Nilay Patel

The sad news that Pitchfork is being folded into GQ means that its excellent features team is being laid off — a team that did some piercing work on how music is actually being made. Here’s a look at the companies that buy huge catalogs from legends and try and get them reworked into new tracks — and more.

Vergecast listeners know about my tortured relationship with my family’s new Samsung Frame TV, but easily the funniest thing is that using any third-party frame blocks the ambient light and motion sensors that make Art Mode convincing. So naturally there is a $99 aftermarket sensor dongle to make it all work... and it still doesn’t quite work, as Samsung won’t let it talk to the API that controls brightness in Art Mode. Whoops!

We bought a 50-inch Frame for our bedroom since the middling picture quality isn’t an issue for a TV that will mostly be in Art Mode, but if we could have fit a 55 I would have been so tempted by the silly motorized mount that rotates it from landscape to portrait automatically. This wire wrapping and AC adapter situation is a little ridiculous, though?

Business Insider dives into an AI-powered “SEO heist”: a shady SEO dude downloaded a competitors’ sitemap, fed it into an LLM, and generated a complete knockoff site that instantly stole traffic away to the tune of 600,000 impressions a month.

9to5Google reports that some YouTube TV subs are seeing a pop-up message noting that a long press of the OK or Select buttons on their remotes will quickly flip back to the last-viewed channel. That’s one of the best old-school cable box remote features there was, so let’s hope it rolls out wide soon.

Founding partner Ben Horowitz says the firm will get involved in politics for the first time as “non-partisan, one issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.”