Editor-in-Chief
When Nilay Patel was four years old, he drove a Chrysler into a small pond because he was trying to learn how the gearshift worked. Years later, he became a technology journalist. He has thus far remained dry.
Nilay Patel is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Verge, the technology and culture brand from Vox Media. In his decade at Vox Media, he’s grown The Verge into one of the largest and most influential tech sites, with a global audience of millions of monthly readers, and award-winning journalism with real-world impact. Honored in Adweek’s "Creative 100" in 2021, under Patel’s leadership, The Verge received its first Pulitzer and National Magazine Award nominations.
Patel is a go-to expert voice in the tech space, hosting The Verge’s Webby award-winning podcasts, Decoder with Nilay Patel and The Vergecast, and appearing on CNBC as a regular contributor. He received an AB in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2003 and his J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2006.
Autoblog was once an institution, but nothing good can survive the private equity disaster pipeline. (In this case, Autoblog’s new owner is Arena Group, the company which took over Sports Illustrated and immediately caused various scandals, including an AI content scandal, that led to their SI contract being terminated.)
The staff has been told the last day will be September 13th, according to a LinkedIn post from former Autoblog editor Sam Abuelsamid. Car media is messy and getting messier every day.
[The Autopian]
A big Wired piece with the Google team behind the Pixel cameras just hit. Let’s gaze upon the philosophical justification for the ongoing AI-powered what-is-a-photo apocalypse:
To Reynolds and the broader Pixel Camera team, it’s not necessarily the photo that’s important, but your memory. [...]
“What some of these edits do is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond.”
No huge problems teaching people they can’t trust any photos at all worth thinking about there!
Notable measles enthusiast RFK Jr. spent a bunch of money on lawyers to learn that the First Amendment prohibits government speech regulations, not content moderation guidelines imposed by private companies like Meta, even if it talks to the government about them. The case was initially dismissed by the trial court, a ruling now affirmed on appeal:
Circuit Judge Eric Miller, appointed to the court by Republican former President Donald Trump, wrote for the appeals court that Meta was a “purely private” company with a First Amendment right not to use its platform to promote views it found distasteful.
“Meta evidently believes that vaccines are safe and effective and that their use should be encouraged,” Miller wrote. “It does not lose the right to promote those views simply because they happen to be shared by the government.”
Don’t worry, though: our nation’s brainworms candidate filed another lawsuit against Meta earlier this year for “election interference.”
Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda says it’s okay if we end up marrying AI chatbots
The head of chatbot maker Replika discusses the role AI will play in the future of human relationships.
DOJ antitrust chief is ‘overjoyed’ after Google monopoly verdict
AAG Jonathan Kanter says the Google monopoly verdict belongs on the ‘Mount Rushmore of antitrust.’
‘There’s no price’ Microsoft could pay Apple to use Bing: all the spiciest parts of the Google antitrust ruling
Finally, a legal ruling on whether TikTok is a real search engine. (It’s not.)