As much as I adore my local LLMs, they can’t hold a candle to the reasoning capabilities of their cloud counterparts, and for good reason. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI clouds can process hundreds of billions of parameters without breaking a sweat, while my GPUs can take a few minutes to come up with answers if I try running 30B (or even 20B) models on my local LLM providers.

Modern smart homes often have around 30, 50, or even 100+ Wi-Fi devices when you count all the bulbs, plugs, and cameras. Most consumer routers start to choke or drop connections once you hit that 30-device threshold because they're just not made to handle so many devices trying to communicate at once. This means that, as a result, your expensive Wi-Fi 7 phone is getting slow speeds because it's sharing a radio channel with 40 cheap smart plugs that phone home every five seconds.

No frills, all artsy thrills. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge I love black-and-white photography. I also adore compact cameras you can always have by your side. So I'm a total mark for the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome, a fixed-lens camera that can't zoom and can't record color - at all. It's a formula that makes the average person ask, "Why?" I've tested the GR IV Monochrome for over a month, taking it with me everywhere and photographing everything. Let me explain how this pricey little point-and-shoot is likely to go down as one of my all-time-favorite cameras.Ricoh GR IV MonochromeScore: 8ProsConsExcellent black-and-white image qualityEverything great about the standard GR IV: sharp lens, small size, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Did you know that some Apple Store employees are jokingly referring to the Mac Mini as the "OpenClaw machine"? While the computer made a decent splash when it was first released, people quickly learned that it was excellent at hosting their OpenClaw agents. It's mighty, it's cheap to run, and its small size means you can tuck it away and forget about it.

The mini PC has gone through a renaissance of sorts in the last few years, especially in the home lab space. Compact machines with decent connectivity and specs are perfect for self-hosting and experimentation, and mini PCs offer that in spades. One of the best mini PCs available for productivity is the Mac Mini, thanks to the performance and efficiency of Apple's M-series silicon, but they've also gained quite a bit of popularity in the home lab space for the same reasons. Picking up a used Mac Mini for your home lab isn't bad advice, but it's worth it to take a really close look at what you plan to do with a mini PC in your home lab before picking one up. The Mac will excel in a very specific set of circumstances, and while it's not completely inept at everything else, you're often working around macOS instead of having free rein over your hardware.

I have spent years exploring the best ways to streamline my coding workflow, but my recent experience with Claude has been a breakthrough. When it comes to Python, I usually prefer a right mix of documentation and experimentation. However, using Claude as a personal tutor changed the math entirely.

Building a PC comes with a lot of unwritten (and written) rules that get passed around forums, YouTube comment sections, and Reddit threads until they calcify into conventional wisdom. Some of them aren't intuitive, but some of them seem a bit too simple, like M.2 SSD installation. When you install your SSD, you put it in the first M.2 slot. It's labeled M2_1, it's closest to the CPU, and it's the fastest one on the board. Why would you put your drive anywhere else? The short answer is that for most builders, that slot is overkill, and depending on your motherboard, using it without the right drive could actually work against you.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the AI coding and vibe-coding booms, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedWriting code was a killer app for AI even before anyone was really talking about AI. In the spring of 2021, 18 months before the world knew the word "ChatGPT," Microsoft debuted the very first product of a partnership with a nonprofit called OpenAI: a tool called GitHub Copilot that watched developers as they wrote code and tried to autocomplete snippets and lines for them …Read the full story at The Verge.

For years, even decades, virtually everyone in the United States had the same phone. Nobody really thought about it, it didn't even matter what it was called - it was just The Phone. Well, The Phone was called the Western Electric 500, and when landline phones ruled the world, the Western Electric 500 ruled the landlines. It was so ubiquitous for so long that even if you've never touched a landline, you've encountered the 500. The Phone app on your iPhone? Looks like a 500. On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Western Electric 500, and the deeply strange world it came to represent. David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and pro …Read the full story at The Verge.

Dutch regulators, the RDW, announced that after over a year and a half of testing, it has officially approved Tesla's Full-Self Driving (FSD) Supervised. This makes the Netherlands the first European country to authorize the use of FSD on its roads. This could open the door to wider adoption throughout the EU. Tesla's European headquarters is located in Amsterdam, so it's only fitting that the country is the first to embrace the company's FSD.In a statement announcing the approval, the RDW said that, "Using driver assistance systems correctly makes a positive contribution to road safety because the driver is supported in their driving task …Read the full story at The Verge.

It was great to see Dino Crisis finally land on Steam earlier this year. Any effort to preserve the classics, clunky or not, should be applauded, as they show us just how far gaming has come since the early days. However, there was just one problem; while Dino Crisis 1 and 2 were being sold on Steam, they didn't want to play nicely on Linux or the Steam Deck.

In a world where AI code is entrenched within people's workflows, developers of all walks of life have had to draw a line somewhere. Some places will outright ban AI code, while others will fully embrace it, and each side has its advantages and disadvantages. Well, it turns out that the world of Linux has finally agreed upon where AI code fits within kernel development. Turns out, it's totally fine if you submit AI-generated code to the kernel; however, if something goes wrong with it, it's on your head. No pointing the finger at Claude Code this time.