Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot all promise to save time, sharpen my work, and make everyday tasks feel effortless. But when each one wants a recurring payment, the real question is: which one actually deserves a place on my credit card bill?

Do you know what kind of birds reside around your area? If not, it's surprisingly easy to find out these days. You don't even need to leave your seat, as there are plenty of resources out there for bird watchers to log and share sightings where you live.

Waze is getting an AI makeover. Google is integrating its flagship AI assistant, Gemini, into the driving app with the goal of letting users personalize their trips a little more. Of the four new updates, only two are being described as involving Gemini. Waze says its updating its conversation reporting feature, first introduced in 2024, to allow drivers to use conversational voice commands to report traffic incidents and suggest map updates, like a road closure or outdated house number. In addition, Waze introduced Destination Search, enabling drivers to use (again) use conversation voice commands (e.g., "Find me a coffee shop that's open …Read the full story at The Verge.

Choosing the right locally-deployed large language model can be a bit of a hassle. Bulky LLMs, for example, can deliver accurate results, but you’ll need decent hardware to get them up and running. I use Mixture-of-Experts models for most of my LLM-heavy tasks, but even with their optimized nature, I can’t use MoE offloading to run 35B clankers on iGPU-laden systems with less than 8GB of memory.

My home lab servers basically never break, and my laptop used to all the time. That's bugged me for years because my servers are always on, run more varied software, and serve more users (okay, one user, but he's very demanding). They also get far less attention day to day, but that was the very reason they survived. The difference wasn't the hardware or the distro. It was that my Proxmox boxes were maintained on a schedule, and my laptop got updated whenever the notification icon annoyed me enough to click it.

When I think of the RX 9070 XT, I see it as the first AMD GPU in a long time that has made me question my decades-old loyalty to Nvidia. I recently spent a few hours with one for a blind upscaler test, and it left me with no doubts about AMD's silicon. The raster performance is excellent to build upon, the efficiency is undeniable, and even at currently inflated market rates, it undercuts its closest Nvidia competitor by a margin that makes you second-guess your conviction at the check-out counter.

While a lot of communication these days is done in team chat rooms like Asana or Microsoft Teams, or via text and chats, email is still an essential part of workflows. Most email clients these days, like Microsoft Outlook, come with built-in tools to make managing the mess of emails easier, but your inbox can still become overwhelming. Not to mention the calendar events, reminders, and more.

The European Union is weighing sweeping new restrictions on children's and teenagers' access to social media, including age limits, an outright ban, and phased access. Social media platforms could also be forced to prove their services are not harmful before young people are allowed to use them.European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc's executive arm could propose new legislation within months, after reviewing recommendations from a panel of experts released today. "This is not about whether children can access social media. It is about when social media can access our children," von der Leyen said. The panel reco …Read the full story at The Verge.

WhatCable. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge Nearly three years ago, I showed you an awesome $8 cable tester that quickly tells you if your USB-C cable is likely fast, slow, powerful, or weak. Sadly, that gadget got discontinued, and I've never found anything as intuitive or inexpensive since. But if you've got a Mac with Apple Silicon chips, you can simply download an even more impressive tester for free. It's called WhatCable, and it works by reading the data your Mac already collects about attached USB devices, data that Apple doesn't normally pass along to you. Just click a little widget that lives in the menu bar atop your Mac, and you can see every USB-C cable and device attach …Read the full story at The Verge.

The sinking feeling of waking up to an unresponsive computer is one I cannot describe. I hit the power button, and instead of my desktop loading, I was greeted by an inaccessible boot device prompt. My massive high-capacity primary SSD died without warning, instantly vaporizing 4TB worth of files, including critical documents, years of local project data, setup archives, and workspace history.

The ultimate stage of smart home engineering isn't writing more complex server scripts. It is distributing your system logic down to the physical endpoints. By migrating device loops to local Zigbee binding clusters and to on-device ESPHome native automation blocks, your home becomes a resilient mesh network. Home Assistant turns a fragile single point of failure into a relaxed high-level coordinator. Home Assistant shouldn't be the mechanical engine that physically connects a light switch to a bulb. It should instead be the data aggregator and dashboard viewer, with low-level, instantaneous automation handled by the on-device microcontrollers and direct radio mesh communications. This creates an air-gapped, zero-latency house that behaves like a real, resilient utility rather than a finicky server project.

Back in the early days of Windows 95, the developers had to deploy some clever fixes to get the operating system to work properly. One of its developers had a problem: it wanted to make sure that software installers never overwrote a file with an older version. To do that, it had to detect that a software installer was running in the first place. So, how did it do that? Easy; it guessed.