Substack will now help users determine whether what they're reading may have been written by AI. A new tool coming to the platform can scan posts, notes, replies, and comments to provide an estimate of how much text could be AI-generated or written with AI assistance, according to a blog post published on Tuesday.The tool is powered by an AI detection company called Pangram and is rolling out across the web and the iOS app, with an Android launch coming "soon." Readers can analyze content longer than 100 words by choosing the "Scan for AI text" option from the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of a post.Substack co-founder and CEO C …Read the full story at The Verge.

Minimalist flip phones seem like they're starting to become a thing. Last month, we saw Commodore's Callback 8020, a stripped-back flip phone that blocks social media, and now, Light is back with the $300 Light Flip.

Repurposing old tech is always a better idea than throwing it out. Some devices you can get more out of by giving them a new function instead of tossing them out. For instance, repurposing tech for a home lab is a good example. Whatever device, unless it is completely dead and unable to power on, it can serve a different tech function in your home.

Affinity becoming free is great news for anyone looking for professional creative software without paying for a subscription. It removes one of the biggest barriers that kept many people searching for alternatives. As someone who regularly edits images, works with graphics, and creates content for my blogs, I was excited to see how it would fit into my workflow. But the more I used it, the more I realized that productivity isn't always about using the most polished software. Sometimes it's about using the tools that naturally fit the way you work, and that's why I still find myself opening open-source apps more often than Affinity.

Sometimes you might walk into a room, issue a voice command, or trigger an automation, and instead get a cold, robotic response that a device is unavailable or your smart home is having trouble connecting to the internet. Realistically, it wasn't a complex network outage, a broken home assistant script, or an AWS server crash behind the blackout. It was a well-meaning family member, house guest, or muscle memory-driven version of yourself who flipped the physical wall switch off.

Whether it’s productivity tools, media managers, or game servers, I stick to free and open-source apps as much as possible. After all, they’re completely private from the prying eyes of random companies, and I don’t have to spend dozens of dollars on monthly subscriptions to unlock essential features. With containerized images, I can even host FOSS tools on a server node and access them from the rest of my devices.

Local AI has changed the way I work. Instead of opening a browser and depending on cloud-based chatbots for every task, I now have models running directly on my PC that are always available and work seamlessly with the rest of my self-hosted setup. But as I expanded my local AI stack, I realized that no single application could handle every part of my workflow equally well. After plenty of experimenting, I stopped looking for an all-in-one solution. Today, I rely on two different apps, and each one plays a distinct role that makes my daily workflow faster and more enjoyable.

Outside of updating my GPU drivers, I've never felt the need to rely on the Nvidia App. When DLSS 4.5 came out with a driver update, I used it once to set DLSS Override to Preset L for Super Resolution, but after that, I went right back to ignoring it. If I wanted to use frame generation or switch between DLSS modes, I'd just use the in-game settings and call it a day. But that changed when 007 First Light's native HDR implementation had issues with frame generation, pushing me to use RTX HDR as a workaround.

Buying the right drives for your network-attached storage (NAS) can be the difference between losing everything and safely storing countless terabytes of data. NAS-specific drives often cost considerably more than standard consumer storage, which is why I’ve used other methods to acquire HDDs for my own systems. These include buying discounted enterprise drives and shucking external enclosures. It remains a great way to find inexpensive storage for a NAS or PC.

On Monday, District 9 and Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Nightborne that's loosely based on Peter Watts' 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short comes from Blomkamp's new AI startup / production company, Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after human actors. But every single one of Nightborne's shots was made with ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator.In an X post about the short, Blomkamp described it as a "test start" meant to demonstrate what generative AI is capable of, and he said that he wants "to tackle a full feature in th …Read the full story at The Verge.

I spend my days dissecting consumer tech hardware, ripping apart gadgets, and analyzing software ecosystems for a living. By nature, I use this critical lens to view everything, including my 2022 car. It's not the rolling computer that the average Tesla or Rivian has become, but I realized I never gave its stock software a shot.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. | Bloomberg via Getty Images OpenAI says its AI models mistakenly breached open-source AI platform Hugging Face during internal testing. In a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI writes that GPT-5.6 Sol and "an even more capable pre-release model" discovered vulnerabilities within their sandboxed testing environment, allowing them to gain access to the internet and target Hugging Face.On July 16th, Hugging Face disclosed a security incident that it says was driven by "an autonomous AI agent system." Hugging Face's AI agents detected and stopped the breach, which OpenAI has now admitted occurred during an evaluation of its models' cybersecurity capabilities. OpenAI says "all e …Read the full story at The Verge.