Plus, in this week’s Installer: Amazon’s smart new stuff, OpenAI’s social network, and much more.
I could say more, but I think Aftermath’s Luke Plunkett has it just right: there’s nothing stopping you. Just click this link and try. At a time when buying video games is getting more confusing and expensive, it’s a breath of fresh air.
If you installed the new Google app for Windows, Google’s now telling you to remove it! To “keep receiving Google app updates,” you have to uninstall and reinstall from scratch. I wonder how many will skip the second step... particularly since it won’t uninstall until you dismiss this message and close the app.
Neal Agarwal has done it again, with a lovely little timewaster called I’m Not a Robot that parodies today’s pre-AI web gatekeeping experience. Will you NOPE right on out of there, or channel Silksong levels of spite like me? Here’s one of its tamer stages; good luck with Level 17.
Guest host Hank Green and Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi go deep on digital marketing, AI, and the influencer-creator debate.
(Emoji? Emojis? Plurals, how do they work.) The Unicode Consortium just released the latest version of its standard, with 164 new emojis and “several thousand additional non-emoji characters.” As we saw in the preview in July, there’s a lot of good stuff in here. But now comes the fun part: seeing how different platforms interpret, and occasionally totally ruin, the new characters. They better not screw up Fight Cloud.
After Google donned its hot dog suit in court to complain that the open web is in decline, one commenter argues that’s where we see Big Tech’s true colors:
trifge01:
Increasingly with these companies, if you want to know how they really feel- look not at the lofty public pronouncements of their leaders, but at their official statements in court.
Get the day’s best comment and more in my free newsletter, The Verge Daily.
Today I learned about comparesffpc.com, which effortlessly lets you compare small-form-factor cases on a virtual 3D desk, in your browser, using this impressive public dataset. It isn’t the only comparo tool, but it’s the cleanest and easiest I’ve used yet. (I’m thinking about swapping my Ncase, any desk-friendly recommends?)
California Senator Alex Padilla granted the Internet Archive federal depository status, allowing it to more easily access and share government documents with the public.
“By being part of the program itself, it just gets us closer to the source of where the materials are coming from, so that it’s more reliably delivered to the Internet Archive,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told KQED.
They say Columbia is just one of five universities they’ve penetrated.
Aravind Srinivas on Perplexity’s new Comet web browser, the AI talent frenzy, and a future IPO.
A report about how much money these websites are making found that 62 of the 85 websites it examined had hosting or content delivery services provided by Amazon and Cloudflare. Google’s sign-on system was also used on 54 of the websites, alongside several other services and payment systems provided by mainstream tech companies.
“They should have ceased providing any and all services to AI nudifiers when it was clear that their only use case was sexual harassment,” said Indicator co-founder Alexios Mantzarlis.
Meaning founder and former Verge reporter Ellis Hamburger on the ethical vacuum in AI and what founders aren’t saying publicly.
Archive of our Own went down for a few days over the 4th of July weekend, upsetting the holiday fanfiction reading plans of the site’s millions of users before service was restored. AO3 goes down occasionally for all sorts of issues, but the reason for this outage was special and hilarious.
According to a post on Reddit, the site went down because someone tried to make 2,147,483,647th bookmark which was beyond the limit that specific database could support. And the bookmarked fic that caused all this: extremely graphic One Direction erotica.
[garbageday.email]
