David Pierce

Editor-at-Large

David PierceMay 29, 2023

Tom Hanks feels your streaming pain.

This whole interview is great, but I nodded aggressively reading his take on streaming services:

So forty-five minutes later you have decided, by way of bitter compromise, what you are going to watch—which is not what you really want to watch, but you’re going to have to go along with it because three of the rotten members of your family have voted in favor of this thing and you’re on the losing side. You turn down the lights. You enter your fucking password. And the code comes along and it asks for your billing address.

And that’s only, like, half the rant. It’s beautiful.

Tom Hanks on the Rewards and “Vicious Reality” of Making Movies

[The New Yorker]

David PierceMay 29, 2023

You merely adopted the AI helper. Clippy was born in it.

Clippy’s back because Microsoft can’t stop building things to use your computer for you. And does Max even want to be a good streaming app? We spent this Friday’s Vergecast debating exactly that.

The odd appeal of absurdly long YouTube videos that play nothing on purpose

David PierceMay 28, 2023

David PierceMay 26, 2023

Ever wonder what it feels like to fight Mark Zuckerberg?

Say what you will about Mark Zuckerberg, dude is a committer. He’s spending billions on the metaverse, he’s still trying to make Reels a thing, and he’s by all accounts pretty good at jiu-jitsu. This interview with Vijay Hanumantha Raju, an opponent from Zuck’s first tournament, is wonderful:

I was going for a lot of takedowns, single legs and double legs. And that’s something that they wanted him to do as well. So the first round he didn’t do it and the second one they kept saying, “Okay, fake the take-down!” But I was like, okay, I can hear that.

This Is What It’s Like to Lose a Jiu-Jitsu Match to Mark Zuckerberg

[GQ]

David PierceMay 26, 2023

On The Vergecast: Clippy’s revenge, Sony’s handheld, and where Max falls on the go90 scale.

An AI that helps you use your computer? What a concept! Also, do you think Max is doomed, or is it the streaming service to beat? Everything old is new again this week.

Google is starting to let users into its AI search experiment

David PierceMay 25, 2023

Arc’s new Boosts feature lets you change the way any website looks

David PierceMay 25, 2023

David PierceMay 24, 2023

On The Vergecast: The fight over AM radio, the future of ethernet, and the legacy of Zelda.

Seriously, it’s like, why doesn’t everyone just make really great, beautiful, complicated, glorious games like Tears of the Kingdom? That and other super sophisticated questions, today on the show. (Plus a fun chat with Senator Ed Markey.)

David PierceMay 23, 2023

Spark is getting on the AI email bandwagon.

Using AI to write emails for you. Dystopian? Useful? Who knows! Gmail and Outlook are both all-in, though. So is Spark: it just released +AI, an in-app assistant that can generate or edit emails for you.

Here’s my question: if I pick “Friendly tone,” does it just add an exclamation point to the end of all my sentences? Because I already do that too much!

Spark +AI – your personal email assistant

[Spark]