Modern computing has come a long, long way. We went from AGP slots moving about 2GB/s and IDE ribbon cables wide enough to block half the airflow in case to a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot carrying roughly thirty times that bandwidth, storage wired straight into the CPU, and a single rear port that pushes 40Gbps of data and a display signal at once.

You would think that a multimedia conglomerate as large as Disney would have a few chief technology officers by now, but the company has just appointed someone to the position for the very first time. Today, Disney announced that Karandeep Anand is joining the company as its new CTO. Anand will report directly to recently appointed CEO Josh D'Amaro, and he will head up the company's infrastructure, product, engineering, and data / AI platforms teams. Anand comes to Disney from chatbot startup Character.AI, where he served as CEO for just over a year and oversaw the company's push into microdramas. Anand jumping ship to Disney comes as a …Read the full story at The Verge.

Ever since the prices of Raspberry Pi single-board computers hit deranged levels, I’ve found myself gravitating towards the ESP32 lineup for my DIY smart home gadgets. But as much as I hate to admit it, I was somewhat intimidated by these microcontrollers when I first bought an ESP32 module years ago.

I love using Android Auto and have done so for many years now. It completely replaced vehicle infotainment systems that are often sluggish, underpowered, and sometimes downright useless.

I use spreadsheets for all kinds of small tasks, from keeping track of projects to organizing information I need regularly. For years, Google Sheets was the obvious choice because it was quick, familiar, and worked from anywhere. But as I moved more of my software to my own setup, keeping important spreadsheets in someone else's cloud started to feel out of place.

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger ordered the state government to take steps that could empower local communities to have a larger say in data center development and slow down approvals in a state that is already home to the data center capital of the world.Executive Order 22 bans executive branch officials from signing nondisclosure agreements for data center projects, requires expedited noise regulations, and requires a review of backup-generation operations used by data centers, among other requirements. The order also establishes an AI task force responsible for evaluating how the state government can address risks to Virginians like wo …Read the full story at The Verge.

I stopped treating my Fire TV Stick like a cheap streaming box the day I started sideloading APKs. And it turned out to be more capable than I expected. Its fate changed when I started removing ads and loading an Android launcher.

I never expected VS Code to replace some of the productivity apps I use every day, but that is exactly what happened. What started as a simple experiment to keep a few article drafts next to my coding projects quickly turned into a much bigger workflow change.

When setting up my home server, I wanted a reliable, always-on core to manage my smart home and media library. When looking at prebuilt 4-bay NAS enclosures or dedicated automation servers, the price tags were around $800 before you even consider hard drives. So, instead of buying a locked-down appliance or building a bulky, power-hungry desktop tower, I looked at mini PCs instead and found the GEEKOM A5 2027.

When a home network starts feeling sluggish, the reflex is to buy a new router. Wi-Fi 7 routers are everywhere; the marketing is loud, and it feels like the obvious fix. But for most homes, the router is not the bottleneck, and a $500 flagship won't fix what's actually wrong.

Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times' case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies' own documentation warned that it was starting a "doom loop" that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the "largest theft of labor in human history," and that it made a "complete mockery of the idea of fair use."Many of the most eye-catching quotes from the document come from Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht. Though, the company has tried to distance itself from Hecht's assertions. Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek told The Verge that "These comments ref …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've been using the ChatGPT Desktop app recently, and as far as it was concerned, it's been talking to OpenAI's servers this entire time. In actuality, it's been talking to a combination of models through my OpenCode subscription, MiniMax M3, and even my local LLMs, like Qwen 3.8 27B and GLM-5.3-Flash.