Tag: Pocket

The police in Boston are searching for two boys who they said flashed a handgun at a pair of children running a lemonade stand on Wednesday and stole an undisclosed amount of cash from a bright pink lockbox.

The robbery, which occurred around 4:45 p.m., rattled South Boston, where it is common for children to set up lemonade stands in the summer for their first taste of the American dream. Many in the neighborhood couldn’t wrap their heads around why someone would target a pair of young entrepreneurs engaged in a time-honored childhood hustle.

Tiffany Byrne, the aunt of the two children working the lemonade stand, said that about $80 was taken.

“The fact that anyone could do this to children is horrible,” she said.

Children’s Lemonade Stand Is Robbed in Broad Daylight in Boston – The New York Times

Two hundred and fifty years ago, fifty-six men signed their names to a document that pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to forge this nation. Some went bankrupt. Some watched their property seized and their children buried. They staked everything so that we could inherit a country so abundant, so free, and so safe that we now have the luxury of despising one another over politics from the comfort of our phones.

Maybe the foreigners have it right. Maybe the eagle and the flyover and the canyon and the kindness of a stranger with car keys really are worth crossing an ocean to see. Maybe, watching them fall in love with the place we take for granted, we could fall in love with it again ourselves and decide to be a little more charitable to the neighbor God told us to love, even when we cannot stand how he votes.

Through Strangers’ Eyes May We See Ourselves Again As Great

Last month, Google announced what it billed as the biggest change to search in 25 years: The search box now automatically expands as you type, and sometimes morphs into a chatbot. As a result, the SEO industry is scurrying to figure out how to get search bots to recommend a given product—a practice sometimes called “GEO,” for generative-engine optimization. To put it more bluntly, your search results are getting sloptimized.
— Read on www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/google-search-ai-optimization/687495/

One thing that a lot of my AI and tech friends don’t really understand is that trust is not about information and its quality alone. It’s about the messenger. And so when they talk about having AGIs that do super-persuasion by writing the most persuasive sentence in the world, I think: I don’t think you understand trust, because it’s not about the sentence. It’s about who says it and their track record and what they’ve told me before. And the stronger your individual brand, the trust you build, the voice you have, the track record that is just yours, the better off you’ll be
— Read on on.substack.com/p/the-independent-writers-advantage

We propose an output-based approach to measure the missing value of data. We treat data as an asset, measure its volume based on the quality of firms’ revenue forecasts, and endogenously determine its depreciation. We then capitalize the data value and explore what the measured GDP would be if the data were treated and transacted similarly to a physical asset. Our findings suggest that the aggregate value of data is about 1.5% of GDP.
— Read on www.nber.org/papers/w35266

Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House account, the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account, and Sephora’s account.
— Read on www.404media.co/hackers-simply-asked-meta-ai-to-give-them-access-to-high-profile-instagram-accounts-it-worked/

Starbucks is sunsetting its AI inventory program after it reportedly miscounted and mislabeled store items.

Another common mistake the AI program made was mixing up different types of milk or skipping them altogether. The program was only active for nine months, according to Reuters.

“With a quick scan using a handheld tablet, partners can instantly see what’s in stock — ensuring cold foam, oat milk, or caramel drizzle are always available,” a now-deleted blog post explaining the AI program read. “Customers can enjoy beverages their way, every time — and partners [Starbucks’ term for its employees] spend less time in the backroom and more time crafting and connecting.”

Starbucks retires AI inventory program after just nine months

The rise of AI coding tools like Claude Code — and OpenAI’s Codex, and GitHub Copilot, and Cursor, and Lovable, and Replit, and a thousand others — is already changing the way software developers work. They’re also giving way to an entirely new kind of software: the software we make just for ourselves. Not to raise venture capital for, not to eventually sell to Google. The era of personal software is upon us, and it is changing our relationship with technology forever. It has certainly already changed mine.

AI lets us make apps the way we used to make lists and spreadsheets. Managing the family budget? Do it in a hand-built app with every feature you need and exactly zero you don’t. Can’t make a to-do list app stick? Roll your own. Rather than triangulate a dozen schedules for the next family trip, whip up a custom meal planner (with built-in grocery assigner). Use it forever, use it once, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t come with a subscription fee or send you marketing emails once a day for the rest of your life. It’s your software. And there’s never been anything like it before.
— Read on www.theverge.com/tech/928905/vibe-code-personal-software-revolution

He had auctioned more than 50,000 cows as he traveled across the country during the dairy sell-off of the past decade. Some were corporate herds of 1,000 or show cattle that brought up to a million dollars, but often Fraley had been the last visitor at family barns like the Watsons’, where he auctioned cows, machinery and sometimes even the property itself for a 10 percent cut. The average Pennsylvania family dairy farm was earning about $20 for every 100 pounds of milk — and that same amount now cost more than $30 to produce. He’d seen farmers who tried to hang on by neglecting their equipment, underfeeding their cows, extending their hours and borrowing tens of thousands they could never repay.

His career had unfolded against a steady backdrop of bankruptcies, accidents and tragedies: the New York farmer who shot all 51 of his dairy cows and then turned the shotgun on himself; an Amish father who suffocated with his two sons after becoming trapped in their grain silo. In 2018, a Wisconsin farmer had sold his cows at auction, taken a part-time job at a grocery store and then killed himself with a note in his pocket. “I’m a dairy farmer,” it read. “I want my old life back, but I can’t get it anymore. Everything I do fails.”

The Last Days of Butter Ridge – The New York Times

Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after. In Experiment 1, while seated and then when walking on a treadmill, adults completed Guilford’s alternate uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking and the compound remote associates (CRA) test of convergent thinking. Walking increased 81% of participants’ creativity on the GAU, but only increased 23% of participants’ scores for the CRA. In Experiment 2, participants completed the GAU when seated and then walking, when walking and then seated, or when seated twice. Again, walking led to higher GAU scores. Moreover, when seated after walking, participants exhibited a residual creative boost. Experiment 3 generalized the prior effects to outdoor walking. Experiment 4 tested the effect of walking on creative analogy generation. Participants sat inside, walked on a treadmill inside, walked outside, or were rolled outside in a wheelchair. Walking outside produced the most novel and highest quality analogies. The effects of outdoor stimulation and walking were separable. Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity.

Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking – PubMed