Following Nvidia's reveal of its RTX Spark laptops, I attended an AMD and HP roundtable at Computex. A fellow reporter asked Rahul Tikoo of AMD and Jim Nottingham of HP, two Vice Presidents at their respective companies, whether they welcomed the new competitor. After all, both companies have been pitching small machines that run big AI models locally for quite a while now. And Nvidia had just tossed its own hat into the ring.

Aitana Lopez, AI avatar by creative agency The Clueless. | Image: The Clueless This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI confusion, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it started At first, AI influencers were relatively easy to identify - and to ignore. Aside from the occasional bursts of hype, they didn't seem to change much about the way social media worked. The earliest virtual influencers - Lil Miquela with her blunt fringe and freckles, Imma with her bubblegum pink bob, and Shudu Gram with her flawless complexion - were obviously digital productions. Collaborations …Read the full story at The Verge.

As AI coding shows zero signs of slowing down, code curators find themselves debating the pros and cons of using LLM-generated code. Some projects, such as the Linux kernel, have tentatively accepted AI-created code, while Flathub has flat-out banned it. Now, another open-source project has made its stance clear: it doesn't want AI-generated code, so it's banning all public pulls for the foreseeable future

If there's anything AI has been really good at, it's taking the drudgery out of keeping meeting notes. No longer do you or a designated note-taker need to sit there and write down everything, else it'll be forgotten forever. However, when you attend so many meetings and are inundated with a ton of recaps, you sometimes need a recap recap. Fortunately, Microsoft is working on just that, with a new meeting recap app that ensures you won't miss a thing.

It's no shocker that PC gaming has gotten a lot more expensive over the past few months. What began as a RAM crisis due to an uptick in people purchasing memory for AI purposes has caused a Domino effect that has raised the price of PC building, premade gaming rigs, and consoles. We saw prices begin to crawl up across the board, but the straw that broke the camel's back for me was the news that the Steam Deck's price was increasing from $549 to $789.

PC builders love to say that building a rig is the easy part; the hard part comes later. Maintaining your PC's performance and longevity, so that it always feels like new, is something we all agree on. That said, the habits that actually make that happen are often ignored when they stop being convenient. Deep-cleaning your PC is perhaps the most ignored maintenance tip ever, and I speak from experience. I know I should clean the dust out of my tower every 6 months or so, but I'm too lazy to stick to that frequency. Wiping the dust from the graphics card, RAM, cooler, and the case takes a few seconds, but removing the stubborn dust deposits from every single component is easier said than done. Still, that's exactly what you need to do to avoid overheating and performance throttling. Ignoring this slightly inconvenient maintenance habit is responsible for your sluggish PC. It's also silently stealing lifespan from your components. If you care about protecting your expensive hardware, deep cleaning should be an integral part of your PC's upkeep.

The internet still runs on two addressing systems that don't really get along: IPv4 is the one practically everyone still has to understand, with its familiar four-number addresses, and it ran out of available addresses to hand out years ago. IPv6 is the official successor, first standardized in 1998 and updated since, and despite nearly three decades of deployment work, it's widely used in some places and still absent or only partially implemented in many others. That leaves the internet stuck in a messy halfway house: IPv4-only in some places, IPv6-first in others, and dual-stack across the entire middle. And that's exactly the situation nobody wanted from a replacement to IPv4.

A router upgrade means the old router gets tossed in a drawer or thrown away. But I try to repurpose it. A couple of months ago, I turned my old ASUS RT-AC66U router into an access point. Later, I repositioned my main router, and then coverage stopped being an issue. Obviously, that meant sending the older router back into the drawer.

Sometimes it feels like the very tools meant to boost your productivity end up detracting from it. With all the notifications, messages, and pings coming in, I often find myself checking incoming alerts more than I do actually getting anything done. If you want your productivity helpers to actually leave you alone for once, you can do a lot worse than to build the QuietDash, a Raspberry Pi-powered eInk display that doesn't pester you.

Most AI users spend a lot of time optimizing prompts, collecting templates, and searching for better instructions. I did the same for months, assuming a bigger prompt library would automatically lead to better results. Instead, it created more complexity. The more prompts I saved, the harder it became to decide which one to use. Eventually, I stumbled across a different approach that focused less on individual prompts and more on reusable workflows. That shift completely changed how I work with AI. Instead of building a collection of prompts, I started building a system, and the difference was immediately noticeable.

The N3 Ultimate doesn’t mind being off center. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Sorry Anker: JMGO now makes my favorite flagship portable projector. The N3 Ultimate is an excellent portable 4K projector that defeats moderate ambient light at severe placement angles and can rival more expensive home theater installations at night. After a few weeks of testing, I think the raw adaptability exhibited by the JMGO's N3 Ultimate justifies its current $2,399 price ($500 off its $2,999 list).Modern all-in-one projectors built around Google TV are already super accommodating when it comes to placement. Set one down on a living room table or campsite rock and it will begin searching for a screen or blank wall while avoiding o …Read the full story at The Verge.

Remember when the only subscriptions you needed to pay for monthly were the obvious ones? Spotify or Apple Music so you could listen to anything without an ad cutting in halfway through the chorus. Netflix, Amazon Prime, maybe Disney+ for the kids or if you love Marvel. That was the whole list for the average user. You'd glance at your bank statement at the end of the month, wince a little, and then move on with your life. Now, there's a whole new column to worry about. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, Replit, Lovable, and so on.