Using an aging PC build can feel frustrating. It used to boot silently and handle 4K gaming or heavy code compilation without breaking a sweat. Now the fans sound like a jet engine the second you open a browser tab, and games that used to hit a locked 90FPS are suddenly hitching and dipping into the forties.

As someone who covers AI tools every single day, I'm at a funny point where I can rule out AI subscriptions as a business expense. However, if you've been keeping up with subscriptions and usage limits, you're likely well aware that the $20 tier that once got you practically unlimited usage no longer cuts it. In fact, the $20 tier is more akin to what once used to be the free tier. With just a few messages in and some heavy usage, you'll hit the 5-hour limit on these plans, and eventually the weekly limit too.

When I replaced my Ryzen 9 5900X with a 5800X3D a couple of years ago, the performance improvement was obvious almost immediately. Some games, like Valorant and Battlefield 2042, were clearly CPU-limited at 1440p when I had the 5900X, often leaving my RTX 4090 sitting at around 70–80% usage. After the upgrade, both ran significantly better, with GPU usage improving across the board. It was so good that I never felt the need to ditch AM4 unless I wanted the RTX 5090.

One of the coolest things about the Linux community is that, if someone wants to make a distro that achieves a very specific goal, they can roll up their sleeves and make it themselves. We've seen this in the past as developers build distros that put gaming first, but not all of them decided to use Ubuntu as the core.

A sneaky rule change has the potential to blow up scientific research in the United States. But there's still time to fight it.On May 29th, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a 412-page proposal to revise federal financial assistance. The language is a combination of distinctly Trumpian attacks on "woke" policies and boring governmentese designed to make your eyes glaze over as quickly as possible. But under phrases like "providing further clarification on the regulatory status of the OMB requirements" is something darker - a threat to scientific research in this country, the livelihoods of thousands of scientists, and the li …Read the full story at The Verge.

After a long wait and a lot of silence, we finally have information about two of the three products Valve said it would release. The Steam Controller is now available to buy, and the Steam Machine is open for pre-orders, even if the price is a little high. However, the elusive third product, the Steam Frame, has yet to materialise. All we really know about it is that it'll be a VR setup, but not much else.

One of the most intimidating parts of using Arch is installing it. That's not to say that's a flaw on the distro; rather, it's one of its biggest strengths, as it gives users complete control over their operating system down to the minute detail. However, for the rest of us mere mortals, it can be really challenging.

Local AI used to ask one big question of you: what can your hardware actually take? The answer determined which models you could run, the context length you could push, and whether vision or audio were even on the table. The question still remains, but it's not as black and white anymore because smaller models keep showing up that don't really care about your specs as much.

Attaching gadgets to your Home Assistant network always feels great, but there's something about making your own smart device that nothing else can replicate. When you have the power to build your own intelligence electronics, it really feels like you have no limitations. No walled gardens, no subscription fees, and no need to buy a new one when it breaks; you have total control over what happens in your smart home.

For the majority of gamers, diminishing returns become severe. Moving to 8,000 Hz doesn't give you a competitive edge unless you're a professional player or gaming at an extremely high level. Instead, it just introduces a CPU processing tax for the majority as an expensive solution to a problem that the rest of the input pipeline usually dominates.

China's Zhipu AI (Z.ai) released its open-weight GLM-5.2, and some researchers have claimed that it matches Mythos in certain bug-finding and cybersecurity scenarios. While GLM lags behind models from Anthropic and OpenAI in other, more general tasks, it seems that China has dramatically reduced the gap in the capabilities between its models and those of the US.This level of advancement is particularly concerning to the US government, which has worked to restrict China's access to powerful models like Anthropic's Mythos and Fable, as well as the hardware necessary to train and run them. The Trump administration views Mythos and other advan …Read the full story at The Verge.

I'd been an X11 user for decades, so when I saw that the developers of KDE were dropping support in favor of Wayland, I didn't know how to feel. If you were an early Linux user, you couldn't get away from the X Window System unless you wanted to use the command line without a GUI, and we all grew up knowing how to use and tweak it.