Unlock a party. | Image: Conclave I have this vivid memory of walking to pick up my oldest from school in June of 2022. For a variety of reasons, I was in a very bad place mentally. And to make matters worse, it was brutally hot. I was depressed, angry with the world, sunburned, and soaked through with sweat. But as the second track on Conclave, "Habla," settled into its groove, I found myself unconsciously strutting. Not walking, but moving through the streets in lockstep with the music, just as a much-needed cool breeze kicked up, and some scaffolding afforded me a full block's worth of shade. For a brief moment, I found myself smiling for the first time in what felt like …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have been experimenting with Claude Code and Google Antigravity extensively as part of my development workflow. I have used them to build an enterprise-grade tool. I would not credit the tools alone, though. There was plenty of human input involved throughout the process. Even so, working with them made me realize just how capable these tools have become.

If you've ever invested hours, days, or weeks into a video game or two, chances are that you've fleetingly thought of your own idea for a game, too. That "dream" game has either never been made, or made already, and you perhaps never thought of it again. I've myself held a couple of ideas to build a video game, but they've always been plans F or G for when I run out of things to do. And yet, I've spent the better part of a week engrossed in an extremely rudimentary draft, or proof-of-concept of my dream game, and it's all thanks to my own local LLM, a quantized version of Google's Gemma4 that I've managed to fit onto my GeForce RTX 4070 Ti.

4K remains the endgame for PC gaming. Sure, there's 8K and even 12K around in the shadows, but 1440p and 4K are where most of the action takes place. I've long used 1440p, switching back and forth between a 4K panel, but I have since fully migrated to the higher resolution for all my interactive entertainment. 8K isn't anywhere close to being here yet, 1440p feels like a downgrade, and 4K is finally much more accessible for many gamers, myself included.

Of all the things on my 2026 bingo card, a random rabbit hole about Blu-rays and DVDs changing how I think about long-term data storage was not one of them. Like many people, I had mentally filed optical discs away as relics of a different era — right up there with MP3 players and dial-up internet. After all, I just figured they were old, fragile, and, of course, obsolete.

For years, the way I would grab text was embarrassing. I would get a screenshot or spot a picture with text I wanted to search for and type it out in Google search. Then I found PowerToys Text Extractor, a free OCR tool buried inside Microsoft PowerToys, and I knew I wasn’t going back to the clunky ways of copying text. It lets me copy text from images, videos, and even apps that block selection on Windows. I can’t remember the last time I retyped something, and going back honestly feels ridiculous.

NotebookLM has become one of my favorite tools for turning documents, research papers, and notes into something I can actually understand and use. But as useful as it is, I have been looking for an alternative that fits more naturally into my everyday workflow. Claude Projects came close, but it still felt more like an organized chatbot than a complete research workspace.

Home Assistant has a way of making you feel organized right up until you look closely. The dashboard can look tidy, the automations can keep running, and the lights can still turn on at the right time. That doesn’t mean the system is actually clean. It just means nothing has broken loudly enough to demand attention yet.

When Nvidia announced the RTX 4080 Founders Edition, there was intense online backlash. The internet screamed about the $1,199 MSRP, the 12VHPWR connector anxiety, and the classic echo-chamber advice to "Hold your line, skip Ada Lovelace, and wait for the massive architectural leap of Blackwell."

When CarPlay is running on your infotainment system in your car, there's a small, unassuming box in the lower-left corner.

There’s also a fake power company to jack up prices thanks to the fake data center. | Image: FBI Last year, the FBI opened a Cyber Range in Huntsville, Alabama, for simulating cyberattacks. Think of it sort of like the famous Hogan's Alley, but for modern digital crime training. It's a massive 22,000 square-foot replica of an entire town, complete with a convenience store, gas station, hospital, and even fully furnished houses.It's a training facility where the bureau can recreate real-world scenarios for training and research purposes. All of the various buildings and facilities are hooked up the way they would be in a real town. There's even a small data center with over 200 servers that can be hacked, infected with malware, and stu …Read the full story at The Verge.

According to a new report from Semafor, the White House's decision to impose export restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos was driven in part by fears that it had been accessed by a group linked to China. If the Chinese government actually had access to Mythos 5 or Fable 5, it would present a serious national security risk. The government could also attempt to reverse engineer the model through distillation, a method in which a "student" AI is trained on a more advanced model to replicate its behavior.The White House has not confirmed this report, and a post on X by Trump advisor David Sacks did not mention China. Instead, Sacks focused on a r …Read the full story at The Verge.