“Chance,” one of the people behind the Chancery Daily Twitter account explains why the Delaware court is special. “Every little thing is going to be fought over in a $44 billion transaction, right?” Chance says. “Every little blessed thing.” If you were wondering how the Twitter v Musk sausage is made in Delaware’s Chancery Court, this is the inside-baseball podcast for you.

Extraordinary investigative work from Cambodian news outlet VOD, interviewing Indonesian migrant workers who were allegedly brought to Cambodia and set to work as pretend beautiful women who would like you to invest in their cryptocurrency platform.

The workers say they lived and worked in the same building, and that their personal phones were taken away; one said he was beaten and tased for a mistake. The workers were rescued after one of their siblings saw a “TikTok describing forced labor and detention” that made him suspicious of his sister’s working conditions — he eventually sought out an NGO that intervened.

In a TikTok video, Victoria Song, who reviewed the Apple Watch Ultra, compared the large smartwatch to a bunch of common household objects, like an AirPods case and a stack of quarters. One of the closest comparisons? A Fig Newton.

For days, Iran has been gripped by major protests after the death of 22 year old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the “morality police.” The latest data from NetBlocks shows how the regime is responding: by making it all but impossible to access Instagram and WhatsApp, some of the only major social media apps accessible in the country.

Meta isn’t saying it’s laying off employees, but the WSJ reports department reorganizations are sending “a significant number of staffers” into a purgatory internally referred to as “the 30 day list” as they seek other jobs internally.

When Google cut half of the incubating projects within Area 120 last week, it gave people until January to find new jobs, a longer than usual window. 1,400 staffers petitioned for more time for internal job searches in the spring.

We tried to figure out what’s next for Grand Theft Auto after a huge leak, whether TikTok is the future of Google, and why Apple won’t just make a camera. It’s a fun Vergecast, available wherever podcasts are sold!

Logitech announced the G Cloud Gaming Handheld earlier today. The new device comes with apps for some of the biggest cloud gaming services pre-installed, and you may be wondering what the point of it is when we all have very powerful phones with great screens. Don’t worry, I answered this question months ago when I wrote about just how bad phones are for serious cloud gaming! I cannot wait until we can run this thing through its paces and see if it gives us the cloud gaming hardware we need.

Deathloop’s perfunctory endings were a weak spot in a game full of great ideas, so I’m intrigued to hear that on top of new weapons and trinkets, the Goldenloop update contains an enigmatic “extended ending.” I’m not sure what that means, but it’s enough to make me consider booting the game up again. Besides, I could murder Aleksis much more elegantly this time.

It’s no secret that once Apple does something, the industry tends to follow, so it’s not much of a surprise that we’re already seeing Dynamic Island clones materialize. Last week we saw MIUI (the Android-based software on Xiaomi phones) themers incorporate Dynamic Island-like ideas into their software, and today 9to5Google reports that Redmi is asking its fans to come up with ideas for what a “Redmi Island” could look like. Apparently Redmi wants to use to display alerts like incoming calls, notifications, and more.
Sure sounds familiar.

Elon Musk’s company is getting ready to debut its supposedly not-fake humanoid robot, Optimus, during its “AI Day” event September 30th. What evidence do we have that it won’t just be another a person in a spandex robot costume doing an extremely awkward dance? There have been meetings! And job postings! And Elon tweeted that there may be a working prototype! Look, this will either be a major breakthrough in the field of robotics or a spectacular flop. But considering Musk has already solved the problem of self-driving cars, I’m inclined to— what’s that? [touches earpiece] I’m being told he hasn’t solved the problem of self-driving cars? And that humanoid robots could prove even more difficult? Oh well, then bring on the spandex dancers I guess.

You have to watch this video, and PC Gamer’s writeup is also great.

Accuracy and timing determine how well you play, with little words popping up to tell you how you’re doing. Words like Perfecto! Or Nice! If you’re sucking, as I typically do, you’ll get a Meh or sometimes a Nasty, which is maybe the funniest word to use to describe someone playing a trombone poorly.

The game has had 1 million players, “both new and returning,” each day this week, according to developer CD Projekt Red. Interest is likely up due to a big new update and the well-received Netflix anime.

The obvious example is Peter Thiel naming his surveillance company Palantir (after an unspeakably evil scrying artifact that irreversibly corrupts its users?) but once you notice one profile of an alt-right or extremist figure mentioning how much they love Lord of the Rings, you start seeing it everywhere — including the footnotes of specious lawsuits attempting to undermine the 2020 election.

Anyways, you should read this, about an ascendant hard-right politician in Italy, whose politics are intertwined with high fantasy fandom in a way that will be unsettling to nerds of good conscience. And if you want to read more about Italy’s neo-fascist Camp Hobbit youth rallies in the 1970s, Atlas Obscura has you covered.

The US government’s two biggest antitrust regulators — FTC chair Lina Khan and Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter — appeared for a Senate Oversight hearing on Tuesday, and there were two quick takeaways:

1) Republicans still are eager to notch some kind of win against Khan and the Democratic FTC majority

2) They don’t really know how to do it yet.

Expect a lot of fireworks here if Republicans take back the Senate majority in November.