Twenty-five years ago, Kevin Lewandowski founded Discogs, arguably the destination online for obsessive vinyl collectors and music nerds of all stripes. It is a marketplace for buying and selling records, obviously, but it's also become so much more. It's a shockingly comprehensive database that covers not just albums and singles, but all the various versions and pressings. It's a really fun rabbit hole to disappear down when you're trying to figure out what obscure pressing of Ministry's The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste or Psalm 69 you had in high school, because you definitely blasted the cover of "Lay Lady Lay" all the time and 100 p …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The New York Times Company is in talks"exclusive negotations" to acquire Letterboxd, the social network for film lovers, for around $330 million, The New York Times reports. The Times Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and A24 were all recently rumored to be among those interested in buying Letterboxd.

The negotiations with the Times Company have included the potential for Letterboxd's co-founders to stay in charge but report to a Times Company executive. Letterboxd would likely remain standalone for the "foreseeable future," according to the NYT. The company would also integrate the Times Company's ad tech.

NYT spokesperson Charlie Sta …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Salon launched 31 years ago as one of the first online-only news magazine outlets, and it announced today in an unsigned post that it's ceasing publication.

The company said that the "business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years," and it decided that its publishing model is "no longer sustainable." It didn't go into detail about why, but many websites are grappling with "Google Zero" and the impact of AI tools. When reached for comment, Salon general manager Amanda Wolfe pointed The Verge to today's announcement post.

"Thirty-one years is a remarkable run, but what matters most is what happene …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and actor Jason Statham have a distinctive feature in common: They're both famously bald, and that definitely hasn't changed in the last few days. However, there are some images of the two men circulating around X, Threads, and Bluesky in which they both have substantially more hair than their usual shaved look, which in Bezos' case appears to be very freshly transplanted. It's all just photo editing fakery, AI or otherwise.

It's unclear how viral these posts are, but they're prevalent enough that a few members of the Verge team have encountered them in their social media feeds. Some people who shared them claimed …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The New York Times and a group of other publications have filed lawsuits against the company that makes the Brave web browser over alleged unlawful scraping to train AI and also letting users bypass their paywalls, as reported by Reuters.

According to a complaint filed by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, Brave Software has monetized its index of scraped websites by, in part, providing AI companies with paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index." The AI companies then use that index to train their models, access content to "respond to specific user queries," or both. Brave has allege …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The website-building platform Squarespace is laying off 19 percent of its employees as it works to "simplify" its operations, Squarespace spokesperson Jeff Seedman says in a statement to The Verge. The job cuts will affect around 300 of Squarespace's 1,800 employees.

"The changes are intended to simplify how we operate, sharpen our priorities and enable the company to move faster as we position Squarespace for its next phase of growth," Seedman says. "We are grateful for the contributions of our departing colleagues and are providing comprehensive support to help them through the transition." Seedman adds that impacted employees will receiv …

Read the full story at The Verge.