Less slop please. | Image: Spotify Spotify Premium users in New Zealand will be the first to experience the service's latest personalization feature. The company is letting users view and make changes to their Taste Profile directly. If your algorithm is serving up too much Bieber, you can politely tell the algorithm to ease up. Beta testers will be able to access the feature by tapping on their profile icon and then selecting Taste Profile from the sidebar menu. The Taste Profile tells you not only what artists you frequently listen to, but also identifies trends in your listening habits. In a little demo clip, Spotify shows an example Taste Profile that includes the line, …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you work on a computer all day, you'll eventually come to realize that a dual-screen setup (at least) is pretty much a requirement. I personally tried to resist the urge to upgrade for years before I finally caved, and it's hard to imagine living without it now. I even went ahead and eventually ended up buying a "super ultrawide" 32:9 monitor that's basically two screens in one.

If you've been part of the PC building scene, you've seen it take a lot of hits. It always recovers, but with each successive crisis, something crucial is lost. Since the pandemic, it feels like we've been living through one hardware crisis after another, with only slim windows of normalcy peppered in between. In the last six years, new standards in terms of pricing, availability, and generational improvements have been forced on PC gamers. However, the latest AI-powered hardware shortage feels different. The AI craze is more than a bubble; it's a fundamental shift in manufacturer priorities. Even if we see this one through by 2028, PC building will never be the same again. It will still exist, but expect to see it morph into an altered hobby, meant for a different kind of consumer.

If you haven't tinkered with them before, Windows' power plans are a great way to customize how you want your PC or laptop to behave under certain conditions. For instance, perhaps you want your laptop to enter sleep mode faster when it's running off the battery versus off the mains, so you don't end up losing a ton of charge because you forgot to close the lid before you did something.

If you've been on the lookout for a new smartwatch, we think the Garmin Vivoactive 5 is going to be a great way to go. Not only are you getting a watch with a sleek and lightweight design, but it's also packed with features.

The Live Nation-Ticketmaster trial is back on. Dozens of states are expected to move forward with their claims against the company's alleged concert industry monopoly beginning on Monday, following a brief hearing on Friday.The Justice Department and a handful of states have accepted settlements with the company, but the majority of the 40 state and district attorney general plaintiffs - as of now - are continuing their fight in court. The states that are pressing forward withdrew their motion for a mistrial, filed after the DOJ announced its settlement in court Monday, and showed up with new outside counsel to lead their trial team in the …Read the full story at The Verge.

My Downloads folder has become the Wild West. I have dozens (okay, hundreds) of different files that accumulate on a monthly basis. These include heaps of generically named screenshots, random PDF files, more ZIP archives than I can count, and even a few installers I grabbed but never ran.

Xbox is getting ready to launch its Gaming Copilot AI assistant on "current-generation consoles" this year, according to a report from GamesRadar. Sonali Yadav, Xbox's product manager for gaming AI, revealed the news during a panel at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), adding that the company will also add the assistant to "more services that players are playing." Microsoft has been working on its gaming-focused Copilot assistant for months now, with the company launching it in beta on the Xbox mobile app, Windows 11, and Xbox Ally handhelds. Players can use their voice to call upon the Gaming Copilot if they get stuck in a game, and th …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you spend any time writing, designing, or just documenting things on your PC, screenshotting becomes one of those small but essential tools. I didn’t think much about it for as long as I’ve had my PC, and just used whatever Windows gave me, which is the Snipping Tool. It worked well enough for the captures I needed, so I didn’t really question its functionality or try to configure it.

Artificial intelligence has entered its gold rush period, and major large language models (LLMs) are developing at a breakneck pace. LLMs largely follow the same developmental playbook. The more data they collect, the more prompts and uploaded documents are indexed, the more the model improves.

It's only been a year since Digg founder Kevin Rose, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, and a few others announced the link-sharing site would relaunch, promising a "social discovery built by communities, not by algorithms." Now, two months after opening its Reddit-like platform to the public, Digg is announcing a "hard reset" that's shutting down operations and will "significantly downsize the Digg team." When they announced its relaunch, Rose told The Verge that AI could "remove the janitorial work of moderators and community managers." Now, the new Digg's CEO Justin Mezzell writes in a note pinned to the homepage that, "We knew bots were …Read the full story at The Verge.

Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. This week, I wanted to see how Trump Mobile stacks up to its conservative carrier competition.Trump Mobile isn't unique. I mean, it is in some pretty specific senses - it's not every day the president's family launches a phone company while he's in office - but it's far from the first company to offer a mobile carrier targeted at the conservative crowd. In fact, there's a rich history of smaller networks trying to make their money from patriots, Christians, and Republican voters. Like Trump Mobile, they're all MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators), carriers that …Read the full story at The Verge.