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Nobody wants to swipe anymore. Dating apps like Bumble and Tinder are scrambling to keep younger users engaged, and dealing with problems like bots on their platforms. But one brand is breaking the pattern and winning. Hinges designed to be deleted tagline signals its strategy: focus on meaningful connection, not endless swiping. The app can feel slower and even harder to use, leading to fewer matches but ultimately more dates. Now, the big question is whether Bumble and Tinder can pull off a similar shift toward quality over quantity.
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E-Commerce
More than 18,000 Amtrak workers will receive a $900 bonus before the end of the year, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced on Thursday evening.Funding for the bonuses will come from Amtrak’s executive leadership team bonus packages, the statement said. The federal administration urged executive leadership “to forgo 50% of the bonus packages that would have been paid out under the misplaced priorities of the previous executive bonus structure.”Amtrak set all-time records for both ridership and revenue in the 2025 fiscal year, according to its annual report, with over $2.7 billion in ticket revenue from 34.5 million riders.The bonuses were applauded by some unions representing train workers.“End-of-year bonuses will now go to 18,000 front-line workers rather than being limited to the executive ranks. This long-overdue recognition of the employees who keep the railroad moving is a step in the right direction,” Mark Wallace, the president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen National union, said in a statement.The announcement comes amid ongoing controversy over the Trump administration’s decision to limit $10,000 bonuses to air traffic controllers and technicians who had perfect attendance during the government shutdown a measure that rewarded only 776 people, and left nearly 20,000 other workers without the payment.The disparity was blasted by air traffic controller unions at the time of the announcement in November.“We are concerned that thousands of air traffic controllers who consistently reported for duty during the shutdown, ensuring the safe transport of passengers and cargo across the nation, while working without pay and uncertain of when they would receive compensation, were excluded from this recognition,” the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union said in a statement. Safiyah Riddle, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
This morning, OpenAI released the companys new GPT-5.2 model. If youre a coder or someone who follows AI benchmarks for fun (hey, I wont judge), this model will excite you tremendously. For everyone else, prepare to be underwhelmedor rather, prepare to wait another month or so for the real OpenAI new release to come out. Keeping up with the Joneses GPT-5.2 is fundamentally about making small tweaks and improvements to the already fairly new GPT-5.1 model. Todays release improves OpenAIs performance on a variety of industry benchmarks. GPT-5.2 is faster and more efficient than its predecessor, and it does a better job solving scientific and technical problems. In particular, its better at writing code and doing math, and performs better on so-called agentic tasks, where the model operates for a long time without human input. OpenAI also says its better at solving real-world financial challenges. If it had existed when I did my ChatGPT investing experiment, maybe I really would have Lambo money by now! Beyond that, theres nothing especially revolutionary in GPT-5.2. So, why make a big fuss about releasing a whole new model before the holidays if it does fairly little thats truly new? Because in the ongoing saga of the AI wars, OpenAI feels it needs to keep up with the Jonesesor in this case, specifically, to keep up with Google. Industry watchers have noted that Googles Gemini 3 model began to threaten GPT-5.1s spot on the kind of performance leaderboards that AI companies pay close attention to. This reportedly caused a code red alert from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman reportedly ordered his teams to stop working on Sora and other projects to focus all their efforts on improving ChatGPT and its underlying models as quickly as possible. When you order a bunch of incredibly intelligent peoplesome of them being paid upwards of $1 million a yearto do something quickly, theyre likely to oblige. Within a few weeks of the reported code red, the OpenAI team had todays incremental release ready to go. GPT-5.2 will probably allow OpenAI to briefly leapfrog its archnemesis Googleand smaller competitor Anthropicin industry benchmarks, once again claiming its place as the undisputed leader in the AI wars. The real main event The code red reportedly isnt over yet, though. Earlier this month, analysts noted that OpenAI was testing a new reasoning model, codenamed “Garlic.” GPT-5.2 might have been part of Garlic. But many in the industry expect an expanded Garlic model (probably under the GPT-5.5 moniker) to come out in Q1 of 2026, potentially as early as January. Its likely to be a fully retrained reasoning model that brings efficiency improvements, but also genuinely impactful ones like a larger context window, new knowledge cutoff (OpenAIs most recent models have been stuck in 2024), better personality, and improved performance on image generation to rival Googles Nano Banana. Its also broadly rumored to include a new Adult Mode that allows ChatGPT to engage in, ahem, risque conversations with users who are older than 18. In the broader context of a potentially entirely revamped model with a January release date, todays GPT-5.2 model feels premature. Releasing it makes OpenAI seem a bit jumpylike its nervous that someone will come along and unseat it, and is willing to go to great lengths to stop that from happening, even if everyday users barely care about coding and science benchmarks. GPT-5.2 says less about OpenAIs technical prowess, then, and more about how Altman and his team are feeling. Google once seemed like it was floundering and slowly losing the AI racegoing the way of Polaroid or Xerox. Now, its back in the game, and seems poised and confident. OpenAI isnt used to playing second fiddle. Faced with the prospect of real competition, the company is clearly getting nervous. Last year, OpenAI celebrated the holidays with a jolly and carefree Shipmas celebration. For Altman and his team, this holiday season is likely to be a lot less fun and carefree.
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E-Commerce
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