Nilay Patel

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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!

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.