There have been traditional camo wraps, F-150 wraps, and now this Tundra wrap. I applaud the effort but it’s a gigantic triangle on wheels with a single massive wiper. We… we know what it is.
Gaze upon the Zenvo Aurora, which has a hybrid V12 engine and a €3 million pricetag.
I wrote about Google’s essential hypocrisy when it comes to the value of AI training data this week, and now Kieran McCarthy has a good blog post outlining how incoherent and inconsistent the law around web scraping really is — in large part because the same big tech companies that scrape the entire web are quick to file lawsuits when you attempt to scrape their sites.
There are few, if any, legal domains where hypocrisy is as baked into the ecosystem as it is with web scraping.
Some of the biggest companies on earth—including Meta and Microsoft—take aggressive, litigious approaches to prohibiting web scraping on their own properties, while taking liberal approaches to scraping data on other companies’ properties.
[Technology & Marketing Law Blog]
So Switched on Pop co-host (and Verge pal) Charlie Harding and I were chatting about the recent report from Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman (herself a notable Verge expat!) detailing Spotify’s panic over white noise podcasts taking away lucrative, um, white noise revenue. And well, he had ChatGPT create an entire white noise podcast series. It is called “Sonic Spectrum: Colors of Serenity” and it is just the funniest shit.
Please enjoy the sounds of “Indigo Insights: The Deep Dive with Purple Noise” and “Solar Symphony: Yellow Noise and Radiance.” Bask in AI-generated blurbs that read like this:
Crimson Currents: The Power of Red Noise: Dive deep into the lush waves of red noise, known to inspire feelings of passion, vitality, and grounding. Allow this frequency to energize and align your root energies, reconnecting you with Earth’s primal vibrations.
Please send it to your most... crystalline friends. If anyone can get Aaron Rodgers to buy into this I’ll send you a very funny bottle of vodka.
Notable Verge traitor Joanna Stern has been in the market for an EV for the past few months. (I know because she keeps texting me about it.) Like any true reviewer, she solved her problem by taking the the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, and the Tesla Model Y head-to-head on a road trip — and called up Marques Brownlee for a little advice along the way.
Google has made clear it is going to use the open web to inform and create anything it wants, and nothing can get in its way. Except maybe Frank Sinatra.
We linked to the big Ronan Farrow profile of Elon Musk in the New Yorker earlier, but this part really caught my eye: Trump-appointed former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine decrying the government’s total reliance on SpaceX.
“At some point, with new competitors emerging, progress will be thwarted when there’s an accident, and people won’t be confident in the capabilities commercial companies have,” Bridenstine said. “I mean, we just saw this submersible going down to visit the Titanic implode. I think we have to think about the non-regulatory environment as sometimes hurting the industry more than the regulatory environment.”
The whole thing really is worth a read.
[The New Yorker]
Vergecast listener Guy flags the sponsored appearance of the (hilarious, wonderful) LG StanbyME Go suitcase TV in a YouTube camping influencer’s video and... well, here’s a screenshot. I love everything about this situation.
Taylor Swift fans have been figuring out how to max out photo and video quality at the Eras Tour since it began — the only restriction is that you can’t bring a camera with a removable lens, so it’s like a little puzzle for photo nerds. There was a wave of point-and-shoot interest, then there was a period where renting Samsung phones just for the periscope zoom was in vogue — but here we have the current peak: Dominic says he took a Sony RX10 IV and set it to shoot jpgs in the fastest burst mode, which captures 24 still frames per second for about 10 seconds at a time. A little Premiere work later, and you have the highest-resolution Eras Tour video anyone’s shot yet.
