Let ChatGPT do some cooking

🏠 Zillow’s new rule: If a home is advertised anywhere online, it now has to be listed on Zillow, too, or they’ll blacklist it. Why? Some brokerages have been posting homes on their own sites first to give their clients early access. Harsh. Long story short: If you’re selling, now you know, thanks to me.

How long it takes to cook the perfect egg. If you hard-boil it, the yolk goes chalky. Soft-boil it, and the whites stay wobbly. Why? Yolks cook best at 149°F, whites at 185°F. Scientists found a fix: Switch the egg between boiling water (212°F) and tepid water (86°F) every two minutes for 32 minutes. This isn’t a breakfast, it’s a culinary hostage situation.

😒 Comcast’s sneaky offer: New Xfinity customers can now lock their internet price for five years. Talking $55/month for 400 Mbps or $105 for 2.1 Gbps. The catch? It doesn’t include taxes or fees. Plus, internet deals will get cheaper with competition from Starlink and AT&T’s satellite service. Locking in your price for five years sounds great, until you realize the fees are multiplying in the dark like gremlins.

🧠 ChatGPT can “think with images”: OpenAI’s latest models, o3 and o4-mini, take ChatGPT’s visual reasoning to unsettlingly sharp levels. They can describe what’s in a photo, zoom, crop and enhance images. “Thinking with images” sounds cool until your AI starts judging your handwriting and that stain on your shirt.

Mind over metal: Move over, Neuralink. Precision Neuroscience, started by a Neuralink cofounder, just tested a brain patch thinner than a human hair on Tim Fisher, a 63-year-old with Parkinson’s (paywall link). Unlike Neuralink, this patch sits gently on your brain without poking it. The FDA just approved it for use for up to 30 days. Tim even fist-bumped the robotic hand used in the test. Love that.

Of people are polite to AI. The kicker? All those “pleases” and “thank yous” are adding up and costing OpenAI tens of millions of dollars in electricity. CEO Sam Altman doesn’t think it’s a bad thing, though. Why? Just in case there’s an AI uprising someday. Plus, being nice can get you better responses.

🛡️ Google scrambles to fix Gmail phishing mess: I told you about this on Saturday, but it’s still going in full force. Don’t fall for spoofed emails claiming your Gmail account is about to be closed down. These are passing Gmail’s scam filters, slipping into inboxes looking squeaky-clean. You know it’s bad when the scammer gets better deliverability than your friend’s birthday email.

AGI, but then what? While most companies are figuring out how to responsibly build AI, Google’s DeepMind is already hiring for what comes after, AI being smarter than humans. The job description should include “Please stop Skynet.”

That’s the range of the U.S. military’s MQ-9B spy drone. The twist? It just got a whole lot deadlier. They’ve strapped a 25-kilowatt laser to it that can melt incoming kamikaze drones and missiles right out of the sky. And it doesn’t stop there: The laser can be scaled up to 300kW in future versions. 

🤖 Robocop is real: Thailand just showed off the Cyborg 1.0, and yes, it’s a bot dressed in full police gear. This thing has 360-degree cameras for eyes, facial recognition to spot suspects and the ability to detect weapons. The creepiest part? Its AI can analyze CCTV and drone footage from anywhere so it can keep tabs on everything. Coming soon near you, there’s a robot dude with WALL-E eyes and a badge.