Go Read This: The Verge’s favorite reads from all over the web

The New York Times profiled the guy who ran Silk Road 2.0 — apparently after eight months in prison he worked for the feds as “a full-time, ankle-monitor-wearing cybercrime consultant, paid in freedom and a stipend that covered dollar pizza slices, toothpaste and subway rides.”

Now he’s shilling his crypto compliance startup, arguing that “his criminal experience can help unmask fraud before it leads to another scam like FTX.”

JD Vance’s former coworkers say the vice presidential candidate wasn’t very good at being a venture capitalist. One person said he was too consumed with his book tour around Hillbilly Elegy to show up to work.

I nodded a lot at this Max Read piece about how we perceive the world now, particularly the current “vibe shift” in politics but also just... everything. I feel like we’ve been debating “is Twitter really the world?” for 15 years now, but the answer feels more slippery than ever.

One way of thinking about every American election since 2015 is as a referendum on whether or not Twitter is real. Did the “prevailing vibes” on Twitter reflect the electoral choices of millions of Americans?

According to The Information, OpenAI is in discussion with Broadcom and other semiconductor designers about developing its own artificial intelligence chip to address shortages in its supply chain and reduce dependency on Nvidia. OpenAI has apparently also hired former Google chip staffers.

Bloomberg previously reported in January that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was planning to raise billions of dollars to set up a network of chip factories.

Apparently J. D. Vance didn’t read my PSA about Venmo. Among his contacts? The elites he claims to loathe, execs from Anthropic and AOL, lobbyists, Tucker Carlson, and the people pushing Project 2025.

I’ll never achieve posting like this.

The police department in Anaheim, California, apparently wants to “be the first” with a Cybertruck, according to an email sent to Tesla modification company Up.Fit and obtained by 404 Media.

Up.Fit has already shown what a Cybertruck for police use may look like. The Anaheim PD later confirmed to 404 Media that the email was “a joke” but that it would still like a Cybertruck for “community engagement.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that Disney is trying to make its streaming platforms work and feel more like Netflix. For example:

New features in the works at Disney include a more-personalized algorithm to power content recommendations, customized promotional art for new shows and movies based on subscriber’s tastes and usage history, and emails sent to viewers who stop watching in the middle of a series reminding them to finish, according to people familiar with the matter.

There’s lots more in the full story.

A report from Bloomberg highlights how a couple’s washable swim diaper business suffered after Amazon’s returns service recirculated a used diaper, leading to a scathing review that hurt sales:

The Barons told Amazon repeatedly that they weren’t at fault and that the review should be taken down. Yet it remains on the site, inflicting lasting harm. The couple says they���re $600,000 in debt, including a loan secured by their home that complicates the prospect of filing for bankruptcy.

Software engineer Robert Heaton wrote a tool that gives him “free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi” on planes, by... repeatedly updating fields in his Air Miles account without paying for in-flight Wi-Fi.

Go read this blog recounting how his PySkyWiFi tool uses data tunneled through the limited space of his Air Miles account information to a proxy computer on the ground. It’s apparently very slow. And it sounds a little familiar.

A group of international enforcers including the US’s Federal Trade Commission evaluated 642 websites and apps offering subscriptions. They found that almost 76% used at least one potential dark pattern — design tricks meant to steer consumers to a desired outcome — and nearly 67% used more than one possible dark pattern. The most common dark pattern they found were “sneaking practices,” where sites hide or delay information that could sway a consumer’s decision.

Fair warning: this MIT Tech Review history / explainer on all things AI is humungous and complicated. But in the vein of Bloomberg’s great “What Is Code?” and “The Crypto Story,” this is as good an all-things-AI opus as I’ve seen yet. Bookmark it, read it, take notes.

According to The Information, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz has secured thousands of AI chips, including Nvidia H100 GPUs, to dole out to its AI portfolio companies in exchange for equity. The initiative is aptly named Oxygen, because these chips are that integral to AI companies. The chips are almost impossible to secure for small startups too, because Big Tech companies hoover up all the supply.

That didn’t pan out, but if you’re curious what it could have looked like, AppleInsider published some pictures of a purported prototype iPhone 15 Pro Max with haptic buttons for the volume rocker and the power button. The report also includes some details on how the buttons might have worked.

A CNN investigation found that Airbnb routinely ignores or silences, through settlements and NDAs, guests who find hidden cameras in their rentals’ bedrooms and bathrooms.

In one case, Airbnb told guests who found a camera pointed at their bed it wanted to get the host’s side of the story. It allowed him to continue hosting for months, even after being told he was under police investigation. Police eventually raided his property:

Among the more than 2,000 recovered images, law enforcement identified more than 30 victims, including several children. Many guests – who booked the same property either through Airbnb or Vrbo – were captured in various stages of undress. Some were recorded having sex.

Update: Altered the text for clarity.

If you’ve been wrestling with the recent revelations about Alice Munro, Michelle Dean might have put it down best over at The Cut.

This piece is many things: a close reading of Munro’s work, an argument for what we can separate between an artist and their art, and ultimately a personal struggle evoked with lucidity in the face of moral ambiguity.

In his latest book, Microsoft software developer turned literature professor Dennis Yi Tenen takes us all the way back to 17th-century apps for a deep dive into computer science and literature’s intertwined history — and, as Tenen says, why it’s important our understanding of AI “become more grounded in the history of the humanities.”

The sleepy town of Granbury, TX was in for a rude awakening when Marathon Digital Holdings opened a bitcoin mine — an operation that not only draws a lot of energy, but creates a tremendous amount of noise:

“We’re living in a nightmare,” Sarah Rosenkranz says... As rock music blares from the speakers and other patrons chatter away, Rosenkranz pulls out her phone and clocks 72 decibels on a sound meter app — the same level that she records in Indigo’s bedroom in the dead of night. In early 2023, her daughter began waking up, yelling and holding her ears. Indigo’s room directly faces the mine, which sits about a mile and a half away. She soon refused to sleep in her own room. She then developed so many ear infections that Rosenkranz pulled her from school in March and learned how to homeschool her for the rest of the semester.

This feature in Time by Andrew Chow is expertly reported. It’s difficult to prove a casual link between the mine’s constant racket and the town’s health, but it’s hard not to be alarmed by what Granbury residents are suffering from: migraines, vertigo, nausea, leaking ear fluids, and a number of other horrifying ailments.

Ticketmaster does some pretty wild (and user-hostile) stuff in the name of stopping scalpers and bots from getting all the good tickets. And the scalpers and bots seem to always have another move. Case in point: those rotating barcodes on your ticket.

If you’ve bought a ticket, this token can be extracted from within the Ticketmaster app (or, in some cases, from Ticketmaster’s desktop website), exported to a third-party platform, and tickets can then be generated on that third-party platform.

While old-school scams usually target retirees, the people getting catfished are young. So maybe one way to keep your friends from being vulnerable to bad actors is just to give them a call?

From a Bloomberg interview with Hironobu Sakaguchi:

“On a rare occasion — I want to stress ‘rare occasion’ — sometimes one of the Mistwalker team members will hop on Final Fantasy XIV, and I’ll see a message saying, ‘Hey, the meeting’s started.”

“We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!” said Japan’s Digital Minister Taro Kono to Reuters for its report: 

Japan’s government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone in a campaign to modernize the bureaucracy. 

Back in 2019, the US finally stopped using 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate the country’s nuclear forces.

The Environmental Protection Agency updated its climate change indicators, a comprehensive report on extreme weather, shifting seasons, ocean impacts, and greenhouse gas emissions in the US.

Heatwave season is 46 days longer for Americans now than it was in the 1960s, for instance.

“The climate crisis is affecting every American right now and with increasing intensity,” EPA administrator Michael Regan said in a press release.

E-book borrowing is the new hot trend, and to use their local libraries, people are buying Kindles. Though paper books are still more popular than digital ones, “Kindle sales have grown in double-digit percentages for each of the past two years and are on track for similar gains this year.”