A social network where everyone’s a bot

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 53, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about Beyoncé and Rosanna Pansino and Bowen Yang, pouring my life back into Todoist, watching the end of The Grand Tour, catching up on some My Brother, My Brother and Me episodes, seeing if the Pixel Recorder app can replace my trusty voice recorder, and moving Headspace to my homescreen to see if it helps me meditate more. (So far… no.)

I also have for you a truly wild new pair of AR glasses, a Batman-adjacent show on HBO, a great new book about the end of Twitter, a funny twist on social networks, and much more. Lotta good new TV this week! Let’s do it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you super into right now? What should everyone else be reading / playing / watching / buying / downloading / building out of Legos right now? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)

• SocialAI. The reaction to this “social network” for iOS, where you post and a thousand AI bots immediately reply, was so funny. Some people loved it, some hated it, half seemed to think it was a joke. It’s not a joke, and it’s actually a really thoughtful take on how to interact with LLMs. It also feels alarmingly similar to being on actual social networks these days. Maybe even better.
• Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. An excellent addition to the canon of books about Musk’s takeover and overhaul of the social network we once knew. There’s a lot of great new detail in here about the chaos of becoming X, too — a really good read.
• Simple Snapchat. I’d love to tell you to buy Snap’s new Spectacles, but they’re ridiculous and also not available for regular people to buy. But you will be able to get Snapchat’s new design, which is so much cleaner and more approachable than the app has been in recent years. I’m not sure it’ll win many new users, but Snapchat is still one of the best messaging apps out there.
• The Bose QuietComfort Earbuds. The AirPods 4 got all the shine this week, but I’ve been a fan of Bose’s earbuds for a while — they sound great, they have great battery, and I love the new “Hey headphones” wake word on the new model. And at $179, these are a solid Apple alternative.
• Omni Loop. The read on this time-travel movie starring Ayo Edebiri and Mary-Louise Parker seems to be that sticklers for continuity will be frustrated but there’s some good and thoughtful stuff and a lot of fun to be had. I will be having that fun ASAP. 
• The Penguin. “Gritty Batman show on HBO” is all you need to tell me for me to be fully in on The Penguin. The reviews so far are a bit mixed — I’ve seen “best show in forever” and “kinda meh,” and a lot of people are comparing it unfavorably to The Sopranos. Personally, I can’t wait.
• Tripsy 3.0. I’m traveling a lot this fall, so I’m back on the hunt for a good place to put all my confirmation numbers, flight details, and expenses. Tripit is fine, but Tripsy looks way better. I’m also into the map view, which is a surprisingly helpful way to plot out a day.
• Agatha All Along. WandaVision is the only Marvel show I recommend to people who don’t care about Marvel because the whole thing was so unusually structured and smart. This spinoff sounds just as inventive and just as cool. More Kathryn Hahn is always a good thing.
• UFO 50.A bunch of developers in 2024 decided to make a bunch of games that look like they’re from the 1980s. Taken together, what they made is kind of a historical document about gaming but also just, like, a bunch of really fun retro-style games. Such a cool concept.
• “The Mark Zuckerberg Interview.” You probably saw the pictures from last week of the Acquired podcast hosts interviewing Zuck at the Chase Center in San Francisco. The resulting 90-minute episode is… kind of awkward in spots but also really revealing in spots. I don’t think I’ve heard Zuckerberg talk through his own history as a CEO like this before.

Screen share

Alex Goldman, the excellent podcaster and former cohost of best-tech-pod-ever Reply All, has a new show! It’s called Hyperfixed, and basically, Alex’s job is to fix people’s problems of all kinds. The first two episodes are silly and deep, and this show is going to be great.

I asked Alex to share his homescreen with us as his new show launches because if there’s one thing I know about Alex, it’s that he’s a person of many interests and obsessions. (I always enjoyed him posting about songs he made in his attic, just to name one example.) I was curious what his phone would say about what he’s up to right now.

Here’s Alex’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 14.

The wallpaper: A picture of my kids being cool on the beach.

The apps: Camera, Weather, Settings, Notes, App Store, FaceTime, Amazon, Proton Mail, Find My, Overcast, Patreon, Koala, Messages, Google Voice, Gmail, Safari.

I know my homescreen is a mess, but I have long since given up on trying to organize it. It has reached an uneasy stasis in which I know where everything is, and it’s been a while since I’ve downloaded an absolutely essential new app.

Everything I need is on the front page: from games to exercise stuff, apps for watching TV and playing music, social media platforms, and so on. My go-to apps are Notes (every morning, I make a bulleted list of things I need to get done), Voice Memos (it’s super convenient if you’re thinking of an idea or a good melody pops into your head to just go ahead and record it before it’s long gone) and Threes. Threes is a game where you try and combine blocks of the same number on a playing field without running out of space, and I have truly not gotten further in the past three or four years, but I still play it like four times a day. Just out of nervous habit. And then Overcast is the podcast app. Everything else is lame in comparison.

I also asked Alex to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:

• Pinball Map. I love pinball. But loving pinball means you’re a pinball snob and you like certain games better than others. For me, the mid-’90s Midway/Williams pinball games were a renaissance, so I’m constantly trying to find copies of Attack From Mars, Medieval Madness, Twilight Zone, Monster Bash, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Bride of Pinbot. Fortunately, the Pinball Map helps me locate them.
• Koala. Koala is an incredibly powerful sampler app. You can record sounds directly off your phone or load sounds in, or rip sound directly from a video. It has nearly all the functionality of the classic Roland SP-404 Samplers, except those are $500, but Koala is around $5.
• Erica Synths’ LXR-02. A cheap handheld drum machine that you can load sounds on to or make sounds with. I am very much a dude making little beats on public transit.
• WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. A blog for a nonprofit radio station in New York City that was shut down almost a decade ago but is full of fantastic obscure recordings, comics, and bizarre culture stories. Probably most famous for being the only place you can find the story of how Paul Simon allegedly stole a bunch of songs on Graceland from Los Lobos.

Crowdsourced

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads. 

“Funny timing that you’d mention Short Film YouTube three days after I discovered a channel that’s a horror treasure trove. The channel is called Vintage Eight, which is by a film professor from the University of New Orleans by the name of Paul Catalanotto. His most popular videos are The Tangi Virus, The Oracle Project, and The Human Trial, which are also conveniently more interconnected than other videos on the channel.” — Drake

“Hild is the best historical fiction I’ve ever read in my whole life. Anyone jonesing for Game of Thrones but IRL (ish) who is also a fan of Tolkien’s references to ancient languages of Britain / Anglos / Saxons / old Norse will love it.” — Christopher

“Caravan SandWitch is a wonderful cozy game. It’s on everything and is just lovely.” — Iain

“Played around with NotebookLM from Google. One fun but helpful use case is to take research papers and generate podcasts. I’ve been reading a bunch of complex ML papers as an engineering student, so I convert them into podcasts and listen on my commute. Certainly interesting TTS application.” — Kruti

“In the most recent newsletters, someone recommended the No Rolls Barred YouTube channel but neglected to mention their best content:Blood on the Clocktower. It’s a social deduction game by The Pandemonium Institute for 7–20 (!!) players. Think like Werewolf or Mafia, but more fun. There’s endless content on YouTube that I can’t stop watching, and I love hosting big parties for it.” — Greg

“With Today in Tabs on hiatus, Caitlin Dewey’s newsletter Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends has become the most dependable curated reading list around. (Also don’t miss her excellent 10-year retrospective of G*mergate.)” — Kevin

“After years of loyalty to Things 3, I bit the bullet and moved over to Todoist. Natural language input is a big factor, but also fed up with long lists in Things — kanban in Todoist breaks things up nicely. I do miss the UI of Things though.” — Scott

“It’s been great following along with RocketJump on their Patreon as they write, plan, and produce their independent action-comedy film! They go really in-depth on everything from location planning to studio pitch decks.” — Josh

“I can’t stop playing Astro Bot. It feels like a love letter to 30 years of PlayStation, and having been a PlayStation fan my entire life, every level just puts a smile on my face.” — Nick

Signing off

On Wednesday, I was at the Made on YouTube event in New York City (the crowd was made up of me and like 200 extremely cool and fun creators), where CEO Neal Mohan and a bunch of other executives rolled out some new features. But forget the new features — the absolute highlight of the event was the singer / songwriter / creator D4vd, who talked about an AI project and then did a live performance of his mega-popular song, “Here With Me.” It was awesome, and I’ve been reading about and watching his videos ever since. Here’s a great GQ interview with lots of details on his story, here’s his TikTok, and here’s his YouTube channel.

To be fair, D4vd is already very popular, so maybe I’m the last one to discover him. But I figured I’d share just in case. I’m a huge fan.

See you next week!