The gist: Curry Barker, the director behind the hit horror film Obsession, just published a new horror short on YouTube. The short, titled "Mama Bear," is nearly five minutes long. The video is pretty unnerving, and fair warning that it gets a little graphic, but it's a fun one to watch if you're looking for something scary […]
The gist: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an earnings call today that Google's AI-powered search modes do not help with traffic to the platform, echoing problems facing other websites and publishers. As part of its Q3 2026 earnings, Reddit revealed that search traffic in October has "dropped by more than 1 million referrals on
The gist: Reddit is announcing a huge shift: It's going to start requiring users to log in. Right now, you can browse Reddit without having an account, and the site is generally a great resource for crowdsourced information on a whole range of topics. I know I'm not the only person who appends "reddit" to a lot […]
The gist: Google parent company Alphabet says that its AI investments are leading to a big growth in searches year-over-year, as noted in its Q3 2026 earnings today. "Our AI investments are driving overall Search query growth, including commercial queries," CEO Sundar Pichai says in a statement. "In fact, our year-over-year quer
The gist: Apple announced an all-new MacBook Pro laptop with an OLED touchscreen at its "Pro and tell" event on Wednesday. It starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch model or $3,399 for the 16-inch version, and it's available to preorder today ahead of its release on November 6th. The new MacBook Pro has what Apple calls a […]
The gist: Reddit is switching up its homepage feeds. The company announced today that it's going to start offering a "new feed experience" that includes both a Following feed to show you posts from subreddits you follow and a For You feed that includes posts from your subreddits and "recommendations related to your interests." Y
The gist: Amazon is giving its premium smart speaker a camera. The new Echo Studio with Home Camera, announced today as part of Amazon's big blast of announcements, has a built-in camera for monitoring a room while you're away, showing things to Alexa, and, soon, to use with video calls on Fire TV devices. It's an iteration […]
The gist: Within hours of the iPhone Duo launch last Friday, people reported that the inner screen on some brand new foldable phones was already broken. The issue was similar across many photos shared on social media: some kind of issue or crack would appear in the middle of the screen above the hinge, with lines appearing […]
The gist: Google announced today its Genie 4 world model for generating interactive experiences using AI. The company says the model has four main updates: It allows for more realistic worlds, lets users update an experience in real time with a natural language prompt, can generate audio, and uses Gemini 3.8 Flash under the hood
The gist: Following reports of iPhone Duos with cracked and broken inside screens, often showing a bright line running from the center to the right side, Apple says in a statement to Bloomberg and 9to5Mac that it's aware of "an issue impacting the inner display" on a "small number of iPhone Duo units." If your iPhone Duo […]
The gist: Instagram is announcing a big push into longform horizontal video, which the platform is calling "Features." Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has been against doing longform video on the platform "for a long time," he says in a six-and-a-half-minute video (here's the widescreen version) with VP of product Tessa Lyons, sayin
The gist: Apple announced a new iPad Mini with a larger, 8.5-inch OLED display. The company revealed the new device just days before its "Pro and tell" event on Wednesday. The iPad Mini starts at $699 for the Wi-Fi-only model, and $849 for Wi-Fi and cellular. At 5.4mm thick, the iPad Mini is thinner and lighter than […]
The gist: Jack Dorsey's Block announced an AI model called Dessa that's trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation," and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny. Take this one, for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. The c
The gist: The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange […]
The gist: Etsy is announcing stricter rules about how AI can be used in listings to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform. In a post, the company says that "many active buyers say they can't tell which items involve AI-generated content" and that sellers are "concerned about your work appearing alongside items that use […
The gist: Meta has re-enabled Muse sharing after security researchers had reported that public conversation links could be easy to find. The researchers said they had been able to find Muse pages like a marketing company's internal revenue review and a small business owner's loan application. Researchers at Claroc reported earli
The gist: Discord's latest update released today has a big improvement for Markdown previews: they should now render correctly instead of with "a bunch of symbols," according to the company. LLMs and AI agents often rely on Markdown files for instructions and context, so these improved previews could be helpful for people sharin
The gist: Yesterday, EA shut down BioWare and canceled the studio's new Mass Effect game in development, but a trailer apparently representing the game was published on Reddit today. The trailer features "in-engine footage" and uses "pre-production assets," according to a message at the beginning of the video. The video focuses
The gist: The Nintendo Switch 2 has apparently been jailbroken, and a modder has already shown the console running a custom version of Mario Kart World featuring new playable characters like Cinnamoroll, the red Angry Bird, Peter Griffin, and Steve from Minecraft. OpenAI's Codex helped make this "ns2jb" jailbreak, according to S
The gist: The Browser Company plans to "sunset" its Arc browser on December 22nd, according to a post on the Arc website. The company moved on to developing its AI-focused Dia browser last year, but it had continued to maintain Arc. Now, the innovative browser will be going away for good. The shutdown is happening in a […]
The gist: On Tuesday, I published a story about how YouTube appeared to be testing hiding the dislike button on videos, with at least two users on X sharing screenshots of the dislike button moved into the three-dot menu. But a YouTube spokesperson, in a Wednesday statement to The Verge, confirmed that YouTube is "not testing hi
The gist: Anthropic just announced an AI agent competitor to Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots: Claude Duet. The new agent, designed for professionals and small business owners, is launching as a "research preview," according to Anthropic, and it's available as a standalone app on iOS and Android and through Claude on the web. The A
The gist: Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a big new 2.5 update that, among other features, brings cross-platform mod support to consoles and content inspired by the new season of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime on Netflix. There's a lot to unpack in the full patch notes. The Edgerunners-specific content includes a new side quest, a g
The gist: BioWare, the legendary studio behind RPGs like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, is shutting down, the company confirmed in a statement. Alongside the closure, Electronic Arts has chosen not to continue development on the next Mass Effect game that was in the works, according to an an
The gist: Apple is officially launching a rebrand of Apple Music. Following the appearance of a redesigned wordmark in a video and an updated app icon in an iOS 27.2 beta, Apple introduced the new "identity" for Apple Music today. There's a new logo, the updated wordmark, and a new sound composed by British producer Fred Again [
The gist: YouTube appears to be testing hiding the dislike button on videos, as reported by 9to5Google. At least two users on X have recently shared screenshots of the dislike button now being placed in the three-dots submenu, and a user on Reddit also shared an image of the dislike button being absent for them. Right now, […]
The gist: Snap has a new brand ambassador for its Specs AR glasses: Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr. The company has brought on Downey as Specs' "Chief Customer Experience Officer" and has published several videos featuring Downey showcasing the capabilities of the new glasses, including as a tool to get help with a putt, practi
The gist: SpaceX announced revenues of $14.6 billion in its Q3 earnings on Tuesday, which it says was a growth of 161 percent year-over-year "fueled by our Super Intelligence (SI) segment and accelerated growth in Connectivity." While its Space division posted a $7 million loss in income from operations, its Connectivity group p
The gist: Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is planning new rounds of layoffs for sometime this month, November, and January, according to Fortune. In July, as part of an organizational "reset," Sharma announced planned layoffs affecting 3,200 staffers over the course of Microsoft's 2027 fiscal year, including 1,600 cuts at that time, and in
The gist: Final Fantasy is a lot different than it used to be. While many of the early Final Fantasy titles look and play similarly to each other, the series has since grown to encompass blockbuster games like Final Fantasy XVI and the gargantuan Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, which don't play much like the classics. But […]
