David Pierce

According to Microsoft and Google, this is the future: An AI writes your emails, which are read and summarized by another AI, and then another one synthesizes it and chimes in on the thread, which is then summarized by your AI, and round and round we go.

This story starts with Elon Musk’s decision to take radar sensors off Tesla cars, but is ultimately about what happens when an inconsistent, hard-driving management style runs into unexpectedly hard problems. And then what happens when a bunch of your best people disappear to try and fix a flailing social network. It’s a good read!

But people are already doing seriously remarkable things with the newest thing in AI. Some people are also seriously nervous about where it’s headed, and how open OpenAI actually is. Plus, would you let a bot write all your emails forever? And wait, hang on, is the moon real? It’s a very existential Vergecast, y’all.

As ever, it’s super complicated to figure out how and where to watch the NCAA basketball tournament. But here’s the trick: skip all the services and just download the NCAA March Madness Live app. It has all the games, including lots for free to everyone.

But seriously: what is a Moon photo? What is a photo at all, really? Live from SXSW, that’s what we tried to figure out.

When Google announced it was shutting down Reader in 2013, the company clearly didn’t think it was big news — it was the fifth bullet in a blog post full of dev tools! But a lot of people still miss it, and with Mastodon and the Fediverse and the open web on the rise, we might need something like it again. Reader Resurrections, anybody?

On The Talk Show, John Gruber and Jason Kottke got way down in the weeds on the evolution of blogging, what it means to be A Blogger, how social media changed what it means to write on the internet, and much more. There’s like a whole hour just about headlines! It’s super nerdy and super fun.