My yard is dying, so I made an app for that
When I returned to my computer five minutes after giving Gemini a lengthy prompt, I had two things: a functional app in a preview window, and a message about a bug.
"~ Channel is unrecoverably broken and will be disposed!" Sounded bad! But right below it was a button to fix the bug. Pretty weird that I just instructed a computer to build a whole app for me with a single prompt, but it needed me to click a button to fix a bug. I did anyway, and in 233 seconds Gemini reported back that it had succeeded, using words like "blockages" and "race conditions." I didn't understand a bit of it. It was thrilling.
This was my second or third attempt a …
Anthropic cuts off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 access following government order
On Friday evening, the government ordered Anthropic to block access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nations, both inside and outside the US, due to national security concerns. That order included employees of Anthropic. To meet those demands, the company has completely cut off access to the models for all customers.
In a statement, Anthropic said that while it was complying with the order, the government "did not provide specific details of its national security concern." Instead, it claims that any evidence of potential jailbreak was provided verbally, and that the vulnerabilities discovered were minor and available via other model …
Echo Isle is a pint-sized adventure inspired by classic Zelda
Echo Isle is heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda, and it's not afraid to show it: The retro graphics bear a striking resemblance to Link's Awakening, the main character wears a blue tunic and wields a sword, and he navigates dungeons to collect items and keys to fight bosses and gather magical MacGuffins. But where Echo Isle shines is how it takes the best parts of a Zelda adventure and shrinks them down to their essence - I finished the game in a little more than an hour.
The game starts with the main character falling from the sky onto Echo Isle, an island protected by a magical lighthouse that has mysteriously gone dark. While you d …
Apple’s new AI photo editing tools mostly work, for better and worse
The most popular camera in the world just got its first set of serious AI photo editing features, and I don't think any of us are ready.
As far as AI photo editing goes, the new features in iOS 27 are pretty tame compared to what you can do on, say, Google's Pixel phones. But for the iPhone, they represent a tipping point in what the native photos app allows you to do to your photos. I mean memories. I mean, I don't know anymore.
These new features are part of the iOS 27 developer beta right now, so bear in mind that Apple may continue making tweaks to them before they're released to the general public. There are three, or maybe two and a …
A better way to manage all your screenshots
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 132, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy soccer, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I've been preparing for a month of getting absolutely nothing done during the World Cup. I've also been reading about Steven Spielberg and wearables and the Boeing 747, overloading on computer nostalgia thanks to The Virtual OS Museum, watching that Knicks game winner over and over and over, listening to the fabulous new This Was SportsCenter podcast and the fabulous old The Renner Files podcast, and trying to tame my …
The future of Hollywood isn’t feeding prompts into vanilla gen AI models
For all the noise that's been made about how generative AI is poised to revolutionize the filmmaking industry, there haven't really been any projects created with the technology that felt like the sort of entertainment people would pay to see. Most AI firms' video models are still only capable of churning out short bursts of visually inconsistent footage. And some of Hollywood's biggest AI partnerships have suddenly evaporated in ways that make it seem like studios might not be able to rely on the new technology coming out of Silicon Valley. For the most part, short-form video slop appears to be the only thing that major production houses ar …
Valve just imported 13 tons of VR headsets in one day
On June 10th, the German container ship Posen docked in Los Angeles after a two-week voyage from Shanghai. As Valve watcher Brad Lynch notes, it was almost certainly carrying the first mass production shipments of the Steam Frame, Valve's new gaming headset.
Import records show that Valve's distribution partner Ceva offloaded nearly 32 metric tons of "Virtual Reality Devices" on Valve's behalf - or roughly 13 tons of actual product, after you subtract the roughly 3,700 kilogram weight of five 40-foot shipping containers.
That's the same math we used to estimate that Valve imported 50 tons of game consoles in two days last month - and sin …
Nothing CEO says phone prices are going to keep going up
If you're thinking about upgrading your phone, "the best time was yesterday," according to Nothing CEO and co-founder Carl Pei, echoing a message we heard during MWC. As Android Authority reports, Pei said in a post on X that the RAM shortage has already impacted Nothing's less expensive mid-range phone: "For Phone 4A , memory costs doubled between when we decided to build the device and when it launched. They've doubled again since." He warned that "Phone prices are going up, and they'll keep going up into next year."
Pei says RAM can now account for over 50 percent of the cost of a new phone. Nothing's just the latest phone maker to warn …
The world’s first trillionaire is a killer
Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO will probably make him the richest person to ever walk the planet. And while his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk's actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse - gleefully.
This is not a serious person, but his abuse of the world is deadly serious. In the first months of President Donald Trump's second term, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) destroyed the US Agency for International Development, whose mission was a boon to public health around the globe. M …
Siri is good now??
You'd be forgiven for thinking this day would never come. Siri has spent a decade and half somewhere between "sort of useful at a few things" and "utterly disastrous, why did I even try, can it honestly not even set a timer." But the wildest thing just happened: Apple put out a new version of Siri, and it actually seems to be pretty good.
On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay talk about their early experiences with Siri AI, and what it means for users, and the rest of the AI industry, for the iPhone's built-in assistant to be good enough at most things. There's very little about Siri AI that feels bleeding edge or brand new, but …