David Pierce, The Verge:

That raises the second question: should you buy this thing? That one’s easy. Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. The AI Pin is an interesting idea that is so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways that I can’t think of anyone to whom I’d recommend spending the $699 for the device and the $24 monthly subscription.

David Pierce absolutely whirlwind dunking on the Humane AI Pin in his review this morning. Goddamn!

Cherlynn Low at Engadget did not care for it either.

If the headline of “The Humane AI Pin is the solution to none of technology’s problems” wasn’t clear enough, here’s a pretty damning pull quote:

Not only is the Humane AI Pin slow, finicky and barely even smart, using it made me look pretty dumb. In a few days of testing, I went from being excited to show it off to my friends to not having any reason to wear it.

I had a feeling that the Pin was a solution looking for a problem, but I didn’t realize it’d be this downright useless or bad. Not the best first step for the Humane team.

Overcast.fm:

Join Seth Meyers as he sits down with fellow SNL alum and comedy-music sensations The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone) to discuss their wildly popular and groundbreaking series of SNL Digital Shorts that aired on Saturday Night Live beginning in 2005. Episode by episode they’ll discuss how each short was created, what the response to it was at the time, and what impact, if any, it still has today. Aided by Seth, the guys will relive their time at SNL and reminisce on the nearly 50-year-old show from a time when putting short comedy sketches on the internet was so novel that they maybe even helped launch YouTube to do it. Along the way they’ll talk all things SNL from guests, fellow cast members, and favorite live sketches including many that never aired.

The Lonely Island has had a near direct line to my funnybone since I first became aware of them and their work in 2005.

In fact, the free giveaway of “Lazy Sunday” was my first iTunes video “purchase”.

Since then, they’ve released three albums, over a hundred shorts, and produced two of my favorite comedies of all time, in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Hot Rod.

Suffice to say, the moment I heard that Andy, Jorma and Akiva were going to be doing a watchalong/look back podcast with Seth Meyers, I was in.

The first episode hit on Monday, and is more about their road to Saturday Night Live and their struggles in getting on air. The Lonely Island gang are great storytellers, and their friendship comes through (though I believe its all recorded remotely). Seth acts as the perfect host, and if you are at all a fan of how comedy is made or the behind the scenes of SNL, I cannot recommend this enough.

If you’re not aware of The Lonely Island for whatever reason, get on watching Popstar. Immediately.

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac

But there’s another important update to the App Store guidelines, and this one applies worldwide. For the first time, Apple is allowing developers to create and distribute game emulators on the App Store. The news was confirmed by Apple in an email sent to developers. Since the very first iPhone, developers have been finding ways to distribute game emulators to iOS users. The App Store guidelines have never allowed emulator software, but some apps have had luck bypassing Apple’s review process by disguising their apps and hiding emulators within them. But that’s changing now with the App Store’s new guidelines.

Discovered late in the day yesterday was a bunch of changes to the App Store guidelines presented to developers by Apple.

The key change presented seems to be that of allowing — in the EU — music apps to allow signups via their own web interface, versus through the App Store alone.

In the mix further down, however, is the revelation that game emulation is now allowed.

Android users have been able to do this for ages, but now, iOS — and presumably iPadOS + tvOS users — will be able to do the same without using some of the complicated go arounds in use currently with Altstore.

Now I’m just hoping that two of the Altstore’s best...

• Delta, a Nintendo focused emulator for iOS

• Provenance, a multi-system emulator that’s also available on tvOS

…make their way to the AppStore.

I do wonder if someone’s gonna try to have something up as early as this week...

Jez Corden, Windows Central:

As part of the emails to her team, Sarah Bond revealed that Microsoft has now set up a dedicated team to ensure the future-proofing of the current Xbox game library against future hardware paradigm shifts, ensuring that our games remain accessible long into the future. "We have formed a new team dedicated to game preservation, important to all of us at Xbox and the industry itself," Bond said. "We are building on our strong history of delivering backwards compatibility to our players, and we remain committed to bringing forward the amazing library of Xbox games for future generations of players to enjoy."

As far as I’m concerned — especially with the model of video game distribution becoming a digital one — this is table stakes for Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, et al.

The hard part is going to be the growth of GAAS titles: how can a game be preserved if the events have ended and servers have gone offline?

Far too often, gaming (hell, media, period) is focused on new and next, when past and current should be celebrated just as much. May this be the first major shot in a series of events ensuring that the work of talented creators can be engaged with years down the line.

Adam Reiner, TASTE:

After six months of conversations with five founders of small to midsize food brands, it appears to be an open secret in the consumer packaged goods industry that Trader Joe’s outsources inspiration for new products by targeting emerging brands under the guise of recruiting them to manufacture private-label items. Private labeling is the ubiquitous (and often clandestine) practice of consumer food brands creating exclusive products for third-party retailers. The terms of these contracts vary, but the enlisted food brand typically receives compensation in the form of a production fee or profit-sharing arrangement.

According to these sources, Trader Joe’s commonly solicits product samples and even asks for potential recipe adjustments—a revealing and time-consuming exercise for bootstrapped founders—before inexplicably abandoning the negotiations and releasing its own private-label versions of similar products at lower prices.

Yikes on bikes, folks.

This is a pretty damning expose of how Trader Joe’s decieves smaller food brands under the guise of a partnership, then undercuts them when the financial terms are deemed untenable by the brand themselves.

I recognize, in all these instances, Trader Joe’s didn’t even need to offer to work with them before ripping them off, but the boldness to proceed even after trying to work together is NOT a good look.

Zack Baron, British GQ:

These days, Nine Inch Nails, which Ross joined as a full-time member in 2016, present a different problem – how do you make something old, something so already well-defined, new again? There are years when Reznor feels like he has the answers and years when he’s less certain. He has put the band on hiatus more than once; after the last Nine Inch Nails tour, in 2022, Reznor deliberately took a break from playing shows as well. “For the first time in a long time I wasn’t sure: what’s the tour going to say?” Reznor told me. “What do I have to say right now? We can still play those songs real good. Maybe we can come up with a new production. But it wasn’t screaming at me: this is what to do right now.”

A really great profile of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, as they’ve asserted themselves as a go-to in the world of film scores.

But now that they’ve established themselves in that world, they’re now thinking bigger: the return of Nine Inch Nails, their own production company, fashion, and something with Epic Games.

You might not peg me as a NIN fan, but 1999’s The Fragile is one of my favorite albums of all time, and its been really great over the last few decades to see Reznor get clean, get healthy, become a family man, and establish himself as a true icon in music, technology and film.

I am very excited to see what he and Ross have planned with all their new projects.

Polygon

Uniqlo’s latest video game collaboration may be its best yet. It teamed up with Nintendo on six T-shirts inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and they’re coming to stores in late April. Each $24.90 T-shirt features iconography and characters from Tears of the Kingdom.

As usual, Uniqlo has put together a pretty sweet series of tees for a licensed property.

I think the pocket tees with the Korok’s peeking out is the most clever of the set.

The Verge

Instagram’s co-founders built a powerful and useful tool for recommending news to readers — but could never quite get it to scale. Yahoo has hundreds of millions of readers — but could use a dose of tech-forward cool to separate it from all the internet’s other news aggregators. And so, the two sides are joining forces: Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the companies announced on Tuesday.

The few times I gave Artifact a spin, I did think it was a compelling way to have news articles raised up and aggregated to your personal taste. At the same time, the weird social features seemed to get absolutely drowned by people trying to push their app/crypto/etc.

Keep the algorithmic news, drop the tech bros holding court like this is LinkedIn, and I think Yahoo! may actually have something compelling in their portfolio that isn’t Fantasy Sports related.

Driving home from another great Super Art Fight event, I had my Apple Music library on shuffle.

Not sure if that’s just a me thing to do, or others handle their music libraries the same way, but that’s not the point.

The song “War on Torpour” from the amazing Canadian post-rock band Do Make Say Think came on, off their 2017 release Stubborn Persistent Illusions.

It’s a hell of a song, and a great kick off to an album. After a slow, yet intense build, the song goes in all sorts of directions.

Here, give it a listen.

Pretty rad, right? Comes in with a lot of energy and a feeling of catharsis, not to mention the drumming is out of this world.

Thing is, for years and years, I just knew that song and its driivng force. Honestly, that’s really what I knew of Do Make Say Think’s music - the sound, the noise, the feeling.

During COVID, I looked up a live performance of the band – and not only is there a killer rendition on YouTube, via House of Strumbo, but I was hit upon not just delight at how well they performed the song, but a reminder that I was seeing – finally – how that incredible noise was made. You can forget that these songs are the efforts of individuals, making noise, together.

That should be timed to the song’s appearance in the video. If not, it’s at 24:45.

It was a crash course for me in not just respecting their efforts, but seeing the craft which spawned it. The magic trick, explained, even if I couldn’t believe it, as my ears and eyes couldn’t jive their perceptions of the work.

I don’t want to sound like an Old Man Yelling at a Cloud here, but I think we forget the art we digest is through the skill and effort of the artesian. They made the magic. Their dedication gave us something to appreciate and love.

And that hung with me on this drive home, how lucky we are to just be able to digest the art of so many, so easily, in a way more accessible than ever before. It’s a lucky time.

Jennifer Maas, Variety:

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) and other unions representing film and TV writers and journalists sent a letter to Congress Thursday urging protections for their industries in any legislation regarding Artificial Intelligence.

Addressed to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the letter was co-signed by the NewsGuild-CWA, Writers Guild of America East (WGAE), Writers Guild of America West (WGAW), and National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET-CWA).

“So far this year, our members have witnessed the impact of unregulated AI on their jobs,” the letter, obtained by Variety, states. “Major news media companies, including Gannett and G/O Media sites, deployed AI articles with fake bylines to replace the work of hardworking local and digital journalists and writers. Film and television writers won critical protections in their collective bargaining agreement, but their work continues to be used by AI developers without their consent.”

This is going to be the first of many instances of different worker organizations speaking up and speaking out to their government about further regulating AI.

My galaxy brained take? The AI revolution will lead to greater adoption of unions and collective bargaining. And I couldn’t be more for that.

Netflix on YouTube:

Michigan, 1963. Kellogg’s and Post, sworn cereal rivals, race to create a pastry that will change the face of breakfast. A tale of ambition, betrayal, sugar, and menacing milkmen, Unfrosted stars Jerry Seinfeld in his directorial debut.

Unfrosted is coming to Netflix on May 3.

Following in the footsteps of other Movies About How This Thing Was Made, like The Social Network, BlackBerry, Air, Tetris, The Founder and many, many others, Jerry Seinfeld (of all people) directs the story of the humble Pop-Tart in Unfrosted.

Personally, I thought Jerry was more of a cereal guy, but I suppose I was wrong.

Strong cast, with people like Melissa McCarthy, Bill Burr and Hugh Grant, so maybe this won’t be too bad? Or maybe it’ll just slide off the public consciousness like most Netflix movies.

Do you think we get a S’mores Pop-Tarts post credits scene?

Mike Langley, McSweeny’s:

That’s a good one. Ha ha. Go ahead and type your email address in the box. Please.

Look, just write it. Hit the enter key. Now give me your password. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.

What, you want me to level with you? You want to know how real this gets?

If I let any more non-subscribers in, they’re gonna kill me. They’re gonna kill my family. Bam. Done.

That’s right, just type the password in the box. Nice and easy.

That wasn’t so bad, was it?

A gloriously grim first person article from everyone’s favorite paywall, The New York Times. Absolutely nails it.

Granted, it must be effective, as I now pay for two newspaper subscriptions, not also including Apple News+.

The New York Times (Paywall):

The concept of the A.I. software is so novel and quirky that when we — Brian X. Chen, a tech columnist who reviewed the Ray-Bans last year, and Mike Isaac, who covers Meta and wears the smart glasses to produce a cooking show — heard about it, we were dying to try it. Meta gave us early access to the update, and we took the technology for a spin over the last few weeks.

The artificial intelligence technology in Meta’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses uses cameras and image recognition to give the wearer information about what he or she is looking at. We wore the glasses to the zoo, grocery stores and a museum while grilling the A.I. with questions and requests.

The upshot: We were simultaneously entertained by the virtual assistant’s goof-ups — for example, mistaking a monkey for a giraffe — and impressed when it carried out useful tasks like determining that a pack of cookies was gluten-free.

Is this impressive tech? Absolutely. Do I see a use for it in my day to day life? Absolutely not.

I feel awkward enough asking Siri for anything, and I’ve been using her since my iPhone 4S way back in 2011.

Maybe the more digital native generations will glom onto this, and maybe future updates will make the process less awkward, but the more I see breakdowns like these, I see solutions looking for problems, rather than the other way around.

If this sort of thing is your jam, though? It’s some of the best integrated A.I. tech I’ve seen so far.

Chew Boom:

7-Eleven has unveiled a bold addition to its beverage lineup with the introduction of Big Bite Hot Dog Sparkling Water, developed in partnership with Miracle Seltzer. This unique offering joins the array of 7-Select sparkling waters, presenting fans with a range of innovative flavors.

In collaboration with Miracle Seltzer, 7-Eleven has curated a selection of sparkling waters featuring intriguing flavors such as Lemon Lime, Green Apple, Sweet Orange, and the unconventional Hot Dog, inspired by one of 7-Eleven’s signature snacks, the Big Bite Hot Dog.

…wait, what the hell?

The Big Bite Hot Dog Sparkling Water promises to encapsulate the essence of the iconic 7-Eleven hot dog experience, complete with the flavors of ketchup and mustard. This innovative beverage aims to transform the traditional pairing of hot dogs and sodas, allowing consumers to enjoy the essence of their favorite snack in a refreshing bubbly form.

That’s it. Wrap up the run of the human race. We’re done here.

While details regarding the availability of the Big Bite Hot Dog Sparkling Water will be disclosed on April 1, the rest of the 7-Select x Miracle Seltzer range, including Lemon Lime, Green Apple, and Sweet Orange flavors, can already be found at select 7-Eleven stores.

OH! It’s a gag. Thank God.