If your Wi-Fi is flaky in the bedroom or dropping in your home office, you might be looking at a $400 Wi-Fi 7 mesh system, thinking that newer is better. However, a better solution to the problem is digging through your old junk drawer or some boxes in your loft to find your old Wi-Fi 5 or Wi-Fi 6 router. It's not slow; it just has a different job now.

The Varmblixt is a smart donut-shaped light fixture that can sit on a table or be mounted on a wall. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Ikea's popular Varmblixt lamp just got a smart home glow-up. The delightfully bulbous light now features color-changing, dimming, and smart home control. I tested the new smart lamp in my daughter's room and found it made a great bedside lamp and added a fun touch of ambiance to her space. While she's rarely a fan of me adding smart tech to her room, she did give this an "It's nice" accolade - high praise from my 15-year-old.The donut lamp, as it's known for its distinctive shape resembling everyone's favorite sweet treat, can be wall-mounted or set flat on a table. It comes with a long power cable, which helps with placement, and differs …Read the full story at The Verge.

The version posted by @realdonaldtrump/Truth Social. Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about Big Tech power plays in Washington and beyond. (And when I say beyond, I mean the great beyond, like Heaven, maybe.) If you've found your way to this newsletter from the wild, annual subscriptions are currently 50 percent off. That's $30 a year for access to an entire newsroom full of reporting about technology and how it's eating society alive - not just in politics!(I will also accept confidential tips at [email protected].)You can't spell "antichrist" without "AI"Of all the things that would have fractured the religious right's alliance with Donald Tr …Read the full story at The Verge.

Does this sound familiar? Whether your home theater's surround system is handled by a soundbar or an AV receiver, audio drop-outs and other issues while watching movies or playing games seem to be a fact of life. For me, it gets worse the more devices that are connected to my TV or receiver, with the HDMI signal on each device trying to take over the screen.

Despite my general distaste for shoehorned AI features that nobody wants, I must admit that large language models have boosted my productivity quite a bit. And I don’t just mean cloud-based LLMs, either. I’ve spent the last couple of months pairing my local models with open-source tools, and these LLMs are surprisingly good at tackling OCR workflows, generating bookmark tags, organizing notes, and other bogus tasks.

Google is launching a new Gemini app on Mac that allows you to interact with the AI assistant without switching windows on your desktop. With the app, you can use the Option + Space shortcut to pull up a floating chat bubble, where you can ask Gemini questions and share your window.Before sharing your window, you'll need to give Gemini permission to access your system's information before sharing your window. From there, the AI assistant will pull information from what you're looking at to help answer your question.It looks a bit like Apple's upgraded version of Spotlight, which you can now use to perform actions on your device, as well …Read the full story at The Verge.

Like probably most people, ChatGPT was the first AI chatbot I used. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that I actually gave its competitors a fair shot, and Gemini ended up surprising me the most. It’s heaps better than other tools for real-time data, and because I’m already deep in the Google ecosystem anyway, the integration just made sense. So at some point, it just became one of my daily drivers, and I started exploring what it could do beyond just answering questions.

Ford is shaking things up as it relates to its EV and software teams. Doug Field, who left Apple five years ago to helm Ford's multibillion-dollar bet on electric vehicles and software, is stepping down next month. Getting a promotion will be Alan Clarke, the ex-Tesla engineer who now leads Ford's California-based skunkworks lab. Clarke's new title will be vice president of advanced development projects, and he will continue to helm the effort to develop Ford's Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) Platform.The shake-up comes less five months after Ford announced a massive $19.5 billion writedown on its EV investment, as well as the discontinua …Read the full story at The Verge.

Open WebUI has been the default recommendation for anyone running a local LLM for a while now, and for good reason. It's the closest thing to ChatGPT's polish that you can self-host, and if you're already using vLLM, Ollama, llama.cpp, or any other local provider, spinning up Open WebUI takes just a few minutes with Docker. For a long time, though, I kind of saw it as the front-end you used despite its gaps, as it lacked a lot of features that you could get through other front-ends. It was great at serving a model through the browser, and it looked good, but it was always missing a handful of features you'd be giving up by not using a cloud option.

FTC seal. | Image: The Verge The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and a group of eight states have announced a proposed settlement with big ad agencies that will prevent them from working together to avoid certain platforms like X based on their political viewpoints. In a complaint, the FTC argues that ad agencies violated antitrust rules by agreeing to a common set of brand safety rules, which would disfavor sites and services deemed to contain content like misinformation. That includes establishing groups like the World Federation of Advertisers' now-defunct Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) to coordinate collective brand safety efforts. GARM was named as …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've been using Windows 10 on my main PC since 2017, and I've been mostly satisfied, so much so that I plan to stick with it a little longer. That said, until last year, I couldn't get rid of OS corruption issues that kept recurring every few months. My SSD was obviously the first thing I suspected, but everything seemed to check out. The one thing I glossed over was the drive's firmware, which I had never thought of updating. When I finally did it, it fixed all my Windows corruption issues overnight. I haven't had to revert to a system image in well over a year. I suspect many of you have never updated your SSD's firmware, assuming it didn't need updating. While these updates can be rare, skipping them can be detrimental to your SSD's performance, stability, and data integrity, as I found out the hard way.

Live Nation-Ticketmaster is an illegal monopolist, a Manhattan jury found, according to Bloomberg. The jury found the company liable on three counts: illegally monopolizing the market for live event ticketing, amphitheaters, and tying its concert promotions business with the use of its venues, Bloomberg reported.The verdict, reached after several days of deliberation, leaves the live entertainment giant open to a potential breakup - which was the stated goal of the lawsuit back when it was filed by the Biden administration's Department of Justice. Such an outcome would go far beyond the settlement that the Trump administration's DOJ reache …Read the full story at The Verge.