Folding Ideas, the folks behind the classic “Line Goes Up” video about NFTs (and generally just a very good YouTube channel), just put up a long and spicy take on the metaverse in general, Decentraland in particular, and especially the people who spend their time and energy promoting them both. It’s a long watch, but it’s a good one. It’ll make you feel things.
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.
There are plenty of reasons companies don’t want this to happen, starting with security risks, but this is also just another bad look for the Musk-led Twitter. Musk did say he planned to open-source Twitter’s algorithm, but I don’t think this is what he meant.
[The New York Times]
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?”
To that end, I submit TikTok’s Shou Chew explaining that TikTok doesn’t collect body, face, or voice data to identify users, except when it needs to know where your eyes are for sunglasses filters and such. To which Georgia representative Buddy Carter responded: “Why do you need to see where the eyes are? To see if they’re dilated?”
When Chew explained TikTok’s age-gating process, Carter interjected: “That’s creepy. Tell me more about that.” Which is a good summation of the hearing so far, really.
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:
Instead of conveying wind direction using text (“NW” or “Northwest”), the app uses arrows! If the wind shifts directions throughout the day, I can feel the wind direction changing using my body.
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.
