 |
|
|
|||||
As a parent, shopping for holiday gifts for your kids can be a dilemma. Of course you want to surprise the little ones with exciting presents, but you also know that most flashy toys wont hold their attention for very long. Theyll likely lose interest in them within a few days and youll be stuck with plastic toy cluttering up their rooms, destined for the donation bin. In addition to being a waste of money, its terrible for the planet. What if you could surprise them with something thats both beautiful and practical? Heres some ideas for gifts that theyll be able to use for years. [Photo: State] A purse of their own State, $60 At some point, your child will need their own bag to carry a little bit of pocket money or a snack. But if you get them a purse or tote, theyre likely to leave it behind somewhere. The solution: a cute bag you can strap onto them. States fanny pack is thoughtfully sized for a childs body and comes in great designs like rainbow sequins. It is cleverly designed to go over their shoulder, so it is always in front of them. [Photo: Minted] New art for their room Minted, prices vary Why not upgrade your childs room with a piece of art they love? Minted offers a wide range of designs that are child-friendly, but wont make you cringe. You could have fun picking a design together. You can order it as a framed poster print, or a canvas. Its something that theyll always associate with their childhood bedroom. [Photo: Original Duckhead] A colorful, artistic umbrella Original Duckhead x Meri Meri Umbrella, $36 Kids love playing in the rain, and they love having their very own umbrella. Original Duckhead, a brand known for its durability and quality, has made a collection of kids umbrellas with the brand Meri Meri. The designs are fun, colorful, but also tasteful. Pick from cherries and smiley faces, dinosaurs, or rainbows. Theyll be perfect to stash in a backpack for a rainy walk back from school. [Photo: Away] A suitcase for all their adventures Away, $250 If you have upcoming travel, why not get them a suitcase theyll love. This one from Away is designed from the same durable materials as the adult bags, but theyre perfectly sized for the under 7 set. Your kid will love packing it and wheeling it through the airport themselves. For the holidays, it comes with a Paw Patrols design in pink and blue. [Photo: Petite Plume] Pajamas fit for a prince or princess Petite Plume, $60 Holiday pajamas have become a trend, but who wants to wear Santa jammies in January? Petite Plume offers gorgeous, high quality nightgowns and pajamas that are so soft and beautiful, your kid will be excited to see them under the tree. (Some of the nightgowns are pretty enoughthat your child might want to wear them to school.) They come in classic designs, like toile and stripes, that can be worn all year around. [Photo: Baublebar] A blanket for sleepovers and picnics Baublebar, $78 While you may not think your child will get excited about a blanket, wait till they see these. Theyre designed in child friendly patterns and colors, and you can customize it with their name. Its the perfect thing for them to bring to sleepovers or the park, or just to decorate their room.
Category:
E-Commerce
More children are cashing in their Make-A-Wish requests to meet their favorite content creators, with creator wishes more than doubling in the past decade. Make-A-Wish Foundation has been granting life-changing wishes for children with a critical illness since 1980. Now, alongside A-Listers and sports stars, YouTubers and TikTokers are also flooding requests, Axios reported. Requests to meet content creators make up 32% of the wishes granted within the entertainment industry, per Axios, the second largest source of requests behind the music industry. Several of the creators say they’ve been granting wishes for years and more than 50 creators and influencers became first-time wish-granters in the last year to keep up with demand. As parents and children realize meeting their favorite streamer, TikToker, or YouTuber is an option, its becoming more and more common. In October, Make-A-Wish, Disney, and MrBeast hosted YouTube and some of the worlds top creators, at Disneyland Resort to grant wishes for 40 children. This shift is unsurprising given the growing influence of content creators. It used to be that if you asked a classroom of kids what they want to be when they grow up, youd get answers like pop star and football player. A 2024 survey of 910 U.S. Gen Alpha kids (ages 12 to 15) by social commerce platform Whop found that nearly a third want to be YouTubers, while one in five aspire to become TikTok creators. Given the chance, they also want to meet their heroes. “Digital creators have built strong, loyal communities based on authenticity and common interests, Jared Perry, chief revenue officer at Make-A-Wish America previously shared in a statement. When this connection is used to rally behind a cause like Make-A-Wish, it can generate significant donations and lead to long-term relationships with an entirely new audience.” Content creators also leverage their own platforms to engage followers in charitable causes. MrBeast, for example, is well-known for his philanthropy through his 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, Beast Philanthropy. Through his Beast Philanthropy channel, he has, in just the past year, given away $1 million of toys, donated $1 million worth of brandnew teeth, and funded a gym for adaptive athletes. The organization donates 100% of the revenue from its content and merchandise. Make-A-Wish relies on fundraisers, donors, and partners to make sick childrens wishes come true. “By becoming ambassadors of Make-A-Wish, and featuring our mission regularly in their content, creators can inspire sustained support and make a meaningful difference,” Perry continued.
Category:
E-Commerce
As I uploaded a 1940s photo of my grandpa Max and hit a few buttons in Googles Veo 3 video generator, I saw a familiar family photo transform from black and white to color. Then, my grandpa stepped out of the photo and walked confidently toward the camera, his army uniform perfectly pressed as his arms swung at the sides of his lanky frame. This is the kind of thing AI lets you do nowvirtually bring back the dead. As a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch this weekend highlighted, though, just because we can reanimate our departed loved ones, that doesnt necessarily mean we should. Grilling the dog The sketch, which The Atlantic has already called SNLs Black Mirror Moment, features Ashley Padilla as an aging grandmother in a nursing home. Her family membersplayed by Sarah Sherman and Marcello Hernándezvisit her on Thanksgiving, and use an AI photo app to bring her old family photos to life as short videos. At first, things go well. Padillas character marvels over a black and white image of her father waving as he stands in front of a spinning ferris wheel. But then, things go hilariously, predictably wrong. A photo of family members at a barbecue turns into a horror scene when the fictional AI app has Padillas father (played by host Glen Powell) roast the family dog, which happens to have no head. As other photos come to life, Padillas father pays a bowling buddy to perform a lewd act, and in a baby photo, her mothers torso splits from her body and floats around the frame as a nuclear bomb explodes in the background. The sketch is hilarious because its so relatable. Anyone who has played with AI video generators knows that they can make delightfully wonky assumptions about the laws of physicsoften with spectacular results. In my testing of AI video generator RunwayML, for example, I asked the model to create a video of a playful kitten at sunset. Things start out cute enough, until the kitten splits in two, with its front half attempting to exit stage-right as its back half continues adorably cavorting around. Show me the movements Video generators make these errors because of the way theyre trained. Whereas a text-based AI model can learn by reading essentially every book, website, and other piece of textual data ever published, the amount of training-ready video content is far more limited. Most AI video generators train on videos from social media platforms like YouTube. That means theyre great at creating the kinds of videos that often appear on those platforms. As Ive demonstrated before, if you want people knocking over wedding cakes or having heated arguments with their roommates, video generators like Veo and Sora excel at making them. For less commonly posted scenes, though, the available training data is far more limited. Most online videos, for example, show interesting things happening. People rarely post hour-long clips of themselves casually walking around (or to SNLs example, holding a baby or grilling a hot dog) on YouTube or Instagram. Those videos would be so terminally boring that no person would want to watch them. Yet copious amounts of video of these kinds of boring, everyday activities are exactly what AI companies need to properly train their video generators. This has created a fascinating market for such clips. Companies like Waffle Video are popping up to serve the need, paying creators to film themselves doing things like chopping vegetables or writing specific words on pieces of paper for AI training. Until AI companies can get their hands on more videos of these kinds of mundane actions, though, AI video generators will struggle to mimic them. Ironically, video generators are currently great at showing fanciful, dramatic actions. Ask them to make the kinds of everyday scenes you might find in an old black and white family photo, though, and you get Fido on the barbie. Reanimate grandma? All that brings us to the question: should you use todays AI tools to reanimate your dead loved ones? My best advice: wait a bit. AI video tech is advancing incredibly quickly. The first tools that added movement to family photoslike Deep Nostalgia from My Heritage, which launched in 2021used machine learning to perform their wizardry. The tech felt revolutionary at the time. Today, it looks primitive compared to the full motion scenes like the one of my Veo-animated grandpa. And even with those advances, Veo and its ilk are still in their avocado chair moment. Image generators have improved tremendously as their creators have gotten better at training them. Video generators will see similarly vast improvementsespecially as AI companies invest millions in buying bespoke training data of everyday movements. Personally, I brought photo of my grandpa to life because I thought the real Grandpa Max would find it amusing. Ive resisted reanimating photos of more recently departed loved ones, though, for many of the reasons implicit in SNLs sketch. Family photos are intimate things. Its nice to see your late loved one smile and wave at you. Seeing them split in two or explode in a nuclear fireball, though, would be disturbingand something you couldnt unsee once youve conjured it up from the depths of Sora or Veos silicon brain. Until AI models can be trusted to avoid these kinds of distributing, random visual detours, we shouldnt trust them with our most prized memories. A splitting kitten is amusing. A splitting grandma, less so.
Category:
E-Commerce
In late October, Tucker Carlson invited Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white-nationalist streamer, onto his popular podcast and Youtube show for a friendly interview. Fuentes has amassed a loyal following with hundreds of thousands of viewers who tune into the racist, misogynist, and antisemitic sentiments he voices in lucid monologues on his nightly show, America First. A talented broadcaster with a biting sense of humor and a combative persona, hes tailor-made for the no-holds-barred environment of big-tech platformsso long as he manages to stay on them. In 2021, he was booted from essentially every tech platform for hate speech, forcing him to start his own streaming service to host his show.Where did Fuentes come from? Why are old-guard conservative institutions and media stalwarts alike catering to himor even cowering before him?The answer lies in how Fuentes has mastered the right-wing online swamps of the Trump era, and the increasingly porous boundaries between the extremely online right and the Republican establishment, explains Ben Lorber, an analyst at Political Research Associates, a group that monitors and studies the far right. You cant tell the story of Fuentess rise without telling the story of alternative tech platforms and transformations of large tech platforms, Lorber says.As the Fuentes interview rippled across social media, conservative sites and prominent figures on the right including Senator Ted Cruz and Jewish commentator Ben Shapiro, asked: What, exactly, had Carlson been thinking by platforming a figure like Fuentes? Three days after the Carlson appearance, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the storied conservative think tank that produced the Project 2025 roadmap for the Trump administration, weighed in. I disagree with, and even abhor, things Nick Fuentes says. But cancelling him is not the answer, either, Roberts said in a video on X, in which he also defended the right of conservatives to criticize Israel as well as Carlsons decision to host Fuentes. Carlsons critics, Roberts added, were globalists and part of a venomous coalition, language that many decried as trafficking in antisemitic tropes. Within the halls of Heritage, Robertss video provoked an insurrection, forcing him to issue a lengthy apology condemning Fuentes. In a speech, Roberts explained that hed wanted only to reach the disaffected young men that comprise Fuentess audience, many of whom identify as Groypers.But the damage has been done. Heritage staff lambasted him at a town hall-style discussion. Numerous employees and a member of the board of trustees have resigned. The cochairs of their antisemitism task force, the creator of Project Esther, a campaign targeting pro-Palestine protestors, also announced they would be severing ties with Heritage. Last Thursday, Democratic Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer announced he would introduce a resolution condemning Fuentes, and he called on his Republican colleagues to join him. They have to engage Once, figures like Fuentes were relegated to the far-right fringes of the internet. Cassie Miller, an analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center, explains that an older generation of conservative activists learned to speak in dog whistles to code racist appeals to voters. This model was pioneered by people like Lee Atwater, an advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W Bush, whose southern strategy infamously deployed euphemisms like states rights in place of explicit appeals to racism. But acolytes of Fuentes grew up in an entirely different media and technology environment, one where the far right saw the rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement as a vehicle to seed their ideas into mainstream politics. There are a lot of younger people, even within the institutionalized right, who are far more comfortable with the kind of overtly racist, transgressive language of someone like Fuentes, Miller says. Fuentes has built his profile through a command of the incentive structures of large tech platforms. He forces people to contend with his views and feel like they have to respond to him. They have to engage in some sort of discourse with him, and it ends up platforming him and legitimizing what hes saying, says Miller. Thats what he did here with Tucker Carlson. Short-form video has also proven to be a powerful weapon for Fuentes. His followers take bite-sized clips from his broadcasts and pump them out on X and other platforms. You might not have context when you come into contact with it, and you might think that, well, he has some legitimate points, Miller adds. Theres also Fuentess ugly blend of fair critiques of Israels wanton slaughter of Palestinians with outright antisemitism, a rhetorical strategy since adopted by figures like Candace Owens and Carlson. Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes, and others are all competing for the same kind of market on the anti-Zionist right, Lorber says. Theyve identified that almost as a growth market. Staying power Fuentess proficiency across online platforms, and the way those platforms have changed in recent years, have allowed him to stage his comeback. After Elon Musk purchased Twitter and renamed it X, he reinstated Fuentess account, where he now has over 1 million followers. His show went on to find a home on Rumblea conservative competitor to Youtube with financial backing from Silicon Valley billionaire and Republican donor Peter Thiel, among otherswhere it is broadcast to thousands nightly. All this has coincided with the slow death of once good faith efforts at hate-speech moderation by large tech platforms, Miller says. A lot of his career, hes been pushed to the margins of online spaces. But what weve seen is that hes had really incredible staying power, she adds. That staying power in the online world may have already spilled over into the real world. Fuentes and others on the far-right like the pseudonymous author Bronze Age Pervert have advised their followers to hide their power level and infiltrate so-called normie conservative institutions. Recently, right-wing writer Rod Dreher wrote of the remarkable prevalence of Groypers among the Republican partys professional ranks in Washington, including, he alleged, in the Trump administration. Reports from Politico have revealed text threads of young Republicans and one Trump appointee sympathizing with Nazism, showing the embrace of Groyper-like ideology. But trying to pinpoint the exact percentage of closeted Groypers might be missing the point. Theres very little difference between whether someone is a dedicated Groyper, or whether they just agree with Fuentess politics independently of being one of his followers, Lorber says. It might be better, Lorber says, to think of Fuentes as a stand in for a worldview and a brand of politicslike an ambassador of the Gen Z radical right. On the rise There is no reason to think that the recent controversy will slow Fuentess ascendancy within the GOP. Trump has long since made common cause with the extreme right. Trump infamously claimed there were very fine people, on both sides of the 2017 United the Right rally in Charlottesville, where men marched with tiki torches chanting Jews will not replace us. (An 18-year-old Fuentes was in attendance). In 2022, Fuentes himself attended a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and the artist formerly known as Kanye West. Examples, in other words, are not hard to find. Great Replacement ideology is now mainstream. Christian Nationalism is now mainstream, and antisemitism is rapidly becoming mainstream too, Lorber says. So for people like Nick Fuentes, the movement has caught up with him. As for Heritage, the fine print of Project 2025 reveals an extremist vision in its own right, one that seeks to transform the country into a Christian Nationalist autocracy. A softening stance towards Fuentes, in other words, doesnt seem so odd. Drawing the line at outright Nazism is certainly preferable to welcoming it. But the time for condemnation may be long since past. Fuentes, meanwhile, will keep posting and streaming, and likely continuing to bend the party to his will in the process. He has a really clear understanding of the way the media environment works, Miller says. For Fuentes, its a huge victory just to have people say his name.
Category:
E-Commerce
As it faces a growing number of lawsuits alleging it helps facilitate child sexual exploitation, online gaming platform Roblox has unveiled a new age verification system. That system, however, could open it up to a different sort of criticism. The popular app, which has roughly 151 million users, announced last week that it plans to require a facial age check for all users who utilize the Roblox chat system. User verification can be accomplished by either submitting a government ID or by submitting a selfie, which AI will examine to estimate the age of the user. The verification will begin rolling out in early December in select markets (which do not include the U.S.) and expand globally in January 2026. “This initiative is designed to provide even more age-appropriate experiences for all users, which we believe will improve interactions for users of all ages on Roblox,” Roblox Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman said in a statement. “Enforcing age checks allows us to implement age-based chat, which helps users better understand who theyre communicating with and limits chat between minors and adults.” Roblox is facing at least 35 lawsuits that allege users met and abused children on the platform. (More than one-third of the platform’s users are under the age of 13.) Attorneys general in Kentucky and Louisiana filed separate lawsuits accusing the company of harming children earlier this year. And a California judge, earlier this month, denied Roblox’s attempt to force one father’s dispute into a private resolution. Roblox already has parental controls and blocks photo sharing and the exchange of personal information. It also uses a mix of human and AI to moderate text and voice interactions. Under the new system, though, users who verify their age will only be allowed to chat with others in a similar age range (unless they are classified a “Trusted Connection” with people they know). Those age groups will be broken into six categories: Under 9, 9 to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20, or over 21. (Chat will not be offered to users under 9 years old, unless a parent provides consent after an age check.) Because families have kids of all ages, Roblox says it will soon roll out solutions for direct chat between parents and children younger than 13 or between siblings in different age groups. Submitting age verification is still optional, but will be required for any user who wishes to utilize the system’s chat feature, which is a popular component with users. Roblox says submitted selfies will be completed through the app using a smartphone’s camera. It also tried to get ahead of possible security concerns, saying “images and video for age checks completed through Facial Age Estimation are processed by our vendor, Persona, and deleted immediately after processing.” Still, some parents could be wary of letting their young children submit photos to the company, given the number of lawsuits and the polarizing nature of facial recognition. In 2021, Facebook abandoned its facial recognition program, which suggested name tags for people in pictures, following privacy watchdog warnings and European Union regulators cracking down on the practice. (The company brought back facial recognition tools last year to assist with reclaiming compromised accounts.) Even Senate Republicans have expressed wariness over facial recognition software, proposing a limit on that technology in U.S. airports (though the bill has not found momentum so far). Folks dont want a national surveillance state, but thats exactly what the TSAs unchecked expansion of facial recognition technology is leading us to,” said Oregons Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, a cosponsor of the bill, in May. Roblox says its age checks won’t stop with the current program. Early next year it will require age checks to access social media links on user profiles, communities, and experience details pages.
Category:
E-Commerce
Sites : [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] next »