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A dispute between a pair of pro athletes who both use the number 8 has been resolved, thanks to a change in font. Former NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. said Friday his NASCAR team, JR Motorsports, had secured the rights to a stylized 8 mark through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The announcement came after attorneys for quarterback Lamar Jackson, who wears the No. 8 jersey for the Baltimore Ravens, filed a notice of opposition with the USPTO over JR Motorsports’s trademark claim to the mark, arguing it falsely suggests a connection with Jackson. pic.twitter.com/uZWk8kPlcW— Dale Earnhardt Jr. (@DaleJr) April 4, 2025 Earnhardt and his team have raced before as No. 8; and in 2019, when the team got the No. 8 car, he said the number was very special to me and to JR nation. Theres a lot of history with the No. 8 in my family and in NASCAR. Its time to write some new stories and continue to add to the numbers rich heritage, according to Autoweek. But the number also means something to Jackson, who played with a No. 8 jersey at the University of Louisville, which the school retired, as well as for the Ravens since being drafted by the team in 2018. Jackson’s attorneys went after another No. 8 athlete last year, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman. At the time, Aikman joked in a post on X, Hey LamarLooks like a worthy conversation over a couple cold EIGHT beers! Maybe Steve Young can arbitrate?? (Aikman was referring to his beer brand Eight; and Young, a former San Francisco 49ers No. 8 player.) Aikman’s joke showed how a single number can refer to multiple well-known athletes simultaneously, potentially watering down the case a single athlete can make to lay absolute claim to a number. Earnhardt didn’t say much about how the dispute was resolved except that his JR Motorsports team would no longer use the forward-leaning 8 mark that they’ve used since 2019 and instead use a backward-leaning mark that resembles the No. 8 car Earnhardt raced with in the 2000s for Dale Earnhardt Inc., the team founded by his father. The resolution seems to suggest that the styling of a number plays a role in how the public perceives it in connection to specific athletes. Jackson has proven litigious over the number, but he said in 2021 that he’d change from No. 8 to No. 1 if he ever won a Super Bowl. So if you see Earnhardt, Aikman, Young, and other No. 8 athletes cheering for the Ravens, you might figure out why.
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E-Commerce
I’m a writer, not a programmer, so until recently a lot of the hype around ChatGPT’s abitilies as a coding tool went over my head. But then I realized generative AI’s programming powers can be helpful for more than just coders. It can also help anyone else dabble in code to get things done. In my case, that means creating new browser bookmarklets. These are special kinds of bookmarks that use JavaScript to modify or act on web content, and they’ve always been an underrated web browsing superpower. For years, I’ve used bookmarklets to speed up web videos, remove page clutter, and quickly search my favorite sites, but I’ve always been limited to whatever example code I can find online. With AI tools like ChatGPT, I can finally make new bookmarklets myself, and the only limit is what I can think to do with them. ChatGPT’s bookmarklet breakdown Ironically, my aha moment with AI-generated bookmarklets arose while getting frustrated with another AI tool, Amazon’s Rufus shopping assistant. Last year, Amazon removed a feature that let you search through customer reviews and Q&As directly from its product pages, replacing it with the much slower Rufus chatbot. That got me thinking about a faster way to search Amazon reviews directly. After noticing that Amazon has separate pages for products and customer reviews, each with the same product code in the address, I realized that a bookmarklet cloud allow for faster searching. Here’s how I asked ChatGPT to make a bookmarklet that searches the customer reviews from an Amazon product page: Here is a link to an Amazon product page, where the ASIN is B0DHV7LR12: https://www.amazon.com/Baseus-Charging-Certified-Magnetic-Retractable/dp/B0DHV7LR12 Here is a link to a page that searches through customer reviews for that product, where B0DHV7LR12 is still the ASIN, and “test” is the search term: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0DHV7LR12/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewopt_kywd?pageNumber=1&filterByKeyword=test I want you to make a bookmarklet that, when clicked on an Amazon product page, opens a “Search Amazon reviews:” dialog box. The bookmarklet will then open the corresponding review page with the search term entered in the dialog box. If the bookmarklet is clicked outside of an Amazon product page, display an error message that says “You must be on an Amazon product page to use this bookmarklet.” This link to my ChatGPT conversation includes both the bookmarklet in question and instructions for installing it. By adding it to your browser’s bookmarks bar, you can click a button from any Amazon page to quickly search its corresponding reviews. More AI-generated bookmarklets Feeling satisfied with my Amazon review search bookmarket, I decided to try making some others. If you want to use any of these yourself, click on the links to each ChatGPT conversation, copy the JavaScript at the bottom of the chat, then create a new bookmark in your browser and paste the JavaScript into the address field: Video Speed: YouTube’s speed controls take too many clicks to access, and I don’t like the default speed increments. I had ChatGPT make a speed-control bookmarklet to my exact specifications, and it works on pretty much any video site, not just YouTube. Hide Stickies: Removes annoying web page elements that follow you around when you scroll, such as menu bars and floating video players. Link Card: I use Obsidian for notetaking, and this bookmarklet converts web links into neatly formatted cards that I can paste into my notes. Link and Excerpt: This helps speed up link sharing on social media. If text is highlighted on a page, clicking the bookmarklet wraps the text in quotes and copies it to the clipboard with the URL underneath. If no text is selected, it just copies the address instead. More Links: Sends the current page to Perplexity with a request for more links to stories that cover the same topic. Clean Link: Copies a link to the current address without common tracking parameters and other junk. Google Maps Search: When clicked, this asks for your destination and starting address, then looks up directions. If you leave the starting address field blank, it just looks up the location instead. Archive Link: Loads an archived snapshot of the current page, as hosted at Archive.Today. I don’t expect you to use all of these yourself, but hopefully they’ll get you thinking about the kinds of things bookmarklets can accomplish, and how you might use AI to build your own. One important note: ChatGPT sometimes inserts comment lines (denoted with a // double slash) to explain, but these can prevent the bookmarklets from working properly. Either remove them yourself or instruct the model not to include them. Why this works Generative AI is handy for making bookmarklets for a few reasons: The stakes are low: While AI-generated code is causing all sorts of problems for businesses, here you’re just generating JavaScript to automate and improve your own web browsing. You’re not at risk of breaking anything critical. The results are immediate: No extensive testing is necessary to see how your AI-generated bookmarklets perform. Either they work or they don’t. They’re easy to modify: If you want to change some element of your newly created bookmarklets, you can just ask using natural language. You might learn something: If you aspire to learn a little JavaScript yourself, bookmarklets are a simple application with immediate practical benefits. You can look at the code that comes out, compare it with other examples, and ask questions to understand how things work. In general, bookmarklets work well whenever you want to perform an action on the current URL, modify web page content, or open a specific site’s search page with keywords pre-applied. If you’re not sure where to start, you can always ask your AI chatbot for ideas.
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E-Commerce
Changing jobs is typically the shortest path to a higher salary, but for the first time in almost 15 years staying put is paying better than moving on. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlantas Wage Growth Tracker job stayers are enjoying greater salary growth than job switchers for the first time since 2010during the aftermath of the global financial crisisand only the third time since the data set began in 1998. In fact, just two years ago, at the height of the Great Resignation, workers were enjoying the highest premium for changing jobs in at least a generation. The returns on job switching have gone down, and I don’t know whether that’s driven by employees or employers, says Melinda Pitts, research director of the Atlanta Feds Center for Human Capital Studies. The last time job stayers outearned job seekers the causes were straightforward, but Pitts says this time around things arent as clear. The unemployment rate is still really low. Its still a pretty tight labor market, and that was not the case coming out of the Great Recession, she says. It appears that there’s something different this time, but I do not know for certain [what]. Pitts explains that in the aftermath of the Great Resignation, a historically tight talent market inspired employers to offer more generous salaries to new hires, but as those costs ballooned, many invested more in retaining their existing workforce. At the same time, those historically high wage premiums for job switchers in 2022 were in part driven by a broader workforce transition, wherein low-wage workers left hard-hit sectors like hospitality during the pandemic and reentered the workforce in higher-paying roles. There’s a possibility that the people who are switching [now] are different, or it could be that employers, even though the unemployment rate is still relatively low, their demand for workers is not as such that they need to offer higher wages, she says. We don’t know if it’s because the composition of workers who switch jobs has changed, or that employers are offering wages [to new hires] similar to their retention wages. Workers Feel StuckFor Good Reason Regardless of the cause, the reversal of that wage growth trend has many Americans feeling stuck in their current roles, and rightfully so. According to a recent survey conducted by Resume Now, two-thirds believe they would be happier in a different job, and 60% have remained in their role longer than they wanted. There are quite a few different barriers to career changing, and some of them might just be imagined, but perception is reality, says Resume Now career expert Keith Spencer. People are worried about the potential for financial instability, particularly right now, so if I were thinking about switching jobs, but I was in a secure job, I might think its not a good time to leave. According to the survey, 35% of respondents fear changing jobs would result in a pay cut, and 34% worry about broader financial instability. In fact, as 2024 came to a close, nearly two-thirds of professionals were concerned about career stagnation, including 73% of tech workers, and many said they intended to change jobs in the new year. We saw a lot of layoffs making big headlines throughout 2024, and that was starting to slow down as the year ended. Interest rates were starting to come down and inflation was starting to ease, Spencer says, adding that the economy hasnt played out the way many had hoped so far in 2025. Layoffs have far outpaced projections in the beginning of this year. So we saw those concerning trends starting to slow down, and then all of a sudden they picked back up, he says. With the current market instability driven by President Donald Trumps sweeping tariffs against global trade partners, Spencer fears more workers are going to feel stuck in economic limbo for longer. Why things will likely get worse before they get better Those new economic challenges cannot be understated and could soon lead to even fewer options for workers in the job market, says Solange Charas, a Columbia University professor and the founder-CEO of HR consulting firm HCMoneyball. I don’t think people appreciate how impactful these tariffs are going to befor the whole economy, obviouslybut for individuals themselves, specifically, she says. Charas explains that the stock markets reaction to Trumps Liberation Day tariff announcement last week is eating away at retirement savings. That could force boomers to remain in the workforce longer, increasing labor supply. At the same time, companies are likely to reevaluate their budgets for this year and make significant cuts, which will likely eat away at demand. The new tariffs are going to reshape the workforce strategy because they create a higher level of expense, and what’s the easiest thing to cut from your P and L? People, she says. People are not going to change jobs voluntarily, because of this tariff situation, and the stock market is reflecting that. While workers typically see wage growth for changing jobs, and job stayers were more recently enjoying a premium from retention-conscious employers, Charas fears neither is likely to see wage growth of any kind in the coming months. People are thinking about staying put, even if they feel like they’re stuck, because being able to put food on the table is going to take a higher priority than self-actualization, she says. People are not going to be job seekers right now, and I don’t know if that’s going to be for the next month, or the next four months, the next six months, or the next year. That is going to depend on how the economy reacts to these tariffs.
Category:
E-Commerce
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