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Joby flight at JFK airport. | Image: The Verge This is The Stepback , a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on aviation, air taxis, and Wi-Fi speeds at 30,000 feet, follow Andrew J. Hawkins . The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here . How it started Last year, two of the leading air taxi companies in the US, Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, sued each other , with Joby accusing Archer of corporate espionage and Archer claiming that Joby was concealing its ties to China. Then, in February of this year, Archer filed a patent infringement suit against a different air taxi rival, Vertical A … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/wno5T6g

The 1 VIII doesn’t look much like any Xperia that’s come before. The Xperia 1 VIII marks an attempt at a step change for Sony's flagship phone line. Not only has it had an aesthetic overhaul, but Sony has also revamped the camera system, dropping the continuous optical zoom telephoto that's defined the last four generations of Xperia phone . It's not all different. Sony staples like a 3.5mm headphone jack and microSD card slot remain, and a few specific design touches, like a thick front bezel that fits stereo speakers, have stayed intact. Sony's ambitious pricing hasn't changed either: The Xperia 1 VIII isn't launching in the US, but in the UK and Europe, it starts from £1,399 / €1,499 (about $1,850), r … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/iVRZum0

Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over 100,000 songs each. According to Reisner, the sets have been downloaded thousands of times and, while it's impossible to know exactly who has used them, Google and Stability have both confirmed they have in research papers. Some of the sources, like the Free Music Archive dataset, are free to stream for personal use but re … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/r0TL4FJ

Indulging in the “Dark Souls of synthesis.” | Image: Aleksander Stojanov / Hainbach Stefan Paul Goetsch, better known as Hainbach, is a German experimental composer, artist, and YouTuber who is perhaps most famous for making music with laboratory equipment and scientific instruments. He describes it as being like the " Dark Souls of synthesis ." Despite using "hard mode" production techniques that often rely on telephone line testing equipment and gear salvaged from nuclear testing facilities, Hainbach is also incredibly prolific , releasing six albums in 2025 alone, along with a handful of singles and EPs. His latest, Gentle Hum , is a collaboration with Ah! Kosmos (Turkish composer, Başak Günak). The album is a melancholic co … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/qfrnw73

From its opening minutes, Moves of the Diamond Hand is upfront about what it offers: You're going to have a lot of strange conversations, and you're going to roll a lot of dice. Get on board with this proposition, and the reward is one of the most creative roleplaying games I've seen in years, even if its many mysteries won't be resolved until 2027. Moves of the Diamond Hand is an Early Access videogame available on PC, macOS, and steamOS (including the Steam Deck, where I played it) from musician and game designer Cosmo D. The game looks and feels like a 2000s-era first-person RPG or immersive sim: environments are grimy, stark, and blocky … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/JEy0ljh

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 133, your guide to the best and Verge -iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy belated Juneteenth, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage .) This week, I've been reading about Sam Bankman-Fried and PE Guy and admin nights (which we should totally all do together one of these days), listening to Paul McCartney on Song Exploder , trudging through the bugs of the iOS 27 beta in order to use the good new Siri, once again trying and failing to switch to YouTube Music , free trial-hopping my way through the World Cup, finally upgrading my camera setup with the E … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/Zb7Eq5m