After buying my first expensive skin cream, I instantly felt buyers’ remorse. Had I wasted my money? The answer is “yes.”

My education began when I spotted a YouTube video titled: “Number One Skin expert: three biggest myths about anti-aging, collagen and sunscreen, by Professor John McGrath.” McGrath is a professor of molecular dermatology at King’s College, London and editor of the British Journal of Dermatology. His research transformed our understanding of genetic skin disorders and vitamin D’s role in skin health. 

OK, so that’s awesome, but I didn’t have the patience to listen to McGrath for over an hour. So I went to Google’s “NotebookLM” to get a summary of it, then fired off my questions.

You can do this too. On a computer go to NotebookLM.google.com, click “upload a source,” and tap “YouTube.” Be sure you’ve copied the YouTube video’s web address from the top of the page, then click “insert,” and paste it in. Besides offering a summary, Notebook LM will take your questions. It’s almost as if the YouTube speaker is in the same room.

In my case, it took but a few seconds to learn that “expensive anti-aging creams often lack scientific proof of deep penetration and primarily offer superficial improvements, while collagen powders are largely ineffective because the body digests them into basic amino acids rather than directly integrating them into skin collagen.” McGrath recommends a simple skincare routine of cleansing, moisturizing, and applying sunscreen. If you want something more, there’s retinol, which is relatively cheap. He says its anti-aging effects are backed by science. Unfortunately, I’m allergic to it.

Besides YouTube videos, NotebookLM allows you to upload articles, slides, audio files, websites and more. It’s  a great way to get the gist of an article, book or presentation without having to read or watch the whole thing. You can upload or paste material from 50 different sources per notebook, each with as many as 500,000 words. That’s more than four times the number of words in the average book, and you get 100 notebooks free.

Copilot Sees All

“Would you like my help with that?” Microsoft Copilot asked me, referring to an email I had on my computer screen. “That’s right up my alley.”

I felt violated. Who told Copilot to read my email? Evidently I did. It’s part of its new “Vision” feature, which allows Microsoft’s artificially intelligent bot to see whatever you have on your screen, whether it’s an email, a private online diary, or an ordinary web page. 

If this bothers you, change it. On your computer, click Copilot’s colorful icon in the upper right of your screen while you’re in the Microsoft Edge browser, an alternative to Google Chrome, Safari and others. The Copilot sidebar will appear. Now click the three vertical dots in the upper right, choose “Settings,” then “Privacy.” Turn off “Context Clues,” and perhaps “Personalization and Memory,” which watches your activity on Bing and MSN to glean your interests. 

But once I got over the surprise of having an email read and commented on, I decided that I like having Copilot’s tailored responses to whatever I have open on the screen. For example, when I had the “Morning Brew” newsletter open in an email, Copilot asked me if I wanted a summary of it. Sure, I said.

Move Over Visa and Mastercard

You may have read that Walmart and Amazon are thinking of offering a way to pay for purchases with stablecoins, a form of cryptocurrency.  But do you know how it would work?

At checkout, you’d use your new stablecoin card just like you’d use a credit card. But in this case, it would automatically convert money from your bank account into stablecoins, cutting out the fees paid to Visa or Mastercard. You might not even be aware that stablecoins were involved. But you’d probably be happy to get a discount for using your new card. 

I can almost hear people freaking out. But stablecoins are pegged to the US dollar, unlike Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. One stablecoin is always worth one dollar. That’s why they’re called stablecoins. In addition to Walmart and Amazon, Expedia and a few airlines, such as BermudAir, are considering them too.  

AI Ad

Here are some scenes from a recent ad that aired during the NBA finals: A shirtless old man wrapped in an American flag shouts, “Indiana gonna win, baby!” A young woman next to an alligator screams, “We’re in Florida asking people what they put their money on!” A man in a pool of eggs predicts that prices will go to $20 a carton. 

The ad is for a trading platform called Kalshi. It ends with the phrase: “The world has gone mad, trade it.”

Though ads like this ordinarily cost around $30,000 to make, this one only cost $2000, using Google’s new video generator, Veo 3. What’s more, it took Veo only two or three days to come up with 15 usable clips. Google Gemini AI furnished the prompts typed into Veo’s search box. A human used a video editing program to polish the results.

But Veo 3 is far from the only video generator. If you sell products on Amazon, for example, you can use their new “Video Ads Generator,” available in the Amazon Ads console, free for all sellers.

Filed under: AI, crytpocurrency