For a long time, I treated AI like a luxury rental car which is fast and powerful, but never really mine. As someone who loves self-hosting, jumping between my private tools and cloud-based AI felt clunky. It was a constant bottleneck that broke my focus.

For most of my PC building career, I rarely had the luxury of choosing components that I truly wanted. Limited by strict budgets, I had to make some tough choices, some of which came back to bite me hard. I had a mental checklist of the PC parts I could cheap out on, based on my limited knowledge and sweeping assumptions. This led to many a build with serious compromises in the cooling, power delivery, and display departments, not that I knew it at the time. I went about my way without realizing the extent to which I had been limiting my builds for years. Entry-level components aren't necessarily bad for your PC, but when they actively hamper performance and risk the stability and safety of your rig, that's when you need to take a step back and rethink your choices.

Rockstar confirmed on Saturday that some of its data was compromised in a breach of a third-party provider. The group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility, saying it had gained access to the company's Snowflake instances (a cloud-hosting provider popular with enterprise customers) via Anodot, a cost-monitoring and analytics service. The group is demanding a ransom by April 14th, or it will leak the data it has stolen.In a statement provided to Kotaku, the company said that the compromised data was limited in scope and "this incident has no impact on our organization or our players." It's unclear exactly which data was compromised, but it …Read the full story at The Verge.

In celebration of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie coming to theaters, Nintendo is making it a little cheaper to get both Super Mario Galaxy games when you buy a $449.99 Nintendo Switch 2 console. Now through May 9th, you can buy a Switch 2 with Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2 for $499.99 ($20 off) from Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, and Target. It’s a small discount, but it’s a good deal if you were planning to pick up a console and both games anyway.Nintendo Switch 2 with Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2 bundleWhere to Buy: $518.98 $499.99 at Amazon $518.98 $499.99 at GameStop $518.98 $499.98 at Best BuyAmazon makes it easy to buy the game and console bundle with a single click. However, Best Buy, GameStop, and Target require you to add both the Switch 2 and either the physical or digital edition of the games to your cart to reflect the discount at checkout. In all three instances, you’ll see a promotion banner beneath the price of the Switch 2, which makes it easy to add everything at once.For a bit of context on the Switch 2, it builds on Nintendo’s original hybrid console with a larger 7.9-inch LCD screen with a 120Hz max refresh rate, eight times the storage (256GB), and significantly snappier performance. The console now comes with magnetic Joy-Con 2 controllers, too, which double as mice in compatible games and feature a shortcut button to access Nintendo’s GameChat feature (if you have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription). The Switch 2 has two USB-C ports (both support charging, but only the bottom one supports video output via the included dock), and the console is compatible with most original Switch titles. Thanks to a recent update, many Switch games will even receive a resolution and performance boost on the newer hardware, at least when playing games in handheld mode.Meanwhile, Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 are a part of a recently remastered two-pack, and both games (which originally debuted on the Wii) look much better than before thanks to an improved user interface and 4K resolution via a free Switch 2 update. The bundle also introduces some new features, including an Assist Mode, an in-game music player, and new Storybook Chapters.

Bottlenecks in PC gaming don't always occur due to the CPU, GPU, or even the software. Some overlooked elements, such as the cable connecting to the monitor or the display output port, rarely enter the conversation because they are thought to "just work." That assumption doesn't really go very far if you are trying to get the most out of your setup.

Retro gaming will always have a certain magic attached to it. Firing up a game you haven't played in decades always feels wonderful, especially when you can run it on anything with a motherboard today. However, you might soon realize it doesn't quite look the way you remember. While our memories of the games we played as kids tend to beautify them, emulating some of those retro classics actually makes you realize they don't look nearly as good as you thought.

I mean, I guess it kinda looks like the moon? | Image: Kate NV / RVNG Intl. For obvious reasons, I've had Moon on the mind all week. So I was trying to figure out what I should recommend this week that would thematically fit. Brian Eno's Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks is incredible, and if you haven't listened to it, go do that now. But it also seemed a bit on the nose. Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool also came to mind. But it also felt a bit obvious. Then I remembered Kate NV's Room for the Moon, a record I had on repeat in 2020. Russian artist Kate Shilonosova chases ideas across 11 tracks inspired by Russian and Japanese pop from the '70s and '80s, as well as children's movies. This obviously leads Room for …Read the full story at The Verge.

DRAM prices have surged by over 170% year-on-year. This means that a 32GB DDR5 kit that would probably cost $100 last year is now pushing $350, and that's if you can even find it in stock anywhere.

Despite spending most of my time buried under my Proxmox nodes and TrueNAS storage rig, I love tinkering with other virtualization platforms, container runtimes, and NAS-centric distros in my spare time. But since I’ve only ever used Linux and Windows (technically Mac, if you include Apple Containers) platforms, you can imagine my surprise when I heard of a home lab platform designed on top of FreeBSD.

Agentic AI is the big thing right now, with names like OpenClaw and NemoClaw filling column inches, telling you to use or to stay away. Agents can organize your computer or delete your inbox, and Microsoft wants to put them into everything Windows.

Whether you are building a complex web app or just trying to automate a tedious script, Al-driven development has changed the workflow. Over the last thirty days, I pushed aside my standard VS Code workflow to live exclusively within the ecosystems of Cursor, Claude Code, and Google Antigravity.

In case you didn't notice, storage prices have been flying high for the last few months. It didn't start with SSDs and HDDs, though. The AI-induced DRAM shortage led to price hikes in consumer memory, and SSDs were the next victim. If you compare the price of a 2TB Gen4 NVMe SSD in September vs. now, you'll see up to a 3x increase. This isn't normal, but it is the reality we're living in right now. Even hard drives have seen a 30–40% price hike as demand shifts from flash storage to spinning drives. Analysts have predicted that we won't see a turnaround till 2028 — that spells doom for data hoarders and power users looking to expand their storage. Even if you aren't in the market to buy a new SSD, you need to be extra cautious about using your existing one. You may be unknowingly reducing your SSD's lifespan, which, in this market, is one of the worst things you can do to your drive.