The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

Careers

EXPERIENCED, INTROVERT BARBER: A San Francisco barbershop now offers a trim on “Silent Mode” catered to shy tech workers and stoners who are too blitzed to chat. We’re cool with the no-talking haircut, the quiet Uber ride, and the self-checkout, but we’ll never get rid of our weekly catchup with our barista crush.

OIL DETECTIVE: Exxon Mobil spent five years and billions of dollars trying to find oil off the coast of Brazil and…it couldn’t find any. It’s ditching the project and will probably start applying to grad school.

ISO MORE CALM PILOTS: A South African pilot completed an emergency landing while casually avoiding getting bitten by a venomous snake slithering underneath his seat.

Personal

ITALIAN SPEAKERS WANTED: Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party introduced legislation that would slap a max fine of $108,705 on Italians who use English and other foreign words in official communications. You could even be punished for mispronouncing bruschetta (it’s “brew-sketta” btw).

ISO ESCAPIST BILLIONAIRES: New Zealand, once a hot spot for the megarich, feels more like Mid Earth these days. After the country tightened up the rules for foreign investor visas, only 15 people applied in the last six months. In 2021, under the previous criteria, 492 did.

For sale

EXTRA MICRO SOCCER RIBBONS: Three North Carolina state senators introduced a bill that would ban participation trophies for kids’ sports. Sorry, Timmy, if you’re not the MVP, you’re nothing. Welcome to the real world.

ONLY BIG BOOZE IN BEANTOWN: A Boston City Councilor proposed a ban on tiny bottles of liquor, saying that by getting rid of shooters, the city could curb public intoxication and litter. Liquor stores and all 12 of Will Hunting’s big brothers are pushing back.—MM

Zeus visited New York City last Saturday when towering lightning bolts struck One World Trade Center. While those bolts look like they could zap everyone below 14th Street, the towering skyscraper is actually doing its job of using its height to shield the area around it (lightning always hunts for the tallest object).

Better yet, One World Trade is also not fried in the process. Building on the pioneering work of Benjamin Franklin, the building’s protection system distributes the electrical charge through its exterior and then buries the current into the bedrock below ground.—NF

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even keep you from getting bamboozled.

You can’t drink your way to better health. A new study reviewing over 40 years of scientific research claiming moderate drinking has health benefits found the previous studies were flawed, and concluded that some light boozing has no salutary effects. Turns out the sober people who moderate drinkers were compared to included former heavy drinkers who quit after developing health problems. Meanwhile, modest drinkers tended to show moderation in other aspects of life, too, meaning they had lots of other healthy habits that likely impacted their stats.

Baseball hitters are getting hotter…literally. According to a study out of Dartmouth, climate change has been responsible for more than 500 MLB home runs since 2010. Researchers analyzed 100,000 major-league games and determined that warmer air has upped the frequency of homers. It’s physics: Warmer air is less dense, making it easier for balls to fly farther since they face less resistance. So, while this probably isn’t the most pressing concern related to a warming planet, each degree the Earth gets hotter is associated with ~95 extra home runs per season.

Become a human polygraph. New research from the University of Amsterdam’s LieLab reveals that you can spot a lie by focusing on how detailed and rich the story is. If the descriptions are full of specifics, the story is probably true. Paying attention to this one signal makes it easier to spot a fib than if you try to consider multiple factors like body language or how convincing or emotional the story is, the study found. Study participants using the method could detect lies vs. the truth nearly 80% of the time, while those relying on intuition or multiple strategies did no better than random chance.—AR

Artificial intelligence needs to check itself before it wrecks itself—and the rest of the world. That was the gist of a recent open letter asking companies on the cutting edge of AI research to pause work on models that are more sophisticated than OpenAI’s GPT-4 for at least six months.

The letter was published by the Future of Life Institute and signed by over 20,000 people, with headliners like Elon Musk and many prominent AI experts. They think that the industry needs to develop some ground rules to avoid Black Mirror turning into a reality show.

Even the loudest tech bulls concede that advanced AI is risky, but whether to hit pause on cutting-edge research has been hotly debated.

Why take an AI detox?

The folks calling for a pause aren’t hermits: Besides Musk, they include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Silicon Valley’s favorite historian, Yuval Noah Harari. According to the letter…

• The current generation of AI tools risks displacing humans from “fulfilling” jobs and filling the internet with propaganda and misinformation.
• Over the long haul, the stakes are even higher: Machines could eventually “outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace” humans.

The letter asks governments to enact the moratorium if AI labs don’t pause voluntarily. It calls for companies to work with authorities to come up with regulations for the nascent technology, insisting that otherwise, the current “AI summer” will be short-lived.

Who’s not on board with pausing AI research?

Bill Gates (the founder of Microsoft, which has a stake in OpenAI) told Reuters that a pause wouldn’t solve any problems with AI and that a moratorium would be unenforceable.

But even some experts without money on the line don’t support the pause: Economist Adam Ozimek insinuated that temporarily halting AI research would mostly benefit knowledge workers at risk of being displaced by intelligent chatbots at the expense of society as a whole. He recently tweeted, “Imagine having ALS or a child with cancer and hearing we need to slow technological progress because white collar workers are nervous.”

Others say pausing AI projects for six months is impractical. Bloomberg columnist Tyler Cowen doesn’t see how it could be enforced globally and thinks that if only the US pauses, it could threaten national security and its competitiveness on the global stage.

And some critics claim that the long-term threats of super-intelligent AI, as laid out in the letter, are overblown. Linguist Emily Bender says its authors’ “longtermist” ideology prioritizes hypothetical future problems over the real problems that AI already has, like perpetuating social injustices. She thinks companies should focus on a) making AI models more transparent about their methods and b) designing them with safeguards from misinformation.

For some, the letter doesn’t go far enough. Political scientist Wendy Wong, who studies how AI affects human rights issues, says that to enact meaningful change, the pause needs to be longer than six months.

Zoom out: Now that AI has evolved from a field dominated by experiments in academic labs to a mainstream corporate phenomenon with multibillion-dollar investments, any discussion about ethics and restrictions puts big money at stake.—SK

The Brew’s resident tastemaker, Jamie, compiles her favorite recs to help you live your best life.

Meal prep: Goated kimchi fried rice recipe.

Book rec: Nonviolent Communication shot to the top of the self-help list after this Instagram review.

Streaming binge: Critically praised anime Demon Slayer’s third season comes out on Crunchyroll today, and you can binge the previous seasons on Netflix.

Playlist: Chris Luno posts DJ sets with beautiful backgrounds for working or when you have people over. Check it out on YouTube.

Smart purchase: This fancy butter has been trending on social media and seems like a superior housewarming gift to wine.

Tech tip: Use this site to convert horizontal videos to vertical for TikTok and Instagram Reels (h/t Jack Appleby).

Life hack: Regrowing green onions from the grocery store is super easy.

Land of plenty: Looking to diversify your portfolio? Farmland has historically produced wealth with limited correlation to volatile markets, but most haven’t had access. AcreTrader can help accredited investors get access and support farmers. Invest in farmland.*

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It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

Every single Peeps chick you stuff into your mouth this Easter comes from one place: Bethlehem (seems appropriate).

A factory in this Pennsylvania city cranks out an average of 5.5 million marshmallow treats per day through a highly mechanized process involving spray guns, marshmallow pipes, and sugar hoses. As one NYT reporter who visited put it, the factory is a “true Willy Wonka experience.”

It wasn’t always a world of pure imagination. In 1953, when Peeps were first manufactured, the process was done by hand, and it took 27 hours to make just one chick. But through automation, the production time has been cut down to six minutes.

Here’s a peep into the Peep-making assembly line, per the NYT:

• A sugar-dyeing process that involves pouring food coloring into 400 pounds of sugar.
• Creating the liquid marshmallow by heating up 1,400 pounds of water, sugar, and corn syrup—topped off with gelatin.
• Sending the marshmallow through another set of machines to deposit the fully formed chicks onto conveyor belts.
• Dousing the chicks in a sugar shower, poking holes in their heads for eyes, letting them cool, and finally packaging them up.

But the innovation doesn’t stop at state-of-the-art machinery. Peeps has expanded into new product varieties, including sour watermelon-flavored Peeps, flavored jelly beans, and even milk chocolate Peeps.

Happy Easter!—NF

Last week we asked: What was the hardest membership you’ve tried to cancel?

Some of our favorite responses:

• “I missed the deadline to cancel an annual fitness app subscription by a few days. I reached out via email asking if I could cancel anyway rather than pay for another year—because I was pregnant and unable to continue HIIT-style workouts. They responded asking for proof...so I sent a baby bump picture of my swelling abdomen. Is that even legal?!”—Ali from San Diego, CA
• “SiriusXM... you basically have to call and convince them you lost your sense of hearing to have the charges stop.”—Craig from Woodridge, IL
• “A bakery/dairy that kept sending me banana bread every week. The worst part is the squirrels got to it before I did.”—Anshul from Chicago, IL
• “A bug-spraying company. I bought my grandparents’ home after they passed, and while the home was in probate, the executor of the will hired a bug spray company. They come out four times a year for $79 per trip. I have canceled via email, phone call, and even canceled my card that was linked to them. They still came out and sprayed. Then they started calling weekly, saying that I owed them. I said multiple times I didn’t need the service anymore, and canceled. They were always apologetic and would update the account to reflect that we no longer needed service. They ended up swinging by while I was at work to spray and asked my wife if she was able to update the card. She did. I gave in after that and accepted defeat. At least I enjoy the life of no spiders in the house.”—Jake

This week’s question

Let’s set the scene: You just received word that the apocalypse is coming and you have to live underground for 10 years. Besides your standard food/weapons/water, what is a must-have item in your disaster kit?

Matty’s answer to get the juices flowing: “I should probably say a journal or book to keep me occupied, but I think tap shoes would be more fun.”

Share your response here.

Planning your next social media campaign? Marketing Brew explains how to work with influencers to connect with potential customers. Download the guide here.

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