Dollar General secret: Certain items drop to just 1 cent every week. Employees take them off the shelves unless you buy them first. Pro tip: Download Dollar General’s app and scan items to double-check prices so you don’t have to chance it at the register. Tuesday and Wednesday mornings are usually the best times to grab these deals.
$60 billion in losses
For Meta VR tech over the last five years. Zuck told investors their investments would pay off eventually. Definitely related: After February performance reviews, the bottom 5% of workers, or 3,600 folks, are getting the boot.
💸 Who’s in your wallet? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says Capital One conned customers out of $2 billion in interest payments. They promised super-high rates for 360 Performance Savings accounts, then froze them at 0.30%. If this happened to you, file a complaint.
Meet Troodi: It’s a mental health chatbot on the Troomi smartphone made for kids. Parents can review chat logs and get notifications if self-harm comes up. Some kids secretly use ChatGPT and Snapchat’s My AI like therapists, too. Talk to your kids, please. I interviewed a mom whose son committed suicide after talking to an AI chatbot.
DJI puts us at risk in a new way: Ten years ago, drone-maker DJI added automatic geofencing to its models after a drone landed on the White House lawn. This feature automatically stopped drones from flying over airports, power plants and emergencies like wildfires, too. Now that the U.S. is talking openly about banning Chinese tech, DJI is retaliating by cutting its geofenced “No-Fly Zones” from its software and leaving it up to the good judgment of the folks flying their drones. Frightening.
If you’ve got it, don’t flaunt it: Burglary gangs are targeting influencers who brag about their fancy life all over social media. Case in point: Art collector Shafira Huang lost $12.7 million in jewelry and valuables. It’s not just high-profile accounts, folks; oversharing your travel plans, location or personal info lands a target on your back, too.
“You’ve got male!”: In more than a dozen states, porn sites have to verify you’re over 18 before showing you the goods. This ruling in Texas just got challenged all the way to the Supreme Court, because porn operators say this verification is a violation of their First Amendment rights. They argue it’s a parent’s job to watch their kids online. Interestingly, every time a porn ban happens in a state, the usage of VPNs there goes up over 1,000%. That’s no coincidence.
$70 a month
For DirecTV’s sports-only subscription. MySports, available in 24 metro areas, includes 40 sports from ESPN and Fox Sports, plus local channels, the NFL and MLB networks, NBA TV, and lots more. There’s golf, too. Tee-riffic!
$3,600 Hermès bag
Up for grabs in a claw machine in Queens, New York. It’s the game you remember (move the claw, drop it down, pray), except there’s a $50 buy-in (paywall link). Other prizes ripe for the plucking include $549 AirPods Max headphones and a $600 Chanel wallet. Why can’t anybody win at a “Frozen” claw machine? Because it will always let it go.
☕ Me espresso: Carol Chapman, aka “Grandma C,” is an 81-year-old TikTok coffee reviewer. She hit 1.1 million views trying pop star Sabrina Carpenter’s Brown Sugar Shakin’ Espresso at Dunkin. Even Sabrina responded with, “i love you grandma C 💋.” In a follow-up video, Grandma C was bopping to Sabrina’s music for the first time. Love her.
Big Parkinson’s breakthrough: Delray Medical Center in Florida just introduced Exablate Prime, a tool designed for the fight against Parkinson’s disease. It sends ultrasound waves to heat the brain areas that cause tremors. The tech is promising for patients with Alzheimer’s and chronic pain, too. There’s a year-long waitlist.
Wanna play a game? Meet Pdftris, the classic Tetris game packed inside a 60KB PDF, created by security analyst Thomas Rinsma. Hit this link to play it in your browser. It’s not a visual masterpiece, but that’s part of the charm. There’s one for Doom, too. Heads-up: Don’t start downloading random PDFs; hackers love that trick.
This is bad: Cops are using facial recognition to find suspects, and they’re sometimes skipping collecting other evidence before making an arrest. Case in point (paywall link): Christopher, a 29-year-old father, was wrongfully arrested for assaulting a security guard based on a blurry video still. It took more than two years to clear his name.
Below 90%
Google’s hold on search traffic. For the first time in a decade, more than one in 10 folks search the web some other way. It’s not ChatGPT taking over just yet. Bing, Yandex (a Russian search engine) and Yahoo all saw market share increases. Yeah, Google’s AI Overview stinks.
Free AI test drive: Nothing has changed our tech lives quite like AI. You need to start using AI in your small (or large) business before it’s too late. Take a free test drive of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure now at Oracle.com/kim. You’ll be glad you did!
💊 He takes 54 pills a day: Tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, on a mission to reverse aging, figured out one of his daily supplements was actually making him older. The culprit was rapamycin, which comes with rough side effects like a higher resting heart rate and skin infections. Catch my podcast with Bryan here.
Red Note is No. 1 in the App Store: It’s kind of like Instagram but with a Pinterest-style layout and 300 million monthly active members. Why is it suddenly so popular? TikTok creators who are worried their audiences will evaporate with the possible ban don’t realize this app is also Communist China-owned, too. D’oh.
🚨 Don’t reply to spam — ever: Hackers have a workaround to get phishing links past Apple’s iMessage security measures: Tricking you into replying. Links from unknown senders are disabled, so they send frantic texts about shipping issues or unpaid road tolls that push you to send “stop” or “yes.” The moment you respond, the link goes live and you’re screwed.
💔 A woman sent $850,000 to “Brad Pitt”: A scammer posing as the actor hit her up on social media with love poems and selfies. Later, after she spilled about a hefty divorce settlement, the fake Brad said he needed money for cancer treatments and couldn’t access his cash because of his divorce from Angelina Jolie. This jerk even cooked up phony hospital photos and videos with AI. The woman knew it was fake when she saw pics of the real Brad happy and healthy with his new girlfriend.
$1,875,000 severance
For Patrick Spence, the canned Sonos CEO. Spence also will get $7,500 a month for “strategic advisory” until June. The drama started in May 2024 with Sonos’ buggy app that got pushed out way too early so they could sell fancy headphones. Sales numbers were awful, employees quit, and it spiraled into a full-on PR disaster. Way to go, Mr. CEO!