AI has been the talk of the town for over a year now, with tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft Copilot threatening to upheave much of digital society as we know it. With those great risks and the potential for deepfakes, automatically generated content, and more, the European Union feels that AI legislation is necessary to safeguard its development without harming users. This legislation was first put forward three years ago, where it aimed to set a global standard for the technology.

A swap file is a form of virtual memory, similar to random access memory (RAM) and cache on a processor in which a file swap can be used to store temporary data. It's the slowest form of memory, located on an HDD or SSD, and is reserved by the Linux system for use when the OS runs out of RAM. By configuring your Linux installation to use a swap file, you can technically use more RAM than your PC has physically installed.

Gemini has all the conversational grace of a page of search results. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge I don’t know how to say this, but sometimes the emotional labor of opening another app on my phone and typing in some text is just too much. I need to gather details about an Airbnb reservation from two different confirmation emails and send them to my friends. Or I want to figure out when to leave this coffee shop to get home by a certain time via bus. These aren’t hard things to do, but they require enough tapping around different apps or tabbing between screens that I start to think, you know what? I don’t really need to send that email yet. I’ll just wing it and hope for the best with the bus schedule.These are the jobs I would like AI to take from me. AI, including Google’s new Gemini assistant, isn’t quite up to it yet. But... Continue reading…

The price to record visitors at your Ring video doorbell is about to go up. | Image: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge In what is fast becoming a trend, another security camera company is raising the price of its subscription plan. According to a Ring support article, starting March 11th, 2024, it will cost $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly to subscribe to the Ring Protect Basic plan, an increase of $1 a month or $10 a year. The Basic is Ring’s cheapest plan and gives you access to cloud storage of recorded videos from one camera or video doorbell. If you subscribe, you’ll see the bump on your next renewal date after March 11th unless you cancel before then.Just last month, Arlo increased its single-camera subscription price to $7.99 monthly from $4.99. Google Nest’s cheapest plan went up to $8 a month from $6 late last year, but that covers all cameras... Continue reading…

Image: Brilliant Labs There’s a new pair of smart spectacles in town — and this time, it’s the $349 Frame glasses said to give you multimodal “AI superpowers.” The open-source eyewear comes from a startup called Brilliant Labs, which touts Frame as a way to get AI translations, web search, and visual analysis right in front of your eyes.As shown in a video posted by Brilliant Labs, you can use your voice to ask the glasses to do things like identify a landmark you’re looking at, search the web for a particular pair of sneakers you’re seeing, or even look up nutrition information for the food you’re about to eat. The information appears as an overlay that shows up directly on the lens.Frame comes in three colors you can preorder now: black, gray, and clear.... Continue reading…

You can score a big TV at a big discount ahead of the big game, and most of them can hit your doorstep by Sunday. | Image: LG February is a star-studded month, with the Grammys, Oscar noms, and America’s biggest sporting event taking center stage. This year, the Super Bowl will play out on February 11th between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers. Whether you’re hosting a party for the big game or simply want to equip a spare room in your home with a new 4K set, the days leading up to the Super Bowl remain one of the best opportunities of the year to add a new TV to your wall for cheap.You could just trek to your local big-box retailer and pick out the biggest, cheapest TV you can find, but the selection can be dizzying, and many of those sets aren’t worth the trouble (even if they only cost a couple hundred dollars). To help you make sense of... Continue reading…

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta and TikTok are challenging fees they must pay EU regulators tasked with enforcing tough new content moderation rules required by the Digital Services Act (DSA), both companies have confirmed to The Verge. Although the fee is capped at 0.05 percent of a company’s profits, Meta isn’t happy that loss-making companies won’t have to pay while it’s on the hook for a reported €11 million, while TikTok is also taking issue with how its user numbers have been calculated to work out its reported €3.9 million fee.“We disagree with the methodology used to calculate these fees,” Meta’s EMEA policy comms spokesperson Ben Walters tells The Verge. “Currently, companies that record a loss don’t have to pay, even if they have a large user base or... Continue reading…

Image: Warner Bros. Discovery Last fall, Warner Bros. Discovery seemed willing to entertain the idea of letting another studio release director Dave Green’s Coyote vs. Acme after initially announcing its plans to Batgirl (read: cancel in exchange for tax write-offs) the nearly completed film in early November. But according to a new report, the studio rejected multiple offers that could have led to the embattled project finally seeing the light of day, and the final decisions were made by executives who had not actually seen the finished movie.According to TheWrap, Amazon, Netflix, and Paramount were more than interested in securing the rights to debut Coyote vs. Acme for themselves after Warner Bros. changed stances and gave the filmmakers behind the live-action /... Continue reading…

Apple Vision Pro, the company's first and highly anticipated augmented reality headset which it showcased at WWDC23 keynote last year, is finally available to purchase. That's right, Apple's new spatial computing hardware has finally hit the stores, and you can grab one right now if you can stomach its $3,500 starting price. The Vision Pro is a mixed-reality headset that can switch between augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) with the help of a physical dial, but there's more to it than that.

Upgrading your monitor is akin to making a huge commitment — you're basically mandating a corresponding GPU upgrade to make the most of your new display. This is what I did when I switched from a 1080p 60Hz monitor to a 1440p 144Hz monitor back in 2020. The higher resolution as well as the higher refresh rate meant that my trusty old GTX 1050 Ti was now woefully inadequate. So, I had to buy a GTX 1660 Ti to get the best gaming experience my monitor could offer.

The update will allow users to see less political content in their recommended feeds. | Illustration: The Verge It’ll soon be easier to avoid seeing political content across Instagram and Threads unless users explicitly choose to have it recommended to them. In a blog post published on Friday, Meta announced that it’s expanding an existing Reels policy that limits political content from people you’re not following (including posts about social issues) from appearing in recommended feeds to more broadly cover the company’s Threads and Instagram platforms.“Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it,“ said Instagram head Adam Mosseri, announcing on Threads that the changes will be applied over the next few weeks. Facebook is also expected to roll out... Continue reading…

Laptops are expensive, and the best ones cost well over $1,000 in 2024. Additionally, because OEMs and customers are craving thin-and-light form factors, they can be more brittle than ever. That's why many laptop owners turn to a great case or sleeve to protect their devices. So many cases are available for modern laptops that it can be hard to figure out which one is right for you. Since the cases themselves can be expensive — usually retailing for between $50 and $100 — going through multiple cases to find the perfect one for your use case isn't feasible.