If you're interested in checking out what's coming next for Windows 11, you owe it to yourself to check out the operating system's Beta and Dev branches. These updates with new features that Microsoft would like people to try out before a full release, but unlike the Canary channel, it's a little more stable, and the features have undergone at least an initial testing phase before being served. Microsoft has just uploaded a new update to both the Beta and Dev channels, and both of them make the File Explorer a lot better to use.

Some of Bose’s best headphones, earbuds, and speakers were nicely discounted for Prime Day, but just because the event has ended doesn’t mean the deals are over. Bose is currently offering discounts on a range of refurbished products, plus an extra 25 percent off on top of that with code SUMMER25. For example, Verge-favorite QuietComfort Ultra Headphones are down to $284.25 ($165 off) at Bose, the lowest price we’ve seen yet. The QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds are also down to $186.75 ($113 off) at Bose, another all-time low (and another Verge favorite).Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (refurbished)Bose’s latest flagship headphones are a replacement for the Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, and offer a more travel-friendly design, spatial audio, better call quality, excellent comfort, and some of the best noise cancellation around. Read our review.Where to Buy: $449 $284.25 at BoseThe QC Ultra Headphones are the perfect noise-canceling headphones for travel, offering excellent audio performance and a design that’s comfortable to wear for long stretches. In his review, former Verge senior reviewer Chris Welch said the wider headband on the QC Ultra Headphones didn’t cause any discomfort over extended use. While the headphones feature the same drivers found in Bose’s older Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, the QC Ultra Headphones include a new Immersive Audio mode, which is the company’s take on spatial audio.The QC Ultra Headphones also offer 24-hour battery life and noise cancellation that’s among the very best. They can block the annoying drone of a plane’s engine and give you peace and quiet in a noisy coffee shop. Additionally, Bose’s transparency mode, which the company calls “Aware,” continues to improve with a more natural sound — nearly reaching the standard set by the AirPods Max.Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (refurbished)With dynamic, rich sound and the best noise cancellation available in true wireless earbuds, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds are a terrific pick if you want to listen to your music in peace. Read our review.Where to Buy: $299 $186.75 at BoseMeanwhile, the QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds offer the best noise cancellation of any earbuds we’ve tested. They deliver excellent audio quality and a satisfying bass, surpassing the sound quality offered by Apple’s AirPods Pro. Like the QC Ultra Headphones, the QC Ultra Earbuds have an immersive audio mode, providing the illusion that you’re not wearing earbuds at all. Plus, the earbuds offer around six hours of battery life, IPX4 water resistance, and a comfortable fit thanks to stabilizer wings, ensuring they stay secure in your ear.Bose’s refurbished store is also offering great deals on the Ultra Open Earbuds, which with the code are down to $186.75 ($113 off), and the Smart Ultra Soundbar, which is down to $524.25 ($475 off), both of which are all-time low prices. If you’re looking for a portable speaker, the SoundLink Flex is $74.25 ($75 off), another all-time low. Bose says its refurbished products undergo thorough testing and cleaning before they’re resold, and they’re backed by the same one-year warranty as new products.

Google is launching eight featured notebooks to start, with more to come. Google is partnering with authors, researchers, and publications to launch “featured” notebooks within its AI note-taking app, NotebookLM. These notebooks come prefilled with research and let you interact with the app’s tools, including its AI podcast maker, to learn more about each topic.Google has released eight featured notebooks to start, including one focused on longevity from Super Agers author Eric Topol, another centered around parenting advice from Jacqueline Nesi’s Substack newsletter, “Techno Sapiens,” and a notebook on the complete works of Shakespeare. It also partnered with The Atlantic and The Economist to launch featured notebooks.Google started letting users share their notebooks publicly last month, and this most recent update appears to be a step toward allowing people to explore a range of premade notebooks rather than creating their own. More than 140,000 people shared public notebooks in the past four weeks, according to Google.“For newcomers to NotebookLM, the notebooks are a preview of how useful the product can be when you’ve assembled a collection of sources for whatever project you’re working on,” Steven Johnson, the editorial director for NotebookLM, writes in a post on X. “But it’s also a preview of a potential future where there are thousands of expert-curated notebooks on all sorts of topics that you can add to your own collection, to have the knowledge you need on tap.”The featured notebooks include original text from the source material, whether it’s a book, play, newsletter, or online article. NotebookLM automatically summarizes this information and comes preloaded with notes about the topics discussed in the source material. You can also interact with NotebookLM’s AI chatbot to ask questions about the information, as well as listen to pregenerated Audio Overviews, the podcast-like discussions featuring AI “hosts.”Google says it plans on launching new featured notebooks in the future, which will include more from The Economist and The Atlantic.

Ani, one of Grok’s AI companions. People who pay for access to SuperGrok can now try the AI chatbot’s new “Companions” avatars, xAI owner Elon Musk announced Monday morning. The companions available currently include Ani, an anime avatar, and Rudy, a cartoony red panda.Ani also has what TestingCatalog describes as an “NSFW” mode where the character wears lingerie. (And just a warning: if you search for posts about the characters on X, you’ll probably come across NSFW videos.)View LinkRight now, users have to go into settings to turn on the companions, but “we will make this easier to turn on in a few days,” Musk says, describing this version as a “soft launch.” Even though I’m a free user of Grok, when I opened the Grok app, I was able to talk to both avatars, so the characters may be more widely available.Users have found that another AI character called “Chad” is in the works. The app already has a voice mode where you can chat back and forth with a faceless version of Grok, and that has an NSFW toggle.The addition of the animated characters follows Grok posting antisemitism and Hitler praise last week, which xAI said was due to an “update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot.”

I’ve been trying out different Linux distributions and am still searching for the one that best suits my needs. The Arch Linux distribution works best with the pre-packed KDE or GNOME environment, but if you don’t, it tends to break, and a lot of manual configuration is required.

It's always cool to check out the games that arrived at the start and the end of a console's lifespan. As developers become more savvy with the hardware and find ways to skirt around its limitations, the games begin to look and play a lot better. By the end of the console's cycle, developers have managed to make the hardware truly sing, making some of the best games the console has ever seen.

Typically associated with circuitry projects and real-time operating systems, microcontrollers are great for tinkerers who prefer working with embedded devices. But unlike their SBC counterparts, you might not find much use for them in typical home lab experiments. That is, unless the microcontroller in question happens to be an ESP32.

Over the weekend, DC Studios' new Superman feature became this year's third-biggest box-office debut in the US. The movie's success is a sign that theatergoers might actually not be quite as tired of superheroes as people tend to think, and that's particularly notable for Warner Bros., given the studio's plan to build a new cinematic universe of DC Comics adaptations for the big screen. But making interconnected film franchises work is easier said than done. And even though Superman is putting up numbers, DC might have a much harder time doing the same with its next couple of cape movies.Though it fell short of A Minecraft Movie's and Lilo …Read the full story at The Verge.

For many PC users, a CPU bottleneck is the scariest thing that can happen to them. The moment they hear this term, their mind conjures up images of crippled performance, lackluster framerates, and their expensive GPU investment going down the drain. While the real effects of a CPU bottleneck might not always be severe, it still pays to spot it early, so you can do something about it. Here are some signs that might point to your CPU bottlenecking your PC.

The plaintiff’s Chevy Tahoe damage after the crash. | Photo: Benavides v. Tesla Tesla is on trial in Miami today in a case that accuses Elon Musk’s company of liability in a fatal crash involving Autopilot. The driver-assist system has come under scrutiny in the past for a number of fatal incidents, but Tesla has only rarely faced a jury trial over the question of whether Autopilot was at fault for someone’s death.The trial comes at a particularly risky moment for Tesla, which is currently forging ahead with its plan to introduce robotaxis to more cities. The company is also experiencing a monthslong backlash for Musk’s hard-right turn and his work with Donald Trump’s administration.Autopilot, which can control steering and braking functions, as well as perform automatic lane changes while on certain highways, has come under increased scrutiny from federal regulators. And it has been at the center of several lawsuits, some of which Tesla has settled and others of which have been dismissed. The case in question involves an inattentive driver of a Tesla Model S and a couple who were out stargazing late at night. Naibel Benavides, 20, was killed in 2019 when George McGee’s Model S rammed into a stationary SUV parked next to a T-intersection. McGee was using Autopilot, but had dropped his phone and was inattentive at the time of the crash. Benavides and her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, who was seriously injured, were standing outside of the SUV when McGee’s Tesla plowed into it.The trial comes at a particularly risky moment for TeslaThe case, which is being heard in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, was filed by Angulo and the family of Benavides.Tesla plans to argue that the company isn’t at fault because Autopilot was not fully in control of the vehicle at the time of the crash, citing data that shows that McGee overrode the driver assist by pressing the accelerator at the time of the crash. Also, Tesla has long argued that drivers bear responsibility when crashes occur involving Autopilot. On its website, the company says that its driver-assistance systems ”require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”The plaintiffs will argue that the system bears some responsibility for failing to warn the driver that a crash was imminent. The vehicle ignored a stop sign before the crash, and the automatic emergency braking should have worked even if Autopilot was not engaged. Still, it will be tough for the plaintiffs to convince a jury that Tesla was at fault. In Florida automobile liability cases, the standard is “whether the car manufacturer exhibited a reckless disregard for human life equivalent to manslaughter by designing and marketing the vehicle,” the court notes.Indeed, in another case involving a crash from 2019, Tesla was found not to be liable for the death of a Model 3 owner whose vehicle crashed while driving in Autopilot. And in another case, a jury ruled against plaintiff Justine Hsu, who sued Tesla after her vehicle hit a median while using Autopilot.Tesla has managed to dodge responsibility for fatal crashes involving its products for a long time. The company was forced to issue several recalls after a federal investigation into dozens of crashes involving Tesla vehicles with Autopilot, but it has never been criminally indicted.In 2023, Musk laughed off a question from investors as to whether his company would accept legal liability for its self-driving vehicles in the future. “There’s a lot of people who assume we have legal liability,” Musk said, “judging by the lawsuits.”Still, the stakes are incredibly high for Tesla — but then again, when are they not? The presiding judge in the Florida case has ruled that the plaintiffs may seek punitive damages from Tesla. And because Tesla has refused to impose geographic limits on Autopilot, despite evidence that the system was ill-equipped to handle some situations, the judge said that a jury could reasonably rule against Tesla.“A reasonable jury could find that Tesla acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit,” she wrote.

I've been using Google's AI-powered research assistant, NotebookLM, since before most people knew it existed. I'm talking about the time when it was still tucked away in Google Labs. If you aren't familiar with what I'm talking about, Google Labs is essentially Google's experimental playground, where the tech giant tests out ideas before releasing them more broadly.

When you’re new to the self-hosting ecosystem, you’ll come across several FOSS utilities capable of replacing their premium, cloud-based mainstream equivalents. So many, in fact, that you’ll often have a hard time choosing the right application for your specific tasks. But once you’ve built an empire of locally-hosted utilities, you’ll come across services specifically designed to help you maintain your application stack.