The wild, intense rise and fall of Flappy Bird
The wild, intense rise and fall of Flappy Bird Flappy Bird was almost preposterously simple. If you ever played the game, even once, you surely remember how it worked, but here’s a summary just in case. You were a bird. Your job was to fly, left to right, for as long as possible without crashing […]
How AIM taught the internet to chat
How AIM taught the internet to chat If you were an internet user around the turn of the century, there’s a good chance I could play a one-second long sound of a door opening and memories would immediately come flooding back. Memories of running home from school and logging onto AOL Instant Messenger to chat […]
Brendan Carr is a dummy
Brendan Carr is a dummy All year on The Vergecast, we’ve been tracking the many bizarre and problematic actions of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. There has been a lot to discuss! Then, this week, ahead of one of our last episodes of the year, Carr appeared in front of the Senate Commerce Committee and spent […]
‘All chaos and panic’: Nilay answers your burning Decoder questions
'All chaos and panic': Nilay answers your burning Decoder questions Welcome to our end-of-year Decoder special! Senior producers Kate Cox and Nick Statt here. We’ve had a big year, including nearly 100 episodes, a new YouTube channel, an ad-free podcast feed, and a slate of great guest hosts while Nilay was on parental leave. It’s been […]
Everything is gambling now
Everything is gambling now Here’s a list of things you can bet on, right this second. This year’s Super Bowl winner, sure. The winner of Survivor season 49, okay. But the number of gifts Santa will deliver this year? The number of tweets Elon Musk will send in the next 7 days? How much money […]
Stack Overflow users don’t trust AI. They’re using it anyway
Stack Overflow users don't trust AI. They're using it anyway Today, I’m talking with Prashanth Chandrasekar, who is the CEO of Stack Overflow. I last had Prashanth on the show in 2022, one month before ChatGPT launched. While the generative AI boom had tons of impact on all sorts of companies, it immediately upended everything […]
Inside the high drama of the iPhone 4
Inside the high drama of the iPhone 4 By 2010, the iPhone era was in full swing. Smartphones were still a new and unfinished idea – the iPhone had only just gotten copy and paste! – but it was clear that these big slabs of glass were going to change the way we did pretty […]
The end of OpenAI, and other 2026 predictions
The end of OpenAI, and other 2026 predictions Here’s a thought: what if the next-generation Siri is awesome? Not just awesome for setting timers and dictating text messages (though that would be nice), but so awesome and fun to talk to that people actually start falling in love with their iPhones. We may not be […]
How to vibe-write a country hit
How to vibe-write a country hit You may not even know it, but you’ve almost certainly encountered songs made mostly or even entirely with AI. If you’ve scrolled on TikTok the last few weeks, you’ve probably heard “I Run” a few times, but there are countless others making their way around social and music platforms. […]
Sen. Ed Markey wants media companies to fight for the First Amendment
Sen. Ed Markey wants media companies to fight for the First Amendment Today, I’m talking with Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and you’ll hear me start with the only question I think anyone should be asking any politician in the federal government right now: What the hell is going on here? Sen. Markey didn’t mince […]