Jay Peters
Here’s the scoop on why the Annapurna Interactive staff resigned.
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who broke the original story, just published a detailed account of what went down. Settle in with some popcorn — it’s pretty wild.
Tech Archive
Archives for September 2024
Jay Peters
Andrew Liszewski
Lauren Feiner
Google and the DOJ are out of court until November 25th.
Closing arguments in their ad tech antitrust trial will start at 10AM that day. But for now, it’s a wrap.
The final day saw a couple of depositions from Google — including testimony from Ryan Pauley, chief revenue officer at Verge parent company Vox Media — plus a Daily Mail executive who returned in a short but heated DOJ rebuttal.
Andrew Liszewski
Govee’s mappable smart holiday lights are now available.
Announced during IFA 2024, Govee’s upgraded Christmas String Lights 2 let you create custom lighting designs through an app using a new mapping feature that determines the location of every glowing bead.
They’re now available in 66, 99, 164, and 328-foot lengths and range in price from $99.99 to $399.99.
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.
Jess Weatherbed
Nathan Edwards
Inside the Internet Archive.
At Wired, Kate Knibbs visits the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters and speaks with its founder, Brewster Kahle, about the Archive’s past, present, and its uncertain future, as it faces copyright lawsuits from print and music publishers.
Go read this, and then listen to Mark Graham, director of the Archive’s Wayback Machine, on Decoder earlier this month.
Emma Roth
Adi Robertson
Gavin Newsom has four days left to make a call on California’s AI safety bill.
The deadline for signing SB 1047 is September 30th. Kylie Robison laid out the stakes earlier this month:
Critics have painted a nearly apocalyptic picture of its impact, calling it a threat to startups, open source developers, and academics. Supporters call it a necessary guardrail for a potentially dangerous technology — and a corrective to years of under-regulation.
Will California flip the AI industry on its head?
Kylie Robison
Nilay Patel
Here’s a peek at some of Meta’s Orion prototypes.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth doesn’t reveal anything particularly new here, but I do love looking at prototypes. There’s much more detail in Alex Heath’s Orion hands-on — perhaps most importantly that Meta doesn’t plan to use these expensive silicon carbide lenses whenever it does produce an actual AR product.
Jess Weatherbed
Dame Maggie Smith, star of Downton Abbey, has died at 89.
Known best to some for playing Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies, the British actor had an extensive career spanning over seven decades across screen and theatre. Her passing was reported by the BBC.
Below is one of my favorite clips, in which she discusses getting cast in roles as an older actor alongside fellow Dames Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins.