The Adobe subscription keeps going up, and it can easily cost hundreds of dollars every year, even if you're paying for a single app. On top of the cost, you also have to deal with system bloat. Illustrator silently runs 15+ background telemetry processes, Creative Cloud Desktop daemons, mandatory cloud-sync prompts, and annoying periodic online license-verification handshakes, which make the software unusable if you can't complete them.

Instagram's visible AI labels are supposed to help people quickly spot synthetically generated content at a glance. Over the last few weeks, however, users have been reporting that the system has gone haywire. They say Meta has been automatically applying an "AI Content" label to images that they didn't create or edit using generative AI tools. Meanwhile, actual AI imagery is slipping through the cracks, leaving the impression that nothing can be trusted on Instagram at all.The precise causes of this tagging seem to vary. Many people said the label appeared on images that were edited using tools like Canva's Background Remover or with negl …Read the full story at The Verge.

Works great on a sunny day. | Image: Bluetti Bluetti doesn't want you to call the Pioneer 5000 a solar generator (SoGen) even though that's what it is. What makes it slightly different from other large power stations that can be charged off solar - aka, a SoGen - is the dolly cart and up to 18KW of instant surge power available to start heavy equipment like air compressors, water pumps, and industrial motors. It features IP65 resistance to water and dust, and is designed to operate in temperatures from -20°C to 55°C. So, yeah, it's a rugged, powerful SoGen.Whatever you call it, Bluetti wants you to consider it instead of a gas-powered generator for job sites, events, emergency respon …Read the full story at The Verge.

Your modern motherboard has more than a few remnants of legacy ports and headers from decades ago. While the obsolete VGA port and even PS/2 ports can be found on some boards today, the serial/COM header has a more interesting story. It was used to connect older mice and modems up until the mid-2000s, which is when the dedicated serial port started disappearing from the rear I/O.

There is a torrent of unappetizing slop coming from restaurants, cafes, and brands that are increasingly turning to AI to generate images promoting their food. The resulting horror show includes donut shrimp, Reubens from the deep, wormlike noodles, and noodle-like pastries and stringy chicken. There's also construction material masquerading as ice cream, ice cream masquerading as brains, and other masonry-adjacent cuisine. I don't even know how to begin describing this monstrous attempt of a burger, and the less said about the trypophobic burrito from hell, grubs and all, the better. There are lumps. And holes. So many holes."Diffusion mo …Read the full story at The Verge.

Just hours after OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, CEO Sam Altman was already apologizing for what he describes as a "messy rollout" after paying users expecting access to the new frontier model were left waiting. The company hailed the model as a "generational leap in capability" on Thursday and described it as the start of "the AGI era," a fuzzy and poorly defined term tech executives nevertheless insist on using to promote their products. It said Astra would roll out to some enterprise customers - specifically those with access to its Daybreak cybersecurity platform - that day. This would expand to include all Plus, Pro, Business, and Enter …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft is giving its developer-optimized Windows experience a name: Project Zenith. While the software maker originally announced a similar developer-optimized Windows effort at Build earlier this year, Project Zenith is designed for new developer-focused devices with 64GB or more of unified memory."Project Zenith devices come with a preconfigured Windows setup for development and a set of tools curated for what developers reach for first," explains Logan Iyer, CVP of Windows platform and developer at Microsoft. "On these devices, developers can run 30B+ parameter models locally and unmetered - accelerating experimentation while helping …Read the full story at The Verge.

Ugreen’s HomeAgent H100 Pro hub combines local storage, on-device AI, and a new voice assistant, Uliya, to run your smart home. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Ugreen, known for its phone power banks, chargers, and NAS storage solutions, is moving into the smart home - in a big way. This week at the IFA tech show, the company launched its HomeAgent smart home platform that combines security camera storage, on-device AI, and smart home control in one system, managed by a voice assistant called Uliya, with the promise that everything runs locally. At the core of Ugreen's HomeAgent system is a hub that acts as the brain of your smart home, running a local-first AI (with some caveats) that you can interact with using natural language via Uliya. There are three hub configurations to choose from, each …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft's Copilot rarely reproduces even full sentences from news articles and books, let alone substantive chunks that could substitute for the original, the company says in new legal filings as it fights copyright claims from publishers including The New York Times and book authors.As part of the lawsuit's discovery, Microsoft provided 8.2 million Copilot chat logs to an expert hired by news publishers. The logs, it claims, were specifically chosen "because they hit on keywords implicating use of News Plaintiffs' websites, and therefore the most likely to contain News Plaintiffs' works." It says the resulting analysis shows that 59,545 …Read the full story at The Verge.

Following the lead of companies like Xteink, Lexar is the latest to sacrifice a USB-C port in the pursuit of slimming down its hardware.When the Lexar Muse Ultra-Slim Portable SSD launches later this year in 512GB and 1TB capacities it will be one of the slimmest you can buy. At its thickest point in the middle it measures just 3.8mm, but that tapers to only 1mm at the edges thanks to high-density NAND stacking and a "custom ultra-thin PCB architecture" inside. But performance remains solid with read speeds up to 1,050MB/s and write speeds maxing out at 1,000MB/s. That's fast enough to record 4K Apple ProRes video at up to 120fps when conn …Read the full story at The Verge.

Europe's biggest tech trade show, IFA, has taken over Berlin this week - and we've been on the ground all week checking it out in person. We figure you have questions, so we're hosting an AMA that's exclusive to Verge subscribers at 12PM ET today. That's when we'll start dropping answers, but you can ask your burning questions whenever you'd like.I'm Dom Preston, a news editor here at The Verge, and I've spent the last few days roaming the trade show halls together with senior smart home reviewer Jen Tuohy, putting as much as we can to the test.As you can probably guess, Jen's been checking out all things smart home, from Philips Hue's n …Read the full story at The Verge.

When setting up a smart doorbell, you might easily be hooked into monthly subscriptions that total over $100 a year, whether that's Nest Aware or Ring Protect. Even then, you just get generic "person was detected" notifications, sometimes even 10 seconds after they've already walked away.