Nilay Patel
I’m sorry, the headlight covers.
I don’t care, I want them. More on this $1.3m 19-units only Diablo restomod from Eccentrica Cars at Autoblog.
Nilay Patel
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Nilay Patel
Yep, that’s how you’d react to a $90 million legal bill.
Elon is suing the law firm Twitter hired to force him into buying the company for “unjust enrichment,” and the complaint contains this email from former board member Martha Fox to former Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett upon receiving the $90m legal services bill for approval just before the Elon deal closed. $84m of the money was wired moments before Elon fired the former executive team. Which, given Elon’s history paying bills… smart!
Nilay Patel
Every YouTuber pivots away from YouTube in the end.
I actually used staff fave Doug Demuro as an example of this cycle on the Vergecast last week… and here he is saying it out loud. Being a creator really isn’t a long term sustainable career, even for the most successful in the game.
Nilay Patel
The opposite of adding a headphone jack to an iPhone.
I love the iPod modding scene so much.
Nilay Patel
All these media company AI plans are aimed at the wrong problem.
Here’s G/O Media, which owns Gizmodo and Jalopnik and the rest, saying it will head down the same sad road as CNET in publishing AI-written content. I don’t know how much more loudly I can say this, but the problem isn’t making more stuff. It’s that distribution on the web is broken. Facebook doesn’t send anyone any traffic anymore, Twitter never really did, and Google traffic has been declining for ages and getting weirder for a host of reasons.
If an AI puts a bunch of cheap spam on a website and no one ever links to it, do you have a media company?
Nilay Patel
Google’s VR / AR strategy is... waiting for Samsung to sort it out.
Alex Heath builds on reporting at Insider in this week’s Command Line, noting that Google’s interest in AR / VR after jumping out to an early lead with Cardboard and supporting 360 video in YouTube is... meh.
“Google big bets are only as strong as the leader advocating for the bet/funding to continue,” one person who worked on Iris recently told me. “So for AR at the moment, Samsung is the sugar daddy supporting the team building goggles. If there is success with Samsung on goggles, then maybe Iris will have another shot at life? That’s the current level of commitment.”
Read more in this week’s Command Line, which is jam-packed with scoops and gossip.
Nilay Patel
Here’s Putin sitting in a gaming chair to, uh, demonstrate strength.
Incredible payoff to this paragraph in the NYT:
Days after an aborted rebellion in Russia by a mercenary group presented a dramatic challenge to his leadership, President Vladimir V. Putin made highly choreographed public appearances in an effort to project power and control, even as U.S. officials said early intelligence reports suggested that a top general had been detained in connection with the failed uprising.
Nothing projects power and control after a coup like that expression in that headrest. Put it in the history books.
Nilay Patel
Google’s search AI listens to a lot of Rush, I guess.
I can’t stop laughing at this. “Info quality may vary,” indeed.
Nilay Patel
“In no small part, Mastodon’s culture is exclusionary.”
The eponymous Bloonface recently shut down their Mastodon instance, with a blog post discussing in detail the current culture clash gripping the decentralized social network as various folks contend with the launch of Instagram Threads, which will eventually interoperate through the ActivityPub protocol.
[T]he people who are broadly “in charge” of Mastodon, as much as anyone is “in charge” of it, are those who are happy with it as is. So things like the follow UX do not matter to them, because they are already on big servers and have big follow lists already, so they have no insight into what new users go through. The new users have no real feedback mechanism, so they just leave and get frustrated, so things will never change.
To strain the analogy to breaking point; rather than a nice desktop login screen, a new user to Mastodon on pretty much anything except a big server gets presented with the equivalent of the blinking white-on-black text of a barebones Debian login screen. This is not fine. No wonder people left.
Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?
[Café Lob-On]
Nilay Patel and Alex Heath