Hey Bizarro Readers!

We only saw each other two weeks ago and already so much has happened since then. Open AI released a new GPT version, Google has started unrolling AI-driven search results, and lots more. And of course those are only the big news stories, but if you’ve been following us for a bit, then you know that we also love to dig up interesting news that maybe didn’t make it on your radar. For this issue, we’ve got the following:

• 💰⏱️ $25 Million Heist Pulled Off in 12 Seconds by MIT Students

• 🍜🖥️ NYC Restaurant Hires Remote Cashiers From Philippines to Take Orders

• 📱☹️ Phones Can Now Tell If Their Owners Are Depressed

Plus we’ve got the usual lineup of tools, stats, another code conundrum challenge, and more.

Let’s get into it!

📰 From the Newsroom

💰⏱️ $25 Million Heist Pulled Off in 12 Seconds by MIT Students

I was originally going to put this story in the “Numbers Game” section of this issue because “$25 million in 12 seconds” is such an attention-grabbing numerical pairing, but the entire backstory is just too good to not give it a more in-depth look. Everything from how they planned it to how they (surprisingly) got caught is entertaining enough to be turned into a movie at some point (à la 21).

• Two brothers studying computer science and math at MIT are accused of stealing $25 million in cryptocurrency in just 12 seconds by exploiting a bug in the Ethereum blockchain protocol.

• The scheme allegedly involved setting up fake validator nodes to tamper with pending transactions before they were added to the blockchain, reordering them to their advantage.

• The brothers face decades in prison for wire fraud and money laundering charges related to this sophisticated theft that the DOJ says "calls the very integrity of the blockchain into question."

Perhaps the most mind-boggling part of this sophisticated crypto heist is how the perpetrators were caught. The level of skill and intellect to exploit an intricate blockchain vulnerability in a mere 12 seconds is something few posses, and yet they somehow forgot to use a TOR browser or a VPN when researching how to "wash crypto" and how to avoid financial KYC requirements. Instead, their publicly-logged browser histories contained damning searches about top crypto lawyers and extradition policies. So smart…and yet so dumb at the same time.

🍜🖥️ NYC Restaurant Hires Remote Cashiers From Philippines to Take Orders

Sansan Chicken, a fried chicken chain with locations in Manhattan and Queens, has implemented a novel approach to staffing its cashiers - outsourcing the roles to remote workers in the Philippines through a company called Happy Cashier.

• This setup allows the restaurants to significantly reduce labor costs by employing workers from a country where the average cashier makes $1 per hour. Sansan Chicken pays them $3 per hour.

• While the virtual Filipino cashiers provide more personalized service than self-service kiosks, some patrons feel the lack of physical human interaction detracts from the authentic dining experience. Not to mention the ethical concerns about displacing local workers who would normally be doing those jobs.

• While Sansan Chicken’s unique remote work model is a bit of a novelty at the moment, it does hint at an increasingly automated future for the service industry. Many people have commented that it’s not too difficult to envision virtual AI bots eventually replacing human workers altogether for roles like taking orders.

This story made me reflect back to a few years ago when I worked with a fully remote company and one of my colleagues, who was Filipino, revealed her salary to me. At first I was angry on her behalf that she was being so underpaid…until she informed me that by her local standards she was making good money. It brings up a larger conversation that’s been the topic of discussion across labor markets for quite a while, but really picked up steam during the lockdowns when remote work took off:

*By company’s domestic rates, I mean if there is a German company hiring remote workers internationally, then they will pay their remote colleagues within the typical German salary range for their position - irrespective of where they live.

📱☹️ Phones Can Now Tell If Their Owners Are Depressed

Has this ever happened to you:

You’re having a conversation with a friend on your phone - whether through text, voice, or voice message - and you mention some specific life event or problem and then shortly afterwards you start getting targeted ads for products or services related to your conversation? Well, it turns out that not only can your phone decipher that you might want to buy something, it can also determine if you’re depressed or not.

• New AI-powered apps can potentially detect signs of depression by analyzing data from your smartphone like selfies, social media usage, sleep patterns, etc. Early research shows reasonable accuracy.

• However, these mental health apps raise privacy concerns - there's little regulation around how personal data is collected, shared, and used by companies. Users may not fully understand the terms.

• While promising for increasing access to mental health care - which is good on the surface - the apps can't replace human connection. Plus there are risks if the technology makes mistakes or companies mishandle sensitive data.

As these AI-driven mental health technologies advance, we must grapple with profound questions. How much are we willing to sacrifice privacy for increased access and early intervention? Can we trust companies and developers to uphold ethical standards with such personal data? One sobering example is Meta's 2018 algorithm scandal, which scanned WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger for suicide risk, triggering over 1,000 non-consensual wellness checks by police. While well-intentioned, it clearly overstepped the bounds of privacy.

⛓️ Ten More Must See Links of the Month

• A British toddler has had her hearing restored after becoming the first person in the world to take part in a pioneering gene therapy trial, in a development that doctors say marks a new era in treating deafness.

• Is Google abusing its search engine dominance to stifle Gmail competitors in search results? That’s what Tuta (formerly Tutanota) mail is claiming. They filed an official complaint with the E.U. after Google dropped visibility of Tuta(nota) by 90% in its search results.

• The Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 are two recently launched AI devices surrounded by a lot of hype. But is the hype worth it? This writer delivers a scathing - at times humorous - answer and argues that they will never be good.

• HTMX is a trending JavaScript library and it seems like everyone in the dev world is talking about it lately. Check out its pros and cons, based on over 1,000 reviews scraped from Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, and YouTube.

• If you’ve used Google at all these past few days then you might’ve noticed that they’ve started integrating AI responses in search results. If you’re not a fan of it and prefer the now “old school” results layout, then you can try this workaround.

• A tech company called Beaverlab has launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for a super-telephoto camera that comes with a 400-mm zoom lens, and works with a smartphone to capture distant imagery. Their original Kickstarter goal was $20,000. As of the time of this writing, they’ve gotten $1,004,447 in pledges!

• The first ever retail sales of no-kill, lab-grown meat have begun in Singapore. The company making the meat is called GOOD Meat and the butcher selling it is called Huber’s. A 120 gram pack goes for $7.20 SGD, which is roughly $5.35 USD.

• 📽️🎞️ Last week, OpenAI released it’s latest GPT iteration - GPT-4o - to the public. It’s free. It’s fast. And it can do a lot of cool things. Check out the sample use case videos in this Twitter thread for examples.

• A team of scientists has created a 3D, nanoscale-resolution map of a single cubic millimeter of the human brain. Although the map covers just a a teensy, minuscule fraction of a full brain, it still contains roughly 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and nearly 150 million synapses. It’s currently the highest-resolution image of the human brain ever created.

• Who’s the fastest WordPress hosting provider out there? Well, if you ask any of the dozens of hosting companies out there, they’ll all probably give you a convoluted roundabout response that amounts to “we are,” but here’s the real data-backed answer.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity."

– Albert Einstein (supposedly)

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 9% of annual work time is spent reorienting after switching applications, according to a study conducted on 137 users from three Fortune 500 companies. The research used a work graph to measure cognitive effort and found that users toggled between apps nearly 1,200 times daily, costing over two seconds each switch. This resulted in nearly four hours per week spent just reorienting.

• 60.28% of all website traffic comes from people using mobile devices (as of last month). For comparison, back in 2011, it was a mere 6.1%. That’s a ten-fold increase in about 13 years.

• 2.6 hours of work and 9 hours of sleep define the "global human day," according to a 2023 study by researchers from McGill University. Their analysis aggregated data from 145 countries, collected between 2000 and 2019. They aimed to provide a comprehensive estimate of human activities averaged over time and across the entire population (including all age groups, income levels, etc).

⌨️ Code Conundrum

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

The winner of last issue’s Ruby on Rails challenge was…no one. I guess we don’t have too many Ruby fans in our community. For the record, the subtle error was the absence of the new action. In the create action, if user.save returns false, it renders the 'new' view, but the 'new' action is not defined in the controller. Therefore, it would result in a routing error when attempting to render the 'new' view.

Let’s bring the conundrum back to JavaScript since you all seemed to enjoy that a lot more.

Send me an email once you spot the error. Please put "Code Conundrum" in the subject line. Once again, the first person who emails me with the correct answer (either saying what the error is or sending back the snippet error-free) will get a shoutout in the next issue.

Also, a quick tip, don’t assume that if you are reading this a day or two after it was published that someone submitted the correct answer already. Just because someone else responds quickly doesn’t mean that they respond correctly.

Interested in sponsoring this section? Reach out to me with “Bizarro Sponsorship” in the subject line.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Google Labs: In issue 152 we told you about Google’s AI Test Kitchen, but Google also has another similar platform called Google Labs. The difference between them is that Labs is a broader platform that highlights Google's AI efforts across products, while the Test Kitchen is more narrowly focused on just three specific AI tools (with a wait list for a fourth). Anyway, Labs has some really cool toys you can play with. Check it out!

https://labs.google/

Storm: This experimental AI is still in its research phase and free to use. Think of it like your personal Wikipedia page generator. If you’re interested in some topic and would like an informational report on it, STORM will do it for you. It’ll also cite all of its sources and link to them so you can always check the claims being made in the report.

https://storm.genie.stanford.edu/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

The large, glowing circular contraption that you’re seeing above is a “portal” between Dublin, Ireland and New York City, USA. One of these was placed in both cities, and connected them via a 24/7 live stream. Sounds like a cool idea, right? A wholesome way to bring people closer together. Well, there’s the theory and there’s the practice.

In practice, the organization behind the portals had to temporarily shut them down after some New Yorkers and Dubliners started flashing their butts at each other, an OnlyFans model on the NYC side gave the good citizens of Dublin a “free preview” of her adult content, and one Dubliner taunted New Yorkers with images of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Uh, humans…

💬 What’s the Word?

Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese concept that embodies the idea of finding a deep sense of purpose or meaning in life. The term combines the words "iki" (生き), meaning life, and "gai" (甲斐), which refers to value or worth. Together, they convey the notion of what makes life worth living.

Tech professionals who discover their ikigai are those who find joy in their work, leverage their unique skills, address significant problems, and receive fair compensation. When tech companies support their employees in finding their ikigai, they create an environment where creativity and productivity thrive, ultimately leading to groundbreaking advancements and a positive impact on society.

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– Martin