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Paying back your student loans just got harder

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  If you need a little help paying for four years of beer pong higher education, getting it could be more challenging. New rules that began yesterday will cap the amount you can borrow and increase some monthly repayments. Here’s some of what’s changing for borrowing: Parents borrowing on behalf of undergraduate students will be limited to $20,000 annually and to $65,000 total. Graduate school borrowing is capped at $100,000 over the course of the program, down from $138,500, but the limit for those pursuing professional degrees , like medicine or law, was raised from $20,500 to $50,000 per year. The Education Department’s plan to exclude some professional fields from the increase, like nursing and accounting, is on hold pending legal challenges. A bad RAP? For repayment, new borrowers must choose between the Tiered Standard Plan and the new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP)—monthly payments for the latter will be 1%–10% of a borrower’s income. Experts say borrowers will pay mo...
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Graduation speakers can’t stop talking about AI

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  It’s that time of year when VIPs head to college campuses, secretly hoping to join Steve Jobs and David Foster Wallace in the commencement address Hall of Fame. This year, CEOs and celebrities are seeking to inspire and uplift the class of 2026 graduates by addressing the thing that keeps many of them up at night (besides partying): AI. AI, ever heard of it? This week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang insisted Carnegie Mellon grads should run, not walk, toward AI, which he said is making the present moment a historically opportune time to start a career. The king of AI chipmaking reassured grads that the tech won’t replace them, but could instead enhance their professional capabilities—as long as they embrace it and don’t get left behind. Similarly, basketball star Magic Johnson advised Stillman College and Tuskegee University grads to grind hard and master AI. But the most important commencement lesson appears to be the importance of reading the room, which real estate development execu...
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University of Michigan drops letter grades for first-semester freshmen

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  Good news for anyone planning to wing it on their Victorian lit final (there are multiple Brontë sisters btw): The University of Michigan won’t release official grades for its freshmen’s first semester. The university said that the pivot to a pass/no credit system for first semester classes is an effort to “curb the mental health crisis” among students. The pilot program will start in the fall of 2027 and apply to the roughly 3,500 students that enter the College of Literature, Science, and Arts each year. Professors will still give students grades on assignments, and the school will internally track grades for scholarship and athletic requirements. But the letter grades won’t show up on students’ transcripts: The administration said the program is aimed at helping students transition to college-level work and explore courses that are more difficult without the risk that a bad grade early on would tank their GPAs. Critics outside the school argue the new approach creates entit...
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Trial to decide if Amazon tricked prime users

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  Uncle Sam is fighting Amazon in court for allegedly tricking customers into signing up for Prime and making the process of canceling the subscription into a digital escape room. Arguments begin today as a case that the Federal Trade Commission filed in 2023 goes to trial. Prime chicanery accusation The FTC will argue that Amazon illegally used so-called “dark patterns” to ensnare Prime subscribers: The regulator claims Amazon nudged customers to sign up for Prime membership, while hiding its $139 annual price tag and disclosures of its autorenewal in fine print. The suit claims that canceling Prime involved clicking through a deluge of prompts. Amazon allegedly internally referred to the obfuscation effort as The Iliad in reference to the Trojan War epic. The e-commerce giant denies deceiving customers. Amazon will maintain that the FTC misconstrued its internal communications. It also claims that the multiple-step cancellation process is standard industry practice and has alre...
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OpenAI denies stealing the fruits of Apple’s labor

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  Apple’s former employees may not be falling far enough away from the tree, at least according to the company’s new lawsuit against OpenAI. The suit , filed in federal court on Friday, accused the startup of systematically leveraging its former employees as part of a broad, coordinated effort to steal trade secrets. What does the lawsuit allege? Apple said “every level” of OpenAI was involved in the scheme, but a lot of the lawsuit centers on Tang Tan, a former Apple VP and OpenAI’s current chief hardware officer, who is accused of getting Apple employees to share company secrets while they interviewed for jobs at OpenAI. Apple turnover: If Apple employees did leave for OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker gave them advice on how to avoid immediately being removed from the company, so they could stay on for a couple more weeks to access Apple’s internal systems and trade secrets, the suit alleged. Apple said it has 400+ former employees now working at OpenAI, including engineer Chang Liu, w...
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Buc-ee’s goes beast mode on trademark protection

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  We thought the only Angry Beavers were Norbert and Daggett, but it might be time to add Buc-ee to the list. Buc-ee’s has garnered a lot of attention for a series of lawsuits it’s filed regarding alleged trademark infringement on its beloved buck-toothed boi. Beaver says ‘leave it’ The convenience mart-slash-gas station chain based in Texas recently thrilled international World Cup fans , but public sentiment has since shifted. On July 26, John Oliver dedicated a segment of Last Week Tonight to the barrage of lawsuits Buc-ee’s has lodged against smaller businesses. These include: Suing the clothing brand Born United for an apparel line featuring a beaver strikingly similar to the Buc-ee’s mascot carrying an automatic weapon . The brand pulled the offending products from its site. A dog park in Missouri called Barc-ee’s , which shut down as a result of the lawsuit. Choke Canyon Bar-B-Q, a San Antonio, TX-based restaurant chain with a circular logo featuring a cartoon alligator. ...
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AI made 16 brand-new viruses

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  ork? If your understanding of biology stops at mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell, just know that Evo was trained on over 9 trillion nucleotides—the building blocks of DNA and RNA—in an attempt to notice patterns that humans have yet to recognize: After gobbling up nature’s beautiful code, the program spat out about 700,000 potential genome combinations. Scientists at Stanford University and the Arc Institute tested 285 of those recipes they deemed viable, and 16 of them grew real-life viruses that have never been produced before. Not all viruses are bad. The rhino, corona, and noro varieties aren’t great, but doctors use engineered viruses to fight drug-resistant bacteria and genetic diseases. Researchers have long manufactured viruses to better understand how they work, and AI could potentially make that work easier. But… there are fears that a bad actor—or a scientist without adequate guardrails—could use the tech to design a bioweapon. The researchers also warned...
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