Scavengers Reign. | Image: Max Thanksgiving is a time to spend with friends and family, and also a time full of periods where you definitely don’t want to move from the couch. You could spend that time mindlessly scrolling on your phone, or you could squeeze in a game or streaming show that fits nicely into a long weekend. If you aren’t planning to catch up some of the big recent TV shows or video games, here are a few things that I’ve been digging lately. Scavengers Reign Streaming on Max This show manages to be silly, scary, and strange…
Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images Many Peloton users were unable to get into Thursday’s Thanksgiving ride, prompting the company’s CEO to apologize. At 10AM ET Peloton kicked off its 10th annual “Turkey Burn” event, with the goal of breaking the Guiness World Record for “largest live cycling class.” But the company struggled with the demand, and many users were unable to participate at all. “We let you down,” CEO Barry McCarthy said in a statement. According to McCarthy, over 37,000 people were able to participate, while it’s unclear how many couldn’t get in. “The number of members trying to join…
The Legion Go (top) and the Steam Deck OLED (bottom), disassembled. | Images: iFixit iFixit published a dual teardown of Valve’s Steam Deck OLED and the Lenovo Legion Go today, giving a nice, detailed look inside both handhelds with all of the site’s usual meticulous detail. This being iFixit, the focus is on the consoles’ repairability, and it gave both high marks — a 9 / 10 for the Steam Deck OLED and 8 / 10 for the Lenovo Legion. The article has a nice summary of the process, but we recommend watching the video for the full effect and…
Illustration: The Verge The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) claims Apple denied a set of new benefits to unionized employees at its Towson, Maryland store, according to a complaint filed on Tuesday. In the complaint, the NLRB alleges Apple didn’t extend enhanced benefits to Towson workers with the goal of “discouraging” other employees from unionizing. Some of those new benefits include new healthcare options, a free Coursera subscription, and prepaid tuition at some colleges. The Apple store in Towson became the first Apple retail location in the US to unionize last year with a historic vote to join the International…
Illustration: The Verge ChatGPT’s voice feature is now available to all users for free. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI announced users can now tap the headphones icon to use their voice to talk with ChatGPT in the mobile app, as well as get an audible response. OpenAI first rolled out the ability to prompt ChatGPT with your voice and images in September, but it only made the feature available to paying users. The release comes as OpenAI’s staff struggle with the sudden ousting of their CEO and messy negotiations for him to return. The demo included in…
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Users on Reddit and Hacker News are complaining that YouTube seems to have inserted an intentional five-second delay before video pages will load in Mozilla’s Firefox and occasionally some other browsers. YouTube tells The Verge that these users are right about the delay, but the browser has nothing to do with it — it’s part of the company’s efforts to quash ad blockers across all platforms. “In the past week, users using ad blockers may have experienced suboptimal viewing, which included delays in loading, regardless of the browser they are using,” YouTube communications manager…
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more. Happy Thanksgiving week! I will be out tomorrow making twice baked potatoes, putting together holiday baby outfits (many tiny overalls will be worn!!), and attempting a night drive to Long Island without hitting Southern State traffic or eliciting baby rage. This is to say, there will be no Hot Pod Insider this week and I will return next Tuesday. But if you want to be able to say “Yeah, I heard about that” at your…
Sam Altman speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 6th, 2023. | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Sam Altman will return as CEO of OpenAI, overcoming an attempted boardroom coup that sent the company into chaos over the past several days. Former president Greg Brockman, who quit in protest of Altman’s firing, will return as well. The company said in a statement late Tuesday that it has an “agreement in principle” for Altman to return alongside a new board composed of Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo. D’Angelo is a holdover from the previous board that initially fired…
Joe Biden arriving to pardon the National Thanksgiving turkeys on November 20, 2023. | Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images US President Joe Biden signed up for a Threads account today, as did the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the second gentleman, Douglas Emhoff. Biden’s first post on Meta’s X (formerly Twitter) competitor harkens back to his 2020 presidential victory speech with references to the country’s divisions and its current “inflection point.” Harris gestured to her travels throughout the US and her having met “over 100” world leaders, and Emhoff wrote about gender equity and “countering hate of all…
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on stage at OpenAI’s first developer conference. | Image: Getty Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced late last night that former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman were both joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team, an announcement that sent Microsoft’s stock price soaring. Now, less than 24 hours later, following The Verge reporting that Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO, Nadella doesn’t seem so sure. “[We’re] committed to OpenAI and Sam, irrespective of what configuration,” said Nadella in an interview with CNBC’s Jon Fortt, adding that…
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images X, formerly Twitter, has followed through with owner Elon Musk’s threat to sue the left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters. Media Matters reported last week that X “has been placing ads for major brands” like Apple and IBM “next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.” Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino have dubbed the report unrepresentative of X’s general user experience. Several companies nonetheless pulled ads after that report and Musk’s direct endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory — and Musk’s lawsuit claims Media Matters is legally liable for…
Photo by Eddie Costas / The Verge Google is racing headlong into the AI future, and that means different parts of the company are destined to collide with one another — Search is now generating AI-powered summary results, but flooding the web with AI-generated text is going to make search that much harder, for example. It’s going to be messy and complicated and fascinating all at the same time. In general, the parts of Google that are charged with moderating platforms (like YouTube and Search) are going to end up colliding with the parts of Google that help people create…
Nothing Chats shown in a promotional image. | Image: Nothing Nothing has pulled the Nothing Chats beta from the Google Play store, saying it is “delaying the launch until further notice” while it fixes “several bugs.” The app promised to let Nothing Phone 2 users text with iMessage, but it required allowing Sunbird, who provides the platform, log into users’ iCloud accounts on its own Mac Mini servers, which… isn’t great? The removal came after users widely shared a blog from Texts.com showing that messages sent with Sunbird’s system aren’t actually end-to-end encrypted — and that it’s not hard to…
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta has reportedly broken up its Responsible AI (RAI) team as it puts more of its resources into generative artificial intelligence. The Information broke the news today, citing an internal post it had seen. According to the report, most RAI members will move to the company’s generative AI product team, while others will work on Meta’s AI infrastructure. The company regularly says it wants to develop AI responsibly and even has a page devoted to the promise, where the company lists its “pillars of responsible AI,” including accountability, transparency, safety, privacy, and more….
Sam Altman speaking on behalf of OpenAI at the APEC CEO Summit the day before he was fired. | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The OpenAI board is in discussions with Sam Altman to return to the company as its CEO, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. One of them said Altman, who was suddenly fired by the board on Friday with no notice, is “ambivalent” about coming back and would want significant governance changes. Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman…
The Last of Us Part II Remastered | Image: Naughty Dog Naughty Dog officially announced The Last of Us Part II Remastered for PS5 on Friday evening following a bunch of leaks about the game earlier in the day. The game will be released on January 19th, 2024 — just like the leaks said. The biggest new addition seems to be a “roguelike survival mode” called No Return that’s “designed to let players prove their mettle in randomized encounters and experience The Last of Us Part II’s combat in a fresh experience,” Naughty Dog’s Jonathon Dornbush said in the announcement…
Image: Epic Games Fortnite just started showing age ratings for every experience you can play in the game, but as a result of those changes, some in-game outfits can’t be used in experiences that are rated Everyone or Everyone 10 Plus, according to a blog post from the Fortnite team. For example, while writing this article, got my game set up to visit the E-rated experience themed around The Game Awards while wearing one of the outfits you can earn from this season’s battle pass. When in the Fortnite lobby, there was a notice that “your selected outfit can’t be…
Image: Valve Valve’s new Steam Deck OLED just went on sale today, but there are goodies for the original LCD model, too — the company is now rolling out a stable build of SteamOS 3.5.5 with a hefty list of fixes and upgrades. Some of the biggest are ones we’ve already seen in a September beta, like support for VRR and HDR external displays, the ability to tweak your screen’s color and undervolt your processor with new firmware, and a graphics driver update with a big performance improvement for Starfield (though it still looks like mud in cities). But there’s…