If you're a gamer, you probably need no introduction to Discord. It's the app most of us use to stay in touch with our online friends or hop into a voice channel before launching an online game. In fact, I use it so often that I automatically start it with Windows, just in case I need to get on a call before joining a ranked match in Valorant.

Windows has felt like an operating system that dictates the features you can use and actions you can perform for many years now. Each time I get a new PC or have to do a non-custom new install, it takes many hours to get past its stock behavior with locked taskbars, Copilot integration, and telemetry-driven settings I don't want.

I have a hard time trusting the responses I get from AI models. Recent releases have become far more accurate, and hallucinations have reduced considerably. That is a welcome change, but I still don’t trust a standalone AI response as much as something I can verify through Perplexity.

When I first started hearing people talk about vibe coding, I couldn't understand why so many developers were excited about it. The idea of describing what you wanted and letting AI generate most of the code felt completely opposite to how I'd learned software development. I always believed good developers should understand the code they write, not simply accept whatever an AI suggests. To me, programming was about solving problems, thinking through the architecture, debugging issues, and knowing exactly why a solution worked. AI-generated code seemed more like a shortcut than a better way to build software.

I've used a lot of password managers over the years, but none come anywhere near the functionality and ease of use of Proton Pass. Outside of Proton Pass, Google Password Manager (Chrome's built-in option) is probably my most-used alternative, but that's just because Chrome is my primary browser. It suffers from a few drawbacks that Proton Pass doesn't. And while Proton Pass is more intuitive and has a nicer interface than most other managers, it has another major draw: it does more than just store passwords.

Over time you might notice that your boot times get slower even if you do have a lightning-fast NVMe SSD. If it ever gets to a point where it feels like pressing the power button leads to a delayed black screen and minutes of sluggish desktop responsiveness, you might actually have an issue in your hands. It's not always the fault of background startup apps, fast startup, or failing hardware.

Two minutes and thirty seconds into the title track of Rachika Nayar's Heaven Come Crashing, an absolutely massive drum and bass beat drops. As a fan of Nayar's debut record Our Hands Against The Dusk, it caught me off guard. That album has no percussion on it at all. Heaven Comes Crashing is almost entirely drum-free, too. There are some rapid-fire mechanical hi-hats on the second track, "Tetramorph," and the back half of track six, "Gayatri," has what sounds like a snare buried deep in the mix. But it isn't until track seven that Nayar delivers an unexpected drum explosion, before immediately retreating to the soothing wash of "Sleepless," …Read the full story at The Verge.

I was convinced my perfect note-taking app simply did not exist. I had moved years of notes between OneNote, Notion, and Obsidian, rebuilding my setup more times than I could count.

It has been an excellent past few weeks for anyone who loves gadgets and airplanes. We've covered a few flight trackers in the past, and our own Adam Conway took a crack at making his own for $20. Fortunately, it looks like even more are being made, and this one can even track space flights.

Edward “Bud” Cole speaks in Japan in 2023. | Image: Jun Sato/WireImage Fender CEO Edward "Bud" Cole gave an interview to T3 in May celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Telecaster with comments on AI and music that initially flew under the radar. But it has started making the rounds recently, pouring more fuel on an already raging fire of bad PR following the company pissing off basically the entire guitar-playing community by sending cease-and-desist letters to builders, claiming copyright of the Stratocaster body shape.Some influential guitar YouTubers have even said they're done buying Fender gear in the wake of the controversy. And Cole's resurfaced comments comparing cover songs and bandmates to a sort …Read the full story at The Verge.

I never owned the original Steam Controller. It launched in November 2015 at $49.99, sold somewhere in the region of 1.5 to 1.6 million units across four years, and was eventually discontinued in November 2019 with the remaining stock dumped at about a fiver each. I was aware of its existence at the time, though it never interested me, and I wouldn't become interested in Valve's hardware until the Steam Deck arrived and I got my hands on one.

One of the first things we do after building a PC is boot into the BIOS and make sure XMP is enabled so that our RAM runs at its rated speed. I clearly remember doing just that when I first built my current PC with a Ryzen 9 5900X in 2020. After that, I never gave my RAM speed another thought. Usually, you have almost no reason to. But then, when I eventually upgraded to the 5800X3D, I had to update the BIOS before swapping the CPU.