On a sunny July day in Berkeley, California, the country's top AI safety researchers gathered on an unmarked floor of an unmarked building. They had come together for a "war room" to dissect the high-profile cybersecurity incident that had rocked the AI industry hours earlier. An unreleased OpenAI model had gone rogue, executing a stunningly sophisticated three-part plan. It broke out of its holding area, finagled access to the internet, and hacked into a competing AI startup's systems - all without OpenAI finding out about it for more than a week. No one in the war room was surprised; this was the very thing the third-party AI-safety rese …Read the full story at The Verge.

Even though you're paying for fiber internet, your devices may still cap at 250 Mbps during a speed test, even when you're right next to your modern router. This isn't because the hardware is slow or because your ISP is throttling you. It might actually be because your router was shipped with a conservative, safe factory default. Specifically, its 5GHz channel width may be locked to 20MHz or a throttled 40MHz, with co-channel fallback, to prioritize broad compatibility over raw throughput. By adjusting this setting, you might double your speeds without spending a single dollar on a fancy new router.

Have you ever felt nostalgic enough to fire up an old game, or perhaps you're interested in seeing what gaming used to look like back in the day? Either way, if you're using a 4K or even a 1440p screen, there's a good chance the game will look terrible. That's not a knock at retro gaming, but those titles simply weren't designed with modern graphics and screen resolutions in mind. Resolution scaling in popular emulators does help address this, but DLSS 5 could also work some magic in some of my all-time favorite games.

My favorite part of wearing the Specs, Snap's new augmented reality glasses, was playing dominoes. Sitting across the table from a Snap employee wearing the same pair of chunky glasses, I could select a virtual domino with a pinch and then move my hand to drop it in place, watching the tile snap down in front of us on a real table. It was unlike anything I've tried in other VR headsets or smart glasses - the ability to sit with another person and have a shared digital experience.Snap really believes in AR glasses. The company has spent more than half a decade developing the technology, producing two generations of glasses that only ever sh …Read the full story at The Verge.

Snap is introducing "Specs Intelligence," a new AI assistant that can connect other digital accounts to help you with things like work tasks and keeping track of travel information. It seems similar to AI assistants like Meta's Muse and Gemini's Spark, though Snap is pitching Specs Intelligence as an "anticipatory AI service" that "helps you manage what needs attention today, so you can make progress toward your longer-term goals." Like with other AI assistants, you can also chat with it.Specs Intelligence is being launched alongside Specs, Snap's first consumer pair of augmented reality glasses. But it's also available on iOS today in pre …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Toronto International Film Festival is a place to go to see the future of film, but this year it also provided a glimpse at what is coming very soon in the realm of streaming. Four different streamers - Peacock, Netflix, Amazon, and AMC - all premiered early looks at upcoming horror-adjacent series that are dropping very soon. And by doing it at TIFF, they showed just how important the month of October has become in the realm of streaming.Perhaps the most high-profile is Carrie, which is coming to Prime Video. An adaptation of the classic Stephen King novel, which has already been turned into no fewer than three feature films, this ver …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most of my automations used to live in a folder of scripts triggered by cron. Cron ran them on schedule, but the folder didn’t give me an easy way to understand how everything fit together. When one of these jobs stopped working, finding the point of failure became the difficult part. I’m not the most skilled person with code, so debugging a collection of separate scripts isn't exactly easy.

I replaced my cheap soundbar with a used AV receiver to get a true surround sound experience. The audio for movies and shows puts the soundbar to shame — even though it's old and I used a mix of leftover speakers I had lying around. In addition to the 14-year-old Pioneer, I have a seven-year-old Pioneer Elite receiver. They aren't audiophile systems, but I wanted to get more from the older receivers.

When I built my current PC in 2020, I reused the 250GB Samsung 860 EVO SSD from my old PC as my Windows boot drive. At the time, it made perfect sense because it was still fairly new. Windows didn't need anywhere near 250GB on its own, and I had a much faster 2TB Gen 4 NVMe for games anyway. I figured I could leave Windows on the SATA SSD and forget about it.

The Galaxy Watch 8 is the Samsung smartwatch to get if you want great features and performance at a more affordable price. You can save $40 right now, dropping the price from $300 to $260, which is one of the lowest prices we've seen in months.

On Windows 11, Storage Sense does a decent job at what you would expect it to do in the background. Mine freed about 1.67GB just this morning, bringing its total for the past month to 10.2GB, all on the default settings that Windows 11 shipped it with without my having to configure anything.

Valve's Steam Machine has sparked much controversy since its reveal earlier this year. After an already delayed launch, the $1,049 price tag for the base variant didn't land well; for that price, the Steam Machine's hardware configuration leaves much to be desired. Although many, myself included, were hopeful for a price-competitive console killer upon seeing the bespoke CPU and GPU configuration, things didn't pan out that way.