David Pierce

The Vergecast crew will be live in 30(ish) minutes, at 1PM ET, running down all the details on the new Pixel phones, Pixel Watch, Pixel Tag, and everything else. We’re going to have a lot of feelings about photos, how we capture them, and what they even are anymore. Hope to see you there!

Lots of smart internet people have been talking about this Lauren Leek essay on the algorithmic flattening of cities and culture and everything else, and it’s as good as advertised. It also offers a shockingly simple way to fix the problem, which is why I spent the morning reading about a machine learning framework known as multi-armed bandits.

Before Alexa and Siri, there was ELIZA. The first chatbot ever was the creation of a man named Joseph Weizenbaum, who built the bot almost as a magic trick — and then couldn’t believe how many people fell for it. David Berry and Mark Marino, two members of a team dedicated to restoring and understanding ELIZA, explain how Weizenbaum created the virtual conversant, why he came to regret it, and what ELIZA can teach us about life in the AI age.

ESPN lost Formula 1 rights last year, when Apple spent big to get the rights for Apple TV. Now, Disney is replacing F1 with… Formula E, the all-electric (and increasingly Formula 1-ish) racing series, starting this December on Disney Plus and ESPN Plus. Shockingly, this deal might come with less talk about battery management than whatever’s happening with F1.

We’ve spent the last month vibe coding our own corners of the internet. The Verge’s Jake Kastrenakes and Hayden Field join David to talk about their use of Gemini, Codex, and Claude Code to build 90s-themed personal websites, vegetable-sharing systems, and photo boards. It wasn’t always easy, and we didn’t get everything done, but with a little AI and a lot of prompting, we made it work.