Instagram's wordmark is iconic. Well, was iconic. Apparently Instagram thought it looked old, so the company rolled out a new one this week. It doesn't look like the old Instagram wordmark. It doesn't even look like it spells Instagram anymore. And we cannot figure out why Instagram decided to do this.

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay start by discussing the new logo, the executive urge to redesign everything all the time, and whether new is always better. After that, they get into the other big Meta release of the week: Mark Zuckerberg's many-thousand-word missive on the future of AI. There are a lot of ideas and proposals …

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Meta is launching an optional Scam Alert feature on WhatsApp that uses on-device machine learning to flag suspicious messages. Earlier this year, Meta also launched scam detection for device linking requests on WhatsApp. The new Scam Alert feature, which is rolling out in a limited beta, shows users a warning if a chat seems like a scam:

If the model identifies a message as a likely scam attempt, the user sees a warning in the chat, which is not visible to the other person. From there, the user can decide what to do: block, report, or continue the conversation. If they decide that a warning is incorrectly flagged, the user can mark the cha …

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Instagram has unveiled a new wordmark, moving away from the recognizable cursive typeface it's used over the last decade. The updated wordmark is a strange mix of half-cursive half-print that's somehow less legible than its predecessor. Like, that totally says "Instagzam," right?

"The wordmark at the top of the app hasn't changed in 10 years, so it was time for a refresh," Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on his account. "Cleaner and more modern, with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that's always made it Instagram."

Mosseri is seemingly aware that this will be a controversial change, because he also posted it t …

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Meta has launched a Threads app for Meta Quest VR headsets, the company announced on Tuesday. The launch follows Meta bringing the app to its Ray-Ban Display AR glasses last month and the recent news that the platform has crossed 500 million monthly active users.

It seems like a pretty full-featured app. Meta says that with the Threads VR app, you can do things like browse feeds, make posts, like and reply to posts, visit profiles, search, and watch videos - you know, Threads stuff.

"We designed the new Threads app for Meta Quest to make using VR more social than ever," Meta says. "Whether you want to keep up with conversations during a ga …

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Recently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he'd used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he'd hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, "Do cool shit." I made what I hoped was a polite noise. What reaction was this man looking for? He probably hoped someone, maybe me, would say it was cool or inspiring. It seemed I was not the first person he'd told about this poster. "You know, it's funny," he said to me. "No one ever says anything about it."

I have been thinking about this now for several days. There's a sort of turducken of things that I find off-puttin …

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a lot to say about the idealized future he now envisions for humanity co-existing with artificial intelligence - his latest essay spans more than 6,500 words on the matter. The lengthy manifesto Zuckerberg published on Monday, titled "The Future is for Everyone," broadly lays out his beliefs about how the technology should be developed, expanded, and regulated, and how Meta is positioning itself to enable those goals.

Some points echo a similar (albeit, much shorter) public letter that Zuckerberg put out last year, heralding the importance of public access to superintelligent AI - a term for artificial general i …

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Earlier this week, the Alaskan cruise ship Wilderness Legacy rescued a small skiff stranded near Farragut Bay after running out of fuel. But, according to tracking data reviewed by the Alaska Beacon and Halifax Shipping News, the closest vessel was actually Mark Zuckerberg's super yacht, Launchpad.

Michael Love, a passenger on the Wilderness Legacy, posted on Bluesky that the captain announced the Launchpad was closer, but "repeatedly refused to respond," which was met with booing from the passengers. The AIS tracking (embedded below) seems to support that the Launchpad was closer to the vessel in trouble, but then stopped near the entrance …

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Meta has been ordered to pay $567 million in the second phase of New Mexico's landmark child safety case, bringing total charges to nearly $1 billion for being a "public nuisance." In a ruling published on Thursday, the Santa Fe district court found that Meta's platforms are a "significant contributing cause" of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and safety throughout New Mexico.

"This case has always been about protecting children, standing up for families, and making sure that one of the world's largest technology companies cannot profit from practices that endanger young people without consequence," New Mexico Attorney G …

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