The Slate Truck is an electric two-seater with 150 miles of range and no stereo. | Image: Slate AutoAsk just about anybody, and they'll tell you that new cars are too expensive. In the wake of tariffs shaking the auto industry and with the Trump administration pledging to kill the federal EV incentive, that situation isn't looking to get better soon, especially for anyone wanting something battery-powered. Changing that overly spendy status quo is going to take something radical, and it's hard to get more radical than what Slate Auto has planned.Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it's taken three years of development to get to this point.But this is more than bargain-basement motoring. Slate is presenting its truck as minimalist design with DIY purpose, an attempt to not just go cheap but to create a new category of vehicle with a huge focus on personalization. That design also enables a low-cost approach to …Read the full story at The Verge.

Sometimes it can be hard to justify a mini PC. But if you need a good amount of computing power in a compact size, and you don't have a lot of space, the mini PC can be the ideal solution. It's also important to highlight that mini PCs have gotten a lot better since they were first introduced, with most modern versions offering plenty of power under the hood, along with expansion options as well.

Bluesky is currently experiencing a major outage.On my desktop browser, my Bluesky feed won’t load at all — it just shows a spinning loading circle. I’m seeing something similar with the mobile app; I can log in, but when I do, the feed doesn’t low. Other Verge colleagues are also experiencing issues.In a 6:55PM ET message on its status page, Bluesky says that that there are “major PDS networking problems” and that “we are investigating a major outage with Bluesky hosted PDS instances.” In a 7:38PM ET message, it says that “we have identified a likely root cause and are rolling out a fix to the Bluesky PDS fleet.”Bluesky didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. The company also hasn’t posted to its Twitter account about what might be going on. In November, Bluesky had some issues with slow-loading feeds and notifications because one of its internet providers had downtime because of a cut fiber cable. That outage happened on what Bluesky said at the time was its “highest traffic day ever.”Update, April 24th: Bluesky says it’s rolling out a fix.

There’s no shortage of task management apps out there, from the powerful features of Todoist to the simplicity of many niche tools. Yet, after years of juggling multiple solutions, I’ve found that Microsoft To Do stands head and shoulders above the rest. Here are some reasons I still think that Microsoft To Do is the ultimate to‑do list app for productivity, seamless workflow integration, and pretty nice to work with.

Ziff Davis, the owner of several digital outlets like CNET, PCMag, IGN, and Everyday Health, is suing OpenAI over claims of copyright infringement, as first reported by The New York Times. In the lawsuit, the digital media company accuses OpenAI of  “intentionally and relentlessly” creating “exact copies” of its outlets’ works without permission. The company also alleges that OpenAI trained its AI models on its work despite Ziff Davis instructing web crawlers not to scrape its data using a robots.txt file, adding that OpenAI allegedly removed copyright information from the content it sucks up.Ziff Davis currently owns more than 45 media brands and has over 3,800 employees, making it one of the biggest publishers to sue OpenAI so far. In the lawsuit, the company said it publishes nearly 2 million new articles every year, and averages over 292 million user visits each month.Some outlets, including The Verge parent company Vox Media, The Associated Press, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, have signed content licensing agreements with OpenAI. However, Ziff Davis is joining The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet, and a group of Canadian media companies on the list of those suing OpenAI over copyright infringement.Ziff Davis alleges that OpenAI has “copied, reproduced, and stored” its outlets’ work, which it uses to create responses in ChatGPT. “Ziff Davis has identified hundreds of full copies of the body text of Ziff Davis Works in merely the small sample of OpenAI’s WebText dataset that it made publicly available,” the company claims.Ziff Davis is asking the court to stop OpenAI from “exploiting” its works, as well as to destroy any dataset or models containing its content.“ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives,” OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom said in a statement to The Verge. “Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.” Ziff Davis declined to comment.

I didn’t realize how much filament I was wasting until I started making minor changes to my slicer settings. What began as a few tweaks to speed up prints quickly turned into a full-on overhaul of how I sliced nearly everything. These aren’t obscure experimental features or gimmicks — they’re practical, everyday settings that made my prints cleaner, faster, and more efficient. If you want to reduce waste without sacrificing quality, these settings truly made a difference.

The default Windows File Explorer does the job just fine, but what if you want something a little extra? For instance, you want the File Explorer to do a specific function, but when you look for it, you discover that Microsoft hasn't added it yet (if it ever will). Fortunately, there are plenty of third-party apps that shunt File Explorer out of the way and supply a different experience that adds user-requested features to the app.

This shot was probably made by AI — the clipboards and Mason jar are good tells. | Image: MicrosoftMicrosoft has revealed that it’s created a minute-long advert for its Surface Pro and Surface Laptop hardware using generative AI. But there’s a twist: it released the ad almost three months ago, and no-one seemed to notice the AI elements.The ad, which went live on YouTube on January 30th, isn’t entirely made up of generated content. In a Microsoft Design blog post published Wednesday, senior design communications manager Jay Tan admits that “the occasional AI hallucination would rear its head,” meaning the creators had to correct some of the AI output and integrate it with real footage.“When deciding on which shots within the ad were to be AI generated, the team determined that any intricate movement such as closeups of hands typing on keyboards had to be shot live,” Tan says. “Shots that were quick cuts or with limited motion, however, were prime for co-creation with generative AI tools.”Microsoft hasn’t specified exactly which shots were generated using AI, though Tan did detail the process. AI tools were first used to generate “a compelling script, storyboards and a pitch deck.” Microsoft’s team then used a combination of written prompts and sample images to get a chatbot to generate text prompts that could be fed into image generators. Those images were iterated on further, edited to correct hallucinations and other errors, and then fed into video generators like Hailuo or Kling. Those are the only specific AI tools named by Tan, with the chatbots and image generators unspecified.“We probably went through thousands of different prompts, chiseling away at the output little by little until we got what we wanted. There’s never really a one-and-done prompt,” says creative director Cisco McCarthy. “It comes from being relentless.” That makes the process sound like more work than it might have been otherwise, but visual designer Brian Townsend estimates that the team “probably saved 90% of the time and cost it would typically take.”The process echoes recent comments from Microsoft’s design chief Jon Friedman to my colleague Tom Warren, that AI is going to become one more tool in creatives’ arsenals, rather than replacing them outright. As Friedman puts it, “suddenly the design job is how do you edit?”Despite the fact that the video has been online for almost three months, there’s little sign that anyone noticed the AI output until now. The ad has a little over 40,000 views on YouTube at the time of writing, and none of the top comments speculate that the video was produced using AI. Knowing that AI was involved, it’s easy enough to guess where — shots of meeting notes that clearly weren’t hand-written, a Mason jar that’s suspiciously large, the telling AI sheen to it all — but without knowing to look for it, it’s clear that plenty of viewers couldn’t spot the difference. The ad’s quick cuts help hide the AI output’s flaws, but suggest that in the right hands, AI tools are now powerful enough to go unnoticed.

There’s no denying that an enterprise-grade server can deliver top-notch performance when running virtual machines. But if you’re planning to run a couple of containers for lightweight apps, there’s no need to break the bank over a new workstation. Despite its tiny form factor, a Raspberry Pi SBC is more than enough to handle a couple of containerized services – especially if you go for the newer models with more than 4GB memory.

A group of tabletop game makers and other American small businesses are filed a lawsuit on Thursday against President Donald Trump and his administration to attempt to stop his tariffs. The lawsuit alleges the tariffs are “unlawful and unconstitutional” and details how they are creating challenges for the plaintiffs’ businesses.The tabletop companies that are among the plaintiffs in the case include Stonemaier Games (which announced its involvement in the lawsuit earlier this week, as reported by Polygon), Spielcraft Games, Rookie Mage Games, XYZ Game Labs, and Tinkerhouse. The 145 percent tariffs imposed on goods imported from China are a significant part of the burden, as spelled out in examples in the lawsuit:Stonemaier Games, which has its products printed at a factory in China, has imports that are “ready to ship on which it estimates it will pay millions in tariffs pursuant to the actions challenged herein.”Spielcraft Games has paid $4,335.40 in tariffs for “a board game set” that it imported from China this month.Rookie Mage Games has paid $3,120.80 in tariffs for “products imported from China” this month and will have to pay tariffs on “all future imports.”XYZ Game Labs estimates that it will have to pay “substantial tariffs” on goods manufactured in China that it plans to import later this year and on “all future imports.”Tinkerhouse is producing a “tabletop roleplaying game accessory” in China that the company has made a down payment on. The company estimates it will have to pay “substantial tariffs” on when it imports the accessory later this year. It also expects that it has to pay tariffs on “all future imports.”Other plaintiffs in the case include Princess Awesome, a clothing company, Mischief Toy Store, a toy store based in Saint Paul, MN, and others. The lawsuit was filed on Thursday with the US Court of International Trade.The lawsuit from the small companies joins a growing list of parties fighting the tariffs in court. On Wednesday, 12 states sued the administration, with New York Attorney General Letitia James calling the tariffs “unlawful” in a statement. The CEO of Learning Resources, a toy company that also filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over tariffs, told CBS MoneyWatch that “this path is catastrophic.”However, the future of the tariffs is also murky right now, with The Wall Street Journal reporting yesterday that the Trump administration is thinking about reducing the tariffs on China

Home Assistant is a deep rabbit hole that can consume a lot of time and money, depending on how far down you wish to traverse. I've used it for many months now, configuring custom integrations with HACS, using Nginx for a secure method to access all the functions when outside the internal network, and adding everything I can to the platform. Throw in Zigbee and you've got a powerful hub for turning your house into a truly smart home. Here are some rather unexpected ways Home Assistant improved my life.

While Switch 2 upgrades for games such as Breath of the Wild will still cost $9.99, Nintendo is pricing Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Super Mario Party Jamboree’s upgrades at $19.99, reports Nintendo Life. The listings for both Mario Party and Kirby expansions went live today on retailer sites like Best Buy.The very joyful Kirby is getting a new Star-Crossed World mode to play, and Mario Party is getting Jamboree TV with extra mini-games. So, in addition to better graphics, you’re getting expansion-like updates as well. For those who already purchased the games at full price and buy the expansions,  it will cost the same $80 ($60 original Switch game plus $20 Switch 2 Expansion) in the end as buying the game for the first time on Switch 2.Meanwhile,Tears of the Kingdom on the original Switch costs $69.99, and with the $9.99 expansion pack, it totals to the same $79.99 price of a new Switch 2 Edition copy. Both Zelda upgrade packs focus on visual and performance improvements, although the new Zelda Notes smartphone connectivity features can help you find more Korok seeds.What the updates won’t do, however, is lower the price of the Switch 2, or help you find one, since preorders from major retailers are already sold out.