Andrew Ross Sorkin and Dario Amodei speak onstage during The New York Times DealBook Summit 2025 at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 03, 2025 in New York City. | Image: Getty This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.Dario Amodei took the stage at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday to throw punches without naming names.The Anthropic CEO spent a good chunk of the interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin drawing a careful line between his company's approach and that of a certain competitor. When asked about whether the AI industry is in a bubble, Amodei separated the "technological side" from the "economic side" and then twisted the knife."On the technological side, I feel really solid," he said. "On the economic side …Read the full story at The Verge.

It’s getting harder and harder for the Hubble and other telescopes orbiting Earth to capture pristine images thanks to the sudden surge in satellite launches. Satellite trails could mess up nearly 40 percent of images the Hubble takes and up to 96 percent of those taken by three other telescopes over the next decade, according to a study by NASA researchers published today in the journal Nature. That could jeopardize scientists’ ability to spot worrisome asteroids or discover new planets, they warn. Our view of space just gets fuzzier without efforts to limit light pollution from new megaconstellations of satellites.The scale of the problem is astounding“My career has been focused on trying to make telescopes see better … try to make the telescopes more sensitive, more precise, getting better images,” says Alejandro Borlaff, a NASA research scientist and lead author of the study. “For the first time, we found something that may actually be worse in the future.” The scale of the problem is astounding. Cheaper launch costs and the proliferation of telecommunications satellites like Starlink’s have opened up a Pandora’s box of new challenges in space. Satellite trails, which look like streaks of light, were already detected in 4.3 percent of images taken by the Hubble between 2018 and 2021. The number of satellites orbiting Earth has grown from 5,000 in 2019 to more than 15,800 today, according to the European Space Agency. That number could reach as high as 560,000 if currently planned satellite launches proceed over the next 10 years or so. Borlaff and his colleagues simulated the view that four telescopes are likely to have after all those launches. With that much crowding in space, they project that the Hubble telescope could inadvertently capture an average of 2.14 satellites per exposure. The Chinese Space Station Telescope Xuntian, one of the other telescopes included in the study that’s expected to launch next year, could see an average of 92 satellites per exposure. The Hubble is less likely to catch as many satellites in its images because of its narrower field of view. Fortunately, other powerful telescopes, including the James Webb, orbit far enough from Earth to avoid light contamination from satellites.View LinkThe issue goes beyond accidentally including a satellite (or many) among the visions of swirling nebulae, stars, and distant planets these telescopes capture. The satellites reflect light from the Sun, Moon, or Earth, which can be bright enough to obscure details that might otherwise be captured in an image were it not for that light pollution. Researchers might not be able to detect a change in the brightness of a star that could indicate that there’s an exoplanet there, Borlaff explains. “You will lose that information because a satellite passed in front of you.” Now’s the time to find solutions, he says, before there are so many satellites in orbit. Efforts to design darker, less reflective satellites have posed new problems because they tend to get hotter and shed more infrared light as a result. Researchers have also tried strategizing to take images at times and locations with a lower likelihood of satellites crossing their path, an endeavor that’s harder to do the more crowded it gets out there. It’ll take more coordination on the ground with companies and governments launching satellites, maybe by placing them in orbit lower than where the telescopes are to avoid obstructing their view or regulating where they can be deployed. “There has to be an optimal way to place constellations and space telescopes … so we can coexist in a sustainable way,” Borlaff says.

The reality is that building your own PC doesn't really save you a lot of money like it used to. Sure, it's fun being able to pick out all your parts, finding just the right case, and spending a few hours putting it all together. But if you're someone that's not looking to go through all of that and just wants something that works great out of the box, then a prebuilt PC is going to be the way to go.

Getting gifts from your family and friends’ wishlists is easy, but getting them something meaningful will make them grateful forever. You'd be surprised how inexpensive it is to make your own cheap smart home sensors and make someone’s life a bit easier. With an ESP32 microcontroller and ESPHome, these cheap smart home sensors can be a catalyst in making a home smarter.

It's always a challenge to develop for community-led projects such as Home Assistant. The team behind this popular smart home platform finds itself in a tricky position with each major release. Some features may be fully developed and tested, but they can sometimes not be certain if it's the right move for every user. This is where the leading feature of the December update comes into play, and it's called Home Assistant Labs.

Every year, the nominations and winners at The Game Awards are guaranteed to be the cause of discourse online. Trying to judge the best games of the year with so many opinions being thrown around is a monumental task in of itself, let alone deciding which game represents the best aspects of the entire industry. And the 2025 show is no exception, with a highly competitive group of nominees for every category. But one game was left out of the coveted Game of the Year category, despite being nominated many times for multiple awards.

If you're a Google Home and Nest smart home ecosystem user, you're likely more than a little frustrated at this point. Over the past few months, especially as Google's attention continues to turn to Gemini, smart speakers like the Nest Audio have become unresponsive and terrible at controlling smart home devices. In my house, my various Nest Audio speakers have become so bad at turning my Philips Hue lights on/off that I've considered getting rid of them entirely for Amazon's Echo smart speakers.

BMW has been peppering us with teasers and bits and pieces about its next-gen EV platform, Neue Klasse, for so long - fully two years now - that I confess I've become a bit numb to the hype. I'd seen the dashboard-filling displays, talked to engineers endlessly about the completely retooled active safety suite, and even got a go behind the wheel of a prototype machine.All this for the launch of a crossover SUV, typically the most milquetoast of all the automotive classifications. But after spending the better part of a day wheeling around the final version of the iX3, I'm surprised to say it was all worth it. This little(ish) SUV really is …Read the full story at The Verge.

For decades, PC builders have used Crucial RAM sticks to power their PCs. However, as we've entered the AI era, said PC builders have been struggling to find specific components as interested parties begin hoovering up hardware to power their LLMs. At the start of the year, we saw a big GPU shortage to the point that new GeForce RTX cards were selling for ridiculous prices.

Passwords were never a good solution, and they were simply the solution that was easy to deploy. For decades, users have been expected to memorize dozens of unique strings, change them every so often in case a service had been breached, and avoid reusing them across services, but the data suggests that very few people actually take these steps. The rise of credential-stuffing attacks, phishing campaigns, and massive password leaks shows just how fragile the system is and has been for years. That's why passkeys are now posited as the modern alternative: secure by default, resistant to phishing, and practically impossible to brute-force. On paper, the shift should be an obvious win for both users and developers.

The refurbished PC hardware market has always thrived in enthusiast circles, thanks to the constant flux in component prices. One month, a GPU costs as much as a small car; the next, it's half the price, so naturally, buying refurbished often feels like a smart shortcut to better performance for less money. And in many cases, it just is: plenty of components age gracefully and offer fantastic value the second time around.

For as long as I can remember, I have always set up my PC using a local account. It was because I prioritized privacy over a bunch of services I didn't really need, and I didn't want Microsoft tracking my usage patterns. But that changed with Windows 11, where Microsoft made it nearly impossible. Although there are still ways to set up Windows 11 with a local account, it's more challenging than ever. On earlier iterations of the OS, you could just choose "Local Account" during setup, but now, you need to run a command which, honestly, most Windows users are unaware of. Additionally, you can switch to a local account after setup, but that isn't a common choice either.