentially controlled. Though lambasted by critics and mocked for a nationwide release on some 1,800 screens, the film did fairly well for a documentary, taking in $7 million on its opening weekend (experts predicted $5 million, skeptics close to $1 million). There’s still basically no chance it will earn back the $75 million Amazon paid to acquire and market the project, but all the jeering arguably brought Melania more attention and may well have motivated MAGA loyalists to head to the theater. Again, spite seems like a more significant motivator than enthusiasm. Still, it’s not clear how well the cultural version of MAGA counterprogramming plays out over time. Consider the most prominent test case to date, the travails of the Kennedy Center, as cultural signpost. Last year The President seized control of the center’s agenda, reorganizing the board, installing loyalists, and naming himself chair. Artists such as Rhiannon Giddens and Issa Rae canceled events, as did producers of a planned Hamilton run of performances. Evidently unfazed, The President took an unusually active role in choosing recipients of the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors, including Sylvester Stallone, George Strait, and Kiss. Critics argued the choices had more to do with political loyalty than artistic merit. But perhaps more to the point, the seemingly populist counterprogramming of a traditional Kennedy Center lineup did not play well in the cultural marketplace: The President, who personally hosted the event, predicted it would pull the ceremony’s largest-ever broadcast audience, and instead it drew the smallest. Regardless, The President proceeded to add his name to the venue—inspiring more cancellations from performers—and more recently to announce the center would close for two years for improvements. One thing that reportedly needs refurbishing is the list of visiting performers: CNN quoted an insider saying that thanks to mounting cancellations and trouble lining up new performances, “there would not have been any programming to announce.” So while we have to wait and see how the Turning Point halftime show plays out against Bad Bunny (and the Puppy Bowl), counterprogramming has become more than just a MAGA-friendly strategy. It’s apparently the only programming the MAGA-verse has to look forward to. View the full article

Watching the Super Bowl without cable keeps getting more expensive. NBC will not offer a free stream of Super Bowl LX in 2026, an NBCUniversal spokesperson confirmed. Instead, cord cutters will need a Peacock Premium subscription, which costs $11 per month for the ad-supported tier. Cable subscribers who want to stream the game can log on to NBC’s apps. This isn’t the first time NBC has put the big game behind a paywall. It also required a Peacock subscription in 2022, but back then you could still stream the Super Bowl for free on your phone via the NFL or Yahoo Sports apps. (Also, a month of Peacock cost just $5 at the time.) It wasn’t always this way. In the late 2010s, before pay TV subscriptions entered a free fall, all the networks would stream the Super Bowl free of charge with minimal friction. Over the past five years, they’ve added new layers of complexity, requiring free trials, account sign-ups, and, in NBC’s case, hard paywalls. Here’s how availability has shifted over the past decade. 2016: Free on CBS apps/website 2017: Free on Fox apps/website 2018: Free on NBC apps/website 2019: Free on CBS apps/website 2020: Free on Fox apps/website 2021: Free on CBS apps/website 2022: Peacock or NBC login required on TVs; free on NFL mobile app 2023: Free on Fox apps/website 2024: Paramount+ required, free trial available 2025: Free on Fox’s Tubi app with sign-in 2026: Peacock or NBC login required, no trial This is the first year in which neither the host network nor the NFL will offer any free way to watch the game. The league stopped offering free mobile access in 2022, when it launched its NFL+ streaming service, and Peacock doesn’t offer free trials. A few free work-arounds still exist. Those who get decent antenna reception from a nearby NBC station or affiliate can watch the Super Bowl for free over the air. Some live TV streaming services that carry NBC also offer free trials, though the cost of forgetting to cancel is steep: Hulu + Live TV charges $90 per month after a three-day trial, while YouTube TV has a 21-day trial followed by a $60-per-month promo rate for two months. Both trial offers are for new subscribers only. Those options aside, the cheapest way to watch the Super Bowl will be to eat the cost of a Peacock subscription, even if it’s only for a month. Like most streamers, Peacock lets you cancel immediately after signing up and still provides the full month you paid for, with no auto-billing at the end. Paying $11 for a single sporting event might sting, but at least it gets you the Winter Olympics as well. Lightshed Ventures analyst Rich Greenfield says that combo may explain why NBCUniversal is willing to paywall the big game, even if it means forgoing some ad impressions from free viewers. “When you have so much firepower, they likely know you’ll convert versus giving so much high-value content away for free as part of a trial,” Greenfield says. Either way, the trend is likely to continue in the years ahead. Paramount+ stopped offering free trials after a price hike in January, and Fox could eventually try to push its new $20-per-month Fox One subscription service instead of serving the game on Tubi. It’s a reflection of the overall state of the streaming industry, which initially used low prices and ad-free viewing to lure in new subscribers. For networks like NBC, CBS, and Fox, profits from the cash cow cable business helped fund those endeavors. But as traditional pay TV subscriptions plummeted, and Wall Street began looking for profits from the streaming side, the cost of access has increased. Free Super Bowl streams are a casualty of that shift. Despite its reputation as a major event for advertisers—with 30-second ads selling for $8 million on average in 2026—the networks are increasingly deciding that they’re better off putting the big game behind paywalls. Check out Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice. View the full article