55 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Nilay Patel

Nilay Patel

Editor-in-Chief

Editor-in-Chief

    More From Nilay Patel

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Cops are asking for more and more Ring footage, and Ring is giving to them.

    Good Politico piece on how cops are filing ever-expanding legal requests for Ring footage and getting it — even for footage from inside people’s homes that aren’t under investigation:

    The warrant included all five of his outdoor cameras, and also added a sixth camera that was inside his house, as well as any videos from cameras associated with his account, which would include the cameras in his store. It would include footage recorded from cameras he had in his living room and bedroom, as well as the 13 cameras he had installed at his store associated with his account.

    Larkin, now incensed that police were requesting footage from inside his home for an investigation that didn’t even involve him, wanted to fight the warrant. He estimated that a lawyer would have been too expensive, and he only had about seven days to challenge it before Ring would comply. He still doesn’t understand how a judge could have signed off on a warrant asking for footage from a camera inside his home, when the investigation was on his neighbor.

    How Reddit is getting simpler — and dealing with TikTok, with chief product officer Pali Bhat

    Reddit announces a scrolling video view for your timeline.

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Some VCs are skeptical of the AI hype after getting burned on crypto.

    “But how will it make money?” they ask about an objectively useful technology, two years after pouring cash into crypto, a technology that appeared to create money but did nothing useful.

    One investor said that, because of the huge amount of capital and computing resources required, recent leaps in generative AI were comparable to landing on the moon: a massively impressive technical achievement, only replicable by those with nation-state level wealth. “Companies are extremely overvalued and the only justifiable investment thesis is to get in incredibly early,” said another veteran investor. “Otherwise you’re only buying in because of FOMO.”

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Deepfakes are going to make this election cycle pretty weird.

    Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair talked to me and several others about whether the political media is ready for the flood of deepfakes that are sure to come in this election cycle. In 2020 they were pretty hard to make, but now anyone can get Biden to talk about boom-bap type shit from the ‘90s for just a couple bucks. It’s going to get wacky.

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    The Cybertruck wiper does not appear to extend.

    Here’s Tesla’s head of design Franz von Holzhausen with a Cybertruck prototype that’s clearly been out in the rain. You can see that Tesla is just going with “a lot of the windshield will be dirty” instead of the complicated extend-o-wiper ideas that have been floating around. I can’t get enough of this.

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    The GOP continues to turn into the party of government speech regulations.

    You can complain about content moderation on social platforms all you want — and we do! — but Mark Zuckerberg can’t send the police to put you in jail if he doesn’t like what you say or where you say it.

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Legalize hip hop!

    There’s more lawyers and litigation in the music industry than ever before (because it’s so much harder to make money) but the release of De La Soul’s catalog to streaming services came with a bunch of compromises because the samples weren’t cleared. That’s a tragedy, argues Dan Charnas in Slate:

    While De La’s absence has been a musical deprivation, their return is marked by a more insidious cultural crime: the adulteration of a landmark work of sonic pastiche. It’s part of a larger injustice we’ve been tolerating for decades [...] But the way hip-hop makes music remains completely unprotected by law.

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Here’s, uh, “Marquise” Brownlee hanging with other non-Tesla owners at a Supercharger.

    This video starts out so normally and ends in such hilarious chaos. I didn’t want it to end!

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    I can’t stop thinking about how the Cybertruck’s windshield wiper will work.

    It’s huge but still not nearly tall enough to cover the entire windshield in one swipe, so it has to extend (as Elon has previously tweeted about). But... how? Extending once means it will go over the top of the car on every swipe, and extending and retracting on every swipe at high speed just seems... well, yeah, that’s going to break real fast. Someone spill the secret!

    Nilay Patel
    Nilay Patel
    Mozilla thinks Mastodon could be the next HTTP.

    Here’s Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker on Decoder, talking about how she wants Mozilla to experiment with Mastodon as the next great consumer internet protocol.