The screen that saved my family

But first, some reading: I finally wrote about how a remarkably simple screen saved my family from our calendar chaos and how Big Tech never thought to make it. Then, how to fight the growing tide of AI slop on LinkedIn. And, finally, our oldest Old Thing yet. 

When I was growing up, I desperately wanted one of those small CRT TVs in the kitchen. Some of my friends had one perched on the counter, but my mom had a rule: no TV screens in the kitchen.

I tried to keep that same rule with my own family. Then a big touchscreen moved onto our kitchen counter and I don’t know how we ever lived without it. 

The Skylight isn’t a Swiss Army knife tablet designed to distract us with videos, games, news or an endless parade of ads. It has one job: keep the family organized. 

“We're not incentivized by getting you and your kids more addicted to our screens. We're incentivized by helping alleviate some mental load,” Aviv Gilboa, the president of Skylight, told me. 

About 99% of the time, the screen displays our weekly calendar. The other 1% of the time? Someone has walked over to check the grocery list or add a reminder. You could call it a “smart home” gadget, though there isn’t actually much that’s “smart” about it. That’s precisely why I love it—and probably why Big Tech (Amazon, Google, Apple) never thought to build it.

It’s simple. We have the $300, 15-inch Skylight Calendar 2. (There are also 10-inch and 27-inch models.) Create an account in the Skylight app, invite the other members of your household and start adding events. You can sync calendars from Google, Microsoft or Apple, but we took a more selective approach. Our Skylight has its own email address, which we add to the Google Calendar events we want the whole family to see. Those events then automatically appear on the screen. 

I can see the eye rolls: A $300 calendar screen? Couldn’t you have just repurposed an old iPad? Sure, but then I’d be the family calendar’s full-time IT department, and we’d still be missing some of the software features we really like. Plus, an iPad, Echo Show, or other home tablet would come with all sorts of distractions. Skylight charges a monthly subscription fee for extra features, but we don’t pay it because we don’t need them.

It solves a real problem. Sure, we could all pull out our phones and open our calendars, but those calendars are already cluttered with work stuff. We found ourselves constantly asking one another what was happening and when. Or we’d have to shuffle through piles of papers to find that day’s school-lunch menu or camp dress-up theme.

The Skylight puts the week in one shared, glanceable place so that everyone—including the kids—can see the family plan. Each event can also be assigned to a specific child, whose photo appears right alongside it: music, karate, Boy Scouts, etc. There’s also a phone app where you can see your calendars and other info but I rarely use it.

It feels safe. “We don't have a microphone or camera on the device because we want to focus on building trust with millions of families, and those things are trustbusters,” Gilboa told me. 

The Skylight, which launched in 2020, doesn’t have the market share—or mindshare—of Google’s Nest Hub or Amazon’s Echo Show. But according to Gilboa, 1.7 million families use a Skylight Calendar every month, and the company is pulling in more than $500 million in annual revenue. Its success is a reminder that a gadget doesn’t have to do everything. Sometimes, dead-simple and single-purpose is exactly what belongs in the kitchen.

So, that scam call wasn’t random. Scammers don’t just guess your number. They buy personal information from data brokers—companies selling your phone number, home address, relatives’ info and much more. That’s how a scam call can turn into phishing, impersonation, identity theft—or someone knowing more about you than they should.

That’s why you need to use a service to clean up your personal info. Incogni removes it from these databases and keeps removing it automatically. There’s never been a better time to try Incogni, especially since New Things readers get 55% off annual plans with code JOANNA55.

Report AI Slop on LinkedIn

If a LinkedIn post reads like it was generated from the prompt, “Write a post that makes me sound like a Partner at Deloitte / a hustle-culture influencer,” you’ve finally got some recourse.

LinkedIn announced yesterday that users can now report suspected AI slop in their feeds. 

In a post on LinkedIn (appropriately), Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan declared that “AI Slop is a top priority for all of us.” Which is good, because it’s rampant. Pangram, a tool that detects AI generated content, recently estimated that 41% of longform and 30% of shortform content on Linkedin is written by AI.

When you see a post that seems like AI slop, tap the three dots in the top corner of the screen and select the new ⚠️ Seems like AI slop button to report it.

I wish I could give you a foolproof way to identify LinkedIn slop, but like bad art or a fake Pokémon card, you kind of just know it when you see it. It’s generic. It’s light on specifics. It’s overflowing with buzzwords. It’s got that tone.

But rest assured, everything you see from me on LinkedIn is good old-fashioned, hands-on-keyboard human content. See you there! 

Name: Rob Feldman

What's your old thing? Otis King Pocket Calculator

What year is your old thing from? 1937

Why do you love your old thing? It belonged to my father, who used it when he was in engineering school in the late 1930s. Here’s a snippet taken from the University of Queensland Physics Museum in Brisbane, Australia: “To use it, one would rotate the outermost and innermost cylinders, selecting the required numbers to be multiplied or divided on the logarithmic scales. Successive multiplication and division could be combined in 1 movement.” Thankfully, calculators were around by the time I got to engineering school! This sits on my desk now, a perfect complement to my laptop, desktop and two monitors.

This newsletter was written and curated by Joanna Stern and Adele Lowitz.