Threads has surpassed 500 million monthly active users, Meta announced on Tuesday, hitting the milestone just shy of the platform's third birthday. Threads got off to a hot start in 2023, reaching 100 million users even faster than ChatGPT, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that he thinks Threads could hit 1 billion users.Meta says that daily active users on Threads continue to "increase strongly across the globe," with "all" of it driven by communities, which allow users to see and make posts about different topics. The company is bringing them out of beta and adding features like a communities hub in the Threads menu and giving communitie …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's a lot of debate about where AI should and shouldn't be in the workplace, but one area I always advocate using AI for is for doing really laborious tasks that an LLM is designed to perform extremely quickly. And one thing an AI can do much faster than us is churn through a huge chunk of data and create a summary based on its findings.

I've been using Hermes Agent for a while now, and the more time I spend with it, the less I think about it as another chat interface. The model matters, obviously, but a chat box is a mere conduit once the model can read files, run scripts, send messages, schedule work, and talk to the services I already use.

It won’t be for everyone, but there’s something delightful about the retro look. | Photo: Commodore When Christian Simpson, a retro gaming YouTuber also known as Peri Fractic, bought the remains of an early PC company called Commodore in 2025, he decided to pick up right where the original Commodore left off. Which meant starting product development in the mid-1990s. Simpson and his team first set to work reviving the company's most iconic product, and you can now buy a Commodore 64 that is the spitting image of the 1982 original (other than the Wi-Fi connectivity, the USB ports, and a few other slightly modern niceties). It's a pure nostalgia play, and by most accounts, a very good one. Commodore says it has sold 30,000 of them since last …Read the full story at The Verge.

I'll just work from the car, I thought. But after a few minutes of staring at my screen on quick mountain switchbacks I could feel the first signs of cold, coagulated nausea bubbling up from that sweaty place in my gut. I looked to the horizon for relief, but nothing helped… until I remembered Apple's magic dots. Introduced in 2024, Apple's Vehicle Motion Cues promise to tap into your device's accelerometer and gyroscope to reduce or, in my case, even eliminate the motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook inside a moving vehicle.According to big-S Science, this type of vehicle motion sickness is caused by the e …Read the full story at The Verge.

Despite being an objectively terrible digital camera, the Kodak Charmera has been incredibly popular thanks to a cheap price tag and several fun retro designs inspired by the iconic 1987 single-use Kodak Fling. Instead of entirely rethinking that formula, Reto, the company licensing the Kodak brand, is following up on the original Charmera with a Millennium Edition. The seven shiny new designs draw inspiration from the tech and aesthetics of the early 2000s, and at $34.99 each, these will probably once again fly off camera store shelves.The Charmera Millennium Edition isn't just about a Y2K facelift. Reto has updated its software with a to …Read the full story at The Verge.

A large speaker bump on the back of the Tab Plus Gen 2 contributes to the tablet’s upgraded sound. | Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge Lenovo announced a new version of its chonky speaker-filled Tab Plus tablet that once again puts a strong focus on audio. While the original Tab Plus launched two years ago with eight built-in speakers requiring a 13.58mm rear bulge to squeeze them all in, the new Tab Plus Gen 2 bumps that to nine speakers with a circular bump on the back that's now 22.7mm thick. To help justify the thicker addition, the Gen 2's speaker bump integrates a fold-out kickstand that rotates 360 degrees to support the tablet in portrait and landscape modes.Lenovo hasn't confirmed exactly where or when the Tab Plus Gen 2 is expected to launch, but it says it will …Read the full story at The Verge.

Ensuring your code is working at its utmost best can be pretty daunting if you're not sure what to pull back, and by how much. However, sometimes the stars align, and you spot a really simple fix that significantly boosts your software's speed. As good as that is, though, not many people can claim they sped up a process by 5% just by moving three chunks of code down by a few lines, which is exactly what one Linux engineer achieved with kernel version 7.2.

Intel announced Firefly ahead of Computex and went into more detail on the new project during the technology event. At first glance, it may sound like Intel simply wanting to go a step further from existing architectures and launch something similar to Apple silicon with tighter integrations, phone-style components, higher efficiency control, and thinner systems. But it's much more than that, especially for portable devices. Intel brought about the Ultrabook to try to create a class of product, and the company is planning to do the same, but this time focusing on making Windows-powered laptops cheaper, thinner, and more standardized.

As the rest of the country celebrated the USA's first World Cup win and the New York Knicks championship, Anthropic spent its weekend fighting the Trump administration over its latest model release. At 5:21 PM on Friday, the company received a US export control directive to suspend access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 AI models by "any foreign national" inside or outside the US, "including foreign national Anthropic employees." The only way that was possible, Anthropic determined, was to completely disable products it spent the past week hyping - and travel to Washington, DC in hopes of changing President Donald Trump's mind. Now, over the com …Read the full story at The Verge.

You know, given how much landscape data Google has, I'm surprised it took this long for it to make a simple flight simulator with it. Still, it's better late than never, as the tech giant has revealed that you can now take flight over all of the landscapes it has gathered data on over the years. The best part is, you don't even need to download anything; you can climb into a virtual plane from your browser.

One of my favorite things about e-Ink displays is that they don't look like displays. Sure, they are screens, and you can put whatever you want on them, but unlike LCDs, you can put an e-Ink display into a picture frame, and it won't look out of place. One excellent example just appeared in the Raspberry Pi community, and while the end product looks amazing, the software running it is an excellent tool for smart home displays.