Lots of you sent over this new TikTok of the Cybertruck after I asked for closeup photos of the wiper on the Vergecast last week — you can see a little bit of evidence for a theory that I’ve heard about it, but not quite enough. Bring me photos of Spider-Man — er, the Cybertruck wiper! Top to bottom! We all know it’s a triangle, people. Show us the blade.
I appreciate Apple’s aggressive attempts to manage battery longevity across its devices, but the new optimized charging algorithm in watchOS 10 consistently left me with a dead watch on my wrist by the end of the day. Anyone else having any luck?
[Apple Support]
New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill comes on Decoder to discuss her new book, Your Face Belongs to Us, and what the spread of facial recognition technology means for the future of privacy.
AI is relatively easy. Working in China? That’s harder.
And they don’t have to tell you anything. Dan Moren writes about the mystery of debugging an iCloud error with Apple:
That second agent proved quite capable, not only agreeing that the situation was strange, but also looking into issues on Apple’s side. Which led to the somewhat bizarre conclusion of this story: after perhaps 20 minutes on the phone, he seemed to hit on something. I heard him laugh and say something along the lines of “that explains it” and then, with my consent, put me on hold. When he came back, he said—and I’m not exactly quoting, but close enough: “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you any more than this, but all your services should be back up pretty much exactly 12 hours after they went down.”
[Six Colors]
I’ve been patiently waiting for the various Lutron Caseta starter kits to go on sale so I can smarten up the lights in our new house — and right on cue, Amazon is selling the Lutron deluxe starter kit for $135 during its Fall Festival of Affiliate Revenue or whatever it’s called.
Casetas are a little more expensive than other smart switches but they run on Lutron’s proprietary 400MHz spectrum so they are lightning fast and rock-solid, and the hub works with every smart home platform, which somewhat excuses Lutron’s foot-dragging around Matter.
The big discount here is because Lutron just released the new Diva dimmers separately, which look more like regular dimmers and support hard-wired three-way switches, but I’ve had a bunch of these original dimmers for years without complaint. (The starter kit with non-dimming smart switches is also on sale for $121, and it’s what I bought.) Go forth!
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The Rivian founder kicked off last month’s Code Conference with a conversation about supply chain challenges, the company’s Amazon deal, and whether the R1T will compete with the Cybertruck.
Getty’s entire brand is built on authenticity. CEO Craig Peters sat down with us at Code to talk about how the company is dealing with AI and disinformation.
The media mogul is working on a syndicate of big publishers including the NYT that will pressure AI companies into huge payments for training data one way or another.
Payments on the scale the publishers expect would mark a dramatic change for companies like Google, which have built high-margin business in large part because they — unlike media companies from Netflix to Comcast — don’t pay for content.
Unless the publishers lower their expectations, or the tech companies adjust their fundamental sense of what it is to be a platform, this high stakes conflict is likely to escalate.
I will remind you that anyone who confidently predicts how a fair use AI copyright case will play out is getting paid by one side or another — fair use cases, even on largely similar facts, are a coin flip every time, and they’re getting weirder not simpler.
