From the first trailer alone, I could tell Halo season 2 would go in a different direction than the first. Where season 1 was bogged down in strange storytelling choices that didn’t leave much room for its characters — namely, the Spartans — to do what they do best — namely, kick Covenant ass — season 2 feels more in line with what a Halo show should be about.
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Halo star Pablo Schreiber is excited for a darker season 2
According to Pablo Schreiber, the difference mostly comes down to tone. “The biggest place where we succeed on a level that we didn’t quite reach in season 1 is that I think the tone of this season feels darker,” he said in an interview with The Verge.
Schreiber, who plays Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, thinks the action has gotten better, too — I agree — and attributes these improvements to Halo’s new showrunner, David Wiener.
“This year, we’re living in David Wiener’s world,” he said. “[His] vision, I believe, matches the tone of the Halo franchise in a way that may be more fitting than the first season, and it’s incredibly successful.”
The first two episodes of Halo’s second season are out now, and they’re damn good. I’ve already shared my thoughts on episode 1, “Sanctuary.” While episode 2, “Sword,” is far lighter on the action, it more than makes up for it with how it reintroduces us to Riz-028 (Natasha Culzac). In the previous season, only half of Silver Team, Kai-125 (Kate Kennedy) and the Master Chief himself, got screen time devoted to their character development. Schreiber said that one of his great joys of this new season was correcting that.
“Early on in the second season, we start to find ways to differentiate everybody, give them a little bit of personality,” he said. “Getting to see all of these people that I’ve worked so closely with over the past almost five years have their moment in the spotlight was something that was really fulfilling for me.”
In terms of the Master Chief’s other relationships, Schreiber has said previously he wasn’t fond of the bewildering-but-brazen sex scene between John and Makee (Charlie Murphy), a human member of the enemy Covenant aliens. Schreiber would have preferred a more subtle approach.
“The more in your face you get with any elements of romance or sex, the less grounded it feels in the franchise,” he said. But Schreiber also doesn’t think the Master Chief, as a character, is too serious for romance; it’s just that he’d prefer another partner: Cortana. “There’s plenty of romance in Halo. It just happens that it’s between John and Cortana, you know.”
Of course, it’s not a new idea that John loves his AI copilot. (Whose personality was cloned from Dr. Halsey, the woman who essentially created John and all the Spartans and is thought of as a mother figure for them all — make of that what you will.) She all but confesses her love for him in Halo 4, and in Halo 5: Guardians, he goes AWOL for the first time in his life in order to bring her back. However, one could read that as fierce loyalty — a trait Spartans are known and beloved for — with Chief considering Cortana as a member of the team.
So it was interesting to hear Master Chief himself describe the final moment of “Sanctuary” as romantic. In the scene, John visits a VR parlor and talks to a hologram that comes close to looking like Cortana but misses the mark. John says to not-quite-Cortana (Christina Bennington) that he feels like part of him is missing and that he hears sounds that he thinks might be her.
Though I’ve never had a sentient, autonomous AI implanted in my brain, I can imagine if I did, and it was subsequently taken away like Cortana was for John, I, too, would feel like something was missing. But I may have been a bit too literal. “If you didn’t hear romantic undertones in that scene, then I’m not sure how to spell that out for you, but I definitely thought that was,” Schreiber said.
Of course, if you’re not a Chief / Cortana shipper (personally, I’m a Tom-B292 / Lucy-B091 girl) or think of them as merely friends, that’s valid, too.
“It depends on your concept of romance,” Schreiber said. “When you’re talking about life partnership, you’re talking about somebody that adds to you, somebody that completes you, somebody that makes you better than you were. That’s certainly what Chief has seen in Cortana.”
Sounds a lot like love to me.
Technology
Amazon.com says things are fixed after some issues with logging in and checking out
If you were having issues shopping on Amazon or loading your playlists on Amazon Music on Thursday, you weren’t alone. For over three hours today, Downdetector showed a sizable spike in people reporting issues with checkout, search, and logging in. The problem seemed to be affecting both the site and the mobile apps. But an Amazon spokesperson tells The Verge that the issues are now fixed.
“We’re sorry that some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping,” Amazon spokesperson Jennie Bryant says in a statement. “We have resolved the issue, which was related to a software code deployment, and website and app are now running smoothly.”
Several Verge staffers experienced issues themselves when there were problems. Clicking through to many products produced a “sorry, something went wrong” error, and even pages that did load were not showing pricing. Users reported being repeatedly logged out of their accounts when trying to check out or load their cart. Even the parts of Amazon.com that were working seem to be loading slowly.
The company has been dealing with AWS outages in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates due to drone strikes by the Iranian military, but there has not been any word of more widespread outages in the US or elsewhere.
Update March 5th: Added comment from Amazon saying that things are fixed.
Technology
$163K in fake medical bill charges; AI uncovers it for you
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Last summer, a man’s brother-in-law suffered a fatal heart attack. The hospital bill for four hours of emergency care: $195,628.
The man’s sister-in-law was ready to pay it. He asked her to wait. He requested an itemized bill with CPT codes, the universal billing codes hospitals use, and fed the whole thing into Claude, an AI chatbot.
Within minutes, Claude found duplicate charges, services billed as “inpatient” even though the patient was never admitted, supply costs inflated by 500% to 2,300% above Medicare rates and charges for procedures that never happened. He cross-checked with ChatGPT. Both AIs agreed. He wrote a six-page letter citing every violation by name.
The hospital dropped the bill to $33,000. An 83% reduction. Zero medical training. A $20 app.
A man cross-checked a hospital bill with AI and got it reduced by some 83%. (Neil Godwin/Getty Images)
Your bill is probably wrong, too
That story sounds extreme. It’s not.
The Medical Billing Advocates of America estimates 3 out of 4 medical bills contain errors. The average hospital bill over $10,000 has roughly $1,300 in mistakes. And less than 1% of denied insurance claims are ever appealed. Hospitals and insurers are banking on the fact that you won’t check.
AI flips that equation. You don’t need to understand CPT codes or have a medical billing degree. You just need to paste.
You can use AI platforms, like ChatGPT, to spot errors or suspicious charges on medical bills. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The 5-minute audit
Step 1: Call your provider and request an itemized bill with CPT codes. Not the summary. The full line-by-line breakdown. You’re legally entitled to this.
Step 2: Open ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini (free versions work) and paste this:
“I’m pasting my itemized medical bill below. Please: (1) Explain every charge in plain English, (2) Flag any duplicate or suspicious charges, (3) Compare each charge to average costs, (4) Identify billing code errors or bundling violations, and (5) Draft a dispute letter I can send to the billing department. Here’s my bill:”
Step 3: Paste your bill. The AI will translate every line and tell you what looks wrong.
WOMAN SAYS CHATGPT SAVED HER LIFE BY HELPING DETECT CANCER, WHICH DOCTORS MISSED
If the AI finds errors, call the billing department and ask for a supervisor. (iStock)
Step 4: If the AI finds errors (it probably will), call the billing department and ask for a supervisor. Reference the specific codes. Hospitals resolve disputes all the time when patients show up prepared.
Pro tip: Counterforce Health (counterforcehealth.org) is a free AI tool built specifically for insurance denial appeals. Worth bookmarking.
It’s time to give your medical bills a thorough examination. The AI will see you now.
Real talk. Everybody’s talking about AI. Nobody’s showing you what to actually DO with it. My new free newsletter, Splash of AI (SplashofAI.com), gives you one trick, one tool and one “wait, I can do THAT?” moment every single week. Five minutes. Plain English. The kind of stuff that saves you time, money or both. You’ll wonder how you got by without it.
Send this to someone who is staring at a medical bill they can’t make sense of. Forward this right now. Seriously. This could save them hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and it takes less time than making coffee.
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Meta’s AI glasses reportedly send sensitive footage to human reviewers in Kenya
Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses could be sending sensitive footage to human reviewers in Nairobi, Kenya, according to an investigation by the Swedish outlets Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten. The report, which was published last week, claims Meta contractors in Kenya have seen videos captured with the smart glasses that show “bathroom visits, sex and other intimate moments.”
So far, at least one proposed class action lawsuit accusing Meta of violating false advertising and privacy laws has emerged in response to Svenska Dagbladet’s reporting, citing the company’s claim that its smart glasses are designed for privacy:
By affirmatively claiming that the Glasses were designed to protect privacy, Meta assumed a duty to disclose material facts that would inform a reasonable consumer’s decision to purchase the product. Instead, Meta hid the alarming reality: that use of the AI features results in a stranger halfway around the world watching the most private moments of a person’s life.
The Nairobi-based contractors interviewed by Svenska Dagbladet are AI annotators, meaning they label images, text, or audio, with the goal of helping AI systems make sense of the data they’re training on. “We see everything — from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker says, according to Svenska Dagbladet. “Meta has that type of content in its databases.”
A former Meta employee reportedly tells Svenska Dagbladet that faces in annotation data are blurred automatically, though workers in Kenya say this “does not always work as intended,” and some faces are still visible. Another person reportedly tells the outlet that a wearer’s bank cards are sometimes seen in the footage they review as well.
Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses come with a built-in AI assistant capable of answering questions about what a user can see. The glasses have soared in popularity in recent years, despite growing concerns over privacy and surveillance.
EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear giant that Meta works with to develop the camera-equipped glasses, sold over 7 million of the AI-powered glasses in 2025 — more than tripling its sales in 2023 and 2024 combined. Last year, Meta made some changes to its privacy policy that keep Meta AI with camera use enabled on your glasses “unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta.’” It also stopped allowing wearers to opt out of storing their voice recordings in the cloud.
As reported by Svenska Dagbladet, the Kenya-based AI reviewers work with transcriptions as well, ensuring Meta AI provides the correct answer to the questions users ask aloud. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton says media captured by its smart glasses “stays on the user’s device” unless they choose to share it with other people or Meta.
“When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do,” Clayton says. “We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed.”
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