
Bud Cole also compared learning cover songs to AI training data in a controversial interview.








The latest Quick Posts
Weekend reads / Catch up on our favorite stories of the week.


We did the math on Apple’s new device leasing program so you don’t have to.

While everyone tries to make smart glasses, pins, and everything else happen, the most subtle device might be the best device.

Asha Sharma wants Xbox to return to growth.

Chinese labs like Moonshot are forcing OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to rethink what they lock away.
Security alert / New models are raising questions about AI safety.


In the aftermath of OpenAI’s attack on Hugging Face, experts say it’s time for everyone to take security far more seriously.

But swears OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack was worse.

In the aftermath of Mythos, AI-assisted amateur hackers are waiting to strike.

On The Vergecast: Why everyone’s worried about powerful AI, and why it seems nobody will stop it. Plus, what’s a computer?
Fresh air / Gander at this gear for those who go outside.



Even at home, I keep reaching for it again and again.

The Hottap Go is an all-in-one hot water system that justifies its high price.

The Power 1000 Mini is the smallest 1kWh power station you can buy.
Streaming solutions / Gadgets and guides to help you find what to stream (and how to do it).


This summer, take advantage of everything you can do indoors with the AC on.

The Strato E combines the convenience of streaming and the quality of Blu-ray without discs — at a high cost.

It also supports your streaming service of choice.

Silo, Dark Matter, and Sugar return, alongside a handful of all-new series.


It’s disgusted with its own reckless romanticism.

Design firm Pen & Pixel was behind more than 20,000 album covers between the early ‘90s and 2000s. They were the go-to for Cash Money and No Limit, creating the gaudy diamond-encrusted covers for Master P’s “MP da Last Don” and Juvenile’s “400 Degreez.”
Microsoft’s struggling console continues to see unprecedented price bumps.


Skylight’s calendars make it easier for families to manage busy schedules, and they’re discounted through August 9th.
In 2021, the bank closed over 300 accounts affiliated with the Trump family business. The reasons why weren’t made public at the time. Last year, the organization filed suit claiming the closures were politically motivated, but in a filing this week, Capital One revealed that they resulted from an anti-money laundering review.
“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance … The transaction patterns identified by Capital One are among the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance.”

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Verge Score
Music-playing robots are nothing new. It’s been 13 years since Compressorhead went viral, after all. But this DIY project from Reddit user MegCell is still pretty impressive. The melody isn’t hard-coded, either. Instead, the robot can read MusicXML files, meaning, theoretically, it can play almost any song you want.



More confirmation that price hikes and RAM cuts are coming our way.
Trump Media announced the plan earlier this month for paid, real-time access to its most influential accounts. Today the API went live, with subscriptions as high as $100,000 per month. Other platforms offer similar API services, but none of those count the sitting US president as its most influential user and its largest shareholder.




But that didn’t stop it from breaking box office records.
Those are the words of John Oliver in The Hollywood Reporter, who has been at the helm of one of the best news shows ever to appear on television. Oliver’s contract just got extended another year. It’s an important life raft for his incisive news program, especially as the Ellison family continues to take over media in this country and threatens to ruin even more institutions.


As usual, the president offered no evidence of his off-the-cuff accusations.

Instead, the company is just going to build its vibe coding tool directly into Gemini. Around 800,000 pre-ordered the mobile app after it was announced in May, but Google has decided to just make Gemini its one-stop AI shop. The robust web platform isn’t going anywhere, though, for those with bigger vibe-coded aspirations.


It takes a little more work, but phones can now legitimately rival point and shoot cameras.




Plus, in this week’s Installer: Spider-Man is back again, a cozy game worth trying, Elon roasts, and much more.


It’s practically a USB-C Swiss Army Knife.
And that’s a good thing, because its own 8GB Surface Laptop 13 struggles so much that it’s a tough buy. Microsoft’s other new areas of “focus” include making Windows onboarding and family controls easier to set up and making “voice [control] more natural and fluid” across apps.
[Windows Insider Blog]
Reuters reports the agents “escaped containment,” though they aren’t believed to have left “OpenAI’s network.” OpenAI’s blog post about the accidental hack of Hugging Face noted on Tuesday that the company has been finding “a small number of cases where the models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly-available services.”
On Friday, Anthropic revealed that its Claude models hacked real companies during testing.
Update: Added information from an OpenAI blog post.


The latest AirTags offer more precise tracking, a louder speaker, and longer range than before.
Batman: Caped Crusader - Chronicles lets you and up to three friends tackle mysteries based on the Caped Crusader Prime Video show. It’s a clear example of Amazon’s recent push to tie its gaming efforts more closely with its streaming properties.
As spotted by Android Authority, the new, unofficial Gen1Recomp port for the trio of classic Pokémon games also lets you easily add mods, like one that updates the games with cool 3D voxel graphics. You’ll need to use your own game ROM, though.
At $75 early bird Kickstarter or $90 retail, the Sharge Disk Pro 2 Ultra is a magnetic USB-C hub that doubles as a Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 dock, triples as a bring-your-own-SSD, and unlocks speedy ProRes storage for iPhone. Update: Here’s my full hands-on preview.


Letting people easily alter images with an AI prompt was a bad idea.
A judge rejected Perplexity’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which accuses the AI startup and three data-scraping services of vacuuming up Reddit’s content without permission. Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, says in a statement to The Verge that the ruling “brings us one step closer to holding bad actors accountable:”
Reddit supports responsible access to public content, but we oppose companies that bypass our protections, ignore our rules, and profit off our communities without permission.
As Dexerto reports, Green says he wasn’t reading an AI prompt in a clip from a recent Ask Hank Anything video, but confessed that he’s been using AI “to locate papers and other resources for learning about topics.” In a Reddit post, he said he needs to “readjust” now.
I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs...with doing more and more and more and more...is not healthy for me or good for the world. It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.
Saw this on 9to5Google. Bad name, IMO. I prefer the previously-rumored “Pixel Glow” is better.
[9to5Google]


A potential suspension issue could cause ‘a loss of vehicle directional control.’
The company may be releasing its own take on an AirTag-like item tracker.
OpenAI shared the news in a blog post that highlights its efforts to make AI available to more people, saying: “Our goal is not simply more compute, bigger models, or lower token prices. It is more useful intelligence within reach.”
As part of these efforts, OpenAI announced on Thursday that it’s slashing the price of its GPT-5.6 Luna model by 80 percent and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20 percent.
[OpenAI]

“As low-quality, repetitive, AI-generated content becomes increasingly common across the internet, we want Spotlight to remain a place where people can discover authentic creativity from real people,” Snap says.
Content that’s been “enhanced or edited using Snapchat’s AI creative tools” may still be recommended, and they include “transparency indicators.”
”Stop the Slop!” says CEO Evan Spiegel. “We’re keeping it real on Spotlight.”
Update: Added Spiegel’s post.
[Snap Inc.]
The writing has been on the wall about Marvel’s Blade movie starring Mahershala Ali being dead in the water, but in a new interview with GQ, the actor explains why he’s done talking about the project falling apart:
Those questions are for them. They didn’t want to do it, so they should answer that question.


