Entertainment
11 Readers Share Mood-Boosting Winter Activities
How’s your winter going? This season has been cold and intense, so we asked readers on Instagram how they’re keeping up their spirits, and hundreds of replies came rolling in. Here, 11 readers share great ideas for staying upbeat…
Above: “I’m a teacher in Minneapolis. During these months of ICE operations, we are hugging and caring for our students, staff and neighbors to the max. Here’s me and my bff, Otis, barely managing. Thank you so much for giving our community the attention it deserves.” — Mel
“Museums are big for my daughter and me. They get us out of the house, slow us down, and remind us there is beauty everywhere. We recently saw the Monet exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. Watching my daughter take in the colors made the experience feel so joyful.” — Fariha
“My friends and I went all out to plan an Ina Garten themed dinner to celebrate her birthday. We even dressed up as Queen Ina, complete with bob wigs. The dinner itself was delicious (shoutout to Ina for the recipes!) and included tomato crostini with whipped feta, balsamic roasted beet salad, orange-roasted rainbow carrots and baked rigatoni with lamb ragù, and brownie pudding. I showed up in a big denim shirt exclaiming ‘how easy is that?!’” — Tenley (second from left)
“Five years ago, we moved to the Pacific Northwest. Be prepared for the rain, they said. Yeah, yeah we get it, it’s wet. No, but for real — it’s dark and cold and rains so, so much! Solution: sauna. All sorts of studies that talk about the health benefits, but wow does it warm you up and make you feel great. Bonus? Selfies in the sauna are hawt.” — Rosalyn
“Three of my neighbors and I have been hosting an art night where we teach each other crafts. A few months ago, I taught linoleum block printmaking. Before the holidays, we did pinch pots and sgraffito with my potter friend. Next up, jewelry making and felting. It’s been wonderful to spend time with women of different ages, and these meetups have inspired so much laughter and community.” — Susan
“My husband and I first tried cold water swimming during the pandemic. I just wanted to…feel something. I immediately got addicted to the high, he was like ‘that was fun, never again!’ Now, I’ve been doing it for six years, and my swimming friends and I call ourselves the North Fork Polar Bears. I’ve trained myself to stay in the water for 15 minutes. Learning to stay is a whole other art, and it’s just that: staying. Before I go in, I feel excited and nervous, and when I get out, I feel a rush of dopamine.” — Leah
“I bought a few Himalayan salt lamps, and I love turning them on and lighting all my candles. I’ve reframed the narrative: instead of ‘ugh, it gets so dark so early,’ I’ll say, ‘It’s time for my mood lighting.’” — Destinee
“Our Run Club has been going strong for 10 years. We lace up in the early morning, two or three times a week, year round. But the real power of Run Club shines in winter. Slogging through snowy sidewalks, jumping over puddles, and running in the dark on a 10° morning leaves us feeling alive! We end our runs with a coffee and gab session before dashing off to work or home to help with the morning kid shuffle. Knowing there is a gaggle of gal pals waiting on the sidewalk at 6:30 a.m. donning Yaks Traks and headlamps, gets us out of bed and through the season together.” — Sara
“My kids play travel hockey, so we are often doubling down on the cold with weekday practices and weekend games. We’re all excitedly following the Olympics, especially hockey and speed skating.” — Clothilde Ewing
“Out of nowhere, I have become a suburban bird watcher. It has been very cold here in Stockholm, so I randomly put up a bird feeder in the apple tree in front of our kitchen window. We’ve fed birds before, but I was never that interested. Now I’ve been spending weekends standing by the window and looking up common winter birds in Sweden to identify them. My husband seems as perplexed by this as I am!” — Mina
“I live in a particularly wintry Canadian city: Ottawa (hello, Heated Rivalry, season two!). I usually spend the season cross-country skiing, but now with a baby, our weekly highlight has become Mom + Baby Aquafit at a local pool, which I was delighted to discover is heated! Bliss! It’s very soothing on sore muscles from rocking and carrying the baby everywhere. Some babies get so relaxed that they even fall asleep.” — Fiona
We’d love to hear your ideas for beating the winter blues, if you’d like to share. Thank you so much! xoxoxo
P.S. Ten readers share their winter outfits, and 14 (more) ideas for staying upbeat this winter.
Entertainment
The AI industry has a big Chicken Little problem
Entrepreneur Matt Shumer’s essay, “Something Big Is Happening,” is going mega-viral on X, where it’s been viewed 42 million times and counting.
The piece warns that rapid advancements in the AI industry over the past few weeks threaten to change the world as we know it. Shumer specifically likens the present moment to the weeks and months preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, and says most people won’t hear the warning “until it’s too late.”
We’ve heard warnings like this before from AI doomers, but Shumer wants us to believe that this time the ground really is shifting beneath our feet.
“But it’s time now,” he writes. “Not in an ‘eventually we should talk about this’ way. In a ‘this is happening right now and I need you to understand it’ way.”
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Unfortunately for Shumer, we’ve heard warnings like this before. We’ve heard it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over. In the long run, some of these predictions will surely come true — a lot of people who are a lot smarter than me certainly believe they will — but I’m not changing my weekend plans to build a bunker.
The AI industry now has a massive Chicken Little problem, which is making it hard to take dire warnings like this too seriously. Because, as I’ve written before, when an AI entrepreneur tells you that AI is a world-changing technology on the order of COVID-19 or the agricultural revolution, you have to take this message for what it really is — a sales pitch.
Why people are so worried about AI right now
Shumer’s essay claims that the latest generative AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic are already capable of doing much of his job.
“Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.”
The post clearly struck a nerve on X. Across the political spectrum, high-profile accounts with millions of followers are sharing the post as an urgent warning.
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To understand Shumer’s post, you need to understand big concepts like AGI and the Singularity. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a hypothetical AI program that “possesses human-like intelligence and can perform any intellectual task that a human can.” The Singularity refers to a threshold at which technology becomes self-improving, allowing it to progress exponentially.
Mashable Light Speed
Shumer is correct that there are good reasons to think that progress has been made toward both AGI and the Singularity.
OpenAI’s latest coding model, GPT-5.3-Codex, helped create itself. Anthropic has made similar claims about recent product launches. And there’s no denying that generative AI is now so good at writing code that it’s decimated the job market for entry-level coders.
It is absolutely true that generative AI is progressing rapidly and that it will surely have big impacts on everyday life, the labor market, and the future.
Even so, it’s hard to believe a weather report from Chicken Little. And it’s harder still to believe everything a car salesman tells you about the amazing new convertible that just rolled onto the sales lot.
Indeed, as Shumer’s post went viral, AI skeptics joined the fray.
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It’s not time to panic yet
There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of Shumer’s claims. In the essay, he provides two specific examples of generative AI’s capabilities — its ability to conduct legal reasoning on par with top lawyers, and its ability to create, test, and debug apps.
Let’s look at the app argument first:
I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
Is this impressive? Absolutely!
At the same time, it’s a running joke in the tech world that you can already find an app for everything. (“There’s an app for that.”) That means coding models can model their work off tens of thousands of existing applications. Is the world really going to be irrevocably changed because we now have the ability to create new apps more quickly?
Let’s look at the legal claim, where Shumer says that AI is “like having a team of [lawyers] available instantly.” There’s just one problem: Lawyers all over the country are getting censured for actually using AI. A lawyer tracking AI hallucinations in the legal profession found 912 documented cases so far.
It’s hard to swallow warnings about AGI when even the most advanced LLMs are still completely incapable of fact-checking. According to OpenAI’s own documentation, its latest model, GPT-5.2, has a hallucination rate of 10.9 percent. Even when given access to the internet to check its work, it still hallucinates 5.8 percent of the time. Would you trust a person that only hallucinates six percent of the time?
Yes, it’s possible that a rapid leap forward is imminent. But it’s also possible that the AI industry will rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns. And there are good reasons to believe the latter is likely. This week, OpenAI introduced ads into ChatGPT, a tactic it previously called a “last resort.” OpenAI is also rolling out a new “ChatGPT adult” mode to let people engage in erotic roleplay with Chat. That’s hardly the behavior of a company that’s about to unleash AI super-intelligence onto an unsuspecting world.
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This article reflects the opinion of the author.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
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Artificial Intelligence
Entertainment
See results from over 25 AI models side by side with this game-changing tool
TL;DR: Upgrade your AI workflow with a lifetime subscription to ChatPlayground AI Unlimited Plan, on sale for just $74.97 with code SAVE5 through Feb. 22.
Credit: ChatPlayground AI
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Mashable Deals
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Mashable Deals
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Entertainment
Big Salad’s Birthday Sale
This week only, we’re offering 20% off annual subscriptions to Big Salad, our weekly newsletter (and the #1 fashion/beauty publication on Substack). For $4/month, you will get every issue for a year — packed with fun finds, life realizations, and essays on sex, dating, love, marriage, divorce, parenting, and friendship — plus access to our deep archives.
Last Friday, I wrote about a dating realization I had that changed everything (gift link, free for all). The comments were truly incredible, and I felt really moved by the ability to share relationship (and life) highs and lows with women who really get it. We really are all in this together.
Here are a few more issues you may enjoy…
On sex, dating, relationships, and friendship:
The genius advice my therapist gave me when my marriage ended.
What it felt like to have sex for the first time post-divorce.
How do you know if it’s time to get divorced?
Four ways I’ve learned to deepen friendships.
The book that profoundly changed my friend’s sex life.
Reader question: “I want to talk dirty in bed, but I’m nervous.”
Nine habits that are making my 40s my favorite decade.
On fashion and beauty:
How to style a shirt like a Copenhagen girl.
7 things we spotted people wearing in Paris (plus, two magic Paris itineraries).
13 beauty products we always finish.
Do I get botox or filler? Readers asked, and I answered. 🙂
At age 46, I finally figured out my hair.
Gemma’s #1 drugstore beauty find.
Our 13 favorite swimsuits.
And, most of all, amazing life insights from women we love:
Ashley C. Ford on why poverty makes it hard to figure out what you like.
Anne Helen Petersen’s book-filled island cottage.
Three people share how they changed their careers. Then, three more women share!
Brooke Barker’s great conversation starter.
Hunter Harris tells us what movies and shows to watch right now.
Abbey Nova’s jaw-dropping garden makeover.
Natasha Pickowicz wants you to throw yourself a party.
My sister’s parenting hack that I can’t stop thinking about.
Alison Piepmeyer’s amazing wallpaper before-and-after photos.
15 incredible books to read.
Nine ways Kate Baer is coming out to play in her 40s.
Here’s the discount link for 20% off annual subscriptions, and here’s the Big Salad homepage, if you’d like to check it out. We would love to have you, and thank you so much for your support and readership. Joannaxo
P.S. We also offer 50 comped subscriptions per month for those who’d like to read Big Salad but aren’t in a place to pay for it at the moment. Just email newsletter@cupofjo.com to get on the list. Thank you!
The AI industry has a big Chicken Little problem
See results from over 25 AI models side by side with this game-changing tool
