Ah, February 13. The day before lovebirds get their moment and the rest of us roll our eyes at and tacky heart-shaped everything. Valentine’s Day, in case you forgot, is rooted in a pretty grim history—Saint Valentine was out there secretly marrying people and got executed for it. Now, we honor his sacrifice with prix-fixe menus and last-minute gas station chocolates. Beautiful.

Meanwhile, winter is still wintering, and we’re all collectively waiting for spring. Soon, we’ll be trading puffer coats for mild disappointment about summer body prep.

For now, just get through this Thursday. The weekend is practically winking at you, and today’s news is here to keep your brain warm. Enjoy the read.

Today’s stories:

• ByteDance drops Goku, AI for image and video generation

• Super Bowl LIX pulled in a record 126M average viewers

• Creepy new fungus turns spiders into zombies

• Gen Alpha slang confuses Millennial parents

• Netflix is sniffing around the podcast world

  and more…

U.S. stocks mostly fell on Wednesday as investors reacted to hotter-than-expected January inflation data and scaled back hopes for Federal Reserve rate cuts in 2025.

The S&P 500 dropped 0.27%, while the Dow Jones fell 225.09 points (0.5%), the Nasdaq managed a small 0.03% gain. Concerns are growing that inflation could flare up again, pushing interest rates higher.

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Kanye Gets Kicked Off Shopify

Kanye West’s Yeezy website is gone after he tried selling a swastika T-shirt. Shopify wasn’t having it. A Shopify rep confirmed they shut it down, saying Yeezy "violated our terms" and wasn’t running a legit business. Translation: even Shopify has limits. This mess follows Kanye’s bizarre Super Bowl moment. On Feb. 9, he aired a 30-second ad in local markets, filmed by himself in a dentist’s chair. He claimed he blew the ad budget on new teeth, so he had to shoot it on an iPhone. The ad told people to visit Yeezy.com, which, as of Tuesday, was only selling one thing—that shirt. The site had other items on Sunday, but by Tuesday morning, it was just the swastika tee. A day later, Shopify wiped the whole store. 

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Netflix wants in on podcasts. Netflix is sniffing around the podcast world, hoping to cash in on the video podcast trend. They even tried to woo Call Her Daddy star Alex Cooper last year, but she took SiriusXM’s $125 million instead. Ouch. Netflix used to side-eye podcasts, but now they’re very interested. YouTube’s podcast dominance has them rethinking things. Industry insiders say Netflix is shopping for podcast talent to host talk-based video shows—cheaper than traditional content and easy to pump out. Their big question now: Which podcasters can we throw money at? Agents say they’re actively name-dropping and trying to figure out who fits. It’s a low-cost, high-content play, and Netflix is late to the party.

Super Bowl LIX breaks records. Breaking news: the NFL is still insanely popular. Super Bowl LIX pulled in a record 126 million average viewers, despite the Eagles steamrolling the Chiefs 40-22 in a game that was never even close. At its peak in the second quarter, 135.7 million people were watching—before realizing it wasn’t going to be a nail-biter. FOX’s numbers come from everywhere: TV, streaming, Spanish-language broadcasts, and NFL digital platforms.

Burnt-down LA home gets 60+ offers. A Pacific Palisades home that literally burned down in January just sparked a bidding war, with over 60 offers and a final price well over $1 million. It was listed at $999K, but in LA, even rubble is prime real estate. Once worth $2.7 million, the four-bedroom house is now just a charred lot with two chimneys. Investors, of course, love the opportunity to flip ashes into cash.

Goku Enters the AI Battle

Sam Altman is having a week. First, Elon Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit, and now ByteDance drops Goku, an AI model for image and video generation. It’s another headache for OpenAI and the U.S. government, which is still trying to figure out how to own AI. Meanwhile, businesses just got another tool to pump out content faster. AI literacy just became non-optional. Goku turns text into high-quality visuals using something called rectified flow transformers. Fancy words for “it makes AI images and videos look smoother and more realistic.” Less glitchy horror-show results, more polished creations. Startups love it. OpenAI? Not so much. Having the “best” model isn’t enough when anyone can build their own. 

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Zombie spiders? Yeah, that’s happening. A creepy new fungus turns spiders into zombies, marches them to their deaths, and then uses their corpses to spread more doom. Found in Irish caves, this nightmare makes spiders crawl into the open, die, and sprout spores that rain down on their clueless buddies. Cave explorer Tim Fogg walked past this horror for years before realizing he was ignoring real-life Last of Us. He thinks it's cool but admits it’s "sad for the spiders." Yeah, no kidding.

NASA Freaking Out Over an Asteroid. NASA just put its best telescope on asteroid 2024 YR4, a space rock with a 1-in-43 shot of slamming into Earth by 2032. That’s way worse than the original 1% estimate. Discovered in December, YR4 is now NASA’s top oh-crap priority. But here’s the fun part: we only know its surface size, so it could be way bigger.

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Millennial Parents Officially Too Old for Gen Alpha Slang

Gen Alpha slang is evolving faster than Millennial parents can Google it. “Skibidi,” “sigma,” “gyat”—it’s a whole new language, and the over-30 crowd is struggling. “Skibidi” can mean anything. “Sigma” is just a cooler “alpha.” “Gyat” means someone’s hot. “Rizz” is charisma with a TikTok filter. Middle schoolers drop dozens of these words a week while their parents are still trying to figure out if “skibidi” is an insult.

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Rare anglerfish sighting near surface. A black seadevil—an anglerfish that strictly sticks to the deep—somehow ended up near the surface off Tenerife in a first-ever sighting. These fish are all about pitch-black abyss life, yet here she was, just floating around in broad daylight. Scientists have no clue what happened. Maybe she’s sick, maybe an ocean current threw her off course, or maybe she just woke up and decided to shake things up. Either way, her deep-sea neighbors are probably wondering where she went.

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TikTok of the day: watch here