OnePlus’ budget-friendly phone is on sale for only $20 more than it was during Black Friday. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge It can be easy to forget affordable champs like the OnePlus Nord N30 5G when you’ve got iPhone 15s and Galaxy S24s dominating store shelves and circulars. It’s our favorite budget smartphone under $300, and today, you can save even more on it. The budget smartphone is down to $249.99 for an unlocked model at Amazon, Best Buy, and direct from OnePlus, which is $50 off and only $20 more than its record low during Black Friday.The OnePlus Nord N30 5G plays in the same arena as something like the Pixel 7A or Samsung Galaxy A54 5G. It’s considerably cheaper than both, but after reviewing it, we found it delivers well enough in most areas that it’d be hard not to recommend it for someone with a seriously cramped budget. It covers the basics... Continue reading…

Image: Roblox Roblox, one of the most popular gaming platforms in the world, has taken a lot of heat from critics who accuse it of exploiting its users, the vast majority of whom are children and teenagers. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, however, Roblox’s studio head, Stefano Corazza, said the platform has actually been a gift to the young developers who make money by creating games on the platform. “You can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labor,’ right? Or you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income,” Corazza said. “So I can be like, 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now with just a laptop, I can create something, make money, and then... Continue reading…

Taiwan is home to a number of semiconductor production facilities, producing nearly all of the world's major semiconductors. However, Taiwan is also earthquake-prone, being located on a fault line between the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate. As a result, the highly sensitive job of producing semiconductors requires a number of earthquake-proof safety measures in order to continue pumping out chips as soon as possible. The most recent earthquake in Taiwan was nowhere near TSMC, taking place on the east coast when all of TSMC's main fabs are on the west coast, but in general, it's a place that's prone to earthquakes, and this is how TSMC manages to protect itself from them.

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures Variety reports that following the massive box office success of Dune: Part Two, Legendary has tapped Denis Villeneuve for a third installment that would presumably continue the story of how Paul Atreides goes on to conquer the galaxy. Earlier this year, Villeneuve told Empire that he had already “put words on paper” thinking about where he would like to take the Dune franchise going forward. Legendary has yet to announce any sort of timeline for when production on Dune 3 might begin. But the studio intends for the movie to debut before its next project with Villeneuve — an adaptation of Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen’s 2024 Pulitzer Prize-nominated nonfiction book about how nuclear war scenarios would likely play out. From the... Continue reading…

Image: Netflix Though Netflix just renewed its live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation, showrunner Albert Kim is parting ways with the show.Variety reports that Jabbar Raisani (Lost in Space) and Christine Boylan (Poker Face) have been tapped to executive produce the next two seasons of Netflix’s Avatar following former showrunner Albert Kim’s decision to step down. Though Netflix has yet to officially announce the change of guard, Kim is reportedly heading over to Disney Plus, where he will executive produce the streamer’s new Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and develop other fresh projects.Kim first became Avatar’s showrunner back in 2020 following the unexpected exits of Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino — the... Continue reading…

YouTube’s Multiview will allow Coachella fans to stream four extra stages on one screen. | Image: YouTube YouTube’s official livestream of this year’s Coachella music festival will feature a technology many football fans are familiar with. Multiview, which allows viewers to watch multiple livestreams on the same screen while tuning into one audio feed, will be available to viewers of the festival’s stream on any YouTube TV app — no need to subscribe to YouTube TV, the platform announced on Thursday. Just as multiview on NFL Sunday Ticket enables audiences to watch four different games at once, the feature for Coachella will allow for up to four different stages at once. Viewers can switch between audio feeds and jump in and out of fullscreen view. There will be a total of six feeds — or six stages — to choose from. The festival this year... Continue reading…

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images Israel’s military has been using artificial intelligence to help choose its bombing targets in Gaza, sacrificing accuracy in favor of speed and killing thousands of civilians in the process, according to an investigation by Israel-based publications +972 Magazine and Local Call.The system, called Lavender, was developed in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7th attacks, the report claims. At its peak, Lavender marked 37,000 Palestinians in Gaza as suspected “Hamas militants” and authorized their assassinations. Israel’s military denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call. A spokesperson told CNN that AI was not being used to identify suspected terrorists but did not dispute the existence of the Lavender... Continue reading…

For some reason, Microsoft hasn't been adding the most wanted features to the Windows 11 Start menu. There are plenty of options that Windows 10 users have that seemingly got lost in the move over to Windows 11. As such, Windows 11 users who want more from their Start menu sometimes download third-party applications to enhance it, such as Start11 and StartAllBack. And while people haven't had issues with the latter app, Microsoft has decided that anyone using StartAllBack won't be getting the next Windows 11 update.

Everyone knows you shouldn't stare at the sun during an eclipse. However, as it turns out, your phone's "eyes" aren't a suitable substitute. NASA has posted that, if you intend to look at the eclipse, pointing your phone at it in hopes to capture it on camera will likely fry its internal circuits, but don't fret; there is a solution if you want to snap a photo to remember the occasion by.

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge Yesterday, I reported that Meta’s AI image generator was making everyone Asian, even when the text prompt specified another race. Today, I briefly had the opposite problem: I was unable to generate any Asian people using the same prompts as the day before.The tests I did yesterday were on Instagram, via the AI image generator available in direct messages. After dozens of tries, I was unable to generate a single accurate image using prompts like “Asian man and Caucasian friend” and “Asian man and white wife.” Only once was the system able to successfully create a picture of an Asian woman and a white man — it kept making everyone Asian. After I initially reached out for comment yesterday, a Meta spokesperson asked for... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge OpenAI’s enterprise customers who want to use generative AI but prize accuracy might be able to get that with new customization options for the GPT-4 API. They include the ability to connect to third-party platforms to share information on fine-tuning, save fine-tuned models during additional training without retraining the entire model, and a new user interface to compare model performance and quality. The OpenAI API was launched in 2020 to allow companies to connect and build on top of its large language models, which was followed last August by opening fine-tuning for GPT-3.5 and eventually GPT-4, too. Highly customized models could provide better results internally. They could also keep responses to the public on track and avoid... Continue reading…

A year ago, Microsoft said that Windows 11 was going to get its own LTSC version. However, after that, Microsoft went silent on the matter and didn't show off a lot about it. Now, someone has leaked some screenshots of Windows 11's LTSC, and it's an interesting peek into what's in store for the operating system, as well as when the new version will release.