By the time I arrived, the waterfront park in downtown Portland, Oregon was already awash with people as far as the eye could see. The No Kings protest in June had turned out around 10,000 people across the city; this one saw several times that number just downtown, with thousands more choosing to join localized protests in their neighborhoods or in the suburbs.Unable to get a precise crowd estimate, I tried instead to count inflatable frog costumes. I gave up on this about twenty minutes later: there were simply too many frogs. Last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating so-called "antifa" a domestic terror …Read the full story at The Verge.

No Kings protest in Chicago. Saturday marked the biggest day of protest since the start of Donald Trumps’ second term. Organizers of the No Kings protests estimated that over seven million people took to the streets to declare their opposition to the president, his policies, and his tactics. Indivisible, the group behind the protests, claims that there were over 2,700 events in all 50 states. That’s a sizable increase from the roughly five million protesters at 2,000 events it claimed for its June No Kings day, signalling that opposition to the president may be growing.Several individual events topped 100,000 participants, including Twin Cities, New York City, and Chicago, which was estimated to have 250,000 people. That Chicago would have one of the largest turnouts in the country is hardly surprising given the administration’s recent immigration crackdown in the city, which has led to several high-profile incidents involving ICE agents.The response from the President and his administration was to post a bunch of AI slop on social media, including one in which the president drops what appears to be feces on protesters from a fighter jet. Perhaps most telling is that in multiple videos and images, Donald Trump is explicitly referred to as King Trump and pictured wearing a crown, including one image posted by the official White House X account. It appears that the administration is putting aside pretense at this point.

To understand the Sony Watchman, you have to go back. Way back. Back to when "TV" wasn't just a way to refer to any piece of content between 20 and 89 minutes, available on every screen everywhere for a few bucks a month. In 1982, when Sony first started selling its new device, "TV" was a piece of furniture. It was probably humungous, and often made largely of wood. Sony helped change all that.For this episode of Version History, we take on the whole story of the Watchman. David Pierce, Allison Johnson, and Victoria Song start with the story of the Walkman (though that's another episode in itself), which was for all intents and purposes th …Read the full story at The Verge.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI and the industry's power dynamics and societal implications, follow Hayden Field. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedSince ChatGPT became a household name, people have been trying to get sexy with it. Even before that, there was the chatbot Replika in 2017, which a lot of people started treating as a romantic partner.And people have been getting around Character.ai's NSFW guardrails for years, coaxing its character- or celebrity-themed chatbots to sext with t …Read the full story at The Verge.

One of the Obsidian plugins I can’t live without is QuickAdd. It helps me save time by reducing the clicks. The plugin also helps me keep my notes consistent from templates by adding dates, titles, and auto-filled fields. It’s a free Obsidian plugin that boosts my productivity, letting me start writing faster without worrying about setup.

I've read a lot of horror books over the last two years. But my absolute favorite is easily Mariana Enriquez' Our Share of Night. The book was originally published in 2019 in Argentina, but it only got an English translation in 2023. While it doesn't quite reach Stephen King lengths, at nearly 600 pages, I'd say it still counts as an epic.There are certainly scary and gruesome moments in the story involving ancient gods, a powerful cult, and brutal ritual violence. But as is usually the case with the best horror, the supernatural here is a stand-in for real-world terrors. In this case, Enriquez uses the occult to explore Argentina's histor …Read the full story at The Verge.

October is shaping up to be one of the biggest months of the year for gaming. Several major studios are launching long-awaited sequels, remakes, and fresh IPs across different genres. Below, we’ll list the biggest and most popular games coming out this month in order of release.

Even the most seasoned PC builders can fall into the trap of believing that their CPU's BIOS defaults are safe, sensible, and tuned for stability. After all, out-of-the-box settings provided by motherboard manufacturers must be subject to extensive testing and quality assurance, so surely, there must be no reason to doubt their reliability, right? Well, not quite.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 102, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy spooky season, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about personal chefs and TikTok's algorithm and deep sea divers, tearing through Cory Doctorow's fabulous Enshittification book, helping curate the wonderful Sunday Long Read newsletter, becoming surprising emotional during the final WTF episode, trying to convince my kid to watch The Twits, finally learning how the NATO phonetic alphabet works, and eating a lot of dried mangos.I also have …Read the full story at The Verge.

The trick to understanding Opera's Neon browser is recognizing that it's not just a browser with an AI bot added to it, but a browser with three AI bots all living side by side. This is both a strength and a weakness, because while you don't have to leave to do all the AI things you want, knowing where to go for which AI tasks can be really confusing. Opera began taking people off the waitlist for its AI browser, Neon, last month. It's entering an increasingly crowded market of AI-powered browsers including Google's Gemini-infused Chrome, Perplexity's Comet, and The Browser Company's Dia. Unlike many of these competitors, Opera is charging …Read the full story at The Verge.

From Apple TV Plus to Peacock, a number of streaming services have recently increased their pricing — and Disney Plus is no exception. Starting on Tuesday, October 21st, the standalone plan with ads will jump from $9.99 to $11.99 a month, while the ad-free Premium tier will increase by $3 to $18.99 a month. The ad-free annual plan is also going up by $30, at which point it will cost $189.99 a year. Ouch.Disney PlusWhere to Buy: $9.99 at Disney Plus (with ads, monthly) $15.99 at Disney Plus Premium (ad-free, monthly) $159.99 at Disney Plus (ad-free, annual)Fortunately, though, there’s still time to lock in the lower rates. If you subscribe to a year of Disney Plus Premium before October 21st, you’ll pay $159.99 for a full year before the price hike goes into effect. The same goes for the monthly plans; if you subscribe now, you’ll only pay $15.99 a month for the ad-free plan or $9.99 a month for the ad-supported tier. After your first billing cycle, though, the new monthly and annual prices will apply automatically, so be sure to set yourself a reminder and mark your calendars if you don’t want to renew.Aside from ads, the main difference between the two tiers is that the step-up Premium plan lets you download content for offline viewing and supports Dolby Atmos audio with select content. Otherwise, both provide access to the same catalog of movies and TV shows, including content from Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, National Geographic, and Marvel. That means, no matter which one you sign up for, you’ll be able to stream upcoming documentaries from both James Cameron and Taylor Swift, as well as Deadpool & Wolverine, the second season of Andor, and newer, kid-friendly favorites like Lilo & Stitch.

Though there's no shortage of AI tools to choose from nowadays, one tool I think is extremely underrated is Perplexity. If you aren't familiar with it, Perplexity is an AI-powered conversational search engine that uses “advanced AI” to search the internet in real time. The way Perplexity and AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini work is slightly different.