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Tesla says it delivered its first car autonomously from factory to customer

Tesla says it delivered its first car autonomously from factory to customer

This might be a bigger deal than the robotaxis. Tesla said it completed its first fully autonomous vehicle delivery from factory to customer. A video posted on X shows the vehicle — a Tesla Model Y — leaving the company’s Austin Gigafactory, driving on the highway, passing through suburban sprawl and residential neighborhoods, before arriving at a customer’s apartment building. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had promised the first fully autonomous delivery would take place on June 28th. But on Friday, he announced that the milestone had been achieved a day early. “There were no people in the car at all…
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The Supreme Court just upended internet law, and I have questions

The Supreme Court just upended internet law, and I have questions

Age verification is perhaps the hottest battleground for online speech, and the Supreme Court just settled a pivotal question: does using it to gate adult content violate the First Amendment in the US? For roughly the past 20 years the answer has been "yes" - now, as of Friday, it's an unambiguous "no." Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is relatively straightforward as Supreme Court rulings go. To summarize, its conclusion is that: States have a valid interest in keeping kids away from pornography Making people prove their ages is a valid strategy to enforce that…
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Squid Game’s uneven season 3 leaves the door wide open

Squid Game’s uneven season 3 leaves the door wide open

The third and final season of the industry-defining Squid Game confidently delivers each new round of the deathly games with spectacularly brutal aplomb - but its attempts at worldbuilding are disappointingly tired and uneven. Some of Squid Game's most interesting dynamics from the first two seasons - the politics among the masked guards, the organ-harvesting operation, the relationship between Front Man/In-ho (played by Lee Byung-hun) and brother Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun), the crew of burly men led by Jun-ho trying to uncover and infiltrate the island hosting the games - screech to frustratingly lackluster conclusions, without enlarging the world beyond what…
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Kobo’s Libra Colour and Elipsa 2E e-readers have dropped to some of their best prices

Kobo’s Libra Colour and Elipsa 2E e-readers have dropped to some of their best prices

The Kobo Elipsa 2E is our favorite note-taking e-reader. Kobo is discounting two of its best e-readers. The Kobo Elipsa 2E, a competitor to the Kindle Scribe, is available for an all-time low of $349.99 ($50 off) from Rakuten Kobo and Target. Meanwhile, the Kobo Libra Colour is available for $209.99 ($20 off) from Amazon, Target, and Rakuten Kobo. The sale runs through July 10th. The Kobo Elipsa 2E is my top pick for taking notes while reading. Its spacious 10.3-inch display lets you write directly on ebook pages — whether in margins, between lines, or wherever inspiration strikes —…
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Reddit turns 20, and it’s going big on AI

Reddit turns 20, and it’s going big on AI

Reddit has become known as the place to go for unfiltered answers from real, human users. But as the site celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, the company is increasingly thinking about how it can augment that human work with AI. The initial rollout of AI tools, like Reddit Answers, is "going really well," CTO Chris Slowe tells The Verge. At a time when Google and its AI tools are going to Reddit for human answers, Reddit is going to its own human answers to power AI features, hoping they're the key to letting people unlock useful information from its…
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Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos

Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos

For years, Meta's trained its AI programs using the billions of public images uploaded by users onto Facebook and Instagram's servers. But apparently, Meta has decided to try training its AI on the billions of images that users haven't uploaded to those servers. On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they'd like to opt into "cloud processing", which would allow Facebook to "select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis", to generate "ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling…
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How vulnerable is critical infrastructure to cyberattack in the US?

How vulnerable is critical infrastructure to cyberattack in the US?

Our water, health, and energy systems are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack. Now, when tensions escalate - like when the US bombed nuclear facilities in Iran this month - the safety of these systems becomes of paramount concern. If conflict erupts, we can expect it to be a "hybrid" battle, Joshua Corman, executive in residence for public safety & resilience at the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), tells The Verge. "With great connectivity comes great responsibility." Battlefields now extend into the digital world, which in turn makes critical infrastructure in the real world a target. I first reached out to…
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Tesla recently lost two key execs

Tesla recently lost two key execs

Yesterday, reports from Forbes and CNBC said that Musk had fired Omead Afshar, who formerly led operations in North America and Europe and was a close confidant of Musk’s. (Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal also reported that Afshar left the company, but did not say he was fired.) The firing follows a major slump in sales for Tesla’s automotive business – last quarter, revenue for that organization fell 20 percent year-over-year. Afshar first joined Tesla in 2017, where he started as a project manager in the office of the CEO, according to his LinkedIn. In 2022, he was reportedly…
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Logitech says all its webcams work with Nintendo Switch 2, save one

Logitech says all its webcams work with Nintendo Switch 2, save one

If you’re looking for a webcam that works with the Nintendo Switch 2’s new GameChat mode that lets you video chat with friends and see their faces within games, it looks like the biggest brand in PC accessories is still your best bet. Logitech is the first webcam maker to confirm to The Verge that the vast majority of its cameras work — all of them, in fact, save for the high-end Logitech Brio 4K. “All of our webcams except Brio 4K work out of the box with Switch 2,” Logitech spokesperson Leila Lewis definitively tells The Verge. When the Nintendo…
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The Nothing Phone 3 might have the weirdest camera design out there

The Nothing Phone 3 might have the weirdest camera design out there

The periscope camera on the Nothing Phone 3 — which is apparently in an odd spot. Earlier this month, I wrote about a leaked image of what was rumored to be the Nothing Phone 3. That image showed a design with a translucent back and three center-aligned cameras. But a new set of supposed Nothing Phone 3 images reveal a different design — with one of the wildest camera layouts I’ve ever seen. Renders from Android Headlines show a phone with a translucent back but three cameras in a weirdly separated layout. Instead of a neat triangle like on Pro…
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