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👋 Good morning. Has life been feeling a little… meh? You’re not alone: 48% of Americans say they’re lacking fun, according to Dave & Buster’s State of Fun Report. It’s not that adults don’t want to have a good time — 89% believe that having fun with others leads to stronger relationships and 71% say fun reduces stress. For many, the holdup is financial: 57% say cost and budget prevent them from making fun plans. On the bright side, we just remembered Dave & Buster's is a thing.

NEWS FLASH

A hammer, paintbrush, and other tools move over a white house.

🏠 It’s a good thing? Martha Stewart co-founded a startup with her neighbor, AI engineer Kyle Rush, and Yih-Han Ma. It’s an AI home management startup called Hint that looks at public data, inspection reports, utility bills, insurance policies, and other data to create a record of what a home might need, whether that’s a new insurance policy, a maintenance reminder, or a repair.

🎧 What was your first Spotify stream? To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the streaming music platform launched a “Wrapped”-esque feature in which users can see highlights from their entire listening history, including their top artist and the first song they ever played, access a playlist of their top 120 jams, and view how many times they’ve listened to them. Fun fact: Spotify officially launched in the US in July 2011, when the top song was LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem.”

✈️ Wheels up: United Airlines Ventures invested in Enhanced Radar, a startup that makes AI software to analyze and transcribe millions of daily air traffic control transmissions to give airlines faster, fuller insights into operations. Instead of just seeing a delay notification, the startup’s software allows airline workers to see the full reason for a delay and respond accordingly.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

Oof: Inflation has now reached its highest point since 2023, with consumer prices up 3.8% YoY. The biggest culprit? Gasoline, now priced at an average of $4.50 per gallon due to the war in Iran.
“Neither credible nor attractive” is how eBay Chairman Paul Pressler described GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen’s $55.5B seemingly random bid to acquire it. Ebay’s market cap is currently ~$49B, to GameStop’s ~$10B.
An AI giant gets dethroned: Anthropic now has more business customers than OpenAI, according to Ramp data, with 34.4% of businesses paying for its service vs. OpenAI’s 32.3%.
Your anime dreams are here: China's Unitree revealed a 1.1k-pound mecha suit that a human can operate from inside. You can buy it for $650k, but know that Unitree’s asked buyers to “refrain” from using it in a “hazardous manner.”

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM

An illustration of a lab. In the center, a saw cuts through a piece of wood.

AI enters the workshop

We know AI is taking over tech, but it’s also helping to modernize older crafts.

Companies are using AI to tackle dust extraction, which protects workers’ lungs, and make table saws that can detect skin within milliseconds to reduce injuries.

Some are taking it even further with robot-powered “microfactories.”

👍 Read more on Mindstream.

THE BIG IDEA

A man in a gray hoodie and denim overalls scrubs a headstone with a sponge.

A subscription service for maintaining graves

No one intends to let a loved one’s gravesite fall into disrepair, but upkeep can be tricky if you live far away or don’t know how.

Startups have been bridging the gap through regular weeding and cleaning services, while social media accounts showing how it’s done — like those run by Caitlin Abrams and Shaun Tookey — have amassed large followings.

Tending is a gravesite maintenance app spun out of All Funeral Services, a software platform that helps cemeteries and crematoriums manage sales, records, and inventory and create searchable online maps.

“We noticed that cemeteries and funeral directors all work with people when they’re in deep grief,” Artem Manilov, co-founder and CEO, told The Hustle. “We need to go through the difficult times, but after, we can honor our ancestors, and that’s actually what we started to build.”

How it works

Tending offers either a one-time restoration starting at $225 or a subscription starting at $96 per session.
About 60% of its customers choose the latter, which includes an initial restoration and quarterly maintenance.
Independent contractors perform the maintenance and upload before-and-after photos to Tending’s app.
AI identifies stone types and offers contractors guidance on how to restore and clean them.
Cemeteries can earn money through referrals.

Tending has completed 20k+ one-time orders across the US, counts 5k+ active subscribers, and receives ~70 new orders daily.

In the near future…

… Tending plans to add family accounts with group chat.

It’s also exploring what memorializations might look like as burials become less common — such as a holographic or virtual space where people can still participate in meaningful rituals.

Elsewhere:

You, Only Virtual is a platform that lets users chat with AI versions of late loved ones.
In Japan, events company Alpha Club Musashino offers metaverse cemeteries for people who are too far and/or busy to visit in person.

And recently, Pam Cronrath worked with Proto Hologram and Hyperreal to create a hologram of her husband of 60+ years to appear at his funeral. It even conducted a Q&A, confusing many guests who, she told reporters, “genuinely couldn't understand how it was happening.

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Close your eyes and picture Gap’s logo. You probably can. That’s because bold, on-brand design is memorable. Here’s how to pull it off.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Share of girls ages 5-13 who view AI assistants and chatbots like Siri, Alexa, and ChatGPT as their friends, according to a new survey from The Girl Scouts of America. Friends, that is, who are cooler, smarter, and funnier than their parents: The survey also found ~50% of little girls prefer AI over the people who raised them when it comes to homework help, pop culture recs, and making them laugh.

Looks like dad jokes just won’t cut it for this generation.

AROUND THE WEB

📅 On this day: In 1973, the US launched Skylab, its first space station.

🎶 That’s cool: Mixed Tapes offers a free, curated playlist of new music across genres every month, plus more specific weekly playlists for subscribers.

🧠 How to: monotask.

🗑️ Game: Tidy up.

🪿 Aww: Animal friendship.

SHOWER THOUGHT

If reincarnation is real, immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) must be what you come back as when the universe has finally had enough of your BS. SOURCE

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Editing by: Sara "I dig it" Friedman.

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