verge-rss

Image: Google

Google has updated the suspicious file warnings Chrome displays for why it might have blocked a potentially suspicious or dangerous file download to hopefully give users clearer explanations. For people who turn on the anti-phishing Enhanced protection feature, opting in to upload suspicious files for scanning in the cloud, it’s also shifted to automatic scans, saying files sent for deep scans are 50 times more likely to be marked as malware.
In response to widespread targeted cookie theft attacks on YouTube channels and other groups, like the Linus Tech Tips hacker takeover last year, Chrome has also added a prompt to scan encrypted archive files such as .zip files that have a password. Users will be prompted to enter the password so its AI system will open and scan them in the cloud for Enhanced protection users, while people with the default settings will have the files scanned locally using the currently available malware definitions.
The new changes are live in the current Chrome releases.

Image: Google
The latest Chrome warning message for suspicious downloads is shown in the upper right, with the old message in the lower left.

For the labels most of us are more likely to see while browsing the internet normally, Google says its warnings will be divided into “suspicious” or “dangerous” categories, depending on the level of confidence its AI models have in the level of risk. Users shown the new warnings have ignored warnings less frequently and acted on them more quickly, according to a press release Google shared with The Verge.

GIF: Google
Google’s automated deep scan.

Image: Google

Google has updated the suspicious file warnings Chrome displays for why it might have blocked a potentially suspicious or dangerous file download to hopefully give users clearer explanations. For people who turn on the anti-phishing Enhanced protection feature, opting in to upload suspicious files for scanning in the cloud, it’s also shifted to automatic scans, saying files sent for deep scans are 50 times more likely to be marked as malware.

In response to widespread targeted cookie theft attacks on YouTube channels and other groups, like the Linus Tech Tips hacker takeover last year, Chrome has also added a prompt to scan encrypted archive files such as .zip files that have a password. Users will be prompted to enter the password so its AI system will open and scan them in the cloud for Enhanced protection users, while people with the default settings will have the files scanned locally using the currently available malware definitions.

The new changes are live in the current Chrome releases.

Image: Google
The latest Chrome warning message for suspicious downloads is shown in the upper right, with the old message in the lower left.

For the labels most of us are more likely to see while browsing the internet normally, Google says its warnings will be divided into “suspicious” or “dangerous” categories, depending on the level of confidence its AI models have in the level of risk. Users shown the new warnings have ignored warnings less frequently and acted on them more quickly, according to a press release Google shared with The Verge.

GIF: Google
Google’s automated deep scan.

Read More 

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

The latest PlayStation beta lets you create personalized 3D audio profiles on your PS5 that could help you “better sense the positions of characters and objects in a game world.” If you’re wearing headphones or earbuds with your PS5, you can perform sound tests to optimize the audio to best suit your needs.
As shown in the video provided by Sony, the tests will ask you various questions, like where you hear a particular sound coming from and the angle you hear a sound moving in. Based on your answers, your PS5 will create an audio profile that will be saved to your account and ideally improve the simulated effect to help you track sounds around you in games.
You can create an audio profile by going to the settings menu and selecting Sound > 3D Audio (Headphones).

Additionally, if you have friends or family members who are signed in to their accounts on your PS5, you can now choose whether they can access your console for Remote Play or whether they’ll need their own system to stream College Football 25 on a PlayStation Portal.
You can modify these permissions by going to the Settings menu and selecting Systems > Remote Play > Enable Remote Play. From there, you’ll see a list of users signed in on your PS5, along with toggles that allow or restrict access.

Image: Sony
You can allow or restrict access to your console via Remote Play.

There’s a new adaptive charging feature for DualSense wireless controllers, DualSense Edge wireless controllers, PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers, and Access controllers — but it’s only available on the latest PS5 model released last year. If enabled, your PS5 will limit the amount of power supplied to your controllers while in rest mode, depending on your controller’s battery level. It will also stop supplying power to the USB port if you don’t have a controller connected.
The beta is available to “selected participants” in the US, UK, Canada, Japan, Germany, and France. Sony notes that it plans to roll out the update globally in the “coming months.”

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

The latest PlayStation beta lets you create personalized 3D audio profiles on your PS5 that could help you “better sense the positions of characters and objects in a game world.” If you’re wearing headphones or earbuds with your PS5, you can perform sound tests to optimize the audio to best suit your needs.

As shown in the video provided by Sony, the tests will ask you various questions, like where you hear a particular sound coming from and the angle you hear a sound moving in. Based on your answers, your PS5 will create an audio profile that will be saved to your account and ideally improve the simulated effect to help you track sounds around you in games.

You can create an audio profile by going to the settings menu and selecting Sound > 3D Audio (Headphones).

Additionally, if you have friends or family members who are signed in to their accounts on your PS5, you can now choose whether they can access your console for Remote Play or whether they’ll need their own system to stream College Football 25 on a PlayStation Portal.

You can modify these permissions by going to the Settings menu and selecting Systems > Remote Play > Enable Remote Play. From there, you’ll see a list of users signed in on your PS5, along with toggles that allow or restrict access.

Image: Sony
You can allow or restrict access to your console via Remote Play.

There’s a new adaptive charging feature for DualSense wireless controllers, DualSense Edge wireless controllers, PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers, and Access controllers — but it’s only available on the latest PS5 model released last year. If enabled, your PS5 will limit the amount of power supplied to your controllers while in rest mode, depending on your controller’s battery level. It will also stop supplying power to the USB port if you don’t have a controller connected.

The beta is available to “selected participants” in the US, UK, Canada, Japan, Germany, and France. Sony notes that it plans to roll out the update globally in the “coming months.”

Read More 

The Ace have an understated design that’s very sleek, especially in white. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

If you’re looking to be an early-ish adopter of some fancy headphones and you like the color white, you’re in luck. The porcelain-colored Sonos Ace are on sale for $409.99 ($40 off) at Amazon.

Sonos’ first wireless headphones feature top-notch sound quality, noise cancellation, and a transparency mode. These features may be par for the course among its equally-pricey competition, but what makes the Ace unique is its integration with the Sonos home audio ecosystem. If you’re invested in Sonos speakers or soundbars, the Ace uses the Sonos app and has a nifty extra where you can instantly swap your TV audio from an Arc soundbar to the privacy of your headphones (if you’re on iOS, since the feature has been delayed for Android). This feature may not be for everyone, and it isn’t yet compatible with the cheaper Beam or Ray soundbars, but it’s a nice little added convenience. Read / watch our review.

Some more hump day deals to help you get over it

The latest version of Focusrite’s Scarlett 2i2 audio interface is on sale at Amazon for $169.99 ($30 off Focusrite’s $199.99 list price), which is its all-time low price. The Scarlett line is a staple of the audio industry, a popular choice for musicians and podcasters alike, but with features like auto-gain it’s not too hard for an amateur to easily pick up. The fourth-gen 2i2 model features dual XLR microphone and quarter-inch instrument inputs, and a new preamp that can even drive quieter mics like the legendary Shure SM7b (which is a notoriously quiet mic that usually requires an in-line gain boost).

Logitech’s G PowerPlay wireless charging mousepad is on a rare discount of $95.95 ($24 off) at Amazon. The 12.6 x 10.8-inch mousepad comes with both cloth and hard surfaces, but most importantly, if you have a compatible Logitech mouse (like one of the G502 or G Pro X Superlight models) it can wirelessly charge that mouse as you click and scroll away — freeing you from ever having to worry about a dead mouse again.
The 15-inch version of the MacBook Air with M3 processor is selling for its best available price at Amazon. You can choose from the base configuration with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $1,099 ($200 off), or a specced-up model with 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD for $1,499 ($200 off). The M3 MacBook Air is our top choice among laptops for most people, as it’s excellent for everyday tasks, light creative workflows, and easily lasting all day on a charge — and if the 13-inch display isn’t large enough, the 15-inch is likely the way to go. If you can spend the extra money for that discounted higher-end configuration it should easily last you for years to come. Read our review.

The Ace have an understated design that’s very sleek, especially in white. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

If you’re looking to be an early-ish adopter of some fancy headphones and you like the color white, you’re in luck. The porcelain-colored Sonos Ace are on sale for $409.99 ($40 off) at Amazon.

Sonos’ first wireless headphones feature top-notch sound quality, noise cancellation, and a transparency mode. These features may be par for the course among its equally-pricey competition, but what makes the Ace unique is its integration with the Sonos home audio ecosystem. If you’re invested in Sonos speakers or soundbars, the Ace uses the Sonos app and has a nifty extra where you can instantly swap your TV audio from an Arc soundbar to the privacy of your headphones (if you’re on iOS, since the feature has been delayed for Android). This feature may not be for everyone, and it isn’t yet compatible with the cheaper Beam or Ray soundbars, but it’s a nice little added convenience. Read / watch our review.

Some more hump day deals to help you get over it

The latest version of Focusrite’s Scarlett 2i2 audio interface is on sale at Amazon for $169.99 ($30 off Focusrite’s $199.99 list price), which is its all-time low price. The Scarlett line is a staple of the audio industry, a popular choice for musicians and podcasters alike, but with features like auto-gain it’s not too hard for an amateur to easily pick up. The fourth-gen 2i2 model features dual XLR microphone and quarter-inch instrument inputs, and a new preamp that can even drive quieter mics like the legendary Shure SM7b (which is a notoriously quiet mic that usually requires an in-line gain boost).

Logitech’s G PowerPlay wireless charging mousepad is on a rare discount of $95.95 ($24 off) at Amazon. The 12.6 x 10.8-inch mousepad comes with both cloth and hard surfaces, but most importantly, if you have a compatible Logitech mouse (like one of the G502 or G Pro X Superlight models) it can wirelessly charge that mouse as you click and scroll away — freeing you from ever having to worry about a dead mouse again.
The 15-inch version of the MacBook Air with M3 processor is selling for its best available price at Amazon. You can choose from the base configuration with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $1,099 ($200 off), or a specced-up model with 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD for $1,499 ($200 off). The M3 MacBook Air is our top choice among laptops for most people, as it’s excellent for everyday tasks, light creative workflows, and easily lasting all day on a charge — and if the 13-inch display isn’t large enough, the 15-inch is likely the way to go. If you can spend the extra money for that discounted higher-end configuration it should easily last you for years to come. Read our review.

Read More 

Apple executives Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi have made it well known that the company has little interest in getting the iPad prepared for macOS software. During an event following Apple’s 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Federighi said, “We want to keep making iPad the best iPad it can be. We are not trying to create a Windows 8 PC or whatever.” But that hasn’t stopped Apple users from craving something more out of their iPads.
Across our articles, videos, and podcasts, we see comments asking about what it would take to get macOS on their devices or asking for predictions of the day Apple will change its mind. So, we decided to try to find the answer.
In this latest video from The Verge, video director Owen Grove tries to solve why Apple doesn’t merge its devices. Does it have to do with hardware? Software? Business? Owen tries using the iPad Pro while mirroring macOS as his solo work device to see how it fares and talks to experts, including AltStore and Delta developer Riley Testut and The Verge’s Nilay Patel, to get their takes on Apple’s business.
The final answer isn’t quite what you think it might be. Watch the full episode on YouTube and let us know which big tech question we should tackle next!

Apple executives Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi have made it well known that the company has little interest in getting the iPad prepared for macOS software. During an event following Apple’s 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Federighi said, “We want to keep making iPad the best iPad it can be. We are not trying to create a Windows 8 PC or whatever.” But that hasn’t stopped Apple users from craving something more out of their iPads.

Across our articles, videos, and podcasts, we see comments asking about what it would take to get macOS on their devices or asking for predictions of the day Apple will change its mind. So, we decided to try to find the answer.

In this latest video from The Verge, video director Owen Grove tries to solve why Apple doesn’t merge its devices. Does it have to do with hardware? Software? Business? Owen tries using the iPad Pro while mirroring macOS as his solo work device to see how it fares and talks to experts, including AltStore and Delta developer Riley Testut and The Verge’s Nilay Patel, to get their takes on Apple’s business.

The final answer isn’t quite what you think it might be. Watch the full episode on YouTube and let us know which big tech question we should tackle next!

Read More 

Sunny the robot has a very expressive face. | Image: Apple

The murder mystery was a chance for showrunner Katie Robbins to imagine a different kind of sci-fi vision. Sunny, a new sci-fi dramedy on Apple TV Plus, is different from most visions of the future — mainly because it barely has any screens. Instead, the show imagines a time when technology is more seamlessly integrated into our lives. Phones rely primarily on audio, friendly robots help around the house, and computer monitors look like they’re made of paper. For showrunner Katie Robbins and the rest of the production crew, designing Sunny became an opportunity to do something different in the realm of science fiction.
“It was such an amazing treat and challenge to think: if we could change things about the world that we live in, what would we change?” Robbins explains. “How would we change the ways we interface with our technology?”
Those differences manifest in a few ways. While everyone in Sunny seems to carry around a phone, for instance, they’re a lot different from modern smartphones. Inspired by the design of Japanese lighters from the 1960s, the devices are curvy rectangles that can flip open to reveal a screen. But hardly anyone on the show uses them that way. Instead, they pop an AirPods-style headphone in one ear (the phone doubles as an earbud case) and do almost everything via voice.

When the characters need to do something visually — browse search results or play a multiplayer game — there’s a built-in projector. And when the citizens of this future actually interact with a display, whether it’s the phone or a computer or a TV playing 24-hour news at a convenience store, the screen looks like it’s made out of electronic paper. Robbins says the displays were all designed to look like the shoji screens found in many Japanese homes so that they fit more naturally into the environment.

Image: Apple
Sunny taking a close look at one of the show’s unique phones.

Part of what makes it all work is that Sunny largely feels out of time. The show follows Suzie (Rashida Jones), who teams up with robotic home assistant Sunny (Joanna Sotomura) to solve the mystery of her husband Masa’s (Hidetoshi Nishijima) disappearance. It’s set in Kyoto, but when it takes place isn’t really clear. The show is vaguely futuristic, with its plentiful robots and voice assistants that can actually understand you, but it’s also decidedly retro when it comes to things like fashion and music. Robbins says that temporal ambiguity is intentional. “We never wanted to specifically timestamp the show, so that it could feel 10 years in the future, 30 years in the future, or an alt-now,” she says. “We wanted it to feel familiar and accessible and not futuristic in a really overt way.”
“We wanted it to feel familiar and accessible and not futuristic in a really overt way.”
Many of the decisions regarding technology — and screens in particular — also came from a practical standpoint. “We wanted to, as much as possible, avoid screen inserts and that kind of thing, and characters constantly picking up their phones and scrolling,” says Robbins. Having most communication happen via voice makes for a better experience for viewers, keeping the focus on the actors, but it also creates tension for the show’s main character. Suzie has lived in Japan for a decade, but because of the ubiquitous real-time translation technology found in her phone, she has never actually had to learn the language. She simply puts in the earbud and carries on a conversation.
“Which is miraculous, and in some ways incredibly connective and allows her to live in a place where she wouldn’t otherwise be able to communicate with people,” Robbins says. “However, there is also a barrier within that technology. Imagine if you lived in a place where almost all of your interaction with people you were hearing translated in your ear. Even though the technology is bringing people together, it’s also creating a barrier in this way that I think is really interesting.”

Image: Apple
Suzie (Rashida Jones) wearing an earbud with real-time translation.

As for the robots, and Sunny in particular, the concept for a cute and friendly assistant similarly came from a story viewpoint. Suzie is someone with a deep-seated distrust of technology who is also going through an incredibly difficult time with the loss of her husband and son. “What if the robot is potentially the thing that brings her out of that?” Robbins remembers thinking.
“Something that felt very cute, and approachable, and amiable so that you could imagine falling in love with it.”
After some research into the field of human-robot interaction — and working with the team at visual effects powerhouse Wētā Workshop — Robbins was able to find a look that both Suzie and viewers would relate to, complete with a big round face with huge, extremely expressive eyes that do an amazing job of conveying emotion. “Something that felt very cute, and approachable, and amiable so that you could imagine falling in love with it,” Robbins explains.
At a time when many of us seem to be desperately searching for some kind of remedy to our overconnected present, there’s a lot of appeal in Sunny’s vision. The bots are mostly friendly and helpful when you need them and easy to ignore when you don’t. Meanwhile, the phones are connectivity tools rather than attention-consuming blackholes, and people actually talk to each other (even if sometimes mediated through a translator). In a world of Boox Palmas, Daylight tablets, and AI tools that leave much to be desired, the Sunny phone could definitely garner an audience — which was the goal all along.
“That was the hope,” says Robbins. “We get the chance to design something here. Let’s design something that we would want.”

Sunny the robot has a very expressive face. | Image: Apple

The murder mystery was a chance for showrunner Katie Robbins to imagine a different kind of sci-fi vision.

Sunny, a new sci-fi dramedy on Apple TV Plus, is different from most visions of the future — mainly because it barely has any screens. Instead, the show imagines a time when technology is more seamlessly integrated into our lives. Phones rely primarily on audio, friendly robots help around the house, and computer monitors look like they’re made of paper. For showrunner Katie Robbins and the rest of the production crew, designing Sunny became an opportunity to do something different in the realm of science fiction.

“It was such an amazing treat and challenge to think: if we could change things about the world that we live in, what would we change?” Robbins explains. “How would we change the ways we interface with our technology?”

Those differences manifest in a few ways. While everyone in Sunny seems to carry around a phone, for instance, they’re a lot different from modern smartphones. Inspired by the design of Japanese lighters from the 1960s, the devices are curvy rectangles that can flip open to reveal a screen. But hardly anyone on the show uses them that way. Instead, they pop an AirPods-style headphone in one ear (the phone doubles as an earbud case) and do almost everything via voice.

When the characters need to do something visually — browse search results or play a multiplayer game — there’s a built-in projector. And when the citizens of this future actually interact with a display, whether it’s the phone or a computer or a TV playing 24-hour news at a convenience store, the screen looks like it’s made out of electronic paper. Robbins says the displays were all designed to look like the shoji screens found in many Japanese homes so that they fit more naturally into the environment.

Part of what makes it all work is that Sunny largely feels out of time. The show follows Suzie (Rashida Jones), who teams up with robotic home assistant Sunny (Joanna Sotomura) to solve the mystery of her husband Masa’s (Hidetoshi Nishijima) disappearance. It’s set in Kyoto, but when it takes place isn’t really clear. The show is vaguely futuristic, with its plentiful robots and voice assistants that can actually understand you, but it’s also decidedly retro when it comes to things like fashion and music. Robbins says that temporal ambiguity is intentional. “We never wanted to specifically timestamp the show, so that it could feel 10 years in the future, 30 years in the future, or an alt-now,” she says. “We wanted it to feel familiar and accessible and not futuristic in a really overt way.”

Many of the decisions regarding technology — and screens in particular — also came from a practical standpoint. “We wanted to, as much as possible, avoid screen inserts and that kind of thing, and characters constantly picking up their phones and scrolling,” says Robbins. Having most communication happen via voice makes for a better experience for viewers, keeping the focus on the actors, but it also creates tension for the show’s main character. Suzie has lived in Japan for a decade, but because of the ubiquitous real-time translation technology found in her phone, she has never actually had to learn the language. She simply puts in the earbud and carries on a conversation.

“Which is miraculous, and in some ways incredibly connective and allows her to live in a place where she wouldn’t otherwise be able to communicate with people,” Robbins says. “However, there is also a barrier within that technology. Imagine if you lived in a place where almost all of your interaction with people you were hearing translated in your ear. Even though the technology is bringing people together, it’s also creating a barrier in this way that I think is really interesting.”

As for the robots, and Sunny in particular, the concept for a cute and friendly assistant similarly came from a story viewpoint. Suzie is someone with a deep-seated distrust of technology who is also going through an incredibly difficult time with the loss of her husband and son. “What if the robot is potentially the thing that brings her out of that?” Robbins remembers thinking.

After some research into the field of human-robot interaction — and working with the team at visual effects powerhouse Wētā Workshop — Robbins was able to find a look that both Suzie and viewers would relate to, complete with a big round face with huge, extremely expressive eyes that do an amazing job of conveying emotion. “Something that felt very cute, and approachable, and amiable so that you could imagine falling in love with it,” Robbins explains.

At a time when many of us seem to be desperately searching for some kind of remedy to our overconnected present, there’s a lot of appeal in Sunny’s vision. The bots are mostly friendly and helpful when you need them and easy to ignore when you don’t. Meanwhile, the phones are connectivity tools rather than attention-consuming blackholes, and people actually talk to each other (even if sometimes mediated through a translator). In a world of Boox Palmas, Daylight tablets, and AI tools that leave much to be desired, the Sunny phone could definitely garner an audience — which was the goal all along.

“That was the hope,” says Robbins. “We get the chance to design something here. Let’s design something that we would want.”

Read More 

Samsung’s flagship foldable is as good as ever, but it feels anything but fresh. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 is like staying in a really fancy Airbnb.
It’s objectively luxurious: spacious and with every amenity you could think of. But it’s a little impractical, and you never feel quite as at ease as you do in your own home. Not to mention, there might be real consequences to tracking dirt in the wrong places. Home isn’t as well appointed, but it’s comfortable, and by the time you check out, you’re ready for that sigh of relief.
With much higher prices than a slab phone and delicate moving parts to protect, book-style foldables like the Fold 6 are more or less luxury items. A phone that folds in half is a little technological marvel that nobody absolutely needs. But even in this rarified space, Samsung’s doesn’t feel as easy to cozy up to as the competition’s. With last year’s introduction of the Google Pixel Fold and OnePlus Open, fans of foldables (in the US, at least, where we have fewer options) got a glimpse of a more familiar format, with a wider outer screen — the one you use a hundred times a day.
Samsung is truly coasting on its four-year lead here. The Z Fold 6 offers such minor upgrades over the 5 that the differences are measured in millimeters: a slightly wider cover screen and a slightly slimmer profile. The phone’s flatness has been improved. There’s a new ultrawide camera. And of course, all the AI you can shake an S Pen at, to the tune of $1,899 — $100 more than the Z Fold 5.

I don’t think we can keep waiting for the Z Fold to evolve into something meaningfully different; Samsung seems to think this is its final form and will just keep polishing the edges every year. And the Fold 6 is an impressive gadget indeed, but I can’t quite get comfortable with it.
The Z Fold 6’s outer screen measures 6.3 inches on the diagonal, up from 6.2 inches on last year’s model thanks to a few more millimeters in width. I can appreciate the difference looking at the two phones side by side, but in practice, the difference is so small that it doesn’t do much to change the experience of using the cover screen. This is still a tall, skinny screen compared to your garden-variety slab-style phone or even the outer screen on the Pixel and OnePlus foldables. I think plenty of people can get used to the outer screen’s unusual dimensions without a problem, but even after a week of use, the keyboard still feels a little too squished every time I use it. Your mileage may vary, etc. etc.

OnePlus Open (left), Pixel Fold (center), and the Galaxy Z Fold 6 (right). I’ll take the one on the left.

The Z Fold 6 also shaves off a little weight compared to the Fold 5 — down to 239 grams from 253. It’s a hair thinner, too, measuring 12.1mm thick when folded compared to 13.4mm. That’s all well and good, but the reality is that the Z Fold 6 is still a chunk when it’s folded in half. It’s only seven grams heavier than Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra, but the way that weight is distributed makes the Z Fold 6 less comfortable to use in one hand, and it definitely makes the phone look stupid as hell in the side pocket of my yoga pants.
The edges closest to the hinge are also more squared off than the ones on the Z Fold 5. They’re pointy enough to jab me in the ribs if the phone is in the pocket of my joggers and I crouch down. This really isn’t a phone you want to carry in any pant pockets, as I’ve learned. Oh, and that improved flatness? The Fold does unfold to lay almost flush when it’s screen-side down on a flat surface. But it still rocks back and forth on the camera bump when you use it fully open on a table, which you’re much more likely to do.

I mean, sure. That’s pretty darn flat.

The Z Fold 6’s main attraction, the 7.6-inch inner screen, is just as impressive as ever. The crease looks about the same — it disappears when looking at the display straight-on, but you’ll see it from an angle. In bright light, it will reach up to 2,600 nits, which makes it comfortable to use outside, but that’s also when I noticed the crease more.
Still, I’ll never not be amazed that I can open this phone up and easily run two apps side by side. This was extremely helpful while planning a bike ride in Komoot while cross-referencing Strava’s heat map since I am too cheap to pay for a premium account on either service.
I wish it was better suited for video conferencing. The laptop-style, partially unfolded configuration lends itself to hands-free video calls, which is nice. But the inner selfie camera is only positioned about halfway up the left side of the screen when you use it like this. It’s an awkward and deeply unflattering angle. Plus the narrow dimensions of the screen make for a cramped experience when it’s folded like that.

The crease is most visible when you’re looking at the screen from an angle.

For more creative pursuits, the inner screen serves as a large canvas for Samsung’s most chaotic new AI feature: sketch to image. There’s no prompting required — all you need to do is draw a rough sketch (and my sketches are very rough) of anything you want to add to a photo, and AI will turn it into a photorealistic addition to your image. The results are often ridiculous and sometimes surprisingly believable. I dare you to try it out at Best Buy or whatever and not have at least a little fun with it.
The rest of Samsung’s AI features — both on the Z Fold 6 and the rest of Samsung’s flagship devices — remain a mixed bag of party tricks. Like Apple, Samsung promises that the very best stuff, like context-aware help from its virtual assistant, is coming later. (Are you there, Bixby? It’s me, Allison.) Galaxy AI, like all AI on phones, remains unproven. But the Z Fold 6 comes with something better than AI gimmicks: a very generous seven years of OS and security updates.

Samsung likes to emphasize the ways that foldables have reached parity with slab phones. That’s basically true of the Fold’s camera system, which is at its best taking photos of people. And while I don’t agree that the cover screen feels as easy to use as a traditional smartphone, it does seem that the Fold 6’s battery life is just as strong as the best slab phones. I tested the phone with the always-on display enabled full time and put it through the wringer on a couple of long bike rides using GPS and streaming music. Even so, I usually had at least 50 percent left at the end of the day.
But the Z Fold 6 still falls short of slab phones in one significant way: durability. Samsung made some tweaks to the materials and the hinge mechanism to improve protection against drops, and it remains fully water resistant, but dust is still the enemy of a folding phone. For a limited time, customers who buy the phone directly from Samsung will get one free screen repair and one screen protector replacement within two years of purchase, but that doesn’t inspire great confidence in long-term durability.

The phone that’s also a tablet.

Don’t get me wrong. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is an amazing gadget. The Fold has won a faithful following — and rightfully so. Multitasking on the big screen is effortless, build quality is as good as foldables get, and the battery reliably lasts a day or more. Heck, you can plug the whole dang thing into a display and use it like a computer.
Samsung pioneered the foldable phone, but now it’s stubbornly iterating on that original concept — and it feels like the time for iteration is over. The company seems committed to its current long and narrow template rather than adopting a wider format. Personally, I think the OnePlus Open is the ideal foldable design, and it’s about halfway between the tall and skinny Z Fold 6 and the wide and short Google Pixel Fold.
Not to mention, this phone costs nearly two thousand US dollars! Can’t we ask for a little more than “improved flatness”? I want an S Pen included, like it is for the less expensive Galaxy S24 Ultra, and some way to store it without having to buy a special case with a pen slot. Or how about, I dunno, cool modular accessories! A better video conferencing experience! Free screen protector replacements for everyone! Let’s dream big, people!
The Z Fold 6 is one hell of a nice place to stay, but to me at least, it doesn’t quite feel like home.
Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Samsung’s flagship foldable is as good as ever, but it feels anything but fresh.

The Galaxy Z Fold 6 is like staying in a really fancy Airbnb.

It’s objectively luxurious: spacious and with every amenity you could think of. But it’s a little impractical, and you never feel quite as at ease as you do in your own home. Not to mention, there might be real consequences to tracking dirt in the wrong places. Home isn’t as well appointed, but it’s comfortable, and by the time you check out, you’re ready for that sigh of relief.

With much higher prices than a slab phone and delicate moving parts to protect, book-style foldables like the Fold 6 are more or less luxury items. A phone that folds in half is a little technological marvel that nobody absolutely needs. But even in this rarified space, Samsung’s doesn’t feel as easy to cozy up to as the competition’s. With last year’s introduction of the Google Pixel Fold and OnePlus Open, fans of foldables (in the US, at least, where we have fewer options) got a glimpse of a more familiar format, with a wider outer screen — the one you use a hundred times a day.

Samsung is truly coasting on its four-year lead here. The Z Fold 6 offers such minor upgrades over the 5 that the differences are measured in millimeters: a slightly wider cover screen and a slightly slimmer profile. The phone’s flatness has been improved. There’s a new ultrawide camera. And of course, all the AI you can shake an S Pen at, to the tune of $1,899 — $100 more than the Z Fold 5.

I don’t think we can keep waiting for the Z Fold to evolve into something meaningfully different; Samsung seems to think this is its final form and will just keep polishing the edges every year. And the Fold 6 is an impressive gadget indeed, but I can’t quite get comfortable with it.

The Z Fold 6’s outer screen measures 6.3 inches on the diagonal, up from 6.2 inches on last year’s model thanks to a few more millimeters in width. I can appreciate the difference looking at the two phones side by side, but in practice, the difference is so small that it doesn’t do much to change the experience of using the cover screen. This is still a tall, skinny screen compared to your garden-variety slab-style phone or even the outer screen on the Pixel and OnePlus foldables. I think plenty of people can get used to the outer screen’s unusual dimensions without a problem, but even after a week of use, the keyboard still feels a little too squished every time I use it. Your mileage may vary, etc. etc.

The Z Fold 6 also shaves off a little weight compared to the Fold 5 — down to 239 grams from 253. It’s a hair thinner, too, measuring 12.1mm thick when folded compared to 13.4mm. That’s all well and good, but the reality is that the Z Fold 6 is still a chunk when it’s folded in half. It’s only seven grams heavier than Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra, but the way that weight is distributed makes the Z Fold 6 less comfortable to use in one hand, and it definitely makes the phone look stupid as hell in the side pocket of my yoga pants.

The edges closest to the hinge are also more squared off than the ones on the Z Fold 5. They’re pointy enough to jab me in the ribs if the phone is in the pocket of my joggers and I crouch down. This really isn’t a phone you want to carry in any pant pockets, as I’ve learned. Oh, and that improved flatness? The Fold does unfold to lay almost flush when it’s screen-side down on a flat surface. But it still rocks back and forth on the camera bump when you use it fully open on a table, which you’re much more likely to do.

The Z Fold 6’s main attraction, the 7.6-inch inner screen, is just as impressive as ever. The crease looks about the same — it disappears when looking at the display straight-on, but you’ll see it from an angle. In bright light, it will reach up to 2,600 nits, which makes it comfortable to use outside, but that’s also when I noticed the crease more.

Still, I’ll never not be amazed that I can open this phone up and easily run two apps side by side. This was extremely helpful while planning a bike ride in Komoot while cross-referencing Strava’s heat map since I am too cheap to pay for a premium account on either service.

I wish it was better suited for video conferencing. The laptop-style, partially unfolded configuration lends itself to hands-free video calls, which is nice. But the inner selfie camera is only positioned about halfway up the left side of the screen when you use it like this. It’s an awkward and deeply unflattering angle. Plus the narrow dimensions of the screen make for a cramped experience when it’s folded like that.

For more creative pursuits, the inner screen serves as a large canvas for Samsung’s most chaotic new AI feature: sketch to image. There’s no prompting required — all you need to do is draw a rough sketch (and my sketches are very rough) of anything you want to add to a photo, and AI will turn it into a photorealistic addition to your image. The results are often ridiculous and sometimes surprisingly believable. I dare you to try it out at Best Buy or whatever and not have at least a little fun with it.

The rest of Samsung’s AI features — both on the Z Fold 6 and the rest of Samsung’s flagship devices — remain a mixed bag of party tricks. Like Apple, Samsung promises that the very best stuff, like context-aware help from its virtual assistant, is coming later. (Are you there, Bixby? It’s me, Allison.) Galaxy AI, like all AI on phones, remains unproven. But the Z Fold 6 comes with something better than AI gimmicks: a very generous seven years of OS and security updates.

Samsung likes to emphasize the ways that foldables have reached parity with slab phones. That’s basically true of the Fold’s camera system, which is at its best taking photos of people. And while I don’t agree that the cover screen feels as easy to use as a traditional smartphone, it does seem that the Fold 6’s battery life is just as strong as the best slab phones. I tested the phone with the always-on display enabled full time and put it through the wringer on a couple of long bike rides using GPS and streaming music. Even so, I usually had at least 50 percent left at the end of the day.

But the Z Fold 6 still falls short of slab phones in one significant way: durability. Samsung made some tweaks to the materials and the hinge mechanism to improve protection against drops, and it remains fully water resistant, but dust is still the enemy of a folding phone. For a limited time, customers who buy the phone directly from Samsung will get one free screen repair and one screen protector replacement within two years of purchase, but that doesn’t inspire great confidence in long-term durability.

Don’t get me wrong. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is an amazing gadget. The Fold has won a faithful following — and rightfully so. Multitasking on the big screen is effortless, build quality is as good as foldables get, and the battery reliably lasts a day or more. Heck, you can plug the whole dang thing into a display and use it like a computer.

Samsung pioneered the foldable phone, but now it’s stubbornly iterating on that original concept — and it feels like the time for iteration is over. The company seems committed to its current long and narrow template rather than adopting a wider format. Personally, I think the OnePlus Open is the ideal foldable design, and it’s about halfway between the tall and skinny Z Fold 6 and the wide and short Google Pixel Fold.

Not to mention, this phone costs nearly two thousand US dollars! Can’t we ask for a little more than “improved flatness”? I want an S Pen included, like it is for the less expensive Galaxy S24 Ultra, and some way to store it without having to buy a special case with a pen slot. Or how about, I dunno, cool modular accessories! A better video conferencing experience! Free screen protector replacements for everyone! Let’s dream big, people!

The Z Fold 6 is one hell of a nice place to stay, but to me at least, it doesn’t quite feel like home.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Read More 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google is bringing a handful of new features to its Google Play store on Android today. There are new categorized “Collections” that highlight content from apps you’ve already installed. The company’s reward program is adding more prizes, including Pixel hardware. Google’s Play Pass subscription service is introducing more versatile gaming capabilities. And in Japan, Google is rolling out a curated space for comics, which will let people dive into first chapter previews without needing to install third-party apps first.
Taken together, these changes are intended to make Google Play “an end-to-end experience that’s more than a store.”
The company previewed some of the latest updates at a media briefing in New York City on Tuesday. Google Play VP Sam Bright highlighted a few upgrades announced back at I/O such as AI-generated app reviews. Those AI features are being expanded with a new tool that will make it simpler to compare apps in similar categories (like photo editing software or fitness apps).
Then Bright moved on to some of the bigger new features. First is a new section of Google Play called Collections.

Image: Google
Collections highlight content from apps already on your phone.

Rather than try to sell you on new apps, Collections are designed to surface content from those you’ve already installed and organize everything into categories like shop, watch, and listen. You’ll see a “continue watching” row for various streaming apps, plus the latest deals from select retailers. “With your app content in one place, it’s easier to pick up right where you left off,” Google’s blog post reads.
Gaming is another big focus of today’s updates. When searching, you can now select from a list of interest filters to refine the types of games that Play suggests. And starting today, Play Pass subscribers on PC are able to play multiple titles at the same time, so you can get your Clash of Clans fix in one window while playing another game elsewhere onscreen. Google launched Play Games for PC as a beta in 2022 and has continued to iterate on it with 4K support and now this.
Google is also trying to make its Play Points reward program more appealing by adding “super weekly prizes.” Available to gold, platinum, and diamond members, these level up the usual prizes by throwing Pixel devices, Razer gaming products, and other hardware into the mix. Prizes will rotate on a weekly basis and can be claimed from the Play Points perks tab.

Image: Google
A curated space for comics is coming to Google Play in Japan.

Android customers in Japan are getting a new curated space in Google Play that’s entirely devoted to comics. “You can access comics-related content all in one place — including free first chapter previews, live events and trailers, editor picks and fan reviews even from apps you haven’t installed,” Google’s blog post reads. A new “comics” tab is coming right to the Google Play homescreen. The company is continuing to explore how it can best use these curated spaces in other regions; the first example was a cricket section in India.

Image: Google
You can tell Google Play to ignore certain apps for its personalization features.

Importantly, Google is also giving everyone greater control over exactly what data is used for Play’s personalized recommendations. Now, you can choose apps that might contain sensitive data that you don’t want to be factored into the store’s personalization algorithms. You can find this option by navigating to “Personalization in Play” from the main menu.
Will these new features lead to people spending more time in Google Play? Perhaps, but many of them (like Collections) are easy to ignore if you prefer to keep using it as a destination for apps like always.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google is bringing a handful of new features to its Google Play store on Android today. There are new categorized “Collections” that highlight content from apps you’ve already installed. The company’s reward program is adding more prizes, including Pixel hardware. Google’s Play Pass subscription service is introducing more versatile gaming capabilities. And in Japan, Google is rolling out a curated space for comics, which will let people dive into first chapter previews without needing to install third-party apps first.

Taken together, these changes are intended to make Google Play “an end-to-end experience that’s more than a store.”

The company previewed some of the latest updates at a media briefing in New York City on Tuesday. Google Play VP Sam Bright highlighted a few upgrades announced back at I/O such as AI-generated app reviews. Those AI features are being expanded with a new tool that will make it simpler to compare apps in similar categories (like photo editing software or fitness apps).

Then Bright moved on to some of the bigger new features. First is a new section of Google Play called Collections.

Image: Google
Collections highlight content from apps already on your phone.

Rather than try to sell you on new apps, Collections are designed to surface content from those you’ve already installed and organize everything into categories like shop, watch, and listen. You’ll see a “continue watching” row for various streaming apps, plus the latest deals from select retailers. “With your app content in one place, it’s easier to pick up right where you left off,” Google’s blog post reads.

Gaming is another big focus of today’s updates. When searching, you can now select from a list of interest filters to refine the types of games that Play suggests. And starting today, Play Pass subscribers on PC are able to play multiple titles at the same time, so you can get your Clash of Clans fix in one window while playing another game elsewhere onscreen. Google launched Play Games for PC as a beta in 2022 and has continued to iterate on it with 4K support and now this.

Google is also trying to make its Play Points reward program more appealing by adding “super weekly prizes.” Available to gold, platinum, and diamond members, these level up the usual prizes by throwing Pixel devices, Razer gaming products, and other hardware into the mix. Prizes will rotate on a weekly basis and can be claimed from the Play Points perks tab.

Image: Google
A curated space for comics is coming to Google Play in Japan.

Android customers in Japan are getting a new curated space in Google Play that’s entirely devoted to comics. “You can access comics-related content all in one place — including free first chapter previews, live events and trailers, editor picks and fan reviews even from apps you haven’t installed,” Google’s blog post reads. A new “comics” tab is coming right to the Google Play homescreen. The company is continuing to explore how it can best use these curated spaces in other regions; the first example was a cricket section in India.

Image: Google
You can tell Google Play to ignore certain apps for its personalization features.

Importantly, Google is also giving everyone greater control over exactly what data is used for Play’s personalized recommendations. Now, you can choose apps that might contain sensitive data that you don’t want to be factored into the store’s personalization algorithms. You can find this option by navigating to “Personalization in Play” from the main menu.

Will these new features lead to people spending more time in Google Play? Perhaps, but many of them (like Collections) are easy to ignore if you prefer to keep using it as a destination for apps like always.

Read More 

In addition to iOS and Android mobile devices, the GameSir G8 Plus works with the Nintendo Switch. | Image: GameSir

GameSir’s latest mobile controller has an added bonus — it also works with the Nintendo Switch. In addition to turning iOS and Android smartphones into handheld consoles not dependent on finicky touchscreen controls, the new GameSir G8 Plus can replace the Switch’s Joy-Cons with more ergonomic alternatives that will never succumb to joystick drift.
Unlike many clamp-on gaming controllers for mobile devices that physically connect through a USB-C or Lightning port, the GameSir G8 Plus uses Bluetooth. That’s what allows it to connect to smartphones, tablets, the Switch, and even PCs without requiring users to pick a version with a specific connector.
The tradeoff is that the gamepad relies on a pair of 500mAh rechargeable batteries. That makes it one more accessory you’ll need to remember to charge, and one that will add almost 314 grams to whatever you clamp it to.
The GameSir G8 Plus also features drift-resistant Hall effect sensors in its joysticks and analog triggers, ensuring gamers will never experience unwanted button presses or movements. The triggers can be switched to a “Hair Trigger Mode” making them more responsive for FPS players.
Motion controls are supported thanks to a six-axis gyroscope, while haptic feedback is provided by a pair of vibration motors. The G8 Plus can even wake the Switch with a single button press, which is a feature that many third-party controllers don’t offer.

Image: GameSir
Gamers can customize the G8 Plus using interchangeable magnetic faceplates and swappable button caps.

The controller’s clamping mechanism can expand to 215 millimeters to accommodate larger smartphones and tablets like the iPad Mini. It’s also customizable with magnetic faceplates that easily pop off and swappable caps for the joysticks and face buttons. It’s a nice feature for gamers who like to personalize their hardware, but only when alternative faceplates are actually available. The company says those are still in planning.

Image: GameSir
The mobile controller can be used to play PC games over Bluetooth or directly connected with a USB-C cable for less lag.

Bluetooth support allows the GameSir G8 Plus to connect to a PC and be used as a standalone wireless controller without a mobile device attached. Gamers wanting less lag can instead opt for a direct connection to a computer using a USB-C cable.
The GameSir G8 Plus is available now for $79.99. That’s cheaper than the $99.99 Backbone One and the same price as a pack of replacement Joy-Cons that can potentially still develop joystick drift.

In addition to iOS and Android mobile devices, the GameSir G8 Plus works with the Nintendo Switch. | Image: GameSir

GameSir’s latest mobile controller has an added bonus — it also works with the Nintendo Switch. In addition to turning iOS and Android smartphones into handheld consoles not dependent on finicky touchscreen controls, the new GameSir G8 Plus can replace the Switch’s Joy-Cons with more ergonomic alternatives that will never succumb to joystick drift.

Unlike many clamp-on gaming controllers for mobile devices that physically connect through a USB-C or Lightning port, the GameSir G8 Plus uses Bluetooth. That’s what allows it to connect to smartphones, tablets, the Switch, and even PCs without requiring users to pick a version with a specific connector.

The tradeoff is that the gamepad relies on a pair of 500mAh rechargeable batteries. That makes it one more accessory you’ll need to remember to charge, and one that will add almost 314 grams to whatever you clamp it to.

The GameSir G8 Plus also features drift-resistant Hall effect sensors in its joysticks and analog triggers, ensuring gamers will never experience unwanted button presses or movements. The triggers can be switched to a “Hair Trigger Mode” making them more responsive for FPS players.

Motion controls are supported thanks to a six-axis gyroscope, while haptic feedback is provided by a pair of vibration motors. The G8 Plus can even wake the Switch with a single button press, which is a feature that many third-party controllers don’t offer.

Image: GameSir
Gamers can customize the G8 Plus using interchangeable magnetic faceplates and swappable button caps.

The controller’s clamping mechanism can expand to 215 millimeters to accommodate larger smartphones and tablets like the iPad Mini. It’s also customizable with magnetic faceplates that easily pop off and swappable caps for the joysticks and face buttons. It’s a nice feature for gamers who like to personalize their hardware, but only when alternative faceplates are actually available. The company says those are still in planning.

Image: GameSir
The mobile controller can be used to play PC games over Bluetooth or directly connected with a USB-C cable for less lag.

Bluetooth support allows the GameSir G8 Plus to connect to a PC and be used as a standalone wireless controller without a mobile device attached. Gamers wanting less lag can instead opt for a direct connection to a computer using a USB-C cable.

The GameSir G8 Plus is available now for $79.99. That’s cheaper than the $99.99 Backbone One and the same price as a pack of replacement Joy-Cons that can potentially still develop joystick drift.

Read More 

In venture capital, you are what you fund. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Two of Silicon Valley’s famous venture capitalists made a case for backing Trump: that their ability to make money is the only value that matters. Last week, the founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz declared their allegiance to Donald Trump in their customary fashion: talking about money on a podcast.
“Sorry, Mom,” Ben Horowitz says in an episode of The Ben & Marc Show. “I know you’re going to be mad at me for this. But, like, we have to do it.”
Marc Andreessen and Horowitz insist they voted for Democrats until now. They are friends with liberals. They claim to be nervous about the social blowback they will receive for this, especially because of the historically progressive nature of the tech industry and the Bay Area.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about.”
But given the general movement among their class toward Trump, I think those claims about being nervous are overblown, if not performative. There is, for instance, Elon Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, which has support from Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire and 8VC’s Joe Lonsdale, among other notables. (The Wall Street Journal reported Musk is planning to donate $45 million a month, which Musk has denied.) There’s the $160 million the crypto movement has put forward in support of right-wing candidates. We can’t forget their VC pal David Sacks speaking at the Republican National Convention. And last but not least, there’s Trump’s running mate choice of JD Vance, a former venture capitalist whose firm’s investors included Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Andreessen himself.
This isn’t a movement. It’s a clique.
The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance. At one point, Andreessen concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden — the ones that led them to support Trump — are what most voters would consider “subsidiary” issues. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” he says. If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and donate to Trump.
These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say, mass deportations and Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce. We are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty — abortion, the rights of gay and trans people, and possibly democracy itself — in favor of crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better.
For Horowitz, “probably the most emotional topic” is crypto — a16z started a $4.5 billion crypto fund in 2022, and the pair believe that the Biden administration has been deeply unfair to crypto. In Horowitz’s view, the Biden administration “basically subverted the rule of law to attack the crypto industry.”
“We’re the largest crypto investors or largest blockchain investors in the world.”
Certainly much of the crypto industry prefers Trump. But it seems obvious that there has been a lot of intra-agency squabbling as Congress dithered on passing any laws. To place the blame squarely on Biden is bizarre, particularly when we have Trump’s chaotic previous term as guidance. Sure, Trump is no longer saying Bitcoin is “a scam against the dollar,” as he did in 2021; he is scheduled to speak at the Bitcoin conference this year. But his record in office is not exactly pro-crypto. During the Trump administration, financial regulator FinCEN initially asked the public to provide comments on a crypto rule change over a 15-day period that included Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day, which effectively shortened the comment window by four working days. There is also the Ripple Labs enforcement case, in which the SEC is seeking a $1.95 billion fine; it, too, dates to the Trump administration.
The pair’s complaints about Gary Gensler, the current head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, are striking. They are particularly annoyed that he won’t pay attention to them. “We’re the largest crypto investors or largest blockchain investors in the world, and we’ve requested meetings with him at least a half a dozen times,” Horowitz says. Gensler has not met with them. Neither, they say, has Senator Elizabeth Warren or Biden himself.
In fact, Andreessen makes it clear that he expects presidential attention, something he’s been getting since he was 23. Given the number of times Andreessen and Horowitz make references to various meetings with various politicians, it’s easy to get the impression that they are mostly insulted that they are being treated like ordinary constituents.
From crypto, we move to AI, which Andreessen and Horowitz don’t think is being regulated correctly either. According to Horowitz, AI is as powerful as, or more powerful than, the internet and the global computer industry from the 1950s on. “This may be the biggest technological boom of all time,” Andreessen says.
These regulations have little to do with technology and a lot to do with old-fashioned lying
Andreessen says in his newsletter-cum-manifesto, “The Little Tech Agenda,” that he is worried that AI will face similar scrutiny to crypto. The FTC has issued guidance to the AI industry that indicated it will pursue companies that exaggerate what their AI can do, say they are using AI when they are not, and recklessly put products on the market without properly analyzing the risks. Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has told lenders that they must supply a reason for a credit denial that’s better than just “computer says no” when using AI models. These regulations have little to do with technology and a lot to do with old-fashioned lying.
In the podcast, Andreessen and Horowitz single out Biden’s executive order about artificial intelligence. The order requires companies to disclose the presence of very large models, as well as to provide the government information about what the plans are for the model, what cybersecurity measures are taken to protect those models, and the results of red-team testing for sensitive subjects, among other things. This is in keeping with Horowitz’s assertion about the seriousness of the technology.
So what’s the problem? The two focus on computing power. The disclosure requirements apply to “any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 1026 integer or floating-point operations, or using primarily biological sequence data and using a quantity of computing power greater than 1023 integer or floating-point operations.” Andreessen and Horowitz think specifying such a limit is ridiculous. Little tech “will be snuffed out by this kind of regulation,” Horowitz says.
It is perhaps worth noting that nothing above the size specified in the executive order — the size Andreessen and Horowitz object to — even exists yet, according to Arati Prabhakar, Biden’s top tech advisor.
The irony is so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to point it out
The fundamental complaint here is that these two believe that the Biden administration’s approach to AI “enshrine[s] the two or three companies that they believe are the only companies that matter as sort of permanent monopolies,” Andreessen says. “And they’re going to just basically destroy the startup ecosystem underneath that.” Andreessen Horowitz is, of course, invested in that ecosystem, having earmarked $2.25 billion for AI applications and infrastructure.
The anti-monopoly rhetoric is in keeping with a16z’s latest marketing push. According to Andreessen’s newsletter, startups are threatened by the government, which is “now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be.” Besides his objections to the way the SEC has increased its oversight of crypto, he is also upset that a stepped-up interest in antitrust has made it more difficult for him to exit investments. “Regulatory agencies are punitively blocking startups from being acquired by the same big companies the government is preferencing in so many other ways,” Andreessen writes. After all, the Federal Trade Commission has launched an inquiry into Big Tech’s partnerships and investments with startups — with the goal of seeing if those partnerships squash competition.
The irony is so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to point it out. Andreessen says he is upset that Big Tech is too powerful, but he opposes antitrust action because that blocks a route for VCs to exit. Either you’re comfortable with Big Tech getting bigger, in which case acquisitions are fine, or you want little tech to be competitive, which means blocking industry consolidation. Mainly, it seems that Andreessen believes in cashing out.
In the podcast, Andreessen and Horowitz pointedly name Google as a threat to startups. “Google, I think we would all agree, is more powerful than probably 95 percent of countries in the world,” Horowitz says at one point. Google, specifically, is a sore spot with the right wing. Vice presidential nominee Vance has already said it should be broken up. Vance believes Google is controlling information and skewing too far left. Of course, Google’s moderation policies don’t just apply to Google News — they also affect YouTube, which hosts a great many right-wing podcasts without issue.
Tax reform was “the final straw for me, the thing that tipped me hard.”
It’s unclear how seriously to take Andreessen and Horowitz’s complaints about Big Tech because the complaints don’t quite square with their behavior. For instance, Facebook is similarly powerful and influential, especially in AI. Andreessen sits on its board. A16z is invested in OpenAI, which has a partnership with Microsoft — and both have lobbied strenuously for more regulation around AI. It sure seems like if a16z wants to change things at those big companies, someone could simply pick up the phone.
At this point in the podcast, you could squint and say maybe the concern about AI and crypto is really about technology and progress. But from those two topics, we move on to classic rich guy shit of the most tedious kind: tax reform. Andreessen says it was “the final straw for me. This is the thing that tipped me hard.” They are upset about a proposal to alter capital gains taxes.
Capital gains are paid on investment assets, and they are typically paid when the investment is sold and the gains are, in industry terms, “realized.” The new Biden treasury proposal means that for people whose wealth is worth more than $100 million, any unrealized capital gains will be taxed, too. This is what has Andreessen and Horowitz in a tizzy. It means that if they own a clutch of highly valued startup shares, they will have to pay taxes on them before they cash out. This is a “very scary proposal,” Horowitz says.
Startups are illiquid assets, Andreessen points out. “Startups never go up and down. They’re never overvalued,” says Horowtiz, dryly. “There’s no bubbles.” Andreessen notes that the way the value of a startup is calculated for the purposes of this proposed tax has to do with the latest round’s valuation.
“Presto chango, we’re Argentina!”
Historically, one of the ways that Andreessen Horowitz has approached startup investing is to inflate a company’s valuation; it is “the OG when it comes to doling out speculative startup valuations.” The new proposed tax punishes this kind of behavior — a high valuation means a high tax. “This makes startups completely implausible,” says Andreessen. “Venture capital just ends. Firms like ours don’t exist.”
This is followed by an anxiety spiral that is sort of difficult to convey in text; I suggest you listen for yourself. “California is done,” says Andreessen. “It’s total destruction.” The taxes won’t just target the wealthy; they’ll come for everyone. “Once the structure gets established, the politicians do what they do: they’ll walk the numbers up,” Andreessen says. “Presto chango, we’re Argentina!” says Horowitz.
Finally, Horowitz gets ahold of himself. “By the way, this one probably won’t get all the way through the system,” he says. “But it might!”
There is another issue that might cause wreckage throughout Silicon Valley. It is immigration. An awful lot of immigrants comprise Silicon Valley’s talent pool — a huge swath of engineers in the US are on H-1B visas. The Trump / Vance ticket is virulently anti-immigrant.
“The crypto industry is uniquely international, and so immigration law is crypto law.”
The current CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and IBM are all immigrants. So are Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are involved in Fwd.us, a lobbying group dedicated to immigration reform that Musk and Sacks both left. If there were an issue that would rally the people who care most about progress, innovation, and talent, you’d think protecting the immigrants who’ve built lives and careers in tech would be it.
Stopping immigration is a core issue of the Trump campaign. During the Republican National Convention, delegates held up signs saying “Mass Deportation Now.” Trump has called the H-1B, the visa many tech workers use to come to Silicon Valley, “very bad” and “unfair” to US workers. In his previous term, he targeted H-1B visa applications specifically; in the fiscal year 2018, almost 25 percent of applications were denied, up from about 13 percent the year before. In fiscal year 2019, 20 percent of H-1B applications were denied. The denials plummeted after several Trump administration rules were thrown out by courts; the denial rate in 2022 was just 2 percent.
Immigration plainly matters for crypto — as Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin says, “The crypto industry is uniquely international, and so immigration law is crypto law.” Buterin is one of the most influential voices in crypto, and Ethereum is the foundation for a swath of Andreessen Horowitz’s investment portfolio. Among the investments that rely on it are MakerDAO, VeeFriends, Dapper Labs, and EigenLayer. It is remarkable that the founder of Ethereum is saying that voting for Trump is against the crypto ethos, and the big crypto investors are doing it anyway.
The word “immigration” is only mentioned by Andreessen and Horowitz in the podcast when they discuss the rally in which someone attempted an assassination: Trump had turned his head to look at a chart that purported to show illegal immigration into the US as the bullet whizzed by. I wondered why such an important issue for tech wasn’t addressed, so I emailed Margit Wennmachers, a16z’s PR guru, to ask. She didn’t reply.

After I finished listening to the podcast, a few things kept nagging at me. Take the very beginning of the podcast. Once upon a time, Andreessen says, you could get very rich and then give the money away in philanthropy, “and you get enormous credit for that. And, you know, it absolves you of whatever.”
At some point in the last 10 years, some people suggested that maybe rich people should pay more taxes instead of giving their money away — that perhaps the whims of some random rich person are not the best way to support the most vulnerable in our society. Andreessen and Horowitz suggest that this critique of philanthropy is simply jealousy. It also unbalanced “the deal.”
“The deal,” as described on the podcast, is vague. To my ear, it sounds like this: Tech companies could basically do whatever they wanted, as long as people who worked there paid high taxes and donated enough money to charitable causes. The money — taxes, donations — made them the good guys.
The one thing all these hype cycles had in common was VCs talking their books, as publicly as possible
Andreessen and Horowitz point to the mid-2010s — that is, the era of low interest rates — as the time of “the deal” unraveling. Notably, this is around the time that the tech hype cycle became obvious even to people who weren’t paying attention. This year, it’s scooters! Now it’s viral media companies! Now it’s metaverse! Now it’s crypto! Now it’s AI!
These ideas were more or less rejected by the market, except possibly AI. The one thing all these hype cycles had in common was VCs talking their books, as publicly as possible. That charge was led by Andreessen Horowitz.
So now, instead of investing in things the market wants, Andreessen and Horowitz appear to be gambling on legislation instead. Their timing is remarkable; not even a week after their Trump endorsement, Biden dropped out of the race, rallying the Democrats behind Vice President Kamala Harris. In the hours immediately following the announcement, small-money donors raised $46.7 million for her campaign. By endorsing Trump, Andreessen and Horowitz have effectively lost whatever leverage they might have had with the Harris campaign.
But maybe that doesn’t matter. Near the end of the podcast, Horowitz says that he was shaken by the assassination attempt on Donald Trump because he’s friends with Ivanka, his daughter, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law. “Ivanka and the kids were just at my house,” Horowitz says, of learning Trump was shot. “We went to see David Copperfield and all that. So my brain was almost frozen because I had this feeling about, ‘Oh my god, Grandpa just got shot.’”
“Ivanka and the kids were just at my house.”
As for Andreessen, he has been inveighing against “woke” capital, engaging in Twitter culture wars, and complaining about what he views as the media’s hostility to free speech for a while now. In Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” he lists what he terms “patron saints” of the movement. They include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian futurist who was also the co-author of The Fascist Manifesto; Nick Land, whose writing is a foundational text for the so-called alt-right; Neven Sesardic, a philosopher who argues that race is biologically real and not socially constructed; and Vilfredo Pareto, who argued that democracy is an illusion.
And this talk about democracy brings me to Curtis Yarvin, personal friend of vice presidential candidate Vance. Yarvin, a software developer, is openly anti-democracy. (Yarvin’s recent newsletter, in response to Biden dropping out, enthusiastically advocates for a return to monarchy. Freak shit.) One of Yarvin’s ideas, called “retire all government employees” or RAGE, is part of Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation proposal for what Trump should do if he wins. This rhetoric was echoed by Vance in 2021, who called out Yarvin by name.
So this VC cabal is trading against the basic principles of America — not merely against personal freedom, but democracy itself — in the hopes of profit. It’s not the first time tech has made the trade against freedom; IBM made it during the Holocaust.
In venture capital, you are what you fund. Andreessen and Horowitz understand this, even embody it. But they aren’t just funding the issues they discuss on their podcast; they are funding Trump and Vance. That means those donations are anti-abortion, anti-immigration, and possibly even anti-democracy because that is what the Trump / Vance ticket stands for. These are not subsidiary issues: these are now what two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures now stand for, too. Is that a good investment?

In venture capital, you are what you fund. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Two of Silicon Valley’s famous venture capitalists made a case for backing Trump: that their ability to make money is the only value that matters.

Last week, the founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz declared their allegiance to Donald Trump in their customary fashion: talking about money on a podcast.

“Sorry, Mom,” Ben Horowitz says in an episode of The Ben & Marc Show. “I know you’re going to be mad at me for this. But, like, we have to do it.”

Marc Andreessen and Horowitz insist they voted for Democrats until now. They are friends with liberals. They claim to be nervous about the social blowback they will receive for this, especially because of the historically progressive nature of the tech industry and the Bay Area.

But given the general movement among their class toward Trump, I think those claims about being nervous are overblown, if not performative. There is, for instance, Elon Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, which has support from Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire and 8VC’s Joe Lonsdale, among other notables. (The Wall Street Journal reported Musk is planning to donate $45 million a month, which Musk has denied.) There’s the $160 million the crypto movement has put forward in support of right-wing candidates. We can’t forget their VC pal David Sacks speaking at the Republican National Convention. And last but not least, there’s Trump’s running mate choice of JD Vance, a former venture capitalist whose firm’s investors included Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Andreessen himself.

This isn’t a movement. It’s a clique.

The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance. At one point, Andreessen concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden — the ones that led them to support Trump — are what most voters would consider “subsidiary” issues. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” he says. If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and donate to Trump.

These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say, mass deportations and Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce. We are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty — abortion, the rights of gay and trans people, and possibly democracy itself — in favor of crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better.

For Horowitz, “probably the most emotional topic” is crypto — a16z started a $4.5 billion crypto fund in 2022, and the pair believe that the Biden administration has been deeply unfair to crypto. In Horowitz’s view, the Biden administration “basically subverted the rule of law to attack the crypto industry.”

Certainly much of the crypto industry prefers Trump. But it seems obvious that there has been a lot of intra-agency squabbling as Congress dithered on passing any laws. To place the blame squarely on Biden is bizarre, particularly when we have Trump’s chaotic previous term as guidance. Sure, Trump is no longer saying Bitcoin is “a scam against the dollar,” as he did in 2021; he is scheduled to speak at the Bitcoin conference this year. But his record in office is not exactly pro-crypto. During the Trump administration, financial regulator FinCEN initially asked the public to provide comments on a crypto rule change over a 15-day period that included Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day, which effectively shortened the comment window by four working days. There is also the Ripple Labs enforcement case, in which the SEC is seeking a $1.95 billion fine; it, too, dates to the Trump administration.

The pair’s complaints about Gary Gensler, the current head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, are striking. They are particularly annoyed that he won’t pay attention to them. “We’re the largest crypto investors or largest blockchain investors in the world, and we’ve requested meetings with him at least a half a dozen times,” Horowitz says. Gensler has not met with them. Neither, they say, has Senator Elizabeth Warren or Biden himself.

In fact, Andreessen makes it clear that he expects presidential attention, something he’s been getting since he was 23. Given the number of times Andreessen and Horowitz make references to various meetings with various politicians, it’s easy to get the impression that they are mostly insulted that they are being treated like ordinary constituents.

From crypto, we move to AI, which Andreessen and Horowitz don’t think is being regulated correctly either. According to Horowitz, AI is as powerful as, or more powerful than, the internet and the global computer industry from the 1950s on. “This may be the biggest technological boom of all time,” Andreessen says.

Andreessen says in his newsletter-cum-manifesto, “The Little Tech Agenda,” that he is worried that AI will face similar scrutiny to crypto. The FTC has issued guidance to the AI industry that indicated it will pursue companies that exaggerate what their AI can do, say they are using AI when they are not, and recklessly put products on the market without properly analyzing the risks. Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has told lenders that they must supply a reason for a credit denial that’s better than just “computer says no” when using AI models. These regulations have little to do with technology and a lot to do with old-fashioned lying.

In the podcast, Andreessen and Horowitz single out Biden’s executive order about artificial intelligence. The order requires companies to disclose the presence of very large models, as well as to provide the government information about what the plans are for the model, what cybersecurity measures are taken to protect those models, and the results of red-team testing for sensitive subjects, among other things. This is in keeping with Horowitz’s assertion about the seriousness of the technology.

So what’s the problem? The two focus on computing power. The disclosure requirements apply to “any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 1026 integer or floating-point operations, or using primarily biological sequence data and using a quantity of computing power greater than 1023 integer or floating-point operations.” Andreessen and Horowitz think specifying such a limit is ridiculous. Little tech “will be snuffed out by this kind of regulation,” Horowitz says.

It is perhaps worth noting that nothing above the size specified in the executive order — the size Andreessen and Horowitz object to — even exists yet, according to Arati Prabhakar, Biden’s top tech advisor.

The fundamental complaint here is that these two believe that the Biden administration’s approach to AI “enshrine[s] the two or three companies that they believe are the only companies that matter as sort of permanent monopolies,” Andreessen says. “And they’re going to just basically destroy the startup ecosystem underneath that.” Andreessen Horowitz is, of course, invested in that ecosystem, having earmarked $2.25 billion for AI applications and infrastructure.

The anti-monopoly rhetoric is in keeping with a16z’s latest marketing push. According to Andreessen’s newsletter, startups are threatened by the government, which is “now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be.” Besides his objections to the way the SEC has increased its oversight of crypto, he is also upset that a stepped-up interest in antitrust has made it more difficult for him to exit investments. “Regulatory agencies are punitively blocking startups from being acquired by the same big companies the government is preferencing in so many other ways,” Andreessen writes. After all, the Federal Trade Commission has launched an inquiry into Big Tech’s partnerships and investments with startups — with the goal of seeing if those partnerships squash competition.

The irony is so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to point it out. Andreessen says he is upset that Big Tech is too powerful, but he opposes antitrust action because that blocks a route for VCs to exit. Either you’re comfortable with Big Tech getting bigger, in which case acquisitions are fine, or you want little tech to be competitive, which means blocking industry consolidation. Mainly, it seems that Andreessen believes in cashing out.

In the podcast, Andreessen and Horowitz pointedly name Google as a threat to startups. “Google, I think we would all agree, is more powerful than probably 95 percent of countries in the world,” Horowitz says at one point. Google, specifically, is a sore spot with the right wing. Vice presidential nominee Vance has already said it should be broken up. Vance believes Google is controlling information and skewing too far left. Of course, Google’s moderation policies don’t just apply to Google News — they also affect YouTube, which hosts a great many right-wing podcasts without issue.

It’s unclear how seriously to take Andreessen and Horowitz’s complaints about Big Tech because the complaints don’t quite square with their behavior. For instance, Facebook is similarly powerful and influential, especially in AI. Andreessen sits on its board. A16z is invested in OpenAI, which has a partnership with Microsoft — and both have lobbied strenuously for more regulation around AI. It sure seems like if a16z wants to change things at those big companies, someone could simply pick up the phone.

At this point in the podcast, you could squint and say maybe the concern about AI and crypto is really about technology and progress. But from those two topics, we move on to classic rich guy shit of the most tedious kind: tax reform. Andreessen says it was “the final straw for me. This is the thing that tipped me hard.” They are upset about a proposal to alter capital gains taxes.

Capital gains are paid on investment assets, and they are typically paid when the investment is sold and the gains are, in industry terms, “realized.” The new Biden treasury proposal means that for people whose wealth is worth more than $100 million, any unrealized capital gains will be taxed, too. This is what has Andreessen and Horowitz in a tizzy. It means that if they own a clutch of highly valued startup shares, they will have to pay taxes on them before they cash out. This is a “very scary proposal,” Horowitz says.

Startups are illiquid assets, Andreessen points out. “Startups never go up and down. They’re never overvalued,” says Horowtiz, dryly. “There’s no bubbles.” Andreessen notes that the way the value of a startup is calculated for the purposes of this proposed tax has to do with the latest round’s valuation.

Historically, one of the ways that Andreessen Horowitz has approached startup investing is to inflate a company’s valuation; it is “the OG when it comes to doling out speculative startup valuations.” The new proposed tax punishes this kind of behavior — a high valuation means a high tax. “This makes startups completely implausible,” says Andreessen. “Venture capital just ends. Firms like ours don’t exist.”

This is followed by an anxiety spiral that is sort of difficult to convey in text; I suggest you listen for yourself. “California is done,” says Andreessen. “It’s total destruction.” The taxes won’t just target the wealthy; they’ll come for everyone. “Once the structure gets established, the politicians do what they do: they’ll walk the numbers up,” Andreessen says. “Presto chango, we’re Argentina!” says Horowitz.

Finally, Horowitz gets ahold of himself. “By the way, this one probably won’t get all the way through the system,” he says. “But it might!”

There is another issue that might cause wreckage throughout Silicon Valley. It is immigration. An awful lot of immigrants comprise Silicon Valley’s talent pool — a huge swath of engineers in the US are on H-1B visas. The Trump / Vance ticket is virulently anti-immigrant.

The current CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and IBM are all immigrants. So are Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are involved in Fwd.us, a lobbying group dedicated to immigration reform that Musk and Sacks both left. If there were an issue that would rally the people who care most about progress, innovation, and talent, you’d think protecting the immigrants who’ve built lives and careers in tech would be it.

Stopping immigration is a core issue of the Trump campaign. During the Republican National Convention, delegates held up signs saying “Mass Deportation Now.” Trump has called the H-1B, the visa many tech workers use to come to Silicon Valley, “very bad” and “unfair” to US workers. In his previous term, he targeted H-1B visa applications specifically; in the fiscal year 2018, almost 25 percent of applications were denied, up from about 13 percent the year before. In fiscal year 2019, 20 percent of H-1B applications were denied. The denials plummeted after several Trump administration rules were thrown out by courts; the denial rate in 2022 was just 2 percent.

Immigration plainly matters for crypto — as Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin says, “The crypto industry is uniquely international, and so immigration law is crypto law.” Buterin is one of the most influential voices in crypto, and Ethereum is the foundation for a swath of Andreessen Horowitz’s investment portfolio. Among the investments that rely on it are MakerDAO, VeeFriends, Dapper Labs, and EigenLayer. It is remarkable that the founder of Ethereum is saying that voting for Trump is against the crypto ethos, and the big crypto investors are doing it anyway.

The word “immigration” is only mentioned by Andreessen and Horowitz in the podcast when they discuss the rally in which someone attempted an assassination: Trump had turned his head to look at a chart that purported to show illegal immigration into the US as the bullet whizzed by. I wondered why such an important issue for tech wasn’t addressed, so I emailed Margit Wennmachers, a16z’s PR guru, to ask. She didn’t reply.

After I finished listening to the podcast, a few things kept nagging at me. Take the very beginning of the podcast. Once upon a time, Andreessen says, you could get very rich and then give the money away in philanthropy, “and you get enormous credit for that. And, you know, it absolves you of whatever.”

At some point in the last 10 years, some people suggested that maybe rich people should pay more taxes instead of giving their money away — that perhaps the whims of some random rich person are not the best way to support the most vulnerable in our society. Andreessen and Horowitz suggest that this critique of philanthropy is simply jealousy. It also unbalanced “the deal.”

“The deal,” as described on the podcast, is vague. To my ear, it sounds like this: Tech companies could basically do whatever they wanted, as long as people who worked there paid high taxes and donated enough money to charitable causes. The money — taxes, donations — made them the good guys.

Andreessen and Horowitz point to the mid-2010s — that is, the era of low interest rates — as the time of “the deal” unraveling. Notably, this is around the time that the tech hype cycle became obvious even to people who weren’t paying attention. This year, it’s scooters! Now it’s viral media companies! Now it’s metaverse! Now it’s crypto! Now it’s AI!

These ideas were more or less rejected by the market, except possibly AI. The one thing all these hype cycles had in common was VCs talking their books, as publicly as possible. That charge was led by Andreessen Horowitz.

So now, instead of investing in things the market wants, Andreessen and Horowitz appear to be gambling on legislation instead. Their timing is remarkable; not even a week after their Trump endorsement, Biden dropped out of the race, rallying the Democrats behind Vice President Kamala Harris. In the hours immediately following the announcement, small-money donors raised $46.7 million for her campaign. By endorsing Trump, Andreessen and Horowitz have effectively lost whatever leverage they might have had with the Harris campaign.

But maybe that doesn’t matter. Near the end of the podcast, Horowitz says that he was shaken by the assassination attempt on Donald Trump because he’s friends with Ivanka, his daughter, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law. “Ivanka and the kids were just at my house,” Horowitz says, of learning Trump was shot. “We went to see David Copperfield and all that. So my brain was almost frozen because I had this feeling about, ‘Oh my god, Grandpa just got shot.’”

As for Andreessen, he has been inveighing against “woke” capital, engaging in Twitter culture wars, and complaining about what he views as the media’s hostility to free speech for a while now. In Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” he lists what he terms “patron saints” of the movement. They include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian futurist who was also the co-author of The Fascist Manifesto; Nick Land, whose writing is a foundational text for the so-called alt-right; Neven Sesardic, a philosopher who argues that race is biologically real and not socially constructed; and Vilfredo Pareto, who argued that democracy is an illusion.

And this talk about democracy brings me to Curtis Yarvin, personal friend of vice presidential candidate Vance. Yarvin, a software developer, is openly anti-democracy. (Yarvin’s recent newsletter, in response to Biden dropping out, enthusiastically advocates for a return to monarchy. Freak shit.) One of Yarvin’s ideas, called “retire all government employees” or RAGE, is part of Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation proposal for what Trump should do if he wins. This rhetoric was echoed by Vance in 2021, who called out Yarvin by name.

So this VC cabal is trading against the basic principles of America — not merely against personal freedom, but democracy itself — in the hopes of profit. It’s not the first time tech has made the trade against freedom; IBM made it during the Holocaust.

In venture capital, you are what you fund. Andreessen and Horowitz understand this, even embody it. But they aren’t just funding the issues they discuss on their podcast; they are funding Trump and Vance. That means those donations are anti-abortion, anti-immigration, and possibly even anti-democracy because that is what the Trump / Vance ticket stands for. These are not subsidiary issues: these are now what two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures now stand for, too. Is that a good investment?

Read More 

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Twitch has introduced new policy and moderation updates that aim to help curb sexual harassment. The streaming platform announced in a blog post that it has made its sexual harassment policy “easier to understand” by more clearly outlining prohibited conduct. Twitch’s moderation tools will now also allow streamers to more easily filter out inappropriate chat messages.
Twitch says the policy itself is “largely unchanged,” but now better defines what the Amazon-owned company considers sexual harassment — including “non-physical behaviors of a sexual nature” that would make users feel degraded, uncomfortable, or generally unwelcome on the platform.
“We prohibit unwanted comments — including comments made using emojis/emotes — regarding someone’s appearance or body, sexual requests or advances, sexual objectification, and negative statements or attacks related to a person’s perceived sexual behaviors or activities, regardless of their gender,” Twitch said. “We also do not tolerate the recording or sharing of non-consensual intimate images or videos under any circumstances, and may report such content to law enforcement.”

Image: Twitch
AutoMod users should now see an additional filtering category specifically for sexual harassment.

Twitch streamers who use AutoMod, the platform’s built-in autonomous moderation feature, can also now enable a new category that filters “unwelcome comments about someone’s appearance, sexual requests or advances, and sexual objectification.” Like the previous categories launched for aggression and bullying, users can customize how strict they want the moderation to be and decide whether to report the users behind the messages. The new AutoMod category is available in English for now, with additional language support in the pipeline.
These updates are being made after it was revealed that popular streamer Guy “Dr Disrespect” Beahm was banned from Twitch four years ago for using the platform’s now-defunct Whispers feature to send “inappropriate” messages to a minor. In general, female gamers still also disproportionately face abuse and sexual harassment from males online, with a Bryter survey finding that two in three experience toxic or threatening behavior, while over ten percent have received rape threats.

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Twitch has introduced new policy and moderation updates that aim to help curb sexual harassment. The streaming platform announced in a blog post that it has made its sexual harassment policy “easier to understand” by more clearly outlining prohibited conduct. Twitch’s moderation tools will now also allow streamers to more easily filter out inappropriate chat messages.

Twitch says the policy itself is “largely unchanged,” but now better defines what the Amazon-owned company considers sexual harassment — including “non-physical behaviors of a sexual nature” that would make users feel degraded, uncomfortable, or generally unwelcome on the platform.

“We prohibit unwanted comments — including comments made using emojis/emotes — regarding someone’s appearance or body, sexual requests or advances, sexual objectification, and negative statements or attacks related to a person’s perceived sexual behaviors or activities, regardless of their gender,” Twitch said. “We also do not tolerate the recording or sharing of non-consensual intimate images or videos under any circumstances, and may report such content to law enforcement.”

Image: Twitch
AutoMod users should now see an additional filtering category specifically for sexual harassment.

Twitch streamers who use AutoMod, the platform’s built-in autonomous moderation feature, can also now enable a new category that filters “unwelcome comments about someone’s appearance, sexual requests or advances, and sexual objectification.” Like the previous categories launched for aggression and bullying, users can customize how strict they want the moderation to be and decide whether to report the users behind the messages. The new AutoMod category is available in English for now, with additional language support in the pipeline.

These updates are being made after it was revealed that popular streamer Guy “Dr Disrespect” Beahm was banned from Twitch four years ago for using the platform’s now-defunct Whispers feature to send “inappropriate” messages to a minor. In general, female gamers still also disproportionately face abuse and sexual harassment from males online, with a Bryter survey finding that two in three experience toxic or threatening behavior, while over ten percent have received rape threats.

Read More