It’s been a weird few weeks

Obvi there was a lot of big national news the past few weeks. Y’all already know I was having a Brat Summer before Joe ended his campaign. I could spend this week recapping all of the best Kamala is Brat memes, but honestly those are already a little played out. So instead lets go back and take a look at the other news we might have missed.

Boop the Snoot! 

Recently folks on Threads discovered that if you “pinch” a photoset together, the app closes the gap between the images. People have been using it to show off panorama shots but this is my favorite use case for this feature. 

Platforms

Instagram & Threads

Instagram’s new AI Studio is here. Basically it lets creators and brands make AI bots to reply to messages and comments on their behalf. I would complain about this feeling soulless, but I never expected to find a soul in a brand’s DMs or a big creator’s replies to begin with. They’ve also killed off the weird celebrity character chatbots that honestly felt like a prototype project along the way towards building AI Studio. 

The Rest of Meta 

There’s a new feature to detect discounts or promos on your site and add them to your ads. But mostly I want to draw attention to Zuckerberg trying to land a PR backflip into being an open platform champion. My brother in Christ, you founded and run one of the single largest closed platforms in the history of the web. Your products haven’t successfully shredded our collective memory to the point where we forgot that. 

TikTok

You can upload custom video thumbnails now!

Google 

Cookiepocalypse is over. Or at least delayed indefinitely. Google’s walking away from its plan to kill cookies on Chrome. Google’s also making some changes to the Play Store. And, as is tradition, the new Pixel phones have leaked. 

Apple

Thanks to EU regulators you can now download torrenting apps to your iPhone in the EU. If Zuckerberg really hated closed platforms, he’d be working on how to get EU style regulation passed here in the US to open up iOS to third party app stores like ATLStore. 

Amazon

A paid version of Alexa is likely coming soon and may cost as much as $10 per month. That’s an expensive kitchen timer. 

Twitch 

Twitch doesn’t make Amazon any money yet, and redid their app to be more TikTok like. 

LinkedIn

You can get a verification badge for your company page now. 

Reddit

404 Media noticed the other day that Reddit shut down access to every search engine other than Google. Reddit confirmed they want other search providers like Microsoft to ink their own deals to access their site’s content via search or AI crawlers. Plus, they've got a big new sports deal and some new lead gen ads. 

Adobe

More GenAI features for Illustrator and Photoshop. 

Canva

Not to be left out, Canva is beefing up their GenAI offerings by acquiring Leonardo.ai. 

X

Where do I fucking start? I guess the straightforward product stuff. Soon users will be able to request Community Notes for specific posts. If you don’t want X’s GenAI to use your posts as training data, you have to manually opt out. Because your account was opted in by default. X has changed the 🔫 emoji back to looking like a realistic gun on the platform after a near universal adoption of the water gun look by platforms around 6 years ago. Now for the part where Elon keeps using the platform to campaign for Trump/against Harris. Shortly after Biden suspended his campaign, X users had trouble following the HarrisHQ account instead getting a strange error. Elon has also shared a deepfake video of Harris in a likely violation of the platform’s own terms of service. Recently, X suspended the account of White Dudes for Harris after the group’s hugely successful fundraising zoom with seemingly no explanation. If you are somehow still active on X and reading my newsletter, please ask yourself if this is the platform you want to help keep alive with your attention. 

These Guys Are Just Weird

I’m a fan of this messaging vibeshift. 

Culture Movers 

Film & TV

Netflix isn’t interested in being part of a bundle. Rumor has it Warner Brothers Discovery may try to break up to boost the stock and/or M&A prospects. Pulse a good article recapping the San Diego Comic Con announcement highlights. 

Publishing 

AP removed an article fact checking the rumor that JD Vance had sexual relations with his couch. If you somehow missed the couch meme cycle, it started on X when someone claimed Vance wrote about shtupping his sofa in Hillbilly Elegy. This was pretty easy to debunk and most folks I saw cracking jokes about it seemed very aware that it wasn’t true. More of a “yea that guy does give off couch fucker energy” than a “I swear this to be true.” But of course AP removing their fact checking article does raise a lot of questions. 

Gaming 

Lots of interesting gaming stuff this week so I’m just gonna rapid fire through the updates. Workers at Bethesda Studios unionized. Netflix is bringing in a former Epic Games bigwig to run their gaming efforts. Fortnight players also hate the Cybertruck. SAG-AFTRA is on strike again, this time as part of negotiations between voice & motion capture performers and gaming companies. Microsoft has a pretty new translucent blue Xbox Controller and I don’t need a new controller but the throwback transparent plastic vibe is calling to me. 

AI 

OpenAI’s new search engine, SearchGPT, is here. We keep on learning about AI video tools using YouTube videos (without creator consent) in their training data. Wix’s new pitch is just to let their AI write your shitty SEO blog for you. Websites are running into trouble blocking AI bot crawlers because companies like Anthropic just make new crawlers.  

Scams

Trump gave a campaign speech at the 2024 Bitcoin conference. In general it seems the crypto/bitcoin community is going all in on weird republican politics right now. So that’s fun. In less nationally significant, but far more personally significant news. It looks like the Olympics are ending their deal with Nintendo in favor of a cheap NFT project. This means no more Mario & Sonic Olympics games. While I’ve never played a Mario & Sonic Olympics title myself, I did always appreciate the idea of an Italian American plumber on performance enhancing drugs competing against a hedgehog who stole all of the rings in multiple Olympic events. No NFT project could ever hope to live up to the whimsy of that premise. 

Words Can Mean More Than One Thing 

PS

Kinda the vibe of this whole newsletter tbh 

*I’m very dyslexic, and this is a largely free project/hobby. I do not set aside the same time for proofreading that I do for other professional work. If you spot a typo that would cause a communication error, please reach out to gently let me know.