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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!  S24The 16 Best Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now  ![]() Over the past year or so, Netflix and Apple TV+ have been duking it out to have the most prestigious film offerings, but some of the best movies are on Amazon Prime Video. The streamer was one of the first to go around picking up film festival darlings and other lovable favorites, and they're all still there in the library, so if they flew under your radar the first time, now is the perfect time to catch up.Our picks for the 16 best films on Amazon Prime are below. All the films in our guide are included in your Prime subscriptionâno renting here. Once you've watched your fill, check out our lists for the best shows on Netflix and best movies on Disney+ if you're looking for something else to watch. We also have a guide to the best shows on Amazon if that's what you're in the mood for.
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S1Ask Ethan: How long will life persist in our Universe?  One of the most humbling aspects of our Universe is the knowledge that, with enough time, all things will eventually pass away. New stars and stellar systems, while they’re expected to keep forming for many billions or even trillions of years to come, are on the decline, with the current star-formation rate only about 3% of what it was at its peak some 11 billion years ago. Planets like Earth around stars like the Sun, while relatively common today, will be extremely rare in the far future. And the longest-lived stars, even if they have Earth-sized planets around them, might be poor candidates for supporting life due to their incredibly active behavior.At some point in the far future, the last living world in the Universe will encounter its demise, signifying an end to what we know as biological activity within our cosmos. But when will this occur? And when and where will the last chances for intelligent life persist? That’s what Terry Dunn wants to know, writing in as follows:
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S2"Parrhesia": The importance of speaking truth to power and how to do it well  Henry VIII of England was a corpulent, binge-drinking, gouty tyrant. He killed the disloyal and dissolved the entire English wing of the Catholic Church when the Pope said he couldn’t divorce his wife. Henry was a king who was quick to laugh and quick to wrath. Here was a man who drained the coffers as quickly as his wine goblet, and who married his way around European royalty. A good character for Game of Thrones; fun for history, but not his subjects. As you can imagine, few people spoke frankly to Hal. People whispered and giggled, but no one dared to speak up. Except for Will Sommers. Sommers was a hunchbacked jester who was by Henry’s side for most of his life. Sommers was witty, musical, and silly — key virtues of the jester. But more importantly, he was the only person who often and sharply spoke truth to the king. Sommers would mock Henry’s girth and his gout. He called the king out on his profligacy and his libido. He made songs about his moods.
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S3Stop saying that ChatGPT "hallucinates"  We are at the dawn of a new era. Over the past year or so, new versions of artificial intelligence have emerged, leading some to claim machine sentience is around the corner. This is either taken to be a godsend that will lead humanity to a promised land of unimagined prosperity, or an existential threat ushering in unimaginable dangers. But behind both claims lies an often-unchallenged assumption about what we, as clearly sentient beings, are and what’s happening inside these technologies. Nowhere are these assumptions or hidden biases more on display than within claims that ChatGPT and similar programs “hallucinate.”When people use the term “hallucination” regarding chatbots, they are referring to their remarkable capacity to “make up” answers to questions. If you ask a chatbot to write a paper on a topic and include references, some of the citations it provides might be complete fabrications. The sources simply don’t exist and never did exist. When biographical information is requested on a real person, a chatbot may return information that is simply false as if it picked them out of thin air and presented them as facts. This ability to generate incorrect information is what’s referred to as a hallucination. But the use of that term in that context belies a dangerous misconception about the state of artificial intelligence and its relation to what human beings do when they hallucinate.
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S43 ways to defend your mind against social media distortions  Stop data brokers from exposing your personal information. Go to our sponsor https://aura.com/bigthink to get a 14-day free trial and see how much of yours is being sold.In this Big Think video, Luke Burgis, Todd Rose, and Amishi Jha explore the intricacies of social media’s influence on human desires, opinion, attention, and overall mental health.
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S5The violent birth of the moon  In the beginning, about 4.6 billion years ago, all was chaos within a cloud of gas left over from a previous generation of stars. There was nothing but molecules of dust and gas, swirling around in the void. The star stuff drew closer together, and then something happened.The material started to collapse under its own gravity. The sun ignited. Let there be light, one creation tale says. Winds howled outward from the infant sun, much more powerfully than the charged particles that stream through the solar wind now, and the gales pushed the remaining dust and gas around. The roiling mix eventually separated into clumps, which grew into larger piles, and eventually became the planets.
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S6Add This Item to the List of WFH No-Nos: Insider Trading  A word to the wise: If you overhear your work-from-home spouse talking business, just forget anything you may learn from it. And most definitely do not trade stocks using what authorities will almost certainly view as inside information.Tyler Loudon, a 42-year-old Houston man, learned this lesson the hard way. He pleaded guilty Thursday to securities fraud for buying and selling stocks based on details gleaned from his wife's business conversations while both were working from home. He made $1.7 million in profits from the deal but has agreed to forfeit those gains.
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S7Cruise's Robotaxis Will Begin Test Runs Again  General Motors' self-driving car unit Cruise is preparing to resume testing its robotaxis on public roads with safety drivers in the coming weeks, with Houston and Dallas as potential locations, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday."We have not set a timeline for deployment. Our goal is to relaunch in one city with manually driven vehicles and supervised testing as soon as possible once we have taken steps to rebuild trust with regulators and the public," Cruise spokesperson Sara Autio said in a statement to Reuters.
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S8Cyber Criminals Are Getting Faster--and Generative AI Could Make Their Work Easier  Cyberattacks are increasingly common--and they're picking up speed. That's scary news for small businesses. The average cost of recovering from a data breach is more than $4 million, according to IBM, and many small businesses don't survive the financial and reputational hit that follows a cyberattack.There's been an uptick in interactive intrusions, in which an unauthorized user imitates a user or administrator, accesses a computer system, and begins moving around the network, according to CrowdStrike's 2024 Global Threat Report, released on Wednesday. The average time it took to carry out such an attack dropped to 62 minutes in 2023 from 84 minutes in 2022, according to the Austin-based cybersecurity firm. In one case documented last year, it took just two minutes seven seconds for a hacker to enter and begin moving around a company's systems.
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S9AI Crypto Tokens in 5 Minutes: What to Know and Where to Start  AI-related cryptocurrency tokens, or coins, are surging after Nvidia's blockbuster Q4 earnings report. Often used to complete transactions and establish governance rights on AI-powered platforms, these crypto currencies can have more utility than traditional crypto investments like bitcoin. Several luminaries in the AI space, including OpenAI founder Sam Altman, have gotten in on the coinage. Purchasers mainly use these AI tokens to facilitate transactions between people and organizations operating in the AI market. You can track their value anywhere cryptocurrency prices are reported. With a market cap just over $1 billion, SingularityNET (AGIX) offers AI tokens which can be traded on its own marketplace for AI-related services. These services include speech recognition, automatic code generation, image resolution improvement, and more. For example, if you wanted to use SingularityNET to separate the vocals from the music in an audio file, you could pay 0.00000100 AGIX tokens for the service at the time of this posting.Â
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S10As its IPO Approaches, Reddit Cites Content Moderation And Meme Stock Resurgence as Risks  The front page of the internet is preparing to go public. Reddit, the user-moderated chat room founded in 2005 that ballooned into a sprawling hub of conversation and community, filed its prospectus for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) with the Securities and Exchange Commision on Thursday. In its Form S-1, Reddit reported losses of $91 million last year on revenues of $804 million, up 21 percent from $666.7 million in 2022. The company's targeted valuation is unclear, but earlier reports indicate it will be in the range of $5 billion. That would be a significant tumble from its 2021 valuation of $10 billion, which was cut by 41 percent in 2023, after Fidelity, a major investor, downgraded its equity stake in the company.Â
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S11Employees at Small Businesses Are Working Less  Why? The report points to the pandemic's impact on the labor market. Employers were eager to hold on to labor, with some opting to reduce hours instead of headcount. Meanwhile, rising wages meant some employees could work fewer hours for the same pay. More workers also transitioned into part-time employment. Indeed, part-time jobs accounted for 43 percent of all hourly jobs in December 2019 and 47 percent this past December, according to the report.Â
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S12Google's CEO Says AI Can Counter Cyber Threats, Even as New Tech Draws Criticism  Google's CEO Sundar Pichai spoke at the Munich Security Conference this week and addressed worries that the AI revolution could create a cybersecurity crisis. While everyone's "right to be worried about the impact on cybersecurity," Pichai said he feels AI tools can also yield positive cybersecurity benefits.Interesting, even encouraging, but Pichai was cheerleading while Google's flagship AI system Gemini was simultaneously in the news for decidedly negative reasons. Users found its amazing generative AI powers, useful for creating never-before-seen imagery, could also be used to generate culturally upsetting images of people -- like people of Asian descent dressed as Nazis. Similarly, OpenAI's generative AI video tech was in the spotlight for the harms it could cause on the creative industry.
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S13IRS Pilots Free Tax-Filing Website, But Business Owners Will Have to Wait  The agency is piloting its Direct File program, which allows certain taxpayers to prepare and file their individual federal returns directly to the IRS with the help of real-time support from agency representatives. The program is being rolled out in phases with the IRS expecting more wide availability by mid-March.The agency has not provided specifics on how or when an expanded rollout could be expected, but for the taxpayers who are eligible now as determined by their location and tax filing complexity, this no-fee government option comes at just the right time. Tax season has become a perennial drain on people's time and money. The IRS found that on average, individuals spend an estimated 13 hours and $240 filing a single tax return. For small businesses, the process required even more time and money with business owners spending roughly 82 hours and $2,900 on tax compliance.
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S144 Ways CEOs Can Get Ahead in 2024  According to Vistage research conducted in December 2023, 50 percent of CEOs said the U.S. economy is currently experiencing or will soon experience a soft economic landing. Nearly the same (46 percent) say we are presently in or will soon be entering a recession. Inflation is slowing, but prices remain much higher than they were. Interest rates have peaked, but they are still at 30-year highs. And although the workforce velocity has slowed, it is still well above pre-pandemic levels. While a growth cycle is imminent, CEOs must first wade through 2024, a year of no-to-low growth and economic contradictions.As business owners and leaders anticipate the rising economic growth tide of 2025, CEOs identified four opportunities they can hone in on to help bridge the gap between today's economic stagnation and the acceleration that lies ahead.
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S15This Week on 'Shark Tank': How Crispy Cones Landed Barbara Corcoran as Its First Investor  By September 2022, when the couple went on Shark Tank for the first time, they had two storefronts--one in Logan, Utah, and one in Rexburg, Idaho--that they'd built with a Small Business Administration loan and a $190,000 credit line. But to scale, they needed more. While watching an episode of Shark Tank one night, Kaitlyn said, the thought of applying dawned on them. "We were thinking, 'What's the difference between us and those people who are pitching right now? We could totally do that,'" she said. Â
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S16Are You Being Emotionally Manipulated at Work?  Research has shown that emotional manipulation (EM) can significantly impact individuals’ well-being and productivity. It can systematically influence cognitive control, which is crucial for effective decision-making and problem-solving, and can also affect individuals’ interpersonal relationships and overall mental health, further impacting their productivity and satisfaction in the workplace. If you think you’re being emotionally manipulated at work, try these five strategies to protect yourself — and your workplace.
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S174 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Changing Careers  Changing careers can be an exhilarating way to keep yourself intellectually engaged, but it inevitably entails some risk. In this article, the author outlines four questions to ask yourself before you transition into a new field: 1) What’s motivating the change? 2) What’s the smallest way to test your hypotheses? 3) What’s your runway? 4) What’s your fallback plan?
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S18How Former U.S. Presidents Found Their Second Acts  Successful former presidents have a few things in common with business leaders who moved onto a new phase after their time in corporate life. The post-presidencies offer a wide-ranging roadmap of the state of possible for anyone moving from one position to another. This is especially needed at the senior-most levels, where CEOs and other top leaders often associate their very self-identities with their jobs and don’t often feel comfortable talking about what they might want to consider doing after their current position. The authors lay out seven post-presidential career paths and what options they illustrate for senior executives considering what’s possible in their own career or life transition.
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S19The 14 Games We're Still Most Looking Forward to In 2024 ![]() If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDIn 2023, it felt like the new hit games were just never going to stop coming. In a way, they didn't. We're firmly in 2024 and we're still excited for new titles. From new games like Hades II, to actuallygood remakes like Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, here are the games we're most excited about this year.
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S20Bitcoin Royalty Descends on the Satoshi Nakamoto Trial ![]() Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, an enigmatic figure about whom almost nothing is known. Fifteen years ago, Satoshi brought the idea of an electronic cash system into being with the help of a small cast of oddballs. This week, some of those early collaboratorsânow crypto-celebrities in their own rightâtook to the witness box of a London courtroom. They had come to testify against an alleged imposter.Since 2016, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright has claimed to be Satoshi. The claim is widely disputed, yet Wright has wielded it in a series of lawsuits against developers and others in pursuit of establishing intellectual property rights over Bitcoin. The stakes are high: If Wright succeeds, he could prevent developers from working on the Bitcoin codebase and dictate the terms of use for the system.
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