James' World 2

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Interestingly, these tend to be free, probably because most of the common problems are universal, and that usually means someone has thought of that already and gotten mad enough to fix it. And if someone on GitHub or an obscure video encoding forum has not solved the issue, there’s some great shareware software out there that won’t break the bank. 

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The Verge

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In the thick of the pandemic, and three years after they immigrated from India, Mifrah Abid and her family were asked to vacate their townhouse in Milton so their landlord could sell it.

The order left them scrambling. Abid’s children were 10 and six, two of her family members were immunocompromised and prices had just started inching toward a pandemic rush. It became clear Abid’s family would have to leave behind the only connections they had as new immigrants. Even renting a single-bedroom condo in Milton would cost $2,100 — far more than what they were paying for the three-bedroom townhouse.

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Forced to move

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There’s an undeniable feeling of excitement when you turn your daily credit card swipes at Starbucks into first-class airfare or a weekend jaunt to Costa Rica. Thanks to mobile banking and the ease of autopay, you can scrupulously avoid any additional costs by paying your monthly bill in full. Free flights and exclusive discounts abound.

Something for nothing, right?

Not exactly nothing. Credit card perks for educated, usually urban professionals are being subsidized by people who have less. In other words, when you book a hotel room or enjoy entry to an airport lounge at no cost, poor consumers are ultimately footing the bill.

Demand for rewards is only going up. In 2016, Chase launched its Sapphire Reserve card. The card comes with perks, bonuses and points multipliers that for big-spending travelers and diners are worth far more than its steep $550 annual fee. There was so much initial demand that Chase ran out of the metal slabs it prints the cards on. Sapphire’s enormous success set off a credit card perks war, with numerous banks flooding the market with sign-on bonuses worth thousands of dollars.

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Kaitlin Brito

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It didn’t take long for Microsoft’s new AI-infused search engine chatbot — codenamed “Sydney” — to display a growing list of discomforting behaviors after it was introduced early in February, with weird outbursts ranging from unrequited declarations of love to painting some users as “enemies.”

As human-like as some of those exchanges appeared, they probably weren’t the early stirrings of a conscious machine rattling its cage. Instead, Sydney’s outbursts reflect its programming, absorbing huge quantities of digitized language and parroting back what its users ask for. Which is to say, it reflects our online selves back to us. And that shouldn’t have been surprising — chatbots’ habit of mirroring us back to ourselves goes back way further than Sydney’s rumination on whether there is a meaning to being a Bing search engine. In fact, it’s been there since the introduction of the first notable chatbot almost 50 years ago.

In 1966, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum released ELIZA (named after the fictional Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion), the first program that allowed some kind of plausible conversation between humans and machines. The process was simple: Modeled after the Rogerian style of psychotherapy, ELIZA would rephrase whatever speech input it was given in the form of a question. If you told it a conversation with your friend left you angry, it might ask, “Why do you feel angry?”

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Your parents learned how to handle money in a different time. A far-off time when it was for more realistic to buy a home, a car or even, you know, eggs. Even when your parents mean well, their money wisdom might be, at best, holding you back and, at worst, doing harm to your financial health. Last week we asked you to share all the unexpected money habits you had to unlearn from your parents. Here’s what Lifehacker readers did to break the cycle of bad money habits in their lives.

Discovering that it’s OK to treat yourself

One of the most common money mindsets that gets internalized is an intense guilt towards spending on anything that isn’t strictly essential—even if you really can afford it.

Lifehacker reader Triflers need not apply shares how they struggled to overcome the sentiment that “spending any amount of money on myself as a treat to myself is selfish, vain, and wasteful.” Now, they say they budget in “treat yo’self” luxuries, “because the point of having money is sometimes to just better your own existence.”

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Photo: RealPeopleStudio (Shutterstock)

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When you face a parenting challenge—disruptive behavior, big emotions, or your own frustration—a short and simple go-to phrase can be your ticket to quickly settling problems in the moment.

“By using simple and concise phrases, we can avoid getting into lengthy arguments or debates with our children, which can escalate emotions and lead to negative outcomes,” said psychologist and family interventionist Vanessa Kahlon. “One-liners can help us remain calm and composed in stressful situations, as they provide a clear and consistent message to our children.”

Before you say something you’ll regret

We’ve all had those parenting moments where our child is emotional or just plain irritating, and we say something out of anger that makes everyone feel worse. Once you have a bank of one-liners to tap into, you can create a pause in the drama, allowing everyone to calm down.

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Photo: MAYA LAB (Shutterstock)

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High up in some ice-filled clouds, sitting inside an airplane loaded with science instruments, Christian Nairy looked at pictures flashing on his computer screen. This high-altitude slideshow is displaying real-time images of cloud particles being sampled by a device out on the plane’s wing — and some of the ice crystals looked like perfect little snowflakes.

“They’re amazing to look at. Especially when they pop up right in front of you on the screen, it’s remarkable,” said Nairy, a Ph.D. student at the University of North Dakota.

He’s just one of the scientists who was aboard a research plane earlier this month as it flew out of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to travel through a winter storm — part of a research campaign called IMPACTS, or the Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Storms mission.

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Scientists expected the James Webb Space Telescope to reveal unknowns in the deepest realms of space.

But they certainly didn’t anticipate this.

While scanning a region of the cosmos near the Big Dipper, a group of astronomers identified six faint objects as they appeared well over 13 billion years ago. They suspect the objects are ancient galaxies. Scientists expect such early collections of stars and swirling matter to be relatively small. After all, such galaxies hadn’t had much time to form or grow. But these galaxies are giants, the researchers report.

“It’s bananas,” Erica Nelson, an astrophysicist at CU Boulder who worked on the new research, said in a statement(Opens in a new tab).

It’s bananas because the objects, which are “red and bright” in the Webb observations, might host billions of stars (and many more planets), similar to our Milky Way galaxy. These galaxies formed some 500 to 700 million years after the universe was created during the Big Bang(Opens in a new tab), and at such a time there simply shouldn’t have been enough matter around to create fantastic bursts of stars and solar systems, Nelson explained.

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In the opening of HBO’s The Last of Us, a couple of scientists on a 1960s-era interview show debate the possibility of a fungus-driven pandemic destroying humanity. It not only sets the tone for the show, it makes you wonder if something like that could actually happen. The answer: No. At least, not right now. In the future, though, it’s a possibility.

This got me thinking about what kind of infection is most likely to ravage humanity and destroy our way of life in the coming years. The contenders: Bacteria, viruses, and fungus. Each has an impressive historical kill count and its own strengths and weaknesses.

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Image: ETAJOE (Shutterstock)

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I feel like I’ve lost years of my life to sleeplessness—sometimes I look as if I have, too. Most nights I wake in the middle of the night, suddenly on some kind of vigil for that saber-toothed tiger attack. But of course, the tiger never comes (I know this because I am then awake for hours). For me, a good night’s sleep is a meager six hours. The worst-case scenario—about four hours, broken into little pieces (a bit like me)—happens all too frequently. 

Like many insomniacs, I’ve tried everything: over-the-counter sleeping pills (they work, but dependency feels wrong), quitting caffeine and alcohol (it helps, but it is no cure), ear plugs and eye masks (essential), sleep podcasts, bedtime breathwork, magnesium and melatonin (all useless), and CBTi (that’s ‘i’ for insomnia—effective but brutal, and my bad habits and wakefulness always won out). I have followed all the received wisdom around sleep hygiene—to no real effect. And with all the literature around the negative health consequences of sleeplessness, it’s easy to let panic steer your life into obsessiveness around sleep. That didn’t help either. 

But then a chance conversation a couple of months ago with the sleep coach Camilla Stoddart changed everything. “Have you tried journaling?” she asked. I hadn’t. I was always too self-conscious, too unconvinced. To me, journalling belonged with pillow mists and milky drinks in the softly-softly, totally ineffective category. Stoddart explained the science: “The amygdala is your brain’s worry center, and is responsible for emotional processing—it’s the amygdala that judges whether something is worth panicking over.” It was my stressed-out amygdala that was waking me up, she said, adding, “but journalling will help to switch it off.”

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Photographed by Steven Meisel, Vogue, June 2006

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