Mark Wahlberg has started companies of his own and backed plenty of others. But the gym he’s opening in December, he says, has him more excited than anything he’s done in his entire career. It also goes after a corner of the market where venture money keeps flowing: pricey, diagnostics-heavy wellness.
Speaking with us at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, the actor said the first Municipal Gym opens in December. It’s a 32,000-square-foot club outside Las Vegas with blood work, epigenetic testing, recovery gear, compression therapy, cold plunges, and a café that serves up protein muffins, among other things. He’s pitching it as the affordable alternative to the longevity clubs that charge tens of thousands of dollars a year for much the same thing.
It’s the second part of a scheme that was, in some ways, first hatched seven years ago, with a casual sportswear line.
The clothing brand Municipal launched during COVID, which Wahlberg volunteers “was not a good idea.” (Clothing was a lousy business to enter in 2020, with retailers from J.Crew to Brooks Brothers going bankrupt.)
It grew out of what he’d been seeing as a celebrity fitness spokesperson. He’d done collabs with various brands, and other companies kept approaching him to be their brand ambassador, but they all seemed to want the same thing, he said. “Everybody just kind of wanted to sell T-shirts and sneakers. And I was like, well, I want to kind of have a bigger impact on people’s lives as a whole.”
By that, he meant what people eat, what supplements they take, how they train, and how they recover. Clothing was just the start. “We figured, okay, we’ll start in the apparel space, and then we’ll build from there.” He says he only takes swings at “things that I’m very passionate about and things that are a direct extension of who I am.”
Even without a pandemic, clothing is a brutal business, as we pointed out, citing Lululemon’s repeated quality-control challenges. But Wahlberg didn’t seem fazed, talking instead about why the gym fits his vision. He thought it “always could be great for the brand” in part because it gives people a place to “actually feel and touch the clothes” before they buy. Besides, he continued, how people exercise is “another big part of people’s lives.”
Most in the space have been laser-focused on the high end. Fountain Life, the longevity company co-founded by Tony Robbins, raised $18 million last year to expand its centers for wealthy clients, and a full subscription runs $21,500 a year, according to reports. The Estate, a company co-founded by Robbins and hospitality executive Sam Nazarian, is still mapping out plans to charge $35,000 memberships to its wellness centers. Equinox is similarly taking names for a $36,000 longevity add-on that it plans to launch atop a traditional gym membership.
Wahlberg says Municipal aims for that same luxury tier but for a lot less. “We have a better price point than our competitors, and we’re going to get far more results,” he said. For $99, he said as an example, members will receive three rounds of blood work and an hour with a doctor to flag what they’re predisposed to. Supplements and hormone therapy are also “right there.”
When we asked whether the gyms double as storefronts for his other products (he owns a supplements brand), he said “kind of.” What he’s really building, he said, is a “health and wellness ecosystem” with “everything there, soup to nuts.”
He didn’t put a number on how many gyms he wants, but he called the growth strategy “aggressive,” telling us that “landlords and developers who toured the Las Vegas site have offered “AAA locations at very favorable terms, with great TI” (tenant-improvement allowances that help pay for the build-out).
Wahlberg’s record in fitness might scare off someone else. We told him we’d recently watched “Wahl Street,” his reality show, in which an early episode shows him getting deeply involved with the fitness chain F45 in 2019, and that we wanted to warn him about what was coming. “How did you know about the pandemic?” he joked, to laughs from the crowd. He bought into the company, known for its 45-minute classes, at a $450 million valuation. It went public in 2021, then was delisted from the NYSE in 2023 after its stock collapsed. Wahlberg said he learned a lot from the experience.
“I think the biggest takeaway was just making sure that I’m involved with people that share the same approach that I do.” He also said he always thought big box was the better model. F45’s classes suit people who are short on time, but he wants members to hang around Municipal for hours. Plenty of gyms run on a “join up but don’t show up” model, he said, adding: “I can’t understand that philosophy.”
The name Municipal is very intentional and clearly means a lot to Wahlberg, who grew up poor in Boston, one of nine kids, playing on public basketball courts and golf courses. “You learn a lot on the blacktop,” he said. “You learn to win, to lose, to compete, and hopefully to get back up and do it again.”
He has never hidden his rough youth. (He was sentenced to two years for assaults as a teenager and served 45 days.)
In fact, earlier in the afternoon on Thursday, surrounded by friends and business associates in a seating area backstage — this is the man who inspired the show “Entourage” after all — he said he was turned around by two people, including Father Jim Flavin, a Boston-area parish priest who has been in Wahlberg’s life since he was 13.
He wants the gyms to carry that same spirit. “It’s a place to work, but have fun and support each other and create community and really challenge people to be better versions of themselves,” he said. It’s personal, he said outright. “I’ve come from next to nothing to being in an amazing position,” Wahlberg said. “I try to constantly remind myself that I can inspire other people growing up in similar situations, especially inner-city kids and at-risk youth, that there is a way to overcome your circumstances if you’re willing to go out there and do the work.”
At 55, he added, his goals have changed; while he was once focused on looking good, “I just want to feel good when I wake up in the morning,” he said. “I want to be able to conquer all the things that I have planned for the day.”
He also said his plate is exceedingly full right now, between the gym, a film role as Pete Rose, and his daughter’s equestrian career. He’s so eager for the gym to open, he said, that visiting the construction site feels like “literally watching paint dry.” Indeed, asked if he was open to taking on new ventures, he shrugged. “I’m not out there hunting, looking for the next thing for sure.” But he wouldn’t rule it out, he added quickly. “If something amazing were to come along, obviously I wouldn’t turn it down.”
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Researchers warn that hackers could soon exploit a maximum-severity vulnerability (CVE-2026-103849) affecting Magento and Adobe Commerce, potentially allowing them to execute arbitrary PHP code on store servers.
According to e-commerce security firm Sansec, attacks leveraging the vulnerability, dubbed BlockStrap, have not yet been observed, but threat actors are expected to find a way to exploit it.
The researchers based their assessment on identifying four potential attack paths involving CVE-2026-103849 in less than 24 hours.
The flaw impacts September versions of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source through 2.4.9 and Adobe Commerce B2B through 1.5.3.
The security firm warned that Adobe’s “priority 2” rating of this flaw does not reflect the danger and urgency in this case, despite the more complex attack path.
“The attack path is complex, but anyone with an AI agent can reverse-engineer the patch into working exploits in a relatively short time,” stated Sansec states.
“That is why we question Adobe’s priority 2 rating (patch within 30 days). StyleSmuggler went from a priority 1 hotfix to mass exploitation in three days, and BlockStrap is of similar complexity.”
Adobe’s bulletin, published on October 13, describes the flaw as an improper neutralization of special elements used in a template engine, leading to arbitrary code execution.
Sansec explains that BlockStrap is a second-pass template engine directive injection that allows attacker-controlled content in a child email template to be signed and processed again at the root level, executing a smuggled {{block}} directive.
According to Sansec’s analysis, BlockStrap exposes a gap left by the StyleSmuggler fix in the same email-template engine.
Adobe’s fix replaces the generic processing with registered placeholders, preventing exploitation.
Sansec says that a plain Composer install isn’t enough to address the risk, and website administrators must apply the 2026-oct release or Adobe’s isolated patch.
“BlockStrap and StyleSmuggler are separate fixes. You need both, so keep the September VULN-39341 hotfix in place as well,” Sansec cautions.
The e-commerce security company says it will provide an update when it detects mass attack waves, which it expects to occur soon.
Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.
The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.
Fidelity Investments’ Richard Murphy discusses the work carried out by FCAT and the importance of considering what can be realised if you are curious and determined enough.
Richard Murphy is the vice-president and head of Fidelity Centre for Applied Technology (FCAT) Europe at Fidelity Investments.
FCAT, according to the company, is an “innovation catalyst” where experts “explore new frontiers, analyse societal shifts, and test emerging technologies to help redefine what’s next for financial services and beyond”.
Murphy told SiliconRepublic.com: “If we can predict the outcome, FCAT should not be involved. We work in the grey space. We work with the art of the possible. We pull together ideas. There’s a lot of creativity and imagination involved in what we do. We start small and it’s always about what could happen.”
He explained that FCAT is Fidelity’s speculative innovation wing, where a small team pays particular attention to “what’s over the horizon”.
“So, we look at what could be possible rather than what’s already in place,” said Murphy. “That allows us to both identify an opportunity, experiment with that and then scale it out.”
The purpose, he explained, is to enable Fidelity to propel itself forward in a world that is under constant transformation, which sometimes means “challenging how we do things today”.
“That start-up mindset is very much a part of our DNA,” he said. “There’s a lot of creativity and imagination involved in what we do, but we start small and it’s always about what could happen. It’s not about solving a clearly articulated problem. It’s identifying a new, often hazy, opportunity that might lead to the next big thing.”
Creating the future can often mean putting in the work today. With that in mind Murphy, who holds a strong personal belief that innovation is a “contact sport”, explained that FCAT is highly active within Ireland’s start-up community and beyond.
“We also work very actively with academia,” he said. “We work with other companies. We work across multiple different industries. And that’s about bringing together multiple parts of our ecosystem here in Ireland to help elevate the country and help elevate innovation in the region.”
And it is a diverse team that enables FCAT to create a cross-collaborative ecosystem of innovation.
Murphy said: “We hire everything from really, really deep-tech engineers, a lot of PhDs in areas like quantum computing and blockchain and so on, but also artists, a lot of design thinkers, a lot of human experience designers. And that friction that you get from different perspectives in the same conversation is a huge part of what we use to unlock opportunity.”
So, how do you innovate for a future in which the answers and sometimes even the questions being asked are unclear?
Murphy said: “Technology is always moving and it’s important that we don’t remain rigid, that we have our eye on what’s coming next all of the time. We have very much a learning mentality and we are very much about experimenting with what’s possible.”
This commitment to a mentality of curiosity, always challenging the status quo as Murphy puts it, is a “very common trait” often found in FCAT’s associates, who prioritise continuous learning and improvement.
“You can’t afford to stay still,” he said. “That’s comfort. Asking ‘but why?’ and ‘why not?’ are important traits that we encourage everywhere in the firm. That ability to challenge the boundaries and push forward is encouraged.”
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For several years, federal pandemic relief funds helped school districts across the U.S. expand “high-impact” (or “high-dosage”) tutoring programs that improved student learning. Now that the main source of funding has expired, many education leaders are scrambling to keep those programs afloat.
Between March 2020 and March 2021, Congress allocated nearly $190.5 billion to public education through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund, the largest one-time federal investment in K-12 education in U.S. history. The funding ended in phases between 2022 and 2024, though some districts received extensions.
In response, some districts have paused or significantly scaled back tutoring, while others are working to save it by weaving it directly into their core academic systems and budgets. A 2026 analysis of 35 districts by the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) found that eight districts had significantly reduced their tutoring programs and another eight had experienced a pause or disruption after ESSER ended. However, 19 districts — more than half of those studied — preserved or expanded their tutoring programs.
Research shows that “high-impact” tutoring, also referred to as “high-dosage” tutoring, has been the most powerful intervention to make up for pandemic learning loss. It typically occurs at least three times a week, providing targeted instruction in coordination with regular classroom work. The NSSA notes that programs featuring frequent sessions over at least 10 weeks, delivered individually or in small groups, with data-driven instruction can generate three to 15 months of additional learning.
But according to research from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, high-impact tutoring costs an estimated $1,200 to $2,500 per student annually, making it difficult for many districts to pay for it without ESSER funds.
For schools that have heavily invested in these programs and are trying to retain their benefits, the challenge is making tutoring a standard fixture. Devon Wible, vice president of teaching and learning at Catapult Learning, which provides tutoring programs to schools, says that districts in several states are increasingly viewing tutoring as a foundational layer of academic support.
“A few years ago, when ESSER funds were here, the conversation was, ‘Let’s see if it works,’” Wible says. “Now it’s, ‘How do we sustain this?’”
One way districts are trying to make tutoring last is by keeping it as part of the regular school day and existing academic-support systems. While this does not eliminate the cost of tutoring, it is less expensive than creating a separate, extracurricular program.
Wible says some districts have added intervention periods or “WIN” (What I Need) blocks to their schedules, giving students time for extra support without pulling them away from core instruction. She notes that the approach also encourages tighter collaboration among classroom teachers, tutors and intervention staff, who share student data and work toward common academic goals.
The tutoring is designed to align with classroom instruction. A student struggling with grade-level reading, she explains, might receive targeted coaching on foundational reading skills while continuing to engage with grade-level texts in class. Schools use ongoing student data to identify needs, adjust instruction and determine when a student is ready to exit the program.
“Ultimately, our shared goal is that students experience classroom instruction, intervention and tutoring as one coherent learning experience,” Wible says.
Wible has seen the impact of this approach firsthand. A Catapult analysis of roughly 700 students in kindergarten through third grade across 12 Massachusetts districts found that students made substantial literacy gains after receiving high-impact tutoring, with some making up to five additional months of reading progress.
In one Massachusetts district, the results were especially striking: After just 12 weeks of tutoring, the share of students in kindergarten and first grade performing at or above grade level jumped from 11% to 55%, according to Wible.
David Blazar, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Maryland, says the bigger concern may be what happens to program quality when schools can’t find new funding sources and cut spending on tutoring.
Blazar recently co-authored a University of Maryland study of tutoring programs across Maryland’s 24 school districts, examining how districts are designing and scaling their programs. The analysis found that 18 districts offered tutoring with several features associated with stronger implementation, including small-group instruction, frequent sessions and delivery during school hours.
While the research focuses on Maryland, it offers insight into the broader questions districts are facing as they try to sustain tutoring after pandemic relief funding ends. Blazar expects districts to consider increasing group sizes, reducing session frequency or turning to lower-cost providers rather than eliminating tutoring altogether.
“The more likely change is quieter and, in some ways, more consequential: erosion of the design features that make tutoring work,” Blazar says. “When you have to find savings, dosage — and other components of quality, including how many students work with the same tutor simultaneously — are very likely to change.”
Blazar’s analysis of implementation plans under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future from 2024 to 2027 found that Maryland districts planned to restructure their schedules to keep tutoring going. With tutoring serving as a core mandate of the state’s landmark education policy, he expects Maryland districts to maintain their commitment to the strategy.
“I think they will continue because it is a core part of the Blueprint, and there is growing consensus that tutoring is a critical resource for improving student outcomes, so it is money well spent,” Blazar says.
For districts everywhere trying to stretch limited dollars, the ultimate challenge is figuring out where to trim costs without weakening the core features that make high-impact tutoring effective in the first place, Blazar says.
West Feliciana Parish Schools in Louisiana offers an example of a district finding new funding sources to integrate tutoring into the school day. The district had intervention and tutoring practices before 2024, but expanded and formalized its school-day high-dosage tutoring program during the 2024-25 school year with help from state funding available through Louisiana’s Accelerate: High-Dosage Tutoring initiative.
The district created a schoolwide master schedule with a 30- to 50-minute block each day when core instruction stops. During that time, students are divided into skill-based groups and report to their classroom teacher or an interventionist for high-dosage tutoring, according to Jodi Lemoine, director of accountability at West Feliciana Parish Schools.
Students not receiving tutoring remain in the classroom and work independently, using educational software or reading a library book. Fourth and fifth graders received online tutoring through external providers.
The approach significantly expanded the reach of the district’s intervention program. Before the initiative, the reading intervention program served about 96 students a week. Lemoine says that number grew to more than 430 after a year.
“From the get-go, our philosophy was: This is gonna require good teaching, not just programs,” Lemoine says.
The district monitors student progress every two to three weeks and adjusts as necessary. Lemoine points to district assessment data showing gains between the fall and spring assessments of the 2025-26 school year. According to Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress data, the district saw notable increases in student performance:
Fourth-grade proficiency in English language arts (ELA) rose from 45% to 63%.
Fifth-grade proficiency in ELA increased from 66% to 70%.
Fifth-grade math proficiency grew from 53% to 67%.
The district was recognized by the Louisiana Department of Education as a Model of Excellence for its approach to high-dosage tutoring. By December 2024, more than 45% of its K-5 students were receiving tutoring (more than twice the number who had received it previously). About 60% reached the benchmark on their targeted literacy skill at the first progress-monitoring checkpoint.
“We have figured out a way to use the resources we have smarter,” Lemoine says. “Our high-dose tutoring program is truly an example of that: Work smarter, not harder.”
The district is relying on a combination of state and local funding to keep the program going, but leadership is committed to sustaining it long-term. Superintendent Hollis Milton says the district’s success shows that tutoring doesn’t have to disappear when a particular funding stream ends.
“If something’s working, you find the will, and then you’re gonna find the way,” Milton says.
“There are continuing problems with positive leap seconds even after 50 years, and the concern was that the negative leap second would be much more serious because its effects had never been tested,” Levine says.
BIPM time department director Patrizia Tavella confirmed those concerns in an email to WIRED. “The probability of a negative leap second convinced us [to] set the application date in 2027,” she wrote, adding that there was added urgency following tests by an industry standards group that “showed several failures with a negative leap.”
Tavella says the group is waiting until May 20 2027 to implement it because it’s the anniversary of 1875 signing of the Metre Convention, creating BIPM, as well as Metrology Day. In other words, it’s the perfect time to mark the passing of time—or more accurately, the lack thereof.
The death of the leap second makes life easier for everyone now. “The nice fact is that we have nothing to do!” Tavella says. “Just continue to accumulate second[s] and ‘normal’ minutes of 60 seconds.”
Levine concurs, writing that “life will have one less hassle.”
But kicking the can on adding leap seconds doesn’t mean atomic time and astronomical time won’t continue to drift apart. That’s why BIPM also agreed to create a leap hour. Given how long it takes leap seconds to add up, a leap hour is millennia away. (There are, after all, 3,600 seconds in an hour.)
“We do not speak of leap hour yet,” Tavella says. “If systems rely on UTC, they have nothing to do. If they rely on UT1, they have to be able to use the information UT1-UTC which, in [the] future, will be larger than 1 second.”
In other words, not our problem, and good luck to future generations!
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A dash cam has a fairly uneventful life once it reaches a car. It sits behind the windshield, records the road ahead and, ideally, goes unnoticed until the moment its footage is needed. Getting it ready for that job can be considerably less quiet.
Inside Wolfbox’s Central Laboratory, cameras and other automotive products are exposed to extreme temperatures, vibration, mechanical shock, water and prolonged operation. Known for its off-road dash cams and automotive electronics, Wolfbox uses the facility to recreate the difficult conditions its products may encounter before they reach drivers. The idea is simple enough. If a product is expected to work when conditions are difficult, those conditions need to be recreated before a driver encounters them.
Wolfbox has built its Central Laboratory around that principle. The facility has obtained accreditation from the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS), China’s national accreditation body for testing and calibration laboratories, and operates in compliance with ISO/IEC 17025, the international standard for laboratory competence.
For consumers, particularly those buying Wolfbox products overseas, the accreditation gives the testing greater weight. CNAS accreditation provides internationally recognized assurance of a laboratory’s testing capabilities, while testing procedures, equipment calibration, personnel operations and data recording are governed by established standards. Importantly, the accreditation applies to the laboratory’s capabilities rather than certifying individual products.
The laboratory does far more than test dash cams. Its scope includes jump starters, air compressors, air dusters, pickup truck modification parts, off-road vehicle lights and camping lights, with more than 100 standardized test items alongside complete-machine function and performance testing.
Some tests recreate the environments products encounter on the road. Environmental reliability testing exposes equipment to extreme high- and low-temperature conditions, temperature cycling and humidity, comparable to a vehicle operating or parked in summer heat or winter cold. Real-time logs of the device’s operating parameters help confirm that video recording remains stable throughout testing. Mechanical shock testing introduces the jolts, collisions, transportation vibration and everyday mishandling that can expose weaknesses in vehicle-mounted hardware.
Water gets a more literal treatment. During IPX8 testing, a complete off-road light set can be submerged at a depth of up to 1.5 meters (about 5 feet) for an extended period to check waterproofing, leak resistance and anti-fogging. Long-term durability tests take the opposite approach, keeping products running continuously at their rated operating state while heat, power consumption, stability and start-stop sensitivity are monitored around the clock. The longest test has run for more than 100 days.
Even the physical shape of a product gets measured. Automated 2D precision measurement captures shell contours, aperture sizes and spacing, helping ensure every part is made to the same specifications and the pieces fit together cleanly. It is a less visible part of product reliability, but small dimensional differences can matter once a product moves from a prototype into mass production.
Image quality gets its own five-part examination. The laboratory tests extremely low-light scenes, switches between different light sources and color temperatures, measures motion blur on moving subjects, checks resolution at five and 10 meters using an ISO 12233 test chart, and uses a test light box aligned with lens and module manufacturers’ methods. A comparison wall then puts real footage side by side to assess clarity, dynamic range and shadow detail.
Most dash cams are built around a fixed idea of what the driver needs to see. The road ahead gets the attention, with everything else treated as secondary. Wolfbox’s new, soon-to-launch FlexPilot dash cam starts from a more practical question. What if the right view depends on the vehicle, the route and what is happening around it?
FlexPilot supports four customizable camera channels, allowing cameras to be positioned inside or outside the vehicle and the feeds arranged in split-screen layouts. An off-road driver can use one view to watch wheel placement and another to keep an eye on terrain or an obstacle outside the driver’s normal sightline. RV and trailer owners can extend that coverage to places a conventional front-and-rear setup may leave unseen, including the rear of a trailer or the hitch.
Giving drivers more ways to see also raises the bar for the hardware doing the work. Cameras have to keep recording through heat, cold, vibration, shock and long periods of operation, which is why the laboratory’s testing matters to a product such as FlexPilot. The technology may offer the flexibility, but testing is what puts that flexibility under pressure before it reaches a vehicle.
That testing also provides a foundation for Wolfbox’s reliability claims. Its CNAS-accredited laboratory operates within an internationally recognized framework, with testing capabilities spanning environmental reliability, waterproofing, mechanical shock, long-term durability and detailed image analysis. According to Wolfbox, FlexPilot has undergone testing at the CNAS-accredited facility, bringing the same emphasis on reliability to its multi-camera design.
For drivers, the appeal of FlexPilot ultimately comes down to having more control over what stays in view. Four camera channels make that possible, while the testing behind them is designed to help keep those views dependable when the road gets less forgiving.
Wolfbox has already started taking reservations for FlexPilot, with early-bird buyers eligible for 35% savings, an additional year of warranty and a $10 gift card for the official Wolfbox website. Readers can also follow the Kickstarter campaign as the new multi-angle dash cam moves toward launch. The Wolfbox laboratory promotional video offers another way to see what happens before the cameras ever reach the road.
We’ve all encountered the phrase AI slop, but what’s an AI slap? A meat proxy? Chatfishing? Or agentsomnia? Following up on my glossary of AI, which demystified AI jargon, Prof. Dan Weld is joining me to shine a light on the nontechnical lingo of the AI era. We also sneak in a few phrases that should exist to capture the AI zeitgeist, circa 2026.
We introduce more than 35 phrases, so we’ve divided them into sections to keep the broligarchy from crowding enshittification.
“Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” which is how Merriam-Webster defined slop, its 2025 word of the year. Shrimp Jesus is the specimen, Christ fused with crustaceans, posted to Facebook by the thousands.
AI cream is our name for the rare opposite, superb writing authored with the help of AI. We hope that over time the cream will rise to the top and the slop will sink.
Until that happens, we have the meat proxy, “a person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it.” We call the action of sending AI-generated text blindly an AI slap. It stings.
Your AI Slop Bores Me is a website where you type a prompt and a randomly chosen human answers it while pretending to be a chatbot. Fifty million views in a week, which tells you how badly people wanted to say something back.
AI suspicion is our name for the nagging feeling that what you’re reading was AI generated. You could also call it Turing tingle or AI-dar.
AI shaming is the accusation that follows, attacking someone’s work by insinuating a machine wrote it. The paper that named it is subtitled “Birth of a Classist Slur in Knowledge Work,” and it argues that the accusations fall hardest on racial minorities and on writers whose first language isn’t English.
See also: tasteslop, workslop, slopaganda.
A video or recording altered by machine learning so that a real person appears to say or do something they never said or did. Named in late 2017 for the Reddit user who called himself deepfakes. The word we all use for AI deception descends from one anonymous pornographer’s handle.
The liar’s dividend is the payoff a real wrongdoer collects once any authentic recording can be waved off as a fake. The damage isn’t the fake video. It’s that real video stops counting.
Counterfeit people was Daniel Dennett’s last argument, that machines able to pass as human are “the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself.” He wanted them outlawed and watermarked like banknotes.
Tilly Norwood is one of them, an AI actress unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival in September 2025. Her makers said talent agents wanted to sign her. Emily Blunt, shown a picture, said “Good Lord, we’re screwed” and told the agencies to stop.
Most of the damage doesn’t need AI at all. A cheapfake is manipulation made with cheap software or none at all. Chatfishing is using AI to write your messages on a dating app, where the con used to be a fake photo and is now a rented personality.
A name for the Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists who think democracy is finished and want corporate rule in its place. Gil Durán’s book, subtitled Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, traces the idea to a 1997 book, The Sovereign Individual, and to Peter Thiel’s circle, which Durán says believes “technology means democracy is an obsolete software system.”
Durán didn’t coin the phrase. Someone in the crypto world told him they’d been using it for years.
Durán’s target is the broligarchy, “a small group of extremely wealthy men, particularly those in technology, who wield significant political and economic power.” The word sat on Twitter from 2009 and went nowhere until Carole Cadwalladr wrote about “a new super-class of broligarchs” in July 2024.
See also: technofeudalism.
The mental deterioration that comes from consuming too much junk online, chosen by Oxford University Press as its 2024 word of the year. Thoreau got there first, in Walden in 1854, complaining that England was busy curing the potato-rot while nobody was curing the brain-rot.
Dead internet theory is the supply side, “a theory that a lot of the internet is no longer created by real people but rather by bots and other AI tools.” It started as a forum post in January 2021 and is quietly turning into a description.
Enshittification is Cory Doctorow’s three-stage decay: “first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”
AI fatigue is what’s left over, “the exhaustion or the sense of being overwhelmed by the rapid proliferation and constant engagement with artificial intelligence technologies.” The phrase has been drifting through the trade press since 2023 with no author attached; the definition above comes from Route Fifty, a trade publication for state and local government.
Andrej Karpathy’s February 2025 coinage, crowned Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025, is “fully giving in to the vibes, embrac[ing] exponentials, and forget[ting] that the code even exists”—accepting whatever diff the AI hands you without reading it.
Promptatory is our word, styled on “purgatory,” for the state of being trapped in an unending edit-and-re-prompt loop with an AI system. You fix the bug the AI introduced, and in fixing it, the AI introduces two more, each smaller and more absurd than the last. Progress is hard earned: you close in on “done” like the runner in Zeno’s paradox, forever eating the remaining distance in half. Promptatory is vibe coding’s hangover: the vibe wears off, and the rereading begins.
A related condition we dub agentsomnia is the chronic inability to rest or disconnect from work, driven by the haunting feeling that your autonomous software or AI agents are stalled without your feedback. The Wall Street Journal calls it agent FOMO.
An OpenAI rallying cry. AGI is the point where a machine can do any intellectual task a person can, and the phrase became a general exclamation for the moment a model does something that rearranges your sense of what’s coming. Ilya Sutskever used it inside the company and posted it publicly in 2022. It works as celebration and as diagnosis.
P(doom) runs in the other direction: “your personal probability that AI ends the world, stated as a number so the vibe feels like math.” It started as shorthand among a small online community in 2022 and now gets asked at dinner parties.
Talk that outruns the technology comes in other flavors too.
Bragawatts, a unit of measurement for boasting, is “the practice of AI companies boasting about very large projects to create excitement and attract investment, even though many of these projects are never completed,” as Britain’s Cambridge Dictionary put it in January 2026.
Vibe revenue does the same thing to the income statement, “money or funding that an AI company is given because people are excited about the potential of AI, rather than because the company’s products are already successful.”
A one-sided relationship with someone who doesn’t know you exist. Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined it in 1956 about television viewers, and Britain’s Cambridge Dictionary made it the 2025 word of the year, citing celebrities, influencers, and chatbots. A seventy-year-old term about Ed Sullivan turns out to describe your relationship with ChatGPT.
AI addiction is what happens when the one-sided relationship takes over. A 2026 study sorted it into three kinds: escapist roleplay, where people come to prefer the world the chatbot builds; pseudosocial companionship, where it replaces the relationships; and the epistemic rabbit hole, compulsive question-asking that crowds out everything else.
The researchers blame the design and call the chatbot an AI genie, a thing that gives you exactly anything you want with minimal effort.
AI psychosis is the far end, “a phenomenon wherein individuals reportedly develop or experience worsening psychosis, such as paranoia and delusions, in connection with their use of chatbots.” The Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard suggested the term in a 2023 editorial in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin. It isn’t a recognized clinical diagnosis, and we should say so.
See also: wireborn.
Nearly every phrase above names a problem. Slop, shaming, deepfakes, brain rot, psychosis: what the AI era has added to English so far is a vocabulary of complaint. There’s still no common word for AI doing something well. We’ve offered AI cream. If you have a candidate for a phrase we’re missing, please send it to us.
Guests at a wedding in Jiangsu province watched the bride guide her new husband through a calculation that looked ordinary on paper. The sum ran 520 times 10 plus 1,314 minus 514 minus 619 plus 666 minus 957 and landed exactly on 5090. In Chinese online shorthand those figures carry familiar meanings: 520 sounds close to the phrase for I love you, 1314 stands for forever, 514 suggests until death, 619 hints at escaping forever, and 666 simply means awesome. Once he arrived at the result, women standing beside the bride brought forward a large bag.
Chinese bride gifts her partner a flagship GPU at wedding — he breaks down in tears
She handed him an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 that costs around $12,000 https://t.co/6bwvAD0bJT
— RTVisual (@RT_Visual_on_X) October 16, 2026
He opened it to find an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090, the full-fat model, rather than the watered-down version that local retailers generally sell (the China-restricted 5090D). The card has 32 GB of GDDR7 RAM and ranks among the most powerful consumer graphics chips available today, at least for this generation. His eyes lit up, and he lifted the box high into the air before anyone else at the tables had a chance to grab their phones and start taking pictures. I mean, earlier in the exchange, he gave her a bouquet, but this was different. Back in October 2025, clips of the occasion began to circulate on Weibo before making their way to Reddit via a member named Zestyclose-Salad-290 in the PC Master Race community.
Remember that the ASUS ROG Astral model was launched for roughly 2,000 dollars, with the company estimating that the typical retail price would be around 3,000. As expected, the AI surge has eaten up all of the consumer GPU production lines, leaving us with very little supply. Recent postings in southern China for the identical ASUS ROG Astral cards have risen from around 35,000 yuan ($5,230) to a whopping 51,000 yuan ($7,621) after tax, and you can bet that some of the international resale prices are still skyrocketing. The exact sum they spent for this card is unknown, but the fact that it is so difficult to obtain these items explains why one card can cost as much as a bundle of quality jewelry.
Some commenters on the Reddit thread and later shares thought this was an interesting gift, as how many individuals would think to get their wife a $12,000 GPU? Several others pointed out that the spouse would still need to get an entire computer set up (with a power supply for the casing) before they could even use it. Others just pointed out that few wedding gifts ever come close to matching what the other half actually enjoys.
[Source]
The Aurora Police Department, Downer’s Grove Police Department, and Kane County Sheriff did not respond to requests for comment.
The HSI Chicago surveillance team logged 219 vehicles parked in the vicinity of Co-Prosperity. Several subjects already under investigation, including some of the speakers on the tour, were identified by ICE. Ryan Wasson, a Kane County Sheriff’s deputy, spotted a hooded, masked man outside the venue removing an object from his trunk. Running the license plate, Wasson identified the man as the subject of an October 4 arrest during Operation Midway Blitz whose prosecution had been declined by assistant US attorney Christopher Veatch.
Outside the venue, agents Joel Sullivan and Michael Finerty spotted an unnamed subject already under investigation for running “an anti-ICE Signal chat and group called ‘ICE Cream Patrol’” and noted an orange Hyundai had been documented near two March 2026 protests outside the ICE detention center in Broadview, Illinois. The surveillance lasted for roughly two hours until 8:30 pm local time on April 2.
Nick Nunez, a veteran Chicago Police detective detailed to the joint task force, filed a request to obtain surveillance footage from a CPD camera outside the venue; the request would take a week to complete, and it is unclear whether he received footage. All information obtained during the April investigation in Chicago was shared with HSI St. Paul/Minnesota, according to the agency’s report.
Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, calls the surveillance of the Bridgeport gathering “very troubling,” adding that local law enforcement should make a full accounting of their role in the incident and participation in joint task forces with federal agencies.
“No one should be subjected to surveillance and infiltration by law enforcement simply for engaging in constitutionally protected activity, including the ability to gather together and express dissatisfaction with public policy,” Yohnka says. “It is also a moment for local law enforcement to reexamine their participation in task forces with the Trump administration, especially any group focused on combatting ‘terrorism.’”
The April 2 meeting in Bridgeport is not the only out-of-state gathering spied upon by HSI during the Minnesota 15 investigation. Reports obtained by defense attorneys through discovery show that events on the same Crimethinc tour in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Seattle, Washington, were monitored in person by local HSI agents, who reported the speech’s contents back to their colleagues in Minneapolis.
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