Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. In recent years, being gobsmacked by AI’s ever-expanding capabilities has become my new normal. More importantly, I’ve found the technology increasingly essential to my own productivity. What AI never did until last week was save my bacon. That changed when I gave OpenAI’s new Dots agent access to my calendar and email. Shortly thereafter, it alerted me to a discrepancy it had spotted. I’d entered a speaking engagement on one date, but a confirmation email mentioned a different day. It turned out that the organizers had forgotten to tell me…
Author: Staff Writer
“Meat proxy” is the worst insult you can hurl at me right now. The term, popularized in August 2026 by the software engineer Niklas Gruhn, refers to a person who takes what artificial intelligence generates and passes it on to another person without reading or even thinking about the output first. As someone who takes pride in my independent thinking, that is the biggest insult I could imagine receiving, if people thought I was operating under AI’s instructions. It’s easy to look down on people who copy and paste AI-generated text, code, or images. We have a name for this…
As a supervisor, you have some ability to dictate what your direct reports work on. The requests you make should typically fit their job description, though most descriptions have a catchall “other duties as assigned” attached, which is likely to cover you. That said, the jobs you give someone generally have a particular expectation of the skills required, the hours to be worked, and the stress level associated with the tasks. If you’re going to ask someone to do something that far exceeds the norm, there are a few things you should consider first. Are you taking advantage? The people…
A new employee says they were reprimanded for drinking too much coffee. The user took to Reddit to detail the situation, which unfolded at a job they’d started only a month prior. Each morning, they used the coffee machine and company-provided K-Cups and creamers. However, one day, a floor manager called them in and told them it was not typical to drink coffee every single morning. “I don’t imagine my boss having anything to say that would make this situation better, and I think it would just be unnecessary trouble,” the user wrote. “I do not want to be seen as someone…
The post-pandemic push to bring workers back to the office has left many nostalgic for more flexible arrangements, such as hybrid or remote work. But a wealth of data since the pandemic now suggests that workplace factors like feeling appreciated and having a good relationship with your manager are much more tied to job satisfaction than the actual time spent in the office. To understand this insight, it’s important to recognize that a return to the office can mean very different things to different workers. Someone who values uninterrupted time at home may resent the commute. A younger trainee struggling…
Apple’s AirPods are arguably the most iconic headphones ever. The small, glossy, stylish buds are lauded for both their sound and design and are worn by hundreds of millions of people across the globe. But come next year, those hundreds of millions of AirPods owners might face a problem they never envisioned: being labeled as creeps or perverts—all for innocuously wearing one of the most instantly recognizable tech gadgets ever made. That’s because Apple will reportedly release a new AirPods model in 2027 with built-in cameras. Doing so poses an existential threat to the brand reputation of Apple’s most successful…
Have you ever pasted text into Slack or Google Docs and noticed that everything looks just plain wrong? You’re not alone. Formatting is a mess on the internet right now, mostly because different apps use different standards. There’s rich text, used by the likes of Microsoft Word and Google Docs. There’s Markdown, an increasingly common way of formatting text using plain-text characters—Reddit and Discord both use this. And then there’s Slack, which for some reason uses its own formatting scheme entirely. The result? Copying and pasting text between apps often turns into a serious headache. And sure, you can always…
Unless you happen to live with a software engineer or avid gamer, you may not be aware of the current shortage in computer RAM—which your resident computer expert may be calling RAMageddon or the RAMpocalypse. The RAM shortage is a familiar story if you’ve ever dealt with capitalism. The demand for memory, specifically dynamic random access memory (DRAM), has increased dramatically because of the rise of AI data centers. AI companies have been buying up the global supply of these memory chips in anticipation of creating future networks. Unfortunately, the computer chip industry has not been able to scale up…
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. When we make county-level home price maps at ResiClub, we usually shade each county by its result. That works, but it has a blind spot: It treats every county the same, no matter how many homes are in it. Out West, in particular, huge counties with very little housing end up dominating the map visually, while small, densely populated counties back East are hard to see. So for today’s piece, we tried something different. We took three of our favorite home price cuts…
Does Google still believe in the open web? With the launch of its new Googlebooks, it doesn’t feel that way. Googlebooks are Google’s attempt to establish a new platform of Android-based laptops, with native Android app support and tight connectivity with Android phones. They’re also an extension of Google’s efforts to rebuild Android around AI, with Gemini features just a quick cursor gesture away. At the same time, Google plans to phase out ChromeOS, which it introduced in 2009 as a lightweight platform for the web. While Chromebooks remain popular in the education sector, Google says it will convert many…