Does running custom shortcuts put the “Pro” in Apple Pencil Pro? I scoffed at the name when the new iPad stylus was announced last week (it doesn’t even have a built-in eraser function?) but I take it back knowing I can use it to turn off my LED candles like I’m waving a magic wand.

It’s Patch Tuesday, and Microsoft says a problem that caused VPN connections to fail after installing the April 2024 security update can be resolved by installing an update released today, May 14th.

According to the notes for KB5037771:

This update addresses a known issue that might cause your VPN connection to fail. This occurs after you install the update dated April 9, 2024, or later.

Google is distributing these little handbooks for prompting AI, which is kind of adorable? It has color-coded highlights breaking down the basic components of a prompt. There’s an early internet “How to use a search engine” vibe about it — I’m gonna hang on to this one for posterity.

A trailer for season 4 of the streaming whodunit has the crew of would-be detectives venturing to Hollywood, which is a big change of pace. You can check it out on Hulu starting on August 27th.

Sergey posted up outside the area where Google was giving demos of Project Astra multi-modal chats. He said he thinks Sundar is doing a good job making hard decisions as CEO, said he mostly uses AI for coding tasks, and politely declined to answer a question from Bloomberg’s Shirin Ghaffary about Larry Page accusing Elon Musk of being a “speciesist.”

While we still don’t know a lot about the upcoming Disney Plus reboot of Daredevil, we do at least have a release window: Marvel says the show will start streaming in March 2025.

RetroArch, a long-running (and very good) emulator frontend, is waiting for Apple to green-light it for the App Store, according to one of its developers. PPSSPP, a well-known PSP emulator, is also in the approval queue, its developer told The Verge via email.

And that’s not all! Another multi-system emulator (Nintendo 3DS, DS, GBA) called Folium is also awaiting approval. There are yet others — see this list on Reddit.

Sorry for messing with your wallet, and possibly your next Tuesday morning — the 1:64 die-cast model’s going on sale at 9AM PT / 12PM ET on the 21st. It’s got a Spectraflame paint job, so it might actually look as wonderfully shiny as it does in these photos.

At Google I/.O 2024 today, Google announced a multimodal version of Gemini Nano, allowing the on-device processing-powered AI model to recognize images, sounds, and spoken language in addition to text.

Those multimodal capabilities are also coming to the Android accessibility feature TalkBack, using AI to fill in missing information about unlabeled images, without requiring a connection to the internet.

I’m at mia@theverge.com. Thanks!

Love Me, co-writer / directors Sam and Andy Zuchero’s new feature about a satellite and an ocean buoy falling in love after humanity’s fall, was one of the most fascinating films playing at this year’s Sundance film festival. And Deadline reports that it’s finally making its way to theaters some time early next year.

Obviously, someone noticed our video that clipped every single AI mention at I/O 2023 last year. Sundar Pichai closed the 2024 keynote by showing how AI can save us some work by using it to keep track. At the time, it was up to 121 AI mentions.

...by the time they were finished, it was probably more like 124.

The scam detection feature Google just announced requires Android users to opt in, and Google claims it’s on-device only, but it’s still essentially listening to your every conversation to look for fraudulent-sounding language.

Are we really ready to swap scamming concerns with privacy-related ones?

Wiley, a publishing company that’s more than 200 years old, is shuttering 19 journals today, the Wall Street Journal reports. Wiley has reportedly had to retract more than 11,300 papers recently “that appeared compromised” as generative AI makes it easier for paper mills to peddle fake research.

Google’s Sameer Samat just made very clear how much Google sees Gemini as a way to make Android a better operating system. Gemini app? On iOS? Yeah yeah sure sure. But AI on Android, and particularly on Pixel, is where the real stuff is for Google. The AI race is very much a smartphone race, friends.

Toward the end (maybe?) of the I/O keynote, Google threw in a cute little ditty about all the things you can do with Gemini prompts: generate photos of cats playing guitar, find smart things to say about Renoir, etc.

It includes the phrase “There’s no wrong way to prompt,” which, have you met people?

After Tesla CEO Elon Musk fired the entire 500 Supercharger team, a TikTok user noticed that all the cables at this Vallejo, Calif. station had been severed, rendering it useless. Vandalism? Or thieves looking to extract the valuable copper from inside the cables?