While ChatGPT has been rising in popularity, it feels like GPT-5 just isn't delivering the results I'm looking for. Alongside this issue, ChatGPT Plus or whatever AI alternative you use can set you back hundreds of dollars a year just to rent intelligence. I had to take a step back and think about the fact that there has to be a better option out there from both a usage and price perspective.

Roblox is rolling out its previously announced requirement for all users to go through an age estimation process to be able to use the platform's chat features. The policy was announced in November 2025 and was rolled out to Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands in December, but now users will be prompted to complete an age check to be able to chat in "all regions where chat is available," Roblox says.The company's facial scan age check process uses technology from Persona, which is also used by Reddit. If a user wants to appeal the result of their age check, they can also verify their age via ID verification, and a parent can also u …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you spend most of your time in graphical apps, it is easy to assume that serious productivity depends on windows, buttons, and menus. Once you start living in the terminal, though, a different picture emerges. Modern command-line tools are fast, scriptable, and surprisingly pleasant to use once you get past the first hour of the learning curve. These five applications show how far a terminal workflow can go and might convince you that you do not always need a GUI to get real work done.

When The Lego Group announced that its biggest innovation since 1978 would be a tiny proprietary computer brick, the reactions were divided. I heard from people concerned this was the death of imagination from a company that's all about imagination - and from people who thought it sounded pretty cool!Personally, I walked in skeptical. My kids loved Lego's previous computer bricks, the Lego Mario toys, but don't play with them for long because they're predictable and fiddly to use! But I walked out with a grin on my face. These Smart Bricks are far smarter and more imaginative than I expected. This isn't like Lego Mario where scanning a b …Read the full story at The Verge.

This cutaway shows how the Bluetti Charger 2 can be integrated into your vehicle. | Image: Bluetti Bluetti's latest car charger can quickly charge power stations at a very fast 1200W - about 10 times faster than plugging it into the 12V cigarette lighter outlet. The Charger 2, as it's called, can also reverse the flow of electrons to jump-start your vehicle or maintain its starter battery when used with a Bluetti power station like the Apex300.For perspective, I typically consume about 1.6kWh per day from power stations when vanlifing around Europe. So, in perfect conditions (that don't exist), I'd only have to drive about 75 minutes to recoup a day's worth of energy if using the Charger 2. The DC-DC charger hits that maximum 1200W ch …Read the full story at The Verge.

As tends to happen every year, CES is here to ring in 2026, and with it comes some of the most exciting tech of the whole year. CES always sets the stage for the next 12 months, and as per usual, this year's edition brings us some incredible new devices to look forward to.

By 2022–2023, building a DDR5 system stopped being "too expensive," with prices of motherboards and memory dropping sufficiently to incentivize mass adoption. By 2024–2025, DDR5 had become the norm, and building a DDR4 system had become a niche instead, relevant only for budget builders. What has happened in the last few months, however, has turned the scales again, making people think twice before building a DDR5 PC. Thanks to outrageous RAM prices, it's now much more expensive to build a DDR5 system than a DDR4 one. The performance differences are getting dwarfed by the huge gulf in the price of DDR4 and DDR5 RAM. We're now at a stage where building a DDR4 system is the smarter recommendation.

Nintendo has been pretty much the sole contender in handheld gaming for a few years, but that seemed to start to change when Valve introduced the Steam Deck in 2022. With more power, better controls, and a surprisingly competitive price, there were very valid reasons for someone to go with a Steam Deck over a Switch, and even a Switch 2.

On December 31st, a brand-new account on Polymarket placed a bet: Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, would be out of office by the end of January. It was the first in a series of increasing bets. On January 3rd, the US bombed the Venezuelan capital, kidnapped Maduro and his wife, and killed at least 80 people along the way. The account cashed out with almost half a million dollars.It would be a misread to describe the surprise invasion of Venezuela as imperial expansion driven by the dictates of capitalism; it is, somehow, worse. Normal capitalism requires a working relationship with reality. Normal capitalism thrives on predictabili …Read the full story at The Verge.

Building a NAS can seem deceptively simple. After all, at its foundation, it's a computer with a hunk of storage, running some kind of operating system that allows you to access its storage volumes from your network. Like many things in the self-hosting world, however, it's rarely that straightforward. The problem is that most of the decisions that matter don’t let their ramifications be known until months or even years later. By then, changing course is expensive, disruptive, or downright impossible without migrating all your data. Looking back, there are a few lessons I wish someone had drilled into me before I ever laid my hands on a drive bay.

NVMe drives have been supported for a long time on Windows, but the definition of "native" has changed over time. Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 added it first, in the form of StorNVMe. As far as we can tell, this has been the standard way of interfacing with an NVMe drive since then, with Microsoft adapting NVMe devices to a storage model built around long-standing SCSI abstractions, rather than as its own protocol. Now, that's changing, as Microsoft is rolling out a truly native NVMe driver for Windows Server 2025 and, as a result, Windows 11, too.

Most of the work I do in Affinity isn’t even editing or designing; it’s spent thinking of ideas, remembering constraints, remembering where tools and features are, re-reading briefs, problem solving, and second-guessing myself. Actually using the app is secondary to all of my mental processes, especially when I’m working on larger projects or batch files. This is where NotebookLM comes in.