David Pierce

Elon Musk’s team is investigating to find out who was behind the FreeSpeechEnthusiast account, the New York Times reported, which was apparently publicly available for some time.

And we bring you the best parts, including Grapefruit Theories and WiFi Problems and The One About The Eyes. We also talk about Bard and ChatGPT… but mostly The One About The Eyes. It’s the Vergecast! This is what hearings do to us.

We have... a lot to say about yesterday’s big TikTok hearing, and everything we learned about the app’s future. And grapefruits. And your home Wi-Fi network. And eyes. Plus, we talk Bard and GPT-4 and whether text boxes are the future of the internet.

On the news of OpenAI launching plugins for ChatGPT, this is a good take from Nvidia’s Jim Fan. If ChatGPT was the device that showed people the future, plugins could turn that device into an all-consuming ecosystem. Don’t forget how early and unproven all this AI stuff still is, but also don’t underestimate how big this is all becoming.

One of the long-running tropes of these hearings is “how much does anyone in the room, including the CEOs and the members of Congress, actually understand the tech at hand?”

I’m not over the fact that Apple killed Dark Sky, the best weather app ever, and replaced it with… nothing. And this post does a great and delightfully detailed job of explaining exactly what made Dark Sky special:

Did you know that a TV antenna is a useful thing to have, in this the year 2023? I sure didn’t. But we talked a lot about what ATSC 3.0 promises, before getting into how to fill your backpack for a 2,600-mile hike, and which iPad(s) you should buy. This episode is going to cost me a lot of money, I think.