Summer is running out, but I accidentally stumbled upon a weird hack that I might come back to for the warmer months. One day recently, before I headed to the office, I tossed some Pixel Buds A-Series wireless earbuds into my messenger bag, and they somehow settled near my packed lunch and the ice pack keeping it cool. I didn’t expect that those earbuds would catch a chill from being close to them, but when I popped them in my ears, the cool sensation was both unexpected and amazing. I kind of felt like I was in a dramatized breath mint commercial, and I can’t stop doing it.

You might be turned off by the idea of inserting earbuds that are anything other than a reflection of the ambient temperature. Perhaps I can win you over by saying they feel cool but not cold. They’re definitely not little earbud-cicles.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

To be clear: at risk of possibly damaging your earbuds or perhaps resulting in some quirky behavior, I don’t want to recommend that you store your earbuds in the refrigerator overnight. A 10-minute chill should do (or bring an ice pack in your bag, if you’re like me and bring a lunch to work sometimes).

In case you want some documented proof that briefly chilling your buds probably won’t have bad consequences, Apple says that AirPods can be safely stored at temperatures as low as 14 degrees Fahrenheit (though it recommends warming them up before using them). Google offers similar information on its support page about Pixel Buds, though Jabra’s support PDF calls for a minimum temperature of 59 degrees. Some earbuds might have different temperature requirements.

So, yeah, don’t store your earbuds in the fridge. But a quick chill before you throw on the morning playlist? It’s the right way to start the day.

Dear Tesla fan who wants to run over a kid to prove a point,

Hi, my name’s Andy and I’m a transportation editor. I saw on Twitter — yes, I know, not a great place to see things — that you were going to run over a kid to prove a point. Something about Tesla and Autopilot and some video on Twitter — again, bad place, should avoid — of a test showing a Tesla vehicle running over a kid-sized dummy and you wanting to prove that those tests are bogus and wrong so you were going to try to run over a real kid to prove your point.

So I thought I’d write you this letter and say this:

Don’t.

Don’t do that.

Really, I would totally just not do that. Don’t force a kid to walk in front of your 4,000-pound metal box traveling at god knows what speed just to prove a point to some dummy on Twitter who posted a thing and got you all mixed-up in the head.

Don’t put a kid’s life at risk to win a Twitter fight.

I see you’re a big fan of Tesla and Elon Musk, with whom you seem to have a pretty cordial relationship on Twitter. That’s very nice! I’m glad you have friends on the internet. You seem to have a lot of them. 129,000 followers! That’s way more than me. Congratulations.

Maybe your test goes well. Maybe the kid lives and your point gets proven and the people you were trying to prove wrong are so embarrassed they turn into corncobs. But I can’t help but worry that some of your many followers will see you tweet about running over a kid with your Tesla to prove a point and think, “Hey, I could do that too!” And maybe their tests don’t go well. And then oops, dead kids.

You’re a big fan of Full Self-Driving, the Tesla driver assist feature that sounds like an autonomous driving system but isn’t because it requires the driver to stay vigilant (as you’ve noted). You want to prove that it’s safe, despite all the safety experts and consumer advocates who say it’s not. I’m glad you like your car’s cool new technology. But it’s just a thing in a car. Kids are way better! They say weird things and giggle at dumb jokes and can be really cute sometimes. Let’s leave the kids out of the Twitter fight, yeah?

I get that you think Full Self-Driving is completely safe and you really want to prove that point to your followers, and based on your personal experience, it seems to be true. But I think you’re confusing your own anecdotal evidence with statistical evidence, which is an informed logical fallacy. Don’t worry, people do this all the time!

Let’s leave the safety tests to the experts, yeah? Every day Tesla and other companies working on driver assist and autonomous driving tech perform thousands of tests and drive millions of miles. There are better ways to get sempai to notice you that don’t involve harming children. Anime Photoshops, weed jokes, COD memes. Our guy is an open book. And you basically wrote the manual for how to get Elon to reply to your tweets!

I don’t know whether you’re serious about running over a child, but online threats have a way of manifesting as real-life disasters and I would probably hate myself if I didn’t say anything at all. A lot of kids die in car crashes every year, but the numbers are going down. Let’s keep it that way.

So please. Pretty please. Don’t run over the kid.

Sincerely, a guy who saw you wanted to run over a kid to prove a point and thought that was a bad idea.

Robinhood is trading just above $10 a share as of this publication, which is about a 73 percent decrease from its price at IPO, $38. The market cap is now under $10 billion. Friends, it’s possible. The more the shares fall, the easier it is for the memestonkers to snatch. How would a bunch of retail investors seize Robinhood? Why not use a DAO?

There’s been a lot of speculation this year — especially after the first round of layoffs, when Robinhood cut 9 percent of its staff — that the app-based trading service is an attractive takeover target. Yesterday, Robinhood cut further: almost a quarter of its remaining staff, including its showy chief product officer hire they got from Google. It also released its earnings a day early, showing dips in revenue, monthly active users, and assets under custody.

Robinhood’s big sell was democratizing finance, remember? Fuck AMC and GameStop, my internet-addled ape friends. It’s time to seize the means of investing: RobinhoodDAO. I will grant that The Verge’s ethics policy prevents me from owning any crypto, but don’t let that stop you from taking my bad ideas seriously. You wanna prove to the world that DAOs are big and important? Time for a corporate raid.

Well, yes, Robinhood’s hemorrhaging monthly active users — in the second quarter of 2022, they had one-third fewer than a year before. But here’s a fun thing about Robinhood’s young user base: They’re going to get older. Usually old people have more money than young ones. So let’s assume some churn, but if we can get one-third of these kiddos to stick, especially the ones with money already, we could make up for the loss in user numbers in the long term through, uh, compound interest? This makes at least as much financial sense as Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, so I look forward to getting calls from banks for debt financing.

We gotta strike while the iron is hot because I think Sam Bankman-Fried is also interested and he has a lot more money. SBF has been on an acquisition spree lately, and Bloomberg reports he’s kicking Robinhood’s tires. Though my unruly curly hair is more sumptuous than his, I don’t think that’s how shareholders are going to make their decision. Plus SBF — as he is known — already has a 7.6 percent stake.

And if we don’t hurry, we’re going to have more to worry about than SBF. See, if he buys Robinhood, they don’t really have to rejigger the business at all — it can stay DraftKings but for stocks. But if you think about your JPMorgans and your Charles Schwabs and your Morgan Stanleys, well, it might be worth it to buy market share among The Youngs.

Now of course, two-thirds of the voting power for Robinhood is concentrated among the Merry Men, founders Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt. We can solve that, too. They’ve given a lot of lip service to financial inclusion, so I propose that we give them what they want: an exciting think tank working toward financial inclusion. They can give TED Talks and host conferences and generally be applauded. That’ll probably be good enough, because if there’s one through line to Tenev’s public appearances, it’s that he desperately wants the audience to like him.

You are saying, Liz, what about the regulatory overhang? Didn’t they just get fined, like, $30 million for violating anti-money-laundering laws on their cryptocurrency stuff? Isn’t Gary Gensler repeatedly kicking them, in the hopes of distracting everyone from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s disastrous inaction on cryptocurrency scams? Yes, my child, yes. But here’s the thing: with risk comes reward! That’s the entire proposition of investing!

Oh, I just found $20 in another pair of pants. Great, we can add that to the bid! But we’d better hurry up or SBF and his inadequately moisturized hair are going to take Robinhood before you and I have a chance to have any fun at all.

So let’s start a DAO. Making a Dune series is some loser shit — let’s fuck up finance. We’ll incorporate in the Virgin Islands or something, and then we’ll raise a bunch of money. Maybe we can introduce a “utility token” for this, where one token equals one vote, and we can let people speculate on the token, and then strategically release our reserves to raise even more money. Robinhood said it wanted to democratize finance. Let’s take the company at its word.

No, you didn’t suddenly forget how to read: Roku, the streaming box and service company, is worried about how much money its buttons are bringing in. Not because it suddenly started making clicky actuators for other companies to include in their products (what a pivot that would be), but because Roku’s really an advertising company in streamer’s clothing. And it absolutely has prime real estate to sell to streaming services: for a fee, it’ll plaster their logos onto buttons that customers will likely see every time they use a Roku. Even better, those buttons will only launch that service.

Basically, Roku’s best ROI may be the Netflix-red and Disney-blue paint its suppliers buy.

Near the bottom of each Roku remote, you’ll see four buttons labeled with a variety of streaming services — currently, Roku’s website shows Netflix, Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, and Paramount Plus. That’s an absolute plethora of pluses, though the buttons change over time as new streaming services are born, die, or make different decisions about where to spend their ad budgets. (I like to imagine that someone once received the worst remote ever, only featuring buttons for streaming services they never use like Sling, Rdio, PlayStation Vue, and Quobo. Points if you can guess which one of those is made up without googling.)

Image: Roku

Roku’s certainly not the only company that relies on “button revenue,” but it really pushes these buttons hard; on its simple remote these shortcuts make up literally a quarter of all the buttons, even if you’re very generous and count the D-pad as four separate inputs. That ratio doesn’t change all that much when you move up to its Voice Remote or Voice Remote Pro, either. It’s easy to see why Roku makes the buttons so prominent; in 2019 Bloomberg reported that streaming services paid about $1 per customer to put their button on the remote. If that number is still accurate, that means Roku could be making up to $4 per remote, just from streaming service fees. Multiply that across most of the 63 million active accounts Roku reported in its Q2 2022 earnings (pdf), and that’s a big chunk of change.

If you’re Roku, that’s a stroke of genius; each time you sell a remote, you get money from whoever’s buying it and from four streaming services. Limiting it to four slots on most models is also smart — last I checked, there were way more streaming services than that who would love to have a button on Roku’s remote. If there’s one thing I learned from my economics classes (aka the great GPU scalping wars of ‘20 and ‘21), low supply plus high demand equals cash in the bank. Roku can basically print money, as long as it keeps selling devices and remotes, and convincing advertisers to keep paying the same amount for their own special buttons.

Yeah, so about that. In its Q2 earnings call last week, the company said that it had to adjust its forecasts because people haven’t been buying as many Roku devices. According to the company’s CFO, the main reason a dip in player sales affects its forecasts “would be a lower expectation of button revenues in certain deals where we’ve sold those deep link buttons on the remote.”

To break that down: Roku didn’t change its financial assumptions just because it wasn’t selling as many streaming boxes, or because fewer boxes means a smaller audience it can sell to advertisers. “The most explicit” result of those reduced sales, according to Roku, is that its button profits are going down.

Of course, consumers aren’t the only ones that are hesitant to throw money at things. Roku’s also very concerned about advertisers tightening their purse strings too, warning shareholders that the current economy could crater ad budgets like the start of the pandemic did. (Reassuring!) That almost certainly includes budgets at some streaming services, which could also drive the price of Roku’s buttons down if they aren’t willing to bid as high for the real estate on your remote.

Sure, you might be able to just ignore these buttons (or live in continuous mild frustration that you can’t remap them to a service you actually use). But streaming services are generally under the impression that paying Roku for button placement could help net them enough subscribers to make it worthwhile, and Roku has now revealed just how important those button assumptions are to its bottom line. If you ever wanted an example of how valuable your attention is, Roku’s buttons may have just put one at your fingertips.

Often, on the internet, completely deranged CGI infrastructure concepts cooked up by bored design students go mildly viral, like those public transit “discs” that ride above traffic on stilts or that idea for a nuclear-powered “flying hotel.” Very rarely these half-baked renders are backed by one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds in the world. Such is the case with Saudi Arabia’s plan to build what looks like a huge mirrored wall in the desert.

If you’ve not been following this saga, let me get you up to speed. Saudi Arabia has a lot of money, and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), has a lot of ambition. In order to leave his mark on the world, MBS plans to develop a huge city in the desert named Neom, which will incorporate pretty much every futuristic technology you can think of, from the merely ambitious (like vertical farms and cloud seeding) to the sci-fi fantastical (like robot cage fights and a fake moon for some reason???).

The whole thing has been strongly criticized, with reports revealing problems from vast over-spending to oppressive treatment of local tribes (who have been forcibly relocated for the project). But MBS has reportedly declared the project “my pyramids,” and so work forges on. The latest twist is a newly revealed design for The Line: a “vertical city” some 500 meters tall, 170 kilometers in length, and — for some reason — covered in mirrors.

Just look at the promo video below and try to convince me this is not the result of some very excitable marketing execs and a fortnight of all-nighters in Blender:

And just look at these renders. I mean just look at them. Do these look like realistic visions of the future to you? They look like that meme of an unimaginably utopian future. Which I guess is the point.

Although it looks like a wall, The Line is actually supposed to be comprised of two huge parallel buildings, connected via walkways and divided into neighborhoods that are supposed to offer all the amenities of city life within a five-minute walking distance.

The Wall Street Journal has some extra details on the project based on internal documents, but they read like unimaginative world-building notes for a new Netflix sci-fi show. Vegetables will be “autonomously harvested and bundled” from community farms; “a high-speed train will run under the mirrored buildings”; the Line will include a stadium “up to 1,000 feet above the ground,” and there’ll be a marina for yachts under an arch between the buildings.

I’m not saying The Line (or something like it) won’t eventually get built. MBS has reportedly budgeted $500 billion for the project and seems determined to spend it. But we’ve seen similar mega-projects come and go, like The World island development in nearby Dubai. In that case, the islands were constructed, but only a few are now open, and most are sinking back into the ocean. We’ll see how long it is before the sheen rubs off The Line’s mirrors.

Dough is fantastic. You can make bread with it! Not to mention biscuits, cookies, pies, pizzas, pasta, and pastry. But — to the best of our knowledge — you cannot make a PC monitor with the stuff.

Perhaps that’s why I can’t stop giggling at this message (via Liliputing):

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Eve is the company that makes the remarkably well-reviewed but pricey Spectrum monitor — and before that, the disastrously crowdfunded Eve V tablet.

Now, the company’s name is Dough.

Which, grammatically speaking, means its flagship monitor is now the Dough Spectrum. It rolls right off the tongue.

Dough explains (lol) that it chose the name because it was, and I quote, “available”:

In the effort of cutting off shipping time and making our products widely accessible, we’re entering retail globally this year. To legally protect our brand, we need to have a name that we can trademark. Sadly, we can’t use EVE. But lucky for us, DOUGH is available.

The only other hint: Dough says it was looking for something “more passionate yet mature.”

While I have to give Dough the benefit of the doubt about that whole “trademark protection” thing — there are other famous Eves to contend with around the world, like the smart home company and the MMO — I suspect the company might also be trying to run away from some particularly crappy SEO. Despite some praise for its recent monitors, some of the highest quality Google results for the company include an excellent Engadget investigation titled “All about Eve: The upstart PC brand struggling to pay back jilted customers” and “Is The Eve Spectrum 4K a Scam? We Bought One to Find Out.”

And here’s the Google card that appears atop a search for “Eve Spectrum”. Not a great look!

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

We’ve covered some delightfully shameful rebrands before, like WeWork’s stint as The We Company, the lying liars behind “Voltswagen,” and what happened when Disney had no Fox left to give. And of course, there’s Meta.

But Dough?

It takes the cake.

A few of us at The Verge have noticed something new about Twitter’s iOS app: when you pull down to refresh your feed, you might hear a couple of new noises. One is a little windup trill that plays when you first pull the feed, and after your feed is done refreshing, you might hear a short confirmation chirp. (Though the sounds are more robotic than any real-life bird I’ve heard.)

I made a recording so you can hear what I’m hearing. It’s a little different from the short “pop” you might have heard when refreshing before.

We’re not exactly sure when the change kicked in, but we first noticed it Friday afternoon, and we’ve seen a bunch of tweets about the new chirp from Friday as well. There are also a handful of tweets mentioning a chirp over the past couple of weeks, which could mean that Twitter has been rolling it out slowly ahead of a bigger release.

This seemingly isn’t an iOS-only change. One Verge staffer on Android is occasionally hearing the second new noise I described, and a few of the tweets I’ve found about the chirp were sent from Android.

If you want to hear the noise for yourself on your phone, just try pulling down to refresh your feed. If you don’t hear it, try force closing the Twitter app and opening it again (this is what worked for me), and make sure you’re on the latest version of the app. We’re not sure how widely this is rolled out, so you may not have the sounds just yet even if you try those steps.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to refresh the app to hear the lovely new sounds again. And again. Maybe just one more time. Last time, I promise…

Say this for Starbucks: its coffee may mostly just taste like burning, but its merch tends to be on point. The latest example, as spotted by 9to5Google, is a collaboration with Samsung (in South Korea only, unfortunately) that created branded cases for the Galaxy S22 lineup and the Galaxy Buds 2.

One of the Buds 2 case options is a dark green case with a Starbucks logo. (Boring.) The other is a small white mug with a handle and fake latte art whose top swivels away to reveal your earbuds. (Less boring!) Thanks to the giant mermaid logo on the side, it won’t appeal to anyone other than the most diehard of Starbucks javaheads, and I suppose I should point out that I’ve never had a Starbucks barista draw a perfect foam leaf on top of my drink, but I love it nonetheless.

Image: Samsung

Samsung has a history with fun cases like these, too. You might remember, for instance, its poké ball case for the Buds, which it released — also exclusively in South Korea — last month. Like that one, the mug is just hilariously impractical: it takes a small, stealthy, pocketable case and turns it into something loud and unwieldy. To give you an idea of the size of the thing, you actually put your entire charger inside the mug. There are no new features and no added battery capacity in that big body — just more gizmo for your gizmo.

But why shouldn’t chargers be more fun just for fun’s sake? The mug is just a cute desk accessory, a place to put your whole earbud kit so you’re not constantly rooting around your pockets and desk to find that tiny case. And, if you’re the purse-carrying type, a bigger and more oblong case might actually be a good thing. The world could use a more chaotic take on cases and chargers in general.

It’s not yet clear what the new Samsung-Starbucks merch will cost when it goes on sale tomorrow, and given that they’re in limited supply and exclusive to South Korea, you probably won’t be able to get your hands on one. But my eBay alert for “coffee mug Buds case” is already set.

Pinkfong, the company behind “Baby Shark” — aka the song with the most-viewed video on all of YouTube — has announced an NFT project titled “Baby Shark: Collection No. 2.” The NFTs in the collection, all 10,000 of them, will feature generative art of the titular baby shark and the rest of his shark family. Generative NFTs are like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, where there are a variety of randomized traits across a collection.

When I first heard this news, I had two thoughts simultaneously (using up my entire daily allotment):

• Please tell me they are not trying to sell NFTs to children

and

So, yes, this is apparently going to be the second set of NFTs featuring Brooklyn (TIL, that’s the baby shark’s name) and his family. The first was announced late last year and, according to Pinkfong, sold out immediately. I regret to inform you that people have spent hundreds and even thousands of dollars on these NFTs, though the initial sale happened in December 2021. That was, according to NonFungible’s market tracker, riiiight before the NFT market started to slump. Sadly, that probably means there are some Baby Shark bag holders out there.

As for whether Pinkfong is trying to get kids interested in this… I’m really not sure where I land on that. Its roadmap (which, yes, does include developing “Baby Shark’s footprint and the universe in the metaverse”) very much seems written for investors and adults. Still, it also banks on you knowing and caring about the “Baby Shark” characters and wanting to be part of the community. That’s just not something I see being true for most adults, though I guess I could always be wrong about that.

What’s definitely not for kids is the “Baby Shark” party at NFT.NYC that Pinkfong will be using to celebrate its second round of NFTs. The company describes the event as a “night of fantastic entertainment, music, and networking,” and let me tell you; I am absolutely dying to know what kind of networking goes on at a party for “Baby Shark” NFTs. Am I curious enough to endure NFT.NYC to find out? Well, unfortunately, I’m too busy doing absolutely anything else that day (plus, you know, I wasn’t invited for some reason). But if you end up going, please email me to tell me what it was like.

I definitely wouldn’t say this invite looks geared towards children.

When it comes down to it, you won’t hear any judgment from me about the adults that personally decide to buy into the “Baby Shark” NFT bandwagon when this collection comes out later this year. (Not because I don’t judge people for buying NFTs, but because I usually do it quietly.) But Pinkfong’s website says that the company is about “defining the first moments of childhood.” Parents out there, please — do not define your kids’ first moments with speculative assets.

In a tweet that is definitely not meant to distract from the news that he’s planning on laying off about 10 percent of his workforce, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that he was shifting the company’s “AI Day” event from August to September in anticipation of being able to show off a “working” Optimus prototype.

You’ll recall that Optimus is the name given to the humanoid robot that Musk said will take on the repetitive, boring tasks that humans are loath to do. The robot was revealed during Tesla’s last AI day in August 2021, and as with all things Musk, it’s difficult to parse the reality from the smokescreen of bullshit he tends to throw out. After promising to reveal a working prototype sometime in 2022, the evening was capped by a person in a spandex robot costume taking the stage and doing an extremely awkward dance.

Tesla’s history is littered with fanciful ideas that never panned out, like a solar-powered Supercharger network, battery swapping, robotic snake-style chargers, city-to-city rocket travel, or a self-driving car you could summon from across the country.

Musk is very good at generating headlines, especially when there’s bad news from which to distract. His move to buy Twitter is slowly unraveling, with federal regulators examining whether he broke the rules when he initially bought a 9 percent stake in the company. And lest we forget, Tesla is still under investigation for the tendency of its vehicles to crash into parked emergency vehicles while using the same AI software that will supposedly power this robot.

Sure, Musk does deliver on some of his promises. He makes cars, some of which can reliably handle some of the driving tasks, but not at the expense of the driver’s attention. He builds rockets that can land themselves and be reused. But a humanoid robot like what Musk is promising should be taken with a Mars-sized grain of salt.

Building a human-replacing robot is something no company on earth is close to achieving. Even Boston Dynamics, which makes one of the most advanced bipedal robots in the world, has never described its machines as anything other than experimental. Its Atlas robot still frequently trips and falls, despite over a decade of work.

If you think Musk is going to be able to leapfrog that work in a year, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona you should really check out.