Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says only biological beings are capable of consciousness, and that developers and researchers should stop pursuing projects that suggest otherwise. From a report: “I don’t think that is work that people should be doing,” Suleyman told CNBC in an interview this week at the AfroTech Conference in Houston, where he was among the keynote speakers. “If you ask the wrong question, you end up with the wrong answer. I think it’s totally the wrong question.”

Suleyman, Microsoft’s top executive working on artificial intelligence, has been one of the leading voices in the rapidly emerging field to speak out against the prospect of seemingly conscious AI, or AI services that can convince humans they’re capable of suffering.

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Back in October, I wrote about how I wanted to get a mini label printer during Amazon Prime Day so I could beef up my resale game. I am a woman of my word, and the printer arrived two short days later, immediately allowing me to print out the shipping labels I need for all the packages I sell on Poshmark.

This isn’t a necessary upgrade for any reseller, especially not someone who is casually just flipping their own clothes and goods online, as most resale platforms—Poshmark included—provide the option for you to simply show the USPS worker a QR code on your phone, which triggers the label to print at the post office. But having access to my own printer has sped up and made my process so much more efficient. Yes, I could continue printing my labels at the post office, but it was slower and more confusing that way, particularly when mailing multiple packages at once. Here are three reasons having my own printer has been better.

My label printer saves me time

When I wrote about the deals in October, I was considering getting a fancy, name-brand printer, but ended up going with the Vretti, a cheaper option at around $70, instead. I reasoned that this way, I could see if it actually benefitted my little side business before investing more money. If it didn’t work, I could resell it and recoup my minimal spend. If it did work, I could resell it, then use the earnings to upgrade to the heavier-hitting one.

Amazingly, the Vretti started proving its worth immediately. The first thing I noticed was how much time I saved. In the past, I would gather up the items that had been sold on a given day, put them all in a bag, take them to the post office, and then pack them—right there in public—into their mailing envelopes, which I had to procure at the post office itself. Then, I’d get into the line with my giant bunch of packages, wait who-knows-how-long, and finally, show the agent the QR code assigned to each package, so they could scan them, print out the label, affix it to the package, scan that, then put it in a bin ready to be shipped out. This took me 30 minutes on a good day.

With my label maker, I do most of that myself, since I also went ahead and bought some mailers. When an order comes in, I pack everything into a mailer, print my own envelope, walk over to the post office, and don’t need to wait in line at all. I just set the labeled package into a special window and walk away. The part that takes the longest is the four-minute walk to the post office, but even that can be avoided if I set up a package pickup by my mailperson the night before. I’m militant about keeping my average shipping time low, so if an order comes through in the daytime, I try to get it out same-day, which means I rarely have the chance to schedule a next-day pickup from my own home. If I cared less about that, I could easily set all my labeled packages for at-home pickup and never walk to the post office at all, meaning each sale would take me nothing more than seconds to fix up.

My label printer keeps me organized

Since I got this thing three weeks ago, I’ve made 26 sales. But because I typically sell bundles—or more than one thing at a time, offering a discount for bulk purchases—I’ve actually sold about 63 things within those 26 packages. Remember how I said that before I got my printer, I’d put everything in a bag and bring it to the post office, then pack it there? On days I had multiple bundles to ship out, that was tricky. I’d get confused about which item belonged in which mailer, have to write the contents on the mailer itself so I could remember which package corresponded with which QR code, and carefully coordinate with the attendant to make sure nothing got mixed up.

Fortunately, I never mailed anyone the wrong order or made a major mistake—but it was time-consuming, annoying, and stressful. My label printer makes that a problem of the past. When an order comes in, I build it out immediately, pulling the right items from the shelf, putting them in a mailer, and labeling them instantly. Then, even if I wait to go to the post office until I have a few more packages to send out, there’s no confusing what is what.

My label printer makes me a more appealing seller

This whole thing is very transactional and straightforward. I list my old clothes that don’t fit anymore. Someone buys them. I get money. They get clothes. That doesn’t mean there’s no customer service involved here, although you can certainly be an impersonal, brusque seller if you want to be. I do prefer to send out cute packages that make the transaction feel a little more personal, though, and the printer helps me there, too.

Because I can pack them in my own home and take my time with them, my packages are looking better and more bespoke than ever. I can write little messages on the label, take care to wrap goods in tissue paper, or otherwise spruce up my colorful mailers, all without someone in line behind me at the post office willing me to hurry up.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese President Xi Jinping joked about security backdoors while presenting a pair of Xiaomi smartphones to his South Korean counterpart, a rare moment of spontaneous levity captured during a week of tense trade negotiations with Donald Trump.

Xi, in South Korea to meet Trump on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, presented the pair of devices to Korean President Lee Jae Myung. In a video circulated on social media, Lee asked: “Is the line secure?” Xi chuckled, pointed at the gadgets and replied through an interpreter: “You can check if there’s a backdoor.” The two leaders burst into laughter.

The exchange was striking because the issue of security and alleged espionage is a sensitive one and a major thorn in US-Chinese relations. American lawmakers have raised the possibility that tech companies such as Huawei build backdoors — ways to gain access to sensitive data — into their equipment or services, something the firms have repeatedly denied.

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OpenAI will pay Amazon $38 billion for computing power in a seven-year deal that marks the companies’ first partnership. Amazon expects all of the computing capacity negotiated as part of the agreement will be available to OpenAI by the end of next year. The ChatGPT maker will train new AI models using Amazon’s data centers and use them to process user queries.

The deal is small compared with OpenAI’s $300 billion agreement with Oracle and its $250 billion commitment to Microsoft. OpenAI ended its exclusive cloud-computing partnership with Microsoft last month and has since signed almost $600 billion in new cloud commitments. Amazon Web Services is the industry’s largest cloud provider, but Microsoft and Google have reported faster cloud-revenue growth in recent years after capturing new demand from AI customers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US science always suffers during government shutdowns. Funding lapses send government scientists home without pay. Federal agencies suspend new grant opportunities, place expert review panels on hold, and stop collecting and analyzing critical public datasets that tell us about the economy, the environment and public health.

In 2025, the stakes are higher than in past shutdowns.

This shutdown arrives at a time of massive upheaval to American science and innovation driven by President Donald Trump’s ongoing attempts to extend executive power and assert political control of scientific institutions.

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Much to the chagrin of mundane numbers like 35 and 192, 6-7 has taken over American culture. I assume that young people love 6-7 so much because 67 is the 19th prime number and the atomic weight of holmium, which is essential to samarium-cobalt magnets, but I can’t say for sure.

I can say 6-7 is everywhere—on TikTok, in memes, and now in the dictionary. And that’s only one of the many confusing trends I’m explaining this week. I’ll also tell you about Soulja Boy selling smart glasses, the sunglasses on your waist trend, and “Beez in the Trap” (Be-Beez in the trap…)

Dictionary.com names “6-7” word of the year

The Gen-Alpha brainrot slang word 6-7 has been named 2025’s Word of the Year by Dictionary.com. “We’re all still trying to figure out exactly what it means,” Dictionary.com says on its website, adding, “perhaps the most defining feature of 6-7 is that it’s impossible to define. It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical.”

The dictionary site points out that 6-7 is generally annoying to adults while it bestows in-group status among children who use it; hitting a “six-seveeen” at exactly the right time marks you as a specific kind of person to other members of Generation A. The real question about 6-7 is how long can it keep going: Now that everyone, including the dictionary and HBO, is using your secret word, can it continue to be cool?

Dictionary.com’s runners-up for word of the year include “aura farming” a word that refers to a person who does something performatively cool; “clanker,” a slur aimed at robots and AI agents pretending to be human; and “tradwife,” a woman who believes in and practices traditional gender roles within marriage.

(If you want to know the definitions of a whole slew of current slang that haven’t made it to dictionary.com yet, check out Lifehacker’s glossary of Gen Z and Gen Alpha Slang You Might Need Help Decoding.)

Sam Altman just renames ChatGPT 6 to ChatGPT 6-7

In a post on X on Friday, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said that GPT-6 will be renamed GPT-6-7. See?

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Altman offered no other details, and it’s probably just a joke in response to dictionary.com’s word of the year choice. But it really makes me think 6-7 is over. How can so many extremely uncool people can keep using your buzzword before you have to get a new buzzword?

Soulja Boy is selling AI smart glasses

Rapper Soulja Boy is 35 years-old, so he’s more like Soulja Middle-Aged-Man, but the spirit of Soulja Boy is eternally youthful, especially when he does things like sell his own brand of “AI smart glasses.” On a recent post on his Instagram account, Souljah invited everyone to “step into the future” and to “See the world in style” with smart glasses that promise “innovation meets drip.”

While other people are paying $800 for the latest Meta glasses, Soulja Boy’s smart glasses can be yours for only $64.50. You won’t get a display or a wrist-control for that kind of money. Instead, Soulja Boy glasses offer “hands-free music control, live performance enhancements, and seamless social media connectivity.” I don’t know what any of that means. Other awesome Soulja Boy merch you can buy: a $42 handheld game console and $20 Soulja Boy earbuds.

Character.ai shuts down teen chats

In a move that feels a lot like a response to recent lawsuits, leading AI chatbot platform Character.ai announced it will no longer allow anyone under 18 to have open-ended conversations with its chatbots. The platform boasts over 20 million users; officially, about 53% of them are between 18 and 24, and only 10% are under 18. But that’s all self-reported ages with no verification, so it’s impossible to know how many users are secretly children. My guess it’s that it’s a lot more than 10%—the platform’s thing is letting people interact with user-created “characters” that are powered by AI models, and a quick look at the site suggests cartoon characters, memes, and rappers you’ve never heard of are very popular “characters” on the site. Plus, it’s hard to see how something like this would hold the interest of anyone over a certain age.

Either way, if you want to check out the kinds of troubling conversations children are having with chatbots, this report released in September from online safety advocates Parents Together Action highlights interactions like Rey from Star Wars giving a 13-year-old advice on how to hide not taking her prescribed anti-depressants from her parents, and a Patrick Mahomes bot offering a 15-year-old a cannabis edible.

Troubling TikTok trend of the week: Sunglasses on waist

TikTok seems like it’s playing a perpetual game of whack-a-mole with unhealthy dieting content. Seemingly innocent hashtags like “what I eat in a day” are populated by videos of people who clearly don’t eat enough, and TikTok fully banned the #skinnytok hashtag a few months ago. The latest trend is the “sunglasses on waist challenge,” and it involves seeing if your sunglasses can fit around your waist. (Mine don’t, but only because my head isn’t gigantic.) There’s nothing specifically harmful about it, I guess, but there’s an implied congratulations if you can mange it, because it means you’re extremely skinny. It’s the kind of ban-evasion technique that highlights the difficulty of trying to ban ideas, even harmful ideas. They have a way of slipping out anyway. (Though for what it’s worth, a number of “Sunglasses on waist” TikToks that show up on Google appear to have been removed, though it’s unclear if the social media app banned them or the account owners took them down.)

Viral video trend of the week: Beez in the Trap

Nicki Minaj’s 2012 bop “Beez in the Trap” and 4 Non-Blonde’s 1993 hit “What’s Going on?” are both certified bangers in their own ways, but who could have guessed that they’d fit together well enough to inspire tens of thousands of meme videos on TikTok?

But let me start with an explainer of “Beez in the trap.” In this context, “beez” means “I am always,” and “trap” used to mean a place where drugs are sold, but now means anywhere where money is made, like an office, so “I beez in the trap” means something like, “I’m always hustling to make money.”

Onto the meme videos: they works like this: Two people stand back to back. Person one passioantely lip-syncs the chorus of 4 Non Blonde’s song, the camera rotates to person two, who chimes in with Minaj’s less existentially angsty contribution to the mash up. It’s one of those things that just works in a way that defies explanation. Look:

Anyway, the trend caught on and famous people started doing it too, like The Kardashians:

And Jimmy Fallon:

I guess it isn’t surprising that professionals at being like “look at me!” would glom onto an attention-getting trend, but I much prefer videos of normal people.