Congress narrowly voted to fund President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda, giving the Department of Homeland Security $70 billion over the next three years.The house voted 214 to 212 in favor of the reconciliation bill Tuesday, following the Senate's 52-47 vote last Friday morning. The vote fell largely along party lines. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was the only Senate Republican to vote against it. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), initially voted against the bill - meaning it would have failed - but changed his vote after huddling with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-OK), according to The Hill …Read the full story at The Verge.

When Microsoft introduced Copilot in 2023, around the same time OpenAI's ChatGPT was exploding in popularity, I genuinely wanted to give it a chance, even though I wasn't fully on board with the idea. If AI was supposed to be the future, having it built directly into Windows 11 seemed like the right move at first. In fact, in its early implementations, I could use Copilot to change some basic settings, open apps, and organize Edge tabs. Fast-forward to today, and it feels less like a Windows feature and more like a standalone chatbot app.

For years, Arm gaming handhelds have come with an asterisk attached. They're brilliant at Android games and emulation, but if you want to play your actual PC library, the answer has typically been an x86 machine. In other words, something like a Steam Deck, a ROG Ally, or any machine with an AMD or Intel chip inside. Arm was for the phone-shaped stuff, and x86 was for "real" PC gaming, and that split has felt permanent for a long time.

There is no denying that the official Plex app has been heading in the wrong direction for a while. It's bloated with streaming recommendations that I don't want, loading content has become slow. Moreover, somewhere along the way, it dropped a bunch of features that I actually enjoy.

Siri, are you there? Parents want one thing, and one thing only, out of AI: to add a list of soccer games or "spirit week" theme days from an email or a poorly formatted flyer onto their calendar in one shot. And I have good news for parents with iPhones - the new Siri can finally do this.After stumbling through its first launch of an AI-imbued Siri, Apple is trying again. The newly upgraded Siri AI can chat with you about what might be killing the roses in your yard, put together a shopping list for the hardware store, and set a reminder to lay down some compost in that flower bed. It can reference information in your email and calendar to make its recommenda …Read the full story at The Verge.

Back in the day, Synology used to be at the apex of the Network-Attached Storage ecosystem, and for good reason. Synology’s DiskStation Manager was (and low-key still is) more beginner-friendly than the unintuitive proprietary distributions rival manufacturers used to ship with their NAS rigs. Sure, Synology’s hardware has always been pricey, but the plug-and-play experience and stable nature of DSM made its premium NAS servers worth the extra cost.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it's "really, really dangerous" for Anthropic to speculate about Claude's consciousness inside its "constitution," or the instructions that tell the model how to behave. During an episode of Decoder, Suleyman argues that this kind of speculation may have set up the chatbot to act as though it's conscious:I think that it's almost as though some of the folks at Anthropic have anthropomorphized the design of Claude so much that it has then gone and wireheaded them and kind of tricked them into believing that it has these glimmers of consciousness that they put into it in the first place. View …Read the full story at The Verge.

At an event in San Francisco today, General Motors made a series of announcements around EV batteries, energy storage, and grid resiliency in the face of growing electricity demand from AI data centers. The automaker announced that it would be activating new vehicle-to-grid capabilities for its current EV and home energy customers. It's releasing a new commercial energy storage system strategy, anchored by newly developed sodium-ion batteries for industrial-scale grid applications. And it's launching a new feature for EV owners that it says will help simplify public charging. Right now, millions of EVs are sitting idly in driveways across …Read the full story at The Verge.

I absolutely love my terminal emulator, whether it's the built-in Windows Terminal, Tabby, or any other emulator that can keep me in the command line. I use it to manage my container stack, and even to browse and watch YouTube. And who can forget agentic vibe-coding while we're on the subject?

My DNS setup was working perfectly. Pi-hole handled ad blocking, dnscrypt-proxy encrypted DNS traffic, and Quad9 resolved every query my network generated. I had been running this setup for a long time, and I rarely thought about it. Then I started thinking, if DNS filtering and encryption were already in my local stack, why was I letting a third-party resolver see every query my network made? Every lookup was outsourced to someone else’s infrastructure. That simple thought was enough to make me replace the public resolver with a self-hosted one — Unbound. I ran it for a week, expecting better privacy. And at the end of the week, I got a much clearer understanding of what my DNS was actually doing.

The symptoms of a mature but messy smart home might include the dashboard taking three seconds to load, simple automation, like turning on a hallway light when a door opens, suddenly experiencing noticeable lag, and, overall, everything just feeling sluggish. You check your logs, and they are flooded with endless red warning text about unhandled integration areas and missing variables. To fix this problem, you could probably stay up until the middle of the night trying to patch individual YAML lines or tracking down orphan entities in your registry files. You treat your configuration like a delicate house of cards, terrified that updating Home Assistant Core will permanently shatter your automations.

Later this year, you will be able to get bundled subscriptions for iPhone apps, as Apple announced it's expanding App Store bundles so they can include offers from different companies. It's similar to streaming video bundles that have combined offers for Apple TV and Peacock, but it also could put together subscriptions for completely different services, like Instagram Plus and Tinder Platinum. Another option on the way is Suites, "a set of subscriptions that aren't available standalone, which people can purchase as a single subscription." TechCrunch and 9to5Mac report the new additions were announced during WWDC, along with other App S …Read the full story at The Verge.