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From the New York Post: Generation Z's recent foray into the corporate world has been an eye-popping escapade plagued by their "annoying" workplace habits and helicopter parents accompanying them on interviews. Now, newcomers to the 9-to-5 grind are inflicting a fresh new level of hell onto the workforce with a trending act of defiance known as "career catfishing." That means "a successful candidate accepted a job and then never showed up," writes Fortune, citing a survey of 1,000 U.K. employees conducted by CV Genius. The New York Post notes researchers "found that a staggering 34% of 20-somethings skip Day 1 of work, sans communicating with their new employer, as a demonstration of autonomy." After drudging through the ever-exasperating job hunting process — which often includes submitting dozens of lengthy applications, suffering through endless rounds of interviews and anxiously awaiting updates from sluggish hiring managers — the Z's are apparently "catfishing" jobs to prove that they, rather than their prospective employers, have all the power. But the rebellious babes aren't the only ones pulling fast ones on new bosses. A surprising 24% of millennials, staffers ranging in age from 28 to 43, have taken a shine to career catfishing, too, per the findings. However, only 11% of Gen Xers, hirelings ages 44 to 59, and 7% of baby boomers, personnel over age 60, have joined in on the office treachery. Unlike their older colleagues, Gen Zs are apparently more concerned about prioritizing their personal needs and goals than kowtowing to the demands of corporate culture. Fortune agrees that "Gen Z applicants aren't alone in going no- and low-contact during the recruiting process. Some 74% of employers now admit that ghosting is a facet of the hiring landscape, according to a 2023 Indeed survey of thousands of job seekers and employers..." That being said, simply not showing up to work could prove unsustainable in the long run. Like many young workers before them, Gen Zers have garnered a poor reputation with employers. Hiring managers have labeled them as the most difficult generation to work with, according to a Resume Genius report. The report found employees also admitted to practicing "quiet vacationing" (taking time off without telling your boss) and "coffee badging" (grabbing coffee in the office before returning home)...

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The food-beauty crossover is suddenly everywhere. It is the allure of nostalgia, the pull of meme culture, and the sticky-sweet scent of capitalism wafting through the air—and we are eating it up.

This high-end OLED comes with wireless connectivity for clean lines in fancy rooms.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd, who stepped down as CEO at the beginning of 2024, is returning to the post in mid-March. Former Slack CEO Lidiane Jones, who succeeded Herd, has resigned for "personal reasons" and will remain in the role until Wolfe Herd takes over. "As I step into the role of CEO, I'm energized and fully committed to Bumble's success, our mission of creating meaningful, equitable relationships, and our opportunity ahead," Wolfe Herd says in a statement. "We have exciting innovation ahead for Bumble in this bold new chapter." Bumble's share price has dropped by half since the app introduced a redesign and feature in April that let men send the first message in response to prewritten questions. "Bumble gained popularity in part because it was set up for women to message their matches first," notes The Verge. "In Bumble's most recent earnings report, it said that the number of paying users had increased from 3.8 million to 4.3 million over the last year, however, average revenue per paying user dropped from $23.42 to $21.17, and its total revenue dropped slightly."

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You can do more with your e-reader than you might realize.

If you missed the recent live, subscriber-only Q&A about money and AI scams with WIRED’s advice columnist Reece Rogers, you can watch the replay here.

The government says technology should "make people's lives easier" but any system won't be mandatory.

The government says technology should "make people's lives easier" but any system won't be mandatory.

If you want to wake up with the sun but aren't a morning person, these bedside devices can simulate a sunrise whenever you want to rouse for the day (and a sunset, too).

Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country Returns HD earlier this week, with fans noticing that the original team members at Retro are not individually credited in the updated version. "Instead, the credits state that it was 'based on the work' of Retro Studios, while the team at Forever Entertainment gets its credits for working on the remaster," reports GameSpot. In a statement issued to Eurogamer, a Nintendo spokesperson said: "We believe in giving proper credit for anyone involved in making or contributing to a game's creation, and value the contributions that all staff make during the development process." From the report: That statement doesn't really address why the original team's names were excluded from the credits, and this has happened before. In 2023, the Retro Studios developers behind Metroid Prime were left out of the credits for Metroid Prime Remastered. Similarly, external translators voiced their frustrations last year because Nintendo didn't credit them for their work either. This story has been largely overshadowed by the reveal of Switch 2 earlier this week. It seems likely that the Donkey Kong Country franchise will be revisited on that system as well. However, it's not among the games rumored for Switch 2. In the meantime, the bizarre Donkey Kong Country animated TV series is still available to watch on Prime Video.

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Smithsonian Magazine reports: A homeowner on Prince Edward Island in Canada has had a very unusual near-death experience: A meteorite landed exactly where he'd been standing roughly two minutes earlier. What's more, his home security camera caught the impact on video -- capturing a rare clip that might be the first known recording of both the visual and audio of a meteorite striking the planet. The shocking event took place in July 2024 and was announced in a statement by the University of Alberta on Monday. "It sounded like a loud, crashing, gunshot bang," the homeowner, Joe Velaidum, tells the Canadian Press' Lyndsay Armstrong. Velaidum wasn't home to hear the sound in person, however. Last summer, he and his partner Laura Kelly noticed strange, star-shaped, grey debris in front of their house after returning from a walk with their dogs. They checked their security camera footage, and that's when they saw and heard it: a small rock plummeting through the sky and smashing into their walkway. It landed so quickly that the space rock itself is only visible in two of the video's frames.

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The Supreme Court earlier upheld a law that would ban the video app in the US unless its Chinese parent-company sells it.

OpenAI has developed a language model designed for engineering proteins, capable of converting regular cells into stem cells. It marks the company's first venture into biological data and demonstrates AI's potential for unexpected scientific discoveries. An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he was "confident" his company knows how to build an AGI, adding that "superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own." The protein engineering project started a year ago when Retro Biosciences, a longevity research company based in San Francisco, approached OpenAI about working together. That link-up did not happen by chance. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, personally funded Retro with $180 million, as MIT Technology Review first reported in 2023. Retro has the goal of extending the normal human lifespan by 10 years. For that, it studies what are called Yamanaka factors. Those are a set of proteins that, when added to a human skin cell, will cause it to morph into a young-seeming stem cell, a type that can produce any other tissue in the body. [...] OpenAI's new model, called GPT-4b micro, was trained to suggest ways to re-engineer the protein factors to increase their function. According to OpenAI, researchers used the model's suggestions to change two of the Yamanaka factors to be more than 50 times as effective -- at least according to some preliminary measures. [...] The model does not work the same way as Google's AlphaFold, which predicts what shape proteins will take. Since the Yamanaka factors are unusually floppy and unstructured proteins, OpenAI said, they called for a different approach, which its large language models were suited to. The model was trained on examples of protein sequences from many species, as well as information on which proteins tend to interact with one another. While that's a lot of data, it's just a fraction of what OpenAI's flagship chatbots were trained on, making GPT-4b an example of a "small language model" that works with a focused data set. Once Retro scientists were given the model, they tried to steer it to suggest possible redesigns of the Yamanaka proteins. The prompting tactic used is similar to the "few-shot" method, in which a user queries a chatbot by providing a series of examples with answers, followed by an example for the bot to respond to. Although genetic engineers have ways to direct evolution of molecules in the lab, they can usually test only so many possibilities. And even a protein of typical length can be changed in nearly infinite ways (since they're built from hundreds of amino acids, and each acid comes in 20 possible varieties). OpenAI's model, however, often spits out suggestions in which a third of the amino acids in the proteins were changed. "We threw this model into the lab immediately and we got real-world results," says Retro's CEO, Joe Betts-Lacroix. He says the model's ideas were unusually good, leading to improvements over the original Yamanaka factors in a substantial fraction of cases.

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Sales of electric vehicles and hybrids reached 20% of new car sales in the U.S. last year, with Tesla maintaining dominance in the EV market despite a slight decline in market share. CNBC reports: Auto data firm Motor Intelligence reports more than 3.2 million "electrified" vehicles were sold last year, or 1.9 million hybrid vehicles, including plug-in models, and 1.3 million all-electric models. Traditional vehicles with gas or diesel internal combustion engines still made up the majority of sales, but declined to 79.8%, falling under 80% for the first time in modern automotive history, according to the data. Regarding sales of pure EVs, Tesla continued to dominate, but Cox Automotive estimated its annual sales fell and its market share dropped to about 49%, down from 55% in 2023. The Tesla Model Y and Model 3 were estimated to be the bestselling EVs in 2024. Following Tesla in EV sales was Hyundai Motor, including Kia, at 9.3% of EV market share; General Motors at 8.7%; and then Ford Motor at 7.5%, according to Motor Intelligence. BMW rounded out the top five at 4.1%. The EV market in the U.S. is highly competitive: Of the 68 mainstream EV models tracked by Cox's Kelley Blue Book, 24 models posted year-over-year sales increases; 17 models were all new to the market; and 27 decreased in volume.

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"The FDIC sued 17 former executives and directors of Silicon Valley Bank on Thursday, seeking to recover billions of dollars for alleged gross negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty," reports Reuters. The move comes almost two years after Silicon Valley Bank's March 2023 collapse, which shocked financial markets and ended up benefiting big players like JPMorgan Chase. From the report: In a complaint filed in San Francisco federal court, the FDIC, in its capacity the bank's receiver, said the defendants ignored fundamental standards of prudent banking and the bank's own risk policies in letting the bank take on excessive risks to boost short-term profit and its stock price. The FDIC faulted the bank's overreliance on unhedged, interest rate-sensitive long-term government bonds such as US Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, as rates looked set to -- and eventually did -- rise. It also objected to the payment of a "grossly imprudent" $294 million dividend to its parent that drained needed capital "at a time of financial distress and management weakness" in December 2022, less than three months before its demise. "SVB represents a case of egregious mismanagement of interest-rate and liquidity risks by the bank's former officers and directors," the complaint said. The defendants include former Chief Executive Gregory Becker, former Chief Financial Officer Daniel Beck, four other former executives and 11 former directors.

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The Department of Health and Human Services released a new proposal with less aggressive increases than were initially proposed, and will give residential care facilities two years to phase in the changes.

If any of the whales become entangled in Maine gear, it could worsen regulations lobstermen say are already too strict.

Some creators told the BBC they will start to diversify where they post their content and lean in to platforms like Instagram and YouTube.

Google computer scientists have been using LLMs to streamline internal code migrations, achieving significant time savings of up to 89% in some cases. The findings appear in a pre-print paper titled "How is Google using AI for internal code migrations?" The Register reports: Their focus is on bespoke AI tools developed for specific product areas, such as Ads, Search, Workspace and YouTube, instead of generic AI tools that provide broadly applicable services like code completion, code review, and question answering. Google's code migrations involved: changing 32-bit IDs in the 500-plus-million-line codebase for Google Ads to 64-bit IDs; converting its old JUnit3 testing library to JUnit4; and replacing the Joda time library with Java's standard java.time package. The int32 to int64 migration, the Googlers explain, was not trivial as the IDs were often generically defined (int32_t in C++ or Integer in Java) and were not easily searchable. They existed in tens of thousands of code locations across thousands of files. Changes had to be tracked across multiple teams and changes to class interfaces had to be considered across multiple files. "The full effort, if done manually, was expected to require hundreds of software engineering years and complex crossteam coordination," the authors explain. For their LLM-based workflow, Google's software engineers implemented the following process. An engineer from Ads would identify an ID in need of migration using a combination of code search, Kythe, and custom scripts. Then an LLM-based migration toolkit, triggered by someone knowledgeable in the art, was run to generate verified changes containing code that passed unit tests. Those changes would be manually checked by the same engineer and potentially corrected. Thereafter, the code changes would be sent to multiple reviewers who are responsible for the portion of the codebase affected by the changes. The result was that 80 percent of the code modifications in the change lists (CLs) were purely the product of AI; the remainder were either human-authored or human-edited AI suggestions. "We discovered that in most cases, the human needed to revert at least some changes the model made that were either incorrect or not necessary," the authors observe. "Given the complexity and sensitive nature of the modified code, effort has to be spent in carefully rolling out each change to users." Based on this, Google undertook further work on LLM-driven verification to reduce the need for detailed review. Even with the need to double-check the LLM's work, the authors estimate that the time required to complete the migration was reduced by 50 percent. With LLM assistance, it took just three months to migrate 5,359 files and modify 149,000 lines of code to complete the JUnit3-JUnit4 transition. Approximately 87 percent of the code generated by AI ended up being committed with no changes. As for the Joda-Java time framework switch, the authors estimate a time saving of 89 percent compared to the projected manual change time, though no specifics were provided to support that assertion.

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Norwegian company Nordic Aquafarms says it is dropping the controversial proposal for a $500 million, land-based aquaculture operation.