Many startups spend years trying to become a household name. Others just spend $10 million on a Super Bowl ad. That's Dreame's bet. The little-known Chinese robot vacuum company has grand ambitions to become a global consumer electronics giant and chose to run a pricey 30-second spot as its opening move. If it works, the ad may be remembered as the beginning of the rise of the next global tech powerhouse. If it doesn't? Well, let's just say Quibi ran a Super Bowl ad, too.Dreame's CEO wants to be the Chinese Elon MuskDreame - pronounced dreamy - used its half-minute of exposure to promise a dizzying product evolution: from robot vacuums a …Read the full story at The Verge.

Whether you are a long-time power user or just starting to experiment with agentic workflows, getting the most out of Claude requires moving beyond simple Q&A. As a tech writer who lives and breathes productivity software, I have spent countless hours pushing Anthropics’ flagship model to its limits.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve created notes and kept putting off opening them because they were so messy. They weren’t formatted, and I couldn’t tell which was a heading and which was copy.

I’ve always been in favor of smarter tech solving brute-force problems, especially when it comes to PC gaming. More efficient rendering, better upscaling, and clever compression — have all worked in the right direction for an industry that's constantly asking for more power. Nvidia's Neural Texture Compression is one such solution, and it aims to slash VRAM usage in games so drastically that it almost sounds magical.

The Mug 2 can keep coffee, tea, cocoa, and other drinks warm for as long as you’d like. | Image: Ember Coffee is what gets many of us through the workday, and a proper smart mug can keep it hot for hours so you can maintain your focus without constantly getting up to reheat your cup. Thankfully, if you don’t own one, the 14-ounce Ember Mug 2 is now available for $97.49 ($52 off) from Amazon, Target, and Ember as part of Ember’s ongoing Mother’s Day sale. You can also buy the smaller 10-ounce model for $84.47 ($46 off) from the same retailers (Amazon, Target, Ember).Ember Mug 2 (14-ounce)Where to Buy: $149.95 $97.49 at Amazon $149.95 $97.49 at Target $149.95 $97.47 at EmberEmber Mug 2 (10-ounce)Where to Buy: $129.95 $84.47 at Amazon $129.95 $84.49 at Target $129.95 $84.47 at EmberUsing the Ember app, the Mug 2 lets you set an exact drinking temperature between 120 and 145 degrees Fahrenheit, which it can maintain for up to 90 minutes or all day using the included charging coaster. You don’t have to worry about the battery draining unnecessarily, either, thanks to an automatic sleep function, which powers down the smart mug when it’s empty or hasn’t been used for several hours.The smart mug offers a fair amount of control beyond that, too. Within the Android / iOS app, you can also create and save preset temperatures for different beverages and set up notifications for when your drink reaches your preferred temperature. Meanwhile, a customizable LED indicator on the coaster lets you quickly check heating and battery status at a glance.As a bonus, the Ember Mug 2 is also relatively easy to care for. It features a scratch-resistant coating to help prevent wear over time and carries an IPX7 water-resistance rating, so it can be safely hand-washed (just don’t put it in the dishwasher).

Working with Ethernet can be challenging at first, especially when making your own terminations. It's fairly easy to use pre-terminated wiring, however, and it's all rather mundane once you get the knack for making your own ends. It usually just works, and if you don't quite get the connection right, Ethernet is fairly forgiving, and all that's required is to redo the termination. But fiber optic cabling is an entirely different beast. It's incredibly difficult to make your own, and working with store-bought cabling can prove troublesome, too.

In 2019, a 36-year-old Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), newly elected to Congress, was photographed for the inaugural Time 100 Next List, wearing a dashing eye patch and looking upwards with hope. A Harvard-educated Navy SEAL who'd lost his legs while fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, Crenshaw was in rarefied company, listed among the magazine's candidates for tomorrow's leaders: musicians like Billie Eilish and Bad Bunny; athletes like Coco Gauff and Alysa Liu; business leaders like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong; fellow political stars like Pete Buttigieg. Crenshaw was, Time declared, "what the Republican Party might look like after Donald Tru …Read the full story at The Verge.

Several US federal agencies are taking up Anthropic's new cybersecurity model to find vulnerabilities, but one is reportedly not getting in on the action: the nation's central cybersecurity coordinator. On Tuesday, Axios reported that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) didn't have access to Mythos Preview, which Anthropic has touted as a powerful tool for finding and patching security vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, other agencies like Commerce Department and National Security Agency (NSA) are reportedly using the model, and President Donald Trump's administration has been negotiating broader access, Axios wrote last w …Read the full story at The Verge.

Anthropic's Mythos AI model, a powerful cybersecurity tool that the company said could be dangerous in the wrong hands, has been accessed by a "small group of unauthorized users," Bloomberg reports. An unnamed member of the group, identified only as "a third-party contractor for Anthropic," told the publication that members of a private online forum got into Mythos via a mix of tactics, utilizing the contractor's access and "commonly used internet sleuthing tools."The Claude Mythos Preview is a new general-purpose model that's capable of identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities "in every major operating system and every major web browser …Read the full story at The Verge.

Ace is the first robot that can beat the best human players while following the official rules of table tennis. | Image: Sony AI Humans have been building ping-pong playing robots for decades, such as Omron's FORPHEUS that challenged amateur competitors at CES 2017. What sets Ace apart from the rest is that the robot, which was developed by Sony's AI division, is the first that can hold its own against top-ranked human players and occasionally even beat them in matches that follow the official rules of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF).AI is already capable of besting humans at games like Chess and Go, but physical games pose a much greater challenge as robots have to be engineered to match the speed and responsiveness of the human mind and body. To b …Read the full story at The Verge.

While Raspberry Pis and ESP32s are great for hobbyists, they also regularly find themselves in products. They're very useful, after all, so it's only natural that companies will use them as their hardware of choice when making something small that doesn't need to be an absolute powerhouse.

Anker has announced its own custom silicon that the company says will bring local AI to audio devices, mobile accessories, and IoT devices. The Thus processor is the world's first neural-net compute-in-memory AI audio chip, which is smaller than traditional chips, and requires less power to run complex computations. That makes it an attractive solution for smaller devices. When comparing Thus to existing chips, Anker CEO Steven Yang said, "Every AI chip built until now stores the model on one side and does the computation on the other. To think, the device has to carry all those parameters across, many times per second, every single infere …Read the full story at The Verge.