• Kristi Hemric began decorating her Manhattan stoop after scaffolding covered her townhouse.
• Her changing displays have featured Lego, the Knicks, flowers, and interactive installations.
• She says the project unexpectedly created connections throughout her neighborhood.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kristi Hemric. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I had always dreamed of buying a townhouse in Manhattan, and when I did, I knew I had to decorate my stoop. I’m from Dallas, and everyone decorates the front of their houses for every single holiday.

But soon after moving in, the building next door had work being done, and scaffolding had gone up and crossed onto my property line, covering my skinny townhouse.

Instead of complaining about it, I decided to make it as pretty as I could — less ugly — with pink flowers. I thought my neighbors wouldn’t like it, but they loved an injection of color through the sunless months of January, February, and March.

This was the start of my stoop creations. Three years later, I’m still decorating my stoop, and the themes have attracted a lot of attention — both organically, with people passing by, and through social media.

I decide last-minute what to do next

As a creative, my theme turnover isn’t well organized. After the pink flowers, I decided lemons would make a great summer theme. When the Knicks started winning, we decorated with basketballs, and as the World Cup started, we strung up country flags and soccer balls.

The decision about what to do next and when to do it is often made at the last minute, but I like it this way. It means that it doesn’t feel like work — that it is purely creative fun. It’s easy to get stuck in our day-to-day jobs, and learning something new — for me, working with flowers — is a way to switch off for a bit.

My husband (the organized one) and I (the creative one) work as a team, and my four kids, ages 6 and under, like to help too.

We have storage units in the Bronx where we store used items so we can recycle decorations for future themes. We don’t buy anything that we can only use once. If we can’t buy it, we make it ourselves.

In the past three years, we’ve given away decorations too — to the restaurants down the street and the hair studio nearby.

Someone proposed on our stoop

One Mother’s Day, we had used real flowers — something we don’t typically do because they don’t weather well — and when it was time to take them down, we gave them away to children to give to their moms. They’d tell me the color their mom loved most, and we’d find a flower of that color.

One of my favorite stoops was our first Lego theme — we built every single Lego botanical flower. A guy who had planned a date around Lego asked if he could propose to his fiancé on our stoop. They ended up inviting us to dinner and to their wedding.

For a later Lego-themed stoop, a local boys’ school sent some of their 8^th graders to help build the sets. The parents messaged us to say how amazing it was that the boys were away from screens.

When we decorated with a Knicks theme, the whole city was enamored, and people kept passing by our house in jerseys to take pictures. That was a magical month.

Who would have thought that my stoop — initially just to beautify scaffolding — would have brought community cohesion and joy?

• Demand for “Dune: Part 3” tickets overwhelmed AMC’s ticketing systems on Tuesday.
• AMC CEO Adam Aron said its IT department was instructed to “take whatever steps are needed.”
• “We thought we were ready, but we weren’t,” Aron said on X.

Some fans of the “Dune” franchise had to duke it out like Paul Atreides to snag tickets during AMC’s latest ticket launch.

In an X post, AMC CEO Adam Aron said high demand for “Dune: Part Three” temporarily slowed or “glitched” its online ticketing system on Tuesday.

“Ticketing traffic across AMC’s website and mobile app reached levels approximately three times higher than what we experienced during the Spider-Man: Brand New Day ticket launch, which itself followed strong advance sales for The Odyssey ticket launch before that,” Aron said.

Aron said the ticket issues plaguing customers were “intolerable and inexcusable.”

“There was much discussion internally ahead of and preparing for the Dune 3 launch. We thought we were ready, but we weren’t,” he said.

In response, Aron said AMC has instructed its IT team to “move at a whirlwind speed to take whatever steps are needed so that our ticketing systems are — in all situations and in all quantities —again top shelf.”

AMC initially released a small batch of tickets for “Dune: Part Three” in April, which quickly sold out, disappointing many fans. Tuesday marked AMC’s second ticket drop for coveted IMAX 70mm screenings and other premium large formats.

AMC experienced similar fan hysteria earlier this year for “The Odyssey,” which debuted in theaters this July and also had a staggered ticket release. Fans of the Greek epic rushed online ticket drops, causing platform crashes, while resellers hawked tickets for as much as $600.

Now “Dune: Part Three” is whipping up similar hype among fans, some of whom camped outside theaters on Tuesday. Business Insider’s Juliana Kaplan reported that fans began forming a line at New York City’s AMC Lincoln Square 13 around midnight, and the queue stretched around the block. The Lincoln Square theater is home to the largest IMAX in the country and shows films in 70mm, making it one of the most in-demand theater experiences of the summer.

Some of those waiting in line for “Dune: Part Three” were likely resellers. Tickets almost immediately landed on eBay, where they were going for outrageous prices. One listing on Wednesday morning was selling IMAX 70MM tickets for $600.

Ticket resellers are major players in the entertainment and events industries, despite pushback from artists, studios, and the US government. They’ve caused ticketing drama for high-profile events like the 2026 World Cup and concerts for Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour.”

Timothée Chalamet is reprising his role as Atreides in “Dune: Part Three,” which explores the consequences of his reign after he took power of the empire. Zendaya, Florence Pugh, Robert Pattinson, Jason Momoa, Javier Bardem, and Anya Taylor-Joy are among its star-studded cast.

• Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard veterans had higher ALS rates than Army veterans.
• Male officers had a 64% higher ALS rate than enlisted veterans, a study found.
• The study points to possible service-related exposures but does not identify them.

Veterans who served in the Air Force, Navy, or Coast Guard had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, rates 15% to 29% higher than Army veterans, according to a new study.

The study, published in the journal Neurology last month, analyzed records for nearly 10 million veterans receiving Department of Veterans Affairs healthcare between 2000 and 2024, including nearly 14,500 with an ALS diagnosis.

Officers were found to face a 64% elevated risk of developing ALS, compared with their enlisted counterparts. The researchers did not determine whether particular military jobs or exposures were responsible for the difference.

ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a degenerative disease that damages the nerve cells that control voluntary movement. Over time, patients lose the ability to control muscles that needed to speak, eat, move, and breathe independently. It is often difficult to diagnose and is fatal.

“Military service is a known risk factor for the development of ALS, but little is known about what factors may contribute to that risk,” Marc Weisskopf, an environmental epidemiologist at Harvard and one of the study authors, said in a Harvard announcement.

Weisskopf cautioned that ALS is rare and the overall risk of developing it remains small, “so even statistically significant increases associated with branch and rank represent only modest increases in risk among military personnel.”

Previous studies have also found ALS is more common in veterans, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, perhaps because veterans face exposure to risk factors like lead, pesticides, and other toxins. While ALS can affect all populations, it’s more frequently found in older white men.

What could explain the branch and rank differences remains unclear. Weisskopf said in an American Academy of Neurology press release that officers and enlisted personnel may face different work conditions.

“Officers tend to experience more psychosocial stress, with pilots experiencing high G-forces, noise and vibration as well as circadian disruption, while enlisted personnel usually experience more extreme physical exercise, heavy weapons use and handling of fuels and solvents,” he said.

Around 46% of veterans with an ALS diagnosis served in the Army, roughly in line with the Army’s share of the overall veteran population examined,

After accounting for age, sex, race, and ethnicity, male Air Force veterans had a 29% higher ALS rate than male Army veterans, while male Coast Guard veterans had a 26% higher rate and male Navy veterans had a 15% higher rate. Male Marine veterans had a 22% lower rate than Army veterans, researchers found.

Differences were more pronounced among men under age 61 than among those over 75.

The researchers said they had limited ability to assess differences among women because ALS is so rare and women make up a smaller share of the military population, just 18%. But among the women who were included, female officers faced a 72% higher risk compared with enlisted women.

“Our findings suggest that officers and those serving in the Air Force, Navy, or Coast Guard may have been exposed to military environments that increase risk for ALS,” Weisskopf said in a release. “Future research should aim to identify these exposures.”

• Amazon Prime Air is expanding its drone delivery service to almost 500 US cities and towns.
• That’s a major ramp up. Amazon now offers drone delivery to 11 US locations.
• Customers can check whether they have access to Amazon’s drone delivery service on its website.

The sight of Amazon’s delivery drones buzzing over their homes could soon be the norm for a growing chunk of Americans.

Amazon said Prime Air is expanding its drone delivery service to almost 500 US cities and towns by the end of this year. The company plans to make the service available to customers in Illinois, Georgia, Ohio, Idaho, and New York.

That’s a major ramp up. Seven states, including Nebraska and Florida, already have access.

The company says that any items that weighs 5 pounds or less, and that can fit in a large shoe box, can be delivered by a drone. That’s the majority of the millions of packages ordered on Amazon every day.

“Orders arrive in as fast as 30 minutes, with most orders arriving around 60 minutes after checkout,” Amazon sad in a press release.

Amazon said it uses “multiple” independent systems to keep the autonomous aircraft performing safely, including its “Detect-and-Avoid” system that monitors airspace and the environment. “It’s similar to a trained pilot who scans the surrounding airspace, and it allows the drones to independently see and make real-time decisions while in flight.”

Although Amazon hasn’t shared the full list of locations, customers can check if they’re currently eligible for the service through the company’s website. On the homepage, customers can click into the drop-down menu and find “Drone Delivery” under the “Programs & Features” section.

Once a customer selects “Drone Delivery,” they’ll be taken to the drone delivery webpage, which includes a map of current and future locations. Additionally, clicking the “Shop Now” button in the drone delivery section will reveal a customer’s status.

Launched in 2022, Amazon is positioning Prime Air as the next horizon in delivery services. Customers can order everything from groceries to medications and electronics.

Walmart has also ramped up its own drone delivery service over the last year, bringing it to 100 more stores in places like Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa.

While that sounds convenient, the sounds of the drones themselves might prove an issue for some residents — as anyone who has tried to chill on a beach while someone flies a consumer drone to get that sweeping shot for Instagram can attest.

Are you worried about the noise from delivery drones? Privacy issues? Something else? Share your thoughts about delivery drones in the comments.

• Anthropic’s push to label AI-generated text is prompting some to create tools to remove those labels.
• One AI watermark remover has gone viral on GitHub, and search interest for the tools has increased.
• AI watermarks have divided users, and some have canceled their Claude subscriptions.

Anthropic wants to make AI-generated text easier to identify. Some software developers are already building tools designed to make those labels disappear.

The AI company said last week the “imperceptible watermark” on text produced by certain Claude models would travel with it when copied and pasted because it’s a statistical pattern created through Claude’s word choices.

While some have welcomed the improved transparency that AI watermarks could offer, the move has also prompted concerns among techies that a label could follow work even if they only used Claude to proofread, translate, or summarize. Some users previously told Business Insider they have canceled their Claude subscriptions because of it.

The backlash has led others to seek out ways to get around it: Google Trends interest for “AI watermark remover” in the US is up 60% week-on-week. Some developers and entrepreneurs have taken matters into their own hands and created tools to remove AI watermarks from text and files.

Anthropic has said it’s introducing the watermark to meet its commitments to the European Union’s AI Act. The company did not respond to Business Insider’s questions about AI watermark removal tools.

‘The wrong answer to a real problem’

Guillaume Meyer, a Paris-based tech entrepreneur and the founder of Memo, an AI tool for e-commerce brands, released an open-source project called “Watermarks Remover” days after Anthropic announced its plans.

The tool strips hidden characters and metadata, then rewrites text to preserve its meaning, thereby disrupting the statistical word-choice patterns that can carry a watermark, Meyer said.

The first version took about five hours to build, he added. It has more than 14,000 GitHub stars, a measure of its popularity among developers that’s similar to “likes” on social media sites. It does not guarantee watermark removal.

“I am all for content attribution,” Meyer told Business Insider. “I am against the watermarking technique, and that’s a very significant distinction.”

Meyer said his objection is that watermarking “treats authorship as a binary thing.” AI could leave a watermark when used to generate the text entirely, but also for lighter editing.

Anthropic said in a blog post that its watermark is not meant to establish authorship.

“I think it’s the wrong answer to a real problem,” Meyer said of efforts to watermark AI-generated text.

A new breed of AI watermark removers

Meyer is not alone in trying to take on AI watermarks.

Sabrina Ramonov, an AI educator for entrepreneurs, said in an X post this week that she created a free, browser-based “Watermark Remover” that says it can “clean hidden AI marks” from text, PDFs, Word documents, web pages, images, and data files.

Meanwhile, Ansh Aneja, a Tokyo-based software developer, said he built a Claude-focused watermark remover on the day Anthropic announced the feature. He later released a local, open-source version called MarkScrub.

In an X post last week, Aneja said the tool went from zero to 8,500 users in a day. Business Insider could not independently verify those figures.

These projects are still nascent, and Business Insider has not been able to independently assess their effectiveness. Other companies, including Google and OpenAI, also use watermarks for images, and there are scores of tools that promise to remove them.

Still, the tools illustrate a long-standing limit of watermarking, said Thibaud Gloaguen, a researcher at ETH Zurich’s Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab.

“There will always be ways to remove the watermark,” he told Business Insider, giving the example of rewording the entire text.

A gray area

Watermark removers sit in a legal gray area: the EU tells AI companies to add durable labels, but does not clearly set out rules for third parties seeking to remove them.

A European Commission spokesperson told Business Insider the bloc’s guidance requires providers’ marking systems to be resilient to common alterations and adversarial actions against them.

The spokesperson added the EU’s transparency code specifically identifies removal, regeneration, copying, and modification as threats that providers should assess.

Those are requirements for AI providers, however. The AI Act does not expressly ban third parties from trying to remove a watermark, said Dmitri Roussinov, a senior lecturer in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde.

If that same removal tool uses AI to regenerate text, though, its provider may have its own obligation under EU law to mark that newly AI-generated output, he told Business Insider.

Konrad Kollnig, an assistant professor at Maastricht University’s Law and Tech Lab, said neither the EU’s AI Act nor Anthropic’s terms appear to bar people from making or sharing removal tools.

Users could, however, face problems if they use one to misrepresent AI-generated work as human-made. Anthropic’s usage policy prohibits impersonating a human by presenting model results as human-generated.

That question could become more urgent when Anthropic releases its planned text-detection API alongside its next model. It has not specified a date yet. Watermarks will apply to new models released on or after August 2, and Anthropic is also planning to roll it out on older models.

“All these watermarking techniques have one big issue,” Kollnig said. “Whenever the watermarking detection tool is made public, anyone can check AI-generated contents — including text and videos — against that detector and can build tools to remove watermarks.”

Are you using an AI watermark remover at work? Contact this reporter via email at tspirlet@businessinsider.com or Signal at thibaultspirlet.40. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• China reacted to US import bans by targeting seven American firms, including Altana.
• Altana’s software helps companies manage visibility and compliance of their complex supply chains.
• Wayfair collaborates with Altana’s AI to trace supply chain risks and improve regulatory adherence.

Altana, a software company that helps brands like Wayfair map their global supply chains, has been barred by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce from doing business with individuals or companies in the country.

It’s an example of how geopolitics continue to complicate the supply chain, even while technology advancements like AI offer new solutions.

The August 5 move came after the US banned imports from dozens of additional Chinese companies over alleged human rights abuses in late July 2026. In addition to Altana, the six other companies on China’s list are the nonprofits Responsible Business Alliance and Verité Group, the human-rights NGO Human Rights in China, and the natural-fiber lab-testing company Stratum Reservoir. The countermeasures list also included Applied DNA Sciences, which recently changed its name to BNB Plus Corp and pivoted from fiber tracking to blockchain services in the cryptocurrency space.

Altana sells its software to businesses so they can uncover forced labor risks and meet strict regulatory compliance. To do that, Altana collects and buys data points from businesses around the world, including in China.

The company’s inclusion on the list could make it more difficult to provide some of this data to its clients, like Wayfair.

A Wayfair spokesperson told Business Insider, “While this is a new development, we remain committed to using technology to see deeper into and better understand our supply chain.”

Altana declined to provide a comment to Business Insider about the actions and how they will affect its software going forward, but did previously speak to Business Insider about the work it has been doing on supply chain mapping.

Demystifying hidden supply chain layers

For a company like Wayfair — one that sources 40 million products globally from 20,000 suppliers — abiding by US government prohibitions requires continuous visibility and cross-checking across multiple supply chain tiers.

It’s a complex process since the company “can’t manage what we don’t see,” Evan Friedler, the director of regulatory and government affairs at Wayfair, told Business Insider during a July interview.

Previously, Wayfair contracted with third-party companies and used internal systems to cross-check its supply chain against unauthorized parties, but “getting to the first tier of the supply chain has historically been the easy part,” Friedler said. Visibility often ended there, leaving factors like questionable labor practices or prohibited companies working in second or third-tier suppliers a mystery. Wayfair’s increasingly global scale and a rising regulatory bar made it more important to reach those other tiers, and AI technology finally made it more possible, Friedler said.

About two years ago, Wayfair began working with Altana to go beyond that first tier and look higher up on the supply chain — and with fewer manual checks, Friedler said. “This solution helps us proactively manage risk rather than react to it.”

AI data processing with a built-in paper trail

Evan Smith, Altana’s cofounder and CEO, said the platform is like “Google Maps for the supply chain.”

Altana draws from paid and free public-domain data and secures rights to certain insights from client and user data sets as they are processed through its system, said Smith. The company won’t share confidential customer data, such as pricing or bill-of-materials details.

Still, they can use the data they obtain to enrich the existing picture of the world supply chain graph, said Smith. “It’s a contributory network where everyone’s hooking their data and their users into a platform that allows for that shared visibility,” he said.

At Wayfair, Altana is used for labor compliance and denied-party issues. For example, Altana notifies Wayfair when suppliers potentially match a government-published list of forced labor or denied parties. Wayfair’s compliance team can investigate these risks sooner than before it adopted the technology, said Friedler. Previously, Wayfair used manual signals and self-reported supplier information for its supply chain diligence.

Altana also uses agentic AI workflows to ingest and store vast quantities of data, pulling in reference information such as the full body of US Customs rulings on product classification. Wayfair workers can click into the provided background information to see the AI’s reasoning and underlying documentation for potential issues so they have the evidence they need to substantiate any AI-issued determinations.

Most of Wayfair’s alerts are ultimately false positives. The Wayfair compliance team investigates potential issues, which can mean confirming company names and spellings, double-checking the supplier’s region, or calling suppliers for more information.

Wayfair then updates the Altana alerts on the platform with this information, which they’d typically be unable to uncover through their own manual processes, Friedler said.