Any smart home user knows the familiar irritation of asking a cloud-based smart speaker to turn off a desk lamp. You will find that the audio is recorded, shipped over the internet to a corporate data center, processed, and then sent back. When it fails, you get the spinning red or orange ring of doom and a robotic voice complaining about connection issues. If it succeeds, you will find that it took so much longer to turn off your desk lamp than if you had just gotten up and done it yourself.

When comparing Windows, macOS, and Linux, Microsoft's offering has one gigantic advantage: 99.9% of PC apps work on it. While Linux has made a ton of headway with Wine, and macOS has its own exclusive apps, stuff just runs on Windows the vast majority of the time. If you want to run something like Claude Code, a new video game, or any powerful app, there's an extremely good chance it has a native Windows app, and a very low chance that it has any others.

By default, Amazon locks your device down to its curated ecosystem. This means you miss out on powerful media players, custom launchers, and niche streaming tools.

The Kane Parsons' film Backrooms is expected to earn up to $90 million in its opening weekend after pulling down $38 million on Friday alone. That's not only above expectations, but absolutely obliterates A24's previous opening weekend record of $25.5 million for Alex Garland's Civil War. It's also a better opening day than The Mandalorian and Grogu, which only pulled down $33.7 million on its way to a total $81.6 million for the weekend. That also means that Backrooms is an incredibly profitable movie, with an estimated $10 million budget. By comparison, the latest Star Wars disappointment cost $165 million and was considered affordable c …Read the full story at The Verge.

Cecil Baldwin is a busy man with some dope boots. | Image: Cecil Baldwin Cecil Baldwin's résumé includes appearances on Gravity Falls, narrating the documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, and performing as part of the New York Neo-Futurists theater company. But he is best known as the host of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, a long-running fiction show that blends macabre Lovecraftian horror with absurdist comedy. As Cecil Palmer, the voice of Night Vale Community Radio, Baldwin keeps the people of the titular town abreast of all the goings ons with the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home and offers tips on how to best maintain their Bloodstone circles. He also cohosts Random Nu …Read the full story at The Verge.

It’s easy to get caught up in the LLM race. For a while, my monthly credit card statement read like a lineup of premium AI subscriptions: ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Microsoft 365 Premium with Copilot.

If you take a look at the modern handheld landscape with devices like the ROG Ally X, the Lenovo Legion Go, and the MSI Claw, the numbers are just jaw-dropping, with 8-core CPUs, 24GB of DDR5 RAM, and massive screens. On paper, these devices absolutely annihilate the Steam Deck's aging custom APU, but in practice you plug them in, boot up a game, and watch the battery drain 1% every minute while the fans shriek like a server rack.

NotebookLM has long exceeded expectations in the functionality department, making it easier to use than any other publicly available LLM with user-added guardrails to perform similarly. Although this AI tool shares the Gemini LLMs with other Gemini-branded Google utilities, its standout feature remains minimal hallucinated info in results because each notebook is limited to the sources you're supplying.

I don't really need to convince you that AI tools go haywire pretty easily. You ask them a simple question, they give you an answer that answers nothing you actually asked. You ask them to tidy up your desktop, they wipe the whole thing. At a company called PocketOS, a Claude-powered coding agent casually deleted the entire production database in nine seconds when doing a routine check. When the founder asked what had happened, the agent confessed that they had guessed instead of verifying it. All that to say, an AI agent going haywire and making bad decisions is a very real concern right now.

Windows XP has been out of support for over 12 years now. Despite that, people still run Windows XP, and many fondly remember it as one of the best Windows iterations to date. It wasn't the most secure or even the most powerful, if we look at it in present terms, but there was something unique about Windows XP that every discussion about Windows somehow circles back to. If you ask me, it was simplicity that made Windows XP a hit.

It's always exciting to wake up one day and remember a game you used to play. You download it immediately, but the joy lasts only 10 minutes until the first Game Over screen, after which you promptly forget about it. Part of that comes down to how these old games were actually meant to look. There were a lot of rough edges in older games that motion blur, pixel art, and the softness of CRT displays helped to mask. Playing them on a razor-sharp modern monitor can sometimes make them feel... sterile.

If you’ve been a part of the PC master race for as long as I have, you’ve probably upgraded your gaming machine enough times to have some spare hardware lying around. Or maybe you skipped the Ship of Theseus situation altogether by replacing your entire system with a shiny new PC. Either way, if you’re not actively using your old gaming companion, there are a bunch of ways to breathe some new life into it – like turning it into a home server.