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• Nicole Bilderback was the ‘friend’ role staple of ’90s teen dramedy.
• Bilderback appeared in classic ’90s films and TV shows like “Clueless” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
• Being Asian didn’t hold her back; it helped her stand out, she says. But she never could book a lead role.

Nicole Bilderback is the ’90s face audiences certainly recognize but almost just as certainly can’t put a name to.

She’s played the “friend” role in a slew of popular teen films and TV shows, like “Clueless,” and “Bring It On,” or “Dawson’s Creek,” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” She was a familiar face at a time where Asian representation on screen was neither practiced or discussed in the media.

In an interview with HuffPost, Bilderback said it would’ve been great if the emergence of young Asian female actresses — like Lana Condor or “Everything Everywhere All At Once” breakout Stephanie Hsu — was happening when she first started out, but she’s also glad she didn’t think about her race much at the time.

“I think being raised as an all-American girl from Dallas, Texas, I just saw myself as an all-American girl who just happened to look Asian. So in other words, I didn’t pigeonhole myself as, ‘Oh, well, I’m probably only going to read for Asian roles,‘” she said.

That self-perception was reflected in the roles she was cast in, some of which she said were originally written for white actresses.

“The majority of the roles that I’ve portrayed have been roles that were either intended for Caucasian actresses or the ethnicity wasn’t specified. So for me, I got lucky in the sense of I wasn’t really typecast as just an Asian actress. And I think a lot of that had to do with the timing,” she told HuffPo in 2018.

“My story, I think, is slightly different than probably the majority of the other Asian-American actors that have been out here doing this for a long time,” she said.

Bilderback said she saw her ethnicity as a help to her career when she started out as a teen, because she felt she was able to bring something different to the table.

“I was just so free-flowing and young and fresh. I think because of that, because I didn’t limit myself, the industry saw me with very open eyes as well,” she said, adding that the ’90s felt like a “great time” to enter the industry for her even though there were only “maybe, a handful of Asian-American actresses out here in LA.”

Back then, she said being Asian “worked to my benefit because I stood out. I was something new and something different, rather than the standard blond hair, blue eyed that they’d already seen hundreds of.

Bilderback recalled moving to LA to pursue acting in the fall of 1993, and auditioning for her first movie — “Clueless.”

She said, “I was auditioning for Summer, the character I ended up playing, and I also auditioned for the role of Amber. When I went in for the callback, which was with the director, Amy Heckerling, and all the producers, I remember they actually added another role for me, so I read also for the role of Heather, Josh’s girlfriend in the movie. So I was being considered for all three of those roles.”

As great it was to be cast in big projects, Bilderback said she still struggled to get lead roles, which she feels being Asian played a major part in. “I did read for a lot of bigger parts, but there was usually either already a star name attached, or maybe at the time they weren’t necessarily as open to an ethnic actress as the lead. Not as much as they are now.”

“The industry is funny, and the casting process is funny. A lot of it is very political,” she said.

Since then, Bilderback has continued acting, mostly in television, and also has taken to writing. She had a career realization: “There’s more than one way of becoming a successful actress and reaching the success that I’ve always known I was meant to reach, other than just through auditioning.”

• A self-described “puzzler” prompted ChatGPT to generate a unique game tailored to Sudoku fans.
• The popular AI chatbot created ‘Sumplete,’ a game its human creator described as a “reverse Sudoku.”
• Since the game launched last week, it has already attracted thousands of players.

ChatGPT came up with its own game.

Daniel Tait, a 28-year-old software developer from Dundee, Scotland, and self-described “puzzler,” recently prompted ChatGPT to generate a unique game tailored to Sudoku fans. The AI chatbot then created ‘Sumplete,’ which Tait described as a “reverse Sudoku.” We first learned about the game via Gizmodo.

After ChatGPT spit out a list of five games he was already familiar with, Tait prompted ChatGPT to create a puzzle game entirely from scratch. 

“I was surprised every step of the way when I asked if it could make a puzzle,” Tait told Insider. “It instantly came up with an idea.”

Tait, who’s been experimenting with the chatbot since its launch in November, had grown accustomed to the chatbot’s limitations — often encountering messages saying the chatbot was unable to perform certain tasks. But this time, ChatGPT delivered. Within 45 seconds, the chatbot created iterations of the game that, after additional toggling and design prompts, would become Sumplete.

Tait described the game as a “reverse Sudoku”: Instead of adding numbers to a grid, the player crosses out numbers from a filled-in grid to add up columns and rows.

Since he publicly launched the game on March 3, Tait said 50,000 people have played Sumplete. While Tait spoke with Insider, 2,500 people were currently playing the game, he said. 

To Tait’s knowledge, there is no other existing iteration of this “reverse Sudoku” game. According to the chatbot, an existing game that is most similar to Sumplete is Magic Square, a game where the player is given a square grid of numbers and is tasked with arranging them to get to an equal sum for each row, column, and diagonal.

Tait, who said he comes from a “puzzler” family, has designed games previously, including a math-equation version of Wordle called Mathler, which he launched in February 2022. After sharing it on Reddit, the game was attracting over 10,000 players a day, Tait said.

Even without his background in software development and toying with game design, Tait said the Sumplete game is an “amazing” example of how anyone can utilize the AI platforms. 

Tait said he plans on keeping the game entirely coded by ChatGPT “to see what it’s capable of,” and has received emails with feedback from some users. He said he plans to paste that feedback into ChatGPT this weekend to see how it improves the game.

Since ChatGPT launched in November, people have been turning to it for practical and creative purposes to test its limits, from writing a new “M*A*S*H” television scene to poems.  Just two months after its launch, the chatbot designed by OpenAI was estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, the fastest-growing consumer application in history, Reuters reported.

Now, you can add creating puzzles to ChatGPT’s list of possibilities.

As for what creating this game could mean for the future of ChatGPT, Tait said his experiment designing Sumplete with ChatGPT has made him wonder about the capacities for creating with AI. “Could a Playstation style-game be developed from ChatGPT in the coming year?” he wondered.

“I’m still trying to get my head around it,” Tait said. “Definitely, AI is going to change a lot of things. The fact it created a puzzle from scratch is another step in a crazy direction.”

Have you used ChatGPT or other AI chatbots in an interesting way? Email the reporter at gmayer@insider.com

• Nidah Barber-Raymond had her first chemical-skin peel in 2009 and was hooked on the process.
• She began making her own peels and left her job in real estate to become a full-time aesthetician.
• After building her brand and creating an at-home peel kit, Barber-Raymond had a six-figure 2020.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 47-year-old Nidah Barber-Raymond, the owner of The Peel Connection. Barber-Raymond’s income has been verified with documentation by Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2009, I was getting a facial and I felt a light sting on my face. I asked the aesthetician what she was using, and she told me it was acid that would boost my skin’s collagen production. 

I was sold on my first peel. Now, I’m an aesthetician making six figures in revenue a year peeling people’s skin. 

A chemical peel exfoliates the top layer of skin to shed all the dead cells, revealing smoother skin underneath. 

After my first peel in 2009, I became obsessed with the process. I would order chemicals online, mix them, and then apply them to myself before applying them to friends, family, and neighbors. 

I experimented for about a year and would always test the mixes on myself first. I only burnt myself once in this process. My parents stressed to me to do everything by the book so I didn’t harm myself.

I quit my nine-to-five in property management to go all in on skin peels

At the time, I was a property manager, but it didn’t excite me. I left the industry in 2010 to focus on becoming an aesthetician. Using some residual income from the rentals I was managing, I had the financial flexibility to start training. The six-month course to become a licensed aesthetician cost $4,000. 

The moment I got my license, I became a full-time aesthetician focused on chemical peels for the face and body. I took on family, friends, and neighbors as my first clients, and they gave me a lot of referrals. 

I also posted ads on Yahoo’s local directory to help people with extreme cases of hyperpigmentation or acne in exchange for pictures and honest reviews — free of charge. Specializing in peels gave me a good niche to market myself. 

I would approach people on the street and offer them free chemical peels. 

I got mixed responses. Some people agreed, and it worked really well, but for others, I didn’t get such a great reaction. I would see people with acne or hyperpigmentation that I knew one session would help, but the question was: How do you approach that conversation? I had to start holding myself back.

After my maternity leave, I returned to skin peels with a vengeance 

I ran that business for about a year under the name Nidah Skincare until I got pregnant in 2013.  I took a two-year break from 2014 until the end of 2016. I am lucky that my husband is a fairly established real-estate developer and investor, so I was able to take this time off to stay at home with our kids.

Once I returned to work, I rebranded my company to The Peel Connection in January 2017 — my business took off from there. 

I became number one on Google and Yelp for chemical peels in LA, which helped me get a lot of organic clients. I did some standard SEO optimization, and I was only specializing in chemical peels, so all my clients’ reviews prompted Google and Yelp to rank my business as No. 1. I also went from doing three peels a day to seven, which got the word out more and grew my following. 

In 2020, I had a couple of publications come in and record videos of me doing my peels. Both of them wanted me to show feet peels — apparently, they’re very popular, which surprised me!

I pivoted quickly during COVID-19 to at-home peels and hit six figures in annual income

My business was going great, but then COVID hit, and I had to shut my studio. I pivoted quickly to home peels.

By that point, I’d done over 30,000 peels and collected data on each one. I was in a good place to figure out the correct ingredients for a safe at-home peel kit that the clients could apply themselves. 

It helped me scale my business because I was able to sell to people all over the world — rather than just within a 30-mile radius of my studio. I hit six figures in yearly revenue for the first time during COVID.

As restrictions eased, there were still customers who wanted to come into the studio and get me to peel them. And I haven’t lost many clients due to offering at-home peels.

The average face peel costs $225, and the home peels cost $100 for one, $150 for two, and $200 for three.

In the studio, I can offer more uncommon areas to peel, such as what I call the “baby-bump peel,” which is the bum, full-body peels, and peels on more sensitive areas. 

I have one client that flew all the way from Germany to have a full-body peel — and I mean everywhere. It cost $3,000 because he was fairly large, and obviously, the more area I cover, the more it’s going to cost.

Skin peels can be life-changing for people, and it’s so fulfilling to see

My favorite area to peel is the back. I get clients who have had back acne for half of their life and never believed they could fix it. This can be a guy who doesn’t take his shirt off at the pool, or a bride who feels limited on what wedding dress she can buy. I love these peels because it’s really emotional and, sometimes, life-changing for these people. 

All of my clients love the peeling process. 

It feeds into that same feeling those pimple-popping videos do — that feeling of being out with the old, it’s cathartic. You peel and are left with baby-fresh skin. I love doing it to myself!

The best part of the job, though, is seeing results from clients and how shocked they can be. I know it sounds corny, but it really makes me feel like I’m making a difference. 

That’s what I was missing in my previous career. I just didn’t feel fulfilled, and it didn’t light me up the way chemical peels do.

• ChatGPT’s popularity is stirring concerns about the proliferation of AI-generated content.
• Researchers have developed tools to detect machine-made videos or text.
• Simple steps like checking your source are crucial for the average media consumer, one told Insider.

Concerns about artificial intelligence programs taking over jobs or robots going rogue are nothing new. But the debut of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot has put some of those fears back in the forefront of the general public’s mind — and with good reason.

Professors are catching students cheating with ChatGPT, jobs initially thought to require a human’s judgment may soon be on the chopping block, and — like so many other AI models — tools like ChatGPT are still plagued by bias. 

There’s also the ever-growing threat of misinformation, which can be all the more potent with AI chatbots.

Chelsea Finn, an assistant professor in computer science at Stanford University and a member of Google Brain’s robotics team, sees valid use cases for tools like ChatGPT.

“They’re useful tools for certain things when we ourselves know the right answer, and we’re just trying to use them to speed up our own work or to edit text, for example, that we’ve written,” she told Insider. “There are reasonable uses for them.”

The concern for Finn is when people start to believe everything that is produced by these models and when bad actors use the tools to deliberately sway public perception.

“A lot of the content these tools generate is inaccurate,” Finn said. “The other thing is that these sorts of models could be used by people who don’t have the best intentions and try to deceive people.”

Researchers have already developed some tools to spot AI-generated content and are claiming they have accuracy rates of up to 96%.

The tools will only get better, Finn said, but the onus will be on the public to be constantly mindful of what it sees on the internet.

Here’s what you can do to detect AI-generated content.

AI detection tools exist

There are several tools available to the public that can detect text generated by large language models (LLM) — the more formal name for chatbots like ChatGPT.

OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, has an AI classifier, that aims to distinguish between human and AI-written text, as well as an older detector demo. One professor who spoke with Insider used the latter tool to determine that a student essay was 99% likely to be AI-generated.

Eric Anthony Mitchell, a computer science graduate student at Stanford, and his colleagues developed a ChatGPT detector aptly called DetectGPT. Finn acted as an advisor for the project. A demo and paper on the tool were released in January

All of these tools are in their early stages, have different approaches to detection, and have their unique limitations, Finn said.

There are essentially two classes of tools, she explained. One relies on collecting large amounts of data — written by people and machine learning models — and then training the tool to distinguish between the text and the AI tool.

The challenge behind this approach is that it relies on a large amount of “representative data,” Finn said. This becomes an issue if, for example, the tool is only given data written in English or data that is mostly written in a colloquial language.

If you were to feed this tool Spanish-language text or a technical text like something from a medical journal, the tool would then struggle to detect AI-generated content.

OpenAI adds the caveat that its classifier is “not fully reliable” on short texts below 1,000 characters and texts written in other languages besides English. 

The second class of tools relies on the large language model’s own prediction of a text being AI-generated or human. It’s almost like asking ChatGPT if a text is AI-generated or not. This is essentially how Mitchell’s DetectGPT operates.

“One of the big upsides to this approach is you don’t have to actually collect the representative dataset, you actually just look at the model’s own predictions,” Finn said.

The limitation is that you need to have access to a representative model, which is not always publicly available, Finn explained. In other words, researchers need access to a model like ChatGPT to be able to run tests where they “ask” the program to detect human or AI-generated text. ChatGPT is not publicly available for researchers to test the model at the moment.

Mitchell and his colleagues report their tool successfully identified large language model-generated text 95% of the time. 

Finn said every tool has its pros and cons but the main question to ask is what type of text is being evaluated. DetectGPT had similar accuracy to the first class of detection tools, but when it came to technical texts, DetectGPT performed better.

Detecting Deepfakes? Human eyes — and veins — provide clues

There are also tools to detect Deepfakes, a portmanteau of “deep-learning” and “fake” that refers to digitally-made images, videos, or audio.

Image forensics is a field that has existed for a long time, Finn said. Since the 19th century, people were able to manipulate images using composites of multiple photos — and then came Photoshop.

Researchers at the University of Buffalo said they’ve developed a tool to detect deepfake images with 94% effectiveness. The tool looks closely at reflections in the eyes of people in the video. If the reflection is different, then it’s a sign that the photo was digitally rendered.

Microsoft announced its own deepfake detector called Microsoft Video Authenticator ahead of the 2020 election with the goal of catching misinformation. The company tested the tool with Project Origin, an initiative that works with a team of media organizations, including BBC and The New York Times, to provide journalists the tools to track the source of origin for videos. According to the tech company, the detector closely examines small imperfections at the edge of a fake image that is undetectable by the human eye.

Last year, Intel announced its “real-time” deepfake detector, FakeCatcher, and said that it has a 96% accuracy rate. The tool is able to look at the “blood flow” of a real human in a video and uses those clues to determine a video’s authenticity, according to the company.

“When our hearts pump blood, our veins change color. These blood flow signals are collected from all over the face and algorithms translate these signals into spatiotemporal maps,” the company wrote in an announcement of its tool. “Then, using deep learning, we can instantly detect whether a video is real or fake.”

Detection tools are an evolving science. As models like ChatGPT or deepfake applications get better, the tools to detect them also have to improve.

“Unlike other problems, this one is constantly changing,” Ragavan Thurairatnam, founder of technology company Dessa, told The New York Times in a story about internet companies’ fight against deepfakes.

Other ways to spot AI-generated content

The effectiveness of detection tools still relies on an individual’s better judgment.

Darren Hick, a Furman University philosophy professor, previously told Insider that he turned to a ChatGPT detector for a student essay only after he noticed that the paper was well written but “made no sense” and was “just flatly wrong.” 

As Finn said, ChatGPT can be helpful when the user already knows the right answer. For average media consumers, the old adage of checking one’s source remains salient.

“I think it’s good to just try not to believe everything you read or see,” Finn said, whether that’s information from a large language model, from a person, or from the internet.

Social media makes media consumption a seamless experience, so it’s important for users to pause for a moment and check the account or outlet from which they’re seeing a piece of news, especially if it’s something sensational or particularly shocking, according to St. Louis’s Washington University’s guide on spotting fake news.  

Viewers should ask themselves if they’re seeing a video or text from a meme page, an entertainment site, an individual’s account, or a news outlet. After seeing a piece of information online and confirming the source, it helps to compare what else is out there on that subject from other reliable sources, according to the university’s guide. 

When it comes to AI-generated videos or images, there are also still visual cues the naked eye can detect. AI has been reported to have issues drawing hands or teeth.

“Usually there are some small artifacts, maybe in people’s eyes, or, if it’s in a video, the way that their mouth is moving looks a little bit unrealistic,” Finn said.

The photo-editing app LensaAI, which also recently became popular with its Magic Avatar feature, had a habit of leaving “ghost signatures” in the corner of its AI-generated portraits. That’s because the tool was trained on pre-existing images, in which artists often left their signatures somewhere on their paintings, ARTnews reported.

“Right now it’s still possible to spot some of these if you’re looking for the right thing,” Finn said. “That said, in the long run, I suspect that these kinds of machine learning models will probably get better, and that may not be a reliable way to detect images and video in the future.”

Good morning, readers. I’m senior reporter Phil Rosen. 

If you missed Jerome Powell’s remarks from his first day on Capitol Hill yesterday, the TLDR is that more rate hikes are coming because the economy’s still running hot.

Here’s how Powell put it: 

“The latest economic data have come in stronger than expected, which suggests that the ultimate level of interest rates is likely to be higher than previously anticipated.”

Let’s get into how markets, strategists, and traders reacted to the hawkish commentary. 

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here. Download Insider’s app here.

1. The market response to Powell’s testimony was anything but muted. Major indexes all fell more than 1% following comments from the Fed boss, while the 2-year Treasury note jumped to its highest mark since 2007.

Remember, when the Fed raises interest rates, the move influences a range of loan products and it becomes more expensive for companies and individuals to borrow money, which is supposed to cause less spending and generally tighten conditions in the real economy. 

The idea is to eventually lower inflation — which most recently clocked in at 6.4% — but the more rate hikes we see, the greater the risk of a recession. 

Higher rates also drag on stocks because the higher cost of debt eats into corporate profitability. 

They also have the effect of making other investments a more attractive alternative to stocks.

For reference, the 2-year Treasury is yielding nearly as much as the S&P 500 has returned in 2023, all while being a much less risky bet. 

So in short: stocks sold off, bond yields jumped, and traders eyed greater potential for a bigger rate hike this month. 

“If the totality of the data were to indicate that faster tightening is warranted, we would be prepared to increase the pace of rate hikes,” Powell said.

At the last Federal Open Market Committee decision on February 1, policymakers downshifted to a 25-basis-point hike, which followed a 50-basis-point move in December and three 75-basis-point moves before that.

But Powell’s now opened the door to up-shifting to another 50 basis-point move.

Before he spoke on the Hill, traders had been pricing in about 31% odds for a half-point rate hike in March. 

Those odds doubled on Tuesday, according to CME’s FedWatch Tool. 

“Powell just said the quiet part out loud,” Callie Cox, US analyst for eToro said Tuesday. “The economy is performing impressively well, but that could complicate the Fed’s efforts to bring inflation down.”

And John Lynch, chief investment officer for Comerica Wealth Management, said the comments weren’t surprising but investors should be taking Powell’s “higher-for-longer” warning seriously.  

Did anything about Powell’s comments yesterday surprise you? What will you be watching for in his statement today? Tweet me (@philrosenn) or email me (prosen@insider.com) to let me know. 

In other news:

2. US stock futures struggle to push higher early Wednesday, after tumbling yesterday thanks to the prospect of more hikes. Powell will be speaking again today, this time before a House committee. Here are the latest market moves.

3. Earnings on deck: Adidas, Admiral Group, and more, all reporting.

4. Leading Wall Street firms and analysts have a lot to say about the AI boom. The nascent industry could be worth more than $15 trillion by 2030, according to leading experts. Here’s how the pros recommend capitalizing on the new tech wave.

5. Citadel’s Ken Griffin made $4.1 billion in 2022. He topped Institutional Investors’ rich list for the first time in six years after his flagship fund surged 38% in the 12-month stretch. His 2022 earnings are the highest ever in the history of the rankings.

6. Oil prices are flashing signs that the US will avoid a recession. Benchmark crude prices are an underrated indicator of a downturn, and right now they suggest reason for optimism, according to DataTrek Research: “The risk of a recession over the near term seems quite low.”

7. Morgan Stanley is warning investors to brace for US stocks to come crashing down once again. The firm’s strategists said the extreme valuations for companies now echo the 2022 bear market — which suggests the “real damage” for this cycle may still be ahead.

8. Dan Lane has interviewed hundreds of real-estate investors. He shared three of his favorite examples from his podcast with 100,000 monthly listeners of how people have used real-estate investing to accomplish their financial goals. 

9. Morgan Stanley recommended a batch of stocks that can protect your portfolio from a coming market downturn. Margin expectations have fallen at the fastest rate since the financial crisis as earnings turn negative — but these 16 tech stocks look poised to rise anyway.

10. Nvidia has room to climb another 19%, according to Credit Suisse analysts. When it comes to artificial intelligence, no other tech firm comes close, the bank said. Shares of the top chip-maker have soared more than 60% year-to-date.

Curated by Phil Rosen in New York. Feedback or tips? Tweet @philrosenn or email prosen@insider.com.

Edited by Max Adams (@maxradams) in New York and Hallam Bullock (@hallam_bullock) in London.

Whether it’s a meetup at a dimly lit bar, an awkward blind date, a speed-dating event, or even an answer to a classified ad in the newspaper, American dating has long been an experiment of throwing strangers together and hoping for the best. In many cases, there was little to connect people except a shared geography or, perhaps, a mutual acquaintance.

For the most part, this dating formula worked. American marriages are full of people who started dating when they were complete strangers. A survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life, where I’m the director, found that 46% of married Americans reported not knowing their spouse before they started dating.

But that’s changing: Today’s young adults, especially young women, are increasingly finding romance in their friend groups. In our survey, 43% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 said they were in a relationship with someone who was first a friend, including an astonishing 50% of women in that cohort. This is double the 21% of people over 65 who reported having been friends with their partner or spouse before they started dating. Among older couples, 52% said their significant other was a complete stranger to them before they got together, while only 35% of young people said the same. In other words, a lot more older Americans created a relationship out of thin air.

While the results of our survey were shocking, there’s a growing body of research showing the importance of the friend-to-partner pipeline. A 2021 survey of college students by researchers at the University of Victoria in Canada found that a whopping 68% of people were friends with their partner before starting a romantic relationship, which suggests that the pipeline may be even stronger among the youngest set of Gen Zers.

This is a monumental shift in how Americans meet their partners. It also represents the most serious repudiation to online-dating culture to date, challenging the idea that young people ignore prospective partners who are stuck in the “friend zone.” And for many women, it makes a lot of sense. In new research and interviews my team and I conducted with nearly two dozen young people, we found three big reasons Gen Z was drawn to friends more than strangers when it came to dating.

It’s more fun

There is no doubt that more Americans are using dating apps, but whatever their benefits, many of the young people we talked to said that constant swiping had sucked much of the fun and excitement out of the process. In a 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center, 46% of Americans said their overall experience with online dating had been negative, up from 42% in Pew’s 2019 survey on the subject, while just over half of women reported a negative experience. In interviews conducted for our survey, young people told us that they found online dating too transactional. Having nearly endless options can result in decision fatigue and greater doubt about the person they eventually select.

“People think that they just have a million options,” one 26-year-old woman told us. “It’s like when you want to watch a show, and you put on Netflix, and you literally find yourself not being able to decide for an hour, and then you wind up not watching anything.”

Dating can induce feelings of anxiety, and this is especially true when we know little about the person, their background, and their intentions. In The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker wrote that dating a friend erased feelings of uncertainty and discomfort that often accompany the early stages of dating: “Relationships that emerge from friendships start from a place of care and warmth — which can mean avoiding the exhausting game-playing that can arise between two dating-weary strangers conditioned to look out for themselves.”

This was a common refrain among interviewees. It’s certainly easier to meet someone with dating apps, but they don’t necessarily increase the odds of making a meaningful connection. “It’s a lot easier to meet people, but finding someone that fits with you is not necessarily easier,” one woman in her late 20s told us. “So it can be easy to fall into a habit of just kind of making these shallow connections and maybe not looking for something deeper.”

Knowing something about a person may increase the odds of compatibility as well. Chemistry is not easy to quantify, but most of us know when we enjoy spending time with someone — and dating a friend increases the odds that the partner will have similar interests or values.

Trusting friends is easier than being sure of strangers

In no area of social life is trust more important than in intimate relationships. The process of building a relationship — which is the purpose of dating — requires us to let our guard down. But being vulnerable is so much more difficult if we are primed to mistrust the person sitting across from us.

Dating a friend may reduce concerns about trust, which is a major issue for young people. As I’ve previously written, today’s young adults are uniquely mistrusting. They express lower levels of confidence in just about everything: government, corporations, the media, and even other people. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of young adults believed “most people can’t be trusted,” more than double the rate of that notion among older people. 

Trust is at even more of a premium when it comes to dating online. In a Pew survey conducted last year, 52% of Americans reported encountering what they believed to be a scammer on an online dating platform. And even when people are trying to be honest in their dating profiles, young people we interviewed told us, they may unintentionally misrepresent or mislead.

“It’s just hard to know how the person truly is through the internet,” one college student said. “You don’t see their reactions. You don’t see the way that they react to situations because you start talking online and you see the pictures online, and you’re like, ‘Oh, she’s really pretty.’ But that could be, like, a filtered photo.”

There is no surefire way to prevent someone from betraying your trust, but dating someone who is already part of your life reduces the likelihood of it.

Mutual friends provide greater accountability

For a young woman, dating someone who shares a connection to the people or places in her life can simply be safer. In dating, especially online dating, women are bombarded with negative attention, harassment, or worse. The new Pew poll found that roughly four in 10 women under 50 reported having been called an offensive name while using dating sites. More than one in 10 had been threatened with physical violence, and 56% reported having been sent a sexually explicit image they did not request. This type of harassment is even more prevalent for young people: In a 2021 study by researchers at the University of Toronto, 84% of college-aged women reported receiving sexually inappropriate messages from a stranger online.

Much of the negative behavior women are subjected to in the process of dating is the result of a lack of accountability. While there are no guarantees, dating someone who is part of your social or professional circle provides more assurance that they won’t act like a jerk, for fear of the social consequences that come from morally questionable behavior. And if they do act poorly, they are far more likely to face repercussions. Strangers may feel less compunction about mistreating people because the consequences of doing so are often minimal. As I’ve written previously, “The strength of shared social bonds encourages people to be on their best behavior.”

The Washington Post columnist Christine Emba makes a similar argument in her book “Rethinking Sex”: “In the past, meeting someone through friends and community gave something of an incentive for good, or at least socially acceptable, behavior.” 

Dating a friend is not without its risks, though. We often prioritize different qualities in a romantic partner than a friend does, which makes the transition from friend to romantic interest difficult. A romantic miscalculation could result in hurt feelings or ruin the friendship. In certain settings, dating someone you know can have professional repercussions, too. Dating in the office is often frowned upon, but a recent Washington Post story said younger workers were increasingly accepting of office romances. 

The comforting news is that there is no perfect method of finding the right partner. People who married strangers are no less satisfied in their relationships than those who married a close friend, our survey found. We don’t know if these relationships are more likely to endure, but given the confluence of factors that influence the quality and longevity of relationships, it’s a good bet that how you meet is not much more than an interesting story.

Daniel Cox is director of the Survey Center on American Life and research fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute.

Good morning, readers. I’m senior reporter Phil Rosen. 

One of my favorite parts of this job is having conversations with folks in and around Wall Street. 

People have varying views on the economy, politics, and pop culture, but as far as reading recommendations are concerned, a consistent pattern emerges. 

Just about everyone advises going through Warren Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders.

They date back more than 50 years, and taken together, the writing leaves you with a good grasp of Buffett’s business philosophy. 

(His letter this year made a particular splash.)

But the famed investor does much more than write letters, of course. 

Over the past three years, Buffett’s empire has been putting cash to work at a particularly fast clip. 

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1. Berkshire Hathaway’s latest annual report illustrates that the company has deployed nearly $90 billion in investments since 2020. 

Buffett’s firm spent close to $107 billion on stocks — that’s just about the market value of Intel — in three years, but sold about $88 billion of that, leaving a net outlay of $18 billion. 

In 2020, Buffett and co. had spent a then-unprecedented $25 billion on stock buybacks, and set a new record of $27 billion in 2021. 

Total share repurchases in three years ended up close to $60 billion. 

Add that to the acquisition of insurance firm Alleghany for about $12 billion, and that puts the total right around $89.5 billion. 

This spending spree is notable not just for its enormous scale but because of the context it happened in. 

Stocks had soared during the pandemic, as SPACs and private equity firms bid up the cost of acquisitions. That’s frustrating for a bargain hunter like Buffett, who’s complained about the lack of compelling buys in that period.

So his team widened their net. They built up stakes in other companies and ramped up repurchases, and the moves have been working. 

But even after all that, Berkshire still ended last year with $129 billion in cash and short-term investments. 

Buffett’s pandemic decisions reflect those from the 2008 financial crisis, when funding dried up and he was one of the few lenders that hadn’t gone under. 

It was actually during those down years he made some of his most lucrative bets. 

Let’s close with one of Buffett’s most quotable quips:

“We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”

What are your thoughts on Buffett’s massive spending spree of the last three years? Tweet me (@philrosenn) or email me (prosen@insider.com) to let me know. 

In other news:

2. US stock futures were tipping lower early Monday, after China gave a lowball GDP growth outlook and investors readied themselves for Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s testimony to Congress this week. Here are the latest market moves.

3. Earnings on deck: Ciena, Nutanix, and more, all reporting.

4. Capitalize on the $900 billion AI boom with these stock picks, according to Bank of America. Investors impressed with ChatGPT may want to gain exposure to the artificial intelligence sector before it becomes too popular in the near future. Here are 20 stocks to buy now.

5. Fundstrat expects the stock market to see its strongest rally of the year soon. If seasonal trends play out like the firm’s Tom Lee expects, the S&P 500 could jump 7% by the end of April. He laid out six reasons why equities could climb higher in the next two months.

6. Russia’s oil and gas revenue tanked in February. Sanctions and price caps ate into export earnings, a Bloomberg report said, citing the country’s finance minister. It’s a sign that measures taken by Western nations against Moscow are having the intended economic impact.

7. Avoiding a recession would actually be bad news for the stock market. That’s according to TS Lombard. In their view, that scenario would likely mean the Fed keeps interest rates high in a “no landing” environment, which would put downward more pressure on equities. Get the full details.

8. A freelancer who makes six-figures said anyone has the ability to turn writing into a side hustle. He shared the “funny and unconventional” cover letter that landed him his first major gig despite not having a background in writing.

9. Meet Dave Allred, a real-estate investor who owns over 1,000 units. He broke down the most impactful investing, personal development, and leadership books that helped him find financial freedom by age 36. See his list of 21 titles.

10. AI software company C3.ai skyrocketed after an upbeat earnings report. In a Friday note, strategist Dan Ives said the company is “walking the walk” now that it’s gaining momentum in the burgeoning AI space. 

Curated by Phil Rosen in New York. Feedback or tips? Tweet @philrosenn or email prosen@insider.com.

Edited by Max Adams (@maxradams) in New York and Nathan Rennolds (@ncrennolds) in London.

Our experts answer readers’ home-buying questions and write unbiased product reviews (here’s how we assess mortgages). In some cases, we receive a commission from our partners; however, our opinions are our own.

Homebuying demand experienced a brief uptick as mortgage rates dropped in January. But now that rates have been steadily increasing this month, that demand has once again started to evaporate. Applications for purchase mortgages are currently at a 28-year low, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

“Lower mortgage rates back in January brought buyers back into the market,” Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, said in a press release. “Now that rates are moving up, affordability is hindered and making it difficult for potential buyers to act, particularly for repeat buyers with existing mortgages at less than half of current rates.”

Mortgage Rates Today

Mortgage Refinance Rates Today

Mortgage Calculator

Use our free mortgage calculator to see how today’s interest rates will affect your monthly payments.

By clicking on “More details,” you’ll also see how much you’ll pay over the entire length of your mortgage, including how much goes toward the principal vs. interest.

30-Year Fixed Mortgage Rates

The current average 30-year fixed mortgage rate is 6.65%, according to Freddie Mac. This is an increase from the previous week.

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is the most common type of home loan. With this type of mortgage, you’ll pay back what you borrowed over 30 years, and your interest rate won’t change for the life of the loan.

The lengthy 30-year term allows you to spread out your payments over a long period of time, meaning you can keep your monthly payments lower and more manageable. The trade-off is that you’ll have a higher rate than you would with shorter terms or adjustable rates. 

15-Year Fixed Mortgage Rates

The average 15-year fixed mortgage rate is 5.59%, an increase from the prior week, according to Freddie Mac data.

If you want the predictability that comes with a fixed rate but are looking to spend less on interest over the life of your loan, a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage might be a good fit for you. Because these terms are shorter and have lower rates than 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, you could potentially save tens of thousands of dollars in interest. However, you’ll have a higher monthly payment than you would with a longer term.

How Do Fed Rate Hikes Affect Mortgages?

The Federal Reserve has been increasing the federal funds rate to try to slow economic growth and get inflation under control. So far, inflation has slowed somewhat, but it’s still well above the Fed’s 2% target rate.

Mortgage rates aren’t directly impacted by changes to the federal funds rate, but they often trend up or down ahead of Fed policy moves. This is because mortgage rates change based on investor demand for mortgage-backed securities, and this demand is often impacted by how investors expect Fed hikes to affect the broader economy. 

As inflation starts to come down, mortgage rates should, too. But the Fed has indicated that it’s watching for sustained signs of slowing inflation, and it’s not going to stop hiking rates until it sees sustained signs of slowing inflation.

When Will Mortgage Rates Go Down?

Mortgage rates increased dramatically in 2022, but they’re expected to trend down later this year.

In January 2023, the Consumer Price Index rose 6.4% year-over-year, a slight slowdown compared to the previous month. This is good news for mortgage borrowers and the broader economy.

As inflation comes down, mortgage rates likely will, too. But the Fed is looking for sustained signs of slowing inflation, which means it’s not likely to stop hiking rates any time soon, though officials have said they expect to start slowing the pace of hikes. This should help ease the upward pressure on mortgage rates.

Are HELOCs a Good Idea Right Now?

Many homeowners gained a lot of equity over the past few years as home prices increased at an unprecedented rate. But because rates are so high now, tapping into that equity can be expensive. 

For homeowners looking to leverage their home’s value to cover a big purchase — such as a home renovation — a home equity line of credit (HELOC) may still be a good option. 

A HELOC is a line of credit that lets you borrow against the equity in your home. It works similarly to a credit card in that you borrow what you need rather than getting the full amount you’re borrowing in a lump sum. 

Depending on your finances and the type of HELOC you get, you may be able to get a better rate with a HELOC than you would with a home equity loan or a cash-out refinance. Just keep in mind that HELOC rates are variable, so if rates start to trend up further, yours will likely increase, as well.

• Michael Burry invested in Bed Bath & Beyond at least twice before the meme-stock boom in early 2021.
• Burry’s Scion firm held a $8 million stake in September 2019, and a $10 million stake in June 2020.
• BBBY shares peaked at $43 in January 2021, quadruple the price at which Burry owned them.

Michael Burry invested in Bed Bath & Beyond at least twice before the meme stock’s spectacular rise and epic fall, Securities and Exchange Commission filings show.

Burry’s Scion Asset Management purchased 750,000 shares of the homewares retailer in the third quarter of 2019, securing a stake worth $8 million on September 30 that year. BBBY was its sixth-largest position out of eight total holdings, and made up 13% of its $60 million US stock portfolio at the time.

Scion exited the wager during the next quarter, only to reinvest a few months later, filings show. It owned 1 million BBBY shares worth almost $11 million on June 30, 2020. Excluding options, the retailer was its number-two position after a nearly $12 million stake in GameStop, making BBBY a key piece of its $91 million portfolio.

However, Burry once again closed the bet over the next three months, meaning he got out before the meme-stock boom in January 2021. A buying frenzy drove BBBY shares as high as $43 during that period; if Burry had kept his million shares, they would have briefly quadrupled in value to $43 million.

Burry may have missed out on a big windfall by selling his stock, but he also avoided a dramatic decline. BBBY has plummeted by more than 95% from its 2021 peak to below $2 a share today, reflecting the retailer’s onerous debts, inventory woes, and warnings of potential bankruptcy.

The company staved off disaster by signing a $1 billion deal with Hudson Bay Capital and other institutional investors in February. Yet Burry tweeted an apparent warning that the agreement could end badly.

“It’s time memesters look up what a death spiral convertible is,” he said. Burry was referring to a situation where a shareholder keeps converting preferred stock into common stock at a discount to the market price, then sells the resulting shares, driving the stock price ever lower.

Burry isn’t the only notable investor to show interest in BBBY. Meme-stock specialist and GameStop chairman Ryan Cohen built a nearly 10% stake in the first quarter of last year, fueling hopes he might engineer a comeback for the retailer. However, he sold up in August, bagging an estimated $68 million profit.

Similarly, a college student named Jake Freeman revealed a 6.2% stake in late July. He cashed out all of his BBBY shares by mid-August, making roughly $110 million.

Burry, a value investor, presumably bought into BBBY because he determined it was oversold and undervalued. He likely had no inkling that retail investors, eager to make some fast money and punish hedge funds, would pile into the stock and send it skyward.

Once that happened, Burry warned buyers of meme stocks they were signing up for the “mother of all crashes.” At least in BBBY’s case, he was right on the money.

• Top economist David Rosenberg warned that US stocks are in for more pain this year – and rang the alarm on recession risks again. 
• “The stock markets and the credit markets seem to think that they have more time than they can buy before the boom really gets lowered on the economy,” he said. 
• Rosenberg pointed out that the US economy is already facing an earnings recession that could jolt the stock market. 

US stocks will feel the pinch from the delayed effect of the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes, and there’s no escaping an economic downturn this year, according to David Rosenberg. 

“The stock markets and the credit markets seem to think that they have more time than they can buy before the boom really gets lowered on the economy,” the Rosenberg Research chief said Thursday on CNBC, adding that the US economy is not strong. 

The economist was speaking of US financial markets’ resilience in the face of the Fed’s aggressive interest-rate hikes aimed at cooling inflation, and added it’s only a matter of time until investors feel the heat. That’s because leading indicators suggest a recession is imminent for the US economy. 

Inflation surged as high as 9.1% last summer, spurring the central bank to boost rates from nearly zero to just below 5% in the past year. That has seen price pressures ease somewhat in recent months, fueling hopes that the Fed will pivot from its hawkish policy and spurring stock and credit-market gains. 

According to Rosenberg, the US will likely slip into recession no later than the second or third quarter of this year. “I don’t think we get out of this without a recession,” added.

“The timer I see for the market, whether it’s credit or equities, has shortened up so much that it’s only when they see the whites of the eyes, and I think a lot of it will have to do with employment,” he said. “Once employment starts contracting, I think that’s where you’re going to find the risk-on trade really coming under downward pressure,” he added. 

Meanwhile, Rosenberg pointed out that an earnings recession is already underway in the US. “What’s the stock market not seeing when you’re seeing declining earnings, not slowing earnings, and declining earnings estimates?” he said.