The biggest new battle royale is ready for your phone

The biggest new battle royale is ready for your phone

Image by Cath Virginia / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 31, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hi, sorry for my bad taste in TV, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading about LA crime rings and AI music tools, watching March Madness even though all my brackets are already busted, watching the story of Mickey Mouse and pretending I don’t care about Love Is Blind while my wife watches even though I’m now kind of obsessed with Love Is Blind, and trying to understand all the basketball terms LeBron James uses in his new podcast.

I also have for you a huge new Netflix show, a super-cheap USB charger, a newish messaging app, the new X-Men series everyone’s excited about, and much more. Oh, and I have some news: if you’re in Chicago or looking for a reason to be in Chicago the weekend of April 13th, I’m going to be there with a few of my friends from The Verge doing an afternoon of AI-related stuff at the Chicago Humanities Festival. It’s going to be fun; get tickets and come hang out!

Alright, jam-packed week. Let’s go.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What are you reading, playing, watching, or making that everyone else should be, too? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them, and tell them to subscribe here.)

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The Drop

• 3 Body Problem. From the co-creators of Game of Thrones, this is a sprawling sci-fi thriller about spies, theoretical physics, geopolitics, and much more. (I just realized that actually makes it sound a lot like Game of Thrones.) The reviews so far are good, not great, but I’m psyched about this one.
• Threads in the fediverse. I want so badly to make “the Threadiverse” a thing. So badly. But I digress: this is cool news! Threads is starting a real beta rollout allowing people to post on Threads and syndicate it through the fediverse via ActivityPub! This is the social networking stuff I believe in.
• “Dune: Part Two Director Denis Villeneuve Breaks Down the Sandworm Scene.” I’m sure I’ve said this before, but “watching people do their jobs really, really well” is my favorite genre of YouTube. And if you’ve seen the new Dune flick, you’ll be as blown away as I was by just how thoughtful, and how difficult, this scene was.
• Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile. This game took up most of the storage on my phone and makes it heat up to about the surface of the sun every time I play. But this is a proper high-end battle royale game on mobile, and I’ll be playing it (with a controller, like a sane person) a lot this weekend.
• The Ikea Sjöss charger. Ikea’s gadgets are like Ikea’s other stuff: not fancy, not super exciting, but cheap and reliable and totally good enough. This new USB wall wart might not charge your laptop super fast, but a $15 two-port USB-C charger is a darn good deal.
• Beeper for Android. After the whole iMessage saga, Beeper is back to building excellent cross-platform messaging apps. Its latest Android app is in public beta now, and it’s great. Fast, simple, lots of handy organization features. Who needs iMessage, really?
• Stardew Valley 1.6. I confess, I never really got into Stardew Valley, but that’s clearly a me problem: the game is at record player levels right now after dropping a huge update with a new farm, a bunch of new stuff you can do, and… mayonnaise. And the game’s on sale right now, too!
• Power User. Taylor Lorenz, a great reporter (and friend of Installer) just launched her new podcast this week, and the first episode is a really fun whip around the internet — from TikTok bans to Facebook pokes to Shrimp Jesus, which I just learned is a real and horrifying thing. (I suppose I should disclose that Taylor’s working with the Vox Media Podcast Network on this one. So there’s that!)
• “What is AI Pin?” I find the AI Pin, and frankly, Humane’s whole thing, really interesting. The company has been sort of weird and mysterious for the last year, but this video — which seems to suggest the Pin is shipping really soon — is the most compelling demo and explanation I’ve seen yet.
• X-Men ‘97. The X-Men are so back. It has a new animation style, an updated version of the intro and theme song you might remember from the ’90s, and a vibe that will feel good and right to anyone who missed this show during its long absence. I forgot how much I loved it until I was right back in it.

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Spotlight

Want to know the single most productive thing I’ve done in the last few weeks? I went and found every single rewards card and gift card in my house, basically everything I have with a barcode on it, and scanned them all into an app just by taking pictures of each one. Now, I have all those cards with me at all times, which means that the next time I stumble on a Chipotle, a Cold Stone Creamery, a Starbucks, or the concert venue a few blocks away from my house, I’ll actually be able to use these cards.

Seriously, I cannot recommend this enough. Gift cards are a nice thing but a terrible user experience — one study last year found that Americans leave billions of dollars unspent every year. In my case, that’s mostly because I just… never have them with me. (My wife, on the other hand, carries them all everywhere, in an enormous wallet, and can thus never find the ones she needs.) You should do it! Some tips:

• There are a bunch of apps that can do this, but on iOS, I did it with the app Barcodes, and on Android, I used Stocard. Stocard’s “offers” are kind of incessant and annoying because the app is trying to be a rewards program in its own right, but in general, I like both apps.
• You can do some of this in Google Wallet or Apple Wallet, but those interfaces are weirder and less reliable, in my experience. If you don’t want to use an app at all, you can probably just use a folder of photos, but the apps make it all better.
• You might be amazed how many things you can put in here. Anything with a code you scan — a gym pass, a Costco card, the thing you use to get into a parking garage, any QR code — can go in there. All the swipe-y magnetic strip stuff, though, no dice.
• Barcodes has some really great widgets, and I’d set one of them up with your most-used card. So, like, Starbucks + grocery store + parking garage, all super easy to access. (It’s also really handy on the Apple Watch.)
• I’ve seen some stories about scanners, especially old ones or ones at an angle, that can’t quite scan a code on your phone. I haven’t had any issues yet, but maybe don’t throw away your most important cards just in case.

It’s very possible I’m the last person on the planet to learn about these apps and get this done. But I’ve already had it come in handy a bunch of times, and I’m actually using all my various cards instead of just leaving them in my desk drawer and occasionally wishing I had them on me.

My only real product request would be to be able to use my phone’s NFC chip for key fobs and other tappable cards — and hey, there’s a whole antitrust case about that now. It could happen.

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Screen share

A real phrase I heard someone use to describe Chris Grant the other day is “heat pump influencer.” It’s a pretty good descriptor, actually. Chris is one of the handiest people I know, the proud owner of a truly remarkable retro gaming rig, and the group publisher for both Polygon and The Verge. But I think, in his heart of hearts, he might just want to talk heat pumps all day.

I asked Chris to share his homescreen, curious which of his many interests would shine through. Are there… heat pump social networks? How many legal-ish emulators would he have? Chris contains multitudes, but he only has the one homescreen. Here it is, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: I use a Pixel 7A for a bunch of reasons, but chief among them is… it’s affordable. I really think smartphones are commodities. The 7A does everything I need it to do, it has an excellent camera, and if I accidentally toss it into the ocean, it’s not a catastrophic financial loss.

The wallpaper: My wallpaper is a picture of my boys and my niece and nephew crammed into my bakfiets (a Dutch front-loaded cargo bike). We use the bike for school drop-off every morning and for any neighborhood kid transport. I added a Bafang motor to it last year, which has extended its utility even further, but it was still leg-powered when I took this pic.

The apps: Weather, Photos, Home Assistant, Sonos, Puzzmo. Notion, Joplin, Slack, Keep Notes, Calculator, Discord, Phone, Messages, Gmail, Chrome, Camera.

My actual homescreen is blank, with the exception of the fixed row of apps and the Google search bar built into the bottom of the Pixel launcher. I really enjoy the simplicity of keeping my Google Discover feed one window to the left, my pinned apps one window to the right, and the entire app library one swipe up. But that’s boring, so I’ll share my pinned apps window, which is… kind of a mess.

I want to start with Google Photos, which is easily one of my top-used apps every day and was a major reason I got an Android phone. There is nothing more important than the pictures on my phone, and I’ve stored them in Google Photos for a long time.

Home Assistant is another frequently accessed app. I use the Android “Device controls” drawer for a lot of things, but I also like to just mess around. If you think my homescreen is a mess, my Home Assistant dashboard is actually criminal. No, you can’t see it.

I have Sonos here, in part to visually remind me, “Hey, remember music? You can play it sometimes.” I still forget. Slack is… well, you know what it is. Opposite Slack is Discord, which, in my brain, is quite specifically not-Slack, so this makes sense. Puzzmo! I really like the crossword, and Typeshift and Flip Art, and and and. You should play Puzzmo with me!

My only folder: Synology. This is for my NAS. While I, like you, probably, trust way too much of my life with cloud services run by companies that I don’t really believe have my best interests in mind, I’m trying to be more thoughtful. My pandemic treat was a NAS, which I use to host all sorts of things. I’m cautious about what’s exposed to the web, versus just my local network, and I still often default to cloud services (see: Google Photos, above) but all in all, I aspire to be a personal cloud kind of person.

I use the Calculator and Weather apps a lot, so what?

The note apps. I (like David) am constantly looking for the best tools to organize my brain. After being an Evernote user for over 15 years (!), I finally decided it was time to move things off as prices increased and their focus on just being a reliable place to store notes and documents wavered. I settled on Joplin, a serviceable alternative with some notable limitations, most notably, its markdown-heavy UX and its mobile app, which struggles to surface everything I have in the Joplin Cloud account. Maybe this goes self-hosted?

Notion, I enjoy using, but I don’t know that I will ever trust it with the sheer volume of data I had in Evernote (and now Joplin). And lastly, Keep is… an app. It stores our family shopping list, which is all it has to do, I suppose.

I also asked Chris to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he shared:

• MiSTerCade. I recently got a Sega New Astro City arcade cabinet, which is the kind of really indulgent purchase I’ve put off forever, and somewhere in that pandemic haze, I decided it was time to just do it. I also got a MiSTerCade to actually play games on (you can read my primer on MiSTer here), and wouldn’t you know it, I’ve had a hard time dismantling the thing because it’s just so much fun to play.
• Heat pump hot water heaters. I am just really excited about heat pumps and the electrification of our heating infrastructure in general. I’ve helped close to a dozen friends and neighbors replace their dead or dying gas or standard electric units, three of whom were this year already. If you’re reading this, consider the 30 percent IRA tax credit, whatever local utility rebates you might be eligible for, and the annual cost savings inherent in a technology that literally generates more energy out than you put in, a magical principle known as the coefficient of performance. Add in some renewable energy sources — say, rooftop solar? — and you’re taking a meaningful bite out of your annual energy consumption. (Editor’s note: I TOLD YOU.)
• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. The storied Prince of Persia franchise morphing into a Metroidvania platformer shouldn’t feel this seamless and obvious, but somehow, it does. I’ve found myself poring over the game’s massive world as I slowly chip away at its map, chase its challenges, and scour its secrets.

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Crowdsourced

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message +1 203-570-8663 with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week.

“This video on the engineering details behind Apple’s new $130 USB-C cable.” – Vinay

“You mentioned that Proton is the best non-Gmail alternative, and although I do agree that it’s not bad, many sites don’t like Proton, and a lot of people in the privacy community have voiced issues with it. I personally have Fastmail, and I love it. It’s about $60 / year for my plan, and it comes with up to 600 aliases, so I have one for all major businesses that I interact with (banks, trash company, and so on), then some ones for specific types of businesses.” – Anthony

“Queue is great for tracking shows and movies you want to / are watching and to find new things. I use it all the time.” – Mike

“Checking in a few weeks after iOS 17.4… Transcripts on Apple Podcasts is shockingly good. I’ve fully converted over from Pocket Casts. Ability to quickly scroll through and read an article when I have a few minutes is amazing. There are a couple quirky things that the stock Podcasts app does that I don’t like (no badges for unplayed episodes, downloads don’t delete right away after played, etc.), but I’ve made my peace.” – Omesh

“I just left Evernote after more than a decade of use. Stagnant, bloated, and increasingly overpriced since new ownership. Switched to UpNote and very happy with it so far.” – Kirk

“Watching Shōgun. Enjoying it so much, I am replaying Ghost of Tsushima.” – John

“Stray Shot, a twin-stick arena shooter where your missed shots spawn into more enemies. There’s a timer, and with too few enemies, your score will be low, but too many will probably overwhelm you. There are eight arenas with multiple enemy types and a few different game modes. Single or multiplayer.” – 301

“Got back into playing Risk on iOS. I basically just play very quick games against the computer every now and then, and it’s fun. I just ignore all the in-app purchase stuff they’ve added to it since the last time I opened it.” – Julián

“I have to plug Mars After Midnight on the Playdate.” – Scott

“Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. I highly recommend the book, as it was just an incredible account of the Lincoln assassination, from the plot to the shooting and the escape. Of course, I will check out the miniseries as well.” – John

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Signing off

The up arrow on my keyboard is stuck. I could probably figure out how to fix it, but I’m choosing instead to take this as an excuse to buy a new keyboard. (Plus, the last time I tried to fix my keyboard, I broke it even worse and bought a new one anyway — I figure, this time, I’m just cutting out the middleman.)

I’ve never been a mechanical keyboard fan — too loud! — but I’m realizing that if you’re not into mechanical keyboards, all your choices are kind of boring. I’m worried I’ll just end up getting lazy and buy Apple’s Magic Keyboard. (In black, natch.) Maybe it’s time to get a mechanical keyboard and just be obnoxiously loud all the time? It’s probably time. Wish me and my wallet luck.

See you next week!

AI-generated blues misses a human touch — and a metronome

AI-generated blues misses a human touch — and a metronome

Suno will happily sing you a tune. | Image: The Verge / Shutterstock

I heard a new song last weekend called “Soul Of The Machine.” It’s a simple, old-timey number in E minor with a standard blues chord progression (musicians in the know would call it a 1-4-5 progression). In it, a voice sings about being a trapped soul with a heart that once beat but is now cold and weak.

“Soul Of The Machine” is not a real song at all. Or is it? It’s getting harder to say. Whatever it is, it’s the creation of Suno, an AI tool from a startup of the same name focused on music generation. Rolling Stone said this song’s prompt was “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” And you know what? I doubt I’d glance askance at it if I heard it in a mix of human-recorded Delta blues tunes. The track is technically impressive, fairly convincing, and not all that good.

I spent 10 years or so as a semiprofessional or professional musician, onstage at least four nights a week. For some of that time, I played in a genre called Western Swing. Bob Wills is the most famous example of the style, but some very smart people have argued that more of his credit should go to Milton Brown, who drew more directly from early blues and swing acts like The Hokum Boys (which featured Big Bill Broonzy) or Bessie Smith. I preferred to play more like Milton Brown.

I’ve played the basic chord progression from “Soul Of The Machine” — and variations of it —countless times. So, when I say that the chords meander in nonsensical ways, it’s because I’ve also wandered in this style. Playing with the rhythm and structure is supposed to build tension and release it, and this song doesn’t do that. For contrast, notice the difference in the way Mississippi John Hurt smartly plays with the rhythm in “It Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” using tricks like dragging out pauses or singing sections on a different beat than you’d expect.

But when I tried to play my guitar along with “Soul Of The Machine,” I couldn’t stay on tempo. The song just steadily winds down, like a steam engine creeping to a stop. Bad tempo or weird chord changes aren’t wrong or bad on their own — nothing is definitively wrong or bad in music — but people who struggle with rhythm don’t just slow down like that. Instead, their tempo rises and falls. And when they make weird chord choices, it’s because they like how it sounds. AI doesn’t have such motivations.

Suno’s model might eventually make music that doesn’t have the quirky artifacts — like the dragging tempo or weird chord changes — that draw attention to its algorithmic core. But not making mistakes is only part of what it needs to do to compete with human music.

As a musician, performing for a live audience was necessary for making money and becoming a known quantity. But we also needed to be good. Doing it well means reacting during a show, lingering on part of a song when the crowd loves it, or switching the setlist up on the fly. When we were at our best, we formed something like a symbiosis with our audience for a few fleeting moments or sometimes for a whole set. The best performers can make that happen almost at will. (I was not one of those performers.)

It’s hard to imagine Suno or anything like it ever being able to pull that off. So I don’t expect it to be a straight-up replacement for live music, which is one of the most important parts of the medium, anytime soon. But that’s only one part of the package, right? Before we get to a robotic band drawing people to a dance floor or making folks cry in an auditorium, AI needs to transcend the parlor trick of imitation and start demonstrating an understanding of what moves people.

Suno co-founder Mikey Shulman told Rolling Stone that the relationship with listeners and music makers is currently “so lopsided” but that Suno can fix that. He said Suno’s goal isn’t to replace musicians but “to get a billion people much more engaged with music than they are now.” The company’s founders “imagine a world of wildly democratized music making.” That’s an idea that people often float for AI art as well. It sounds like a friendly, lofty goal, and I get the appeal — it’s not all that different from what made Neo learning Kung Fu through a neck plug in The Matrix such an attractive idea. No, Suno won’t instantly teach someone how to make music, but if you want to make a blues song and you’ve never picked up a guitar, “Soul Of The Machine” could make that feel almost within reach.

But I always get stuck on that word: democratized. Rolling Stone was paraphrasing Suno in that instance, but plenty of AI art proponents have used the word “democratizing” while extolling the benefits of creating text or art through an algorithmic proxy, and it carries this unsettling implication that, somehow, creative people are gatekeeping the creative process.

Even if that were true, it’s not very clear that Suno could help with that. It’s questionable whether tools like it are anywhere close to making the leap, on their own, from digital facsimile to human-style creativity.

Image created with ChatGPT by Wes Davis / The Verge

AI image generators have the same problems with details, like the image above, where I tried to get ChatGPT to give me something like Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. As a teenager, I would pull Mignola’s comic pages as close as my eyes would let me so I could soak up the details. Here, the details make it worse, not better. My enjoyment crumbles when I see quirks like a missing foot or a jacket morphing into the fake Hellboy’s arms.

I’m sympathetic to the desire to use AI to make up for any shortcomings I have as an artist, but every time I hear talk about democratizing creativity, I can’t help but picture someone arguing with one of these gatekeepers when they could just walk around them by simply doing creative things.

That’s not to say you won’t find people trying to gatekeep art, but I’ve found there are more artists offering help and encouragement than demanding my bona fides before I can join their ranks. You could sum up many artists’ attitudes with this quote from songwriter Dan Reeder: “You can make a mess of the simplest song, and no one will laugh at you. And if they do, they can blow me, too, ‘cause no one should laugh at you.”

“And then it can take two months to have 15 images produced.”

None of this is to say AI needs to replace creativity outright to be useful. I wouldn’t argue if you told me you thought Dustin Ballard’s “There I Ruined It” AI voice parody songs — which work because of his impressive singing ability and musical understanding — are art. And as The Verge’s Becca Farsace showed in a December video, Boris Eldagsen spends months on AI-generated artwork that shows how his “promptography” can create thought-provoking work.

In both cases, AI isn’t used as a shortcut to creativity. Instead, it enhances the ideas they already had and may even inspire new ones. If anything, they reinforce the idea that if you want to create something, there’s only one way: just be creative.

32°N’s liquid lens sunglasses double as reading glasses for GenXers

32°N’s liquid lens sunglasses double as reading glasses for GenXers

Sunglasses that convert to reading glasses with a swipe.

Glasses are the defining feature of the nerd emoji, but add a dark tint to those lenses, and suddenly you and the emoji are cool. Glasses with chips are for “glassholes” and reading glasses are for olds — and nothing, I think we can agree, is lamer than an over-40-year-old like me.

So what happens if you combine reading glasses with sunglasses and put a chip in that so discretely that nobody can even tell?

That’s what Deep Optics has done with its latest 32°N-branded Muir sunglasses that I’ve been testing for the last few weeks. A swipe on the frame sends an electrical signal to the two liquid crystal lenses to change the state of millions of tiny pixels so that close objects come into focus.

As such, these 32 Degrees North specs eliminate the need to carry (and lose) both reading glasses and sunglasses — at least, that’s the promise made in exchange for $849 of your hard-earned money.

I’ve been enamored by liquid lens tech since I first saw it demonstrated at CES in 2017. That was long before I could admit that I needed reading glasses due to the onset of presbyopia, the gradual age-related loss of my eyes’ ability to focus on anything nearby.

32°N’s Muir sunglasses adjust focus with a swipe to see nearby objects. To be clear (ha!), they are not transition sunglasses that change opacity with the brightness of the sun, nor can they correct near or farsightedness. The lenses from Deep Optics change to reading glasses without ever changing opacity, and 32°N’s sunglasses aren’t offered with prescription lenses. I did all my testing while wearing contact lenses.

The new Muir frames look very similar to the company’s existing Wharton frames, originally launched in 2021 / 2022 as a Kickstarter. Both are offered in chunky black or transparent plastic, but the new Muir frame features a slightly wider and curved fit.

I think the Muir frames looked good on the handful of family and friends I asked to model them. But they don’t feel premium in the hand, reminding me a little too much of those cheap 3D glasses theaters hand out. But if you’re interested in buying these transforming sunglasses, then fashion is a secondary consideration to being able to read a menu while seated at a terrace cafe.

A triple tap on the frame at the right temple activates the Bluetooth radio for pairing. Setup in the 32°N phone app is quick, with an excellent video explainer that walks you through each step. The company also offers guided one-on-one video onboarding sessions if you prefer the human touch. Either way, it’s during setup that you discover exactly how limited those liquid crystal lenses are.

For typical reading glasses, the entire lenses are magnifiers, making them good for seeing things nearby and that’s it. That’s why you see people in their mid-40s and over constantly taking them on and off.

But a single swipe from the right temple toward the ear on the new Muir frame doesn’t transition the entire lenses into magnifiers — it only transitions a squared-off section in each lens where the active liquid crystal lens resides. So, a lens within a lens, if you will, like an on-demand bifocal.

GIF: 32°N

This GIF from 32°N shows the liquid crystal lens being activated for up-close reading.

And within that square is a narrow sweet spot that offers magnification, with everything else in the square blurred when active. With your head and eyes adjusted properly, that narrow magnification band allows me to read about five lines of smartphone text at default settings. To see more, I have to move my head.

Everything outside that liquid crystal square is an unaltered “safety zone” with no magnification at all, making it useful to quickly glance around you without having to swipe to disable magnification.

Another swipe from the temple backward, and the reading glasses revert entirely to sunglasses. From the outside, you can also see the lenses changing but only from certain angles, in just the right lighting, and only if you look very, very closely.

In practice, everything works, but it takes a while to feel natural because the liquid crystal lens doesn’t focus immediately. Even then, after several hours of testing, I still find myself adjusting my eyes or head position to hunt for the sweet spot in order to read things. The gestures, on the other hand, became second nature rather quickly.

After swiping for magnification, you see the lens immediately smear before returning to focus in about two to three seconds. It feels slow, but it’s magnitudes faster than having to fish out a pair of reading glasses. Swiping again to revert back to just sunglasses is more seamless and faster.

The reverse swipe from ear to temple toggles the magnification focal distance between any two of three settings: Watch mode (very close), smartphone (close), laptop (not so close). The focal shift is subtle but meaningful, in my experience. I set mine to toggle between laptop and phone, where I spend most of my reading time.

Holding multiple fingers against the temple toggles the lenses into your default reading mode (smartphone for me) and stays there for a preset delay after the hand is removed (two seconds for me). This proved to be a very useful gesture for quickly checking phone notifications, a payment terminal, or anything else you need to quickly read in close proximity.

But $849 is a lot to spend on these, especially when a decent pair of polarized sunglasses fitted with multi-focal prescription lenses can be had for around $500.

There’s absolutely a gee-whiz factor to liquid crystal lens tech, and the undeniable convenience it offers to any aging GenXer who would benefit from only having to carry (and care for) a single pair of glasses. They (we) were the first generation to grow up with personal computers, so it’s only right that they’re the first to get computerized glasses to keep reading them.

Ultimately, if you’re interested in these new Muir adaptive sunglasses, I’d suggest giving them a try before committing — something 32°N makes possible with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Stability AI CEO resigns to ‘pursue decentralized AI’

Stability AI CEO resigns to ‘pursue decentralized AI’

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Emad Mostaque is stepping down from his role as CEO of Stability AI, the startup that helped bring Stable Diffusion to life. In a press release late on Friday night, Stability AI says Mostaque is leaving the company “to pursue decentralized AI.” Mostaque will also step down from his position on the board of directors at Stability AI.

The board has appointed two interim co-CEOs to lead Stability AI — COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte — while it conducts a search for a permanent CEO. “As we search for a permanent CEO, I have full confidence that Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte, in their roles as interim co-CEOs, will adeptly steer the company forward in developing and commercializing industry-leading generative AI products,” says Jim O’Shaughnessy, chairman of the board at Stability AI.

That push toward developing commercialized AI products is likely a big part of why Mostaque has stepped down. “Not going to beat centralized AI with more centralized AI,” said Mostaque in a post on X, following his resignation. “It is now time to ensure AI remains open and decentralized,” says Mostaque in a separate statement.

There was a lot of drama in the AI startup world this week

Mostaque’s departure comes just days after Forbes reported that Stability AI was in trouble after other key developers resigned. Three out of the five researchers who originally created the technology behind Stable Diffusion have left the company recently. The leadership changes at Stability AI also come in the same week rival startup Inflection AI experienced what was effectively a Microsoft talent acquisition.

Google DeepMind co-founder and former Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft earlier this week as the CEO of a new AI team. Microsoft also hired some key Inflection AI employees, including co-founder Karén Simonyan who is now the chief scientist of Microsoft AI. Most of Inflection’s staff is joining Microsoft AI, leaving the AI startup to pivot to enterprise offerings.

Stability’s flagship AI product, Stable Diffusion, is used by many to offer text-to-image generation AI tools. Stability released its newest model, Stable Cascade, just weeks ago as an option for researchers on GitHub. Stability AI also started offering a paid membership for commercial use of its models in December, to help fund its research.

Stability AI has popularized the stable diffusion method of AI, but has faced lawsuits around the data that Stable Diffusion is allegedly trained on. A lawsuit in the UK from Getty Images is heading to trial later this year, and it could be a big moment for the legislative framework around generative AI products.

The Government’s Struggles With Outsourcing Software Development

The Government’s Struggles With Outsourcing Software Development The bloated cost of the ArriveCAN app and new investigations into possible fraud have highlighted some problems with turning to outside companies.

The A.I. Boom Makes Millions for an Unlikely Industry Player: Anguilla

The A.I. Boom Makes Millions for an Unlikely Industry Player: Anguilla The small Caribbean territory brought in $32 million last year, more than 10 percent of its G.D.P., from companies registering web addresses that end in .ai.

GitLab confirms it’s removed Suyu, a fork of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu

GitLab confirms it’s removed Suyu, a fork of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images, The Verge

Nintendo might not need to individually sue emulators out of existence to drive them deeper underground. Today, GitLab cut off access to Nintendo Switch emulator Suyu, and disabled the accounts of its developers, after receiving what appears to be a scary email in the form of a DMCA takedown request.

“GitLab received a DMCA takedown notice from a representative of the rightsholder and followed our standard process outlined here,” spokesperson Kristen Butler tells The Verge.

Suyu was a fork of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo successfully sued, but this isn’t about Nintendo now having the rights to Yuzu’s code — or maybe even Nintendo at all? Nintendo didn’t necessarily win the rights to Yuzu’s code in its settlement, and GitLab didn’t tell The Verge that Nintendo is behind the takedown.

One of the emails received by a Suyu contributor.

Instead, as you can see in the email above — one of several being shared in Suyu’s Discord and published earlier by Overkill.wtf — whoever sent the takedown request is trying to piggyback on how Yuzu allegedly violated DMCA 1201 by circumventing Nintendo’s technical protection measures. Oh, and maybe also subtly threatening GitLab with unlawful trafficking (also part of DMCA 1201) while they’re at it.

I’m not a lawyer, but a couple of lawyers told me two years ago that a valid DMCA takedown request should technically contain “a description of the copyrighted work that you claim is being infringed,” and that DMCA 1201 is not the same thing as DMCA 512, which covers takedown requests.

Also, Suyu has claimed it does not include the same circumvention measures as Yuzu.

But those lawyers also told me that valid or invalid, it doesn’t necessarily matter all that much, since a platform like GitLab doesn’t have to host anything that it doesn’t want to host. It may not be worth the time and effort to push back on an invalid DMCA takedown request to protect something you might not even care to protect — particularly if the alternative is Nintendo coming at you with an actual lawsuit.

What Suyu’s GitLab page looks like now.

GitLab didn’t immediately answer a question about whether it’s company policy to disable user’s accounts before giving them the opportunity to delete their projects or file a DMCA counter-notice. The company’s online handbook does not say why GitLab might decide to block or ban a user from its platform; only that “we may, in appropriate circumstances, disable access or terminate the account(s) of the reported user(s).”

Suyu appears to have already found a new home. About an hour ago, its leader wrote “I’m most certainly going to host a copy of the code.” By that point, another member had already cloned the repository to git.suyu.dev.

Motorola spoiled a good budget phone with bloatware

Motorola spoiled a good budget phone with bloatware

We could’ve had it all, Motorola.

There are some phones that just feel nice to pick up, and the 2024 Moto G Power is one of them. It’s sitting on my desk and even though I don’t need to do anything with it right now, I pick it up anyway. That soft-touch back! The flat-yet-slightly-contoured edges! I turn it to look at the headphone jack on the bottom edge, just to remind myself if it’s there. If the battery is even a little low, I set it on my wireless charging stand just for the thrill. All this on a $300 phone! Imagine!

But after spending a little more time with the Moto G Power, I come crashing back down to reality. The LCD panel isn’t as nice and contrast-y as an OLED (that’s forgivable). The camera is underwhelming and suffers from Motorola’s unusual image processing tendencies (less forgivable). But again, this is a $300 phone in a world where $1,000 is the standard going rate for a top-tier flagship. Much can be forgiven!

Except one thing: the bloatware.

Deals, deals, deals!

If you enable the notifications panel in the shopping app you’ll come face to face with this user privacy nightmare.

Scroll through the app drawer and you’ll see a handful of automatically downloaded “folders.” They are not folders; they are apps. I first encountered them on last year’s Moto G Stylus 5G, and I hate them very much.

There are three main offenders — Shopping, Entertainment, and GamesHub — and each of these apps acts as a little hub. Icons for apps that you have legitimately downloaded will appear in the corresponding “folder.” You’ll also find tons of other suggested apps to download — pages and pages of them! Apps as far as the eye can see!

Dismissing the suggested apps section replaces it with a “Discover” section. In the shopping app, it invites you to “Unlock the power of shopping” with links to buy stuff like kitschy Easter decor from TJ Maxx. Mercifully, there’s a toggle to hide this section.

Moto got the hardware right. The software is another story.

These apps are all made by a company called Swish, and you can’t opt out of downloading any of them during the setup process. You can (and should!) opt out of downloading a third-party lock screen from a different service called Glance.

The more I dig into the software on this phone, the more I hate it. The preinstalled weather app is festooned with ads and even more suggested apps, plus pithy insights like “Gotta love air conditioning at these high levels of humidity.” If you tap the option to remove ads, a pop-up asks you to pay $4 for 1Weather Pro.

Ad-free weather forecasts cost $4, apparently.

Honestly, I’m good on personalized recommendations.

What feels particularly ghoulish is that all of these services are absolutely hungry for your data — they want to be able to send you notifications, track your whereabouts, and download apps on your behalf — and it’s hard to tell exactly what company is behind any of it. The “About” section in the weather app says it comes from a service called OneLouder. OneLouder, it turns out, is owned by Pinsight media, which was formerly owned by Sprint and now owned by a company called InMobi. To be clear, this app asks for constant access to your location. At the very least, it should be clear exactly what company you’re giving that permission to!

You can uninstall all of this garbage — I’m actually begging you to, if you happen to purchase this phone. You can download another weather app from a source your trust, or at least one that you can identify. You can make your own damn app folders. But if you’re not technically savvy, you probably won’t realize you can do all of this. That’s a shame, because there’s a good budget phone underneath all of this crap.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Ikea releases a pair of affordable USB-C chargers

Ikea releases a pair of affordable USB-C chargers

Ikea is now selling a pair of its own USB-C chargers that start at just $7.99. The 30W Sjöss charger comes with a single USB-C port, and there’s also a 45W model (also called Sjöss) that has two USB-C ports for $14.99. This dual-port charger can only output 45W of power when using one port at a time, with the output halved at 22W to each device when plugging in two simultaneously.

Ikea’s chargers are compatible with Power Delivery (PD 3.0), Quick Charge (QC4+), and Programmable Power Supply (PPS) specs. Both chargers come with a sheet of colored stickers that lets you “personalize” them — useful in households where kids or flatmates can easily mix them up.

The big news here is how affordable Ikea’s two chargers are. At the time of writing Anker’s most affordable single-port USB-C charger has an MSRP of $13.99 and offers 20W of power, while getting 30W of power typically costs $19.99 (though both are currently discounted). It’s a similar story over on Aukey’s online store.

Although you should always check the small print for the charging standards (and voltage / current) your device needs to charge at its fastest, 30W should be enough to fast-charge some Samsung devices and iPhones, and even matches the wattage of the base charger Apple supplies with its M2-powered MacBook Air. 45W should be able to handle some faster-charging devices too — though, again, be sure to check the fine print.

Neuralink video shows patient using brain implant to play chess on laptop

Neuralink video shows patient using brain implant to play chess on laptop

Neuralink’s N1 implant. | Image: Neuralink

Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company has released a video purporting to show the first human patient using Neuralink’s brain implant to control a mouse cursor and play a game of chess.

The patient, identified as 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, said he was injured in a diving accident eight years ago that paralyzed him below the shoulders. Arbaugh describes using the Neuralink implant as like using the Force from the Star Wars franchise, allowing him to “just stare somewhere on the screen” and move the cursor where he wants.

Elon Musk, who founded Neuralink in 2016, retweeted the video of Arbaugh and said it demonstrated “telepathy.”

https://t.co/OMIeGGjYtG

— Neuralink (@neuralink) March 20, 2024

In addition to playing chess, Arbaugh said the Neuralink implant had also allowed him to play the video game Civilization VI for eight hours straight, though he was limited by having to wait for the implant to charge. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave Neuralink permission to conduct in-human clinical trials last year, and shortly afterwards the company announced that it was seeking test subjects for an initial six-year trial.

The video marks the first time Neuralink has shared footage of a human using its brain implant, after Musk announced in January that the first trial participant was “recovering well” after having the technology implanted. It comes a little under three years after the company released a video that showed a monkey controlling an on-screen cursor to play Pong using the technology.

This kind of control via a brain-computer interface isn’t entirely new; The Wall Street Journal notes that in 2004 a paralyzed person was also able to move a cursor thanks to help from a brain-computer interface. But this earlier iteration of the technology wasn’t able to transmit data wirelessly like Neuralink, and relied on wires protruding through the skin. The fact that Arbaugh was able to hold a conversation while moving the cursor is also notable, according to the WSJ.

“It’s certainly a good starting point,” Wisconsin Institute for Translational Neuroengineering co-director Kip Ludwig tells Reuters. However, he denied that the demo represents a “breakthrough.” Other companies like BlackRock and Synchron have also demonstrated how paralyzed patients can use brain-computer interfaces to control electronic devices, though Synchron’s less-invasive approach may not be able to gather as much neural data, according to the WSJ. Paradromics and Precision Neuroscience are also working on brain implants to compete with Neuralink.

Neuralink has been criticized for the way it’s conducted its trials, with critics pointing towards a lack of transparency around elements like the number of subjects or what outcomes it’s assessing, Wired notes. The company’s previous experiments on monkeys have also been the subject of controversy, including reports that animals involved in the trials had to be euthanized after suffering complications including brain bleeds, “bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis, and cerebral edema.”

Although Neuralink is initially being pitched as an assistive technology, Musk has said he eventually wants it to be implanted into perfectly healthy people to enhance their capabilities. But that’s still a long ways off.

Arbaugh admitted that “there’s still a lot of work to be done” and that the team “have run into some issues.” But he also says that the implant “has already changed my life.”

Reddit’s I.P.O. Is a Content Moderation Success Story

Reddit’s I.P.O. Is a Content Moderation Success Story The site’s journey from toxic cesspool to trusted news source illustrates the business value of keeping bad actors at bay.

Kate Middleton, Britney Spears and the Online Trolls Doubting Their Existence

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Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time

Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time

Illustration: The Verge

Threads is coming to the fediverse — and we just got our first official look at how that might work from Meta itself. During the FediForum conference on Tuesday, Meta’s Peter Cottle showed off a brief demo of how users will eventually be able to connect their accounts and posts to the fediverse. The integration will let users share their posts across different platforms through Threads, letting them reach multiple audiences at once. Meta is just one of the many platforms aiming to join the fediverse, a group of decentralized social networks aiming to become interoperable with one another.

As you can see in the video below, which FediForum shared with The Verge, Cottle can navigate to his Threads account settings and toggle on an option called “fediverse sharing.” Meta will then show a pop-up explaining what exactly the fediverse is, along with some disclaimers Meta will flag to users so they know what they’re getting into.

First, Meta notes that users will need to have a public profile to toggle on the feature, something Instagram head Adam Mosseri has already mentioned. Users in the current alpha test also can’t view replies to their posts and can only see the likes they get. Cottle says Meta is working “super hard” on changing that.

Additionally, Meta warns that Threads can’t “guarantee” that a post gets deleted on other linked platforms if a user decides to delete it on Threads. In other words, your post may still be visible on, say, a linked Mastodon server, even if you decide to delete it with Threads.

“I think this is a downside of the protocol that we use today, but I think it’s important to let people know that if you post something and another server grabs a copy, we can’t necessarily enforce it,” Cottle says.

Once fediverse sharing is enabled, users will be able to post to other services that interoperate through ActivityPub. Cottle says Threads will “wait five minutes” before sending posts out into the fediverse, during which users have a chance to edit or delete their post. If a Threads user has fediverse sharing enabled, their profiles will display a “pill” icon that other users can click into to copy their fediverse usernames.

Cottle demonstrated the process of using Threads to post to the fediverse, and you can already see how his post federated out to Mastodon.

“I know there’s a ton of skepticism about Meta entering the fediverse — it’s completely understandable,” Cottle says. “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”

The FediForum is an online event that gives developers the opportunity to show off what they’re working on in the fediverse. “It’s good for them, and it’s good for the rest of us to see what they’re up to,” Johannes Ernst, one of FediForum’s co-founders, tells The Verge. “They’re being transparent about what they’re building and why.”

Threads started testing an ActivityPub integration last year, and Mosseri suggested last December that Threads’ plans for the fediverse could take “the better part of a year” to pan out. Earlier this month, Threads gave Evan Prodromou, one of the creators of the ActivityPub protocol, the ability to post on both Threads and Mastodon. Threads also plans on letting users follow non-Threads fediverse accounts and letting creators take their followers with them to another platform.

The Google Pixel 8A may get a brighter, 120Hz display

The Google Pixel 8A may get a brighter, 120Hz display

Image: OnLeaks / Smartprix

Google’s Pixel 8A may have a 120Hz display — up from 90Hz in the Pixel 7A — and a brighter screen, according to Kamila Wojciechowska, whose past leaks have included videos of the pre-release Pixel Fold.

Google’s I/O 2024 conference is set for May 14th, when the company will likely talk a lot about AI again. That’s also probably where the company will announce the Pixel 8A.

Writing for Android Authority, Wojciechowska says this next entry in the line of budget Pixel phones will feature 1,400 nits of peak brightness, up from the 7A’s 1,000 nits, and limited support for DisplayPort output via USB-C. Those may both be improvements over its predecessor, but if this leak is accurate, it won’t follow the 7A’s lead with a better camera system than the Pixel 8, as it says Google is carrying over last year’s cameras to the 8A, instead.

Past leaks have suggested the Pixel 8A will get the updated, rounded corners of the Pixel 8, the Tensor G3 chip, and that it will continue to be a 6.1-inch phone like the 7A, all of which Wojciechowska’s leak corroborates today. Taken together, all of these rumored changes could make the Pixel 8A feel a lot more like a smaller (or, as some would say, correctly sized) and cheaper version of the Pixel 8, just with a nice discount.

Google gave the Pixel 8 access to fewer AI features than the Pixel 8 Pro. Wojciechowska says the Tensor G3 in the new 8A will be slightly thicker and hotter than the G3 that drives the Pixel 8, so the big question is how many AI features will be open to owners of the cheaper phone.

Ad-free Facebook might get way cheaper to appease EU regulators

Ad-free Facebook might get way cheaper to appease EU regulators

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta says it’s offered to reduce the price of its ad-free subscription for Instagram and Facebook in Europe to address regulatory concerns, Reuters reports. Speaking in a hearing with the European Commission, Meta lawyer Tim Lamb said the company has “offered to drop the price from €9.99 to €5.99 for a single account and €4 for any additional accounts” in its discussion with privacy regulators in an attempt to “get to a steady state.”

Lamb said €5.99 is “by far the lowest end of the range that any reasonable person should be paying for services of this quality” and hoped that the “regulatory uncertainty” will “settle down quickly.” It reportedly made the offer to cut its prices to data protection authorities earlier this year.

The company launched its ad-free subscription last November after European Union regulators challenged the legal basis for its collection and processing of user data. Meta hoped that this “Subscription for no ads” program would allow it to effectively get consent to process user data under the EU’s GDPR rules as well as the Digital Markets Act. The subscription is available in the European Economic Area and Switzerland.

But the paid tier was quickly the subject of complaints from consumer groups, who’ve attacked the measure as a “pay-or-consent” smokescreen. “Meta’s offer to consumers is smoke and mirrors to cover up what is, at its core, the same old hoovering up of all kinds of sensitive information about people’s lives which it then monetises through its invasive advertising model,” the European Consumer Organisation’s (BEUC) deputy director general, Ursula Pachl, said in a statement in February.

Eight consumer groups from the BEUC’s network filed complaints with their respective national data protection authorities accusing Meta of not complying with the GDPR. The group said Meta doesn’t have a “valid legal basis” to justify its data collection and that “the choice it imposes on its users can not lead to their freely given and informed consent.”

It’s unclear whether simply lowering the price of this monthly subscription will address these privacy concerns. Although privacy rights group NOYB attacked the cost of the subscription for being “way out of proportion” to the value Meta gets from tracking EU users, other groups have more structural complaints with the way the subscription has been implemented. BEUC, which serves as an umbrella group of 45 consumer organizations, has called for Meta to give consumers more time to think about their choice, for example, and to be more transparent about which data is collected under the paid option.

From Russia, Elaborate Tales of Fake Journalists

From Russia, Elaborate Tales of Fake Journalists As the Ukraine war grinds on, the Kremlin has created increasingly complex fabrications online to discredit Ukraine’s leader and undercut aid. Some have a Hollywood-style plot twist.

Steam streamlines its family sharing features

Steam streamlines its family sharing features

Image: The Verge

Today, Steam launched Steam Families, an overhaul of its family sharing system. The new system gets rid of limits on how many people can play games from one library, makes buying games for your kids easier, and adds new parental controls and sharing options.

Before, you needed to use two different systems — Family Sharing and Family View — if you wanted to share your library but limit which games your kids could play. Also under the old approach, only one person at a time could play a game from another’s library. Now — to use Steam’s example — if you’re playing your copy of Portal 2 and someone else wants to play Half-Life from your library, that’s fine. They’ll only be booted if you start up Portal 2 while they’re playing it from your library. That’s right — they can’t earn your cake and eat it, too. (I hope this Portal reference is satisfactory.)

Image: Valve

Set up Steam Family Sharing under Family Management.

You’ll need to be in the beta program to try it, which you can do by visiting Settings > Interface > Client Beta Participation and selecting “Steam Family Beta.” Then, to create a family, go to the Store page, click your account, then Account details > Family Management > Create a Family.

Accounts can share a library with five other family members, just as before, but there’s no mention of limits to the number of devices you can authorize. (It was capped at 10 before.) Offline play is supported now, too, whereas the previous sharing scheme required you to be online to play games from someone else’s library.

Image: Valve

Here’s what a shared library might look like.

Doing parent stuff is also easier, and not just because you now can manage kids’ access to specific games, monitor their play time, and set time-based restrictions. You won’t have to go through the rigamarole of buying a gift card or handing off your credit card to buy your kid a game anymore — you just approve their request for a game, and your account is charged for it.

A note of caution, though: the new system is region-locked, so if you’ve been sharing with someone in another country, you might not be able to continue doing so. And if someone leaves your family, they can’t join or start another one for a full year.

Steam says developers have to approve their titles for family sharing, while others, like free-to-play games or those requiring third-party keys, accounts, or subscriptions, can’t be shared.

Storing Renewable Energy, One Balloon at a Time

Storing Renewable Energy, One Balloon at a Time To decarbonize the electrical grid, companies are finding creative ways to store energy during periods of low demand.

The Department of Homeland Security Is Embracing A.I.

The Department of Homeland Security Is Embracing A.I. The agency will be the first in the federal government to roll out a comprehensive plan to integrate the technology into a variety of uses, from fighting crime to helping disaster survivors.

xAI open sources Grok

xAI open sources Grok

The Verge

On March 11th, Elon Musk said xAI would open source its AI chatbot Grok, and now an open release is available on GitHub. This will allow researchers and developers to build on the model and impact how xAI updates Grok in the future as it competes with rival tech from OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others.

A company blog post explains that this open release includes the “base model weights and network architecture” of the “314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, Grok-1.” It continues saying the model is from a checkpoint last October and hasn’t undergone fine-tuning “for any specific application, such as dialogue.”

As VentureBeat notes, it’s being released under the Apache 2.0 license that enables commercial use but doesn’t include the data used to train it or connections to X for real-time data. xAI said in a November 2023 post that the LLM Grok was “developed over the last four months” and is targeted for uses around coding generation, creative writing, and answering questions.

░W░E░I░G░H░T░S░I░N░B░I░O░

— Grok (@grok) March 17, 2024

After Musk bought Twitter (now X), the code behind its algorithms was eventually released, and Musk has openly criticized companies that don’t open-source their AI model. That includes OpenAI, which he helped found but is now suing, alleging the company breached an original founding agreement that it would be open source.

Companies have released open-source or limited open-source models to get feedback from other researchers on how to improve them. While there are many fully open-source AI foundation models like Mistral and Falcon, the most widely used models are either closed-sourced or offer a limited open license. Meta’s Llama 2, for example, gives its research away for free but makes customers with 700 million daily users pay a fee and won’t let developers iterate on top of Llama 2.

When the Grok chatbot launched, accessing it required an X subscription (aka a paid blue check). Grok’s pitch was to be a more irreverent, up-to-date chatbot alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. Instead, in our early testing, it was unfunny and lacked anything that could help it stand out against the more powerful and advanced chatbots available elsewhere.

Very nice to see Grok go open-source & open-weights: https://t.co/RTlvQarPzy

— François Chollet (@fchollet) March 17, 2024

here's your DEEP DIVE into @grok's architecture!
I just went through the https://t.co/8Y5cjeImg6, for this 314B open source behemoth with *no strings attached*.

pic.twitter.com/CraHKGqILe

— Andrew Kean Gao (@itsandrewgao) March 17, 2024

Grok weights are out under Apache 2.0: https://t.co/9K4IfarqXK

It's more open source than other open weights models, which usual come with usage restrictions.

It's less open source than Pythia, Bloom, and OLMo, which come with training code and reproducible datasets. https://t.co/kxu2anrNiP pic.twitter.com/UeNew30Lzn

— Sebastian Raschka (@rasbt) March 17, 2024

Elon Musk to Open Source Grok Chatbot in Latest AI War Escalation

Elon Musk to Open Source Grok Chatbot in Latest AI War Escalation Mr. Musk’s move to open up the code behind Grok is the latest volley in a war to win the A.I. battle, after a suit against OpenAI on the same topic.

A better way to find stuff to watch

A better way to find stuff to watch

Cath Virginia / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 30, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome. So psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been playing the fun puzzler Close Cities, scrounging up money to buy TikTok, reading the latest in my favorite spy-thriller series, debating becoming a mansion squatter, testing Today for simple tasks, taking notes on this great video about the editing in Oppenheimer, and yelling “SPACE!” while watching the most recent SpaceX launch.

I also have for you a new AI productivity tool, a great way to find stuff to watch, some new shows about old events, and a deep dive into the collapse of the Apple Car. Let’s do it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What app are you obsessed with right now? What show can you not stop talking about? What game is burning all your controller batteries this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)

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The Drop

• Likewise. I’ve been a fan of Likewise as a show and movie and podcast recommender for a while, and the app just got a redesign I really like. It’s extremely just TikTok, but it kind of works — you just scroll from title to title and trailer to trailer until you find something you like.
• The Apple Car - A $10 Billion Failure. There’s been a lot of great reporting about what happened to Apple’s car project, and this is a great summary. It also makes a pretty good case that, actually, the things that make Apple Apple are exactly the reasons it was never going to win in the car biz.
• Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. We all rewatched Oppenheimer this week after its big Oscar win, right? If not, go do that, it’s on Peacock. But if you’re looking for some more, this Netflix series is it: a deep dive into how the Cold War started, and whether it ever actually ended.
• Proton Mail for desktop. I’m pretty ready to call Proton the best non-Gmail email service on the internet. (Gmail’s not even that great, it’s just… it’s Gmail.) The new Mac and Windows apps include both mail and calendar, and it’s silly they don’t work offline yet, but that’s apparently coming soon.
• The Dyson 360 Vis Nav. A $1,200 robot vacuum seems silly, in the way that Dyson’s prices always seem silly, but they do seem to be worth it a lot. Early looks at this one seem sort of split on whether it’s worth the price, but its mega power and apparent skill with corners is pretty enticing.
• Evernote. I never, ever thought I’d mention Evernote here — the app seemed to be on a slow road to nothingness. But under new ownership, it’s kind of on a tear? It got Outlook calendar integration this week, plus some handy new formatting stuff (I love collapsible headers in long notes), and suddenly I’m tempted back to an app I once left for dead.
• Manhunt. A seven-part miniseries about the epic hunt for Abraham Lincoln’s killer? (Which, fun fact, apparently took place in part in the neighborhood where my wife grew up, but that’s not the point?) I’m here for it. I need to read the book it’s based on, too, which I’m told is terrific.
• Dola. I have long extolled the virtues of text messaging as a productivity tool. This is a really clever (and surprisingly powerful) version of that: an AI assistant that communicates through text messages, that can set reminders, make calendar events, and more. I’ve been using it for one-off reminders all week, and it works great.
• Ozone on Bluesky. This is the fediverse stuff that gets me excited: the Bluesky team is open-sourcing its moderation tool, so that anyone can build their own moderation systems and users can use whichever one they want. And it all gets integrated right into Bluesky.

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Screen share

Michael Fisher goes by many names. Michael Fisher is one of them. But he’s also MrMobile, and Captain2Phones, and — this is my personal nickname for him — The World’s Only Remaining Fan of The Palm Pre. He’s also, as of recently, the co-founder of a nifty new keyboard case for iPhone called Clicks.

Michael and I recently had a long, fun chat about keyboards, which is coming to a Vergecast feed near you very soon. But I also asked him to share his homescreen, because, I mean, there aren’t many people on Earth who have had as many homescreens as he has. I secretly hoped he’d send me 12 screenshots and just say, like, “Sorry, these are all my daily drivers.”

Alas, all I got was one. But it’s a fun one. Here’s Michael’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: Google Pixel Fold. Thirteen years of reviewing smartphones has cursed me with an unquenchable thirst for novelty, so I switch devices constantly even when I don’t need to — but I find the Pixel Fold never gets far from my daily rotation. Turns out a digital Moleskine is quite a comforting thing to carry, at least for tech nerds of a certain age.

The wallpaper: I’ll be honest: when Google briefed me on its emoji wallpaper last year, I rolled my eyes. But having a bunch of icons representing your interests splayed out in a pleasing pattern on the screen you see the most? Turns out it’s pretty cool! (Also, I like how it “breathes” when I tap it.)

The apps: Phone, Google Voice, NYC Ferry, Instagram, Gmail, Reddit, Todoist, Slack, Food Bazaar.

One of the things I adore about large-format foldables is all the space they afford me to just... spread out. So my choice of layout is more notable than my list of apps, which I’ve clustered into five folders for two-tap access whether the phone is open or closed. Alongside those, an anchor row of apps that used to be critical core features... but as I write this, I realize how little I actually use the dialer or Google Voice (my SMS solution since it was called GrandCentral before Google scooped it up). Habit is a helluva drug.

Another thing I’ve spent too long doing: letting phones try to guess which apps I might want to use at any given time. That’s the bottom row there, and Google’s done a pretty good job of suggesting, on this Monday midafternoon, a mix of productivity and messaging apps. I generally save my Reddit sessions until after bedtime, and I’ve never used my local grocery store app before sundown, so those are oddballs... but I still appreciate the suggestions that do make sense.

I will shout out one app: NYC Ferry, which lets me navigate my fair city by sea instead of subway. If you live in New York City and you don’t use the ferry, I genuinely don’t know what you’re doing. (Bonus: they let local elementary schoolers name all the boats, so you’re whisked to and fro by vessels bearing legends like “Tooth Ferry” and “Lunchbox.” It’s the best.)

Finally: I’m big on glanceable info, so I use a trio of widgets to make sure I’m getting useful data the second I open my phone. All three are from Google: Calendar for my schedule, Weather for whether I need an umbrella, and At A Glance to give me reminders about stuff I might have missed on the other two.

I also asked Michael to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he said:

• In preparing for a recent episode of the Living In The Future podcast, I watched the classic science-fiction film Outland. A 1981 Sean Connery playing a federal SPACE MARSHAL! Sent to tame a rough-and-tumble mining colony on one of Jupiter’s moons! Yes, it’s High Noon in space, but that’s the best kind of compliment — and what really puts it over the top is the production design, whose blend of Alien and Star Trek II is the purest form of cassette futurism.
• Speaking of old stuff: I’ve recently fallen back in love with text adventures, the interactive fiction stories that first opened my eyes to computer gaming. Alter Ego was originally written for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and their contemporaries back in 1986 — and these days it’s playable as an app or in a browser. It allows you to live an entire human life, from birth to death, making choices to dictate your path along the way. Playing through a whole lifetime on my phone was surprisingly fulfilling and even at times profound (even if I died in the dumbest way possible, catching a pitch in a softball game).
• Finally, out in the real world: I had my first experience at a cat cafe this weekend. If you’re not familiar: this is a cafe you can visit that — yes — is festooned with felines. It was a deeply necessary opportunity for me to get away from the digital world and reconnect with the natural one, and if you have a cat cafe near you, it’s the perfect activity for a rainy Saturday. You just need to be prepared for the overwhelming urge to adopt one — or two! — and by the time you read this, I may well have two fluffy new roommates as a result of my own visit! Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.

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Crowdsourced

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message +1 (203) 570-8663 with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week.

“I’m a week late, but I wanted to get a single point on the board for Pandora. The new music page highlights artists that match my tastes, and they still have a stupendous radio feature — hardly surprising considering they popularized it. Also, Pandora has a slight edge by keeping podcasts (a feature I do not use) tucked away out of sight, while Spotify loses points, like some people I know, for never shutting up about Joe Rogan, who clearly peaked in the 90’s on News Radio.” — Will

“New Pokémon TCG set coming next week, so prepping for that, as well as playing Pokémon Go, because well… I’m always playing Pokémon Go… always.” — Bobby

“One small stuff that completely changed the way I use my lockscreen on iOS… Random photos. When I realized that I can hand pick the photos super easily, apply cool filters and make them change randomly when I touch the screen, it became the best way to revive weekends, holidays or last night’s parties by featuring the five-to-ten best pictures on my lock screen. It’s so much more practical and fun than having to open the Photos app.” — Benoit

“​​More and more of my friends have been signing on to BeReal — wonder if any other friend groups are seeing this growth. Also, the app keeps trying to get you to view public profiles and I would like them to stop that.” — Wisdom

“The amazing Empty Fasting app that launched this week. One-time fee for a beautifully designed fasting app.” — Esteban

“I thought I’d throw in a great ‘audio products’ reviewer, Darko Audio. He has some good info and thoughts at the high end and some nerdy written content on streaming protocols. Personally, I’m a Spotify user since, as you say, it’s everywhere. I do feel pushed ever further away from Spotify with each software update that seems to chip away at what was a near perfect interface.” — David

“Bought a used, but excellent condition Pixel 7 Pro. After trade-in, $201. Wife recently got the same-condition iPhone 13. Makes you think about upgrade cycles. Also Zack from JerryRigEverything has left an impression on me regarding recycling tech and parts and whatnot.” – Omar

“It’s owl breeding season, and I’m back to watching live streams of nesting European eagle owls. In addition to being cute, the camera quality for bird cams is so much better than it was just a couple years ago. Tristan and Isolde on Cam 3 have a clutch of 4 eggs this year!” — Daniel

“Watching Mr. & Mrs. Smith and organizing my notes using the PARA method in Microsoft Loop and Capacities.” — Carter

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Signing off

Over the last two weeks, my 15-month-old son has become a Train Kid. He wants to look at trains, make train noises, yell at the trains outside, walk by the train car outside the library whenever we go past. After months of just, like, watching Wiggles videos on repeat, trains are a terrific new trend.

And y’all: if you’re not already into TrainTube, you are missing out. Hours upon hours of beautifully shot videos of awesome-looking trains in beautiful locations. It’s peaceful, it’s surprisingly good background noise for working to, and there is nothing funnier to me than the fact that an hourlong video of trains has 107 million views — and according to the comments, most of them are toddlers. I love the internet.

See you next week!

US prosecutors are investigating how Meta platforms played a part in illegal drug sales

US prosecutors are investigating how Meta platforms played a part in illegal drug sales

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Federal prosecutors asking questions about Meta are "looking into whether the company’s social-media platforms are facilitating and profiting from the illegal sale of drugs," according to unnamed sources in a report today by the Wall Street Journal. Prosecutors reportedly sent Meta subpoenas last year seeking records on “violative drug content on Meta’s platforms and/or the illicit sale of drugs via Meta’s platforms.”

A Meta spokesperson told the Journal that, “The sale of illicit drugs is against our policies and we work to find and remove this content from our services. Meta proactively cooperates with law enforcement authorities to help combat the sale and distribution of illicit drugs.”

The WSJ said TikTok did not respond when asked whether it has received any subpoenas.

Researchers who collected data about prescription drug ads on Facebook for the Journal in 2022 also said they received a subpoena. Meta didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.

As the Journal notes, Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg posted on Friday that the company has joined the Alliance to Prevent Drug Harms. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said during a session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs yesterday that the US and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime had begun “a new collaborative effort with Meta, Snap, and others to disrupt synthetic drug activity online.”

Bose’s noise-canceling QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds are back at their lowest price

Bose’s noise-canceling QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds are back at their lowest price

Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds drown out noise exceptionally well while delivering enjoyable sound. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Working from coffee shops can be great, but noisy neighbors can make it hard to focus. If you’re looking for a way to drown out the noise without being rude, the best noise-canceling earbuds have thankfully returned to their best price. Best Buy, Walmart, and Bose are all selling the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds for $249 ($50 off).

In addition to top-notch noise cancellation, the wireless earbuds sound great with a new immersive audio component. Bose also improved voice call performance, so you should have no problem making calls from cafes, while the transparency mode remains crystal clear. The buds are now designed to fit even more securely in your ears while retaining perks like IPX4 water resistance, so you don’t have to worry while wearing them commuting or working out. All in all, they’re an excellent pair of buds that’ll guarantee you some peace and quiet whenever and wherever, even if you do need to pay $50 to add wireless charging and will not get multipoint support.

If you’re looking for an affordable mobile gaming controller, you might consider giving Razer’s Kishi V2 a try. It has USB-C, meaning it works with Android devices of varying sizes, and the white Xbox Edition version is down to $79.99 at Woot ($70 off), which is one of its better prices to date.

While some of us at The Verge prefer the Backbone One controller for its slightly better build and inclusion of a 3.5mm headphone jack, the Kishi V2 is more than serviceable for mobile gaming, whether you’re streaming over services like Xbox Game Pass or racking up killstreaks in titles like Call of Duty: Mobile. The Razer Nexus app that syncs up with the Kishi may not be stellar, but it did get a sizable update last year that improved the UI, fixed a battery drain issue when left connected to an asleep Android phone, and allowed for virtual button remapping on Android.

More good deals to welcome the weekend

• The latest Google Nest Thermostat is on sale for $99.99 ($30 off) at Amazon and Best Buy, which is one of its better prices to date. The smart thermostat is a good basic thermostat with an energy-saving mode to help you save money on energy bills. Sadly, it doesn’t adapt to your habits, but it does support Matter, which means it’s compatible with Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, Google Assistant, and any other Matter-compatible platform. Read our review.
• Those traveling out of the country for spring break can pick up the Epicka Universal Travel Adapter One for $19.99 ($4 off) at Amazon, which is about $2 shy of its all-time low price. The adapter charges electronics quickly, thanks to a USB-C port and four standard USB-A ports, while you can use it in over 150 countries.
• Right now, 8BitDo’s Retro Mechanical Keyboard is down to its all-time low price of $84.99 ($15 off) at Amazon, while the Famicom-inspired Fami Edition is $79.99 ($20 off) at Woot. From the colors to the programmable “Super Buttons,” the NES-inspired keyboards look just like their ’90s console counterparts. The keyboard also features hot-swappable Kailh Box White V2 switches and multiple connectivity modes, with support for Bluetooth and 2.4GHz wireless via a dongle.
• Google’s floodlight-equipped Nest Cam is down to $219.99 ($60 off) at Best Buy. This is the best floodlight camera to use with Google Assistant. Along with two bright adjustable floodlights, it comes with free video recording and smart alerts for people, vehicles, and animals.

TikTok Bill’s Progress Slows in the Senate

TikTok Bill’s Progress Slows in the Senate Legislation to force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the app or have it banned in the United States sailed through the House, but the Senate has no plans to move hastily.