đ Itâs Friday and weâve got human lawyers outdueling robot lawyers, new rules for passwords, and repeated use of the words âFrostyâ and âMcFlurryâ â so if youâre coming to us hungry, be warned thatâs gonna get way worse.
đ§ On the pod:The market likes Southwest Airlinesâ new game plan. Will consumers feel the same?
NEWS FLASH
đ¤ Want to chat with John Cena on Instagram? Soon you can: Meta is borrowing the voices of five celebrities â Cena, Kristen Bell, Judi Dench, Awkwafina, and Keegan-Michael Key â to power its Meta AI chatbot. The feature will first roll out to US users, who will be able to select the celebrity voice of their choosing before gabbing with the chatbot on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, or WhatsApp.
đ Meta didnât stop there with its new doodads: The company also revealed the new $300 Meta Quest 3S headset, which will replace the Quest 2 and Quest Pro, and its Orion AR glasses. Due in 2027, they can project holograms onto the lenses, make calls, send messages, and play music and video. They can also apparently scan whatâs in your fridge and offer recipe suggestions, per Metaâs demo.
đź Well, that backfired: AI startup DoNotPay hailed itself as the first-ever robot lawyer allowing users to âsue anyone with the click of a button.â But the FTC called BS, saying DoNotPayâs claims were deceptive â its chatbot was not tested or validated by qualified attorneys and could not actually replace a human lawyer. In the end, DoNotPay did, in fact, pay: $193k, to settle the charges, in an arrangement no doubt brokered by living, breathing lawyers.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Woah: Alphabet invested $11m in Distance Technologies, a mixed-reality startup thatâs turning the transparent surfaces on car windshields and plane cockpits into AR displays.
OpenAI lost three top execs â CTO Mira Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew, and VP of research Barret Zoph, further diminishing a leadership team thatâs been shrinking for months.
Canât do that: The US DOJ alleges former Skael CEO Baba Nadimpalli fudged revenue numbers and bank statements to woo investors. The AI company, which planned to create whatever âdigital employeesâ are, had raised $40m.
FOR BEGRUDGING âLINKEDINFLUENCERSâ
First impressions start with your profile
LinkedIn as a social platform? An A for effort, yet often despicable.
But LinkedIn as a job-hunting joint? Makes a lotta sense.
Since thatâs where career hustlers hang, we baked you this gleaming guide on how to spruce up your LinkedIn presence â and take your personal page from good to great.
The little red-haired girl is taking a swing at the big dog
Fast-food chain Wendyâs makes a fraction of what McDonaldâs rakes in every year, but that hasnât stopped it from spotting a weak point in Ronaldâs clown armor and going on the attack.
Wendyâs confidence as the aggressor centers on its most reliable menu item: the humble Frosty.
A cross between a milkshake and a regular scoop of ice cream, the Frosty has been on the Wendyâs menu since founder Dave Thomas opened his first location in 1969.
The classic flavor is a cross between chocolate and vanilla.
Other options, like pumpkin spice and an upcoming SpongeBob SquarePants crossover, have popped up.
Some die-hard Frostyheads resent the fad flavors for displacing vanilla (which is a bit like hating the stars for replacing the clouds).
MeanwhileâŚ
⌠McDonaldâs has its McFlurry, a dairy innovation that answers the question: âWhat if ice cream had stuff in it?â Unfortunately, the McFlurry machine is infamously unreliable.
McBroken, a web app by software developer Rashiq Zahid, tracks which locations arenât serving ice cream.
Taylor Co. manufactures ice-cream machines for loads of chains, including both Wendyâs and McDonaldâs, but McDonaldâs insists on using a unique model.
Itâs not that the Taylor machines constantly break, per Allrecipes, but that they have a time-intensive self-cleaning process that seems to⌠break easily.
BTW, while weâre talking about the McFlurry: In 2006, McDonaldâs was forced to redesign its widemouthed McFlurry lids in England after hedgehog conservationists noticed the favorite little prickly guys could easily get trapped in them.
Taking the fight straight to Grimaceâs doormatâŚ
⌠Wendyâs has allied itself with McBroken to promote a $1 Frosty deal with an ad on the website and new icons on the map to show if youâre closer to a Wendyâs than you are to a functioning McFlurry machine.
Last quarter, McDonaldâs posted $6.49B in revenue while Wendyâs hit $570m, so this may not immediately put Wendyâs on top, but it does invite the question: Will round hamburgers soon be a thing of the past?
Real or AI? Itâs time for another round. Test your skills in detecting AI in marketing ads, photos, emails, music, and more.
This weekendâs final regular season MLB games means it may be your last shot at ballpark nachos until spring. Nosh knowledgeably knowing how one familyâs nine-figure molten-cheese empire put those nachos on the menu.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Approximate number of words in one of the most tedious reads of your life: the latest Digital Identity Guidelines, issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. What even is it? The NIST sets nonbinding tech standards and governs things like password requirements. Special characters, forced password changes, security questions? Thatâs their jam.
What to know from the NISTâs ~35k-word salad: The new guidelines remove the requirement that users periodically change their passwords, set 64 characters as the maximum password length (eight is the minimum), and nix that whole ânew passwords must have at least one number, one special character, and one upper- and lowercase letterâ thing.
AROUND THE WEB
đ On this day: In 2019, ~2m people around the world walked out of school and work to call for climate change action, 57 years to the day after Rachel Carsonâs Silent Spring, which exposed the environmental dangers of pesticides, was published.
đ¸ Thatâs interesting: What flowers mean, at least according to Victorians.
đ Game:The New York Times is testing a sports version of âConnections.â
đ How to:make Palacsinta Americana, a spin on a Hungarian dessert crepe.
Your 2x-weekly dump of winning tips and tricks is here. Get to clickinâ:
𦸠The hero we deserve?: One of our colleagues tested six top AI scheduling assistants so none of us had to. Which one came out on top?
đ From 5k to 50k: How influencers Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lands have used AI to skyrocket their follower counts on YouTube and X (and no, itâs not all bots).
đ Perfectionist intervention time: Howâs that all-or-nothing mindset going for you? More harm than good, weâre assuming? Here are some hard-won tips on cutting that junk out.
SHOWER THOUGHT
By inventing the silicon chip, we just tricked sand into thinking.SOURCE
Today’s email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Sara Friedman, and Sam Barsanti. Editing by: Ben âFrosty? McFlurry? Wake me up when weâre talking about Dairy Queenâ Berkley.
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