The Atlantic created a searchable database of the music used to train AI
Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over 100,000 songs each.
According to Reisner, the sets have been downloaded thousands of times and, while it's impossible to know exactly who has used them, Google and Stability have both confirmed they have in research papers. Some of the sources, like the Free Music Archive dataset, are free to stream for personal use but re …
Musician and YouTuber Hainbach on ‘Breath of the Wild’ and Swiss Army Knives
Stefan Paul Goetsch, better known as Hainbach, is a German experimental composer, artist, and YouTuber who is perhaps most famous for making music with laboratory equipment and scientific instruments. He describes it as being like the "Dark Souls of synthesis." Despite using "hard mode" production techniques that often rely on telephone line testing equipment and gear salvaged from nuclear testing facilities, Hainbach is also incredibly prolific, releasing six albums in 2025 alone, along with a handful of singles and EPs. His latest, Gentle Hum, is a collaboration with Ah! Kosmos (Turkish composer, Başak Günak). The album is a melancholic co …
Moves of the Diamond Hand is an unfinished, irresistibly weird dice-based RPG
From its opening minutes, Moves of the Diamond Hand is upfront about what it offers: You're going to have a lot of strange conversations, and you're going to roll a lot of dice. Get on board with this proposition, and the reward is one of the most creative roleplaying games I've seen in years, even if its many mysteries won't be resolved until 2027.
Moves of the Diamond Hand is an Early Access videogame available on PC, macOS, and steamOS (including the Steam Deck, where I played it) from musician and game designer Cosmo D. The game looks and feels like a 2000s-era first-person RPG or immersive sim: environments are grimy, stark, and blocky …
Toy Story has the right take on tech
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 133, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy belated Juneteenth, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I've been reading about Sam Bankman-Fried and PE Guy and admin nights (which we should totally all do together one of these days), listening to Paul McCartney on Song Exploder, trudging through the bugs of the iOS 27 beta in order to use the good new Siri, once again trying and failing to switch to YouTube Music, free trial-hopping my way through the World Cup, finally upgrading my camera setup with the E …
SwitchBot’s Standing Circulator Fan is worth fighting for
I can't remember the last time I got excited about a fan. Normally, I just buy whatever Vornado or Dreo model fits my budget, but that was before I started testing the battery-powered Standing Circulator Fan from SwitchBot.
As the name indicates, the SwitchBot fan is a 3D circulator - a fancy way of saying that it can tilt up, down, left, and right to push a decent amount air around a room. It looks okay, despite all the plastic, is relatively quiet, runs for hours on battery, has an integrated nightlight, transforms from a desktop to standing fan in seconds, and works on its own or as part of a smart home. There's a lot to like here.
Over …
Nothing cancels this year’s CMF phone due to RAM prices
Nothing's next budget phone is the latest victim of RAMageddon. As 9to5Google reports, Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis announced in a post on X that a follow-up to the CMF Phone 2 Pro won't be coming this year:
We were working on a successor but with memory prices where they are right now, we can't build a phone that feels like a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF. As a result, we've decided not to launch a new CMF phone this year.
Last week, Nothing CEO and co-founder Carl Pei also said the RAM shortage has impacted the cost of the company's mid-range phone, stating, "For Phone 4A, memory costs doubled between …
NASA selects Eric Schmidt’s rocket company for a 2028 mission to Mars
Relativity Space, the rocket company led by former Google executive Eric Schmidt, was picked to launch NASA's Aeolus payload to Mars in 2028, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Under a new public-private partnership, Relativity Space will provide the "spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations" to fly Aeolus to Mars, where the payload will "provide the first integrated, daily, global view of Martian winds, temperatures, dust, and clouds."
The Aeolus payload will have four instruments on board for studying the Martian atmosphere, which NASA says will "directly inform entry, descent, and landing systems and support safer, more predictable mis …
Hue’s wired wall modules bring non-smart lights into its ecosystem
Smart lighting company Philips Hue has launched its first wired wall modules. Installed behind existing wall switches, the new devices bring non-smart lights into the Hue ecosystem for the first time. Hue also announced new Play table and floor lamps that are more affordable versions of its Signe series, along with upgrades to its E14 candle bulbs that add a broader white light spectrum and Matter-over-Thread compatibility.
The new lights are now available globally; however, the Wired Wall Switch Modules are Europe-only. Signify CTO George Yianni told The Verge that there are currently no plans to launch them in the US, but the company woul …
The NTS Radio Player brings the best of internet radio to your hi-fi
NTS Radio and Swedish audio company Atonemo have teamed up on a dedicated player that brings NTS's genre-defying mixes and streaming stations to almost any stereo or speaker setup. And, like Atonemo's existing Streamplayer, you can also listen to your favorite streaming services with it, using AirPlay 2, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, or Tidal Connect.
The $179 NTS Radio Player puts out 24-bit / 192kHz audio over a standard 3.5mm audio jack and comes with an adapter cable for connecting to RCA on your vintage hi-fi system, or whatever other speakers you have lying around. The top of the device has two buttons for tuning in directly to NTS 1 …
The film about Sam Altman has been dropped by Amazon MGM
Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Artificial, has reportedly been dropped by Amazon MGM.
The film, which stars Andrew Garfield and covers the rollercoaster five days in 2023 spanning Altman's termination and reinstatement as CEO, had been in the works for about a year. The cast also includes A Complete Unknown actress Monica Barbaro as OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, and Anora's Yura Borisov as OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
In a statement to Deadline, the studio said it believes the movie "will be better served if it were released by a different studio and is working closely with the filmmak …