The have’s and the have yachts
Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, sporting a gold chain and Gen Z curly hair, knows everyone’s roasting him online. From being called a lizard to claims he doesn’t blink, he’s ok with it. At 40, he says from his 387-foot mega yacht, if you’re gonna joke, “At least make them good memes.”
Catch ‘em all: OpenAI is afraid to release an AI-detection tool they’ve been sitting on for nearly two years. It’s reportedly 99% effective at detecting AI-generated text with watermarks, and all they have to do is “turn it on.” Why the holdup? People are keeping their AI use quiet, and OpenAI will tick off people by releasing its tool.
🤑 Apple payout: Payments are on the way for anyone stuck with the defective MacBook butterfly keyboard available from 2015 to 2019. Payouts range from $50 to $395. Check your mailbox if you submitted your info for the settlement.
Two down, eight to go: Neuralink successfully implanted another brain chip into a human patient. No word on when its second trial recipient had surgery, but Elon Musk says it’s “gone extremely well.” The plan is to have eight more brain chip implants completed this year. I interviewed the first recipient, Noland. Amazing guy!
Tech to the rescue: A family of seven was saved from their sinking boat on Utah Lake thanks to a hero and drone. A bystander found the family a mile and a half from shore and shared the GPS coordinates with emergency services. Everyone’s OK, except for the drone; its battery ran out, and it took a dive.
🔍 How do you spell monopoly? G-O-O-G-L-E: A federal judge ruled it was illegal for Google to pay $26 billion for other web browsers and phone manufacturers to make it their default search engine (paywall link). How to fix this mess? Make Google’s parent company, Alphabet, sell off Google or invalidate the illegal payoff and let manufacturers select their own search engines.
Lost my appetite: Viral posts on X claim celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Hanks and Robert De Niro are being banned from restaurants. The posts started as satire on Facebook, and now people are sharing “facts.” Don’t be one of them.
All talk, no show tunes: Three major labels are suing AI music company Suno for training its model on copyrighted songs. Suno’s defense? “Yep, we did it.” Suno says it’s “fair use” to use protected songs in their back-end tech to create something completely new. Now, that’s an interesting defense.
🧎♀️ This is bolo-knee: In videos with tens of millions of views, TikTokkers say the most comfortable way to sit on a plane is with your knees up to your chest and your feet on the edge of the seat, with the seatbelt fastened around your feet. This is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons — mostly because it could catapult you forward in severe turbulence.
Delta lost $500 million in the CrowdStrike Windows outage: It took down 8.5 million PCs. Delta CEO Ed Bastian said, “When was the last time you heard about a big outage at Apple?” Ouch. Insider secret: Apple gives developers much lower access to their key internal framework so it’s unlikely a single update could do big damage.