PLA is still the filament I’d recommend to a beginner if the goal is getting a 3D printer up and running without turning the first few prints into a troubleshooting exercise. It behaves predictably, prints cleanly, and I generally know what to expect when I load a spool. My problem with PLA starts later, once the print is off the bed and in use. I’ve become much less willing to equate “easy to print” with “good material for the job,” especially when that job involves being dropped, bumped, flexed, or otherwise treated like a normal object rather than a display piece.

Port forwarding is the default move for remote access. People do it because it's simple. I too was in the same situation. I used to open a port for each service I wanted to access remotely. The question never crossed my mind: “What would happen if I opened a port on my router?”

My living room’s TV has had a Fire TV Stick 4K plugged into its HDMI port for the past few years. The Fire TV Stick does its job of providing quick streaming access to Netflix, Prime Video, and other services my family enjoys. As I delved deeper into building my home lab, the Fire TV Stick struggled to keep up. Initially, I just tried using the streaming stick to access my home media server and assumed that was the end of it.

At CES 2026, HDMI 2.2 looked every bit like the future — we saw a 500Hz gaming monitor showing off impossibly smooth motion, and the shiny new Ultra96 cables from Elka that sat right beside it made us all want them immediately. For everyone watching, that demo was enough to make them wonder just how far behind their own setups had fallen.

Uploading personal documents to cloud chatbots is pretty normalized, but that doesn't mean that you don't feel a little pause before doing it. You know that your private information is "somewhere out there" now, but because we can't see what's actually happening, it's easy to sweep it under the rug.

On Friday, Amazon customers received an email alerting them to an update to the site's terms and conditions. Most notably, it stated that disputes would now be resolved through arbitration and said users agree to a class action waiver. Amazon framed this as a "fast and efficient" way to resolve issues, but it notably would prevent customers from seeking the involvement of a judge or jury in most circumstances. Customers can still take Amazon to small claims court in certain circumstances, though payouts are often limited to a few thousand dollars.The relevant sections of Amazon's legal policies page now read:YOU AND WE AGREE THAT ANY …Read the full story at The Verge.

I could ask my local LLM to write a script, troubleshoot a Docker container, or explain how to organize a folder full of files, and it would usually give me a sensible answer. That answer was also where its job ended. My local LLM could not handle an entire task on its own.

For three weeks, a $600 gaming router sat open in my laptop tab. Big, bulky, eight antennas, a glowing logo. I kept going back to that tab because I kept losing gunfights. My shots landed a beat late, and I skipped a heartbeat. My friends saw enemies, and I saw “game over”.

I've tested a pretty wide range of docking stations in my day, but the Wavlink 6-in-1 USB4 Dock (WL-UMD4406) is a pretty unique one, for better or for worse. It comes with just five extra ports for your device, but it gives you an SSD enclosure as well, and that's an important part of the setup.

In every possible universe? | Image: Backwoodz Studioz "Breakups are… tough."It's the opening lines of an interlude towards the end of DOOMED! Called "It Happens in Every Universe." It's also basically the thesis of the entire record. It's no grand revelation, but it's a well-trodden subject that Open Mike Eagle manages to mine for artistic gold.Eagle's subject matter is usually personal, and his productions tinged with nostalgia. But DOOMED! is his most intimate album yet. A lot of that is due to the production from Kenny Segal. The two have traveled in the same orbit and worked together before, but this is the first full-length album release from the two. These are some of Segal's most c …Read the full story at The Verge.

ChatGPT's desktop app on macOS has a new feature called Computer History that turns your actions into training data, learning how you work, suggesting automations, and even picking up tasks you left half done. It uses your activity to build a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can reference when you make a request.The feature is opt-in, rather than opt-out, and you can exclude certain apps and websites from Computer History, and you can delete entries if you want finer-grained control. Ari Weinstein, Product and Engineering manager at OpenAI, said on X that Computer History will automatically ignore content in incognito or private browser ta …Read the full story at The Verge.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI safety, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it started It all started in July, when one of OpenAI's autonomous AI agents went rogue during a cybersecurity test. The agent escaped its isolated testing environment, accessed the internet, and hacked another company, Hugging Face. A few years ago, that might have sounded like science fiction. But, broadly speaking, that's exactly what happened, and the incident kicked off a wave of concern over what increa …Read the full story at The Verge.