After it was announced that Sony was dropping Hideo Kojima's Physint, and that instead the Metal Gear Solid creator's latest title would be coming to Xbox, there were a flurry of rumors about the falling out. Bloomberg reported that the decision was driven by a number of factors, including missed deadlines, budget and profitability concerns, and its timed exclusivity. In an interview with IGN, Kojima said that, considering the broader state of the industry, which has seen a number of studios close, he was worried about the future of Kojima Productions:I know there's a lot of news in the game industry that many studios are closing down, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Every time I'm on TikTok or Instagram, I almost always come across a video of someone recommending, promoting, or simply raving about Wispr Flow. At this point, I've probably heard some variation of "I barely type anymore" more times than I can count. Now, as a writer, those four words hurt. They really, really, really hurt.

My smart home already controls most of the devices I use around the house, including the downstairs lights, TV, speakers, smart plugs, thermostat, and more. Yet when I was done for the night, I still handled each part separately. I had to switch everything off, change the temperature, arm the house, and enable Sleep Focus on my phone.

The AI doom and gloom has been really kicking into high gear lately.

The man who may stand to make the most money from the AI boom seems to think he knows better than anyone else, including researchers who have studied and worked on AI for decades. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, he claimed there was a "0% chance" of AI being the end of the world. He also said of people sounding the alarm about the dangers of AI that, "Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible."He also claims that calls from CEOs like Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman to slow down the development of AI are "not grounded in science." He even argued that there was no need for new rules, laws, or guidelines, in …Read the full story at The Verge.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve tried running local LLMs on several servers, ranging from full-on RTX cards, NAS units, and old gaming PCs to random laptops and Raspberry Pi boards. To no one’s surprise, I’ve had the best luck with Nvidia cards, and not just modern ones featuring Tensor cores. In fact, I currently use an old GTX 1080 to run Gemma-4-E4B for my everyday productivity Docker apps, and this behemoth of a card can even drive the likes of GPT-OSS-20B and Gemma-4-26B-A4B at respectable speeds as long as I rely on MoE offloading.

The president posted on Truth Social that he wanted to appoint an "AI czar" to lead a new "AI force." He made the announcement amid growing calls from across the political spectrum and even within the industry to pump the brakes on AI development. He posted that his administration "will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!"In the rambling post, Trump said that data centers were "wealthy and prestigious" and claimed without evidence that they raised salaries, lowered taxes, and made for safer streets in the communities in which they were …Read the full story at The Verge.

Podcast ads have become difficult to ignore. Every show nowadays begins with a pre-roll, stops for one or two sponsor messages in the middle, and finishes with another promotion. You can always skip them manually, but if, like me, you like to listen to podcasts while doing something else, you have to reach for your phone to skip the ads.

In August, I wrote about my love of the music history podcast No Dogs in Space, but mourned the fact that there hadn't been a new episode in over two years. Little did I know that hosts Carolina Hidalgo and Marcus Parks were gearing up to announce the show's return with season four, Punk 2.0. The first episode premiered this week, part one of a series on the New York Dolls, a band near and dear to my heart as a native Staten Islander, home of frontman David Johansen.For the new season, Hidalgo and Parks decided it was time to get back to basics. Part of that was that they felt punk rock was where their passion and expertise were strongest. …Read the full story at The Verge.

Windows comes with a built-in tool for almost everything, which is convenient until you find yourself using the same few features every day. I used to stick with the defaults simply because they were already there. Over time, though, I started trying free alternatives whenever a Windows tool felt too basic or got in the way of how I work.

If you come from the Adobe ecosystem, or are still in it, you know that most graphics work pipelines mean a two-app dance. Photoshop for anything raster, Illustrator for anything vector, and a folder full of exports bouncing between them every time something needs to be adjusted. Canceling Adobe doesn't really fix it either because most alternatives specialize in either one or the other - GIMP and Photopea for raster, Inkscape for vector. So it's the same story.

After the success of Backrooms, it looks like A24 is trying to cash in on yet another internet horror craze with a new installment in the V/H/S horror anthology series set in the SCP Foundation universe. But as soon as it was announced, the backlash started, and V/H/S: SCP already appears to be on shaky ground.SCP is a creepypasta that, like Backrooms, originated on 4chan. The fictional SCP (Special Containment Procedures) Foundation documents, captures, and contains paranormal or supernatural anomalies. It's a sprawling story told primarily through wiki entries that mimic documentation you might file while working at a government agency. …Read the full story at The Verge.