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Last quarter, the VP of engineering at a large gaming company explained to Oso how they’d built an AI site reliability engineering agent to help resolve incidents and fix production issues. For weeks, it worked beautifully—triaging alerts, identifying root causes, even suggesting fixes their team would have taken hours to develop.

Then one day, it launched a denial-of-service attack on their internal monitoring system.

The agent had permissions to query their monitoring APIs. It was supposed to use them to gather context for incident response. But when it decided those APIs might hold the answer to a particularly thorny issue, it started hammering them with requests until the system fell over.

They shut the agent down, obviously. But unplugging the agent is a blunt instrument—it means losing all the goodness they were getting before.

An agent is a system. To secure any system, you need the right mental model to reason about it. The industry doesn’t have that mental model for agents yet, and that’s a problem.

Without a shared mental model of what an agent is, people can’t decompose it. And if it can’t be decomposed, security can’t be designed around it. The disasters make headlines. More commonly, though, concerns about agent security are leading to agents so locked down they can barely do anything.

Nondeterminism is both the promise and the peril of agents. An AI agent behaves in nondeterministic ways because it is given the agency to determine how it executes tasks. You can’t remove that autonomy without gutting the agent—but you can mitigate the risks. The most fundamental control is permissions.

Consider Wade Foster’s sharp post on the “AI Automation Spectrum” and prior work by Anthropic, Tines, and Simon Willison. If you can categorize what kind of system you’re building, you can reason about what could go wrong and how to prevent it. Many organizations want to move from left to right on a spectrum of autonomy, but most are stuck because they can’t reason about what agents might do. Taxonomy can be a diagnostic tool. Know what’s nondeterministic, and you’ll know where the risk is and what controls to apply.

Agent Taxonomy

Imagine you’re a retailer. When you get customer feedback, you want to ask happy customers to leave reviews and fix issues for unhappy ones, but you want to automate this. You could build a straightforward automated workflow, or you could move from left to right on this spectrum of autonomy.

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BMW Group

Finding an affordable luxury SUV that mixes practicality with high-end amenities and expressive design doesn’t have to be a budget-busting exercise. Using Edmunds’ rankings and a $50,000 budget — including mandatory destination charges — here are 10 of the best affordable luxury SUVs on the market today. The top pick, the BMW X1, edges out its rivals, but only by a smidge. You really can’t go wrong with any of these right-priced luxurious crossovers and SUVs, which are listed out below from first to last based on their Edmunds Rating.

2026 BMW X1

The BMW X1, the smallest SUV in BMW’s lineup, serves as a good performance gateway thanks to the base xDrive28i model’s strong 241-horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder engine. But the entry-level BMW isn’t just about zip and zest. It’s spacious inside and loaded with tech, like the automaker’s relatively intuitive iDrive software that is displayed via a crisp and bright curved display. Watch your spending carefully, however, as the X1’s price can climb quickly with option packages.

Starting price: $43,975

2026 Mercedes-Benz GLB

No affordable luxury crossover on this list does as much as the Mercedes-Benz GLB. This lineup of small SUVs offers seating for up to seven passengers thanks to its optional pint-size third-row bench. Even if you don’t need all those seats, the GLB has a big cargo area for its relatively petite footprint. You’ll also find good tech and a particularly sophisticated suite of safety and convenience features in the available Driver Assistance package.

Starting price: $46,950

2026 Mercedes-Benz GLA

If you only associate Mercedes-Benz with its high-end offerings, the relatively affordable GLA would like to introduce itself. The entry to the Mercedes range rides and handles well with a sporty personality, and it offers much of the styling personality of the brand’s more expensive cars. It’s not particularly spacious inside, however, so consider other options — like the related GLB described above — if you need more room.

Starting price: $42,850

2026 Volvo XC40

The Volvo XC40 is small on price but big on personality and in-car tech. At the forefront is Volvo’s Pilot Assist feature, which modulates speed and assists steering — a real boon on long road trips or grueling commutes alike. Inside, its vertical screen runs Google Built-In software with nat

J.A. Dunbar // Shutterstock

Nearly half of all U.S. households rely on gas or propane furnaces to stay warm. But for those homes, the rules of home heating are about to change. By late 2028, a new federal mandate from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will require all nonweatherized gas furnaces to hit a 95% annual fuel utilization efficiency (AFUE) rating. The numbers tell a clear story.

The DOE expects this shift to save consumers roughly $24.8 billion in utility costs over the next 30 years. That sounds like a win, but it comes with a catch. For many, the transition means immediate “sticker shock” from higher upfront equipment costs and the technical headache of secondary structural retrofits. This report from Vectra Mechanical breaks down how these new regulations are forcing a high-stakes evolution in home heating nationwide.

Vectra Mechanical

What You Need to Know About the New Standard

From a regulatory perspective, this update addresses a core utilization inefficiency in domestic home heating. According to the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), many older gas furnaces operate at approximately 70% to 80% efficiency, meaning a significant share of the fuel energy is lost through exhaust rather than converted into usable thermal energy.

This energy loss translates directly into higher operating expenses and increased environmental impact. Gas-powered furnaces emit carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx), which are primary contributors to greenhouse gas levels and local air quality degradation.

Units that meet the 95% AFUE standard utilize condensing technology to recover latent heat from exhaust gases before they are discharged. As a result, a higher percentage of fuel is converted into usable heat, significantly reducing waste.

According to the Department of Energy (DOE) projections mentioned above, this transition is expected to avoid the release of 332 million metric tons of carbon emissions over the next 30 years.

In terms of direct fuel-to-heat conversion, the efficiency delta is significant:

• 80% AFUE: 80 cents becomes heat, and 20 cents is wasted.
• 95% AFUE: 95 cents is converted into heat, and only 5 cents turns into exhaust.

Who It Impacts

The federal mandate ef

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Improving engagement is a priority for many organizations. You introduce new initiatives, invest in better communication, and offer more perks, all in the hope of creating a more connected and motivated workplace. But even with those efforts, something can still feel off. Engagement doesn’t always respond the way you expect.

So what if the most important factor isn’t what you’re doing, but how your leadership team is showing up?

The truth is: Employee engagement isn’t rooted in surface-level perks. It grows through trust, meaningful feedback, and consistent support from leaders in the moments that matter most. Understanding that connection is the first step toward creating real impact. WorkTango examines how leadership can affect engagement among employees and how surveys can help.

How leadership affects employee engagement

Employee engagement is built (or broken) by leadership.

Your employees are paying attention. They see how leaders communicate, how they handle feedback, and whether or not they follow through. These behaviors directly shape how connected employees are to their work and your culture.

That’s why engagement isn’t just an HR initiative. It’s an organization-wide initiative that relies heavily on leaders.

It’s no surprise that employee engagement and leadership development are now ranked among the top three priorities for businesses in 2025, according to Society for Human Resource Management research. And it’s also why organizations that treat leadership development and engagement as separate priorities often struggle to move the needle on either.

To support engagement, leaders need clarity on what effective leadership looks like and how their behavior shapes the employee experience.

Leadership styles and how they influence employee engagement

Leaders don’t all show up the same way, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. WorkTango developed five core leadership archetypes that show up across organizations. Each has a distinct way of building engagement and supporting team success.

• Strategists focus on long-term goals. They help employees understand how their work connects to the bigger picture and bring clarity through strong planning and decision-making.
• Collaborators build trust and inclusion. They focus on relationships, make space for different perspectives, and create a sense of safety and belonging across their teams.
• Influencers motivate people around a shared vision. They bring energy, visibility, and clear direction, helping employees feel connected to the work and inspired to move it forward.
• Executors keep teams focused and accountable. They’re action-oriented, reliable, and help employees stay clear on what needs to happen and when.
• Communicators help employees feel informed. They promote transparency, active listening, and effective communication so teams feel seen, heard, and in the loop.
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Bignai // Shutterstock

Tipping in America historically has been more about gratitude for good service than giving a set amount. Nowadays, with more tipping options popping up everywhere from coffee shops to self-checkout kiosks, the pressure to give has become a reflection of local economics, labor laws, and cultural norms. Americans across the country are beginning to rethink how much, when, and whether to tip at all.

This phenomenon is not occurring evenly across the country. Spokeo put together data from leading sources, including LendingTree, OysterLink, Toast, and more, to demonstrate the wide variation in tipping behavior across states. Much like a people search can reveal how location shapes someone’s background, this data shows how geography influences generosity. From minimum wage laws to tourism economies, learn what’s driving the trends behind where Americans tip the most and the least on average.

The national picture and the top and bottom states

On a national level, tipping remains deeply ingrained in American culture, especially in everyday settings like restaurants and bars. In data gathered from Toast’s Restaurant Trends report, from the first quarter of 2025, it’s clear to see a trend:

Spokeo

States with the lowest tipping averages still hover around 17%, showing how tipping culture clearly has not gone away. That said, the heat map shows just how widely tipping varies across the country. According to data from restaurant and hospitality job platform OysterLink, the following five states have the highest average tip rates, all above 20%:

1. Delaware — 21.5%
2. West Virginia — 20.5%
3. New Hampshire — 20.4%
4. Indiana — 20.4%
5. Kentucky — 20.3%

One of the main characteristics of all these states is a large service-sector workforce. Conversely, the five worst tipping states are:

1. California — 17.3%
2. Washington — 17.8%
3. Nevada — 18.1%
4. Florida — 18.2%
5. Texas — 18.7%

Lower wages compared to the cost of living, tighter household budgets, and different expectations all play a role in keeping tipping averages below the national norm in these states.

Why states differ: 3 key drivers

While a 4.2% differential between the highest-tipping state and the lowest-tipping state on an average basis may not seem like a lot, it amounts to $17.30 versus $21.50 on a $100 tab. This can easily add up over time for those who rely on tips to supplement their income. There are three