Akai teased its new MPC Sample Key on Instagram earlier this week, and said it plans to open-source its software so the modding community can hack it to their hearts' delight. While there's no word yet on when the device will launch or how much it will cost, The Verge has received exclusive images of the upcoming instrument that offer some details about its feature set.

While the Sample Key shares many of the same controls as the MPC Sample - including the three context-sensitive encoders, a large main encoder - it seems designed for pitched sample playback, rather than chopping up drums. In fact, the "chop" button from the MPC Sample is m …

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Curry Barker, the director behind the hit horror film Obsession, just published a new horror short on YouTube. The short, titled "Mama Bear," is nearly five minutes long. The video is pretty unnerving, and fair warning that it gets a little graphic, but it's a fun one to watch if you're looking for something scary ahead of Halloween on Saturday.

Barker wrote, directed, and edited "Mama Bear," according to the description for the video, which was published on his that's a bad idea YouTube channel. The description also has a note thanking Windows for "sponsoring this short film," and Barker was featured in an Instagram video earlier this week …

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Patrick Stewart, best known for his roles in Star Trek and X-Men, has died at age 86. A message posted to Stewart's Instagram account says the actor died in his Los Angeles home on Wednesday "following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia."

Born in 1940 in Mirfield, Yorkshire, England, Stewart began his acting career in theater. He eventually landed the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ran from 1987 to 1994. Stewart returned as the Star Trek captain in subsequent films, including Star Trek: Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrec …

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The MPC Sample Key isn't even formally announced yet, but Akai is already showing off what the modding community is cooking up through vibe coding. Akai has decided to embrace the explosion of hackers and custom firmware developers by giving them early access to the device, which will have open-source firmware.

It will likely run some version of the same software found on the MPC Sample, but with tweaks to accommodate the traditional keyboard, pitch, and mod wheels. Unlike the higher-end MPC Key 37, however, the Sample Key doesn't have pads. Instead, you play back samples with the keys.

I …

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For the last several years, Readwise has been building tools for power readers. There's the eponymous product, Readwise, which stores and categorizes your Kindle highlights to help you remember what you've read. There's Readwise Reader, an app for reading newsletters, PDFs, and web articles you've saved for later. And now there's Readwise Books, a full-fledged platform for buying, reading, and talking about books.

Readwise Books is currently in beta, available through invite or to existing Readwise subscribers. I've been testing the app for a few days, and it's a much bigger take on reading than most. Tristan Homsi and Daniel Doyon, Readwis …

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TikTok is launching an in-app restaurant guide in a challenge to other platforms like Yelp and even Google Maps.

The company on Wednesday announced the launch of Must Eat, a new section of the TikTok app built on 40 million posts, reviews, and comments about dining on the platform. The new feature uses videos and discussions of buzzy local businesses to create restaurant recommendation guides. Users can leave reviews of restaurants, call and make reservations, and search for nearby businesses on a map.

At a launch event this week, TikTok US CEO Adam Presser called Must Eat "the compilation of all of the conversation that's happening on the …

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In Marvel's VisionQuest, a superpowered robot tries to better understand humanity by getting lost in elaborate, digital daydreams in which he and other artificial intelligence-powered beings live together in a home. The series is deeply fantastical, yet it plays with some of the ideas that have come to dominate the conversation about real-world generative artificial intelligence, exploring whether we should look at thinking machines as people and if AI truly poses the kind of existential danger that should keep us up at night. It's also a reminder how aggressively Silicon Valley has used the trappings of science fiction to sell us on its AI …

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On October 2nd, just as Major League Baseball's Division Series was kicking off, the main MLB Instagram and TikTok accounts posted a video hyping up the teams still in the running for the World Series. It featured clips of players from the Milwaukee Brewers, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago White Sox, and more sliding into home plate, hitting homers, and celebrating hits - standard fare for a highlight reel. What really makes the montage, though, is that it's set to an Olivia Rodrigo song.

The song, "My Way," is an album track - not even a single - from Rodrigo's latest record. It's not exactly the soundtrack one might expect from an MLB-produc …

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From the bright minds that brought you FTX Arena and NBA Top Shot NFT maketplace (where sales last month dropped to $762,781, which is a 99.66 percent decrease compared to the February 2021 peak of $226,350,843), the NBA announced Monday that it has new "preferred" prediction market deals for Kalshi and Polymarket, as well as a memorandum of understanding with the US CFTC about how to manage the relationships. It also announced an expansion of its DraftKings deal to include prediction markets, and says that more expansions will be announced with others soon.

The NBA is already facing scandals after Jontay Porter pleaded guilty to conspiracy …

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The RealReal, a secondhand luxury fashion consignment retailer, said it's updating its bot defense system, effectively making it harder for AI agents to shop on its site.

The change comes days after The Verge reported that an AI agent could be used to take advantage of The RealReal's item reserve system. On the retailer's website, an item goes "on hold" and is unavailable for other customers to buy for 20 minutes once it's placed in a user's shopping cart. Using Meta's Muse, The Verge was able to instruct the AI agent to continuously re-add The RealReal listings in a shopping cart as soon as the 20-minute hold had expired, effectively block …

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In my mind, Spooky Season music comes in two distinct flavors. There are the fun, occasionally goofy songs like "The Monster Mash" and John Carpenter's "Halloween Theme." Then there is the genuinely terrifying: Throbbing Gristle, The Body, or Scott Walker's The Drift.

This 2006 album from the singer-songwriter is truly upsetting. On it, Walker explores death, disease, and tragedy. But not just from some abstract perspective. There are visceral descriptions of the hanging of Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci. He sings about 9/11, his stillborn twin brother, and the Srebrenica genocide. Lyrically, it's about as dark as an album …

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BBC's Blue Planet III is looking to prove its authenticity by leaving in the less-than-perfect shots. Previous incarnations of the nature series were defined by their gorgeous, crystal-clear footage that seemed almost too good to be real. But one dead giveaway of AI is when things look too polished and seamless. To counter that, Blue Planet III goes warts and all.

Executive Producer Elizabeth White told The Guardian in the past, "the amount of plankton and things" floating in the water would have caused them to cut a shot. Or "we might have framed out a boat or a buoy or gone: 'Oh, actually … the water conditions are not really good enough …

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Lindsay Powell, who releases records under the name Fielded, has spent most of her career subverting expectations and genre conventions. According to their Bandcamp page, Fielded started as an experimental noise project before growing into something closer to R&B. But from moment one, her take on the genre was restless, relentlessly playing with what R&B even means.

Her first album, Ninety-Thirty-Thirty, includes songs heavily indebted to '80s synth-pop and features multiple saxophone solos. Boy Angel is a quirky electronic exploration with huge saw-wave synths, jittery percussion, and sky-high vocal stacks. While 2020's Demisexual Lovelace …

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Lee Chang Dong's seventh feature film, Possible Love, is inspired by true events from 2009, when a Korean conglomerate fired a third of its staff - 2,600 employees - after which many died by suicide. Possible Love is the latest in a long line of Lee movies that engage with themes of class or labor or religion or compressed modernity, that uniquely Korean affliction, without feeling didactic.

A different kind of movie would have captured the heat of that labor struggle. Possible Love picks up with the characters in the aftermath, a murkier time that defies easy understanding. The film opens with an epigraph: "Thou shall not covet." What foll …

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Across several decades in Hollywood, Caleb Deschanel has seen a lot. He served as cinematographer on films like The Passion of the Christ and The Patriot, worked on sequences in The Godfather and Titanic, and directed a few episodes of Twin Peaks. Even still, nothing could quite prepare him for his first stop-motion project: working as the cinematographer on Wildwood, the latest release from Coraline studio Laika. While he knew that stop-motion was a long and involved process, he was still surprised by just how much work went into these movies. "When I started I thought it was one thing, and then I quickly found out that it was another thing …

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Xbox's first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief operating officer in July.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Chiang's departure in a surprisingly short memo today. "Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today. I'm grateful for her years of service and wish her well," said Sharma. As Chiang is departing today, her immediate responsibilities are being split up between other Xbox leaders …

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Remember Popcorn Time, the app that served as an easy-to-use front end for streaming torrents of movies and TV shows? Development of the MPAA's least-favorite app of the 2010s has been abandoned for years, but the "Netflix of Piracy" software is still installed on millions of devices that are just waiting to join a bot army. Researchers at Eye Security found the updater for a Popcorn Time fork called "Time4Popcorn" still running on tons of Windows, macOS, and Android devices located around the world, phoning home to now-abandoned web domains over unencrypted HTTP and running an outdated, insecure version of Chrome.

Eye Security's Niels Teus …

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If you've been feeling nostalgic for your old iPod, you can head over to Apple Music's 404 page to listen to music on a virtual re-creation of the first-generation iPod. The hidden iPod was spotted by users on social media on Friday. It's appropriately stocked with music from the early 2000s, like Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" or Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc." The iPod seems to pop up on any non-existent Apple Music page, so you can find it by just adding a string of random letters after the main Apple Music URL.

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Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters assured investors this week that they have nothing to be concerned about. Sure, the company was going to lay off 1,000 employees, downsizing its product, tech, and legal departments, and was ousting its chief content officer, film chairman, and film vice president. But it had also hired a new COO - "one of the most effective at-scale operators in the entertainment industry," Sarandos said - to turn things around.

Though executive shake-ups aren't uncommon, having so many of them back to back would send a concerning message even in the best of circumstances. With Netflix, however, the situation lo …

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Retro video games are everywhere lately - especially in places where they aren't supposed to be. Halo in a web browser, Wind Waker on the iPhone, Super Smash Bros. in mixed reality. Over the past month or so, these kinds of unexpected projects have gone viral with incredible frequency thanks to new AI tools, as hobbyists take apart games and then rebuild them for new platforms. But while AI has supercharged the pace of these ports, it's also tearing apart tight-knit communities dedicated to preserving games.

Decomps and recomps - shorthand for decompile and recompile - are a form of reverse engineering that involves breaking a game down to …

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