We joke about the byzantine nature of EU regulations on The Vergecast all the time, but Congress’ failure to pass tech antitrust reform really does mean that Europe will be in charge of the tech economy for years to come, as American big tech companies will have to spend much more time designing products for that market instead of ours.
the way people talk about it feels exactly like people describing their dreams: tedious and of no consequence, but you have to be nice and pretend to care since it was obviously important to them. I haven’t had Twitter on my phone for a few weeks now, but I only realized what that specific feeling is after Adi wrote this great piece about AI-generated art. This feeling needs a name!
Just a fun Wikipedia link I’m posting for no reason.
[Wikipedia]
TikTok’s influence on the music industry is seismic — there’s a reason songs just keep getting shorter and sounding like nursery rhymes — but here’s neat Billboard piece on how labels and streamers are turning to TikTok for the next generation of talent.
Within a year of posting as Mostley Music, Motley found himself suddenly able to break into the industry which felt impenetrable to him just months earlier. Atlantic and Interscope/ Darkroom offered him A&R consultant gigs and Spotify tapped him as co-host of their Spotify Live show Lorem Life.
and then Zack Snyder somehow convinced them to release it in 4:3 because he thought it looked more like IMAX? That all really happened!
iOS 16.2 is out now with support for Matter (and the first Matter devices updates have arrived) so a reminder that the simplest HomeKit bugfix if things go sideways is to sign whatever Apple TV (or HomePod) serves as your home hub out of iCloud, restart it, and sign in again to download a fresh HomeKit config. This fixed all my broken automations over the weekend!
I spent so much time covering 3DTV in my baby gadget blogger days, but it was always doomed because no one wants to wear the glasses. The Ringer looks back at Avatar, James Cameron, and his short-lived 3D phenomenon.
Rewatching Avatar now, its best moments still have a weightless, stratospheric kick, and you can understand why insiders and observers would have bet on a wide-scale 3D revolution. The early 2010s featured wildly profitable 3D releases encompassing fairy-tale adaptations (Alice in Wonderland), Pixar crowd-pleasers (Toy Story 3), and keynote MCU entries (Captain America: the First Avenger). For a brief moment, polarized glasses were basically mandatory for any summertime theater outing.
The Hunter Biden laptop saga is back in the news because of Twitter and our scoop from today that even WordPress debated taking down the NY Post story at the CMS level. But a reminder that the laptop itself has been widely reported on, including this exhaustive September cover story from Andrew Rice and Olivia Nuzzi in our sister publication New York.
Mac Isaac was a Mac guy in every sense. He had a tattoo of Apple’s smiley-face Finder icon on his bicep and a triangular FireWire icon on the back of his neck. In an unlucky twist for Biden, he was also a Trump supporter, and like everyone in Delaware, he knew the name of Joe Biden’s younger son.
The three laptops, Mac Isaac recalls, were all liquid damaged. One was dead. One was easily revived. The third, a 13-inch MacBook Pro, had a sticky, ruined keyboard. But Mac Isaac thought he could still salvage its data. The job would cost $85 and take a few days.
[Intelligencer]
Twitter’s new manual verification-and-labeling process is going just great, as the Norway’s Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs have all been labeled “Nigeria government organization.”
