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Thomas Ricker

Thomas Ricker

Deputy Editor

Thomas' first gadget memory was typing 7734 into his father's inverted, HP-35 scientific calculator. Clearly fated to tech blogging, he would have to wait another 20 years before the rise of the medium. A degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering led Thomas to Silicon Valley just prior to the dot-com boom. In June of 2011, Thomas wrote his 1,362,258th word for Engadget, leaving to help launch The Verge.

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Verge Score

EcoFlow’s battery-powered A/C and heater combo is too overblown

The Wave 2 heat pump is very capable for its size, but EcoFlow’s absurd marketing sets unrealistic expectations.

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Margrethe Vestager will not return as EU competition chief.

The Danish minister feared by Big Tech and who Donald Trump called the EU’s “tax lady,” will not be reappointed for a third term, the FT reports

“She is astonishing in terms of stamina,” said one EU official who regularly worked with Vestager. “It’s absolutely crazy. She read all the stuff . . . round the clock and had hundreds of meetings and she is still alive.”

US tech CEOs shouldn’t celebrate too quickly, though, as the attention-seeking Musk-baiting French commissioner Thierry Breton is said to be in contention for the role


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Donald Trump x Elon Musk is tonight.

The “conversation” starts at 8PM ET on the former president’s X account on the service formerly known as Twitter which Musk previously said “must be politically neutral” to deserve our trust. 

Musk says he’s doing some “system scaling tests,” hoping to avoid another system meltdown like we saw when he tried to launch Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign on Spaces.


Here come YouTube’s community notes.

Invitations are going out for Google’s community-led pilot to moderate misinformation by letting users append highly-rated notes to confusing or inaccurate videos. Per 9to5Google, you can sign up to participate on mobile in the US by clicking your profile pic in the app, then selecting “help inform viewers” under general settings.

Let us know in the comments if you’re seeing notes on videos.


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Neuralink implanted in second human.

“I don’t want to jinx it, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant,” Elon Musk said on the Lex Fridman podcast. “There’s a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes.” The wires on Neuralink’s first human brain implant retracted, resulting in fewer electrodes that could measure brain signals. 10 more implants could come before the end of this year if regulators approve.


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Verge Score

The HoverAir X1 is the first drone I want to use all the time

A selfie drone that makes the case for ditching GPS, obstacle avoidance, and controllers.

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My bologna has a first name, it’s D-E-M-E-N-T-I-A.

Several recent studies found an association between eating “ultraprocessed foods” — made with ingredients not found in a home kitchen — and cognitive decline. New preliminary research presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference suggests that regularly eating processed meats like hot dogs, bacon, and bologna increases the risk of developing dementia later in life.

The study tracked more than 130,000 adults in the United States for up to 43 years. During that period, 11,173 people developed dementia. Those who consumed about two servings of processed red meat per week had a 14 percent greater risk of developing dementia compared to those who ate fewer than three servings per month.

Conversely, eating unprocessed red meat did not significantly increase the risk for dementia.


RIP Twitter for Mac.

There’s no official confirmation, but the app — which has been abandoned before — has been delisted from the Mac App Store. It’s still functional, although it’s been increasingly buggy since the transition to X. It remains one of the last vestiges of Twitter iconography and terminology which I’ll memorialize in the grab below.

Update:  The Mac app now prompts users to “upgrade” to the iPad version of X, which is a worse experience.


The app has been delisted from Apple’s Mac App Store.
The app has been delisted from Apple’s Mac App Store.
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Now it’s the iPhone 16 Pro.

Following yesterday’s more colorful iPhone 16 leak, we now have the Pro “dummies” showing up in three titanium colors. It’s also rumored to come in a “rose titanium” hue, as 9to5Mac points out.


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The iPhone 16, dummy.

In what’s become an annual tradition, we now have the non-working iPhone 16 “dummy units” — created for case and accessory makers — from perennial leaker Sonny Dickson. In addition to showing the new colors, we can also see the camera bump aligned vertically in what should be the final size and shape of the device Apple announces this fall.