You, me, my colleagues, my friends, and practically anyone who uses AI regularly all have one thing in common: we hate usage limits. Nothing kills the momentum of whatever you're working on quite like being (politely) told you've burned through your allowance and need to wait before you can keep going.

Each of those teeny lens blades is around the same thickness as a human hair. | Image: iFixit iFixit's latest device teardown shows us the inner workings of the new variable aperture lens inside Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, alongside some repair concerns to be mindful of. The adjustable mechanical iris opens and closes magnetically, controlling how much light should pass through to the sensor, featuring six leaf-like overlapping blades that are each about as thin as a human hair.You can see that scale comparison yourself below in a side-by-side image that iFixit took using a Evident DSX2000 microscope. Cramming that mechanism into the same main camera footprint as the iPhone 17 Pro series models is impressive, with iFixit …Read the full story at The Verge.

Oftentimes, when a new set of open weights drops for a new model, I rush to the scene to see what it's capable of. Most recently, it happened when Qwen3.8-27B arrived in August, and it will probably happen again the next time Alibaba or Google ships something that piques my interest.

I’ve been repurposing old systems into server workstations for a while, and managing resource consumption is by far one of the biggest hurdles when dealing with cheap dinosaur rigs. Linux distros are pretty neat for reviving Windows machines from the bygone era, but desktop environments tend to siphon a lot of CPU and memory resources that I’d otherwise like to allocate to my virtualized apps.

Windows 11 is undoubtedly the best-looking OS release by Microsoft to date. Its design is modern and doesn't look out of place, even for an OS that's nearly five years old at this point. Windows 10's design felt quite flat when compared to something like macOS or some niche Linux distributions. So, Windows 11’s visual overhaul was much welcomed by today's standards. However, I'm not a fan of some of the visual effects, and they can feel slow after regular use.

If you played the original BioShock on an ordinary PC, there's a setting you probably never got to use. It makes each room in Rapture sound like the room it is, with all the sound effects. However, on today's motherboard audio, that setting is normally grayed out because the game expects the EAX audio support found on cards like Creative's Sound Blaster X-Fi from about 20 years ago.

The United Nations logo at the UN headquarters in New York. | Getty Images Governments need to rein in increasingly capable AI agents before their risks are fully understood, a United Nations scientific panel warned in the global organization's first major assessment of OpenAI's hack of Hugging Face earlier this year.The report cements AI's place on the global diplomatic agenda this week as leaders gather in New York for the UN General Assembly and the US and China hold talks on AI. Last week, UN secretary general António Guterres called on governments to cooperate on addressing the threats posed by AI, warning that "the world cannot afford a race to the bottom on AI safety."It is the first thematic brief from …Read the full story at The Verge.

One of the best parts of the tinkering community is that they always devise ways to repurpose your spare hardware into something cool. If you have a Raspberry Pi 3B or better, and you have a spare monitor kicking around (which is 90% of tinkerers), someone has devised a way to turn the two into a wall-mounted digital calendar.

The days of being impressed when an AI spits out lines and lines of code that actually run are pretty much over. At this point, an AI being able to take a prompt, dig through a project, make the changes I asked for, and leave me with something that at least works is the bare minimum.

Meta's Muse AI agent has been blocked from shopping Amazon on behalf of its users, GeekWire reports. A popup message started appearing on Sunday for Muse users saying that "continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed."According to GeekWire, Meta didn't notify Amazon that Muse would access its store. Amazon also expressed privacy and security concerns over Muse failing to identify itself when it browses, and seemingly capturing customer credentials."We think it's fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nixie tubes look awesome, but for a simple home project, they can be a little pricey. Fortunately, there are ways to get a similar effect using hardware that doesn't cost a pretty penny; plus, it can do other cool stuff too. Such is the case of this Nixie-inspired ESP32 clock, and because it doesn't use real Nixie tubes, they can do more than tell the time.

We've covered our fair share of homemade airplane trackers on XDA, and while they're all fantastic, they tend to be aimed at aviation enthusiasts. Sometimes, though, you don't need all the data; you just want to know what cool plane is flying over your head at that very moment. This ESP32 project does just that by keeping an eye on the sky and automatically informing you whenever a plane flies by.