On the infinite list of possible uses for AI, “getting selfie advice from a Kylie Jenner voice clone” seems both completely off-the-wall and also pretty inevitable. So of course it does exist. It’s not a widely-available app, at least not yet; it’s an experiment from artist and programmer Dries Depoorter.

With access to a couple of APIs from OpenAI and ElevenLabs, and a little knowledge of Python, you too can up your selfie game. The app will take a photo through your webcam, then feed it to ChatGPT with a prompt asking for funny advice in the voice of Ms. Jenner. The text output is then passed to an ElevenLabs voice clone of the selfie maven, and out pops the advice:

“Ok, love the candid vibe, but let’s add some drama. Turn towards the light, lose the headphones, and think mysterious thoughts to spice it up, cuz lighting is everything, babe.”

On this episode of The Vergecast, we explore the AI-tinged worlds Depoorter has been creating. The Kylie Jenner selfie bot is just the tip of the iceberg: throughout his career, Depoorter has built all manner of quirky and provocative installations and online experiments. There’s a clock that tells you how much of your life you’ve already lived; a phone charger that only works when your eyes are closed; a mobile chat app that you can only use when your phone has less than 5% battery.

His most eyebrow-raising work, though, is around AI and surveillance. In his projects Depoorter takes unsecured webcam footage from around the world, and uses it to stalk celebrities, catch jaywalkers in the act, keep politicians honest, and generally make you question your own privacy and anonymity.

We talked with Depoorter about how he creates his work, how he thinks about the future of AI, and how he responds to the people who see his art and want to turn it into commerce. It’s a wild conversation, so check it out above. To see all of Dries’ work, head over to his portfolio.

A good video game speedrun is a marvel to witness. You watch players fly through your favorite games, hitting impossible jumps and finding shortcuts you never knew existed. It makes you see a familiar game in a whole new light. If you’ve never watched a speedrun, check out this world-record run through the original Super Mario Bros., and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Being, you know, a speedrun, it’ll take all of five minutes of your time.

But what you won’t see (unless you follow speedrunners on Twitch) is the hours upon hours of work it took to create that perfect run — the thousands of attempts to navigate a game with perfect precision, shaving off every unnecessary move, exploiting every weird glitch. It’s punishing work for the player — and for the controller they use run after run, day after day. And all that “grinding,” as speedrunners call it, is taking an unexpected toll.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we explore a looming crisis in the Nintendo 64 speedrunning community: players are grinding their controllers to plastic dust and at such a quick pace that optimal N64 controllers are growing scarce. We also speak with Beck Abney (abney317 on Twitch), a Mario Kart 64 speedrunning legend who is dealing with an even more bizarre, personal form of controller hell.

This also happens to be the first episode in our “Five Senses of Gaming” miniseries, so stay tuned every Sunday this month for another gaming story about another sense. And yes, if you read that sentence and thought Really? Smell? Taste!?, well… buckle up.

If you want an even deeper dive into the wild world of speedrunning, here are some links to get you started:

• A great primer on the Nintendo 64 joystick shortage
• Watch abney317 on Twitch
• Mariokart64.com, the home of the MK64 speedrunning community
• “The quest to beat abney317” on YouTube
• More on Beck Abney’s controller problems
• More fun speedrunning storytelling on YouTube

Last December, along with a Verge video crew, I found myself wandering across a snowy mountain of garbage in Logan, Utah. Everyone we’d talked to told us that Logan was a gorgeous place to visit pretty much anytime except the dead of winter. They also told us the landfill wasn’t the most pleasant place to explore at any time of year. The landfill in the dead of winter was a real one-two punch — though the cold probably helped with the smell a little.

But the landfill held a piece of a puzzle that had nagged at us for months: the fate of the Lisa, Apple’s most iconic failure.  

In September 1989, according to a news article, Apple buried about 2,700 unsold Lisa computers in Logan. The Lisa was released in 1983, and it was Apple’s first stab at a truly modern, graphically driven computer: it had a mouse, windows, icons, menus, and other things we’ve all come to expect from “user-friendly” desktops. It had those features a full year before the release of the Macintosh. It was also doomed.

“The Lisa was the first computer out there … that you didn’t have to struggle with a big computer manual or even hire a consultant to use,” explained veteran tech journalist Steven Levy in a recent interview. “You could understand it out of the box and start using it.” But the Lisa famously had a $10,000 price tag and some hardware issues, and it was overshadowed by the forthcoming cheaper Mac. Even discounted, upgraded, and rebranded as the Macintosh XL, it survived a paltry two years and was dropped in 1985. 

The burial in Logan was the final insult for a computer that never had a fighting chance, and it piqued our interest. What had happened to the Lisa between its discontinuation in 1985 and its final demise in 1989? Why destroy the last of the Lisas? And why did this all go down in Utah? That article offered a handful of curious details — enough to motivate us to head to Logan and figure out what really happened more than 30 years ago.

Yes, obviously we really wanted to dig up the Lisas. We’d all heard of Atari burying the famously bad video game adaptation of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1983. We’d watched some enterprising documentarians exhume the cartridges to great fanfare and play the notoriously unplayable game right there at the dump. We had dreams of booting up a piece of Apple history after ceremoniously rescuing it from decades of municipal waste.

Unfortunately, standing atop Mount Lisa, it was clear a resurrection wasn’t in the cards. We received a light warning from a bulldozer operator (specifically: “stay out of my way and stay out of the garbage because I don’t want to see you die today”). We chatted with him a little and asked where the Lisas might be. He pointed at the depths of the hill — 1989, he said, was “way down at the bottom.” And even if we’d found them, reports suggested that landfill workers had run over the computers with bulldozers before dropping them into the ground.

Where the Lisas were, clearly, was far out of our reach. So instead, we focused on how and why. A few people with knowledge of the incident still lived around Logan, though finding them drove home just how much time has passed since 1989. The reporter who wrote the original article is now an acclaimed romance novelist. The photo editor, another eyewitness to the burial, is a retired dairy farmer and cheesemaker. We interviewed them both, which is how this story about finding vintage computers involved a tour of a cheese cave. 

But the main character in our story of the last Lisas is a former computer salesman named Bob Cook. In the mid-’80s, Bob was an Apple reseller who saw a novel sales opportunity: old computers. The first generations of personal computers were becoming obsolete, and Bob went into business selling them at a discount. He struck unique deals to take old, sometimes used inventory off Apple’s hands on consignment: first about 3,500 Apple III computers in 1985 and then the last 7,000 Lisas a year later. In the process, he helped invent a whole new niche in the computer business.

“Computers were supposed to be leading edge, so nobody was thinking about selling the trailing edge of high technology,” he told us with a chuckle. Bob filled in a new section of the Lisa’s history. He hadn’t just been trying to resell the computers — he’d been trying to improve them. Bob took the leftover Lisas and applied all his experience with computers at the dawn of the industry. He estimates he spent $200,000 on R&D, upgrading both the hardware and operating system to be more competitive with newer Mac models like the Plus, at a fraction of the price. He did so much work that he felt a rechristening was in order.

“It was something different. So we called it the ‘Lisa Professional,’” he said.

But we embarked on Bob’s journey knowing it didn’t have a happy ending. What possessed Apple to change its mind about the deal and destroy the Lisas he was selling? We won’t spoil the answer here. But the story involves sabotage, hired goons, and the outsize influence of one Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. It’s a remarkable tale that helps explain how Apple became the historically profitable tech leviathan that it is today. You can watch the full documentary today, embedded above or on our YouTube channel. 

Fun fact from the files of “there’s a job for that”: there are multiple companies that specialize in making fake Moon dirt. Technically, it’s called lunar regolith to help differentiate it from “soil,” which implies the presence of organic material, or from “dirt,” which, for this story, I learned literally just means “anything that makes you dirty.” Whatever you call it, it is nothing like our friendly terrestrial soils: it’s sharp, dusty, and jagged; it’s full of glassy globs from meteorite impacts; and its chemical composition has been altered by constant bombardment from solar wind. In short, lunar regolith is strange and alien stuff. 

So why would multiple companies go out of their way to simulate it? Because as more governments and private companies take an interest in lunar missions (you might have watched Artemis 1 finally lift off recently!), they all need to test their hardware here on Earth. They need to know how their landers and rovers and spacesuits are going to stand up to terrain that’s basically covered with dusty shards of glass. Carting barrels of actual regolith back from the Moon isn’t exactly practical, so a cottage industry has popped up to process terrestrial rocks and minerals into a family of lunar regolith simulants. They’re not perfect — no fancy lab process is likely to replicate millions of years’ worth of solar wind — but modern simulants are good enough for space agencies and private startups to set their lunar equipment up for success before it ever touches down on the Moon.

Fun fact number two: one of the simulant companies, the University of Central Florida’s Exolith Lab, lets you just… order their fake Moon dirt on the internet. So we did*! We examined both the raw materials and finished products in our studio and spoke to Exolith about how they make their simulant on a semi-industrial scale. We also tried our own demonstration involving a baking pan full of simulant and a model rocket — to see how that turned out, check out the video above. 

*Obligatory “don’t try this at home” disclaimer: because lunar regolith (real or simulated) is so dusty, it can actually be pretty hazardous if you inhale it. Exolith talked us through the proper safety precautions before we got our hands dirty. So, if you find yourself inspired to start your own regolith simulant collection, read up on safe handling first!

Update November 30th, 2:37pm ET: Article updated to clarify that Exolith Lab is associated with the University of Central Florida.