Will Elon Musk keep funding Twitter’s most interesting side project?

Project Bluesky

Elon Musk finally owns Twitter now. While Twitter’s users are still parsing what that means for them, we’ve got a general idea: laxer content moderation, fewer people keeping the lights on, and maybe the eventual addition of “everything app” features like payments and reservations for services. But the standard Twitter app isn’t the only platform whose future Musk now controls. Over the past three years, Twitter Inc. has also been funding a decentralized social networking project called Bluesky — and it finally seems close to bearing fruit. But under Twitter’s new leadership, with its original champions gone, its future prospects seem shaky.

Bluesky was launched under Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s leadership back in 2019, and its...

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GM pauses ads on Twitter after Elon Musk’s acquisition

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

General Motors has temporarily halted advertising on Twitter after Tesla CEO Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of the social network on Friday (via CNBC). The automaker says it’s pausing paid advertising on Twitter to evaluate “the direction of the platform” under Musk’s leadership, but will continue to use the network to interact with customers.

“We are engaging with Twitter to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership,” an emailed statement provided to The Verge by GM spokesperson Dan Flores says. “As is normal course of business with a significant change in a media platform, we have temporarily paused our paid advertising. Our customer care interactions on Twitter will continue.”

It’s unclear...

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Jordan Peele and Keke Palmer open up about evolving in the public eye and the trap of ‘elevated films’

Jordan Peele and Keke Palmer. | Image: Universal Pictures

Nope director Jordan Peele and star Keke Palmer have mixed feelings about how much is too much to know about a movie before you go see it

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Echo Dot with Clock (2022) review: a good time

With better sound, faster responses, and more sensors, Amazon’s Echo Dot with Clock fifth-gen is more useful for your smart home and remains the best budget smart speaker you can buy.

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How to find the best deals during Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Even though Amazon just wrapped its fall Prime Day event, Black Friday and Cyber Monday remain the biggest shopping days of the year. Thankfully, like in previous years, we’ll be working to highlight the best prices on tablets, phones, TVs, gaming gear, and other tech throughout the deals-packed week, whether you plan to shop in-person or online.

You can always count on us to publish the best deals that you need to know about, however, if you want to be among the first people to discover price drops on the products you’re interested in, you’ll want to get set up with a price-tracking tool. We’ve included a few of our favorite examples below, pointing out how each can help you track deals in slightly different ways, each with its own...

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Lego is moving on from its Mindstorms educational robots

The projects you can build with Lego’s Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit, which will be going away by the end of the year. | Image: Lego

As reported by Lego fan sites like Brick Fanatics and Brickset, Lego is discontinuing its Mindstorms kits, which are meant to let people make robots out of Lego bricks, pins, beams, motors, gears, and other pieces, and then program using Lego’s control hubs (via Gizmodo). The devices have been sold as a way to let children and adults easily build and program robots since 1998.

While the company isn’t completely done with the idea of educational robotics kits, it will stop selling its Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit by the end of this year.

The company’s statements suggest there’s an end date on its support for the various apps used to program and control Mindstorms robots on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Fire OS, saying that it’ll...

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Apple’s first unionized workers say the company is withholding new benefits

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Organizers at Apple’s Towson Town Center store in Maryland claim that the company isn’t telling the whole truth when it comes to withholding benefits from workers at the location. As the company’s first retail location to unionize in the US pushes to negotiate a contract, workers say it’s making it difficult for them to bargain for their benefits.

In a letter addressed to Tim Cook, the negotiating committee says they’re disappointed to learn the company won’t be offering workers at the location some new health and education benefits that are rolling out to other retail employees. The union also says that Apple has been spreading “misinformation” by saying workers would have to bargain for those benefits to be included in their contract....

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There are too many iPads, iPhones, and Apple Watches

I didn’t think buying a new iPad would require an advanced degree in cost-benefit analysis. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Last week, I decided I was going to buy a new iPad.

There’s nothing wrong with the sixth-gen iPad I currently have, except it’s heavier than I’d like. All I want to do is watch my silly dramas in bed and for it to hurt less when I whack myself in the forehead while drifting offto sleep. It’d be nice to have a faster tablet for odd tasks where my iPhone screen is too small and my laptop is too large — especially on vacation. Besides, four years is a respectable amount of time to wait when all you want is a slightly faster (and perhaps more colorful) version of what you already got.

I moseyed on over to the Apple website. There was the ninth-gen iPad and the 10th-gen iPad. There was also the iPad Mini and the iPad Air. I’m not a Pro, but...

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Honda sets up the first motorcycle battery swap station for its mobile power packs

Honda’s power station battery slots are angled for easier access. | Image: Honda

Honda delivered a new battery swapping station in Tokyo that’s looking mighty similar to the one Gogoro makes. The automaker’s new power pack exchanger lets electric motorcycle riders easily flip their depleting batteries for fresh ones instead of needing to wait around for a charge.

The Honda power station itself looks very similar to Gogoro’s: like a vending machine with a grid of battery packs that slide in and out of slots.

Image: Honda

Honda’s “Power Pack Exchanger e:” station can be expanded to accommodate a whole lot of batteries in busy parts of cities.

You can access fully charged batteries by interacting with the touchscreen, pulling one out, and popping in your discharged ones to charge up for use by...

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How to set up Google Home Household Routines

Learn how to use Google Home Routines in your smart home. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Google Home is Google’s smart home ecosystem, where you can control all your compatible smart home devices — such as smart lighting, smart cameras, smart locks, and more. The easiest way to do this is with Google’s smart home Routines. These are multi-action shortcuts that control one or more devices and / or trigger one or more actions to happen automatically based on another single action.

For example, you can set a Routine that turns your lights off and your cameras on at 10PM each night. Or you can set one up that adjusts the brightness of your lights when the TV turns on and one that turns the bathroom light on when a motion sensor detects movement. Routines can be tailored by time as well, so if your doorbell rings after sunset,...

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Unlocking your Meta Quest with SideQuest is a fun weekend project

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

I recently decided that I was going to figure out how to play custom Beat Saber tracks on my Meta Quest 2, no matter what it took. Thankfully, the free program I ended up using, called SideQuest, only took an hour or two of tinkering to get working, making it the perfect weekend project. Even better, SideQuest is useful for so much more than just modifying Beat Saber — it lets you sideload community-made games and experiences and even change the Quest home environment that acts as the backdrop to the system menus and app picker.

If that sounds intriguing, read on: we’re about to go over how to install SideQuest and use it to get software onto your headset.

Installing SideQuest

The first thing you have to do is install SideQuest on your...

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Instagram and Facebook are down for some people

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

It’s not just you — Instagram and Facebook appear to be completely down for some users, as indicated by reports from Downdetector.com, as well as staff members at The Verge. While not everyone appears to be affected and some people can load all of Meta’s services without an issue, users outside the US, as well as some US residents on the West Coast, appear to be having more problems.

If you open both apps and are affected by the issue, you may see some cached content displayed but receive an error message saying that the feed can’t be refreshed or the images and content might not load at all. Based on our tests, both websites may also completely fail to load on a desktop browser or display.

That’s not how Instagram’s...

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Google wants Meet to run on more devices and work better with Zoom

Zoom Rooms will work with Google Meet devices, and Google Meet will work in Zoom Rooms — simple, right? | Image: Google

Google is trying to spread its Meet videoconferencing software to more devices and to make the hardware meant for Meet more compatible with Zoom. On Wednesday, the company announced that its enterprise version of Meet will be coming to devices running Android, where it’s traditionally run on ChromeOS.

The latter change will start with devices from Poly and Logitech, but let’s back up a second here because I know there are probably a few of you thinking something along the lines of “what do you mean, ChromeOS? Isn’t Meet just an app on my phone, or a website I can visit, or a tab in Gmail, or... ?” And the answer is yes, but for enterprise users, it’s even more. For years, the company has been selling dedicated Google Meet hardware for...

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Driverless cars aren’t going away, but we need to lower our expectations about them

Driverless cars aren’t going to change the world. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The driverless car startups that haven’t run out of money, gone out of business, or been bought out want you to know that driverless cars aren’t going away. These companies insist that skepticism about the technology is expected but unwarranted and that driverless cars will, in the words of one co-founder, “change the world.”

Where have we heard this before? Oh right, practically every tech company and Silicon Valley partisan that has emerged in the last decade or so has insisted that their only goal is to empower mankind and change the world (and not, I don’t know, make gobs and gobs of money).

I do agree autonomous vehicles are coming (many are already here), but I think we need to rein in the “change the world” rhetoric. Like,...

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People are pretending to be laid-off Twitter employees carrying boxes outside of HQ

Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

In videos circulating on Twitter Friday morning, two men carrying boxes are seen standing near the entrance to Twitter’s San Francisco building, claiming to have been laid off by Elon Musk, who officially took over the company Thursday evening.

There are plenty of problems with what these two men say to reporters. The most glaring is that one man identifies himself as a software engineer named “Rahul Ligma.” The Verge has confirmed that name does not exist in Twitter’s Slack or email system. There is also no evidence that the employee exists on LinkedIn.

“Ligma” is, of course, also an internet hoax designed to elicit the response “lick my balls” from people who are in on the joke. That didn’t stop multiple outlets, including CNBC and B...

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Elon Musk says Twitter will have a ‘content moderation council’

Laura Normand / The Verge

Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, says the company is setting up a council to make important moderation decisions at the company. In a tweet on Friday, Musk said the “council” will have “widely diverse viewpoints” and that “no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”

Part of Musk’s professed reasoning for buying Twitter hinged on making it a platform for “free speech,” and he has said he’d consider letting controversial figures like former president Donald Trump back onto the platform. With Friday’s announcement, it seems as if he’s placing that sort of decision into the hands of a council.

Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.

No major...

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Traffic jams are tied to lower birth weights, study finds

Cars are lined up in traffic on Airline Drive in Houston, Texas, on April 13th, 2020. | Photo by MARK FELIX / AFP via Getty Images

Traffic jams are linked to lower birth weights, new research finds. Pregnant people in the most congested neighborhoods gave birth to babies who weighed less than babies in less congested areas, according to a study published today in the journal Science Advances.

A baby with low birth weight faces a greater risk of health complications — from infection to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The new study adds to the body of evidence showing that clearing up pollution from cars and trucks will help babies stay healthier. It shows that it’s not just the volume of traffic that affects air quality and health outcomes — the flow of that traffic matters, too.

A baby with low birth weight faces a greater risk of health complications

Babies...

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Snapchat is cutting payments for Spotlight content again

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Snapchat is decreasing the reward money creators can get when they make content for the platform’s TikTok competitor — again.

Business Insider reports that the pot of cash up for grabs for users making Spotlight videos now sits at millions of dollars per year. In February, Snap said it was offering up millions a month to creators making high-performing short-form videos for Spotlight. Even that was a dip from when Spotlight first launched in the fall of 2020, and Snap made splashy promises of paying out $1 million a day for a period of time to people making TikTok-style videos.

Snap spokesperson Farrin Jay confirmed the fund sits at “millions of dollars throughout the year” and said the company is focused on rewarding Spotlight creators...

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Signalis is old-school PlayStation-era horror at its best

Signalis. | Image: Humble Games

If you miss the days of old-school Resident Evil and Silent Hill, this is just the thing

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Here are the best Amazon Echo deals right now

The Echo Show 5 (left), Echo Show 8 (middle), and the Echo Show (right). | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Amazon’s current Echo lineup offers a broad selection of smart speakers and displays that can fit just about anywhere in your home. Whether you want to place a voice assistant in your living room, replace the bulletin board in your office, or pick up a touchscreen-enabled device to showcase recipes in the kitchen, there's an Echo device for just about every occasion and use case.

Regardless of why you might want one, there’s also always a way to save on an Echo device, from the last-gen Dot to the wall-mounted Echo Show 15. Even when they’re selling at full price, for instance, Amazon offers a 25 percent discount when you trade in select devices, meaning there are still other ways to save money when none of the models are on sale.

B...

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PSA: streamers might want to disable music in Bayonetta 3 before playing

Image: PlatinumGames / Nintendo

Bayonetta 3 launches today and streamers might need to adjust some settings before they happily dig their seven-inch gun-barreled heels into the game, as one of the songs might get you slapped with a copyright strike.

One of the prevailing themes of the Bayonetta series was that there’s always a pop-y remix of a classic song that accompanied our bundled busty bad bitch Bayonetta as she stomped demons, angels, and now, scientific horrors to death. The original Bayonetta featured “Fly Me to the Moon,” and Bayonetta 2’s theme was “Moon River.” Bayonetta 3 keeps up the tradition of remixing the golden oldies with “Moonlight Serenade,” and that’s where content creators might get into a bit of trouble.

In its review embargo for the game,...

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Volvo C40 Recharge review: Volvo’s little electric rocket ship

The Volvo C40 Recharge is smaller than a Tesla Model Y, but it’s cheaper, too.

Volvo didn’t need to make its smallest EV this powerful or this fun, but I’m glad it did. The acceleration is great and the range is sufficient, but the native Android operating system leaves a lot to be desired.

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How to deactivate your Twitter account

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Twitter’s a convenient way to get your memes, world news, and pop culture hot takes all in one place. However, being an active Twitter user requires sifting through a daily deluge of toxic characters, including QAnon, white supremacists, bots, and deepfakes. In addition, a recent change of management may have you strongly considering the advantages of bailing. And there’s no denying the stress and anxiety that the fast pace of Twitter’s news cycle and the strain of constantly debating reply guys can bring.

Hear me out on this: you don’t actually have to use Twitter. You can just delete your account.

Don’t worry: it doesn’t have to be permanent. If you find yourself feeling empty and directionless after doing this — or if you can’t...

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How to set up Bedtime mode in Android 13

Setting up Bedtime mode on your Android 13 is an easy way to try and get more zzz’s. | Samar Haddad; Allison Johnson / The Verge

Bedtime mode is one of those rare smartphone tools that’s actually designed to help you use your phone less. Instead of doomscrolling into the wee hours of the morning, configuring your Android phone’s Bedtime mode can help remind you when it’s time to wind down and make it easier to put your phone away. Here’s how to get started.

I followed these initial setup steps on a Google Pixel 6 Pro running Android 13 with the October 5th security update. They may differ slightly on other Android devices, but the overall process should be similar. (Note: if you’ve already set up Bedtime mode, you can skip to the next section to see your customization options.)

• Go to Settings > Digital Wellbeing & parental controls > Bedtime mode.
• Toggle Do Not...

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NBA 2K League bans players for gambling on league games

Bucks Gaming celebrating winning the 2022 NBA 2K League 5v5 finals in August. | Photo by Ron Hoskins/NBAE via Getty Images

The NBA 2K League has announced that six players and a coach have been “disqualified indefinitely” following a gambling controversy. The esports league made the announcement yesterday.

The suspended players include Christopher Lafanette, Dorian Earl Miller, and Robert Nastasi from the league’s affiliate of the Portland Trail Blazers; Zekirri Dennis of Mavs Gaming; and Kimanni Ingram of Jazz Gaming, who the league said “wagered or attempted to wager on NBA 2K League games, either on their own or through other individuals, and also violated the rules by failing to report violations or cooperate fully with the investigation.” Also receiving punishment are Blazers coach Andrew Maxie and player Marquis Gill for “failing to report violations...

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The Xbox Series S comes with the latest Call of Duty for free at Target

Image: Activision

If you’re itching to play the latest Call of Duty game that releases today but you’re in the sad state of not owning a game console to play it on, we have a deal for you. At Target, you can pick up the $299.99 Xbox Series S online or in-store, and you’ll receive a free digital copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (no, not the 2009 classic; Activision is just reusing old names now). Buying that game by itself normally costs $70, so this could be a great promo for you to take advantage of before it expires Saturday, October 29th, at 11:59PM PT.

The Series S is a great console with or without this deal. It’s small, so it won’t hog a bunch of space in your entertainment center. And despite being significantly less powerful than the Series...

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Welcome to hell, Elon

Illustration by Alex Castro

You break it, you buy it.

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The future of solid-state batteries could be 3D-printed

The race to create a solid-state battery that could compete with today’s lithium-ion cells is heating up. Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere: in your phone, car, camera, and more. Since their debut in the 1990s, they’ve become a leader in energy storage. But they have one major flaw: safety. Lithium-ion batteries have a tendency to catch fire, especially when damaged or at high temperatures.

Solid-state batteries replace a flammable liquid electrolyte in lithium-ion batteries with a more stable solid one. They also could have more power, faster charging, and a longer lifespan. Right now, lots of startups are trying to get their first batteries out of the lab and into a factory and hope to prove that solid-state batteries can be...

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Apple iPad Pro (2022) review: bump the chip

Apple’s latest iPad Pro has one upgrade from last year: a new processor. That enables a new feature for the Apple Pencil and is technically faster than the old one. But since this year’s update is so small, here’s a wish list for things when Apple does redesign its top-of-the-line iPad.

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How weak leadership cratered Twitter’s morale

Alex Castro / The Verge

Internal surveys from 2019 to 2022 show that the company’s morale crisis predates Elon Musk

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