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The start of the new year is a great time to get your finances in order, and a good budgeting app can help with that. Instead of laboring over a spreadsheet, you can try one of our favorite budgeting apps for less than usual. Monarch Money is running a sale that gives new users 50 percent off one year of the service, bringing the final cost down to just $50. Just use the code NEWYEAR2026 at checkout to get the discount.
Monarch Money makes for a capable and detailed budgeting companion. You can use the service via apps for iOS, Android, iPadOS or the web, and Monarch also offers a Chrome extension that can sync your Amazon and Target transactions and automatically categorize them. Like other budgeting apps, Monarch Money lets you connect multiple financial accounts and track your money based on where you spend it over time. Monarch offers two different approaches to tracking budgeting (flexible and category budgeting) depending on what fits your life best, and the ability to add a budget widget on your phone so you can know how you're tracking that month.
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One way to read more in the new year is to incorporate audiobooks as part of your reading habit. Audible is having a sale right now that makes that easier and cheaper to do: you can get three months of access for only $1 per month, or a total of $3. The promotion runs through January 21.
An Audible subscription grants one audiobook per month to keep. This can be selected from a massive catalog of new releases and bestsellers. The collection here has just about everything.
However, it's easy to plow through a single book in a month. Users also get streaming access to thousands of curated titles. Think of it l
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Part of a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of abandoning its non-profit status claims Musk is owed anywhere from $79 billion to $134 billion in damages for the "wrongful gains" of OpenAI and Microsoft.
Musk claims in the filing that he's entitled to a chunk of the company's recent $500 billion valuation, after contributing $38 million in "seed funding" during the AI company's early years. It wasn't just money — according to the filing, Musk helped advise on key employee recruitment, introductions with business contacts and startup advice.
If this sounds familiar, it's because the lawsuit dates back to March 2024. It's still going.
— Mat Smith
The other big stories (and deals) this morning
ASUS changes mind, will continue selling the RTX 5070 Ti after all
Musk claims Tesla will restart work on its Dojo supercomputer
Microsoft issues emergency fix after update stops some Windows 11 devices from shutting down
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 Sometimes, you just need to give your mind a little vacation. And these days, outer space sounds like as good a destination as any. Thankfully, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is here to give us a dazzling new image of the Helix Nebula.
Discovered in the early 19th century, the Helix Nebula resides in the constellation Aquarius. (Cue The 5th Dimension.) At about 655 light-years away, it's one of Earth's closest planetary nebulae. When zoomed farther out, it's easy to see why it's been nicknamed the Eye of God or Eye of Sauron. This 2004 image from the Hubble telescope illustrates that.
A wider view of the same nebula from 2004NASA / ESA / C.R. O'Dell (Vanderbilt University) / M. Meixner / P. McCullough / G. Bacon ( STSI)What we're seeing in the nebula is, in a sense, a moment of death that lays the groundwork for a new birth. The dying star (out of frame in the closer new image) sheds its outer layers. As expelled gas and dust cool, they provide raw material that could someday form new stars and perhaps planetary systems.
The new image from Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) provides a much closer, higher-resolution view.
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If you're new to vibe coding, these tips might help you on your journey to creating apps with natural language.
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Basketball fans can save on NBA League Pass right now, which lets you catch a bunch of out-of-market NBA games via streaming. The League Pass Premium subscription is on sale for $75, down from the usual $160, and League Pass Standard is marked down to $50 from $110. Considering we're almost halfway though the season, the discount makes sense and is a good deal for anyone who wants to keep a close eye on the rest of the games to be played this year.
The Standard plan includes commercials and support for only one device at a time, while the Premium tier offers no commercials, in-arena streams during breaks in the game, offline viewing of full games and concurrent streams on up to three devices at once.
Last year, League Pass added mult
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A new year is the perfect time to get your spending in order, and if you're not trying to build your own spreadsheet, budgeting apps are one of the best ways to do it. To save yourself some money in the process, you can pick up a year-long subscription to Monarch Money, one of Engadget's favorite budgeting apps, for just $50 if you use code NEWYEAR2026 at checkout and you're a new subscriber. That's a 50 percent discount on the service's normal $100 price.
Monarch Money makes for a capable and detailed budgeting companion. You can use the service via apps for iOS, Android, iPadOS or the web, and Monarch also offers a Chrome extension that can sync your Amazon and Target transactions and automatically categorize them. Like other budgeting apps, Monarch Money lets you connect multiple financial accounts and track your money based on where you spend it over time. Monarch offers two different approaches to tracking budgeting (flexible and category budgeting) depending on what fits your life best, and the ability to add a budget widget on your phone so you can know how you're tracking that month.
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You know things are messed up when a Big Tech company fights accusations of union-busting by insisting it was only AI layoffs. That's where things stand after a group of fired TikTok moderators in the UK filed a legal claim with an employment tribunal. The Guardian reported on Friday that around 400 TikTok content moderators who were unionizing were laid off before Christmas.
The workers were sacked a week before a vote was scheduled to establish a collective bargaining unit. The moderators said they wanted better protection against the personal toll of processing traumatic content at a high speed. They accused TikTok of unfair dismissal and violating UK trade union laws.
"Content moderators have the most dangerous job on the internet," John Chadfield, the national officer for tech workers at the Communication Workers Union (CWU), said in a statement to The Guardian. "They are exposed to the child sex abuse material, executions, war and drug use. Their job is to make sure this content doesn't reach TikTok's 30 million monthly users. It is high pressure and low paid. They wanted input into their workflows and more say over how they kept the platform safe. They said they were being asked to do too much with too few resources."
TikTok denied that the firings were union-busting, calling the accusations "baseless." Instead, the company claimed the layoffs were part of a restructuring plan amid its adoption of AI for content moderation. The company said 91 percent of transgressive content is now removed automatically.
The company first announced a restructuring exercise in August, just as hundre
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