Game, set, match

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today: Amazon engineers chastise Amazon in Seattle hearing; Search engine DuckDuckGo sees its traffic triple after Google doubles down on AI; and why does Rover love to munch on the grass? 

But first, our weekly poll!

Hershey’s S’mores Kit is kind of a cheat code in the campfire snack category. Everyone loves to mix in some s’mores at the cottage, lake house, or sitting around a fire pit in the middle of nowhere. Mountains, valleys, beaches, deserts, etc.—s’mores will get the job done if there’s a fire burning.

But when a kit comes out that lets you make your cookie sandwich using Hershey’s chocolate, you’ve reached another level of confectionary awesome.

In that sense, it’s no surprise the Hershey’s kit is generating $250 million per year for the chocolatier, and the company believes it can drive that number up to $300 million during the next five years.

“It’s a significant and growing piece, especially for the Hershey’s brand,” said Katrina Vatter, senior brand manager for Hershey’s chocolate. “We’re going to need to continue to come up with different ways and reasons to keep the activity going.”

The company is reminding consumers everywhere that s’mores are almost necessarily a communal snack, guaranteed to end up stashed away in a core memory of every kid who eats one, and if Hershey has its way, guaranteed to be a memory revisited when new and long-time fans alike pick up their kit.

S’mores are celebrating their 100th birthday this year. Care to indulge in one of the 2.5 billion that will be eaten in 2026?

Google announced at its I/O conference last week that it would be radically redesigning the search experience, upgrading it to weave Gemini much more into the way users interact with the search engine.

While useful in many ways, plenty of users have also expressed disappointment and frustration with the endless encroachment of AI, especially when it’s leveraged to replace something that worked so well for them.

It’s yet to be seen if any meaningful long-term split will manifest between those sticking with Google and riding the AI train, and those refusing to surrender the search experience they’ve been familiar with for a quarter century.

In the immediate aftermath of Google pushing the update though, installations of DuckDuckGo on browsers rose 21% week-over-week. Traffic on its “No AI” search site tripled, according to a company representative who spoke with MacRumors.

DuckDuckGo allows users to custom-tailor their AI experience when using the search engine. While it does leverage AI to answer user questions, basically all of the AI-based features can be turned off at the user’s discretion.

Most dog owners assume when their pup is eating grass, it means he’s got an upset tummy and he’s trying to throw up.

While it is sometimes the case that the dog is priming the pump, the reality is there isn’t actually much evidence that dogs graze for any other reason than because they like it.

A 2008 study by researchers at UC Davis found 79% of dog owners whose dogs were around plants daily said they ate the plants—usually grass. 68% of respondents on a follow-up survey of 1,500 dog owners said their dogs grazed daily or weekly, with the vast majority eating grass.

The study also found only 9% of dogs actually appeared ill before eating grass, and only 22% puked regularly.

“Most dogs eat grass because it is a food they enjoy,” says Carlo Siracusa, professor of clinical small animal behavior and welfare at the University of Pennsylvania.

Is dog food, therefore, completely missing something? Realistically, it would be hard to convince dog owners to buy something their dog will just eat right out of the backyard for free.

Still, it suggests grazing is an inherited behavior from wild canid ancestors, and even though some will throw up after, dogs might just love grass. Ask Snoop 😉 

“Fly off the handle” is one of those perfect English idioms, in that the thing it’s describing perfectly fits the metaphor from which it’s derived.

To fly off the handle is to go from calm and stable to wild and out of control, and to do so rapidly. Think of a baseball manager arguing with an umpire, getting tossed from the game, and then—simply put—losing his effing mind.

That’s flying off the handle.

So why is it a perfect idiom? The phrase was born when lumberjacks were chopping their way to promised lands in the West. If you’ve ever seen a lumberjack going at it, you can imagine the horror of an axe flying off the handle at full speed in any direction.

This was a common workplace safety gap, and unsurprisingly inspired the phrase as we know it today. It was first used that way in print in the 1830s.

“But he wouldn’t believe me till he took his glasses and red it himsely, and when he see it was all just as I red it, I did’nt know but he would a flew off the handle. I rally believe if he had been in Nashville then, he would have gone right into the Legislature and drove every son-of-a-gun of ‘em out of the State House.”
—The Record (West Chester, PA), 25 Nov. 1835

Quizmaster’s choice

Here we are at the end of the another week, and you know what that means. It’s another round of à la carte with today’s trivia! 😏