(L-R) Sen. Mike Rounds, Pamela Brown, Chris Malachowsky, Kevin O'Leary, Gabriele Caccia, Tammy Haddad, Michele L. Jawando, Sen. Mark Warner, Michael Kelly and Major General Patrick Ellis attend the Second Annual AI Honors. | Getty Images for Washington AI N Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about tech politics, tech influence, and tech shenanigans in Washington, DC. (If you're not a subscriber, you can get on board here.) We're back after a two-week hiatus, during most of which I was gallivanting in the Netherlands for a family wedding, and a trip to the Heineken Experience, which is, truly, an ~experience~.Before I left, I asked everyone in Washington to please chill out while I was gone. This clearly did not happen, and I have returned to a political landscape that can be best described as that meme from Community where the room is on fire. Let's get into th …Read the full story at The Verge.

The RAMageddon crisis has got Microsoft rethinking its Xbox console hardware business. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox strategy chief Matthew Ball have both revealed this week that Microsoft is reevaluating plans for its next-generation Project Helix console and exploring "radically different" console business models in the meantime."We are working very hard to rethink everything that we can about Helix, which is a console we are committed to shipping, and we are very cognizant of the ways in which we need to change as a company to make sure it is affordable, to make sure that it's flexible," said Ball in an interview with The Game Business …Read the full story at The Verge.

Connecting AI tools to anything that contains loads of personal information has always felt like a step too far for me. Claude has been the only AI tool I've stuck with for this long and is usually the first, or only, one I open every day. But I'm not a security expert, and the things I keep reading from people who actually are have made me cautious about hooking it up to my real accounts and tools that span beyond work and projects, stuff where much more of my personal data lives.

What good are our AI tools if they can't complement some of the most structurally repetitive tasks in our workflow? After all, that was a key part of the promise long before any of these utilities landed in our productivity stacks, and even now, it remains the most practical test for whether they deliver on it. If you look at some of the most common research tasks, like compiling weekly reports, pricing roundups, and even academic tasks like developing literature reviews, you'll notice the methodology behind them largely remains the same in almost every cycle.

Used enterprise SAS drives are one of the best-kept secrets in the home lab world, featuring massive capacity, excellent reliability ratings, and prices that make new consumer NAS drives look like a rip-off. With that said, they're a completely different animal to SATA drives that most people start with, and the amount of effort and cost it takes to go from finding and ordering drives to actually getting a working NAS using SAS is a bumpier road than people suggest. I learned most of this the hard way on my own build, and if you plan to go down the same path, these four pieces of knowledge will be instrumental.

Chinese EV colossus BYD has announced plans to speed up its conquest of the European auto market with the rollout of superfast Flash Chargers across the continent. BYD has already installed the first new chargers in Germany and the UK, and plans to roll out 3,000 across Europe by the end of next year.At an estimated cost of €580,000 (about $670,000) per charger according to the Financial Times, that would mean a total spend of roughly $2 billion to install the network. The 1,500kW charging stations are significantly more powerful than Tesla's 500kW V4 Superchargers, though Tesla already has 20,000 chargers installed in Europe. BYD, which h …Read the full story at The Verge.

It took me far too long to get Proxmox up and running in my home lab, but now that everything is running smoothly, my focus has shifted to mapping, documenting, monitoring, and adding redundancies to ensure minimal downtime. Proxmox itself offers many features to aid with this. The web UI is absolutely awesome to use, and you can easily configure remote access for managing the home lab while away, but I wanted to use a few tools to take this a step further, bolstering on more protections with Proxmox's backups, snapshots, and other useful functionality.

When HexOS launched at the end of 2024, I was genuinely excited. Here was a NAS operating system built on top of TrueNAS Scale, one of the most battle-tested storage platforms in the world, but wrapped in an interface that didn't require much of anything by way of advanced Linux knowledge to understand. TrueNAS is phenomenal software, but it's built for enterprises and homelabbers who know what a ZFS vdev is, or is at least capable of learning. HexOS promised to make that power accessible to everyone else.

A group of independent musicians is suing Google claiming it trained Lyria on their uploads. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge If you've uploaded a song to YouTube, Google almost certainly considers your video fair game for training its Lyria music AI, it just won't admit it right now. A group of independent musicians is suing Google, claiming that it illegally used songs they uploaded to YouTube to train its Lyria 3 model. Google has filed a motion to dismiss the case, saying:Their lawsuit is based on the unsupported hypothesis that Google trained on their specific works. Even accepting their untested allegations as fact, the Complaint cannot stand. Plaintiffs each granted YouTube, and Google - which provides the service-a broad license to use the uploaded con …Read the full story at The Verge.

Anthropic just released Claude Fable 5, calling it the most powerful AI model it has ever made widely available and praising its skills in biology, among others. But the model won't answer basic biology questions - the kind you'd expect a high schooler to handle. Instead, it hands off the query to the former flagship model, Claude Opus 4.8.It isn't because Fable doesn't know the answers. It's because Anthropic won't let it, by design.Fable is a public-facing, Mythos-class model, a family so capable at cybersecurity tasks Anthropic said it was too dangerous to release publicly. But while Anthropic has spent much of the extended Mythos rol …Read the full story at The Verge.

New college graduates around the country have been booing and heckling commencement speakers who hype up AI. Microsoft would like everyone to talk it out.In a blog post running more than 3,100 words, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith addressed the recent spate of viral clips from graduation ceremonies, like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt getting an earful at the University of Arizona, or the speaker in Florida who seemed surprised when students booed at the mention of AI as "the next industrial revolution." The videos speak to a broader societal sentiment around AI - the technology is deeply unpopular even as technology compani …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have spent a decade convincing myself that incremental IDE upgrades like a faster syntax highlighter, smoother git integration, or even standard AI autocomplete were massive leaps forward.