Smart home products can be expensive as they begin to boast premium features or come from name brands, which make you feel like you can only pick up more products from them once you've invested in their ecosystem. For the price of one premium Wi-Fi sensor, you can fit out three rooms with Zigbee.

Waabi, the Toronto-based autonomous trucking startup, is expanding its portfolio to include robotaxis. And it's bringing Uber along for the ride.Raquel Urtasun, the former chief scientist at Uber's now defunct Advanced Technologies Group, founded Waabi in 2021 to be a more "AI-centric approach" to autonomous vehicles. That approach initially focused on trucking, with Waabi using its proprietary software to automate driving on commercial delivery routes in Texas. But with self-driving trucks turning out to be a way harder problem than originally thought, and robotaxis seemingly having their own moment, Waabi is now turning its focus to auto …Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple’s CEO is the latest executive to speak out following the killing of Alex Pretti. | Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge Apple CEO Tim Cook has spoken out about "the events in Minneapolis" after federal agents shot and killed another protester over the weekend, telling employees that he has shared his feelings with President Trump. In an internal memo reported by Bloomberg, Cook said that "this is a time for deescalation," and that he had "a good conversation with the President this week where I shared my views." Cook was one of several Tech CEOs, alongside Amazon's Andy Jassy and AMD's Lisa Su, who attended a VIP screening of Amazon's $40 million Melania documentary, just hours after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents. Cook's attendance sparked a fres …Read the full story at The Verge.

Ever since the first Obsbot Tiny webcam I reviewed back in 2022, this relatively new company has consistently impressed me with the video quality and features it offers. The Tiny 4K was already fantastic at the time, and followed by the even better Tiny 2 in 2024, along with a couple of cheaper models in between.

Aluminium OS looks like exactly what it is: a hybrid of Android and ChromeOS. We've been waiting months for our first look at Android running on a PC in Google's upcoming ChromeOS / Android hybrid platform, codenamed Aluminium OS. Now we've seen it in action, and have Google to thank for the leak.9to5Google spotted a bug report related to Chrome Incognito tabs published to the Google Issue Tracker yesterday, including two screen recordings taken from a device running Aluminium OS. Google has now restricted access to the report, but 9to5Google managed to pull the videos first. The site also reports that the bug tracker mentioned an ALOS software version - already confirmed to be the initialism for Aluminium OS - and …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft is getting ready to improve Windows 11's ability to resume Android apps on a PC. The software giant first introduced its cross-device resume last year, letting Windows 11 users resume OneDrive sessions from their Android device on a PC. Now, it's expanding this to Spotify playback, browsing sessions, and more.The improved cross-device resume support, which has been in testing since August, is part of the latest Release Preview update to Windows 11 that started rolling out yesterday. It includes the ability to resume Spotify playback on a PC from a phone, as well as any work in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You'll also be able to c …Read the full story at The Verge.

One thing I don't miss after moving to Linux is the Windows 11 Start menu. Trust me, once you've gotten used to being able to edit things in your application launcher, it's hard to go back to the rigid, immutable system that is Windows 11's Start menu. Recently, the company added categories to the Start menu, but you cannot edit, rename, or rearrange them in any way.

Six anomalies found in Hubble’s archives. A pair of astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) discovered more than 800 previously undocumented "astrophysical anomalies" hiding in Hubble's archives. To do so, researchers David O'Ryan and Pablo Gómez trained an AI model to comb through Hubble's 35-year dataset, hunting for strange objects and flagging them for manual review. It's "a treasure trove of data in which astrophysical anomalies might be found," O'Ryan said in a statement. Studying space is hard. There's lots of it, it's noisy, and the flood of data generated by tools like the Hubble Space Telescope can overwhelm even large research teams. And sometimes space is weird. …Read the full story at The Verge.

I know this is stating the obvious for anyone experienced with hosting, and yet, you'd be surprised just how many people put it off, and that's not even counting those who simply don't know better. Dedicated boot drives are universally recommended, but in a home server, there's almost nothing more important, even though they're still surprisingly uncommon.

Let's say you open a 2026 AAA title and see 120 FPS on your counter, but your mouse feels like it's dragging through mud, and you're unable to click or fire as you typically would. GPU manufacturers, like Nvidia and AMD, have seemingly successfully redefined the word "performance." It used to mean how fast your PC can process a game, but now it feels like it actually means how smooth the video output looks.

I'm terrible at meeting notes. Not in the "I forget to take them" way, but in the "my notes look like a crime scene of half-finished sentences, misspelled names, and arrows pointing nowhere" way. I've tried structured templates, Cornell notes, bullet journaling, all of it. Nothing stuck because I can't think and format simultaneously. Then I found NotebookLM, Google's AI research assistant, and realized I didn't need to fix my note-taking. I just needed something that could make sense of the mess I was already creating.

Across six top large language models, xAI's Grok performed the worst at identifying and countering antisemitic content, according to a study published Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League. On the other end of the spectrum, Anthropic's Claude performed the best according to the report's metrics, but the ADL said all models had gaps that required improvement. The ADL tested Grok, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's Llama, Claude, Google's Gemini, and DeepSeek by prompting models with a variety of narratives and statements falling under three categories defined by the ADL: "anti-Jewish," "anti-Zionist," and "extremist." The study rated chatbots on th …Read the full story at The Verge.