Shortly before the US military launched an attack on Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, an account on Polymarket made some very suspiciously timed investments. The prediction market had been running bets on when or if Maduro would be removed from power, with prices for "out by January 31, 2026" as low as $0.07 late Friday evening. But within 24 hours of the military action, a newly created account invested tens of thousands of dollars, racking up several hundred thousand in profits.The account was created less than a week ago, and invested over $30,000 the day before the assault, turning a profit of over $408,000. The activit …Read the full story at The Verge.

High-end GPUs have always been expensive, but we're in for some wild years ahead. The ongoing AI-fueled memory shortage has already skyrocketed consumer RAM prices, with storage drives following closely behind. The next component to join this PC hardware winter is the graphics card, a much sought-after entity on any gaming PC. The DRAM supply reassignment and consequent dip in production are set to make high-end graphics card ownership harder than ever. My plan to upgrade from the RTX 3080 to another high-end GPU will have to wait till we're on the other side of this years-long crisis. Till then, a mid-range GPU will have to do, not that I'm complaining much.

A NAS is often sold as a one-stop solution for everything related to storage and beyond. It is touted as a replacement for the cloud and many of the services you otherwise rely on the internet for. It feels like a superpower — a device that can not only store your files but also act as your media backup, project management software, email host, a place to run Docker containers, smart home manager, surveillance station, and whatnot.

Valve has announced the winners of the 2025 Steam Awards and, unsurprisingly, Hollow Knight: Silksong, took home the Game of the Year honors. It was also given the "Best Game You Suck At" award, which, I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. Given the relentless fawning over Silksong since its release in September, an event that nearly brought the entire digital video game distribution system to its knees, that it would win Game of the Year felt like something of a forgone conclusion. The Best Game on Steam Deck was awarded to Hades II (an award we'd already unofficially granted it). The mechanics of Hades lend it to being played in sh …Read the full story at The Verge.

I am extremely prone to distraction and procrastination, and that's a fatal combination for productivity. A small distraction, such as a notification or the urge to change the song I have playing in the background, can send me down a rabbit hole of diversions that make even quick tasks take significantly longer than they should. I often feel like I spend as much time fighting my own impulses as I do actually working, so I decided to do something about it. I turned my desktop into a distraction-free writing environment, and I did it all using free tools.

There's no denying that GitHub is a critical part of modern software development processes. Between repositories, issues, pull requests, documentation and releases, it covers the length and breadth of modern development processes and releases. But if you tinker a lot, of spend a lot of time coding up small utilities or, perhaps, are just learning how to code, you might be wondering if it's even worth uploading this half-baked code to a third-party server.

If I were to merely mention the blue-and-silver BMW M3 GTR E46 in a crowd of gamers, I'd undoubtedly hear at least half of them go 'ooh' and 'aah' excitedly, the exclamations dripping with nostalgia. Do that today for gamers born after 2010, and the reaction would be drastically different. That's because we haven't had a truly iconic hero car in racing games for far too long now, and that absence is starting to feel heavy. Movies still understand this. Brian O'Conner's orange Toyota Supra and green Mitsubishi Eclipse, Han's VeilSide Mazda RX-7, or John Wick's Mustang — these cars are extensions of character, memory, and myth.

Smart homes appear perfect in video demos, but they can be laborious in real life. While I made the best of Home Assistant to set up my smart home, I struggled to make it work for my family. Not everyone was a fan of waiting for the lights or appliances to turn on. Since that made them physically turn smart things on and off, it broke several automations.

I, like many others, have fallen victim to the "New year, New build" excitement. I had the part list ready, the case picked out, and way too many tabs open with all the components I was hoping to purchase. But the reality is that a RAM crisis has sent me back, with pretty much all kits facing a price hike.

PowerShell is one of the core components of Windows 11, and even less tech-savvy users may find themselves fiddling with it from time to time. But when you start wanting to make bigger changes to your PC, PowerShell can be an essential tool with a lot to offer, and that's mainly thanks to scripts.

Let me get this out of the way first and foremost: Elden Ring is damn near perfect. It's one of those games where finding faults feels almost disrespectful, like nitpicking brushstrokes on a masterpiece. And yet, when a studio like FromSoftware drops something monumental, it's impossible not to start wishing for more, for better, smarter, cleaner, and bolder.

Well, it's that time of the year when we put our Christmas gifts away, drink lots of water to get rid of the New Year's Day party hangover, and wonder why we don't have anything fun to look forward to in January. Fortunately, while we have a ways yet until another exciting day of the year rolls around, Valve has given us a reason to rejoice: the results of the 2025 Steam Awards.