Feed aggregator

Updated with 2026 promo details. Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union (PSECU) has a $300 new checking account bonus. That is also my referral link as I successfully did a similar $300 deal previously. PSECU is a digital-first credit union with a very open membership. If you don’t satisfy the available free options, anyone can join with $10:

Don’t meet any of the criteria above? No problem! You can still become eligible for PSECU membership by joining the Pennsylvania Recreation and Park Society (PRPS).

PRPS is a statewide association providing education, advocacy, and resources for those working and volunteering to manage Pennsylvania’s 6,000+ local parks. Park and recreation departments provide safe and affordable recreation opportunities, creating stronger and more inclusive communities.

PRPS membership dues are $20, but we cover $10 when you select to join PRPS during our application process.

There may also be a required $5 initial deposit into a share savings account. I also experienced a hard credit check on Experian when I joined over a year ago, but more recent reports are that they have switched to a soft pull. Here are the details on the bonus requirements:

$300 Checking Bonus Requirements

• Enter your email address into the referral link. Make sure this email address matches the one on your application.
• Complete your application with promo code 2026REFER (should be automatically applied) and be approved for at least one savings and one checking account with debit card.
• Sign up and log into digital banking (online or mobile).
• Set up and receive 2 Qualifying Payroll Direct Deposit(s), each of $500 or more, into either the new savings or checking accounts.
• Above must be completed within 100 days of establishing your membership.

My application process went smoothly and similar to other credit unions. I did have to upload a scan of the front and back of my driver’s license to help verify my identity (which is a good thing in my opinion) as well as answer some identity verification questions based on my credit report. The application took a couple days to process but I was able to get my account information and online access without any phone call or physical paperwork required. I did have to call them briefly to get my checking account number (didn’t want to wait on the free checks to arrive) in order to set up my direct deposit. My bonus arrived without issue and as promised.

One bonus per tax ID, so a couple could each open their own PSECU accounts and get $300 each even if they live in the same household.

PSECU occasionally has some decent CD rates, and they have a 2% cash back credit card with no annual fee if you maintain a checking account with direct deposit.

Greenlight perk. Another useful perk of PSECU for those with kids and teens is they include a free Greenlight subscription, which is a popular reloadable debit card service for kids. This is usually $5 a month ($60 a year). Here’s my Greenlight Kids Debit Card review.

More fine print, saved for future reference:

* $300 New Member Bonus Terms and Conditions. From 1.1.26 to 12.31.26, PSECU is running a new member incentive bonus. To be eligible to receive $300, new members must apply for membership using the promotional code and satisfy each of the requirements listed below. Your membership application must be started between 1.1.26 and 12.31.26 to be eligible to participate in this bonus offer. Applications started before 1.1.26 or after 12.31.26 will be disqualified from participation in the promotion. After the first 100 days from the date membership is established, PSECU will assess whether all promotional requirements have been met. If eligible, bonus processing may take up to an additional 45 days. Therefore, if all conditions are satisfied, the $300 bonus can be deposited into your Regular savings share within 145 days of the membership establishment date. PSECU reserves the right to extend processing time if requirements are not met or if additional verification is needed. This promotion is limited to individuals who are either a U.S. Citizen or permanent resident alien residing in the U.S. who are 18 years of age or older at the time membership is established. Eligibility is determined based on the applicant’s status as of the date of membership establishment, and no exceptions will be made. Limit one (1) new member $300 New Member Bonus per tax identification number used to open a new PSECU account. Joint owners listed on accounts are not eligible to be rewarded for this bonus unless they open their own account. You will not be eligible for the $300 New Member Bonus if you are a current PSECU member or have closed an account within the past 12 months. You are not eligible to receive this bonus if you ever received any new member incentive bonus from PSECU for opening a new account, regardless of when the prior bonus was awarded. This restriction applies to all prior new member promotional offers and is not subject to exception. Members who open accounts and/or loans by fraudulent, suspicious, or illegal means, including but not limited to providing PSECU with fraudulent or fabricated information, are not eligible to participate in this bonus offer. PSECU may adjust the deposited bonus or remove the deposited bonus at any time if PSECU suspects accounts and/or loans were opened by fraudulent, suspicious, or illegal means, including but not limited to providing PSECU with fraudulent or fabricated information. A minimum share deposit of $5 is required to open and maintain a Regular savings share account. The $5 share deposit is also a mandatory condition for eligibility to receive the $300 New Member Bonus, and the member must be in good standing as defined by PSECU’s Bylaws Article II, Section 1. A $5 minimum share purchase will be made on behalf of the new member by PSECU. The Annual Percentage Yield on PSECU’s Regular savings share account is 0.25%. This variable rate is current as of 12.1.2025 and may change. Withdrawals and fees may reduce earnings on the account. The recipient of the bonus ($300) is solely responsible for payment of applicable taxes on that amount. If you have any questions, please seek the advice of a qualified tax professional. The decision to award a portion or total bonus is solely within PSECU’s discretion, and all decisions made by PSECU shall be final. PSECU may terminate or change the terms and conditions of this promotion without notice. Subject to all applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations.

Updated with new and slightly improved 5% deposit bonus. Also, check if any of your past bonuses are unlocked. Crypto exchange OKX is currently offering a few different bonuses which may be stackable. Details below.

1. New customers: $200 referral bonus Should auto-populate the promo code 79795662. That’s mine, thanks if you use it! Details below.
2. New and existing customers: New 5% Deposit Match for all deposits of at least $10 (max $5,000 on $100k deposit). 24 week hold period to get full deposit match, paid out every 14 days. Details below. If you use your deposits to hold USDG, then you will stack on top of the 5% APY earned on USDG.
3. New and existing customers: 5% APY on USDG (stablecoin)
4. New and existing customers: Free crypto via X Drops Club. Must maintain a $1,000+ portfolio of crypto (cash, USDC, USDT and USDG stablecoin does not count). BTC, ETH do count. You must also “join” each airdrop before the window closes. More details here and here.

1. $200 New customer bonus details. For new OKX customers:

• Sign up via special referral link. I think they allow either smartphone or browser sign-up, but identity verification may be easier on a smartphone. That’s my referral link, which should auto-populate with the promo code 79795662. Thanks if you use it!
• Complete identity verification (driver’s license and smartphone selfie).
• $200 BTC Bonus if you deposit $200+ of either cash (link bank account via Plaid) or crypto within 30 days, trade that $200 or more of crypto (can purchase stablecoin like USDG), and hold the assets for at least 30 days within a 90-day period. After 90 days, the bonus will be tradable and withdrawable.
• Stablecoins such as USDG, USDT, and USDC qualify for deposit, trading volume, and AUM holding requirements.

2. New 5% Deposit Match

• OKX is running a 5% bonus match on new deposits (minimum $10 and maximum $100,000). You must hold for 24 weeks to get the full 5%, but it is paid out gradually every 14 days (2 weeks). That means up to a $5,000 payout on $100,000 after 24 weeks. You still keep liquidity and can withdraw your deposits at any time, but you lose the match.
• Must opt in *first* by March 4th, 2026, and then make the deposit. Look for this offer in app.
• Full terms.
• This works out to over 10% annualized, plus if you hold USDG that also earns an additional 5% APY at OKX.

3. OKX is also paying 5% APY on USDG deposits currently. USDG stablecoin is not FDIC-insured. They claim to be fully backed by US Treasury Bills with monthly audits and regulated by Singapore, but I still plan to withdraw my USDG out into a real FDIC-insured bank as soon as the holding period is over. This is a short-term play for me; I’m in for the stacking bonus duration and then I’m out.

4. X Drops Club is a recurring rewards program with automatic daily drops that scale with a user’s eligible crypto balance. Must maintain $1,000+ in eligible crypto assets (excluding fiat, USDC, USDT, and USDG).

Please perform your own due diligence on crypto apps. They are still not regulated on the same level as bank account or brokerage accounts. The bonuses are bigger, but there is added platform risk with crypto apps that are not FDIC or SIPC-insured. I don’t like to keep significant funds in there any longer than is required for the bonus to clear, and I only do short-term deals.

Here is the OKX Wikipedia page and they are profiled in the Forbes article “The World’s Most Trustworthy Crypto Exchanges”. (Also see: Kraken and Gemini bonuses.)

Note: OKX does not allow customers to be individuals residing in New York, Texas, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the US Virgin Islands.

Bafta has brought in "human achievement" as a guiding principle for its annual awards as the film and television industry grapples with the rapid adoption of AI tools in many parts of production. From a report: In an interview with the FT, Bafta chair Sara Putt, who is nearing the end of her three-year tenure, said artificial intelligence would change how people worked "but at the base of everything in this industry is human creativity." However, while AI has been banned in Bafta's performance awards -- meaning, for example, that AI-generated avatars cannot be put forward for leading actress or actor -- it is not prohibited in other categories. Putt said AI tools were increasingly useful in production but added: "We've actually added [human creativity] as a criteria this year... Those very human skills of communication and collaboration are not going anywhere anytime soon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models -- Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini -- appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only 30 of the returned passwords were unique, and 18 of the duplicates were the exact same string. The estimated entropy of LLM-generated 16-character passwords came in around 20 to 27 bits, far below the 98 to 120 bits expected of truly random passwords.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Turbostat With Linux 7.0 Can Report New L2 Cache Statistics  Phoronix

Despite the popular notion that the modern economy runs around the clock, a new NBER working paper analyzing fifty years of U.S. labor data from 1973 to 2023 finds that Americans have been steadily and consistently moving away from evening and night work toward traditional daytime hours [PDF]. The share of the workforce on the job at 11PM, for instance, fell by over 25% from its 1970s level. Economists Jeff Biddle and Daniel Hamermesh argue the primary driver is rising real incomes -- night work is essentially an inferior good that workers avoid as they earn more. The wage premium employers must pay for undesirable hours has grown by about three percentage points over the period. One sector bucked the trend: retail, where the rise of big-box chains, 24-hour Walmart supercenters and overnight distribution center restocking pushed more employees into late-night and early-morning shifts. The Covid-era surge in telework, rather than spreading work across the day, actually accelerated the concentration into prime hours -- especially among college-educated workers. France showed a similar pattern of daytime compression over 1966-2010, but the U.K. did not, likely because rapid de-unionization there eliminated the union wage premiums that had made night work comparatively attractive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study [PDF] from Ramp's economics lab has found that businesses are steadily replacing freelance workers hired through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr with AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the substitution is happening at a fraction of the cost. The paper, authored by Ryan Stevens, Ramp's Director of Applied Sciences, tracked firm-level spending data from Q3 2021 to Q3 2025 across thousands of companies on Ramp's expense management platform. The share of total business spend going to online labor marketplaces fell from 0.66% in Q4 2021 to 0.14% in Q3 2025, while AI model provider spending rose from zero to 2.85% over the same period. More than half the businesses that used freelance marketplaces in Q2 2022 had stopped entirely by Q2 2025. The cost dynamics are particularly notable. Firms most exposed to AI -- those that historically spent the most on freelancers -- substituted at a rate of roughly $1 in reduced freelance spend for every $0.03 in AI spend. A middle-exposure group showed a ratio of $1 to $0.30. The study uses a difference-in-differences design built around the launch of ChatGPT in October 2022 as a natural experiment. Stevens notes that micro-level substitution does not imply aggregate job loss, as demand for workers who build and maintain AI systems could grow faster than displacement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

5 programs you need to know about as a Linux user  MakeUseOf

Linux is not a Windows substitute: Here's how you should approach it  How-To Geek

Three new Chrome features designed to give you a productivity boost: Split view, Save to Google Drive and PDF annotations.Three new Chrome features designed to give you a productivity boost: Split view, Save to Google Drive and PDF annotations.

Introducing Pomelli Photoshoot, turn product photos into professional studio shots instantly using Nano Banana.Introducing Pomelli Photoshoot, turn product photos into professional studio shots instantly using Nano Banana.

In 2025, we significantly enhanced the Google Play and Android app ecosystems.

Accenture has reportedly started tracking staff use of its AI tools and will take this into consideration when deciding on top promotions, as the consulting company tries to increase uptake of the technology by its workforce. From a report: The company told senior managers and associate directors that being promoted to leadership roles would require "regular adoption" of artificial intelligence, according to an internal email seen by the Financial Times. The consultancy has also begun collecting data on weekly log-ins to its AI tools by some senior staff members, the FT reports. Accenture has previously said it has trained 550,000 of its 780,000-strong workforce in generative AI, up from only 30 people in 2022, and has announced it is rolling out training to all of its employees as part of its annual $1bn annual spend on learning. Among the tools whose use will reportedly be monitored is Accenture's AI Refinery. The chief executive, Julie Sweet, has previously said this will "create opportunities for companies to reimagine their processes and operations, discover new ways of working, and scale AI solutions across the enterprise to help drive continuous change and create value."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI Helped Uncover A "50-80x Improvement" For Linux's IO_uring  Phoronix

My favourite thing about Linux gaming will now automagically apply crucial fan patches to your Metal Gear installs, making it even easier than on Windows  PC Gamer

My favourite thing about Linux gaming will now automagically apply crucial fan patches to your Metal Gear installs, making it even easier than on Windows  PC Gamer

Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country -- and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. Anna Bond, legal director at Lewis Silkin, says the complaints she now sees sometimes cite Canadian legislation or fabricated case law. Sinead Casey, employment partner at Linklaters, calls such filings "confidently incompetent" -- superficially persuasive even to lawyers. The flood of bloated claims is compounding pressure on an already stretched tribunal system: Ministry of Justice figures show new employment cases rose 33% in the three months to September, even as concluded cases fell 10% year over year. Investor Marc Andreessen, quipping on X: Overheard in Silicon Valley: "Marginal cost of arguing is going to zero."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

3.1 Pro is designed for tasks where a simple answer isn’t enough.3.1 Pro is designed for tasks where a simple answer isn’t enough.

I've used Windows for decades, but I tried Linux to see if it's truly 'easy' now - and one thing surprised me  ZDNET

Linux Kernel 7.0 Speeds Up File Cache Memory Reclaim by Up to 75%  TechPowerUp