How many wipers does one Cybertruck need, anyway? And can someone please build a good streaming box? Plus we have a lot of ideas about how, when, and why to run right at your bank. Which seems to be a pretty popular activity at the moment. It’s The Vergecast!
There are no good streaming boxes, and I blame everybody.
Those 3.5-inch save icons are a million years old, and nobody really wants to keep using them. And yet: specialty embroidery machines, some commercial airliners, and a surprising number of other things still can’t work any other way. There are even people still making and selling new floppies! There’s new tech all the time, but old tech never truly dies.
As Reddit points out, today is the one-year anniversary of “Line Goes Up,” Dan Olson’s long investigation/treatise on what NFTs really are... and why there’s really not much value in them at all. Twelve months later it’s amazing how much the video gets right, and how little has changed since. Still a fun watch, too!
That’s what this story from The Athletic posits, anyway. Apple reportedly wanted the NFL to let it stream football on “known and unknown” platforms, and AR and VR would be the most obvious unknowns. But the NFL wouldn’t accept such broad language, it seems.
The simpler story here is that Apple is a control freak of an organization, and so is the NFL. In this case, I’m betting YouTube was happy to give the NFL exactly the cable-style deal it wanted — and write a really big check.
Cameron’s Smartless chat is filled with tech talk, which isn’t surprising given that it’s, you know, James Cameron. Dude loves gadgets. But I thought it was fascinating that he said if and when Terminator comes back, he’d spend less time worrying about humanoid robots and more on the scary power of AI. And, he wonders: would we even know if AI had already taken over?
This is a fun read about a bunch of media nerds playing a super old board game through Slack, and how Twitter and Facebook are giving way to a small-group-based internet. But mostly: chat room games are awesome, and the world needs more of them.
International debates over the true inventor, super influential companies you’ve never heard of, and a key moment in the global tech industry: all that and more in the story of a little tiny thumb drive. Fun weekend read, this one.
[IEEE Spectrum]
