Gears of War: E-Day. This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the bleak state of the video game industry, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedMicrosoft closed out Summer Game Fest with a bang. The company's annual June showcase was packed with crowd-pleasers: Halo, Gears of War, Fable, a translucent Xbox, and even some pleasant surprises like new Persona and Crazy Taxi games. It was the kind of event that harkened back to the boisterous days of E3, when the industry was in a healthier place an …Read the full story at The Verge.

Local AI seems to rise in popularity month after month, but yet, the question of accessibility requires an honest approach. Running a model locally means installing Ollama or LM Studio, researching which model fits your use case, checking whether it's compatible with your hardware, and hoping you own the right hardware to begin with. Even the most patient, beginner-friendly tutorials tend to assume a pre-existing knowledge of terminals, VRAM budgets, and quantization formats.

Before Keurig, the coffee in your office was almost certainly terrible. Old, burned, made by someone who would rather poorly eyeball than properly measure. Just altogether gross. After Keurig? You could make your own coffee, a cup at a time, exactly when you needed it. The single-cup brewer was an elegant solution to an extremely common problem. At least, that's how it started.On this episode of Version History, we dig into the history of the Keurig, and the ways in which the idea got vastly bigger than anyone expected. K-Cups and Keurig machines became ubiquitous in offices all across the US, then quickly began to invade our homes as well …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Sourdough Sidekick was codeveloped with King Arthur Baking Company. Baking sourdough bread is inherently old-fashioned, relying on natural fermentation and wild yeast instead of the simple, predictable commercial stuff. So it might sound anathema to bring a gadget into the mix. The trick to the Sourdough Sidekick - backed and branded by King Arthur flour - is that it promises to automate the boring bit of sourdough baking: starter management. It feeds your starter flour and water on a set schedule, ready for exactly when you want to bake, leaving you to focus on kneading, shaping, and the actual baking. Like any single-purpose kitchen gadget, you'll have to be confident you'll get enough use to justify b …Read the full story at The Verge.

First, you drop bombs, then you send aid. Totally logical. | Image: Definitive Jux There was a period in the early aughts when Definitive Jux (nee: Def Jux) seemed like it was going to be the future of hip hop. While the label featured plenty of experimental, boundary-pushing, and politically minded acts, Lif stood out as the most "conscious rapper" in the traditional sense. It was clear though, that label head El-P envisioned that as an important part of Def Jux's identity, as the first record it put out was 2000's Enter the Colossus EP, from Lif.Mr. Lif's follow-up was 2002's Emergency Rations EP, a sort of place setter for the full-length I, Phantom just a couple of months later. It opens with a skit about Lif missing …Read the full story at The Verge.

Vizio OS works well, but you don’t even need to use it. When I first started testing Vizio's 65-inch Mini LED Quantum TV, I thought the big story was that Vizio was back and that it had a quantum-dot TV for under $398 - the cheapest on the market. Vizio's been pretty quiet since it was acquired by Walmart in 2024, so putting out a TV with quantum dots, which allow for higher brightness levels and more accurate color, at a budget price seemed like a strong comeback.But that's not the big story. While those two points are intriguing, the big news about the Mini LED Quantum TV is that Vizio accidentally made the best dumb TV on the market.Vizio Mini LED Quantum TVWhere to Buy: $398 at Walmart ( …Read the full story at The Verge.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve tinkered with multiple virtualization platforms, ranging from ESXi to the behemoth Harvester, and although each distro has its own perks, I’ve stuck with Proxmox for my home server tasks. Between its killer KVM performance, solid LXC support, detailed SDN stack, terrific cluster provisions, and useful first-party backup and management tools, Proxmox is quite the force to be reckoned with when it comes to virtualization projects.

There’s a specific kind of confidence that comes from opening a fresh roll of PETG. The bag is tight, the desiccant packet is still inside, and the filament looks untouched. It’s easy to treat that as proof that the spool is ready to go straight into the printer. I’ve done that plenty of times, and I’ve also wondered why a brand-new roll suddenly started stringing before I even had a chance to blame my slicer settings.

Ray tracing has come a long way since Nvidia first made it the headline feature of its RTX 20-series GPUs back in 2018. I don't know if you remember, but the initial impressions were mixed because you had to drop to 1080p to get better reflections or shadows, even on a flagship GPU like the RTX 2080 Ti. Gamers made it clear that the performance hit was simply not worth it, especially when the visual upgrade didn't feel dramatic. Then we got DLSS, which helped offset the FPS hit, but its early implementations looked like a blurry mess.

A look at in-game cosmetics you’ll get with the Ultimate edition. | Image: Rockstar Games Rockstar's long-awaited Grand Theft Auto VI is launching November 19th, 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X consoles. The game will be available digitally at launch, with physical cases containing codes, not discs, so your options for preordering are straightforward. The preloading phase for the game begins on November 12th, which should give you plenty of time to install the game. There are two versions of the game to choose from, the $79.99 Standard and $99.99 Ultimate editions. Both include the same preorder perks. You'll get the Vintage Vice City Pack when the game launches. It's a set of in-game items that includes vehicles, we …Read the full story at The Verge.

Vibe-coding tools have this weird framing problem where everyone talks about them like they're strictly for developers. Which might make sense on the surface because the output is code and the interfaces of these tools often look like code editors. But the whole point of these tools is that they're natural language first: they're meant for you to describe what you want in plain language, then you can build it. That's the actual pitch. Vibe-coding tools are meant to make coding tasks more accessible to the general population.

I call BS: the founding fathers definitely would have been Microsoft Teams users. | Image: Google "Group project, but make it 1776." That's how a new commercial for Google Workspace opens. And things only get cringier from there. The clip imagines what it would be like if the founding fathers turned to Google's collaboration tools and Gemini to help them draft the Declaration of Independence. Ben Franklin texts Thomas Jefferson to check on the status of a draft, who takes a photo and uses AI to transcribe it into a Google Doc. Franklin and Adams hop in to make edits in suggestion mode, Gemini finds them a meeting time, takes notes during a Google Meet call, and then Nano Banana whips up a seal for the United States featuring a turkey ( …Read the full story at The Verge.