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.

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.

Christopher Nolan's engrossing take on The Odyssey dominated at the box office and spurred a newfound interest in classic literature among filmgoers. But a new retelling of the story made entirely with AI is so bad that it might just make viewers hate the original tale altogether.The new film, called Odysseus: The Fall, comes via AI firm Fountain 0 and is written and directed by company cofounder Ash Koosha, who also lent his likeness to the title character and created all of the music. (The film's credits are very short.) The studio's only previous work is an AI film called Dreams of Violets that made it into Tribeca earlier this year. Th …Read the full story at The Verge.

You can easily run a local model on a decently specced PC or MacBook, but the performance is often abysmal for most tasks. The main reason is the hardware in your device, which limits how capable a model you can run, and most consumer PCs and laptops can’t run a very good model.

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.

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.

E-waste from the AI boom has been vastly underestimated, a new report warns. By 2050, it could become enough trash to fill 23 million shipping containers - roughly enough 40-foot containers to circle the world six times if lined up in a row. It's a significantly higher estimate of AI's e-waste than previous studies have found because the authors of the new report factor in all the infrastructure needed to support servers in data centers. The broader scope provides a clearer picture of junk AI leaves behind, according to the nonprofit Basel Action Network (BAN), which published the paper today. "AI may feel weightless, but every model dep …Read the full story at The Verge.

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.

For as long as I've known it was possible, I've used port forwarding as a means to expose certain services to the open internet. It started with small things, like a game server here and a TeamSpeak VOIP server there, but once my interest grew towards hosting a media server and potentially replacing subscriptions, I knew it was time to find a better solution. Forwarding ports means opening a hole on your network for any and all traffic that goes looking, and believe me, if it's open, people will find it. Instead of forwarding ports for everything I wanted to be able to access externally, I use a mesh VPN for the more personal stuff, and anything else that needs to be exposed is done through a reverse proxy.

RISC-V has been around for a long time, but its big breakthrough always seems to be just around the corner. Maybe it'll turn up in a laptop one day, or a server, or your phone, but every year it feels as if all we get are development boards from the likes of SiFive. Here's the thing, though: Nvidia thinks it shipped over a billion RISC-V cores in 2024, even if they're not your typical computing-oriented chips.

There are always tools that you can't stop using and talking about once you go hands-on with them. However, as time passes, the novelty often wears off and they slowly fade into the background as you move on to the next shiny thing.