Major dairy producer Prairie Farms has announced a recall of select gallons of its popular Fat Free Milk due to concerns that the beverage may be contaminated with food-grade cleaning agents, which could make consumers ill if ingested. Heres what you need to know.
Prairie Farms recalls select Gallon Fat Free Milk
Last week, Prairie Farms announced that it had initiated a voluntary recall of select Prairie Farms Gallon Fat Free Milk products produced at its Dubuque, Iowa, facility.
The reason for the recall is that select gallons may have been contaminated with food-grade cleaning agents, according to the recall notice posted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The cleaning agents have the possibility of causing illness in individuals if consumed.
What Prairie Farms milk is being recalled?
Given the popularity and widespread availability of Prairie Farms milk, news of a recall may cause significant concern. However, the company says the recall is limited to one product and only a subset of the gallons produced.
Specifically, Prairie Farms says that the impacted product is the following:
Product Information:
Prairie Farms Gallon FAT FREE Milk
Code Date: DEC08
Plant Code: PLT19-145
Facility: Dubuque, Iowa
Impacted Production Window (Timestamp): 17:5121:23
UPC: 7273023117
In the recall notice, Prairie Farms states that only a specific segment of the product run DEC08 was affected by the cleaning agent.
The affected product was processed between 17:51 and 21:23, representing a portion of that days production, the notice explains. To ensure complete containment, Prairie Farms is recalling Gallon Fat Free Milk with the DEC08 code date, PLT19-145 plant code produced during the impacted timeframe of 17:51 to 21:23.
The company says that approximately 320 gallons of the milk product were sold before the discovery of the possible cleaning agent contamination.
Where was the recalled Prairie Farms milk sold?
Prairie Farms says the recalled milk was distributed to Woodmans stores in Illinois and Wisconsin.
The company says the remaining product distribution locations include:
Illinois
Bloomingdale
Buffalo Grove
Carpentersville
Lakemoor
North Aurora
Rockford
Wisconsin
Appleton
Beloit
Green Bay
Janesville
Kenosha
Madison
Menomonee Falls
Oak Creek
Onalaska
Racine
Sun Prairie
Waukesha
What should I do if I have the recalled Prairie Farms milk?
Prairie Farms says that if you have the recalled milk, you should not consume it.
Instead, you should return it to its place of purchase or safely dispose of it.
Full details of the recall can be found on the FDAs website here.
Deals promoted as some of the best of the holiday season are expected to keep people across the United States glued to their computers and smartphones as the post-Thanksgiving shopping marathon wraps up on Cyber Monday.It’s no secret that buying things online is now a staple of many people’s everyday routines. And year after year, those purchases mount during the gift-giving holiday rush. Experts expect consumers to drive record Cyber Monday spending this year, even amid wider economic uncertainty.Adobe Analytics has estimated that U.S. shoppers will spend $14.2 billion online Monday, or 6.3% more than in 2024. They already spent $11.8 billion online for Black Friday and another $6.4 billion on Thanksgiving Day, exceeding Adobe’s forecasts.Consumer spending for Cyber Week the five major shopping days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday provides a strong indication of how much shoppers are willing to spend for the holidays.“Cyber Week is off to a strong start,” Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, said. “Discounts are set to remain elevated through Cyber Monday, which we expect will remain the biggest online shopping day of the season and year.”Deals on electronics and apparel are poised to peak Monday at 30% and 26% off average listed prices, per Adobe’s latest estimates.While the amount of money going into online shopping carts is expected to reach new heights as consumers try to get the biggest bangs for their bucks while they can, rising retail prices also may contribute to any record sales figures that materialize.Businesses and households have watched anxiously for financial impacts from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on foreign imports. Workers in both the public and private sectors are also struggling with anxieties over job security amid both corporate layoffs and the after-effects of the 43-day government shutdown.For the November-December holiday season overall, the National Retail Federation estimates that U.S. shoppers will spend more than $1 trillion for the first time this year. But the rate of growth is slowing with an anticipated increase of 3.7% to 4.2% year over year, compared to 4.3% during last year’s holiday season.At the same time, credit card debt and delinquencies on other short-term loans have been rising. More and more shoppers are turning to “buy now, pay later” plans, which allow them to delay payments on holiday decor, gifts and other items.Buy now, pay later loans are expected to drive $20.2 billion in online spending this holiday season, according to Adobe, up 11% from last year. The firm predicted that buy now, pay later loans would pass a new $1 billion milestone on Cyber Monday, the vast majority involving purchases made on mobile devices.Overall, mobile devices have become the dominant shopping platform consumers are turning to for the holidays. Adobe expects smartphones, wearable tech and other handheld electronics to account for 56.1% of online spending this season, worth a total of $142.7 billion.Five years ago, a majority of online purchases were made on desktops.Shopping services powered by artificial intelligence are also expected to play a role in what consumers choose to buy. Software company Salesforce estimated that AI asssitants and digital agents contributed to $14.2 billion of the total $79 billion it said was spent online worldwide on Black Friday.Cyber Monday’s “hot sellers” will include gaming consoles such as the Nintendo Switch 2 and toys-turned-fashion statements like Labubu Dolls, Adobe said. The analystics firm anticipates the newest editions of popular consumer electronics including the iPhone 17, Google Pixel 10 and Samsung Galaxy S25 will also see high demand.To many, Cyber Monday is billed as the “last call” to take advantage of the deepest discounts in the days following Thanksgiving. But its reach has grown over the years.Cyber Monday is two decades old now, dating back to when the National Retail Federation first coined the term in 2005. Today, sales continue to bubble up throughout the week riding on the hype that the industry has built to fuel consumer spending.
Wyatte Grantham-Philips, AP Business Writer
The Koss Porta Pro headphones are one of the most iconic and popular designs in the history of audio equipment. The headphones were first released in 1984 in response to the rise of the Sony Walkman and aimed to translate the companys audio prowess into a portable, affordable form factor.
The results were unmistakably odd. The collapsible headband, blue driver housings and striking shape meant you could spot them from a mile away. But Koss managed to deliver its trademark warm, bassy sound signature into an accessible product, and its retro-futuristic industrial design has never quite gone out of style.
[Photo: Wikimedia]
Koss, which is still a family-run business headquartered in Milwaukee, sold the Porta Pro virtually unchanged for decades. At under $50, they remained a great option for on-the-go listening. But with the demise of the smartphone headphone jack, eventually a modern wireless update was an obvious move.
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Going wireless
Unfortunately, Kosss first attempt in 2018 was a whiff. Despite coming after Apples AirPods made their debut, the wireless Porta Pro relied on a cable that housed an inline remote and a battery that rested on the wearers neck. Between the awkward wearability and a persistently flashing blue LED, the feedback was generally scathing.
But recently, I found out that Koss released a radically updated version around a year ago, dubbed the Porta Pro Wireless 2.0. This feels like the sort of thing I should have noticed at the time, but apparently Koss didnt feel the need to actually tell anyone about the new version. Theres a press release, sure, but for some reason the product got virtually no coverage in the usual channels.
Major sites like The Verge didnt follow up on withering coverage of the 1.0 model. You wont find reviews on major audio equipment outlets. Even the thread on legendarily obsessive audiophile forum Head-Fi has just 13 posts. (For comparison, the thread on my own Koss go-tos, the relatively obscure KPH30i, has 392.)
The Porta Pro Wireless 2.0 is, however, freely available to order on Amazon for $99, so obviously I had to check it out.
[Photo: Koss]
Nailed it
I am pleased to report that Koss actually nailed everything with this 2.0 edition. These are, for mostly better and occasionally worse, exactly what you would have expected from a wireless set of Porta Pro headphones in the first place.
Most importantly, the dangly neck wire has been banished. Its now actually accurate to call these wireless. You lose the controls on the inline remote, sure, but I think most people would take that tradeoff. And while the design of the cans themselves remains the same as the original, the lack of wire makes them much more practical to wear.
On the tech side of things, Koss has thankfully upgraded the 2.0 model to USB-C for charging. There is still a pulsating LED that indicates connectivity, but its tucked away on the underside of the right earpiece and isnt bright enough to be an annoyance. And unlike the previous model, these support analog audio through a cable when the battery dies.
Porta Pro headphones were never known for their sturdy build qualityin fact, theyre positively flimsy. But the upside of this is that theyre very comfortable and can be squeezed down easily into a small circular footprint, which Koss takes advantage of with the helpful inclusion of a compact round hard case.
As for the sound, well, they sound like Porta Pro headphones, which is to say they sound awesome for what they are. Theyre not exactly reference-level audio hardware, but the thumping bass and smoothed-off treble is a great fit for rock, rap and beyond, while the semi-open-back design allows for sound that feels wider and less claustrophobic than noise-cancelling Bluetooth cans.
[Photo: Koss]
The Porta Pro Wireless 2.0 does still feel pretty retro, for better and worse. Theres the lightweight plastic design, of course, which I imagine Koss correctly deemed to be nonnegotiable. But theres also the lack of modern features that are standard on headphones these days, like easy pairing. Getting these up and running on your phone is a roughly equivalent experience to using a Bluetooth earpiece in your car 15 years ago.
If youve never used Porta Pro headphones before, I should also point out that these are not necessarily the most versatile headphones around. The on-ear, semi-open-back design is what enables the surprisingly wide oundstage, but it also means they offer virtually no sound isolation, and your audio is going to leak out to people around you. In other words, dont plan to use them on a plane.
Still, overall the Porta Pro Wireless 2.0 does exactly what it ought tothese are Porta Pro headphones, but wireless. Maybe the muted launch was because Koss was stung by the reception to the previous wireless model. If so, I think that was a mistake. That was a bad product, and this is not.
I think the world should know that you can, in fact, now buy a great wireless version of Porta Pro headphones, which remain a genuine design classic to this day. Im honestly not sure why this was news to me, but if its news to you too, my work here is done.
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December is a month that many look forward to as holiday festivities kick into full gear and extended R&R with our loved ones nears. But for cryptocurrency investors, the month is off to anything but a good start.
As of the time of this writing, cryptocurrency prices are down across the board on the first day of December trading. This encompasses significant price drops of major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and Solana. Heres what you need to know.
Cryptocurrencies begin December with steep declines
Nearly every major cryptocurrency is seeing significant declines on the first trading day of December. As of the time of this writing, most major coins are down over the past 24 hours, including:
Bitcoin: down 5%
Ethereum: down 5.5%
XRP: down 6.8%
BNB: down 5.9%
Solana: down 6.8%
Additionally, meme coins have also declined, with Dogecoin down 8%.
Unfortunately, these drops aren’t outliers for cryptocurrencies as of late. Over the past month, big-name cryptocurrencies have been hit hard as investors sold off the digital tokens amid declining risk appetites.
Over the last 30 days, Bitcoin has now declined 21%, dropping from around $111,000 per token to todays current price of just over $86,600.
During the same period, Ethereum fell by more than 26%, XRP by more than 18%, BNB by more than 24%, and Solana by more than 31%. Dogecoin is down more than 26% over the past month.
Why are Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies dropping today?
There isnt a single event weighing on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies today, just like there has not been one single event weighing on the digital token markets over the past month.
Instead, the first trading day of December drops in cryptocurrencies across the board are likely being spurred by multiple factors.
Perhaps the most significant factor behind the December 1 crypto drop is ongoing uncertainty about whether the Federal Reserve will vote to cut interest rates when the central bank meets to vote on the matter on December 9-10.
A drop in interest rates is generally seen as a good thing for cryptocurrencies as rate drops increase liquidity in the markets, which typically spurs investors to take more risk.
As cryptocurrencies are among the most volatile assets, increased risk-taking can stimulate investment in the coins, sending their prices higher. Yet if the Fed does not reduce rates, that increase in liquidity will not materialize, which could impact risk asset investments.
Barchart reports that the markets are discounting an 83% chance that the Federal Reserves monetary policymaking group, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), will cut interest rates by 25 basis points.
However, rate drops aren’t the only reason Bitcoin and other cryptos are starting December on the wrong foot.
As Fast Company previously reported, in November, investors increasingly turned sour on artificial intelligence stocks, including on AI heavyweights like Nvidia Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) and major OpenAI investor Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT).
Over the past month, NVDA shares have declined nearly 12% and MSFT shares are down more than 9%.
The share prices of AI and AI-adjacent companies have been highly volatile this year amid growing fears of an AI bubble. Many investors who invest in those companies have high-risk appetites, which is why many AI investors are also cryptocurrency investors.
And when one high-risk asset declines, investors tend to sell off their other high-risk assets to lock in any gains and prevent further losses. Continuing fears of an AI bubble, then, could be influencing declines in cryptocurrency prices.
Aside from these two ongoing factors that have been weighing on crypto markets for a while now, there are a few more recent events that may be contributing to crypto losses on the first trading day of December.
According to a report from CNBC, Peoples Bank of China issued a warning on Saturday about illegal activities involving digital tokens. That warning sent shares of companies in the digital asset sector lower on the Hong Kong market.
Additionally, CoinDesk reports that early Monday saw notable forced liquidations in crypto markets as traders failed to meet margin requirements for leveraged positions, putting pressure on cryptocurrency prices.
2025 turns negative for crypto
When the year began, many investors and industry watchers expressed optimism that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were in for a tremendous year of growth in 2025, largely thanks to the incoming Trump administration and its crypto-friendly policies.
But while tokens like Bitcoin did reach an all-time high of more than $126,000 this year, the crypto king has declined well below its 2025 starting price.
As of this writing, Bitcoin has lost about 7.24% of its 2025 opening value. Ethereum has lost 14.6% of its value, and Solana has lost 32%.
BNB is a rare bright spot for major cryptocurrencies this year. The coin has seen growth of nearly 18% so far this year.
Of course, given the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies, it’s always possible that things could reverse quickly. There is still one month left in the year, and if there is a late bull run on the tokens, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies could still come out green for the year.
Whether or not that happens likely depends a lot on the Feds rate cut decision next weekand, of course, the greed and fear that investors feel in the run-up to the new year.
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! Im Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
Leaders juggle a lot of demands and priorities. However, most CEOs tell me theyre highly attentive to company culture, change management, and workforce transformation in the age of AIall areas that their chief human resources officers (CHROs) or chief people officers (CPOs) are tackling, too, notes Jennifer Wilson, cohead of the global Human Resources Officer practice at leadership advisory firm Heidrick & Struggles.
The only other seat besides CEO that has a cross-enterprise view is the chief human resources officer, Wilson says. The best CHROs these days are weighing in and shaping strategy around big corporate issues.
Yet CHROs are rarely tapped for the CEO role. Heidrick & Struggless data shows that only 16 CEOs at Americas 1,000 largest companies by revenue have previous HR experience.
An overlooked role
Most of those executives worked in HR as part of their climb up the corporate ladder. General Motors CEO Mary Barra, for example, was a vice president of global human resources at GM for two years between roles as a vice president of global manufacturing engineering and a promotion to senior vice president of global product development. Joanna Geraghty, CEO of JetBlue Airways, was the CPO of the airline for four years after serving as associate general counsel and before moving to an executive vice president role overseeing customer experience.
More unusual is the case of Leena Nair, who was the CHRO at Unilever when Chanel, the privately held luxury brand, recruited her to be its global CEO.
At a time when chief financial officers, chief technology officers, and even lawyers are moving to the CEO role, Tami Rosen, chief development officer and a board member at Pagaya, an AI-powered fintech, and former CPO at Atlassian, says overlooking HR executives is a miss. For too long, CHRO and CPO roles have been miscast as operational or administrative when in reality they are the only seats with a true 360-degree view of the company, driving strategy, mission, culture, risk, performance, and people, she says.
The CEO’s support system
Megan Myungwon Lee was CHRO andvice president of corporate planning and strategic initiatives when she was promoted to chairwoman and CEO of Panasonic North America in 2021. Lee says Osaka, Japanbased Panasonic has a history of viewing HR, finance, and strategy as a three-legged stool supporting the CEO. In Japan, if you hire a person, its a $3 million investment because people usually retire with the company, she notes. Its not a variable cost.
Lee says her experiences in HRPanasonic initially hired her as a bilingual secretaryexposed her directly and indirectly to all aspects of the company. It has also shaped her leadership style. Being a leader is like [being] a parent in that you lead with empathyguiding, setting boundaries, and making tough decisionswhile always asking,How would I want someone to treat my own children in this situation?
Boards of directors may disregard CHROs in their CEO succession planning for any number of reasons: Some want their chief executive to have client-facing experience; a tech company may prioritize a leader with an engineering background. But Pagayas Rosen says boards ignore HR talent at their peril. More CHROs and CPOs should be elevated to CEO because theirs is the most well-rounded role in the company, connected to the business, the strategy, the culture, and every team, she says.
Does your team elevate HR pros to the top?
Does your company have a CPO or CHRO who is a candidate to succeed the CEO? If so, what are the reasons why your company may elevate them? Id like to hear your stories. Send them in an email to stephaniemehta@mansueto.com.
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When the Los Angeles wildfires swept through the city earlier this year, experts flocked to the internet to dissect the anatomy of a fire-resistant building. Many of them ended up describing bunker-like architecture with boxy buildings, sparse landscape, and lots of concrete. A new building in Malibu offers a more nuanced approach.
Malibu High School, which opened in August, is located in an area that Cal Fire (the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) recently designated as a very high fire hazard severity zone. This means that the school, which has replaced a nondescript building from the 1950s, had to comply with stringent fire safety regulations.
[Photo: Here and Now Agency]
The new school is distributed across two connected buildings. It was constructed entirely of noncombustible materials like concrete shear walls and floors, steel columns and beams, and fire-rated glass. It is surrounded by a newly built fire road to allow easy firetruck access, and drought-resistant landscaping. Still, it looks less like a fortified concrete bunker, and more like the kind of airy, low-lying buildings you might find elsewhere in Malibu.
“The messages the building sends about your safety is much more like a community center,” says Nathan Bishop, lead architect and principal at local firm Koning Eizenberg Architecture. “It’s about making it feel like a social place to hang out and just be.”
[Photo: Here and Now Agency]
A balanced approach to fire-resistant architecture
Malibu High School, part of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, is nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. It is located near a ring of coastal shrubs that is notoriously flammable but is also protected by the California Coastal Act as Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA.)
In 2018, the area was hit by the Woolsey Fire, which destroyed over 1,600 structures, and burned nearly 97,000 acres in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. The former high school building, which stood on the same site, narrowly survived, but according to Bishop, the “shared memory” of Woolsey was present in everyone’s mind. “There are still teachers who haven’t replaced their houses because they burned down,” he said.
It’s no surprise, then, that fire resiliency was part of the architects’ mandate from the very beginning, when they won an RFP to redesign the school in 2019. The challenge was ensuring the school didn’t look like a bunker.
[Photo: Here and Now Agency]
To lighten the visible footprint of the building, the architects positioned solar panels over a canopy so they could cast shadows on the building’s glazed facade. This helped reduce solar gain while allowing the building to have more glass to balance the concrete. The panels, which remain quite visible, help the building achieve its net-zero goals, but they also help communicate the value of sustainability to students.
The team used textured concrete that makes the building feel like it is part of the hillside, and copper panels that add some color and texture. They also implemented a dedicated air filtration system for wildfire events. “[The school] is fortified and strong, but not in a defensive way,” says Bishop, noting the school can now serve as a community wildfire shelter.
The open design ensured the building feels like it belongs on the rugged hillside of Malibu. The surrounding drought-resistant landscape, by San Diego-based Spurlock Landscape Architects, further anchors the school with a coastal landscape that doubles as a fuel modification zone. This is meant to reduce the risk of wildfire by thinning or replacing combustible vegetation.
The landscape architects used California-native plants like aloe vera and agave interspersed with locally sourced rock mulch. They laid out the plants so they would grow from low succulents closer to the building to larger canopies on the outer perimeter. Since many buildings catch fire from what is closest to them, the areas nearest to the building are mostly hardscape. (The January 2025 wildfires didn’t reach as far north as the high school, which was therefore spared.)
[Photo: Here and Now Agency]
Rethinking the American high school
By the time Koning Eizenberg Architecture got involved in 2020, Malibu High School had been seeing enrollment issues for years. (The school enrolled about 440 students in 2021, compared to nearly 1,000 in 2017.)
To compete with nearby private schools, where enrollment issues haven’t been as stark, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District wanted to rethink not just the building but also the way high schoolers studied inside it.
Instead of organizing the school by academic departments, the high school follows a more distributed model where “everything is everywhere,” as Bishop puts it. Science labs abut art studios and teacher rooms are scattered around the campus instead of concentrated in a single building. The distributed model allowed the architects to abolish the archetypal silos that have become high school movie tropesscience geeks hang out here; jocks hang out thereand foster more encounters between different disciplines.
[Photo: Here and Now Agency]
“There is something about rethinking the story of the American high school, and the social fabric of the American high school,” says Bishop.
Before they moved into the new building, high schoolers shared the old building with local middle schoolers, where they studied in nondescript classrooms. Now, each classroom is adjacent to an outdoor space, creating a “fuzzy edge that lets the life of the building spill out,” says Bishop. Students in marine biology class go down to the beach to collect samples. Those in pottery class bring their wheels into the courtyard. Meanwhile, the preserved ESHA acts as a learning lab, where students can learn about ecology.
Instead of cutting off the building from its surroundings, the architects carefully integrated it within the landscape, proof that students can learn from nature instead of turning their back on it.
Now that AI can control your web browser, the next frontier might be to take over your entire computer.
At least that’s what Seattle-based startup Vercept is trying to do with Vy, a currently free Windows and Mac app that can manipulate your mouse and keyboard to automate tedious or repetitive tasks. You just tell it what you’re trying to do, and then it takes control. Vy first launched as a beta for Macs in May, but has now been rebuilt and is available for Windows as well.
My experiments with Vy have yielded mixed results. If you’ve ever yelled at ChatGPT for failing to follow instructions, that frustration becomes magnified when AI is piloting your entire computer — tasks you might want to automate might just be done faster manually. Still, I can see some areas where an AI computer agent could be useful, which is why other companies (including Microsoft) are pursuing the same goal.
I spent a lot of time waiting
Kiana Ehsani, Vercept’s CEO and co-founder, says Vy is more human-like than the agent features in AI web browsers such as Perplexity Comet and ChatGPT Atlas.
While those browsers reportedly work by inspecting the underlying structure of web pages, Vy takes frequent screenshots to analyze what’s happening on your screen. It then executes mouse or keyboard commands to mimic the way you’d control the computer yourself. Ehsani says people are using it to automate Excel work, extract data from the web for sharing into apps like Slack, or figure out how to use new software.
“We want to have a model that understands your screen and takes action very similarly to how you do it,” Ehsani says.
This ends up taking a while, though, as each individual action requires Vy to take a screenshot and upload it to its servers for analysis. Everything from opening an app to clicking a menu button requires another screenshot and more time waiting for a response — so a routine that takes 10 seconds for a human might take Vy five minutes.
Vy has a couple ways to mitigate this. One option is to run tasks in “Background” mode, which lets you keep using your computer while Vy does its work in an invisible browser window. Vy’s capabilities are limited in this mode, though, as it can interact with files and web pages but can’t control other apps. (I had some impish fun getting Vy to fulfill various Microsoft Rewards tasks on my behalfperforming daily Bing searches, filling out various quizzesbut felt guilty about how much compute power must’ve been burned along the way.)
The other option is to schedule tasks for when you’re not around. For instance, I set up a daily routine for 7 a.m. that minimizes any open windows on my desktop, opens Obsidian, moves it to the center of the screen, and loads my to-do list. Watching Vy do this in real-time is excruciating, but scheduling it to run before I sit down at my computerthereby forcing me to confront my to-do listis pretty helpful.
Ehsani hopes that on-device AI will speed things up in the future. Instead of having to constantly upload screenshots and download instructions, the goal is for Vy to process everything directly on the computer, though it’s unclear when that might happen or how powerful a PC you’d need.
It needs a lot of hand-holding
Getting Vy to perform tasks on your computer can be a bit like bossing a child around, in that it’s liable to ignore or misinterpret your instructions.
A quirk of Obsidian, for instance, is that if you load the app while it’s already running, it will load an entirely new instance of Obsidian with a menu for choosing which notebook vault to open. To keep this from happening in my to-do list scenario, I asked Vy to only click the Obsidian icon on the Windows taskbar, which would load any existing instance of Obsidian instead of launching a new one.
But every time I tested the routine, Vy kept ignoring my instructions and would try to click the Obsidian icon on the desktop, thereby opening a new window. I would interrupt the assistant and tell it to focus on clicking the taskbar icon, but it had trouble finding it and kept trying to open the app in other ways. At one point it even clicked the Windows Start menu to launch Obsidian from there.
Ultimately I had to edit my workflow with clear instructions to never click the desktop icon, never open the Windows Start menu, and avoid using other methods to open Obsidian outside of the taskbar. I also had to lay out explicit guidance to look for a purple crystal icon that appears next to other icons in the taskbar. All told, I spent about 20 minutes troubleshooting this tiny routine that mostly involved minimizing some windows and clicking a button.
Vy does have an alternative “Watch and repeat” tool for creating workflows, in which it records your screen while you perform the desired steps. But this was even less reliable in my experience. When I tried setting up my Obsidian automation this way, Vy didn’t minimize any of my open windows and instead just moved its own app to the middle of the screen.
It raises some privacy and security concerns
Watching Vy take persistent screenshots of my desktop was also a reminder of how much personal info could wind up on Vercept’s servers. Every time Vy takes a screenshot, it captures everything on your screen, even if it’s unrelated to the task.
Until I started asking Vercept about its data retention policies, the company did not publish them on its website. Vercept now says it keeps screenshots for six months unless you delete the underlying chat manually. Either way, it keeps data for up to 30 days for safety purposes.
Ehsani says it doesn’t capture screenshots when Vy isn’t actively working on a task, and doesn’t perform any post-processing on screenshot contents. Still, a few people at Vercept have full access to users’ data, including their screenshots.
“There is a trade-off here,” Ehsani acknowledges.
As with any agentic AI system, Vy risks making users vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, in which an attacker hides malicious instructions in web pages, emails, or calendar invites. Vercept says it has some ways to mitigate thisfor instance, by instructing Vy to watch for signs of malicious behaviorbut no AI system has a foolproof answer to this problem yet.
It seems inevitable anyway
Despite the potential problems and limitations, AI agents that control your devices are coming. Microsoft already has a mode for its Copilot Windows assistant that can scan what’s on your screen and provide guidance, and it’s testing a “Copilot Actions” feature that can perform tasks on your behalf.
Other developers are also pursuing this idea. Github is full of experimental AI control projects, and commercial alternatives include NeuralAgent and Screenpipe. Vercept is notable among tese efforts for having raised a $16 million seed round in January, with backers including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean.
Ehsani says the goal is to expand beyond just a single computer. An Android app is also in the works, and she hopes that you’ll eventually be able to give Vy instructions on your phone and have it carry the actions out on your computer, or vice versa. “One of our main visions is getting rid of mouse, keyboard, and touchscreens altogether,” Ehsani says.
For now, at least, the natural speed at which humans can click around a desktop gives them the edge.
As the U.S. and China battle over technology, tariffs, and global influence, one question still looms for Europeans: what is Europes edge?
That was the question recently posed by 21st Century, a Copenhagen-based think tank that collaborates with policymakers and thought leaders to explore the future of Europe. According to Johanna Fabrin, managing director and partner at 21st Century, the answer lies in the EUs regulatory backbonethink GDPR-level data protection, rigorous environmental standards, and foodsafety rules. From a consumer perspective, knowing that if something is made in Europe, there will not be arsenic in it, there’s that trust that is important, she says.
To convey that trust, the team has proposed a Made in Europe label that would signal quality, safety, and adherence to European standards. Similar to the CE label, which signifies that a product meets EU health, safety, and environmental protections, companies could display it on products to help consumers make informed decisions. The ultimate goal? To elevate the European brand as one that is trusted.
[Image: courtesy Dada Projects]
‘Debrandifying’ the label
Made in Europe was developed in collaboration with British studio Dada. But it is more than a labelits a certification. “A symbol of trust,” says Alice Shaughnessy, head of operations at Dada.
[Image: courtesy Dada Projects]
Shaughnessys team worked hard to “debrandify” the design so it reads less like a corporate logo and more like a stamp of approval. They cycled through dozens of proposalsfrom a wordmark spelling out “EUR” to the words “Made in Europe” set into a circlebefore landing on twelve stars arranged in the shape of a lowercase “e”.
[Images: courtesy Dada Projects]
By referencing the quintessential European symbol found on the EU flag, the design creates a clear association with the European institution. It conveys clout while remaining instantly recognizable. “It was important for us to be able to sit within that hall of great European design in some small way,” says Shaughnessy.
Like all initiatives developed by 21st Century, the label is intended as a blueprint that sparks conversation. The team has built a “living ecosystem” of use cases that show how the label could integrate into daily lifefrom a simple logo on a fruit sticker to an embossed mark on the side of a leather chair.
[Image: courtesy Dada Projects]
The label was designed to pair with Digital Product Passportsa QR code the EU will require by 2027 for categories like batteries, textiles, electronics, and furniture. Eventually, it could subsume existing certifications like CE, acting as an umbrella label that is relatable and easy for consumers to understand. Instead of decoding what B-Corp or CE means, you would see ‘Made in Europe’ and immediately associate it with European values like sustainability, ethical production, and consumer protection.
[Image: courtesy Dada Projects]
Building on a momentum
This isnt the first time the idea of a European made in label has surfaced. Back in 2014, the European Parliament backed a proposal for source-country labeling, including a voluntary Made in the EU tag. But the proposal stalled due to political resistance and fragmented enforcement.
Now, Fabrin and Shaughnessy argue, the conditions are different. For one, Europes leverage on the geopolitical stage is rising: Russias war on Ukraine has renewed interest from candidate countries like Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine; Brexit has made the EU passport all the more desirable; and growing disillusionment with the American brand has made some companies turn to the EU for answers. Fabrin says she is hearing it firsthand as some IT consultants ask for CRMs based in Europe because of GDPR regulations. This kind of momentum usually motivates the European Commission to act quite quickly, she says.
[Image: courtesy Dada Projects]
The biggest hurdle may be adoption: smaller businesses will need incentives to retrofit supply chains for this label. But 21st Europes vision is not to wait for lawits to catalyze a movement. Countries like Canada and Denmark have already started to take action with their own versions of made in labels. If large corporations like, say, Lego, were to adopt the mark voluntarily, it could inspire smaller companies to think about the label as a positioning exercise. [Were] thinking about the European brand as a long-term investment, says Fabrin, and a Made in Europe label is one contributor to building that brand.
“Parasocial” is the Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year. That feeling that you and Harry Styles would instantly become friends if you ever bumped into each other? Yes, thats parasocial.
The term dates back to 1956, coined by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl to describe how TV watchers formed para-social relationships with those on their screen.
The word has taken on even greater meaning in the age of social media, where we have unparalleled access to the lives of influencers, online personalities, and celebrities via phones.
Take Taylor Swift and Travis Kelces engagement. The news triggered mass hysteria online, with many displaying genuine raw emotion for a couple theyve never even met. Or British singer Lily Allen, whose latest album West End Girl details a breakup and sparked a parasocial interest in her love life, according to the Cambridge Dictionary.
Its not just celebrities. This year, the dictionary noted a surge in those looking up the word after the Youtube star IShowSpeed blocked an obsessive fan, identified as his “number 1 parasocial. A number of popular female streamers have spoken publicly about dealing with stalking, some resorting to hiring security while navigating online fame.
Oftentimes these parasocial relationships are built unintentionally. After spending so many hours consuming content from influencers and content creators, its only natural that fans feel a sense of kinship and emotional attachment, even if its one-sided. So strong are some of these parasocial ties, a 2024 study revealed that parasocial relationships with YouTubers more effectively filled emotional needs than relationships with “real” acquaintances or colleagues.
However, it can bleed into something darker.
Add artificial intelligence into the mix and things get even more complex. Many confide in AI tools like ChatGPT as they would friends or romantic partners. By September of 2025, the Cambridge Dictionary definition of parasocial was updated to include the possibility of a relationship with an artificial intelligence.
Colin McIntosh, Cambridge Dictionarys chief editor, said the word captures the zeitgeist of 2025, as the publics fascination with celebrities and their lifestyles continues to reach new heights. He noted in a statement: Its interesting from a language point of view because it has made the transition from an academic term to one used by ordinary people in their social media posts.
The other words shortlisted this year were pseudonymization, which spiked in interest this year in relation to discussions around protecting personal data. Also memeify as it relates to internet culture.
The dictionary added 6,000 new words this year, including internet neologisms like delulu, skibidi and tradwife. Looking ahead, words to watch include glazing, vibey, bias, breathwork, and doomspending.”
In 2021, Prada created Candy, an influencer designed to sell perfume. With an appearance rendered using then-state-of-the-art tools, Candys not-quite-real vibe felt straight out of the Silicon (Uncanny) Valley. It was peppy, but cartoonlike, and it was hard to see how Candy could sell perfume it could never smell.
Since then, technologies have greatly improved. A brand can now render any persona with a product, create movies with that model persona animated in a realistic way, and show them demonstrating products. By creating their own influencers, brands can keep their advertising budgets down and generate profits. Its possible that the virtual influencers will come for even more human-influencer jobs as the financial opportunities continue to grow.
Long before the internet, the idea of influencing existed as sales. People have sold things to others since currency began, and while it takes labor, time, and effort to persuade others to buy what one is selling, different types of techniques and tactics emerged over the years to varying degrees of success.
The rise of social media channels such as Facebook, X, Pinterest, and especially Instagram, enabled broader reach for those unable to afford network advertising. As a result of this shift, brands began to outsource marketing to people using these models to share and demonstrate their products and services through brand partnerships. In a short time, the influencer industry has exploded in growth: The global influencer marketing platform market size is set to grow from around $23.6 billion this year to roughly $70.9 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. Influencing has become an aspirational profession for one in three people ages 18 to 30and for those who succeed, a substantial income awaits.Influencers are successful due to their relatability, charm, resonance, and the ways they represent a lifestyle or objects that others wish to emulate, replicate, or possess. Martha Stewart, an early influencer, started with books before harnessing television and print media to convince thousands that they could also realize the fantasy that she portrayed. Her partnerships with Target, Macys, QVC, and Kohler, brought her endorsements of products, tools, and decorations, into homes, creating a multichannel, multisensory impressionand earned her a $400 million fortune.
Celebrities like Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Brooke Shields may not invent what they sell, but they successfully promote products to their fans, building upon the parasocial (one-sided) relationships that fans project onto them. Influencing has gotten increasingly personal over time, with Influencers extending their reach to give us peeks into their homes and lives.
But influencers can also be regular people with the attributes and willingness to invite their followers into their lives. Influencers with no celebrity status, but the ability to be persuasive salespeople for brands, are plentiful.
Virtual influencers already exist with varying degrees of success and popularity, ranging from animated characters to realistically modeled personas. With the kind of money that is up for grabs, some businesses are creating AI personas or are considering applying these technologies to replace human influencers to maximize profits.
Or will they? A sense of agency is what defines successful human influencers. We dont know what they are going to do, or how they are going to do itand that novelty is appealing. Part of what attracts us to influencers are their stories, their lived experiences, and their families. These, in turn, create a brand message that attracts endorsements and piques our interest. Without a story and background, an influencer’s sponsored post is just an ad similar to any other.
There is, of course, a price to being an influencer. Megs Mahoney Dusil is the co-owner of the Purse Forum, a premier destination for handbag, jewelry, and brand communities. In The Price of Influence: When Your Life Becomes Your Brand, Dunsil reflects on 20 years of being influential, observing that for her, kids and tragedy were the highest performing topics for platform traffic. She describes the performative aspect of being an influencer as emotional labor in disguise, a tightrope of constant negotiation between the person you are and the persona you project.
Good or bad, Dusils realization may pave the way for humans and AI to form influencer partnerships, where their demonstrations and emotional connections are combined with software tools and renderings to provide a quasi-real experience. Human influencers could keep their profits (and their privacy), by using software like Synthesia, Vidyard, Rephrase AI, Adobe Substance 3D, and others to generate facsimiles of themselves, without having to reveal all. They could also benefit from the cost savings of realistic software tools, too, saving money and time on travel by creating the environment they present in a home studio. Time will tell if virtual influencers will make a difference as to how we are persuaded. We already see influencers through mediated channels, so it wont be that different for us to have a window into the fantasy of a digitally realized influencer hearth, rather than their actual home.
But will we be comfortable buying products sold to us by beings that arent real? We might. We already have been acclimated to fantasy advertising campaigns. This would just circle us back to celebrity territory where the parasocial relationships we have with the personas selling us things, are those one-sided ones that we project onto them, and are not real.
As with most jobs lately, its likely that AI will come for influencers, but with some savvy vibe-coding, influencers may be able to retain their brand partnerships, privacy, and income.
