Gen Z Would Rather Live in the Past and OpenAI Just Gave Us Tamagotchi Code Pets

Half of Gen Z would rather time travel backward than stay here

A new NBC News survey found that 47 percent of Americans aged 18–29 would choose to live in the past if given the option. Only 38 percent would stay in the present. A tiny minority is willing to look forward.

That is not a rounding error. That is half of an entire generation saying "no thanks" to 2026.

The reasons are predictable but depressing: housing costs, student debt, climate anxiety, the general sense that upward mobility is now a punchline. What is less obvious is how this maps onto the parasocial economy that dominates Gen Z media consumption. When your entire feed is curated nostalgia and people you have never met feel like close friends, the boundary between "the past" and "right now" gets blurry fast.

Speaking of which: parasocial relationships are apparently making us act like toxic exes toward celebrities we have never spoken to. Psychology Today defines them as one-sided emotional bonds with media personalities. The VICE piece notes that we now grieve breakups with influencers the same way we mourn real relationships. The line between real and performed intimacy has collapsed, and Gen Z is the cohort that grew up entirely inside that collapse.

Put those two data points together and you get a generation that prefers imagined pasts and mediated relationships to whatever messy reality is happening outside the screen.

Apple is spending more on R&D than ever and it is all about AI

Apple's R&D spending hit a new record this quarter as the company ramps up AI investment across the board. The exact figure was not broken out separately, but the trend is clear: more chips, more models, more infrastructure.

This comes alongside Apple's Q2 2026 earnings, which posted $111.2 billion in revenue, up 17 percent year-over-year. The company also warned that supply constraints for the Mac mini and Mac Studio will persist for several months. Demand is high, fabs are full, and Apple is prioritizing AI-adjacent hardware over consumer refresh cycles.

What is notable here is not the revenue number — Apple always prints money — but the R&D intensity. They are not just buying compute. They are building the stack that lets them own the AI experience end-to-end without sending every query to a third party. That takes years and billions, and we are watching it play out in real time through quarterly filings.

OpenAI updated Codex and now your IDE has a Tamagotchi

Buried in this week's news: OpenAI updated Codex and added Tamagotchi-style pets that hover over your dock or taskbar while you code. You can customize them. They react to your workflow. They are deeply silly and also kind of perfect.

One engineer already made "Lil Finder Guy" and posted about it on Friday. The vibe is less productivity tool, more ambient companionship for people who spend 10 hours a day in a terminal window. It is the same impulse that made Clippy annoying in 1997 but might actually work now because we have all been domesticated by notification badges and emoji reactions.

This is not a feature anyone asked for. It is also exactly the kind of thing that makes a tool feel less like work and more like hanging out. If you are going to spend your entire day talking to a language model anyway, why not give it a face and a mood?

Replit's CEO would rather not sell, Uber wants to turn drivers into sensors, and other quick hits

Replit CEO Amjad Masad sat down with TechCrunch to talk about the Cursor deal rumors, fighting Apple's App Store policies, and why he would rather not sell the company. The subtext: Replit is building a platform, not an exit.

Uber is pitching self-driving companies on the idea of turning its millions of drivers into a distributed sensor grid. The pitch is simple: every rideshare trip is already generating GPS traces, camera feeds, and real-time traffic data. Why not package that up and sell it to autonomy labs that need ground truth for their models?

It is a clever pivot. Uber's drivers are not going anywhere soon, and the sensor data they generate is actually valuable. Whether any AV company bites is another question — most of them already have their own fleets — but the ask is not unreasonable.

Musely, a telehealth company focused on skincare and hair loss, secured $360M from General Catalyst without giving up equity. The structure is unusual: it is a revenue-based financing deal that lets the company scale marketing spend without dilution. Non-dilutive capital is having a moment, especially in categories where customer acquisition cost is predictable and margins are high.

The vibe this week

This was not a big launch week. No new foundation models, no surprise acquisitions, no consumer app that broke through. Instead we got incremental updates, earnings calls, and one very good survey about how half of young people would rather live in 1995 than deal with the present.

That probably tells you more about the state of things than any product announcement would.