The Sims 4 has been out for a decade, but those of us who played the earlier games in the franchise remember the iconic burglar. Part of the joy of The Sims games is having something randomly go wrong, all the way from a kitchen fire to a meteor crashing through your roof. One of these random hazards was the burglar, who is finally making their triumphant return to the series with todays free update.The Sims fans have been requesting the return of the burglar for some time, as its a beloved hazard from all three of the previous games, and many simply modded it into the game with fan-created content.The burglar, aptly named Robin Banks, is a sneaky thief who will wait until night to strike. If your Sim is a night owl, you may even be able to call the police in hopes of them arresting her. There are also burglar alarms Sims can buy and then upgrade to become even more efficient at stopping intruders. According to a dev diary, there are 50 unique reactions Sims can have to a burglar, from trying to fight them, to pulling out a freeze ray and immobilizing them.Dont worry players of taste and refinement can befriend or even seduce Robin Banks, adding her to their household. If Robin becomes a roommate or tragically dies, she will be replaced by another Sim with similar traits.Theres a surprising amount of cross-compatibility with other expansions. For instance, owning the Cats and Dogs expansion pack means you can simply own a dog to chase off Robin. A werewolf can intimidate a burglar into fleeing, while a vampire might just enjoy the free midnight snack. This is part of a promising trend with The Sims 4 overall. The upcoming expansion, Businesses and Hobbies, is similarly interactive with past expansions. Businesses and Hobbies is set to release on Mar. 6.

We may earn a commission from links on this page.Weve all been there: You find the perfect product, the chair or skin cream that will solve all your problems through the liberal application of capitalismbut it doesnt fit into your budget. You have three choices: You can spend the next few months (years?) saving diligently toward the glorious day when you can afford to pull the trigger; you can put that purchase on a credit card and deal with the interest chargesor you can find a dupe.Dupesshort for duplicatesare having their moment. While knockoffs are nothing new, as anyone who has ever bought a designer handbag on the streets of New York City can attest, dupes are a little different. Knockoffs are trying to fool people that theyre the name-brand product, but dupes are their own thingtheyre not pretending to be the expensive item, they just replicate its look and function at a lower price point.Finding dupes can be as easy as a Google image search or a quick trip to Target or Lidlbut it can sometimes be a challenge. Thankfully, there are a variety of apps you can use that make locating dupes a lot easier, and companies that make their own dupes for specific items.How to scour the web for dupesIf youre looking for duplicate furniture and housewares, you could spend hours digging through subreddits and Facebook pages, but luckily there tools and sites that make it a lot easier. Some of the most useful include:TikTok. The social media behemoth is kind of dupe central these days. You can type the name of what youre looking for with hashtags like #dupe or #dupefinder to see whats out there. Whats good about using TikTok is that most of the results will show people actually using and discussing the dupes, which can help you figure out if theyre truly worth buying. Dupe.com has been getting a lot of press of late thanks to the love it gets from social media. Its interface is pretty simple: You paste in the URL of an item (furniture, housewares, or clothing) or drag an image into the search bar, and Dupe searches the internet for lookalikes. For example, if you want an Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman from Herman Millerwhich sells for anywhere from $6,000 to $8,000 newDupe.com quickly leads you to Walmart, where you can buy this leather lounge chair with a very similar look and vibe. (Theres also an app.)Spoken.io works very similarly: Paste in a URL or drag/upload a photo, and it will scan the web and point you to a list of discounted dupes. For example, it turned up this $1,899 Eames-like chairnot quite as cheap as the Walmart version, but still a significant savings over the original.Dupeshop focuses on skincare and makeup products, and it doesnt just point you at purchase linksit pulls together detailed comparisons, reviews, videos, and other information so you can feel confident that the dupe product will perform as expected.SkinSkool distinguishes itself by offering a list of potential dupes organized by a similarity score and labeled with a dollar sign icon indicating how expensive the dupe is. This makes it easy to cross-reference your budget with the available options. The site explicitly states that it bases its choices solely on the publicly available ingredient lists of the products, so it doesnt offer any kind of hands-on review.A few companies that make their own dupesSome companies have made a name for themselves because they make and sell their own high-quality dupes, so you dont have to search the entire internet trying to find them. A few examples include:Brandefy was founded to exploit the fact that name-brand beauty and skincare products at every price point are largely manufactured in the same facilities using the same ingredients. It creates inspired by products that are often indistinguishable from the pricier versions. Brandefy is more oriented toward its app than the website, however, so its a good choice if you want to check something on your phone while youre out shopping.The Essence Vault and Dossier both offer up perfume dupes. Perfumes are expensive to develop, to manufacture, and to packagebut you cant actually copyright a fragrance, so dupe perfumes tend to be uncannily like the expensive brand theyre copying. That being said, you may notice a quality difference between the good stuff and the dupes. But if your budget is dupe-sized, both The Essence Vault and Dossier offer scents explicitly inspired by designer fragrances (Dossier also sells their own original scents).Element Brooklyn offers soaps, lotions, and other products that dupe brands like Aesop or Le Labo with an environmentally friendly twist: Its products are refillable, so you arent dumping plastic bottles into landfills all the time.Quince takes the same approach as Brandefy, but for clothing, claiming to use the same factories and manufacturers as the high-end luxury brands it's replicating.Italic is a Los Angeles-based company that sells clothing, jewelry, and accessories that closely resemble luxury brands. Its prices arent as low as literal dupes, but you can still find fashion that looks just like the top-tier brands at a much lower cost.Some caveats to keep in mindKeep in mind that it can be difficult to judge whether a dupe is going to be worth buying even at a drastically lower price point. It can be very difficult to tell from a photo whether a piece of furniture or clothing is going to be anywhere near the quality of the real thing, for example. Thats where apps like TikTok that offer endorsements from folks who have actually used the dupes can be super valuable.Another option for doing your dupe due diligence on beauty and skincare products is SkinSort, which has a useful comparison tool. You can compare a dupe to the brand its replicating and SkinSort will show you a list of ingredients in each (along with explanations for what each does) and reviews from people who have actually used the dupe.Finally, if you want to save some money without risking a downgraded experience, you can also look for name-brand items at secondhand places like Poshmark, which sells clothes, skincare, perfume, and beauty products. A lot of sellers on these platforms have access to name-brand stuff (some work for retailers where they get deep discounts, giving them room for resell profits, for examplelook for folks who have a lot of a specific product on hand and youre probably looking at a hustling sales associate) and you can find some real bargains that way. This gives you the main benefit of a dupe (lower prices) without compromising in any way.

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.The Pixel 9 Pro is the latest, most premium model in the Pixel lineup. It was released in August 2024, and already the unlocked 128GB Google Pixel 9 Pro XL is discounted to $799 (down from $1,099). That's the lowest price it has yet reached on Amazon, according to price-tracking tools. Google Pixel 9 Pro XL Operating System: Android 14, Ram Memory: 16 GB, Memory Storage: 128 GB, Screen Size: 6.8 Inches. $799.00 at Amazon $1,099.00 Save $300.00 Get Deal Get Deal $799.00 at Amazon $1,099.00 Save $300.00 This Pixel 9 Pro XL comes with 16GB of RAM, 128GB of memory storage, a 120 HZ refresh rate, and the Android 14 operating system. As Michelle Ehrhardt explained in Lifehacker's review of the Pixel 9 Pro, the phone's hardware is the best Google has produced, but its AI features aren't quite there yet. The XL version is bigger than the regular Pro size, but smaller than previous XL versions at 6.4 by 3.0 by 0.3 inches.If you have the Pixel 8 Pro, you might not notice a huge difference. However, if you're upgrading from an older phone or switching from a non-Pixel phone, the 9 Pro XL has a lot to love, especially if you prioritize good cameras.One of the best aspects of Pixel phones is their future-proofing: They tend to receive ongoing support for many years. My Pixel 6A still gets all of the updates and tons of AI features that make the phone feel fresh many years later. With the Pixel 9 Pro XL, you'll be getting a quality phone that will receive software updates for some time (as long as seven years).

Microsoft announced that it is making some features available for free in its Copilot AI assistant. Everyone now has unlimited access to Voice and Think Deeper, which is powered by OpenAIs o1 model.Copilot got the Voice feature, which allows users to have conversations with the AI assistant, in October 2024. Think Deeper is intended to parse complicated queries, such as assessing the pros and cons of major home purchases, taking cost and long-term value into account."We are working hard to scale unlimited access to advanced features to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible," the blog post noted. Microsoft noted that users could experience delays or interruptions during times of high usage for these newly free Copilot applications. Members of the Copilot Pro subscription will still have preferred access to the company's latest AI models at those peak usage times, as well as to new features that are still in the experimental stage.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/microsoft-copilot-offers-voice-and-o1-powered-think-deeper-for-free-232723768.html?src=rss

A bizarre bug is causing iPhones to automatically change the word racist to Trump when using the built-in dictation feature in iOS. The issue, which seems to have been discovered by TikTok users, crops up when using the voice-to-text feature in Apple apps like Messages.When speaking the word racist, iOS briefly transcribes the text as Trump before changing it back to the intended word. Its not clear what could cause this behavior. Engadget was able to replicate the issue, as you can see in the GIF below.Apple told The New York Timesit was due to phonetic overlap between the two words, despite the fact that the two words do not sound similar. That also doesn't explain why "racist," with a lowercase "r" would transcribe as "Trump" seemingly a reference to our current president and not "trump," the noun. An AI expert who once worked on Siri told the paper it could be a serious prank on the part of an Apple employee.Apple didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.Whether its a bug or prank, it surfaced at a particularly embarrassing time for the iPhone maker, which announced on Monday that it planned to invest $500 billion in manufacturing facilities for AI servers. The investment, most of which was already planned, came after Apple CEO Tim Cook met with President Donald Trump at the White House last week.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/iphones-are-briefly-changing-racist-to-trump-due-to-an-ios-dictation-issue-230712021.html?src=rss

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The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more.For the last decade, chief marketing officers (CMOs) havent felt as appreciated and necessary as they once were. But that may be changingI should stress may.Im thinking of the 2024 CMO Tenure Study by marketing consultancy Spencer Stuart. Theyve been issuing this study for two decades. Four years ago, the length of CMO tenure tightened to its smallest interval in more than a decade. In Spencer Stuarts latest report, the average time spent by Fortune 500 CMOs in that job post in 2023 was 4.2 years, unchanged from 2022. While I wouldnt say flat is the new up, stabilization after years of decline is somewhat positive.A bit more context: Conventional wisdom has suggested that CMOs turn over more often than other C-suite leaders. But Spencer Stuarts analysis shows that CMO tenure is just under the 4.6-year average for all C-suite leaders such as chief operating officers, chief revenue officers, chief technology officers, etc.Still, CMOs are living in an era of less, according to a Gartner Marketing Practice study. Issued in May 2024, around the same time as the Spencer Stuart report, the GMP study notes that in the four years preceding the pandemic, average marketing budgets were 11% of overall revenue. In the four years since, theyve dropped to an anemic 8.2%.The roles of marketing and advertising appear more diminished than ever before. Meanwhile, ad agencies and brand marketing departments are under greater pressure and scrutiny to prove effectiveness. The essential quality of the CMOs job is akin to an orchestra conductor; but instead of musicians, the role is to make sure companies and individuals act seamlessly and complementary.But its not. There are reasons for that, good and bad.Short-sighted efficiencyAn ethos of efficiency has served as the defining, underlying feature of the advertising business for the last 25 years.The 60s were about pushing the boundaries of creativity. Advertisers and agencies wanted to impress everybody with the ideas, images, and messages bursting from Madison Avenue.However, that shifted: The 21st century has been about personalization, speedand above allcost savings.But it takes a larger advertising team to expertly handle all parts of the marketing funnel from discovery to purchase while simultaneously instilling brand loyalty.The demands are, in fact, too complex for one agency, let alone one individual. As a result, specialists have divided the responsibilities associated with the multiple consumer touchpoints that need to be checked off.So much for efficiency. If only there were a single individual who could organize, synthesize, and prioritize all those crucial tasks.Oh, right. Thats what the CMO does. Its what the CMO has always done.Marketings ah-ha momentCompanies are increasingly recognizing this. There is solid value in developing marketing leadership from within. In 2023, 74% of CMOs of the top 100 advertisers were serving in their first corporate-level CMO rolethe highest percentage since Spencer Stuart began tracking this data in 2016. Moreover, 59% of these CMOs were promoted from inside their companies.This move toward internal promotion signals an ah-ha moment as the CMO role is rediscovered as the truly efficient solution to advertisings largest problems. Institutional knowledge and recognizable authority are virtues worth keeping.We might be witnessing a maturing perspective on marketing leadership. Organizations are investing in succession planning and management development specifically for the CMO role.Theres even a higher opinion for the general marketing and management acumen a CMO possesses, Spencer Stuart data indicates. When external hires are needed, companies are showing greater flexibility, with 43% of CMOs recruited for Fortune 500 companies in 2023 coming from different industries, up from 37% in 2022.Despite facing significant budget constraintswith 64% of CMOs reporting insufficient funds to execute their 2024 strategy per Gartnertheres optimism about the potential of generative AI to expand marketings impact beyond traditional resource limitations. This technological evolution could help CMOs overcome the era of less while delivering more value.As companies focus on developing their marketing leadership pipeline, they have an opportunity to increase diversity at the top by identifying high-potential leaders early and creating smoother development paths. Not only would that strengthen the CMO role, it also ensures marketing leadership better reflects the diverse audiences they serve, which helps build brand affection.When consumers associate a brand with trust and other positive qualities, the path to performance and purchases is more immediate and direct. The intersecting lines of technology, branding, advertising, and sales all converge at the CMOs desk. Perhaps its time agencies, platform companies, and the brands themselves showed more trust and value in the CMO role after all.Tim Ringel is global CEO of Meet The People.