The world’s top AI models can be prompted to generate near-verbatim copies of bestselling novels, raising fresh questions about the industry’s claim that its systems do not store copyrighted works.

A series of recent studies has shown that large language models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and xAI memorize far more of their training data than previously thought.

AI and legal experts told the FT this “memorization” ability could have serious ramifications on AI groups’ battle against dozens of copyright lawsuits around the world, as it undermines their core defense that LLMs “learn” from copyrighted works but do not store copies.

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For all its faults as a platform, YouTube’s video player functionality is easily among the best online. It streams reliably to almost every device you can think of, in your choice of both video quality and playback speed. But it’s the array of hidden features and interface tricks that push it over the edge for me. (Other video players, take note.) Here are 10 of my favorite hacks that make YouTube easier to use.

Search YouTube video transcripts with Ctrl-F

Almost every video on YouTube either has an official or auto-generated subtitled track. While these are mainly used for captioning, you can also pull up this transcript on the web and use Ctrl-F (or Cmd-F on Macs) to search for keywords in a video and jump straight to the part you want to see.

This feature has been around for a while, but YouTube has shuffled around where to find the transcript from time to time. As of this writing, the most reliable way to find it is to open the video’s description, scroll to the bottom, and click Show transcript to open it up in a side bar.

Set a sleep timer for long videos

Four hour video essays and ASMR streams can be great background noise to help you fall asleep. However, if you want to avoid getting jolted awake by that one really loud joke you forgot about, you can set a sleep timer to pause any video after a certain amount of time.

On web or mobile, click the Settings icon on any given video and choose Sleep timer (on mobile, it may be under Settings > More). You can choose a timer ranging from 10 to 60 minutes. You can also automatically pause once the current video is over, which is helpful if you usually have auto-play enabled.

Link to specific timestamps in a video

One of YouTube’s handiest features is the ability to deep-link to a specific second of any video, like I did in the last section. There are several ways to get a precise timestamp link. If you’re on the web, you can right click a video and choose “Copy video URL at current time.” And on mobile, when you click the Share icon, you can tap the toggle next to the timestamp to add the precise link.

If none of those are options, you can even create your own timestamp link. At the end of any video URL, add “&t=01h05m47s”, replacing the numbers with the specific time you want to link to. You can use any combination of hours, minutes, and seconds to specify the point in the video you want.

Use arrow keys or double-taps for quick navigation

Most video players at this point have some kind of “Hang on, what did they just say?” button that lets you skip 5-10 seconds backward or forward. YouTube has several. The most straightforward, on mobile, is the double-tap. Tap twice on the left side of the screen to go backwards 10 seconds, and on the right to go forward. Keep tapping to move forward or back by further increments of 10 seconds.

On the web, you have even finer grain control. You can use the left and right arrow keys to move 5 seconds back and forth. Alternatively, you can use the J-K-L keys to move in 10 second increments (with K being used to pause the video). This latter method is borrowed from video editors, making it a handy way to keep your muscle memory consistent if you do a lot of editing.

Move frame-by-frame with keyboard shortcuts

YouTubers love putting walls of text in a single frame of a video that you have to pause to be able to read. On mobile, the only way to read these–or examine any specific frame–is to back up and try to time your pause perfectly. On the web, however, there’s a better way. While paused on a video, you can press the , (comma) or . (period) keys to move back or forward exactly one frame at a time. You can hold these keys down to slowly move through frames as well.

Quickly fast-forward with a long-press

It’s pretty common knowledge at this point that you can play YouTube videos at 2x (or higher) speed, but what if you only want to rush through a small part of a video, like an ad read? On the mobile version of YouTube, there’s a handy gesture to do just that, without changing your default playback speed.

Simply long-press and hold anywhere on the video while it’s playing. This will temporarily cause the video to play back at 2x speed, until you lift your finger. If you’re already watching at 2x or higher, it won’t play any faster (or slower) than your current speed, though.

Set your video quality defaults

YouTube generally does a pretty good job of automatically deciding what video quality to stream at, balancing fidelity with bandwidth demands. You can manually override this on a per-video basis, but on mobile, you have a few more options to get broader control.

In the YouTube mobile app, head to Settings > Quality. Here, you can set separate quality defaults for video when you’re streaming over mobile networks or wifi, as well as audio quality. The latter is particularly helpful if you use YouTube for listening to music or podcasts. If your wifi is reliably fast, it can be worth it to set higher quality defaults, rather than manually change each video’s resolution whenever you notice the quality looks degraded. 

Use incognito mode to preserve your suggestions

YouTube can get overly eager to show you videos even vaguely similar to one you watched before. If you’d rather not get a feed full of videos on how to fix a door, you can use an incognito tab to browse without contributing to your algorithm’s history. It’s a little tougher on mobile, but fortunately the YouTube app has an option for that.

In the mobile YouTube app, navigate to the You tab. Along the top of the screen, tap “Turn on incognito.” This will let you search and browse without any algorithmic recommendations or contributing to your history. You can manually turn off incognito mode, or it will automatically turn off after 90 minutes of inactivity. Note, if you’re a YouTube Premium subscriber, none of your benefits will apply while you’re browsing incognito.

Remove unwanted videos from your history

If you forget to turn on incognito mode, you can still remove videos from your browsing history so they won’t muck up your recommendations. To do this, head to your YouTube history on mobile or the web, tap the three-dot menu next to the video in question, and choose “Remove from watch history.”

This is usually enough to prevent a video from becoming the algorithm’s latest fixation, but it also means you won’t be able to find the video in your history again. If you want provide any kind of direct feedback, like a thumbs down or a report, make sure to do that first. Otherwise, if you navigate to the video again, it will be re-added to your history.

Master even more keyboard shortcuts

Beyond basic navigation, YouTube on the web has a plethora of helpful keyboard shortcuts that you might never encounter that are worth knowing about. Some of them are pretty niche, but you never know when they can come in handy:

• Up and Down arrows: Turn the volume on a video up or down in 5% increments.

• Shift+> and Shift+<:> Speed up or slow down the current video playback speed

• M: Mute the current video.

• F: Enter/exit fullscreen mode.

• T: Enter/exit Theater mode

• Shift+N: Play the next video in your queue or playlist.

• Shift+P: Play the previous video in your queue or playlist.

• Ctrl/Cmd+Left or Right arrow keys: Navigate to the next or previous chapter in a video.

A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult — whom the researchers call “hasslers” — are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological age relative to same-age peers.

The research drew on DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks and ego-centric network data from a state-representative probability sample of 2,345 adults in Indiana, aged 18 to 103. Nearly 29% of respondents reported at least one hassler in their close network. The biological toll varied by relationship type: hasslers who were family members showed the strongest and most consistent associations with accelerated aging, while spouse hasslers showed no significant effect on either epigenetic measure.

The damage also went beyond aging clocks — each additional hassler was associated with greater depression and anxiety severity, higher BMI, increased inflammation, and higher multimorbidity. When benchmarked against smoking, a major behavioral risk factor for aging, the hassler effect corresponded to roughly 13 to 17% of smoking’s estimated impact on the same aging clocks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you receive a text from a random number offering you a job, it’s almost certainly a scam, and you likely know to ignore and delete the message and move on with your life. But a message from a recruiter with a link to an employment application may give you pause—and fraudsters are hoping that you’ll believe it just enough to hand over your personal information. Malwarebytes recently identified a phishing scam that uses fake Google Forms posing as job applications to harvest user account credentials.

How the Google Forms job scam works

This specific campaign involves a fake Google Forms site that impersonates the real thing. Links sent to scam targets—likely via email or LinkedIn—direct to forms.google.ss-o[.]com, which looks like a subdomain of the legitimate forms.google.com. (It isn’t.) The “ss-o” may be a trust signal for “single sign-on” and fail to raise red flags for many users. Each target receives a personalized URL, which leads to a (fake) Google Form inviting the user to apply for a job.

As Malwarebytes found, the fake page uses the standard Google Forms colors, header, and disclaimers. The form itself is greyed out behind a pop-up prompting users to “sign in to continue.” Again, this doesn’t look particularly suspicious for a typical Google flow. But the sign-in button redirects to another domain that has been used in multiple phishing attacks to harvest credentials.

Fraudsters have long used Google apps to perpetuate phishing schemes. A 2025 campaign targeting students, faculty, and staff at U.S. colleges and universities used Google Forms that mimicked legitimate school communications to collect login credentials entered directly into the form itself. (Google warns you to never, ever do this.) And numerous attacks on Gmail users have leveraged shared Google Docs to direct victims to a fake sign-in page.

How to avoid phishing attempts on your Google credentials

As always, your first red flag for a scam is a link sent via an unsolicited job offer—even if that link goes to a seemingly legitimate site. Scammers have all kinds of tricks for spoofing URLs and using recognizable domains to gain your trust. Always hover over hyperlinks to see the actual destination before clicking, and look carefully for additions or misspellings in the URL.

Plus, you should probably be wary of any job application submitted via Google Forms. Do your due diligence in speaking with an actual human, and do not send sensitive personal information through Google Forms.

This is also a good reason to use a password manager, which won’t allow you to fill login credentials on a fake site. If your password manager gives you a warning or prevents you from using autofill, don’t override it.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing back on growing concerns about AI’s environmental footprint, dismissing claims about ChatGPT’s water consumption as “totally fake” and arguing that the fairer way to measure AI’s energy use is to compare it against humans.

In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers once made water usage a real concern but said that is no longer the case, calling internet claims of 17 gallons of water per query “completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality.”

On energy, he conceded it is “fair” to worry about total consumption given how heavily the world now relies on AI, and called for a rapid shift toward nuclear, wind and solar power. He took particular issue with comparisons that pit the cost of training a model against a single human inference, noting it “takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat” before a person gets smart — and that on a per-query basis, AI has “probably already caught up on an energy efficiency basis.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you want to understand a generation, look at the athletes they revere. The post-war generation’s suburban conformity found a hero in baseball’s ultimate company man—Stan Musial—and his 22 seasons on the Cardinals. Boomers were drawn to Broadway Joe Namath, a self-important celebrity who wasn’t even a good quarterback. Gen X saw itself in Tiger Woods’ stoic, lone-grinder-in-a-high-stakes-vacuum style. This year’s Winter Olympics introduced the world to the first iconic athletes that express Gen Z’s vibe, and they’re amazing. But first, let’s talk about Baby Boo Syndrome.

What is “Baby Boo Syndrome”?

It seems like everyone on TikTok has come down with Baby Boo Syndrome this week. The trend started with a short dance video from @selenaaa.dta using a particularly snippet of YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “What You Is.” The rapper saying “She gon call me baby boo” is both really catchy and really annoying, in other words, a perfect ear-worm.

@selenaaa.dta’s unique style earned their video over 10 million views, but it took more than a year for everyone else to catch up and start posting their own choreography to the music. Then things got weird.

Baby Boo variations and remixes started appearing, like this operatic cover:

and this patriotic remix:

And this mash-up with “Baby Shark”

The rapid spread of the trend and the catchiness of the song soon led to people diagnosing cases of “Baby Boo Syndrome” in videos like this:

and like this:

and this:

I am getting definite 6-7 vibes with this one.

Alysa Liu is Gen Z’s sports hero

Olympic gold medalist figure skater Alysa Liu is that rare athlete that kids should consider a role model. Liu embodies everything that makes people between of 14 and 29, and America itself, so uniquely awesome. First there’s the look. Liu’s blonde halo highlight and frenulum piercing is fully in tune with Gen Z’s aesthetic, but it’s deeper than style.

Like roughly 22% of Generation Z, Liu is from an immigrant family—her parents are Chinese dissidents who fled after Tiananmen Square. Liu was a skating prodigy, then, like everyone of her age, COVID shaped her destiny. She retired from skating at 16 when her local rink’s closure gave her time to consider the strain skating was taking on her mental health. After attending UCLA for two years, Liu came back to the ice, but on her own, very Gen Z, terms: She would be in charge of her training schedule, costumes, and diet. Maybe more importantly, she rejected the competitiveness of her sport in favor of viewing figure skating as an act of self-expression, something fun.

Many in the conservative world of figure skating thought she was finished—you don’t succeed as a world class athlete while without sacrificing everything in your life for it, and it’s definitely not fun. But Liu made it to the Olympics and murdered her individual routine like it was no big deal, then walked off the ice giving NBC’s camera a hearty, “That’s what I’m fucking talking about.” So punk rock. Just as iconic: Liu sharing victory with silver medal winner Kaori Sakamoto of Japan.

Amber Glenn: Alysa Liu’s nerdier counterpart

Maybe she’s not as fierce and in-your-face as Liu, but Team USA figure skater Amber Glenn is quietly becoming a Gen Z icon as well. The 26-year-old figure skater is open about her mental health struggles and being queer, and she’s also a passionate Magic: The Gathering player. A recent interview reveals that Glenn carries her Magic cards with her, but leaves the “super fancy” ones at home because they’re her prized possessions, and she doesn’t want to lose them.

Viral video of the week: Punch-kun the monkey

The main character of the internet this week is a baby macaque from the in Japan. Punch-kun was introduced to the world on the Ichikawa City Zoo’s twitter account.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Punch was born on July 26, 2025, but was rejected by his stressed-out mother. Zookeepers raised him, giving him an orangutan plush toy to replace mom. He drags it everywhere, which is cute, but things got a lot less adorable when the zoo introduced the little guy to other monkeys. It seems to not go well at all.

Everyone spread the video above because how could you not? It’s so poignant. Many were moved, and others angered by the seeming mistreatment of Punch by the other macaques, or angry at the zoo for putting him in that position.

Weirdly enough, it turns out the internet got it totally wrong. The controversy lead to the zoo explaining that the macaque dragging him around in the video isn’t bullying Punch; it’s an older member of the troop teaching him how to fit in. It’s monkey business. They are wild animals, and they don’t do things like humans do.

The saga of Punch is ongoing. Sometimes he seems to be getting along with the troop better, sometimes he still seems like an outsider. Keep checking every social media site for updates.

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Finding a decent soundbar under $100 is rare, especially from a brand like Amazon. But right now, the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus in an Open Box condition is $99.99 at Woot, as compared to its usual $249.99 price on Amazon. The previous low that price trackers tracked was $149, so this deal drops it by another $50. Prime members get free standard shipping, while non-Prime buyers pay a $6 shipping fee. That said, Woot does not ship this product to Alaska, Hawaii, APO addresses, or P.O. Boxes. The sale runs for six more days or until it sells out.

Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus

$99.99
at Woot

$249.99
Save $150.00

$99.99
at Woot

$249.99
Save $150.00

This is a 3.1-channel system with three forward-facing drivers and tweeter pairs and two built-in woofers. It’s 37 inches long, which gives it a more substantial presence under a TV. For connectivity, it includes HDMI eARC, optical audio input, USB-A, and a standard power port. You also get Bluetooth for streaming music from your phone, but no wifi, multi-room support, or built-in voice assistant. Despite the name, it does not run the Fire TV smart TV platform. It’s simply a soundbar, and it works with any TV that supports HDMI ARC or optical output, notes this PCMag review. The included remote lets you switch between a few preset EQ modes, adjust bass and treble, and control volume.

In everyday use, it’s a clear upgrade over standard TV speakers. Dialogue sounds crisp and easy to follow, and music has decent detail in the mids and highs, and it can get loud without distortion. The main limitation is bass. On its own, it doesn’t deliver deep low-end impact, so action scenes and bass-heavy tracks won’t feel especially full. Amazon does offer bundles with a wireless subwoofer for $374.99 or a 5.1 setup with surrounds for $489.99, if you want to add more weight and immersion. Also, while the bar supports Dolby Atmos, without height channels, the effect is limited.