its ur expert

I tell Amazon’s Alexa to shut up on a near daily basis. I have almost zero interest in speaking to Gemini after our first awkward chat . The hitches, misunderstandings, and lag in any given AI “conversation” mean I’m always wasting time speaking when I could be texting instead.  But speaking to “Maya,” one of two voices from a new startup headed by the man who built Oculus VR and sold it to Facebook , is the first time I’ve been left wanting more. Like I could just talk to it, or at least play a genuinely fun game of testing its limits, like I did with Bing before Microsoft decided to tame down its unhinged persona. I don’t have to describe it to you: you can try it , and you can listen to my first conversation yourself just below. Fair warning: I am a nerd! Confronted with a new voice assistant, I will ask it to dream up a Dungeons & Dragons-esque adventure and quiz it about small Android phones .  But here you go: While I could absolutely still hear some chatb...

Meta has fired “roughly 20†employees who leaked “confidential information outside the company,†according to a spokesperson. “We tell employees when they join the company, and we offer periodic reminders, that it is against our policies to leak internal information, no matter the intent,†Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold tells The Verge exclusively. “We recently conducted an investigation that resulted in roughly 20 employees being terminated for sharing confidential information outside the company, and we expect there will be more. We take this seriously, and will continue to take action when we identify leaks.” Meta has ramped up its efforts to find leakers due to a recent influx of stories detailing unannounced product plans and internal meetings, including a recent all-hands led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After we and other outlets reported on what Zuckerberg said during that meeting , employees were warned not to leak . In comments that were subsequently leaked, CTO Andrew...

Meta is making sweeping changes to its content moderation policies , including abandoning third-party fact-checks in favor of X’s crowd-sourced “Community Notes” approach and loosening restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity. Under the updated Hateful Conduct policy, for example, calling gay and trans people “mentally ill” is now allowed, while an explicit ban on referring to women as “household objects” has been removed . Policy chief Joel Kaplan says that in pursuit of “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes,” Meta will focus more on preventing overenforcement of its content policies and less on mediating potentially harmful — but technically legal — discussions on its platform. The company is also ending its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement appeals to many of the new administration’s talking points . Zuckerberg, who has visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago multiple times since the election and attended the inauguration, has promis...

PlayerUnknown Productions, the studio from PUBG creator Brendan Greene (aka PlayerUnknown), has shared a gameplay trailer for Prologue: Go Wayback! , a single-player survival game that’s launching in early access on Steam this year. The studio previously shared that the game would be built with “machine-learning-driven terrain generation technology,” and in this new trailer, you can see some gorgeous, wooded areas on display. In the game, you’ll also have to deal with various types of weather, including pouring rain and heavy snow. The point of the game, according to a fact sheet, is to explore and survive so that you can find a weather station to call for help. Prologue is just one of three games in the works from PlayerUnknown Productions. The “ultimate project,” dubbed Project Artemis , is going to be “a massive multiplayer sandbox experience” that builds on the technology featured in Prologue and a tech demo, Preface: Undiscovered World , that’s available on Steam . from ...

Exposure to extreme heat could lead to faster aging, a new study published today in the journal Science Advances suggests. Older people living in hotter areas of the US showed faster aging at the molecular level than people living in cooler areas. The study looked at measures of a person’s biological, or epigenetic, age, which is based on how a person’s body is functioning at the molecular and cellular levels and doesn’t necessarily match a person’s chronological age based on birth. Longer-term exposure to heat was associated with an increase in a person’s biological age by up to 2.48 years. The impact on the body is comparable to the effects of smoking, according to the study authors. Extreme heat is already the deadliest type of weather disaster in the US, a threat that’s growing as climate change leads to more frequent and intense heatwaves . The new research shows how there are more subtle, insidious ways that prolonged heat exposure can affect the body beyond heat illness or...

First-generation Echo speakers won’t get Alexa Plus. Amazon is bringing the new AI-powered Alexa Plus to a wide range of its existing Echo devices — but the upgrade will skip many of the earliest models. The majority of the company’s first-generation Echos won’t get support, according to the Alexa Plus FAQ page , though Amazon says they will continue to work with the standard Alexa. Alexa Plus won’t support “certain older generation Echo devices,” such as the first-generation Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Tap, Echo Spot, and Echo Show; the second-generation Echo Show won’t support it, either. Amazon spokesperson Kristy Schmidt confirmed that is the full list of devices. If so, that still leaves many early Echo devices that will work with Alexa Plus. That means I’ll be able to ask Alexa to book a restaurant reservation through my Echo Flex , the quirky modular Echo speaker that plugs straight into a wall outlet. And people can still get an AI-generated song piped through sp...

The Dark Horse Digital service is being shut down, and as part of that, the Dark Horse Comics iOS app will no longer be supported, according to an announcement . Dark Horse Comics says people should download comics they’ve purchased by March 30th, as it will end support for its iOS app and the standalone  Plants vs. Zombies  comics app the following day. You can still visit the Dark Horse Digital website if you make an account before the deadline to read the comics you’ve bought — but only through “at least” summer 2025, the company  says in a FAQ . You can also sync your website account with the app to download issues, according to the announcement.  This isn’t totally the end for Dark Horse’s ebook comics; the company says its books will continue being available “on numerous digital reading platforms.” But it says it decided to stop its own direct-to-reader sales because “consumer reading preferences have evolved in different directions.” According to Dark Hors...

Amazon is holding a press event this week , where we expect it to finally launch its “new” Alexa . This could be the beginning of a major shift in how we use generative AI in our homes, or it could be a big disappointment.  The latter seems likely, based on the delays and persistent rumors that the voice assistant is struggling with its revamp . But I’m hoping we’ll at least end up somewhere in the middle — with a smarter, more useful Alexa, if not the “superhuman assistant” Amazon has promised . The event, scheduled for 10AM on Wednesday, February 26th, in New York City, is being hosted by Amazon’s new devices and service chief Panos Panay, which is a strong hint there’ll be new hardware. The flagship fourth-gen Amazon Echo speaker is way past due for an upgrade, and with smart glasses being so hot right now , I could see Alexa getting cozier on our faces.  Here’s a look at what we expect from the event, what not to expect, and what we hope is coming. Remember to tune i...

Google has announced new searchable transcripts for videos you store in Google Drive. The feature is rolling out to all Google Workspace users, starting today and finishing by March 26th. The transcripts look a lot like those you’d see on YouTube. If one is available, it’ll appear in a sidebar next to the video as blocks of timestamped text, with each block highlighted as it’s spoken in the video you’re watching. The search bar for the transcript sits at the top of this sidebar, and clicking on specific text blocks will take you to that moment in the video. You can see the transcripts by clicking the settings icon at the bottom of the video and then choosing “Transcript.” The transcript option is only available if the video already has captions, as indicated by the CC button that shows up in the controls along the bottom of the Google Drive video player. If a video doesn’t have captions, you can create them by right-clicking a video file in Drive, choosing “Manage caption tracks,”...

Anthropic is releasing Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its first “hybrid reasoning model” that can solve more complex problems and outperforms previous models in areas like math and coding.  In addition to a new model, Anthropic is also releasing a “limited research preview” of its “agentic” coding tool called Claude Code. While Anthropic already powers AI coding tools like Cursor, it’s pitching Claude Code as “an active collaborator that can search and read code, edit files, write and run tests, commit and push code to GitHub, and use command line tools.” Claude 3.7 Sonnet is available starting Monday in the Claude app and for developers through Anthropic’s API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertix AI. The model costs the same to run as its predecessor, 3.5 Sonnet , at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. While OpenAI and others offer separate so-called reasoning models, Anthropic product research lead Dianne Penn tells The Verge that the company wanted to s...

Apple has announced plans to invest more than $500 billion in the US over the next four years, including hiring 20,000 new employees and launching a new server factory in Texas. The announcement was teased after a meeting last week between CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump, and comes as the company tries to mitigate the business impact of Trump’s trade tariffs, with a 10 percent tariff already in effect on goods imported from China, and a 25 percent tariff threatened for chips. The announcement echoes one Apple made in early 2018 , during the first Trump administration. At that point Apple also promised 20,000 new jobs as part of a $350 billion spend in the US, alongside a new campus in Austin which is still under construction . The company successfully appealed for tariff exemptions for some of its products, and a new US investment may be a way to secure further protection from Trump’s new charges. Apple has not confirmed how many of the new investments were already plan...

Grok, Elon Musk’s ChatGPT competitor, temporarily refused to respond with “sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation,” according to xAI’s head of engineering, Igor Babuschkin. After Grok users noticed that the chatbot had been given instructions to not respond with those results, Babuschkin blamed an unnamed, ex-OpenAI employee at xAI for updating Grok’s system prompt without approval. In response to questions on X, Babuschkin said that Grok’s system prompt (the internal rules that govern how an AI responds to queries) is publicly visible “because we believe users should be able to see what it is we’re asking Grok.” He said “an employee pushed the change” to the system prompt “because they thought it would help, but this is obviously not in line with our values.” Musk likes to call Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI with the mission to “understand the universe.” Since the latest Grok-3 model was released , the chatbot has said that President Trump, Musk...

On Friday, the Space Force published a picture taken last year from a camera mounted on the secretive X-37B space plane while high above the Earth. Space.com notes that the “one other glimpse†of the plane in space was while it was “deploying from Falcon Heavy’s upper stage†during its December 2023 launch. The Space Force says it snapped the photo during experimental “first-of-kind†aerobraking maneuvers “to safely change its orbit using minimal fuel.†The Air Force said in October this would involve “a series of passes using the drag of Earth’s atmosphere,†and that once complete, it would resume its other experiments before de-orbiting. An X-37B onboard camera, used to ensure the health and safety of the vehicle, captures an image of Earth while conducting experiments in HEO in 2024.The X-37B executed a series of first-of-kind maneuvers, called aerobraking, to safely change its orbit using minimal fuel. pic.twitter.com/ccisgl493P — United States Space For...

Elon Musk tweeted Saturday that federal workers would soon get an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week.” According to the New York Times , the email from the Office of Personnel Management went to agencies across the federal government that afternoon, including the FBI, State Department, and others, with a deadline for response by 11:59PM ET on Monday.  However, the message lacked a detail from Musk’s tweet, according to the Times , where he said, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” which a number of lawyers have said would be illegal.  The Washington Post reports that experts said it “may be asking some recipients to violate federal laws,” and Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor quoted by the Times , said, “There is zero basis in the civil service system for this.”  House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement Sunday that “Elon Musk is traumatizing hardworking federal employees, their children...

Last year’s M3 MacBook Airs. Apple is readying its MacBook Air line for an update to M4 chips in March, according to Bloomberg ’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter . With the slim laptops’ spec bump, the MacBook line’s M4 transition will be complete. Gurman didn’t provide timing beyond that the laptops are coming next month, but as usual before it launches a product, Apple is “preparing its marketing, sales and retail teams for the debut” and letting its retail stock of the laptops clear out. Both the 13-inch and 15-inch models are expected to come at the same time, like last year. Since the Apple Silicon transition, the MacBook Airs have largely shared specs with the low-end MacBook Pro, just packed into a slimmer laptop with omissions like fewer ports and no cooling fan. The base model 14-inch Pro starts with 10-core CPUs and 10-core GPUs and feature 16GB of RAM — you can get a sense of that configuration’s performance from our review of the base M4 MacBook Pro . Ideal...

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 72, your guide to the best and Verge -iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you like gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage .)  This week, I’ve been reading about Hasan Piker and calculator apps and car thieves and the real economics of YouTuber life , using my month of Paramount Plus to watch Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Yellowjackets , replacing my big podcast headphones with the Shure SE215 in-ear headphones, switching all my reading out of the Kindle ecosystem for increasingly obvious reasons , and taking copious notes on Kevin Kelly’s 50 years of travel tips . I also have for you Apple’s slightly confusing latest smartphone, a couple of new things to watch this weekend, the best new Xbox game in a while, and much more. Also, the first part of our group project on all the ways we listen to music. Let’s do this. (As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas...

The Switchbot S10 is one robot vacuum with Matter support. Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 18.4 yesterday, which users have since discovered contains support for robot vacuums in the Apple Home app through  Matter . As spotted by 9to5Mac , Smart Home Centre confirmed the functionality using a Switchbot S10, which offers its own beta support for Matter. (Switchbot first added Matter robot vacuum support last year, but it required a hub and was kind of a hack .) Apple Home screenshots shared in the story show the robot vacuum’s Home widget (complete with a little robot vacuum glyph) along with a control screen featuring a start / stop button, options for choosing between “Vacuum” and “Vacuum and Mop,” selections for operating modes like “Quiet” or “Deep Clean.” There’s also a “Send to Dock” option, although Smart Home Centre notes that this only paused the S10. Robot vacuums in the new iOS beta can also be added to automations and scenes. You can see how a...

There are so many people here that nobody can tell where the end of the line is. New people arrive, ask if there’s a line, shuffle into a blob of bodies idling and waiting for someone to give them instructions. The hallway is horribly warm — unclear if it’s from the bodies or the heat — and it’s a little smelly, which could just be me but I don’t think it is. I estimate between 100 and 150 people are hanging around, waiting for 2:15PM to roll around, their anticipation building. This is not a club with a strict bouncer, though it feels like it. This is the Luigi Mangione hearing. The hearing is a relatively minor pre-trial status update, but for the people most tapped in, there is a lot riding on it — the Luigi info-drip has been a bit dry lately. Court dates for the 26 year old accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December keep getting pushed back. Mangione, who is currently being held in federal custody in a Brooklyn jail , has not made a public...

A week after this story was first published, Apple removed its Advanced Data Protection feature in the UK in response to government demands, calling itself “gravely disappointed†with the move . Originally published February 13th. The encryption wars have reached a fever pitch, and the most contentious battle is not happening in the United States, where much of the action has been in the past — like the government’s efforts to restrict exports of encryption software until the 1990s and the FBI’s standoff with Apple in 2016. It’s in the United Kingdom, where the government has reportedly ordered Apple to give officials blanket access to iCloud users’ encrypted backups. And the order allegedly didn’t just apply to UK users — it demanded backdoor access for users worldwide .  The secret order, first reported by The Washington Post , was issued in January under the auspices of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act of 2016. Apple’s compliance or refusal will h...

The iPhone 15 Pro will get Visual Intelligence, Apple’s Google Lens-like tool that lets you point your phone’s camera at things in the world to learn more about them, in a future software update, Apple representatives told John Gruber of Daring Fireball . Visual Intelligence was originally introduced with the initial iPhone 16 lineup in September, and Apple showed it off as a feature that you launched from the Camera Control button. But yesterday, Apple announced that Visual Intelligence would be available on the iPhone 16E, which does not have the Camera Control button, through its Action Button. That suggested that the feature could technically work with the iPhone 15 Pro, which also has an Action Button, and now Apple is confirming that Visual Intelligence will indeed come to that phone and be available via the Action Button. You’ll also be able to launch Visual Intelligence from the Control Center on the iPhone 15 Pro, Apple told Gruber. Apple didn’t tell Gruber which update wi...

With artificial intelligence being so prevalent across, well, just about everything these days, it’s no small feat for AI developers to make their products stand out among the deluge. Very few have managed to capture as much attention as Rabbit, the AI startup that’s managed to sell 40,000 units of its standalone $199 R1 gadget within eight days of launching the device at CES in January this year. The AI-powered Rabbit OS behind the Rabbit R1 is essentially a dedicated virtual assistant that’s designed to interact with your favorite apps like a kind of universal controller. The OS is built upon a “Large Action Model” trained to interact with common apps like Spotify and Uber to get things done; from sending messages, controlling music, making online purchases, and more. At around half the size of an iPhone, the orange Rabbit R1 gadget was designed in collaboration with Teenage Engineering, and features a 2.88-inch touchscreen, a scrolling navigation wheel, and a rotating camera. ...

When S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl was released in November , it was clearly not yet the game its developers, GSC Game World, wanted it to be. Sure, this imagining of the Zone was fabulously moody, a desolate and bleak expanse of bog, scrubland, abandoned warehouses, and pallid vistas. For all the ways it was transportive and evocative, it did not yet feel truly alive. The Zone was, dare I say, a little too quiet, lacking the kind of brilliant emergent moments (like three-way skirmishes between stalkers, more stalkers, and roving packs of mutant dogs) that have previously defined the franchise. I ended my review wondering whether the game would, and indeed could, become the very best “shining†version of itself.  Three months on, with two major and five smaller patches under its belt, I’m thrilled to report that the game is close to becoming exactly that. To cut a long story short, the enemy AI in combat situations is vastly improved, A-Life 2.0 (the more expansiv...

It’s been nearly four years since Spotify announced a HiFi tier for its music streaming service that would support lossless audio. That wait could end this year, Bloomberg reports , as the company works to finalize details, including streaming rights. Spotify could charge as much as $5 or $6 extra per month for the new tier — said to be named “Music Pro” — which is in line with estimates CEO Daniel Ek shared last year. Spotify’s Premium tier currently starts at $11.99 per month before family or student discounts, the result of two price hikes in as many years . Competitors like Apple Music include lossless streaming in their services’ base price , but Spotify reportedly plans to justify the extra charge by including more features in Music Pro, including song remixing and concert ticket sales that would grant subscribers exclusive deals and early access. Earlier this month, Spotify signed a new multi-year licensing agreement with Warner Music Group to secure future streaming righ...

A team from Elon Musk’s SpaceX is visiting the Air Traffic Control Command Center in Virginia Monday to help overhaul the system in the wake of last month’s deadly air disaster in Washington, DC, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced. The news comes after CNN reported that the Federal Aviation Administration fired hundreds of probationary employees who maintain critical air traffic control infrastructure. The exact number of workers losing their jobs is unknown, but the union representing them said it was in the “hundreds.” The Trump administration is in the process of trying to eliminate thousands of federal employees as it works with Congressional Republicans on a massive tax cutting bill that is said to favor mostly corporations and the wealthy . America deserves safe, state-of-the-art air travel, and President Trump has ordered that I deliver a new, world-class air traffic control system that will be the envy of the world.     To do that, I ne...

X users are currently unable to post links to Signal.me, which are used to quickly and securely send direct messages to Signal users. A variety of failure notifications are being reported when X users attempt to post Signal links on the platform, some of which identify the blocked message as containing spam, harmful content, or malicious activity.  When my colleague tried, he was met with an error message saying “something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.” The issue was first reported by Matt Binder , who notes that only Signal.me links appear to be impacted. Links to the Signal.org domain do not appear to be blocked, nor do similar services like Telegram. Signal is notably used by journalists to receive confidential information from sources, reassured by the knowledge that messages are end-to-end encrypted and stored on-device. The messaging service has become especially relevant in recent weeks as a tool for federal whistleblowers to report DOGE activit...