As I've gotten older, I've learned to embrace rare chances to step out of my comfort zone. This time, it was by disconnecting in a remote area abroad with a group of people I didn't know. Allie Hubers I traveled to a remote part of Sweden to celebrate my friend's 30th birthday with 25 strangers. We quickly bonded through late-night conversations as we disconnected in the Swedish countryside. Pushing myself outside my comfort zone reminded me how rewarding it can be to embrace the unknown. When my college friend invited me to Sweden for her 30th birthday, I didn't hesitate to say yes. In fact, I booked my flight to Europe within an hour of receiving her invitation in the mail. Her camp-themed celebration was set to take place over a summer weekend in the small, remote town of Björkasjö, Sweden. My friend had rented a massive 7,000-square-foot house that once operated as an actual summer camp, so group meals, camp-inspired games, and lake swims were part of the plan. I'm always eager to plan my next adventure, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to celebrate her milestone birthday. However, as the trip approached and the guest list was finalized, I recognized only my friend's and her sister's names. Soon, I realized I'd basically be spending the weekend off the grid in another country with 25 strangers. After a bit of solo travel, I connected with the group and formed fast friendships I explored Copenhagen solo before heading off the grid. Allie Hubers Before the weekend festivities began, I spent the day exploring Copenhagen on my own. I usually travel with friends or family, so kicking off my trip this way was yet another step outside of my comfort zone. Despite being a Type-A planner, I had nothing arranged but a hotel room for the night. To my surprise, I wasn't lonely and really enjoyed the freedom of wandering the city on my own without a plan. Following my solo day in Copenhagen, I hopped into a rental car with two other women who were also traveling to the same summer camp. My friend had loosely connected us a few days before the trip, and although we had mutual friends from Minnesota, we didn't actually meet until we arrived in Europe. Our drive was filled with conversations. Allie Hubers I was worried the 2½ -hour drive into remote Sweden could be awkward, but we ended up talking and laughing the entire time, despite the jet lag. As a Midwesterner now living in Florida, I always appreciate connecting with people who share those same roots. The three of us quickly bonded over McFlurries and chicken sandwiches at McDonald's during a very non-traditional Swedish fika. Once we arrived at the camp compound, the three of us grabbed a room to share for the weekend. By that night, we were already swapping stories and getting ready together like we'd known each other longer than a day. During the trip, I shared a room with new friends. Allie Hubers As people arrived from all over the US and Europe, conversations kept flowing. The group ranged from recent college graduates in their mid-20s to married couples in their 30s expecting their first child. I loved meeting another military spouse, fellow alums from my college, and plenty of Taylor Swift fans. Despite our different backgrounds, ages, and life experiences, everyone was interested in getting to know each other. Stepping away from the rest of the world truly allowed us to bond through deeper conversations. Instead of mindlessly scrolling on my phone each night, I was engaging in interesting conversations with new friends and soaking in the peaceful Swedish countryside. I was even surprised by how much I had in common with some of the recent Gen Z college graduates, despite our eight-year age gap. While they were building careers in bustling New York City, I was settling into a quieter life with my husband in Florida's Panhandle. Although our lives looked very different, we found plenty to talk about, including a shared love of international travel. Spending the weekend outdoors also pushed me outside my comfort zone Between meeting new people and being off the grid, I was reminded that some of the best experiences can come from discomfort. Allie Hubers As promised, the birthday weekend was filled with nonstop fun, including a lot of late-night parties and day drinking. I was never really into the party scene in college, and I certainly don't have the same stamina at 30 that I did back then. Some of the drinking games were completely new to me — and I couldn't decide if I felt young for joining in or old because I couldn't hang. I still pushed myself to keep up, knowing I didn't want to miss out on the experience. Beyond the partying, I often found myself embracing new experiences I normally wouldn't have tried otherwise. I found myself cooking, playing new games, and trying things I normally would not. Allie Hubers For instance, a cold midnight swim in the lake, which I later learned had leeches, isn't normally my idea of fun. As someone who isn't particularly outdoorsy, I never expected this to become one of my favorite memories of the trip. Even still, I ran into the chilly water under the bright moonlight, laughing and smiling from ear to ear with new friends. And although I'm not much of a cook, I was also happy to jump into the kitchen and help prepare meals for the group. By the end of the weekend, the 25 strangers didn't feel like strangers anymore I loved meeting new people and forming fast friendships all weekend. Allie Hubers Knowing my friend had brought together a group of people she loved and cared about gave me the confidence I needed to go on this trip, and I'm grateful. Opportunities to step out of my comfort zone like this are rare, and the older I get, the more I realize how important it is to say yes when they come up. A few years ago, I would have felt overwhelmed at the idea of spending a weekend in another country with new people. After this experience, I wouldn't hesitate to take the risk again. It reminded me that stepping into discomfort can create some of the most memorable travel experiences. Read the original article on Business Insider

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The flaw allows an unauthenticated attacker to craft a GitHub Issue in an org's public repository and then silently pull data from its private repos, too.

Jordan Tovin/Reuters Bricks fell from a Manhattan tower that formerly held Pfizer's global headquarters on Tuesday morning. The incident sparked a large emergency response and the evacuation of several buildings. FDNY said it found "buckled" columns and "sagging" floors at the high-rise at 235 East 42nd Street. A Manhattan high-rise that once served as Pfizer's global headquarters was evacuated Tuesday morning after bricks plunged from the 38-story tower, sparking a large emergency response and the clearing of several neighboring buildings. New York City Fire Department officials said that after emergency responders arrived at the under-construction building at 235 East 42nd Street in Midtown, they found two support columns "buckled" on the 21st and 22nd floors, as well as "sagging" floors between the 21st and 26th floors. The 38-story tower at 235 East 42nd Street. FDNY The FDNY initially received a call about falling bricks just before 8 a.m. ET, according to officials. Seven other surrounding buildings were evacuated as a precaution as city officials assessed the scene, fire officials said. Several Manhattan buildings were evacuated. Jordan Tovin/Reuters No injuries were reported, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that all construction workers who had been inside the building at 235 East 42nd Street were accounted for. "Multiple cracks and sagging floors were found at the 21st floor," Mamdani told reporters during a press conference. Sagging floors were discovered at 235 East 42nd Street. Jordan Tovin/Reuters Video footage circulating on social media appears to show structural steel beams bending inside the building. @newyorkcityy__ Steel beams are collapsing #pziferbuilding ♬ original sound - NYC The former Pfizer headquarters is undergoing a major conversion from office space into a 1,600-unit residential rental development with a quarter of the units reserved for affordable housing. The former Pfizer building is undergoing a major conversion. Jordan Tovin/Reuters The project, developed by the firm MetroLoft, is slated for completion early next year and is expected to include ground-floor retail space and 100,000 square feet of amenities. Representatives for MetroLoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider. MetroLoft says on its website that upon completion, the project will be New York City's "largest office to residential conversion to date." Read the original article on Business Insider

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One out of every five Americans say they lost more than $100 by following financial advice from an AI chatbot, a 2025 survey found. Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash Consider the following scenario. Suzy is 63, recently retired, and trying to decide when to start receiving Social Security and how to manage her retirement savings to minimize the tax hit. She opens an AI chatbot, types in the details and gets a calm, well-organized and confident answer: Claim now, convert this much, here is the reasoning. The chatbot sounds authoritative and even shows its work. So Suzy follows its guidance and never calls a financial planner. Maybe the advice was fine. But maybe it quietly ignored the fact that Suzy’s spouse is younger and in poor health, which can flip the Social Security math. It also may have overlooked that the retirement savings plan conversion it suggested would push Suzy into paying higher Medicare premiums two years later. Suzy won’t find out for a long time, if ever, whether this guidance was right for her. And the AI will never call back to say it was unsure. Suzy isn’t an exception. AI chatbots have entered everyday life with remarkable speed: A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 34% of U.S. adults and 58% of those under 30 have used ChatGPT, roughly double the share two years earlier. A growing number are asking AI about money, and some are getting burned. According to a 2025 survey of 2,000 U.S. adults by Pearl.com, a professional services platform, 19% said they lost more than $100 by following financial advice from an AI chatbot. Among Gen Z investors, that figure rose to 27%. These aren’t hypothetical risks. People are already paying for answers about their money that are confident – and wrong. As a finance professor who has been closely watching the spread of AI into personal finance, this is the part of the AI story that worries me most. And it’s not the part you usually hear about. We argue about AI the wrong way There are two seemingly opposite complaints about AI. One is that people trust it too much, treating a chatbot like an oracle, a tendency researchers call algorithm appreciation. The other is that people don’t trust it enough and dismiss its useful tools, a tendency known as algorithm aversion. I argue these are actually two sides of the same coin, and what decides which side you see is whether you can tell when the AI is wrong. When an AI fails in an obvious way, you notice and lose confidence. So you’re more likely to seek a professional or another human you trust sooner than you otherwise would. That is the safe failure. The dangerous failure is the opposite. The answer is fluent, confident – and wrong. You have no way to catch it, so you keep managing the problem yourself long past when you should have asked for help. The trouble is that with money, the second kind of failure is the common kind. Typical users of chatbots for financial advice tend to be younger, with men outnumbering women. Tim Gouw on Upslash, CC BY When you mistake fluency for accuracy Three things make financial advice especially treacherous for AI. First, fluency is not accuracy. People naturally read a confident and well-articulated answer as competent. But how polished an answer sounds tells you almost nothing about whether it fits your situation or the accuracy of the proposed solution. A chatbot can be word-perfect and still be wrong about your taxes, because your taxes depend on details it never asked about. Second, AI is least reliable exactly where the stakes are highest. AI tools are good at routine and general topics: what a Roth IRA is, how compound interest works, the difference between a stock and a bond. But financial life is full of rare, complicated, one-time decisions: exercising stock options, understanding the alternative minimum tax, making required, minimum 401(k) distributions, deciding on a Social Security strategy as a couple, drawing up a divorce settlement. I made a similar argument three years ago about AI trading on Wall Street. Because market crashes are rare, there’s little data for AI to learn from, so it can be most confident exactly where it is least informed. That worry hasn’t faded. Market watchers now caution that AI trading bots are creating fresh financial risks, and that same blind spot applies to your personal finances. Researchers call this uneven competence a “jagged frontier” – reliable with common cases but unreliable for unusual ones. And in finance, the unusual cases tend to be the expensive ones. Third, you often can’t check the work. Financial advice is what economists call a “credence good,” like a mechanic’s diagnosis or a doctor’s recommendation. You often can’t tell whether the advice was good, sometimes for years. A mistaken tax move may not surface until an audit. A bad 401(k) drawdown plan may not bite until the stock market slumps. Without quick feedback, the wrong-but-confident answer never gets corrected. This is why the Pearl numbers above are probably an undercount, since they capture only losses people noticed. The quiet failure is the one to watch Notice that the real harm in Suzy’s story isn’t a single dramatic mistake. It’s that a confident answer made Suzy feel no need to call a professional, so the call never happened. The danger is not so much that you act on bad advice but that you never seek good advice. The smoother and more reassuring the tool, the easier it is to stay in do-it-yourself mode past the point when you need outside help. Who’s most at risk? In a study of a large robo-advising platform in India, co-author Vishaal Baulkaran and I found that its users skew young, are predominantly male and tend to be smaller retail investors and professionals. And new account sign-ups rise during periods of high market volatility. In other words, the people leaning hardest on automated advice match that 27% figure among those Gen Zers who lost more than $100 while using a chatbot for financial advice. They reach for it just when markets turn turbulent and a wrong move is most costly. There’s also an incentive worth naming. In my new analysis, I argue that a tool that earns its revenue by holding your attention has a reason to sound confident and helpful: Confidence keeps you on the platform. The catch is that the user it retains that way is sometimes the one who should have been handed off to a human. A system tuned to keep you engaged isn’t the same as one tuned to protect your financial future, and the two can point in different directions. The disruption is already underway, as wealth managers face what Bloomberg has called a chatbot reckoning. A single, new AI tax tool recently sent wealth management stocks sliding as investors bet that automated advice will eat into the business. How to be smart about using AI These findings don’t mean that people should avoid AI for money advice. Used well, these tools are a valuable and free financial educator. This is also not to say that a financial adviser always has the right answers. As with finding any kind of specialist, it’s important to do research first and make sure they meet the kind of criteria laid out by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Fee transparency is also crucial. But if you do turn to AI, the skill is knowing where to draw the line. Treat AI as a starting point, not a verdict. It’s excellent for learning concepts, drafting questions and getting oriented before a meeting. It can teach people the vocabulary to have a smarter conversation with an expert. But watch out for the signals that you have left its comfort zone and entered the territory where AI is weakest and a confident answer is least trustworthy. The red flags are large dollar amounts, tax consequences, anything irreversible and anything that turns on the specifics of your situation rather than a general rule. Estate questions, the drawdown of retirement savings, strategies for claiming Social Security benefits, business structure and major one-time transactions all belong in this category. Those are the decisions that call for bringing in a human, such as a certified financial planner. And remember, confidence isn’t competence. When the answer about your money sounds most polished and most certain, that’s not a reason to relax. On the hardest questions, that smooth confidence is exactly the signal that you should pick up the phone and talk to an expert. Pawan Jain does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Your family’s $300 stake in OpenAI Sam Altman’s proposal that Americans should share in the wealth created by AI is back in the spotlight, with reports that he is discussing giving…