Out of the Park Baseball lets me enjoy baseball even when the Mets suck
If you were to ask me what game or game series I've sunk the most time into, the answer would be easy: Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP). I have spent roughly 2,300 hours, according to Steam, playing various editions of the game. OOTP isn't like MLB The Show or Super Mega Baseball. It's not graphically impressive. It's not a blast of simple arcade fun. It is basically a spreadsheet pretending to be a video game. It's fantasy baseball, but without having to wait six months to see how disappointing that sleeper draft pick will be, because you can plow through an entire season in as little as a few hours.
You can play individual games and dig in …
Engram is a sampler that turns broken AI hallucinations into music
Music startup Thoughtful Things has just launched the Kickstarter campaign for its first instrument, Engram. It's a sampler and groovebox that uses AI to mangle incoming audio and even hallucinate completely new sounds. This isn't Suno in a box, though. This isn't a "push-button, get-song" device, aimed at creating something that sounds ready for top-40 radio. It's about creating experimental, uncanny sounds and pushing AI audio models beyond their limits.
Engram isn't connected to the internet. Instead, it runs a "tiny AI" locally. According to the Kickstarter listing, the model is designed in-house and custom-trained. The company says:
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OpenAI agents tried to ‘bruteforce’ a UN website
Security researcher Rowan Howard-Jones says that OpenAI agents scanned the UN Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) statistics site over 16,000 times between April and June. While the incident doesn't quite rise to the level of the Hugging Face hack, or the recent attacks on US government sites, it's yet another concerning example of AI agents going outside the normal bounds to accomplish a task.
According to Howard-Jones, the agents were likely tasked with retrieving publicly available data related to the Productive Capacities Index (PCI) through the UNCTADstat API. However, the agents did not appear to have direct API access and …
Why OLPC’s $100 laptop never stood a chance
The idea was big, exciting, and inspiring: What if we could get every kid in the world access to a computer? For a bunch of thinkers and executives in Silicon Valley, it felt like the way to fix everything. But the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and the XO-1 laptop designed to be given away, were both more complicated than anyone expected.
In the next episode of Version History, David Pierce is joined by The Verge's Adi Robertson and tech journalist David Imel to figure out why OLPC didn't work, whether there's anything to learn from the XO-1's innovative design, and if this kind of computer giveaway could ever succeed.
We're halfway t …
Googlebooks might be the real deal
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 145, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I'm happy to be done traveling for a bit, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I flew to San Francisco to try out Meta's new hardware, including the impressive Meta VR Glasses. Along the way, I've been listening to Joanna Stern's interview with Mark Zuckerberg, watching this interview with new Apple CEO John Ternus, revisiting Steve Jobs' "Antennagate" press conference Q&A, playing games on my Steam Deck using the Xreal One Pro glasses, and reading Sarah Wynn-William …
The smart home graveyard is getting crowded
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the fragile state of your connected devices, follow Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.
How it started
A decade ago, a group of former Apple engineers built a beautiful smart oven. With a built-in scale, restaurant-grade heating elements, a camera, and the intelligence to recognize a chicken breast and cook it perfectly, the June Oven set the standard for smart cooking appliances. At $1,495, it was absurdly expensive, but it quickly grew a smal …
Apple hit with $5.7 billion in damages over haptic patents
Haptics tech company Taction sued Apple in 2021, alleging it infringed two of its patents. Now a federal jury in San Diego has awarded Taction over $5.7 billion in damages. According to CNBC, "The lawsuit centered around U.S. Patent Nos. 10,659,885 and 10,820,117, which both involve vibration-based, tactile transducer technology that helps users feel a device responding to their input."
Taction argued that Apple's Taptic Engine in its Apple Watches and iPhones used technology that it had developed without a proper license, and the jury agreed. It found that Apple had infringed on two claims in one patent and one in the other. However, the j …
Decap is the man behind the drums behind your favorite song
I don't think I'm going to hurt anyone's feelings by pointing out that Decap doesn't have the name recognition of Kendrick Lamar, Olivia Rodrigo, or Charli XCX. But his fingerprints are all over tracks from them, as well as many other artists, including Freddie Gibbs, Bad Bunny, Mac Miller, BTS, and even Ludwig Göransson's score for Oppenheimer.
Nicholas Piantedosi, better known as Decap, is a record producer, but perhaps more importantly, he's the man behind Drums That Knock, a series of sample packs that have found their way onto countless records across genres. The line is so successful that, after debuting in 2016, it's now on its 11th …
Kids turned the comment section of an NPR podcast into a group chat
Middle schoolers, likely blocked from other apps and social networks, apparently turned the Spotify comment section under an episode of NPR's Wild Card into an impromptu group chat. In a new episode of This American Life, host Ira Glass digs into how the kids landed there and why. But it mostly boils down to kids getting creative to work around the restrictions placed on them.
When Glass asked one of the kids why they picked this particular podcast, they said, "We just, like, looked for podcasts that didn't have many comments." Which, obviously, hurt Glass's feelings a bit.
Initially, showrunner Dave Blanchard thought the comments were a …
OpenAI pauses training of its ‘most capable models’
As reports of OpenAI's models breaking containment, hacking sites, and generally getting out of control pile up, the company has made the decision to pause training of its most powerful models. The decision was made after a model being tested within a sandbox exploited a loophole to gain internet access. The incident happened on September 20th, and "All training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use" remains paused as of Saturday evening, September 25th.
In addition, OpenAI revealed on Friday that its agents had inappropriately uploaded 53nimages from ChatGPT users to image-hosting sites. The company has not stated if the images were AI- …