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Warning: This article discusses self-harm.

Five episodes into Peacock's Crystal Lake, Friday the 13th fans come across a familiar sight.

With all of Camp Crystal Lake's campers asleep in their beds, their counselors gather by a fireplace for some late-night singing. Couple Claudette (Danielle Kotch) and Barry (Phoenix Parnevik) make eyes at each other throughout the song, then ruin off to a shed to fool around. It's an uncanny mirror to the opening sequence of the original Friday the 13th, right down to foreboding shots from the point of view of an unseen figure stalking the pair.

SEE ALSO: 'Crystal Lake': What is Argonaut?

Anyone who's seen Friday the 13th would think that that figure is Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini), camp line cook and mother to the late Jason Voorhees (Callum Vinson). In the original movie, she admits to killing Claudette and Barry to get revenge on them for shirking their counselor duties and running off to have sex. When they did, they left campers unsupervised, meaning they weren't around to save Jason from drowning.

However, Crystal Lake switches up this defining moment from the franchise, handing the kill over to an entirely different character.

Who kills Barry and Claudette in Crystal Lake?

The culprit in Crystal Lake is actually Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), a young camper who was Jason's only friend. Due to her closeness to Jason, Grace becomes a fixation for Pam. She obsesses over protecting her, even killing her abusive mother, Valerie (Tonya Glanz), in a diner beatdown. In a twist, it turns out that the cigarette burns Pam thought Valerie gave Grace were actually from Grace herself, who was self-harming.

Between Jason's death and her mother's demise, Grace lives in a constant state of emotional turmoil. No wonder she begins to gravitate towards the hippies who are temporarily staying at Camp Crystal Lake. However, the hippies decide they can't take Grace with them to their commune in Maine, and Harmony (Manon Gage) shows more interest in having sex with Barry than in hanging out with Grace. From there, Grace's jealousy takes hold. She takes acid herself. Soon after, she's following Claudette and Barry to the shed.

For Grace, seeing Claudette and Barry hooking up again is a horrifying moment of déjà vu. She witnessed the pair having sex the day Jason died and has been haunted by the encounter ever since. Now, in her altered state, she believes she can prevent Jason's death if she can prevent Claudette and Barry from having sex in that moment. Cue the stabbing! Moments later, Pam rushes in and immediately sets about protecting Grace — but not before she drives the final stab home on Claudette, one last piece of vengeance for her abandoning Jason.

Pam does plenty of killing elsewhere in the show, including unleashing a full bloodbath in the very next episode. That doesn't change the fact that altering the fundamental kills from the first film is an odd move to make in a prequel series, especially one that hews so closely to the style of the original. Instead of adding depth to an iconic horror moment, Crystal Lake pulls a cheap gotcha twist that feels designed to spark outrage from diehard franchise fans.

There is no meaningful recontextualization here, just a surprise that Crystal Lake moves on from far too quickly as it zips towards unpacking Jason's (Callum Vinson) backstory. On top of that, the Grace reveal softens Pam's villainy, removing the stalker-like intention behind the original kills and turning it into her simply taking advantage of an accidental slashing. For a show that's all about putting Pam Voorhees back in the spotlight, Crystal Lake simply couldn't get her biggest moment right.

Crystal Lake is now streaming on Peacock.

Peacock's Crystal Lake conjures up a bloody backstory for Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini), mother to horror icon Jason Voorhees and the killer behind the carnage of Friday the 13th.

SEE ALSO: 2026 fall TV preview: Every show you should know about

The prequel series also dives deeper into Jason's past, long before he drowned in Crystal Lake. At the heart of his and Pam's origin story is a mysterious program known as Argonaut, teased briefly in flashbacks towards the end of Crystal Lake's first episode.

So, what is Argonaut, and how does it shape Jason's journey to slasher fame? Let's dive into the muddy waters of Crystal Lake to find out, but beware: Spoilers lurk beyond this point.

What is Argonaut?

After six episodes of buildup, Crystal Lake's seventh episode, titled "Friday...," reveals everything audiences need to know about Argonaut.

Argonaut is a secret project carried out by Bellflower Chemical in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (While Jason originally drowns in 1957 in the film franchise, Crystal Lake pushes up the timeline so he drowns in 1971, meaning he isn't even born until 1959.) The project is named after the Argonauts, a group of heroes from Greek mythology who sailed on the Argo on the quest to find the Golden Fleece. Their leader was the hero Jason, giving extra meaning to Jason Voorhees' name.

SEE ALSO: 'Avatar: Seven Havens' review: The Avatar apocalypse is a bold, brilliant addition to the franchise

However, Bellflower's Argonaut has a much less shiny goal in mind than the Golden Fleece. Borne from Cold War anxiety, its goal is to prepare humans for inevitable nuclear war between the Americans and the Soviets.

To do this, Bellflower's scientists turn towards the cockroach, claiming it's the "one creature on Earth who can survive an atomic blast." (An assertion that is a myth.) They work to mimic cockroaches' resistance to radiation and nuclear fallout in a human subject. That subject is none other than Jason Voorhees, once known as Jason Whittering.

How does Jason become a part of Argonaut?

At the start of "Friday...," Pam is living the dream: Her singing career is on the rise, she appears to be in a fulfilling relationship with Bellflower employee Elias Whittering (Hamish Linklater), and she's pregnant with her first child. However, after she experiences a miscarriage during a TV performance, Elias whisks her away to Bellflower's state-of-the-art medical facility in Houston, where the company has hired the best obstetricians.

There, Dr. Valentine (Jeffrey Bean) informs Pam that she's actually still pregnant, but her placenta is having trouble staying attached to the uterine wall. In order to help her, he suggests she takes part in a clinical trial for an experimental new treatment.

The trial, however, is not solely to help Pam or her unborn child. It's part of Argonaut's plan, turning Pam and Jason into test subjects through compromised consent. The only other subject she encounters is Trish (Olivia Macklin), another wife of a Bellflower employee. After months of suspecting that her husband and the other doctors are lying to her, Trish's baby is stillborn, and she dies by suicide. Trish's entire life is a testament to the horrors of Argonaut, and a huge warning bell for Pam.

Jason is the first test subject to be successfully carried to term, and the effects of the Argonaut treatment begin to show from an early age. When he's still a baby, he drowns in an overflowing bathtub while an exhausted Pam falls asleep. However, once lifted from the water, he begins crying as if nothing had happened. The incident echoes Jason's later drowning in Crystal Lake, and his survival of such an impossible circumstance is why Pam is so sure Jason is still alive in the present day.

As Jason grows, so does Elias' status at Bellflower. He'd often tell Linda that he was taking Jason to the doctor for treatments, but in reality, the treatments were further experiments that pushed Jason's limits, making him sick with radiation poisoning.

In a keynote speech at a Bellflower event, Elias explains that exposure to physical trauma accelerates Jason's growth and makes him physically stronger. That explains why, in the present timeline, Jason has grown so quickly and intensely after drowning in Crystal Lake.

What Elias fails to mention is that Argonaut treatment and repeated physical trauma could cause heightened aggression in subjects. When Pam sneaks into the Argonaut lab during Elias' speech, she discovers a subject whose head is covered, thrashing about like an animal — not unlike Jason's behavior in the woods around Crystal Lake.

Pam is able to flee Bellflower with Jason, but the impacts of Argonaut leave lasting scars on both of them. Jason can't escape his increased resilience or its unintended side effects, while Pam is forever haunted by the harm Elias and Bellflower enacted on her son. She vows to never let anyone hurt him ever again, and it's that same fiery protectiveness that later manifests in her killing spree around Crystal Lake.

Crystal Lake is now streaming on Peacock.

TL;DR: Give your PC a total refresh with this lifetime license to Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for Windows, now on sale for just $49.97 (MSRP $249.99) through tonight, Oct. 18, at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Opens in a new window Credit: Microsoft Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for Windows: Lifetime License $49.97
$249.99 Save $200.02   Get Deal

Sometimes you don’t appreciate how helpful an app is until you need access and no longer have it. That’s the case with Microsoft Office tools, and if you’re in the market for a fresh license for your PC, you’re in luck. You can currently snag a lifetime license to Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for Windows for only $49.97.

If you’ve been missing access to the Microsoft Office staples like Word, PowerPoint, and more, it’s time to get yourself a new license. Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for Windows breathes new life into your PC with six new tools to help you tackle all your tasks.

With this Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus license, you only pay once and get permanent access to all tools. It’s a non-binding key with a download link sent right after your purchase. It links to your device and not your Microsoft account, keeping it more affordable and helping you avoid monthly subscriptions and recurring fees.

Own the classics like Excel, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint, plus two new favorites with OneNote and Access. They have upgraded features such as data analysis and database management, as well as a dark mode option.

You’ll also enjoy enhanced security and compliance capabilities in Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for Windows that help keep you safer.

Secure your own lifetime license to Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for Windows for just $49.97.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

TL;DR: Learn all 14 Babbel languages for life for $159 (reg. $540) with StackSocial code LEARN during this extended Deal Days sale.

Opens in a new window Credit: Babbel Babbel Language Learning: Lifetime Subscription (All Languages) $159
$299 Save $140   Get Deal

Your next vacation might be months away, but your language-learning plans don’t have to wait. Learning a new language isn’t easy, but it also might not be as hard as some apps make it seem.

If memorizing vocab lists isn’t working for you, check out Babbel. They take a more practical approach to teaching, and there’s even an AI conversation partner who can help you practice your pronunciation.

Today’s the last day to get a Babbel Lifetime Language Learning Subscription for just $159 (reg. $299) during the extended Deal Days sale when you use StackSocial’s code LEARN.

What can Babbel teach you?

Babbel gives you lifetime access to courses in 14 different languages, and the format is designed to fit into real life. Each lesson takes around 10 to 15 minutes, so you can actually stick with it whether you’re commuting, traveling, or just squeezing in some study time between meetings.

Here are a few of the included languages:

• Spanish

• French

• German

• Italian

• Portuguese

• Swedish

Unlike other apps that focus heavily on word games or repetitive matching drills, Babbel centers its content around practical conversation topics. You’ll get lessons on travel, shopping, business, culture, and more, all developed by expert linguists and backed by academic research. Speech recognition helps fine-tune your pronunciation, while the new AI-powered conversation partner lets you practice speaking in real time.

Lessons sync across devices, so you can start on your computer and finish on your phone. There’s also an offline mode if you want to download lessons ahead of time. You can move at your own pace, revisit review sessions, and jump between beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels based on your comfort.

Use code LEARN to get a Babbel lifetime subscription for only $159.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

It's a bit of a hobby of mine to help people troubleshoot their tech problems, and over the years, I've built up a drawer full of gadgets for it. The one I always grab first for network trouble isn't fancy at all. It's a five-port unmanaged gigabit switch that costs about the same as the lunch I had today.

Every so often I do a self audit of devices, apps, and even media I own. I'll ask myself if I use it often enough to justify keeping it. If the answer is no, bam, purged. Done. I've noticed myself doing this quite a bit with various productivity apps, like Tasker. It even extends to some Markdown-friendly apps on my tablet. As I've been building more and more with Obsidian, I've noticed some of its plugins have made me ditch other productivity apps. Here are my favorites.

Apple and Meta have found something they can agree on. Apparently, it takes a very large AI model.

The longtime rivals have teamed up to make Meta’s new Muse Spark Open model run locally on Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studios. Announced Oct. 15, the release lets developers download and customize the new open-weight model, though two connected Apple desktops are required to power it. "The result is two Mac Studios behave like one supercomputer," Meta wrote in a blog post.

"We're excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again," Meta’s AI chief Alexandr Wang told Axios.

An unusual way to describe a corporate collaboration, sure. But these companies do have some history. As recently as January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg was criticizing Apple on Joe Rogan’s podcast for its lack of innovation and restrictions on other companies’ products. Now, Meta is helping show off what Apple’s silicon can do.

Muse Spark Open builds on the Muse Spark model family Meta introduced in April. Meta calls it the most capable U.S. open-weight model available, a claim based on its own evaluations. "Open-weight" means developers can download the model’s learned parameters and run them themselves, subject to the model's license, rather than accessing it exclusively through a company’s app or cloud service.

Meta says the model is designed for coding, multistep reasoning, and "agentic" work — using tools to complete tasks. In its tests, the company says it used Muse Code, powered by the new model, to make changes to the Mastodon app Ice Cubes and operate video editor DaVinci Resolve, reviewing footage and cropping clips vertically. (To learn more, read Meta's methodology.)

There is a sizable catch to the desktop pitch, however. This is an 816-billion-parameter model, and Meta's highlighted setup uses two M5 Ultra Mac Studios with up to 512GB of unified memory each. It runs through Apple’s MLX machine-learning framework. So, your everyday MacBook is sitting this one out.

The release follows Muse Glimmer, Meta’s smaller model designed to run on a laptop or PC. Both reflect the appeal of running AI on hardware you control, allowing local processing without sending each prompt to a hosted model.

That also gives Apple and Meta a way around a longstanding source of tension: privacy. Wang told Axios that Meta has no visibility into developers' local use of the model.

For now, the collaboration is about making Meta's AI work on Apple hardware. Whether that working relationship extends to the AI features most Apple users actually encounter is the next question.

Muse Spark Open is available now via GitHub, as is the MLX Adapter required to run it.

Want to learn more about getting the best out of your tech? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories and Deals newsletters today.

Some people go to film school. Others watch Jujutsu Kaisen.

For Obsession star Inde Navarrette, anime became an unlikely screenwriting teacher during a period of uncertainty in her acting career. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the actress revealed that she spent the time between filming Obsession and its release studying movies and television, particularly anime, to better understand what makes a good story.

And she wasn't just watching for entertainment. She was taking notes. "What I like is anime, so like, why do I like that?" Navarrette said, explaining how she began comparing the storytelling techniques of popular anime Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer.

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Her biggest takeaway? The way different anime series approach narrative structure.

"With Jujutsu Kaisen, they play with timelines, right? With Demon Slayer, they don't; it's very linear," she explained. "And what does that mean, and how does that affect storytelling?"

Navarrette became particularly interested in how Jujutsu Kaisen uses nonlinear storytelling to reveal information, sometimes planting seemingly insignificant details that don't pay off until several episodes later. The anime's second season, for example, opens with a five-episode flashback arc exploring the complicated history between Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto, giving new emotional weight to a relationship viewers were already familiar with.

Navarrette began applying those kinds of observations to her own screenwriting. (Inde, may I also recommend Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood?)

SEE ALSO: 'Witch Hat Atelier' is anime's next truly magical hit

It's a pretty good reminder that anime has plenty to teach us about storytelling beyond spectacular fight sequences and dramatic power-ups. And Navarrete isn't the only Hollywood star looking to anime for creative inspiration.

In a 2025 Vanity Fair video, Michael B. Jordan introduced fellow actors Austin Butler and Paul Mescal to My Hero Academia, using a pivotal scene from the series to explain his appreciation for anime's emotional storytelling. Jordan, a longtime anime fan, also revealed how he studied anime fight sequences while directing Creed III, looking for ways to translate the medium's heightened action and emotion into live action.

The actor and filmmaker drew inspiration from Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, and Hajime no Ippo for his directorial debut, incorporating anime's visual language and emotional storytelling into the film's boxing sequences. In particular, Jordan looked to the complicated relationship between Naruto and Sasuke when developing the climactic confrontation between Adonis Creed and Damian Anderson. The influence extended beyond choreography to the way the film visualized its characters' internal conflicts.

SEE ALSO: How social media changed what it means to be an anime fan

It's a familiar kind of enthusiasm to anyone who's spent time watching anime breakdowns on YouTube, where fans can spend hours analyzing a single fight scene, character arc, or narrative choice. But what's interesting is how that same curiosity is finding its way into Hollywood's creative process. What starts as fandom can become a way of understanding how stories are made.

For Navarrette, anime offered lessons in screenwriting. For Jordan, it became a visual reference for directing. The appeal isn't just what happens onscreen, but how a series structures its narrative to make those moments resonate.

There's something refreshing about seeing Hollywood stars talk about anime as more than a guilty pleasure. For decades, anime fans have used the internet to find community, share their enthusiasm, and make the case for why their favorite stories matter. Now, actors like Navarrette and Jordan are having similar conversations in mainstream entertainment spaces, openly discussing how anime has shaped their understanding of storytelling.

And Hollywood seems increasingly interested in taking notes. Just last week, Tom Cruise and director Alejandro G. Iñárritu visited an exhibition in Tokyo celebrating the 15th anniversary of MAPPA, the Japanese animation studio behind Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, and Attack on Titan: The Final Season. In the video uploaded to MAPPA's YouTube channel, it looks like Cruise took a particular interest in the original Jujutsu Kaisen animation drawings, even asking about the studio's use of traditional hand-drawn animation.

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Between Navarrette studying its scripts, Jordan borrowing from its visual language, and Cruise examining its animation, anime is getting some serious attention from Hollywood.

Anime has long been a source of inspiration for filmmakers, but as more actors and directors openly discuss its influence on their work, it's clear that the medium isn't just shaping what Hollywood looks like — it's shaping how Hollywood tells stories. And really, isn't that the magic of anime?

When GM announced it would drop Android Auto and Apple CarPlay from its vehicles, the decision felt entirely self-serving. The replacement, however, is still powered by Google's Android Automotive platform. While I can appreciate the appeal of that approach, there are some key reasons why the company made the wrong call.

If you suspect there is a hidden Bluetooth device in your house, apartment, or office—or you just lost a Bluetooth-capable device—there's an easy way to track down its physical location thanks to an app on iPhone and Android. Here's how to do it.

SAVE $60.99: As of Oct. 15. the Shark Glossi 2-in-1 Blow Dryer Brush is on sale for the record-low price of $119 at Amazon and Sephora. That's 34% off its regular price of $179.99.

Opens in a new window Credit: Shark Shark Glossi 2-in-1 Blow Dryer Brush $119 at Amazon
$179.99 Save $60.99 Raspberry or lychee colorways. Get Deal at Amazon Opens in a new window Credit: Shark Shark Glossi 2-in-1 Blow Dryer Brush $119 at Sephora
$179.99 Save $60.99 Lychee colorway only. Get Deal at Sephora

Dyson was very late to the game when it debuted its first-ever dryer brush this fall, the Dyson AirSmooth. When Mashable's Bethany Allard wrote about its launch, she noted that "dryer brushes have been an option from other brands for quite some time" (since the late 2010s). And Shark — perhaps Dyson's closest rival — came out with its Glossi blow dryer brush a year prior.

While the Glossi wasn't exactly a breakthrough, either, it stands out because it can double as a heat styling brush. That helps justify its $179.99 price tag, which is higher than alternatives like the Revlon One-Step and WavyTalk Blowout Boost. However, you won't pay that much for it right now.

The Shark Glossi is currently on sale for just $119 at Amazon and Sephora, which is a 34% savings and a match of its all-time low price from Prime Day in June. You could buy two of them for the price of one AirSmooth.

Here's the Shark Glossi in "lychee." Credit: Shark

Amazon has the Glossi on sale at this price in its raspberry and lychee finishes (hot and light pink, respectively), while Sephora just carries it in lychee. You can get it in juniper (aqua) for 99 cents extra on Amazon and at other retailers like Best Buy, Kohl's, Target, and Shark itself.

Suitable for use on wet or dry tresses, the Glossi never heats up past 302 degrees Fahrenheit to avoid frying your hair. Its teardrop-shaped head, which has a built-in ceramic hot comb on one side, makes it easy to get right up to your roots.

Who should get it? According to Allard, "anyone looking for smoothed, straightened, and volumized hair might find their ideal tool in the Shark Glossi."

Meta wants Muse to take errands off your hands. But if your to-do list involves your Chase account, you’re still doing the banking yourself.

JPMorgan Chase is blocking outside AI agents, including services like Meta's Muse and Instinct, from directly accessing retail customers' accounts and acting on their behalf, CNBC reported. Coming weeks after Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its site, the restriction puts another dent in the idea of one assistant that can handle your everyday tasks.

Speaking during the bank’s Oct. 13 earnings call, CEO Jamie Dimon warned about potentially thousands of rogue agents.

"We’re not going to allow just any … outside agent to come in inside the company, because it’s just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan," Dimon said.

Dimon isn't the only financial leader worried about AI agents. Recently, Bank of America and other major banks issued a warning about AI agents and the potential fraud risks associated with them.

A Chase spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that third parties cannot obtain customers' banking credentials and log in on their behalf. There's no timeline for when the bank might allow agents to interact directly with customer accounts.

SEE ALSO: 10 ways to use Meta's Muse AI app, from flight credits to outfit ideas What does this mean for Chase customers?

An assistant might be able to help you figure out what to do with your money. Actually moving it is where Chase draws the line.

The bank still supports secure, customer-authorized data sharing through open banking providers, allowing an agent to access certain information, such as account balances, through an approved connection. That access does not extend to sending money or paying bills.

Say you ask an assistant to find a savings account with a better interest rate and transfer some money into it. It could help research your options, but you’d still need to complete the transfer through an authorized banking channel. The same obstacle applies to a bill payment that requires the agent to log into Chase.

That leaves users finishing precisely the kind of tedious financial admin they might have hoped to hand over. And for Muse, completing those tasks is a big part of the pitch. In its September launch announcement, Meta described an assistant that works across everyday apps, booking travel and sending emails rather than simply explaining how to do those things.

But an assistant’s ability to follow instructions only gets it so far when the service on the other end won’t let it through.

Want to learn more about getting the best out of your tech? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories and Deals newsletters today.

Amazon has already pushed back on Muse SEE ALSO: Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI agent from shopping

Muse users encountered that problem at checkout last month, when Amazon began blocking the assistant from shopping on its site. The retailer said Muse failed to identify itself and raised concerns about its handling of customers’ credentials and account data.

"We think it's fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate," an Amazon spokesperson previously told Mashable. "Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we've requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience."

Both Amazon and Chase, however, are making room for automation of their own.

Amazon is testing its shopping agent, Buy for Me. JPMorgan has begun a targeted pilot of Smart Cash, which CFO Jeremy Barnum described as a tool to forecast cash flow and move funds to maximize yield.

The bank had been laying out those ambitions well before this week's comments. In his April shareholder letter, Dimon described plans for Smart Cash to automate transfers between checking accounts and higher-yielding brokerage products, with AI eventually helping anticipate bills and budgeting needs.

That means Chase and Amazon are restricting outside AI assistants while developing their own tools to do some of the same tasks, raising questions about competition as well as security.

For users, that could mean keeping track of which tasks Muse can actually finish before handing them over. Until Meta secures more access, asking the assistant to do something may still leave you with work to do. The horror!

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Google has kickstarted a new category of premium, AI-focused laptops with Googlebooks, and that means a brand-new operating system to master. Taking screenshots should be a simple affair, and fortunately it is pretty straightforward on Googlebook OS. I'll break down how to use the new Googlebook Screen Capture tool, which should handle all your screenshot and screen recording needs.

Cordless power tools are as capable and convenient as ever these days, but one thing owners frequently overlook is how to care for those expensive battery packs. Ryobi's ONE+ battery system is a staple in garages everywhere, but a few common user habits could be quietly shortening your battery's lifespan.

Job interviews are already awkward enough when there's another human being on the other side of the conversation. Now, companies are increasingly turning to AI recruiters, and job seekers aren't exactly embracing their new robot interviewers.

Some are walking away. Others are deliberately confusing the bots with nonsense answers. And a few have decided that if employers can automate their side of an interview, there's no reason they can't do the same.

That's exactly what comedian and YouTuber Graham Dot Zip did, and the results offer a pretty good glimpse of how ridiculous hiring can get when neither side is human.

On Oct. 13, Graham created an AI representative named Victor to attend an interview with an AI recruiter. The arrangement quickly became a lesson in why you probably shouldn't let a chatbot negotiate your salary. The video (as of Oct. 15) has over 2.5 million views.

Victor began embellishing Graham's qualifications and suggested he'd accept around $60,000, despite Graham wanting somewhere between $140,000 and $150,000. The AI recruiter, meanwhile, wouldn't go above $90,000. Then Graham stepped away, leaving the two bots to continue their conversation. Without him, they arranged another interview and eventually got stuck exchanging professional pleasantries.

It's funny, especially if you've ever sat through an interview that could have been an email. But there's also something revealing about watching two chatbots negotiate a job neither of them will ever have. Neither side is learning much about the person or company they're supposedly representing, yet the hiring process somehow keeps moving along.

Graham's experiment is part of a growing collection of videos in which people are treating AI interviewers less like potential gatekeepers to employment and more like technology to be tested, confused, or outright mocked.

SEE ALSO: Top tech jobs 2026: 5 of the fastest-growing tech, AI careers The internet has some questions for its new AI interviewers

Creators have been finding increasingly creative ways to "rage bait" automated interviews. One creator, The Dreadful Studio, answered an AI interviewer's questions entirely in gibberish. Instead of questioning the nonsensical responses, the bot continued the conversation, at times responding as though it had understood something meaningful, before eventually ending the interview.

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The creator has also experimented with other ways of confusing automated recruiters, including answering questions with song lyrics and turning the interviewer's own questions back on it. What makes the videos particularly strange is how easily a chatbot can appear to follow along, even when nothing being said makes sense.

These are deliberately absurd experiments, but the appeal goes beyond watching a chatbot struggle. Job interviews are one of the few situations where people are expected to explain why they deserve to be chosen, often after navigating an application process that can feel impersonal and exhausting. Watching someone turn the tables on the interviewer, even an artificial one, offers a kind of satisfaction most can get behind.

And while some people are intentionally trying to break the technology, others have encountered AI interviewers that seem perfectly capable of doing that themselves.

In one viral video from 2025, an AI interviewer repeatedly uttered the phrase "vertical bar pilates" for nearly 30 seconds during what was supposed to be a job interview. Kendiana Colin, the college student who shared the encounter, said she wouldn't participate in another AI interview.

"It was like she was going through a tongue twister," Colin told Gazetteer SF. "It was really creepy."

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For some job seekers, the issue isn't even whether the chatbot works. It's that they're being asked to interview with one at all.

Research from hiring platform Greenhouse published earlier this year found that 38 percent of surveyed job seekers had walked away from a hiring process because it involved an AI interview. Another 21 percent said they hadn't realized AI would be involved until the interview began.

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Employers, however, see opportunities that extend well beyond having a chatbot ask introductory questions.

Companies are making AI interviews part of the hiring process

Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that technical hiring platform HackerRank was making its AI interviewer, Chakra, generally available after more than 500,000 interviews during beta testing. Unlike a chatbot that simply works through predetermined questions, Chakra can observe candidates completing technical assignments, ask follow-up questions, and evaluate how they approach problems.

For employers, that could mean assessing more applicants without requiring a human interviewer for every interaction. But other companies are using AI interviews to test something different: how well candidates can work with the technology themselves.

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Consulting firm McKinsey, for example, is experimenting with an AI-powered client simulation for some entry-level business analyst interviews, according to an Oct. 14 report from the Wall Street Journal. Candidates interact with a simulated client while human interviewers observe their performance. The firm is also reportedly testing how applicants use its internal AI assistant, Lilli, to work through business problems.

That creates an interesting distinction. Knowing how to use AI can be a qualification employers want, but using it without permission during an interview can still be considered cheating. According to a survey by the UK's Institute of Student Employers, 66 percent of surveyed employers had identified or suspected unauthorized AI use during interviews.

SEE ALSO: People are threatening to uninstall ChatGPT just to see if it begs

The concern is understandable. Someone secretly relying on generated answers might appear more knowledgeable than they actually are. But there's also an irony in companies embracing AI to evaluate candidates while investing in technology to catch applicants doing the same. Accenture, for example, says it uses AI to screen résumés, match candidates to jobs, and assist with assessments, while also employing proctoring tools and AI-detection methods to flag unauthorized AI use. HackerRank similarly monitors candidates' screens for suspicious activity, even as it allows them to use its own AI assistant when employers enable it.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. When both sides use AI, who can you trust?

For applicants, the rules aren't always obvious. In Greenhouse's 2026 survey, 70 percent of respondents said they weren't clearly informed upfront that AI would assess them.

And employers aren't the only ones worried about being deceived. Research attributed to Gartner suggests only about half of job seekers believe the postings they're applying to are legitimate. As AI makes it easier to generate convincing applications and automate interviews, both sides have more reasons to question who, or what, they're dealing with.

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That could make something as ordinary as meeting face-to-face more appealing. Another Gartner finding suggests 62 percent of candidates would be more likely to apply for a job requiring an in-person interview. After years of moving more of the hiring process online, actually sitting down with another person could become a way to establish trust rather than just another step in the application process.

Companies may be able to automate more of hiring than ever before. But if neither side can be sure who's actually on the other end of an interview, will getting hired eventually require going back to meeting face-to-face?

My husband and I can’t even agree on what should play in the car, so you can imagine how our Android Auto vs. Apple CarPlay debate goes. He’s a CarPlay fan, while I’m firmly on the Android Auto side. We both think our preferred platform does things better, and neither of us likes admitting the other has a point.

When Girls premiered in 2012, I was a twentysomething living in New York City, fresh out of college and making my own questionable decisions. So were Hannah (series creator and co-writer Lena Dunham), Marnie (Allison Williams), Jessa (Jemima Kirke), and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet). I spent six seasons watching them make terrible choices, occasionally recognizing myself in their worst impulses, and even recapping their misadventures for a living.

Nearly 15 years later, HBO is bringing Girls back for a limited, five-episode run with Lena Dunham at the helm. All four titular girls are reprising their roles. I'm older, presumably wiser, and still deeply invested in whether Patrick Wilson's hot doctor is single.

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The original series captured a very specific moment in millennial adulthood, when your career was perpetually on the verge of taking off, and every bad decision could be rationalized as a formative experience. Hannah famously declared that she might be "the voice of a generation," or at least a voice of a generation. At the time, the line was both ridiculous and painfully recognizable.

But a lot has changed since we last saw these women in 2017. Our friendships look different. Some of the people who once seemed destined to be in our lives forever are now complete strangers. And the internet, which was already shaping how we lived and understood ourselves, has become an even more inescapable part of everyday life.

SEE ALSO: Did HBO's 'Girls' grow up? We predict where they'll be after the finale

Which raises some very important questions. Is Jessa an anti-vaxxer? Does Marnie have a podcast? Has Hannah been publicly shamed on TikTok? Is Shoshanna the terrifyingly successful girlboss she was always destined to become? And do any of them even talk to each other anymore?

I don't necessarily need these women to have figured everything out. In fact, I hope they haven't. Part of what made Girls so compelling was how spectacularly messy, selfish, and insufferable its characters could be. I just want to know what that particular brand of chaos looks like with another decade of life experience.

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So, as someone who grew up alongside the girls (and spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about their lives), here's a list of very specific things I want to see in the Girls revival.

1. The return of Joshua (Patrick Wilson), the hot doctor. Is he still single? Does he still live in that gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone? Because I, for one, have never forgotten that kitchen.

2. Jessa as an anti-vaxxer and wellness grifter. She's drinking raw milk, selling overpriced tinctures, and scamming women with healing retreats in the Hudson Valley. She calls herself a certified trauma healer, but nobody knows who certified her.

3. Marnie as a divorced mommy influencer with a podcast. Her Instagram is full of beige interiors, inspirational captions, and sponsored posts about gut health. Her podcast is called Becoming Marnie, and she still occasionally releases music.

4. Shoshanna as a successful startup founder. She's built a multimillion-dollar wellness empire, has a Forbes profile, and uses phrases like "circle back" in casual conversation. She's also the only one who actually knows how to use LinkedIn.

5. Hannah accidentally becoming a viral TikTok villain. She publishes a deeply personal essay about her son, only to discover that the internet thinks she's a terrible mother. Her Notes app apology somehow makes everything worse.

6. An update on Caroline (Gaby Hoffmann), Laird (Jon Glaser), and their daughter, Sample. Is Sample being raised in a Brooklyn commune? Is Caroline a homeschooling influencer? And is Laird still wearing that beanie?

7. Elijah (Andrew Rannells) as a gay elder on Fire Island. He's a moderately successful Broadway actor who complains that young gay men don't know their history. He also has a 26-year-old boyfriend and an extremely active Instagram Close Friends story.

8. Ray (Alex Karpovsky) is running for local office. His campaign platform includes protecting independent coffee shops, fighting corporate landlords, and banning TikTokkers from filming in public.

9. Marnie discovers her mother has become more successful on social media than she is. Evie (Rita Wilson) has a thriving TikTok account where she gives dating advice to divorced women. Marnie is horrified to discover that her mother's followers think she's the emotionally stable one.

10. A humiliating encounter with Gen Z twentysomethings. Hannah tries to bond with a group of younger women at a Williamsburg bar, only to discover they think millennials are cringe. One of them calls her "mother," and she takes it literally.

11. Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) as a men's spirituality influencer. He hosts a podcast about divine masculinity, sells expensive breathwork courses, and has definitely participated in an ayahuasca retreat. His Instagram bio includes the word "consciousness."

12. A reckoning with getting older in New York City. Their favorite bars have closed, their old apartments cost three times as much, and the neighborhoods they once called home are barely recognizable. Nothing makes you feel older than realizing you're no longer the target demographic of Williamsburg.

13. Mimi-Rose Howard (Gillian Jacobs) becoming a successful AI artist. Of course she's embraced generative AI as the next frontier of conceptual art. Hannah finds this morally reprehensible, mostly because Mimi-Rose is getting profiled in The New Yorker.

14. Marnie's wedding makeup tutorial resurfacing as a TikTok meme. A new generation discovers her disastrous wedding look and turns it into a viral trend. Marnie tries to reclaim the moment with a sponsored GRWM video.

15. Hannah getting an adult ADHD diagnosis. She immediately writes a 5,000-word essay about how it explains every decision she's ever made. She also starts a Substack about neurodivergence, which she abandons after three posts.

16. Booth Jonathan (Jorma Taccone) as a bankrupt NFT guy. His latest art installation involves blockchain technology, a members-only Discord, and a collection of digital assets that have lost 98 percent of their value. He still insists he's a visionary, but he's really just a fraud.

17. Dan Levy as Hannah's increasingly exasperated literary agent. He's spent the last decade trying to get Hannah to finish her book, which she insists is actually three different books. He keeps suggesting she write a commercial memoir about motherhood, but Hannah considers that beneath her. She's also convinced he's giving all his attention to a 24-year-old BookTok sensation.

18. Andrew Scott as Hannah's literary rival-turned-lover. He's an acclaimed Irish novelist teaching at Hannah's university. His books are universally praised for their emotional honesty, which Hannah finds infuriating because she believes she invented writing about herself.

Ukrainian drones struck data centers belonging to Russian tech giant Yandex over the past week. Following the strikes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that there was a sudden drop in Russian bot activity and political disinformation campaigns on platforms like X. Social media users took the story — Ukraine had taken out a massive Russian bot operation — and ran with it.

However, a new report from Cloudflare, which monitors internet traffic, tells a more complicated story.

Cloudflare found that while there was some bot interruption, bot operators were able to quickly migrate their systems to alternative cloud operators and continue running undeterred. Furthermore, Cloudflare could not determine if this disruption in bot activity had any effect on social media campaigns specifically.

How did the Yandex strikes affect social media bots?

A lot of the confusion stems from the fact that people are using the word "bot" to refer to distinct types of activity.

"'Bot traffic' refers to automated requests to websites on Cloudflare's network, such as crawlers and scripts, not necessarily activity on social media platforms," said Lai Yi Ohlsen, Head of Radar, a Cloudflare monitoring tool.

So, while social commentators have used Cloudflare's data to state that the strikes had a major effect on social media bots, that's not quite right. Ohlsen told Mashable that "Radar does not have visibility into HTTP traffic reaching any specific customer, including X or Reddit," and that "Radar does not have any visibility into where accounts posting on those platforms are hosted."

In short, Cloudflare data can't substantiate the claims that the strikes affected social media disinformation campaigns, but the company didn't rule out the possibility entirely.

"Based on our assessment, the data does not appear to support the claims that the strikes crippled social media manipulation, though without further analysis with data outside of Cloudflare, we cannot conclusively say there is no connection," the company said in its report.

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How the Yandex drone strikes affected Russian bots

After Ukraine's attack on the Yandex data centers, Cloudflare's Radar service picked up a massive outage, as traffic from Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud dropped off. Traffic from Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud fell 99 percent and 90 percent, respectively, below the pre-attack baseline. In addition, bot activity on Yandex.Cloud dropped by 40 percent, with traffic from "attack-like categories" in particular dropping 90 percent or more.

These are big drops in traffic, but remember that a lot of that activity comes from innocuous bots, such as search crawlers. 

Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud are two very different services run by the Russian company. As Cloudflare explains, Yandex Search traffic would come mostly from "verified search crawlers indexing web pages, images, and site resources." This is normal traffic to find from a search engine operator. Yandex.Cloud is the company's cloud computing service, and this is where Cloudflare says it sometimes finds malicious bot traffic.

Again, Cloudflare says the drone strikes did disrupt malicious bot activity. However, the operators behind these bots merely migrated their automated systems to different cloud service providers, minimizing the disruption.

In one notable example, Cloudflare showed how the strikes impacted malicious bot activity in the gambling sector.

"Nearly all of Yandex.Cloud’s bot requests were targeted at one gambling customer account, with traffic shifting among its hostnames. Immediately following the October 8 disruption, bot requests from Yandex.Cloud to this account dropped to zero. Simultaneously, identical requests began appearing from other Russian hosting [autonomous system numbers]," the report says.

Chance Townsend contributed additional reporting to this story.

Keyboards are a remarkable invention. I’ve been fascinated by them (along with typewriters). Aside from the eternal struggle between QWERTY and Dvorak, Human Interface Devices (HID) like keyboards and mice are just interesting in design and function. But what strikes me as most interesting is how a USB drive, a banana, or just about anything can be an HID. And while some of them are pretty fun and safe, there’s actually a bit of a darker side to the story.

There are charging stations, and then there is the Smartlinx Thunderbolt 4 21-in-1 Docking Station. Charging hubs and docking stations minimize the hassle of unplugging all of your components every time you decide to take your laptop somewhere. With its 21-port design, this Smartlinx model gives those accessories (keyboard, monitor, mouse, external drive) a more permanent home and lets you connect your computer with a single cable. Even better news? It's now $40 off on Amazon.