Image: Laura Normand / The Verge Donald Trump has launched a new meme coin, according to posts from his X and Truth Social accounts last night. The posts, which have come just days before Trump’s inauguration, were initially met with suspicion by many that his accounts had been hacked.Skeptics highlighted by Decrypt last night pointed to several red flags, such as that the millions of dollars seeding the project came from Binance and Gate, which only serve overseas customers. The coin’s website credits the project to the same group behind Trump’s NFTs, as noted by Cointelegraph, which reports that sources close to Trump’s family confirmed the announcements’ legitimacy. Both posts remain up as of this morning. Screenshot: X Trump’s official X account announced a new meme coin on Friday. The idea that Trump would debut a meme coin is no big surprise, given his multiple NFT collections and his introduction of a crypto platform last year. He has made cryptocurrency a big part of his new agenda and has assembled a crypto and AI-focused tech policy team led by “crypto czar” David Sacks. Trump also plans to issue an executive order naming crypto a “national imperative or priority” after he’s inaugurated next week, Bloomberg reported ahead of the weekend.

Photo by NASA / Isaac Watson Canoo announced yesterday it is ceasing operations “immediately” and that it has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in Delaware. The EV startup estimates in its filing that its assets are worth $126 million and that it owes over $164 million to its creditors, TechCrunch noted yesterday.Now, the US will appoint “a Bankruptcy Trustee to oversee the liquidation of the Company’s assets and the distribution of proceeds to creditors,” Canoo writes. The company says it chose to file after failing to get support from either the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office or foreign investors. Canoo had signaled its dire situation last month when it idled its Oklahoma operations and put its employees on a “mandatory unpaid break.” Before that, it had lost a steady stream of executives, including all of its founders.“We are truly disappointed that things turned out as they did,” Canoo chairman and CEO Tony Aquila said in the announcement before thanking various government and business entities Canoo has dealt with. Those dealings have included producing shuttles for NASA’s Artemis crew and an agreement to build 4,500 electric delivery vans for Walmart.

Building a PC is often considered to be an "adult LEGO" activity, but it can sometimes be a tad intimidating, especially for a first-time builder. Even if you manage to get a great PC parts list from a friend, subreddit, or YouTuber, you still need to assemble everything without making mistakes that could cost hundreds of dollars or more to fix.

If you own an AMD Ryzen CPU and have done a Google search for information about RAM overclocking, speed, and stability in the last 7 years, chances are you might have come across something called the "Infinity Fabric." Usually brought into discussions to explain the somewhat unique relationship of AMD CPUs with high-speed memory, Infinity Fabric is an internal interconnect bus that forms the core of AMD's scalable CPU architecture.

x86 has been the primary architecture of PCs and servers over the last few decades, and yet, we're starting to see a tangible shift towards something different. Arm is becoming more and more commonplace, with software vendors finally building their applications for Arm platforms on Windows with the release of the Snapdragon X Elite. Plus, Apple's own shift towards Arm means that an entire segment of mainstream and professional machines are no longer using x86, too.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called TikTok’s threat to “go dark” tomorrow a “stunt,” and said there is no reason that TikTok or any other companies should take any actions under the ban before the Trump administration is sworn in Monday morning, several news outlets are reporting.“It is a stunt, and we see no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions in the next few days before the Trump Administration takes office on Monday,” MSNBC quotes Jean-Pierre as saying. “We have laid out our position clearly and straightforwardly: actions to implement this law will fall to the next administration. So TikTok and other companies should take up any concerns with them.”The statement comes one day after TikTok threatened to go offline if the Biden administration doesn’t offer reassurance that companies like Apple and Google won’t be held liable for defying the ban, which the Supreme Court upheld yesterday. Company CEO Shou Chew also appealed to Donald Trump, saying the company is “grateful” for his support of the platform. Trump said that a “90-day extension is something that will be most likely done” during an interview with Meet The Press moderator Kristen Welker for NBC News. That followed reporting earlier this week that the incoming President plans to issue an executive order doing so. Given that the ban’s deadline is up before he’s sworn in, it’s not clear whether Trump can actually extend it. He can choose not to enforce the ban, just as Biden says he will, but that still leaves Apple and Google to decide if Trump’s word is worth the legal risk that would come with defying the ban by leaving the app available for download.

We love our video games to death, so much so that we're willing to stretch ourselves to buy overpriced GPUs, additional consoles, and way more powerful hardware than we really need, simply to make games look pretty and smooth. What we also love doing (almost as much) is ranting about the things that are wrong with the gaming industry.

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge Instagram will now let you upload Reels that are up to 3 minutes long, doubling the 90-second limit the platform had in place before, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri announced today.He credits today’s change to users’ feedback saying that the 90 seconds “is just too short.” That’s a big turnaround for Mosseri, who said in July last year that the platform wouldn’t pursue longform videos because it could compromise the platform’s “core identity to connect people with friends.” It also comes as TikTok, which started allowing 3-minute videos in 2021, is gearing up to go dark on Sunday in response to an imminent US ban. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)Instagram has been slow to bump the length of Reels — it’s been more than two years since it started allowing minute-and-a-half videos. The company has tested extending the limit to as much as 10 minutes but has held off on rolling that out, leaving the ability to post long videos to non-Reels posts.

Adam Scott in Severance’s season 1 finale. | Image: Apple After a long wait, Severance is back. Season 2 premiered on Apple TV Plus on January 17th, more than two years after the first season wrapped up. The wait was particularly hard because of how the season 1 finale ended — a massive cliffhanger that would completely upend the lives of almost everyone in this sci-fi thriller. Cliffhangers are a tricky business. They can help keep viewers interested in whatever comes next, but they can also be frustrating, seeming to withhold information purely for the purpose of keeping people hooked.Severance has managed this balancing act well so far, and I had the chance to talk to some of the creative team behind the show — creator Dan Erickson, director Ben Stiller, and star Adam Scott — about how they’ve pulled it off. “Honestly it’s just sort of guessing in your mind,” Stiller tells The Verge. “You try to think about what the stakes are that we’ve established, and hopefully you’ve earned it by the end.”One of the trickiest parts for Severance, at least early on, was that the team wasn’t really sure how audiences would react. It’s a weird show that follows a group of office workers who have their brains surgically altered to separate their... Read the full story at The Verge.

It's such an odd time to be an Intel fan. The company continues to struggle with its desktop CPUs but Lunar Lake mobile processors and Arc discrete graphics cards have been largely well received. I'm a big fan of Intel's push into the affordable GPU market segment, offering gamers excellent value with Battlemage GPUs for less than $250. The latest addition to the family is the Intel Arc B570, a 1080p and 1440p GPU for $219, seriously undercutting some of the offerings from direct competitors. It's a great time to be a PC gamer as Intel looks to break up the GPU duopoly and here's why these cards will be a sleeper hit for desktop systems.

Image: The Verge Microsoft is testing AI-powered Windows search in a new dev channel build for Windows 11 Insider testers. Announced in October, it uses semantic indexing to let users search for local files using more casual language. Like other Microsoft AI features, you’ll need a Copilot Plus PC to use it.The feature applies whether you’re using search boxes in Settings, File Explorer, or the taskbar. And you don’t need to be connected to the internet for it to work, thanks to the NPU chips on Copilot Plus computers. For now, AI search is limited to Windows settings and files with image and text formats that include JPEG, PNG, PDF, TXT, and XLS. Image: Microsoft Microsoft says that search only works for files in locations you’ve chosen to index. Users can tweak those locations using options found under Settings > Privacy & security > Searching Windows, or turn on “Enhanced” to index their whole machine. The company adds that the feature will eventually expand to include cloud data such as that stored in OneDrive.AI-powered Windows search “will gradually roll out to Windows Insiders on Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs,” Microsoft writes, with support for Intel or AMD Copilot Plus computers later. The feature will work for machines set to Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish languages. Image: Microsoft In addition to the new search, the build also includes AI writing tools offered by Click to Do, a feature that lets you choose from context-sensitive menus of options when you hold the Windows key down and left-click on your screen. Now, when you click a block of text and select Rewrite, there’s a “Refine” option that can correct grammar for you.

Ask a PC builder whether they care about performance or looks, and they'll probably answer "both." Building a PC that looks unique, however, is easier said than done. Since everyone usually builds with the same overused components, it's hard to craft a PC that stands out. You either end up creating the same fish tank PC as countless others, or an understated black or white-themed build with no RGB.