Considering how many AI tools and features have launched in the past three years, we've all gotten into the habit of using them all the same way: sending a prompt and hoping for the best. For a lot of AI products, especially conversational chatbots that are meant to generate an answer and nothing more, that's basically fine. The worst case is a reply you don't like, and you try again.

Slots & Daggers, a low-key, fantasy-themed slot machine roguelike, was one of my favorite games last year. That may sound like a complicated description, but the game mixes ideas from deckbuilding roguelikes with slot machines to create an engrossing loop, and there's steady meta-progression that helps you push further with just about every run. Perhaps the best part is that Slots & Daggers is short: Solo developer Friedemann describes the game as a mini roguelike, and I completed it, including all 12 achievements, in just under six hours. This month, Slots & Daggers came out on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X / S, and …Read the full story at The Verge.

Whenever something doesn't feel right with your body, it's always tempting to reach for Google to see what might be wrong. It's quick, it's free, and it can sometimes make you feel at peace (and sometimes make you panic even more). LLMs have only accelerated this behaviour, with people flocking to AIs to share malaises, upload photos of injuries, and ask about conditions.

A good time with old maps. | Image: Past Maps Craig Campbell walked away from the river of investor money flowing into AI to create, of all things, a website.Sure, Campbell probably could have started an AI company. He's a former engineer at Meta and an experienced tech founder who in 2022 sold his last venture - an e-commerce tool for businesses that use Shopify - right as the AI boom was booming. "I had my prior VC investors breathing down my neck, going 'start something else. We'll write you a blank check.'" He had other ideas.People generally aren't rushing to get into the website business, what with the Google Zero event horizon approaching. Campbell was undeterred and has gro …Read the full story at The Verge.

Smart home automation room tracking is frustrating. Let's say you place a Zigbee motion sensor in your home office, but because you're sitting quietly working at your PC, reading a long thread, or even just browsing YouTube, the sensor assumes the room is empty and plunges you into darkness. The irony of this is that you're sitting in front of a multi-thousand-dollar machine that knows exactly what you're doing down to the millisecond.

Google recently made waves with its announcement of the Googlebook platform. Bringing together elements of Chrome OS and Android, along with a lot of AI features, it's the company's latest attempt at winning over laptop users, after Chromebooks mostly gained traction in the entry-level education market.

I wanted the problem to be almost anything except the obvious one. My 3D printer was tuned well enough, my bed was clean, my filament was dry, and my slicer profile looked respectable at a glance. Yet print after print came out with ugly walls, rough top surfaces, and seams that looked more like damage than a normal part of the process. I kept changing everything around the failure instead of admitting that my extrusion settings might be wrong.

There's no question about AI's effect on coding. It has huge ramifications on how people create apps and systems, and curators of software have had to consider whether or not they allow AI-generated code in their projects. Linus Torvalds has already given the green light to AI-generated code (although it still has to be good code), but a maintainer at Flathub has gone the opposite way and banned it, because people just can't behave.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with an RTX laptop at CES 2025. | Image: Getty Images It's the world's worst kept secret that Nvidia is about to announce its own Arm-powered laptop chips at Computex this weekend, and now Microsoft, Nvidia, and Arm are all openly teasing the announcement. The Windows and Nvidia GeForce accounts on X both posted "A new era of PC" earlier today, and now Arm has followed up with an identical post. All three posts include coordinates pointing to where Computex is hosted in Taipei. Nvidia is holding a Computex keynote in Taipei at 8PM PT / 11PM ET on Sunday night, where it's rumored to be announcing its new N1 and N1x laptop chips.A new era of PC. 25.0528, 121.5990- Windows (@Windows) May 29, …Read the full story at The Verge.

TikTok sellers that appear to be AI generated, in tears. | The Verge Aliyah, a light-skinned Black woman dressed in country-western gear, is struggling to sell metal buckles she handmade on TikTok. In a video for the social media platform from March, she cries to the camera and pleads for views: "Even as a black woman, I have more faith that white women will stay 13 seconds [on this video] to save my belt buckle business," the onscreen text reads. She wipes a tear off her cheek. But Aliyah isn't real, and neither are her supposedly handmade products - she's one of many AI-generated influencers created to sell mass-produced products via dropshipping on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Identical belt buckles …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's getting harder and harder to find a monitor that doesn't have some flavor of OLED panel, which is a good thing because the technology is getting better and better. That leaves monitor manufacturers having to differentiate in other ways, like this Lenovo Yoga Pro 27UD-10.

NotebookLM has been one of the most reliable tools in my stack for over a year now. Like most of you probably, it's where I go when I've got a pile of, well, anything to make sense of. However, reliability and versatility aren't the same things. NotebookLM is built around a fairly rigid idea of how research should go - you bring it a clean set of sources and it works strictly within them. When you veer off that path the sessions can start to get frustrating pretty quickly.