Other than totally crushing my battery, and a weird keyboard bug in iOS 17, Apple’s new betas have been pretty solid! We dug into what we’re seeing in them so far, then had a long philosophical debate about LLMs and GPTs, before clearing our calendars for the games of the summer. But mostly this episode is about my deep loathing of the Wimbledon AI commentary. It’s The Vergecast!
The Golfer’s Journal made a fun mini-doc about how a simple little ball-rolling game became such a phenomenon, and the surprisingly big and serious community of people who love it and play it together. It’s delightful. Did I watch this and then seriously debate buying myself a Golden Tee cabinet? You bet I did.
That was the subject of almost all of The Vergecast this week – we talked about how Threads came to be, why it launched so quickly, what to call the things you post on Threads, ActivityPub, and much more. All our numbers are already out of date, because wow is this app growing fast, but the rest I think holds up!
Is Instagram Threads going to become the fastest-growing app of all time? Sure looks like it. Will Meta care about it long-term, will it ever launch in the EU, will Threads ever actually embrace the fediverse? Who knows. Are ads coming to Threads? You betcha.
This week on the show, it’s all Threads all the time.
This joke about the iPhone is old, I think, but the TikTok is new and it made me laugh. Best iPhone analogy ever.
(Also, for my money Gary Gulman has one of the all-time funniest standup bits about abbreviating the states. Trust me.)
I’m not really a go-wild-with-widgets iPhone user, but this ThisisE video has me going all-in on smart stacks and redoing my Focus Modes. Lots of fun stuff in here!
In this (very good!) story about Mattel’s recent history and its plans to become a massive generator of intellectual property is a truly wild number:
Thirteen more [Mattel] films have been publicly announced, including movies about He-Man and Polly Pocket; forty-five are in development.
45 movies! Many of them based on toys you’ve heard of and stars you know. The Mattel Cinematic Universe is going to be epic.
[The New Yorker]
