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A new extension for Chrome stops AI slop from invading your life. Called Slop Evader, it is a temporal firewall that modifies your Google search queries to exclude any results indexed after November 30, 2022. That is the day the ChatGPT asteroid hit the open web, upending culture and reality as we know it. Installing Slop Evader is easy: just add it to Chrome, toggle it on, and suddenly, the scroll of generative garbage vanishes. You are back in the old internet knowing that every article you read is not the product of simulated intelligence. It’s an enticing idea, especially given that the latest estimation is that more than 50% of all new articles on the internet are now generated by AI. But the digitally Amish lifestyle has an obvious flaw: You aren’t just evading slop; you are evading legitimate news, scientific breakthroughs, and culture itself. Which, on second thought, maybe is a good idea too. The Chrome extension works on a premise that is 50% brilliant, 50% useless, and 100% depressing. Slop Evader is a powerful statement, but not exactly a solution. It’s a vacation from the permanent doubt that comes from clicking on anything these days. [Screenshots: Slop Evader] Kill AI switch It doesnt seem the AI slop will stop. Europol predicts that by 2026, 90% of online content could be synthetically generated. We are no longer surfing a web of human knowledge; we are drowning in a sea of hallucinations. We dont need gimmicks. We need a way to access information without risk of being deceived by machines. We need a built-in toggle in every browser and platform to turn off the machine-generated trash. Since AI can no longer be detected by software, our only hope lies in proving what is real, not spotting what is fake. There are already some efforts to do exactly that. For images, videos, and sound, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authentication (C2PA) has proposed a digital birth certificate for every pixel and sound wave you encounter. The technology already exists to cryptographically sign media at the point of capture, creating an unbroken chain of custody from the camera lens to your screen. When I spoke to Ziad AsgharSVP of product management at Qualcommto talk about the end of reality, he told me that fake audio and video content is a big concern for everyone. “As these [AI] technologies become more prevalent, this is going to be a challenge,” he says. He was right two years ago, he is even more right today. We need content that works like NFTs, using blockchain-like certificates to prove a video or an article wasn’t hallucinated by a GPU. Qualcomm has successfully integrated C2PA support directly into its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform. The chip uses cryptography to sign the actual pixels of your photos the moment you snap them. Sony, Canon, and Leica have also rolled out firmware updates that sign images right at the point of capture. If you shoot with a Sony Alpha 9 III or a Canon EOS R1 today, you can generate a tamper-evident digital birth certificate for that file. The problem is that most platforms shred this information when you upload. There are exceptions. TikTok supports C2PA and tells users what content was actually captured by a camera. Google has started integrating C2PA into its Search and Ads platforms, allowing the About this image tool to verify provenance. And LinkedIn has the best option: The company says that it overlays an icon on C2PA-signed images that users can click to inspect the edit history. So it can be done. If there was another certification standard for other types of contentlike this articleand if every platform supported the standards in full, users would be able to push the Kill AI switch. But, of course, you know where this ends. Yeah, it will never happen The same tech giants adopting these standards are simultaneously playing a cynical double game. While Meta and TikTok claim to be cracking down on AI slop by downranking third-party generated content, they are aggressively pushing their own AI tools. TikTok limits the reach of external AI videos while actively encouraging you to use its in-app AI filters. Meanwhile, Meta says it will throttle down AI content promotion, but they give users AI tools to create an eternal tsunami of slop. They aren’t trying to save the internet from AI. They are trying to secure their own monopoly on AI pollution. They want to ensure that the only slop you consume is the premium, high-margin slop they generated for you. It is all about revenue domination. If you use Midjourney, you are a spammer. If you use Meta AI, you are a “creator. We can’t expect the companies profiting from AI creation to give us tools to deactivate the very content we create on their platform. So it seems, for now, our best (and imperfect) bet is something like Slop Evadera time machine to transport you to a simpler time.
Category:
E-Commerce
One April night eight years ago, two tech leaders sat down with a former Forest Service employee at Terroir, a natural wine bar in San Francisco. Then they started sketching out a plan that would eventually reshape Californias housing policy. Landmark housing reforms that passed in the state in 2025, one that allows more housing to be built near transit stops, and another curbing the use of environmental law to block new housingand which many believed would never succeedcan be traced back to that night, five bottles of wine, and crucial backing from Silicon Valley executives. An unlikely new leader Brian Hanlon, the Forest Service employee, was an unlikely leader for a new housing movement. Hanlon moved to the Bay Area in 2010 after dropping out of a PhD program, and got a job managing grant paperwork for USFS. He wasnt planning to work on housing; he considered becoming a winemaker. But he soon saw the impact of Californias housing policy directly. When he first arrived in the area, apartments were still relatively affordable. Within a year, he saw demand spike: every open house he visited had 20 to 30 people competing for the same apartment. Over the next couple of years, as rents in the city continued to rise, Hanlon got involved with rental advocacy groups, but quickly saw the limitations. He felt advocates werent engaging with what he saw as a basic problem: restrictive policy made it too difficult to build housing, and the shortage of housingnot just landlords trying to extract higher rents from renterswas what was driving up prices. Even then, I was like, Its not landlord greed. There arent enough homes. Landlords are just as greedy in Houston, Texas, or wherever else, he says. I kind of got excommunicated from that movement because I believed in more housing. A friend introduced him to Sonia Trauss, a math teacher who had started advocating for new housing development at planning meetingsa YIMBY (yes in my backyard) counterpart to the resistance to new construction that was common in San Francisco, which is commonly characterized as NIMBY (“not in my backyard”). This resistance came largely from two separate, but sometimes aligned, groups: first, homeowners who believe new constructions of apartments around their homes will lower the resale value, obstruct their views, and otherwise affect “the neighborhood character”; and second, advocates for low-income tenants who believe that the new construction pushed by the YIMBY movement in gentrifying working-class neighborhoods will accelerate the damaging process of pricing out long-time residents. The first group is more powerful politically at the state level, but at the start of Hanlon and Trauss’s advocacy in San Francisco, many of the fights were with the second, leading to vitriolic conflict in the city (and online). Trauss faced intense criticism for comparing tenant advocates to Trump voters during a speech at hearing. And in one incident, Hanlon was at a public film screening about the eviction crisis, talking with a resident who was fighting a plan to demolish his apartment building, when an activist forced him out of the event, screaming “Get the fuck out!” As the conflicts continued in San Francisco, Hanlon decided he needed to do more than tackle one planning meetingand one buildingat a time. After he and Trauss secured some funding, they founded a nonprofit, California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, and filed a lawsuit against a Bay Area suburb for not building enough housing. They lost the suit, and Hanlon realized that they needed to change direction. I was like, alright, well, were going to fail as a nonprofit if we dont change the law, he says. Rewriting the law With help from a likeminded developer hed met, Hanlon brought together a group of land-use attorneys, planners, and other developers and explained why the lawsuit had failed and how he wanted the law to change so cities would have to allow more construction. Hanlon copied the existing law into Microsoft Word, rewrote it based on feedback from the group, and then gave it to a lawyer to draft a real version of a potential bill. Then he started heading to Sacramento, meeting with anyone whod talk. A lawyer from the Building Industry Association told him that he was wasting his time. “I’m like, alright, thanks for your feedback,” he says. “And then I just kept going.” At the time, he had little money and few connections. At a housing conference, he entered a contest to meet the new chair of the states Department of Housing Developmentthe competition involved guessing the number of Monopoly houses in a giant jar. I remembered a little bit of middle school geometry or something, and I just looked at the jar and did the right math and guessed the right number of houses, he says. He won a lunch with Ben Metcalf, the new chair, and peppered him with questions about housing reform in the state. Meanwhile, he was starting to make more connections in the tech industry. Trauss had already gotten some support from tech CEOs like Yelps Jeremy Stoppleman, who saw that the housing shortage could hurt their industry since it was so hard for employees to find a place to live. Like others, hed read a viral article in TechCrunch from Kim-Mai Cutler explaining how housing policy restricted development. That story really helped put everything in perspectivelike, oh, this is actually by design, Stoppleman says. [It was] many years of decisions to specifically constrain housing production, density, and growth. That created a real point of frustration as a person leading a business with thousands of employees here in the Bay Area. Hanlon met Zack Rosen, CEO of the WebOps platform Pantheon, on Twitter. I got in a fight with him on the internet, Rosen says. I got into one of those things where it was back and forth, back and forth, and by the third time, Im like, man, I dont know what Im talking about. He suggested to Hanlon that they meet up for coffee, and they became friends. Rosen, too, wanted to invest in a solution to the housing crisis. “The tech industry didn’t create these terrible housing policies, they predate us,” Rosen says. “However, the success of our industry and these terrible housing policies are a train wreck. The net effect of that train wreck is immiseration for the state of Californiayou know, teachers teaching [while] homeless in San Francisco. I mean, it’s insane. So for me, it was like, look, the tech industry has a special responsibility to help solve it.” A few weeks later, Hanlon ran into Rosen in Sacramento, along with Nat Friedmanthe former CEO of GitHub, now head of Metas Superintelligence Labs, who had come to Sacramento to talk about housing with an assemblymember. They started walking through the capitol building, and knocked on the door of the governors office, where they managed to wrangle a meeting with staffers on the fly. Policymakers wanted to act, but the issue was complex, and they needed help understanding what laws could truly help. On the drive back home, Rosen started thinking about partnering wth Hanlon. Making a bet on a new startup nonprofit They stayed in touch, and nearly a year later, Rosen, Friedman, and Hanlon met at the wine bar to talk about the potential for a new nonprofit. They talked for hours, closing out the bar. Hanlon pitched them on the vision of a new housing advocacy organization for the state that would work on new policy, build coalitions and a grassroots movement, and massively scale up homebuilding. At the time, Hanlon was still working on a shoestring budget, helping shepherd a housing bill called SB 167based on what he’d drafted earlierthrough the committee process. Imagine all that we could do if I had a real team and a real budget? he said. They didnt know exactly how the new organization would work. We ended up with more questions than answers, says Rosen. But we had a direction. We had a strategy. They were sold on the idea. It was reminiscent to me of the beginnings of a great startup, he says. It just felt like hey, here’s this obvious idea. No one’s doing it. Is it possible to do? Absolutely. Is it incredibly difficult to do? Absolutely. Let’s go do it. Within a couple of months, they had raised hundreds of thousands for the project. Hanlon resigned from his previous nonprofit with Trauss. Rosen joined the new organization, California YIMBY, as a cofounder. Its something that probably only would have happened in San Francisco. I dont think I ever would have raised this sort of philanthropic capital just given my profileIm some guy who was working for the Forest Service and moved to the Mission because I was really into wine, fixed gear bikes, and shows, Hanlon says. That doesnt sound like someone Id want to make a big bet on to try to rebuild the built environment of the worlds fourth largest economy. But his vision resonated with them, and with friends of Friedman’s who gave to the new nonprofit. “Brian’s a mile a minutevery fast on his feet, very thoughtful, had clearly done tons of research, knew his stuff,” says Stoppleman. “It was a really unique strategy that he was laying out. For me, it’s exciting to meet people at that stage when they’re just getting going. Obviously brilliant, lots of energy, a lot of passion, probably some naivete. There is a parallel, 100%, to the startup world.” The tech leaders who put in money also were willing to try something new. I don’t mean to just make a paean to enlightened tech leaders, but I will say, San Francisco’s entrepreneurial tech leaders don’t treat the status quo or entrenched power as immutable reality, says Hanlon. They treat it as problems to be solved and building a new future. And that’s rare and uncommon.I think there’s this real sense that we’re not on this Earth for very long, it’s good and right to work quickly to solve your problems. And also, that failure isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is not trying, or trying and not being ambitious. Sweeping changes in policy After the nonprofit was founded in 2017as a 501(c)(4) organization, so its allowed to lobby full timeit led advocacy for SB 167, a bill that made it harder for cities to fail to comply with state laws designed to force cities to approve more housing. The organization also fought for new laws that make it easier to build ADUs and missing middle housing like duplexes. But the biggest victories, after earlier failed attempts, came this year. First, the state passed a set of laws that reform CEQA, the California’s environmental law, which has sometimes been used as a method to stop development. Some housing now has a faster review process under the law. When the nonprofit first began working on CEQA reform, they were told that it was impossible. This fall, the state also passed SB 79, a law that legalizes large apartment buildings near major transit stops throughout the stateeven when local laws restrict density or height. That can help significantly shrink the state’s housing shortage. In L.A., alone, by one estimate, it will eventually zone for 1.46 million new housing units. Along with CEQA reform, it was something they’d first talked about at the wine bar. “That was really was got Nat and Zack excited that night,” Hanlon says. Earlier attempts to pass the law, including a bill introduced in 2018, helped change the conversation about housing. Academics had long argued for more housing near transit, but this type of policy was new. “That’s the first bill, to my knowledge, that had actually been commensurate with the scale of the problem to actually solve it,” Hanlon says. It died quickly in committee, but got people talking in other cities. In New York City, the planning office held a meeting to discuss it. Other advocacy groups in other states started considering new changes to state policy. The latest version of the bill barely passed. It’s likely the only bill in the history of the state, Hanlon says, to become law after “rolling” the first two policy committee chairs, meaning it passed over their objections. The bill had to make it through nine votes, and then the governor’s vote. At each step, it barely made it. “This was incredibly, incredibly hard fought.” Still, he says, despite fierce opposition to the bill, including citizen protests and formal opposition from dozens of city councils, the debate was less heated than it had been in the past. Previous bills had faced widespread, statewide activism in large town halls and protestsmany of which were organized by Livable California, a group of homeowners founded by a former oil executive that fights zoning changes and regulations that would make it easier to build apartmentsalong with a deluge of op-eds and even a study with false data that argued that Los Angeles could meet its housing needs with vacant apartments. Now, the ideas behind the YIMBY have now become more mainstream. Policymakers have largely accepted the idea that the housing shortage is a supply problem, and that policy has held back development. “YIMBY benefits from being correct,” says Rosen. “It’s real. It’s substantive. It’s right. It also benefits from taking what should be an obscure issue like zoning, and turning it into something that’s real and personal for peoplehousing. And that was clear from the beginning.” When the YIMBY movement started to take off, “what wasn’t clear was how you would translate that movement that was getting attention into change of government that would enable a boom in housing,” he says. “There’s a huge leap between those things. We’ve got a long list of modern-day political movements that capture attention and don’t deliver the outcome. It’s not that any of the work of translating attention in a movement into outcomes is like rocket science. But it’s tremendously difficult work. And it’s very deliberate kind of work, very strategic work. It’s very stage sequenced. To me, it feels like kind of like scaling a company.” The work isn’t done. The next big battle, Hanlon says, is the steep fees that local governments impose on new developments, which can make building infeasible even when ther barriers are taken away. But 2025 has “absolutely been a breakthrough year,” says Rosen. “We have a lot left to do. But I don’t know that there’s going to be a political lift that heavy.”
Category:
E-Commerce
When the Department of the Interior announced on Monday that it was suspending the leases of five offshore wind farms that are currently under construction, it blamed national security concerns. Military experts say thats an excuse. I think it is all made up, says Dave Belote, a retired Air Force colonel who previously led the Department of Defenses energy siting clearinghouse at the Pentagon and who currently consults with onshore wind companies about military issues. I’ve got 15 years of experience that I will stack against the Secretary of Interior to say that is all made up to please a president that just irrationally hates windmills. Each of the five projectstwo off the coast of New York, and others in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Rhode Islandwent through a yearslong vetting process that closely involved the Department of Defense, now renamed the Department of War. (After the administration threatened some of the wind farms earlier in the year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul reportedly negotiated with the Trump administration and even agreed to approve a natural gas pipeline in exchange for saving one of the wind farmsbut those efforts may now have been in vain.) Any potential military issues were already fully considered, says Belote. When it announced the new cancellations, the Department of Interior cited radar issues. But thats already well knownand the Department of Defense has known how to deal with it for more than a decade. Spinning wind turbines do interfere with radar, but wind project developers currently pay for a software patch that edits that interference out of NORADs radar scope. With a bigger investment, the radar itself could be upgraded to eliminate the issue without relying on the patch. The military needs to know how to deal with wind turbines regardless of whether they’re in U.S. waters. China, for example, has 129 offshore wind farms. “They are concentrated along the shorelines in the most militarily significant areas around Shanghai and around Taiwan Strait,” says Belote. “If any American is launching from a carrier or Guam or Japan or Korea and pointed west at the Chinese shoreline, that man or woman in the fighter cockpit or bomber cockpit is going to have to deal with a whole bunch of spinning wind turbines on their radar scopes or head of displays. So the whole idea that we can neither train nor detect threats in the presence of small numbers of offshore wind turbines is ludicrous.” The administration has also cited unspecified “classified” issues, but Belote saysas someone who has considered all possible issues that could theoretically occurthat those issues don’t exist. “There’s no there there,” he says. (The Department of Defense said it could not immediately respond to Fast Company‘s request for a comment on the issue.) On the East Coast, Belote argues that the military could even make use of the infrastructure on offshore wind turbines because they already have power, fiber optics, and security that could improve communications in military exercises. There’s also a bigger national security argument: wind is a critical domestic energy source at a time when the country needs to rapidly ramp up production. “Energy security is national security,” Kirk Lippold, a retired Navy commander, wrote earlier this year. “Americas coastal regions host nearly 40% of our population, and offshore wind offers a direct and effective way to provide these areas with utility-scale energy. This is not just about powerits about ensuring that those economic centers remain online amid geopolitical instability or supply chain disruption. When we cede control of our energy futurewhether to geopolitical rivals, volatile oil markets, or outdated infrastructurewe weaken our ability to defend American interests at home and abroad.” A group of retired senior military officials echoed the same arguments in an open letter to Secretary Burgum in May. Because of the strain that data centers are putting on the grid, “it has never been so important that our country is energy independent,” they wrote. “When we rely on energy from foreign countries, it leaves us vulnerable to global market shocks outside of our control.” Collectively, the offshore wind projects could power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses. They also could help tackle soaring energy bills for consumers. It’s not clear what will happen next. The Trump administration also tried to stop Rhode Island’s Revolution Wind project earlier in the year, but a court stepped in and the project resumed construction. “When the Trump Administration imposed a stop work order on Revolution Wind several months ago based on similarly vague assertions regarding national security, the courts found that order was unlawful and stopped the Trump administrations effort to obstruct the build-out of clean, affordable power,” says Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “The administration is now trying to unlawfully stop these five projects which are creating thousands of jobs and making electricity more affordable, including Revolution Wind. We will see what happens in the courts. Even if the administration fails again in court, another pause will make it harder for the projects to survive. When Revolution Wind previously stopped work, it reportedly cost the developer more than $2 million a day.
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E-Commerce
Lego has a nostalgia problem. I do, too. Like Hollywood and its eternal cycle of remakes, the Danish company has found a bottomless treasure pot full of GenX and Gen Z people willing to burn their credit cards to turn their golden memories into bricks. By my count, 2025 alone brought a record-setting 16 sets related to old Lego properties and external IPs, shattering 2023’s previous peak of 9 sets. Whether that’s considered a problem or not depends on who you ask. You can argue that we (the people who keep buying these sets) are all the ones who have the problem. The Danish are just milking it. Building Lego soothes kids and adults alike but, when you are putting together these nostalgia-sets, there is an additional satisfaction factor. Its part of you, its what you know, like that old song that plays in your head from time to time and you have the urge to play on your headphones. As you assemble it, you can’t help but enjoy the way in which the Billund designers have abstracted the original objects and created details and features that seem impossible to reproduce at pixel-size brick resolution. Lego won’t share sales figures but, privately, insiders have hinted that these sets bring in lots of revenue, especially because they are large and complex with many pieces and high price tags. The year-over-year increase of new sets seem to confirms this: Between 2014 and 2022, the company released an average of 3.7 sets per year tapping into ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s themes. That number has more than doubled. From 2023 through 2025, Lego produced 31 nostalgia-focused setsa dramatic acceleration that establishes a new baseline. Many of these sets are part of the Lego Icons line, which launched in 2020 as a way to tap into the growing appetite from Lego’s adult customers. Other sets come through the Lego Ideas, launched in 2008, a sort of Kickstarter-ish platform that asks fans to submit designs for official Lego sets. These are then voted on by the community and a handful become commercial products each year. Until 2024, it was an open design call but that year Lego launched explicitly decade-targeted design challenges. First came the “Turn Back Time80s Challenge,” which generated more than 290 submissions. The challenge proved so successful that Lego immediately launched a “Build Your Nostalgia90s Throwback” competition for 2025. Rather than waiting for the nostalgia to happen organically, Lego is now actively soliciting it because it works. Now, if you are like meor my son, who is definitely not a Gen X but is growing up in Gen X cultureyou may be wondering whats cool this year. Well, thats why Im here, my friends. These are the best at every price point all the way up to the crazy nuts $1,000 Death Star (now, if you buy that one, then you will have a very real problem of the financial kind). [Photo: Lego] Home One Starcruiser This is a tiny reminder that Star Wars Original Trilogy sets remain a cornerstone of Lego’s nostalgia strategy. Released January 2025 for $70, this 559-piece Rebel Alliance frigate appeared in Return of the Jedi as part of the climactic Endor battle. It’s a compact set designed for anyone who wants a manageable Star Wars display without a 7,541-piece Millennium Falcon commitment. That it came out on the very first day of 2025 signals how central Star Wars remains to Lego’s calendar. [Photo: Lego] The Simpsons: Krusty Burger This year also brought a new Simpson set. Homer’s favorite fast-food joint comes to life with 1,635 pieces. The Krusty Burger has been serving fictional beef since the show’s early ’90s heyday, and Lego has captured every detail: the oversized signage, the drive-through window, and a small buildable Krusty the Clown figure. It’s the kind of set that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it isa shrine to a show that defined a generation’s sense of humor. At $210, it’s a reasonable price point for 1990s pop-culture archaeology. The set includes minifigures of Homer, Marge, Krusty, and the rest of Springfields best and finest. [Photo: Lego] Williams Racing FW14B & Nigel Mansell After releasing Ayrton Sennas McLaren last year, this is Lego’s tribute to one of Formula One’s most dominant seasons: 1992, when British driver Nigel Mansell piloted the Williams FW14B to legendary status. With 799 pieces and priced at $80, this is the kind of nostalgia that doesn’t rely on Hollywood but will appeal to the GenX and GenZ generations. The model includes working steering and suspension details that make it feel less like a toy and more like precision engineering translated into plastic. [Photo: Lego] Blacktron Renegade This one is pure Lego archaeology and made a lot of people happy back in the late ’80s. The Blacktron theme launched in 1987 and became one of the company’s most iconic design languagesa line of villainous space vehicles with electric lime-yellow and black color schemes that defined entire childhoods, opposite from the late ’70s good guys of the Galaxy Explorer. The Blacktron Renegade, $100, resurrects that aesthetic with precision. [Photo: Lego] Minifigure Vending Machine This one emerged from Lego’s Ideas platform, and it is a meta-nostalgic deep cut. The 315-piece set is essentially a tribute to Lego’s own 1980s and ’90s theme history. The vending machine dispenses minifigures, but the real genius is that it functions as a shrine to classic Lego design eras. It’s designed to celebrate the Classic Space, Pirates, and Castle themes that defined childhoods. Priced at $100, it’s Lego essentially building a monument to itself, self-referencing nostalgia so dense that it risks becoming an emotional black hole. [Photo: Lego] Gremlins: Gizmo The 1,125-piece set captures Gizmo, the Mogwai creature from Gremlins, in brick form. The process of bringing Gizmo to life required Lego’s design team to solve problems that shouldn’t exist. How do you suggest fur texture with plastic bricks? How do you create a nose that reads as a nose without being literal? Lego senior model designer Chris McVeigh told me how he tackled the fur question by using a specific element he originally developed for Lego’s 2023 Architecture set of Himeji Castle: a small 2×2 plate with an upturned corner. “I decided to use that to give the effect of wispy hair flowing off the model,” McVeigh says. For the nose, he experimented with half-circle and full-circle plates, ultimately landing on a 2×2 round plate with subtle cutouts. “It’s one of the exciting things about Lego,” McVeigh explains. “The brain fills the blanks.” At $110, it’s priced in the mid-range for a detailed character build, which is appropriate for a creature that required months of design refinement to get exactly right. [Photo: Lego] The Goonies This 2,912-piece behemoth, priced at $330, recreates an iconic scene from Richard Donner’s 1985 adventure film. Born from Lego’s “Turn Back Time80s Challenge,” where it competed against more than 290 other submissions, the set includes buildable structures and minifigures of the main Goonies characters. It doesnt get more cultish than that. [Photo: Lego] Captain Jack Sparrow’s Pirate Ship OK, so this one is early aughts but, with Jerry Bruckheimer and Johnny Depp, it feels ’90s to me. Released in September, its backordered everywhere, becoming one of the companys hottest hits. The $380 set brings Jack Sparrow and the Black Pearl to life with 2,862 pieces, recreating the iconic pirate ship from the 2003 film The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, complete with detailed rigging, a functioning ship’s wheel, a working cannon, and a brig with torture implements. Multiple minifigures come with the set, including Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, Elizabeth Swann, and Will Turner. [Photo: Lego] Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D This was a shocker for Lego aficionados, who are used to living in a Star Wars dominated world. Just for that, it became the champion of 2025 nostalgia releases with 3,600 pieces. Priced at $400, it reproduces the Starship Enterprise-D from TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired from 1987 to 1994 and defined what Star Trek meant to millions of people who never watched the original. The model measures 23.5 inches long and includes a working saucer separation functiona feature so technically ambitious it required serious engineering. It has all the crew (nine minifigures), including Captain Picard. It’s also bundled with set 40768, the Star Trek Type-15 Shuttlepod, a 261-piece GWP that features opening wing doors and a detailed interior LCARS display. [Photo: Lego] Lego Game Boy The $60 set recreates the original 1989 Nintendo Game Boy in brick form with impressive accuracy. The measurements are almost identical to the original and it includes posable directional buttons, a pressable A/B button cluster, and a buildable cartridge slot. The set even includes minifigure-scale versions of classic Game Boy games like Tetris and The Legend of Zelda printed on the buildable cartridges. Its also my favorite set because you can actually make it into a real Game Boy using this kit. [Photo: Lego] Death Star This is no Lego Set. At 9,023 pieces and $1,000, this is a bloody actual moon. It is so big it must actually have its own gravity field. It is also the most expensive Lego set ever made, breaking the previous record held by both the Millennium Falcon UCS ($850) and the AT-AT UCS ($850). Released back in October, this Death Star is a cross-section cutaway of the Empire’s most infamous space station that features little vignettes from A New Hope and Return of the Jedi: the detention block, trash compactor, tractor beam control room, Moff Tarkin’s boardroom, and the Emperor’s Throne Room where Luke and Vader’s final confrontation takes place. It stands 27.5 inches tall and it is 31 inches wide. The build includes 38 minifiguresincluding three different Luke SkywalkersTatooine outfit, Stormtrooper disguise, and Return of the Jedis Jedi Knighttwo Han Solos, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Grand Moff Tarkin, and even the internet-famous Hot Tub Stormtrooper from the Lego Star Wars video games. [Screenshot: Lego Ideas] X-Files: The Truth Is Out There This set is not released yet, but it was announced in 2025 as the winner of Lego’s “Build Your Nostalgia90s Throwback” challenge. While it is currently in development with no official release date or price yet confirmed, the design won a competitive fan vote against four other finalists: Edward Scissorhands, The Fifth Element, Jumanji, and Buffy the Vampire Slayerall quintessential ’90s intellectual property. The fact that the X-Files won tells you everything about which generational cohort Lego is chasing right now. Its also a great fit for our times, as the show that defined paranoia and skepticism for everyone born between 1970 and 1990.
Category:
E-Commerce
How should leaders prepare for AIs accelerating impact on work and everyday life? AI scientist, entrepreneur, and Pioneers of AI podcast host Rana el Kaliouby shares her predictions for the year aheadfrom physical AI entering the real world to what it means to onboard AI into your org chart. El Kaliouby cuts through todays biggest AI headlines, bringing to light the insights that will matter most in the months to come. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Let’s look ahead to 2026. You sent me some fascinating thoughts about AI’s next-phase impact on business, and I’d love to take you through them. The first one was the rise of what you called relationship intelligent AI. So everybody’s worried that AI is going to make us less human and take away our human-to-human connections. There is definitely a risk of that. But I think the thing I’m most excited about for 2026 is how AI can actually help us build deeper human connections and more meaningful human experiences. And the way this happens is through AI that can really help you organize your relationships and your network and surface connections that you need and maybe make warm introductions to you. I love connecting with people, but my relationship data is a mess. It’s all in my brain. Some of it is in LinkedIn, some are on WhatsApp. I take a lot of notes when I meet new people and I use an AI note taker. It’s just a mess. It’s very disparate data sources. And I always think of this scene in, do you know The Devil Wears Prada? Have you seen? Oh, that’s exactly what I was thinking of. The character is kind of whispering in your ear. Exactly. It was Anne Hathaway [as Andy], and she was with Meryl Streep [as Miranda] at this gala. And this guy and his partner were moving toward Miranda and she [didnt rememeber their names]. And Andy whispers in Miranda’s ear: “He’s the ambassador and his new wife.” And I was like, “That’s exactly what I need. I need an AI version of Anne Hathaway.” And it’s now doable with LLMs because it’s all this unstructured, messy data that an AI can take all of that, contextualize it, and hopefully be that AI chief of staff for you. Is that like a product? Is that something that you would have to do to turn your chatbot, whatever, your Claude or your ChatGPT into that? Or is it a new product that you think is going to come out that will make that easy for you? There are already a number of new companies that are starting in this space. So one company’s called VIA.AI, it’s a Boston-based company. They do this for sales professionals and BD professionals who have to do this for their work. There’s a company called Goodword that I’m very excited about. They’re doing this for just the average person. Like you and I, we have very strong networks, but how can we organize it? So I’m excited about that one. There’s a company called Boardy that does this for investors and founders. So it’s becoming a thing, and I’m excited to see how these companies take off in 2026. They’re all fairly new, so it’ll be interesting to see how they evolve. Yeah, and whether they can stay ahead of some of the bigger chatbots that may just try to integrate some of this capability into the products they already have. That’s always the case in this kind of evolution of technology: What’s a feature and what’s a company, right? What’s an independent service? Absolutely. When I’m looking at these companies and I’m diligencing them, that’s a key question that I ask. Is this something that the next version of ChatGPT or Gemini is just going to implement? And if the answer is yes, then that’s obviously not a defensible company. But a lot of times there’s this additional moat of data and algorithms that you need to sit on top of these LLMs. And I believe in this relationship intelligence space, I don’t think this is something that just a kind of an off-the-shelf LLM can do. It really needs to know you. It needs to know your data, it needs to know your relationships. And you have to trust it enough to share all that data with it, right? Absolutely. That’s your proprietary data, whether it’s about your business or about you individually. Exactly. And I don’t want this to all go up to OpenAI’s cloud. I want to trust that I have control over these really private relations. If you and I have a conversation about our kids, I don’t necessarily want that to now sit in a general OpenAI cloud and be used to train the next ChatGPT. So that safety and security, appreciating the privacy and the importance of this data, is really key. Another business change you expect in 2026 is the insertion of AI into the org chart. This is about who manages AI, like performance reviews and team culture impacts? Yeah, so this goes back to the thesis that there’s this shift in how AI is creating value, and it’s not a tool anymore. Well, it is a tool. It’ll always be a tool, but it’s not a tool that helps you get work done faster. It could actually take an end-to-end task and get it done for you. And I’ll give a few examples. So I’m an investor in a company called Synthpop, and instead of building a tool that helps healthcare administrators accelerate or really become efficient in how they do patient intake, it just takes the task of patient intake. It does the thing end to end. And so if you then imagine what that means for a hospital or a clinic, it will have a combination of human workers collaborating and working closely with AI coworkers. And so then the question becomes, well, who manages these hybrid teams? Sometimes it’s a human manager, sometimes it’s an AI manager. I’m also an investor in a company called Tough Day, and they sell you AI managers. And then how do you do performance reviews for these hybrid teams? How do you build a culture? Like at Affectiva, my company, culture was our superpower. How do you build a culture when some of your team members are AI and some of your team members are humans? So I think that is going to spur a lot of conversation around how do you build organizations that are combinations of digital agents and human employees? As you talk about this merging of AI agents and humans in work, it brings up that looming question about the impact of AI on jobs and employment. And some numbers are coming out now that make it seem like, “Oh, it’s bad for jobs.” There are other numbers coming out that are like, “Oh, we’re actually hirng more people because of it.” Do you have a prediction about what is going to happen with that in 2026? Is AI going to take over roles that have been done by humans that quickly? We had a really fascinating roundtable discussion at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference and the headline was like, “Is AI killing entry-level jobs?” And actually, a lot of the Fortune companies and also AI companies that were around the table were basically saying, “No, we’re hiring more entry-level jobs. They’re just not the same jobs that we were traditionally seeing.” And also the career ladders have changed. So my prediction is we’re going to see an entirely different organization where I think if you are able to come in an entry-level position, for example, but work very closely with AI and be AI-native and be AI fluent and be able to wear multiple hats, I think that’s going to go a long way. As opposed to this very siloed job trajectory where you come in, this is your little task, and then you do more of it, and then you go up the career ladder. I think that’s going to change. I think young people are looking for different ways of working, and I think AI is changing all of that anyway. Will there be jobs that will go away? I think so. I can’t remember who said this line, but it’s now very popular: It’s not AI that’s going to take your job. It’s going to be somebody who knows how to use AI. And I believe that to be true.
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