Those and other big questions — questions like, “why is Microsoft so weird about Edge?” and “why are there blue checks in Gmail now?” — on this Friday’s Vergecast. Like and subscribe!
I refuse to believe that they’re actually skeets now, but the Bluesky momentum seems to be real. And also insane. Plus, if the godfather of AI is worried about AI, should we be too? All that, and a bunch of laser bongs, on the show today.
Not the new ones, whoever is making those now. I mean a new version of the old idea, about a phone that made you more productive but didn’t try to capture all your time and money. BlackBerry director Matt Johnson, who we interviewed on The Vergecast this week, thinks you might. I kind of think I would.
(This whole episode is really fun, by the way: we talked about computer-screen movies, directors commentary, and much more. Check it out!)
I don’t agree with all of it, but this n+1 takedown of the modern internet media experience — the paywalls, the focus on insiders, the newsletterification of everything — is if nothing else a fantastic read.
One sometimes finds oneself in the debased position of opening a new article, immediately selecting all, and pasting the results into an unformatted Google Doc before the paywall finishes loading. This kind of subterfuge can only generate sheepishness — but then again, how many subscriptions can one person handle?
We’re calling it The Director’s Episode, because it turned out to be all about how tech changes the way we make movies... and the movies we make about tech. It’s a fun episode, even though I don’t think we’ve solved the commentary problem yet.
Call it FAST, call it AVOD, call it whatever you want. Free ad-supported streaming is having a moment, and it’s only going to get bigger from here.
Plus, that Humane demo at TED. It can’t be real, right? Where’s the Qualcomm chip? After all, The Vergecast is nothing if not a place to ask deep questions about the location of Qualcomm chips.
Seriously, if you’ve never checked out Forecast Advisor, you gotta try it. And are you Team Bluesky or Team Mastodon? Eventually, you might not need to choose — that’s the whole idea — but right now they seem to be chasing one another in a big way.
