Nick Statt

The Verge was one of the more prominent media outlets on threads, but for the past month, it's clear you're all in on Blue Sky much more. What caused this change? And it can't be just that meta deprioritizes news because that was true for the past year and you were all still using it as your main platform anyway. So what's going on with Blue Sky?

It's funny you say all that because kind of a cornerstone of the decoder research process is going to a search engine, typing in some information, and finding an article from 20 years ago that tells you the date of when something happened or, you know, a merger from 2002. And that's really, really important to have that information available to you.

And it does feel like that is harder and harder to find the further out you go. Which ties into our question from Ty on Blue Sky, who said, with instability increasing in a number of areas, will a focus on permanence see a renewed push? All our digital things are only as good as stability allows.

Well, listener Mike Espinosa had thoughts about what we could ask guests. He says he seems to remember, Nila, you asking a bunch of people, when do you read email? He misses hearing that question. He thinks it would be especially good with repeat guests. He also gives his personal email philosophy. So he wants to know, what is your email philosophy? I'm curious, what is your email philosophy?

Are you an inbox zero person? Are you reading your email all day long? More importantly, should we start asking guests this question again? Do you think we'd get interesting answers?

So Mike's email philosophy is he doesn't, he says, my answer for the last few years is he doesn't read his email. He filters anything that was sent to me outside of his org and not addressed to me. Even CCs are filtered.

For the most part, nobody notices, and when they do, I just say the truth, which is that I get so much email that sometimes I look at something, and then I forget to respond to it, and it gets buried. Nobody ever questions him on that, and nobody stays mad, he says.

He archives everything, so if it does come up, he can search for it and pretend like he read it, which this honestly sounds like a great email philosophy.

We're back with Nilay and the Decoder team answering your biggest questions and looking ahead to 2025. So a lot of listeners have written in with, of course, their thoughts about AI, the coder's most explored theme of 2024. John Pickerton wrote saying that he would love a dedicated podcast or miniseries on something like the intersection of AI and software engineering.

He was a big fan of the GitHub episode. He says there is a lot going on in the space, including lots of people himself exploring running models locally on their own GPUs. Cam wrote in that there is a topic he would love to hear more about on the Decoder podcast, and that's AI in the defense sector. He says he doesn't hear a lot about that.

He would love if a podcast explored a lot of the questions around AI and the defense sector, like investments, if the tech is working, who's benefiting from it, the ethical questions around it. But the question to you, Nilay, is what do you think are the most unexplored AI topics right now? And what are you personally interested in exploring about AI more in 2025?

So Jordan from blue sky gave us the perfect wrap up question for the Q and a portion of this, which is Nilay. What do you think might be the overarching theme for tech in 2025?

We're also heading into almost the one-year anniversary of our second episode. Eli, what do you think we should be covering in the second episode, and why are you excited about that?

I would love to do more about robots. I think robots are a fascinating industry and I think they're going through a lot of changes right now. I just read a fascinating profile actually in the New Yorker about generative AI tech being applied to robotics in a way that is fascinating. Achieving some interesting breakthroughs.

I think there's going to be a lot of really fascinating stories happening at the intersection of AI and then the things that we want AI to do in the real world, which are historically very constrained by how bad robots are at maneuvering the real world. But that could change. And I think there's a lot of fun stories to be had there.

A lot of really challenging stories, too, about what a world of robots will do and what that means.

And that's it for our 2024 end of the year wrap up. I'd like to thank Nilay for being the Decoder guest for a change and Kate for joining me on the show. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. We had a lot of fun and we're going to do this again next year.

If you have thoughts about this episode, what you'd like to hear more of or answers to those questions we discussed at the end, like who should we have on the show in 2025 and what our second episode should focus on, please do email us at decoderattheverge.com. We hope this episode proved that we really do read every email. You can also hit up Nilay directly on Threads or Blue Sky.

He's reckless1280. We also have a TikTok. Check it out at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you really love the show, give us that five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and myself, Nick Statt, and our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.