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When Ela Darling began performing in porn at the tail end of the 2000s, tube sites like Pornhub were relatively new, and major studios like Vivid and Digital Playground still dominated the market. For performers, the job was straightforward: show up to set, turn in a good performance, and collect a check. Everything else - from scripting the scene to editing and marketing to makeup - was generally handled by the studio's team of professionals. Fast forward to 2025. Vivid and Digital Playground are distant memories. Sites like OnlyFans - and competitors like JustForFans, Clips4Sale, and ManyVids - now rule the roost. And while that shift has empowered many performers to create careers that would have been unimaginable in earlier eras, it's also come with a cost. While some jobs, like broadcasting and distribution, are now handled by third-party platforms like OnlyFans, a great deal of the work that used to be handled by a studio is now the performers' responsibility. In ad...

Joby Aviation is getting ready to take flight. The electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) company has delivered its first production aircraft to Dubai, where it plans to launch a commercial air taxi service in early 2026. Joby, which has successfully completed multiple flight tests with a pilot onboard, says it has begun in-market testing ahead of the anticipated launch of commercial operations. It’s a significant milestone for Joby, which has been developing the technology to power its multi-rotor aircraft since 2009. And its a significant milestone for the fledgling air taxi sector, which has been leaning on hype and promises for the future of air travel to attract investors and potential clients while its aircraft trudge through years of safety testing and certification. Dubai is aiming to become a launchpad for advanced air mobility, granting Joby a six-year exclusive operating agreement last year. The agreement, signed at the World Governments Summit, provides Joby wit...

Spotify is adding new personalization features to Discover Weekly, the popular and influential playlist streamed by millions of users. The regularly updated playlist will now have buttons for genres like pop, R&B, and funk at the top, allowing users to tell Spotify what they want more of. The Discover Weekly playlist is one of the more noteworthy things Spotify has introduced: the company says songs on the playlist have been streamed more than 100 billion times. The weekly mixtape — generated via Spotify algorithms — promised to introduce users to new music that they might enjoy, pulling from listener data. But more recently, there have been complaints that Discover Weekly playlists, meant for finding new music, were spitting out the same songs, and that the platform’s systems weren’t accurately classifying genres. (Spotify told Business Insider in May that it had updated genre accuracy and the Discover Weekly recommendation algorithm.) In addition to the genre options, the D...

The insights are more repackaging data you already know with common sense advice than deductive analysis. After nearly a decade of wearables testing, I've amassed a truly terrifying amount of health and fitness data. And while I enjoy poring over my daily data, there's one part I've come to loathe: AI summaries. Over the last two years, a deluge of AI-generated summaries has been sprinkled into every fitness, wellness, and wearable app. Strava introduced a feature called Athlete Intelligence , pitched as AI taking your raw workout data and relaying it to you in "plain English." Whoop has Whoop Coach , an AI chatbot that gives you a "Daily Outlook" report summarizing the weather, your recent activity and recovery metrics, and workout suggestions. Oura added Oura Advisor , another chatbot that summarizes data and pulls out long-term trends. Even my bed greets me with summaries every morning of how its AI helped keep me asleep every night. Each platfo...

A screenshot from Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. | Image: Pocket Trap / PM Studios, Inc When I was a kid, there was a moment when it felt like everyone was obsessed with yo-yos. I never got better than just being able to make the yo-yo go up and down. But with Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo , I could pretend like I was halfway decent - all while playing a silly game that feels like a spiritual successor to the Game Boy Advance titles I loved growing up. Pipistrello is a top-down adventure game, in which you use your yo-yo to attack enemies and traverse the world. You play as Pippit, a goofy bat who has dreams of yo-yo excellence but is also a freeloader who relies on financial support from his wealthy aunt, an energy magnate. In the opening minutes of the game, the aunt gets merged with your yo-yo as four big baddies steal her Mega Batteries, and your goal is to get the batteries back and help free her. The game is quite charming. Pippit is a lovable doofus, and you'll al...

Over the years, Tesla has built part of its reputation on hosting big, bold events to generate authentic hype for upcoming releases. The robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas , last week wasn't one of them. Coverage of the rollout was dominated by a close-knit cohort of Tesla influencers and Elon Musk superfans, many of whom are openly supportive of the CEO's vision. Journalists and tech bloggers who might have been more critical of the technology were not only excluded but also actively ridiculed and mocked by Tesla fans and some of their followers for attempting to ask basic questions about the service. In Austin and online, Tesla fans were taking a cue from Musk, who has spent years fomenting a culture of resentment toward critical media. One of the more prominent influencers, who goes by Zack on X, claimed he was approached multiple times by a Reuters journalist , whom he promptly ignored. That post, which has over 2,000 likes, received supportive responses from other users -...

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 88, your guide to the best and Verge -iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy heat dome , and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage .) This week, I've been reading about crypto crimes and egg thieves and Gap , watching Last Breath and Tires and The Four Seasons , testing the super simple Min browser, learning a ton from The Magic of Code , playing too much Ridiculous Fishing , vibe-coding a tracker for baby feedings, finally winning a Knockout Tour in Mario Kart World , lusting after the new Teenage Engineering scooter , taking photos with Project Indigo , and listening to Star Wars Lofi all day every day. This is the last Installer for me this summer! It's baby time. Starting next week, you'll be in the very good hands of Jay Peters , who has some awesome stuff lined up for you. He'll be in the Installer inbox, so please, send him emails, hit him up with questio...

Scorching hot days tend to hit certain neighborhoods harder than others, a problem that becomes more dangerous during record-breaking heat like swathes of the US experienced over the past week. A new online dashboard shows how Latino neighborhoods are disproportionately affected in California. Developed by University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the tool helps fill in gaps as the Trump administration takes a sledgehammer to federal climate , race, and ethnicity data resources.  “We want to provide facts, reliable data sources. We don’t want this to be something that gets erased from the policy sphere,” says Arturo Vargas Bustamante, faculty research director at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI). “We don’t want this to be something that gets erased” The Latino Climate & Health Dashboard includes data on extreme heat and air pollution, as well as asthma rates and other health conditions — issues that are linked to each other. High temperature...

In the past week, big AI companies have - in theory - chalked up two big legal wins. But things are not quite as straightforward as they may seem, and copyright law hasn't been this exciting since last month's showdown at the Library of Congress. First, Judge William Alsup ruled it was fair use for Anthropic to train on a series of authors' books. Then, Judge Vince Chhabria dismissed another group of authors' complaint against Meta for training on their books. Yet far from settling the legal conundrums around modern AI, these rulings might have just made things even more complicated. Both cases are indeed qualified victories for Meta and Anthropic. And at least one judge - Alsup - seems sympathetic to some of the AI industry's core arguments about copyright. But that same ruling railed against the startup's use of pirated media, leaving it potentially on the hook for massive financial damage. (Anthropic even admitted it did not initially purchase a copy o...

With the dawning of a new era of hybridization in the automotive industry, more and more manufacturers are integrating electric propulsion into their lineups. Mild-hybrid systems are well-established, and more beneficial plug-in hybrid systems keep getting better and better. Even Lamborghini's participating in the latest wave of hybridization, which might come as a surprise to some. That's because this Italian company's outlandish supercars have never been regarded as thrifty, or ever trying to be thrifting. They've always returned old-truck-like fuel economy thanks to their ravenous 10- and 12-cylinder engines. And their innate ability to make those behind the wheel drive them as inefficiently as possible doesn't help, either. But by God, it's a reality in the 2025 Lamborghini Revuelto , the Italian brand's top V12-powered model. Its plug-in hybrid system is mainly there to up the thrills, but surprisingly, it can also return respectable fuel economy wit...

Threads will let you temporarily block words, just like X. Threads has taken another step towards decoupling from Instagram by introducing its own word blocking filters. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Thursday that the Hidden Words setting on Threads includes “newly added custom filters to block words, phrases, and emojis in batches, with optional time limits.” A previous version of Hidden Words was tied to Instagram, meaning you could only mute the same words and phrases across both platforms. This change enables users to tailor what they want to filter out of their feeds, search, profiles, and replies on both services. “Threads is about fostering an open exchange of perspectives, and to do so people need to be able to shape the experience into one where they feel comfortable expressing themselves,” Mosseri said on Threads. The update also lets Threads users temporarily snooze words they don’t want to permanently block, with a 30-day time limit option that tracks the n...

Sendi Jia, a designer running her own studio between Beijing, China, and London, England, says she mainly uses AI generators like DALL-E to make fake photos for background panels or websites when her clients don't have access to real ones. That's helped clients with limited budgets, but it's also exposed just how much of the creative process AI can replace. Recently, a potential client working in a university contacted Jia about creating the logo for a new project. Then, they changed their mind. They had used AI to make it, they said. Chinese graphic artists are rapidly experiencing the impact of image generators on their day-to-day work: the technology enables copycats and profoundly shifts clients' perception of their work, specifically in terms of how much that work costs and how much time it takes to produce. Freelance artists or designers working in industries with clients that invest in stylized, eye-catching graphics, like advertising, are particularly at risk...

The Dell 14 Premium (left) and Dell 16 Premium (right) look just like their XPS forebears. After scrapping its XPS branding earlier this year, Dell has now launched two of the new “Premium” laptop models that are replacing it. Aside from being refreshed with Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 Arrow Lake processors, a slightly revised Dell lid logo, and a few other spec changes, the Dell 16 Premium and Dell 14 Premium are nearly identical to the popular XPS 16 and XPS 14 that preceded them. “The new name signals a fresh chapter — one that makes it easier than ever to find the right PC while providing the same exceptional quality, design, and performance,” Dell’s product management lead, Kevin Terwilliger, said in the announcement blog . Both laptops are available now in the US and Canada, with prices starting at $1,649.99 ($2,649.99 Canadian) for the Dell 14 Premium and $2,699.99 ($3,749.99 Canadian) for the Dell 16 Premium. There are still two color options available — a silver “Platinu...

"Maybe you could organize your plants like this," my friend's text message said, with an attached photo of white pots of plants floating midair in front of a huge, sunny window. As a newbie plant collector, I do need to organize my growing collection of flora, but not like this - the photo was AI-generated and the plants depicted were not real. Even as a beginner, I was able to identify issues with the photo. Obviously, my plants cannot physically defy gravity, but most egregiously, the organizational method of putting plants in direct sunlight would completely incinerate their leaves. This was the first time I came across AI-generated plant content from well-meaning people who earnestly believe it is real, but its proliferation is a growing problem in plant-lover communities online and off. While online retailers have often scammed less-knowledgeable consumers, the rise of online stores using AI-generated photos of fake, usually vibrant, and otherworldly-looking plant...

Ring’s new video descriptions can now tell and show you what’s happening at home. Ring cameras are getting an AI upgrade that can tell you what’s happening at your front door, as well as show you. Video Descriptions is a new feature that generates text descriptions of the motion activity on Ring doorbells and cameras. Now, instead of an alert that says “Front door: person detected,” you’ll get something like “person with broom and mop is leaving.” Or instead of “Living room: motion detected,” you might get “a dog is tearing up paper towels on the rug.” You can see how this would be helpful; you probably don’t need to do anything about the first one, but the second one demands some action. These new descriptive alerts will appear in the camera notification on your phone, so you can see at a glance if you need to bother clicking through and waiting for the video to load. Video Descriptions is rolling out today, June 25th, in beta to Ring Home Premium subscribers in the US and Can...

Cables that support the HDMI 2.2 specification will include an Ultra96 label so they’re easier to identify. | Image: HDMI Forum After first announcing it at CES 2025 , the HDMI Forum is finally releasing the new HDMI 2.2 specification to manufacturers today. Although there is no definitive timeline for how long it will take hardware makers to adopt the new specification, the first Ultra96 HDMI Cables, with bandwidth capabilities boosted to up to 96Gbps, could be available later this year.  HDMI 2.1 and the current Ultra High Speed HDMI cables have a maximum bandwidth of 48Gbps which supports resolutions up to 10K and refresh rates up to 120Hz with 4K content. HDMI 2.2 and the new Ultra96 cables will enable even higher resolutions and refresh rates including 4K at 480Hz, 8K at 240Hz, 10K at 120Hz, and even 16K at 60Hz. It will also handle uncompressed video formats with 10-bit and 12-bit color at 8K at 60Hz and 4K at 240Hz. Given how difficult it still is to find native 8K co...

Ace Two Lite. | Image: Veloretti Dutch bicycle brand Veloretti just announced a slimmed-down version of its excellent Electric Two series of electric bikes for European commuters. The step-over Ace Two Lite is a lighter and less expensive version of the very heavy  Ace Two e-bike I reviewed  back in 2023, which ditches the sublime Enviolo automatic shifter in favor of a simpler single-speed, belt-driven transmission. It’s being sold alongside the step-through  Ivy Two Lite  for €2,599. The original Ace Two and Ivy Two e-bikes live on, only now they carry a Pro suffix and a new lower price of €2,990. That gives Veloretti a collection of e-bikes that straddle the  €2,681 European average . I should note that the Lite models aren’t exactly lightweight . They shave 3kg (6.61 pounds) off the Pro frames, putting them at 27kg (59.5 pounds) instead of 30kg (66.1 pounds). That’s still heavy, but Veloretti e-bikes ride super sturdy when carrying around groceries or ...

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is an expansive, captivating sequel filled with huge environments to explore and a big story from Hideo Kojima to try and wrap your head around. But one of my favorite additions is a small one: an in-game music player that basically functions as your own iPod. Woodkid, a co-composer on the game (and whose real name is Yoann Lemoine), tells The Verge that the music player was important to Kojima because it's "the way Hideo is in everyday life… He plays songs all the time." (And posts about songs on social media, too .) "I think he wanted the players to be able to have the same experience," Woodkid says. Music was a big part of the original game. Some of my favorite moments from the first Death Stranding took place when songs from artists like Low Roar, Silent Poets, and Woodkid kicked in while exploring the game's world. That still happens a lot in Death Stranding 2 , and it's just as effective at setting a mood. But ...

Google Earth can display a Street View timeline of certain locations, like New York’s Vessel sculpture. Google Earth will now let you look at historical imagery from Street View. The update, which comes as part of the tool’s 20th anniversary, allows you to see how a location has changed over time. Google Earth already offers the ability to switch to Street View while viewing satellite imagery, but now you can look through images captured across different years — just like you can in Google Maps. Last year, Google launched the ability to view historical satellite and aerial imagery, which was previously only available in the Earth Pro desktop app. Google is also planning to roll out a new feature that gives professional users “AI-driven insights” about the planet. That includes information about tree canopy coverage, allowing users to see where an area is more heavily shaded and which places might benefit from cooling approaches. It will also offer access to land surface temperat...

At a pristine, multimillion-dollar lab on the Manhattan waterfront, just down the street from a men's homeless shelter and the medical examiner's office, a slice of summer plum is being converted into fragrance code. This is the work of Osmo, a fragrance tech startup claiming to build artificial olfactory intelligence. Osmo has parlayed this innovation into offering turnkey fragrance compounding that promises a 48-hour sample turnaround from initial client prompt. In the time it takes your Amazon Prime order to arrive, you may now order a custom perfume. Traditionally, creating a fragrance isn't fast. After a client provides a brief - usually a mood, memory, or concept - a perfumer begins weeks or months of formulation trials, compounding and revising dozens of modifications, or "mods." Each must settle before it can be evaluated for balance, projection, and drydown. Raw materials often need years of cultivation. Bottling, regulatory reviews, packaging, and tes...

Uber customers in Atlanta now have the option of hailing a driverless Waymo robotaxi, the company announced today. Atlanta is the second market, after Austin , to play host to Uber and Waymo’s burgeoning autonomous ridehail partnership . At launch, Waymo’s vehicles will be available exclusively on the Uber app in Atlanta. The two companies first announced a deal to put Waymo’s robotaxis on the Uber app back in 2023 , indicating that Austin would be first, followed by Atlanta. Waymo’s own ridehail app, Waymo One, will not be operational in Atlanta; customers who open Waymo One will be redirected to Uber’s app. Waymo’s vehicles will only operate within a 65-square-mile service area that includes Atlanta’s Downtown, Buckhead, and Capitol View neighborhoods. The vehicles don’t drive on highways yet, nor will they make trips to the airport. Another thing to consider: simply calling an Uber in Waymo’s service area doesn’t guarantee a robotaxi will show up. Like in Austin, the companies wi...

Verizon is trying to streamline its customer service experience by overhauling it with more chatbots and AI tools . The My Verizon app is being relaunched today with a new “AI-powered Verizon Assistant” that aims to help consumers “manage upgrades, add new lines, ask billing questions, take advantage of savings, and more,” according to the telecom giant’s announcement. The idea is that this chatbot service will be able to quickly complete tasks that typically need to be handled by human service reps, providing a more efficient and flexible experience for customers. Dory Butler, senior vice president of customer experience at Verizon, told The Verge that the Verizon AI assistant will transfer customers to a human agent either upon request or if it’s unable to handle the enquiry it’s been given. Butler says the company had “worked very closely with Google” to prevent the Verizon AI agent from hallucinating by creating small language models that are personalized to Verizon services an...

It took me a long time to appreciate Death Stranding . I'm not even sure I fully got it after my initial playthrough, which was equal parts mesmerizing and dull . The game, in which you play as a postapocalyptic delivery man in a world ravaged by a breach with the afterlife, demands a lot from players. The gameplay is fiddly and frustrating, and the storyline is often inscrutable, at times seeming to make no sense. While it borrows elements from walking sims and stealth games, there's nothing like Death Stranding , and so it's hard to calibrate your expectations accordingly. It really wasn't until the end of the game that I felt I finally understood what director Hideo Kojima and his team were going for. And with all of that out of the way, playing the sequel was a more rewarding experience. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is a direct follow-up. You once again control Sam (played by Norman Reedus), who now is living in hiding with his adopted child, Lou, after previ...

Its certainly an aquired taste. | Image: nothing_fan_account While Nothing is gearing up to officially unveil its first over-ear headphones next week, leaked images and videos have given us a good idea of what they look like. The Nothing Headphone 1 sports an unusual design that appears consistently across leaks from multiple sources, featuring a squircle earcup with the company’s signature transparent elements and support for what looks like a 3.5mm audio cable. Nothing announced in a video last month that it would be launching over-ear headphones in “summer 2025,” but remained largely tight-lipped about what to expect. What little was teased — including Nothing’s Tom Ridley saying the company was making “a more interesting looking pair of headphones that say something about you,” and Adam Bates suggesting its buttons would feature distinct designs for each control function — appears to have been realized in these design leaks. View Link Images shared by Nothing_fan_blog on In...

A vehicle Tesla is using for robotaxi testing purposes on Oltorf Street in Austin, Texas, US, on Sunday, June 22, 2025. Tesla finally did the damn thing. The company launched its hotly anticipated robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, June 22nd — and we’re now starting to see some of the first reactions roll in. But first, we have to get a few important caveats out of the way. Tellingly, the service is not open to the general public, nor is it completely “unsupervised,” as Elon Musk once promised . The vehicles will include Tesla-employed “safety monitors” in the front passenger seat who can react to a dangerous situation by hitting a kill switch. Other autonomous vehicle operators would place safety monitors in the driver or passenger seats, but typically only during the testing phase. Tesla is unique in its use of safety monitors during commercial service. The rides are limited to a geofenced area of the city that has been thoroughly mapped by the company. And in ...

OpenAI has scrubbed mentions of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, from its website and social media channels. The sudden change closely follows their recent announcement of OpenAI’s nearly $6.5 billion acquisition and plans to create dedicated AI hardware. OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory. The announcement blog post and a nine-minute video featuring Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are no longer available. The blog post from Ive and Altman announcing the deal said, “The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco.” OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood: This page is temporarily down due to a court order following a trademark complaint from iyO about our use of the...

Andru Marino is an audio and video producer at The Verge . “I make videos on our YouTube / TikTok / Instagram channels, and have produced our podcasts like Vergecast , Decoder , and Why’d You Push That Button? ” He also keeps a lot of notes, and his latest favorite places to keep them are the Triangle and Sidekick notebooks. I asked him about them. Where did you first hear about these notebooks? I don’t really remember when I first saw the Triangle Notebook. It was probably an Instagram ad. I had kept a link to the notebook’s website in a browser tab on my phone for a few months and kept thinking about it.  When did you buy it, and what went into the decision? I bought it in April, and what really attracted me was how weird it was. Why does the notebook need to be a triangle? Oh, it opens up into a square! Wow, I love that! The main reason I use paper is to doodle, and I thought this shape would inspire me to doodle differently.  And then I saw this company also made...

Monotype is keen for you to know what AI might do in typography. As one of the largest type design companies in the world, Monotype owns Helvetica, Futura, and Gill Sans - among 250,000 other fonts. In the typography giant's 2025 Re:Vision trends report , published in February, Monotype devotes an entire chapter to how AI will result in a reactive typography that will "leverage emotional and psychological data" to tailor itself to the reader. It might bring text into focus when you look at it and soften when your gaze drifts. It could shift typefaces depending on the time of day and light level. It could even adapt to reading speeds and emphasize the important portions of online text for greater engagement. AI, the report suggests, will make type accessible through "intelligent agents and chatbots" and let anyone generate typography regardless of training or design proficiency. How that will be deployed isn't certain, possibly as part of proprietarily tra...