One morning, you wake up, open a service, only to find it inaccessible. And when you check your Docker containers or monitoring services, everything looks fine. I have faced it many times in the past, and most recently a few weeks ago with my Nextcloud service.

New helpful little guy just dropped. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge It's a tale as old as last week: OpenAI's new agent platform, called Dots, is full of cute little guys who can do your bidding. But unlike the ultra-approachable Meta Muse, Dots feel very much like using workplace software that happens to be able to order you a burrito - emphasis on work. OpenAI announced Dots earlier this week. Like Muse, Dots have blobby, anthropomorphic avatars and customizable names. In the future, OpenAI says you'll be able to have multiple Dots, but right now you get one. I named mine Dotty McDotface.The interface looks similar to Muse's; you chat with the agent in one window and follow its work in another as it …Read the full story at The Verge.

San Antonio City Councilmember Ric Galvan remembers when data centers first arrived in his city in the 2000s, looking like relatively unassuming office buildings. But that's changed in recent years, as data centers have grown into massive "hyperscale" facilities spanning millions of square feet and housing the physical infrastructure for AI. There are now more than a dozen data centers in Galvan's roughly 55-square-mile district, and he expects that number to grow to around 20 over the next few years if proposed projects are completed. They're clustered along two main roads, concentrating nuisances in the same neighborhoods: traffic and tr …Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI's answer to Muse arrived this week, and it looks a whole lot like Muse dressed up in a suit and tie. Dots is a business-first product - for now, at least - costing a minimum of $100 per month. And sure, you can make a cute little Dot character, just like you can make a cute little Muse character. But OpenAI's early marketing is all about how you can use it to do Business Things: launch websites, reschedule calls, build slide decks for board meetings. Muse, on the other hand, keeps reminding me to buy a jacket I looked at.This week on The Vergecast, we're talking about Dots and the current state of agentic assistants. Our conversatio …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nacon announced what the company is claiming is the world's first officially licensed PlayStation 5 controller with a built-in screen for adjusting settings like joystick sensitivity or remapping buttons right on the gamepad. The Revolution 5 Unlimited's screen can also be used to mix audio from multiple sources so while using a pair of headphones connected to the gamepad with a cable you can listen to music from your phone and sounds from the game you're playing at the same time.The Revolution 5 Unlimited is available for preorder starting today for $229.99 through Nacon's online store and is expected to ship sometime later this year. Whi …Read the full story at The Verge.

Rivian had high hopes for its more affordable R2 vehicle - and so far, those hopes appear to be paying off. The company released its third-quarter production and delivery numbers today, reporting 19,751 vehicles produced and 19,248 delivered. That represents an 85 percent year-over-year increase in production and a 45 percent jump in deliveries. (For a direct-to-consumer automaker like Rivian, deliveries serve as a proxy for sales.) The company also reaffirmed its full-year 2026 guidance, expecting to deliver 65,000 to 70,000 vehicles.Rivian's sales surge is a rare bright spot in a struggling industry. A year after President Trump and Re …Read the full story at The Verge.

My WireGuard tunnel never actually dropped. The handshake stayed fresh, my NAS loaded, and yet my lab hostnames stopped resolving, ad blocking quietly switched off, and some services failed once before working on the second try. I'd already lost an evening to the Tailscale version of this problem, so I had a hunch about the cause.

Yes, Sebulba is in the game. The podracing scene in The Phantom Menace is one of my favorite movie sequences ever. It's just so dang cool: The futuristic racers tear over treacherous Tatooine terrain while various Star Wars aliens bark at each other in incomprehensible sci-fi languages. Eventually a young Anakin Skywalker proves his mettle by clawing his way from the back of the pack to win the race, which left an impression on me when I first saw it at 10 years old. I always wished I could pilot a podracer myself. Over the past several days, I've been able to live out that dream thanks to Star Wars: Galactic Racer, which takes everything from that brilliant scene and p …Read the full story at The Verge.

When I bought my RTX 4070 Ti GPU in 2023, it was pretty much the third-best card I could buy from Nvidia. The one thing I was absolutely fawning over was the possibility of frame generation with the new GPU, which, at the time, was an exclusive feature for RTX 40 series GPUs.

In a throwback to MySpace-style internet drama, Shivon Zilis announced that she and the father of her four children, Elon Musk, had broken up on X.To do so, she quote-tweeted a post from "Big Tech Alert," an account that, among other things, monitors what accounts are following and unfollowing each other. That post noted Musk was no longer following her on X. It was also sponsored by Kalshi, because everything in this relationship is totally fucking cursed, dude.In her statement, Zilis wrote, "It's hard to go from in love to let go in a week with no warning, but that's just how it is sometimes." "Uh, you know."Zilis, in addition to h …Read the full story at The Verge.

Beehiiv, a creator platform that has risen in popularity as an alternative to Substack, is increasing its prices - and many users aren't happy. In a post explaining the increase, Beehiiv cofounder and CEO Tyler Denk says it will allow the company to "continue investing in our core platform experience."As part of the change, Beehiiv is changing the name of its midrange Scale plan to Lite, which has gone up by at least $10 per month depending on subscriber count. For someone with up to 10,000 subscribers, for example, Beehiiv will charge $139 / month instead of $109. Meanwhile, the Pro plan (formerly Max) will cost $239 / month for up to 10, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Madison, a server in New York City, greets every table by asking about each diner's allergies. Lately, there have been some close calls. "Sometimes people will tell me they have a shellfish allergy, and I'll come back, and they won't ask me any questions," says Madison, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her identity. "And they'll order a fish dish that comes with a broth that is made of shellfish." When she tells them a dish contains an allergen, she's had guests push back, saying ChatGPT disagrees. "They just want to talk to ChatGPT," Madison explains. "You're allergic to shellfish, and ChatGPT says there's no shellfish …Read the full story at The Verge.