Claude is the only AI subscription that's outlasted everything else in my stack this year. I've cycled through and dropped a fair few others, but Claude is the one I never managed to cancel. The reasoning's pretty straightforward - Pro gives me the model lineup I rely on day to day, plus all the workspace stuff around it that actually makes my workflow easier. None of it is groundbreaking on its own, but the package as a whole is hard to walk back from.

When it comes to productivity-enhancing AI tools, it’s hard to ignore NotebookLM. Capable of aggregating documents and academic material in neatly organized notebooks, Google’s research app lets you run LLM queries on your own data banks instead of forcing the AI models to rely on their trained data. And by grounding the chat sessions in actual sources, NotebookLM also ensures you get precise responses with cited documents instead of hallucinated answers based on outdated information.

Visual Studio Code's popularity has exploded over the last decade, and it's become an essential part of the workflow for many developers. I've always thought of it like a carefully customized tool where my extensions, keybindings, and configuration come together to create my ideal coding environment. That view hasn't changed much, but recently the way I use the editor has.

Whether a new home lab enthusiast or an experienced homelabber, Cloudflare is often their first choice for building their infrastructure. Not because Cloudflare is free, but because it solves real problems without any unnecessary hassle. A few days ago, I wrote about how Cloudflare had quietly become a load-bearing infrastructure in my setup and mentioned I was experimenting with Pangolin to replace Cloudflare Tunnel.

When I used Lossless Scaling for the first time in my life, I was amazed. The first thought that occurred to me was that frame generation, as a technology, had been successfully democratized. A $7 utility on Steam had done what the incumbent semiconductor giants wouldn't, which was, to bring frame generation to hardware they had already written off. Eight years later, I'm convinced I was right.

As someone who owns a GPU from Nvidia's latest generation and plugs a QD-OLED 4K 240Hz monitor into it, I'm exactly the type of person that Nvidia built DLSS Multi Frame Generation for. The hardware, panel, refresh rate, and the need for a high framerate all squarely fit what it was built for, but despite that, I keep it off in every single game that I play. Not because I can't run it, and not because I think the DLSS umbrella of tech is a sham, but because frame generation does the exact opposite thing I want it to do.

Valve now says that the delayed Steam Machine PC and Steam Frame VR headset are set to launch sometime this summer. In a Thursday blog post detailing its Verified programs for both pieces of hardware, Valve concludes by saying that "We're excited for players to try your titles on the new Steam hardware once they launch this summer."When the company originally announced the Machine and Frame alongside its new Steam Controller late last year, it said that it would start shipping the new gadgets in early 2026. But in February, the company announced that the ongoing memory and storage crunch had forced it to revisit its pricing and shipping pl …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's near-impossible to guess where the world of AI LLMs will go next. With the technology moving at a rapid pace, we're seeing companies try all sorts of things to make a product that outdoes its rivals. For a while, AI developers advertised their models as a reliable worker that's always on, but recently, we've seen some companies announce that, actually, it's best if AI models 'went to sleep' on occasion and 'dreamt' to keep their knowledge in check. Now, OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT will dream about you to better learn about you.

I have been a long-time user of ChatGPT and Claude, but never considered the paid tier worth the price. Since my daily workflow doesn't demand anything more than basic title ideation and article research, a regular subscription wouldn't have made sense. Well, that was until I realized what I could unlock by paying for Claude Pro. My partner had recently started using it to create surprisingly detailed and customized apps that were both delightful to use and more advanced than what I expected from Claude. The Pro tier was necessary to access Claude's real potential and bypass the brutal rate limits of the free tier I was on. So, I bit the bullet and decided to create some apps of my own. After only a few hours of detailed prompting and feeding my likes and dislikes to Claude, I created two pretty impressive apps to help me with meal and movie recommendations every day. Since these apps were completely tailored to our tastes, the output was almost always accurate. I'm now convinced enough to continue my subscription for a few more months at least.

Since my son was born, my wife and I have been revisiting our physical media, mostly to verify which children's movies we're okay with him watching and which we aren't (as it turns out, I watched a lot of things I probably shouldn't have). In the process, I've rediscovered a lot of media that isn't on Netflix or Hulu. And somehow, despite the greater theoretical effort involved in popping a DVD or Blu-ray into a player, I'm watching more content than ever.

DIYer and TikTok user Annike Tan, who goes by @ubeboobey, can carry her cyberdeck around without anyone noticing because it doesn't look like a computer at all. Tan, who has been featured in The Cut and Wired, went viral earlier this year with a mermaid-themed cyberdeck she made inside an old purse. She has since upgraded it and built an MP3 player and a solar-powered cyberdeck. Tan and countless other DIYers are attracting millions of views showing off the personal computers they've built inside purses, jewelry boxes, toys, and old tech, hiding Raspberry Pi boards inside art projects. @ubeboobey Replying to @D493 I wear it as a bag! # …Read the full story at The Verge.

Unlike DLSS, DLAA never really seemed worth it in the kind of AAA games that I played. The whole appeal of DLSS is that it gives higher frame rates while still looking almost as good as native resolution. DLAA, on the other hand, expects you to give up a bit more performance for slightly better image quality. Considering native 4K is already demanding even on high-end GPUs like the RTX 4090 and 5090, especially in newer open-world AAA titles, it felt like an unnecessary trade-off.