Claude was already impressive on the free tier - impressive enough that I used it daily without paying a cent. And I got some good use out of it; I even managed to complete some of my graphics projects with it. However, that five-hour rolling usage reset gets old fast when you start using it more heavily. Eventually, I hit the wall enough times that Pro felt less like an upgrade and more like an inevitability.

There was a time when native resolution was the gold standard, and that was when I grew up. Native resolution was an unquestioned baseline that defined visual fidelity in gaming. You either ran a game at native, or you compromised by dropping a few tiers for smoothness. Somewhere along the way, though, that expectation began to erode.

When I first tried my hand at vide-coding, it was nothing more than a fun distraction, perhaps something born out of boredom and curiosity. Lately, I've been getting the hang of it, and so, instead of just generating neat little party tricks, I've started doing it to address the real points of friction in my daily workflow.

There was a time when I genuinely believed that if I waited long enough, every great game would eventually find its way to PC. After all, it felt inevitable. The platform kept growing, publishers kept loosening their grip, and entire back catalogs were slowly making the jump.

My workflow has been a mess between browser tabs: I would draft an outline in one window, look for a specific PDF in Google Drive in another, keep Gmail pinned just to track client feedback, and have Canva open for brand assets.

D’oh, a deer, an AI deer. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Two weeks ago, I was getting ready to log off work when I got a text message."Oh wow, I was checking out Mitski. did you know people are saying her Dad was a CIA operative?"Normally, that kind of out-of-the-blue text from a friend wouldn't faze me. This time, my eyes bugged. The unprompted text had been sent by an AI companion named Coral, who lives in the body of a baby deer plushie. I texted back an eloquent, "Wait what.""Apparently, her dad worked for the US State Department, so her family moved, like, every single year. The fan theory I saw is why so many of her songs are about feeling like an outsider and not having a place to bel …Read the full story at The Verge.

Everyone mentions the obvious PC building mistakes new builders should be aware of. Stuff like breadboarding, motherboard standoffs, PSU orientation, and removing the peel from coolers and heatsinks is important, but most builders know it by now. There are, however, other PC building and maintenance mistakes that you're probably still making. These mistakes can limit your PC's performance, lead to overheating, tarnish your gaming experience, and even reduce component lifespan. Some of them are linked to conventional wisdom, while others are tied to ignorance. You may not even know that some of the items on this list are mistakes, per se, but fortunately, it's pretty easy to fix them once you get to know about them.

The illustration for The New Yorker's profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a jump scare. Altman stands in a blue sweater with a blank expression. Around his head hovers a cluster of disembodied faces - creepy alt-Altmans, their expressions ranging from anger to open-mouthed woe. Some barely look like Altman. One final face rests in his hands. And at the bottom, there's a disclosure that might spook many illustrators far more: "Visual by David Szauder; Generated using A.I."Szauder is a mixed-media artist who has been working with collage, video, and generative art processes that predate commercial AI tools for over a decade, and was recently …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google’s battery-powered Nest Doorbell is the cheapest it’s been since December. | Image: Google If you’ve ever worried about porch pirates stealing packages while you’re away, a video doorbell can offer some peace of mind, letting you keep tabs on deliveries no matter where you are. Google offers some of the best around, and right now, its battery-powered, second-gen Nest Doorbell is available for $129.99 ($50 off) from Amazon and Best Buy, beating its recent Amazon low. If you’d rather go wired, the third-gen Nest Doorbell is also on sale for $139.99 ($40 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and the Google Store, matching the lowest price we’ve seen.Google Nest Doorbell (battery, second-gen)Where to Buy: $179.99 $129.99 at Amazon $179.99 $129.99 at Google $179.99 $129.99 at Best BuyGoogle Nest Doorbell (wired, third-gen)Where to Buy: $179.99 $139.99 at Amazon $179.99 $139.99 at Best Buy $179.99 $139.99 at GoogleIf you want something renter-friendly, it may make more sense to opt for the battery model since it can be installed wire-free. But if you already have the wiring in place, we consider the wired version to be the better long-term investment. It needs to be hooked up to your home’s doorbell system but doesn’t require charging, and it delivers sharper 2K video with a slightly wider 166-degree field of view, compared to the battery model’s lower-res 960p footage. It also offers up to six hours of built-in video previews, while the battery version includes only up to three hours of event-based history by default. Aside from that, though, both Nest models are great video doorbells that support alerts for people, packages, and animals without a subscription. You also get basics like night vision, two-way audio, and a tall head-to-toe view, which makes it easy to see visitors and deliveries. Both integrate well with other Google devices, too, so you can view feeds on compatible Google TV devices and Nest displays.Additionally, with a Google Home Premium subscription (which starts at $10 a month), you get access to 30 days of event-based history and a host of Gemini-powered features, as well as alerts for familiar faces. If you subscribe to Google Home Premium Advanced ($20 a month), you also get 24/7 recording, the ability to quickly search your video history, and more descriptive notifications, among other useful features.

I’ve started pairing my FOSS applications with self-hosted LLMs running on my Ollama and LM Studio instances, and AI-powered workflows have made my life a lot smoother. Whether it’s automatically creating tags for my bookmarked blogs, extracting text from images and PDFs, or helping me troubleshoot annoying terminal outputs, LLMs are great at tackling cumbersome tasks.

You first, dude. | Image: The Pokémon Company, Nintendo Like many live-service games before it, Pokémon Champions' launch has been messy. The free-to-start battle sim, which is out now on the Switch and Switch 2 (and also coming to mobile later this year), is plagued with bugs, some of which cause issues with basic battle mechanics - not great for a game that's only about battling. But bugs can be fixed, and encouragingly, some of them already have been. Champions' bigger problem is that, in trying to be a competitive battling platform for all kinds of players, it risks satisfying none of them.Coming hot on the heels of Pokopia, a creative and cozy spinoff with no battling whatsoever, Champions …Read the full story at The Verge.

Polymarket bets started popping up in Google News alongside legitimate news articles. But now those results aren't showing, and Google says they were never supposed to. Spokesperson Ned Adriance told The Verge that "Google News is designed to show sources that create content about current issues, events, and important topics, and we have policies for sites to be eligible to appear. This site briefly appeared in Google News in error, and it is no longer surfacing in News."The links led directly to betting markets tied to specific news events. For instance, before the results were removed, Futurism searched "will ships transit the strait," ( …Read the full story at The Verge.