It's been about a month and a half since Microsoft's new Xbox Mode rolled out, and the vision behind it is clear. The company wants to bring a simplified, gaming console-style interface to all PCs running Windows 11. Having spent some time testing it, I can already say it's one of Microsoft's most significant, yet simple leaps towards gearing up the operating system for an uncompromised gaming experience.

When picking between AI model subscriptions, the focus is usually on what you can do with them, or how fast they can generate output, or a myriad of other benchmarks that directly compare how the model performs. And that's fine, the whole tech world is built on benchmarks as the thread that weaves between vastly different devices, software, and other services. When you're a company with one main product, it's all about finding ways to use that one thing, and making it better than the competition.

The deadline to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is coming up a week from now on June 12th, and legislators seem no closer to reaching a deal. If this sounds like deja vu, it's because we've been here before. Congress reauthorized Section 702 in late April - but only for 45 days, so lawmakers could negotiate reforms to the controversial wiretapping authority."There were no reformers in any of the conversations that happened. Full stop," Sean Vitka, the executive director of Demand Progress, said on a press call Friday afternoon, hours after the Senate voted 52 to 47 against a deal that would have renewed …Read the full story at The Verge.

Geoff Keighley’s annual June celebration of games is here. Summer Game Fest Live, the big live show that will feature a whole bunch of gaming news and announcements, begins at 5PM ET and is set to run for two hours. The event itself will take place in person at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, but it will also be streaming live on YouTube.Summer Game Fest Live sits squarely in the middle of a big run of video game showcases; PlayStation hosted a State of Play on Tuesday, and the Xbox Games Showcase takes place on Sunday. That doesn’t mean there won’t be some big surprises, though. Last year, for example, Capcom used the show to announce Resident Evil Requiem. According to this year’s livestream’s description, expect a “live look at what’s next in video games, with new game announcements, surprise special guests and more,” and while that’s not very specific, Keighley probably has some flashy news in store.Read on for our coverage of the biggest updates from the show. Get your knives out for this one. Screenbound, a game that can be both a 2D and 3D platformer simultaneously, launches in September. I know Threads of Time isn’t newly announced, but it looks so cool. More than a decade later, the team behind N++ is back with a multiplayer sequel Fortnite’s next season tests the extraction waters. A bloody good announcement. Grand Theft Auto VI is warping the video game release calendar Final Fantasy VII’s remake trilogy will conclude with Revelation Tifa can kick Ryu’s ass, and now you can prove it. The Wolf Among Us 2 isn’t dead yet. For those following along at home… Palworld 1.0 launches in July. Attack on Titan in its entirety. Another look at Clutch. Gotta go a little fast. A wild expansion has appeared. There’s a surprise drop among us. 007 First Light is getting a new story mission later this year. A new hope. Assassin’s cat. Virtua Fighter Crossroads is the next Virtua Fighter game. It’s the Sebulba game! Titled Goose Game. Control Resonant is a sequel — and also a starting point Who doesn’t love a good cube? PlatinumGames is making another TMNT game. Stranger Than Heaven is coming out in January — and features Tupac? Fumito Ueda’s next game is Gen Atlas. Uh oh, the xenomorph is back. Cuphead returns. Capcom is remaking Resident Evil: Code Veronica. No Highguard-esque ending today. TGI(SG)F. Minecraft Dungeons II could launch this September. Paramount is making a unified games studio.

Before I got into the home server ecosystem, I’d only use PCIe slots to pair graphics cards to my gaming rigs and then forget about them altogether until my next PC building misadventure. But little did I know that every unoccupied PCIe slot was a free expansion header that’s as useful for home lab nodes as it is for an everyday machine. With all kinds of adapters floating out there, slotting one into a spare PCIe socket can add extra functionality to budget-friendly motherboards.

Back in 2015, the two-person studio Metanet released N++, a brutally hard 2D platformer that was a decade in the making, building off of previous releases dating back to the freeware Flash title N. At the time, cofounder Raigan Burns issued some famous last words: "We hope it's not another 10 years before we come up with a game." But now here we are, more than a decade later, and N is getting another sequel. And this time the focus is on multiplayer.The new game is called, absurdly, N Plus Infinity Times Two. Whereas N++ was meant to be the ultimate single-player version of the N concept, this game is described as "the ultimate virtual cou …Read the full story at The Verge.

Chronologically, Control Resonant is a sequel to 2019's Control. But in most other ways, the games aren't directly connected. To developer Remedy, they're more like two sides of the same coin.When Resonant was first revealed last year, creative director Mikael Kasurinen said you can play the games in any order. The world of Control is reality-bending in lots of ways, but the general linear progression of time isn't really one of them - how would someone start with the sequel?It didn't click until I played Resonant myself. In a two-plus-hour preview earlier this week, I played the opening act of the game, as well as a later story mission …Read the full story at The Verge.

Square Enix has officially announced the third and final game in its Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy: Final Fantasy VII Revelation. It will release on multiple platforms simultaneously - PC, PS5, Xbox Series X / S, and Nintendo Switch 2 - in spring 2027.In footage shown onstage at Summer Game Fest Live, there was a lot to take in: You'll get to fly the Highwind airship, jump off it to land in the game's open world, play as Vincent Valentine and Cid Highwind in battle (who weren't playable in Rebirth), challenge the gigantic Weapons, and visit places from the original game, like Wutai. You'll also get to dress up your characters with armor …Read the full story at The Verge.

Single-board computers sound exciting when you try to step into the world of home labbing. They seem like a good idea because you get a tiny computer that can surprisingly run real apps for an astonishingly low price. It's one of the reasons I also got into the world of single-board computers like Raspberry Pi and Radxa. I even have many of them lying around, either serving a single purpose or running a couple of tools.

If you're not a developer, chances are you boarded the Claude hype train late. For most of its run, Anthropic was known for having models that had stronger coding capabilities than the rest of the competition, and Claude was the the model engineers and the people you'd likely call "tech-savy" reached to serious work while everyone else thought all AI could do was improve an email you were writing to your boss to ask for a raise, or whip up a birthday message for a cousin they barely remember. However, before we knew it, it turned into the AI app everyone (and their mothers) seemed to be talking about overnight. It hit number one on the App Store, people started casually name dropping it in group chats (just as they'd tell you they "GPT-ed" it), and your timeline filled up with people discovering, apparently for the first time, that AI could do more than reword a paragraph.

Who's afraid of the next GTA? Based on the last few days of Summer Game Fest, just about everyone. Grand Theft Auto VI hasn't been present at any of the keynote events, but its presence was felt every time a release date was announced. The month of November, when GTA VI launches, is virtually empty. The rest of the fall, meanwhile, is absolutely packed.It started at Sony's State of Play showcase on Tuesday. Even before that show, we knew that Wolverine, the next big PlayStation exclusive, would be launching on September 15th. But now it's joined by a bunch of major third-party titles: Dune: Awakening (September 22nd), Control Resonant (Sep …Read the full story at The Verge.

Three years of 3D printing have taught me that filament choice matters most after the novelty wears off. PLA still has a place on my shelf, and I’ll happily use it for quick prototypes, decorative parts, and anything that doesn’t need to survive daily use. But when I’m printing something that has to hold weight, resist heat, clip into place, or live near electronics, I don’t reach for PLA anymore. I reach for PETG because it offers the best balance of strength, flexibility, and reliability without turning every print into a materials science project.