TikTok sellers that appear to be AI generated, in tears. | The Verge Aliyah, a light-skinned Black woman dressed in country-western gear, is struggling to sell metal buckles she handmade on TikTok. In a video for the social media platform from March, she cries to the camera and pleads for views: "Even as a black woman, I have more faith that white women will stay 13 seconds [on this video] to save my belt buckle business," the onscreen text reads. She wipes a tear off her cheek. But Aliyah isn't real, and neither are her supposedly handmade products - she's one of many AI-generated influencers created to sell mass-produced products via dropshipping on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Identical belt buckles …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Arduboy FX-C squeezes a lot of entertainment into a thin, credit card-sized handheld. As handheld consoles continue to grow and push the limits of what you can actually hold in your hands, the Arduboy FX-C comes in a refreshingly pocketable package.  It manages to squeeze the best features of past models and some welcome upgrades into a handheld that’s still no larger or thicker than a few credit cards. It’s the best version of the Arduboy so far, particularly for gamers who want to jump into the handheld’s ever-expanding library of games and apps right out of the box, but one of its most compelling upgrades isn’t quite ready for primetime.The original Arduboy was a Tetris-playing business card created by Kevin Bates to show off his electronics skills. It went viral in 2014 prompting Bates to turn the idea into a commercial device a year later that was both a tiny open-source gaming device and a tool that could help would-be developers learn to code.Arduboy FX-CWhere to Buy: $79 at Amazon $79 at ArduboyAfter over a decade of minor iterations, the Arduboy FX-C looks very much like the original. The controls are limited to six buttons, four of which function as a D-pad. They have a minimal amount of travel given the device is just 5mm thin, but a satisfying amount of click when pressed. The piezoelectric speaker is high pitched but more than loud enough, and its 1.3-inch, 1-bit OLED screen is bright enough to be playable outdoors.While the 37-year-old original Game Boy could display four shades of greenish-gray, the Arduboy FX-C’s screen is monochromatic and limited to only white pixels. Developers have to rely on visual tricks like dithering or flickering to create grayscale graphics. Equally limiting is the FX-C’s ATmega32u4 processor that’s paired with just 2.5KB of RAM. Compared to other black-and-white handhelds like the Playdate, the Arduboy FX-C feels primitive but its limitations have forced game developers to get creative and experimental, which is a big part of this platform’s appeal.My biggest frustration with the original Arduboy was its minimal storage that had me regularly connecting the device to my laptop when I wanted to play a different game. In 2020, Bates introduced the Arduboy FX with an extra flash chip on board that could hold 250 games. The FX-C inherits that chip, but a slightly larger version, bumping its included library of games to over 300, while also upgrading the device from microUSB to USB-C.It’d be nice if the FX-C had a color screen, a proper D-pad, dedicated volume buttons, an improved sound chip, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even a microSD card slot, but none of those upgrades really feel necessary. It’s a handheld that feels pared down to the absolute bare necessities for gaming, but it works.A tiny switch on the top edge of the FX-C powers up the handheld but it can occasionally be a challenge if, like me, your fingernails are short. After a near instant boot up, you’re presented with a simple homescreen and menu system. The bundled games are sorted into several categories including Action, Adventure, Arcade, Runner, Puzzle, and Racing you cycle through by scrolling left and right. Games in each category are instead scrolled vertically by pressing up or down. It’s simple and easy to navigate, however I would like to see one additional category that lists all the games alphabetically.All of the games that have been developed for the Arduboy are distributed for free, so you’re not going to find any classic 8-bit games you recognize like Super Mario Bros. or Castlevania that Nintendo is still making available on platforms like its Switch. But there are plenty of excellent doppelgängers that are similar enough to scratch a nostalgic itch while also being unique enough to keep lawyers at bay. Surprisingly, despite the FX-C’s limited processing power, there are far more than just side-scrollers and falling block puzzle games included. You’ll also find first-person shooters, dungeon crawlers, and racing games with excellent frame rates.There’s a lot of fun to be had, but don’t expect games that will take you weeks to finish. The Arduboy FX-C is better suited for quick pick-up-and-play sessions when you’ve got a few minutes to kill.Unfortunately, the feature that convinced me to buy a pair of FX-Cs isn’t quite ready. I haven’t been able to get multiplayer over USB to work, although some users on the Arduboy community forums have been successful. Bates says the feature is still in development. Arduboy multiplayer cleverly takes advantage of the extra conductors on modern USB cables to pass game data back and forth, as Bates explains in a forum post, but it requires a more expensive USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt cable to work. After testing several different USB 3.0 cables from Amazon, I’ve had no success. It’s a feature I know can work and I expect hiccups to be sorted out eventually, but if that’s your only reason for grabbing a pair of FX-Cs, I’d hold off for now.The Arduboy FX-C is still a solid upgrade. The original was one of the last devices I had to keep microUSB cables around for, but the huge collection of bundled games sourced from the Arduboy development community is the real reason to snag one. I’ve barely tried 10 percent of them at this point, and while the quality varies, it’s hard to feel disappointed when you’re not actually paying for them. A console is only as good as its library of games, and over the past decade, the Arduboy has managed to cultivate a devoted community developing hundreds. If you go in with an open mind and don’t worry about what it’s missing, you’ll absolutely enjoy this handheld.Photography by Andrew Liszewski / The Verge

Smart home automation room tracking is frustrating. Let's say you place a Zigbee motion sensor in your home office, but because you're sitting quietly working at your PC, reading a long thread, or even just browsing YouTube, the sensor assumes the room is empty and plunges you into darkness. The irony of this is that you're sitting in front of a multi-thousand-dollar machine that knows exactly what you're doing down to the millisecond.

Google recently made waves with its announcement of the Googlebook platform. Bringing together elements of Chrome OS and Android, along with a lot of AI features, it's the company's latest attempt at winning over laptop users, after Chromebooks mostly gained traction in the entry-level education market.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with an RTX laptop at CES 2025. | Image: Getty Images It's the world's worst kept secret that Nvidia is about to announce its own Arm-powered laptop chips at Computex this weekend, and now Microsoft, Nvidia, and Arm are all openly teasing the announcement. The Windows and Nvidia GeForce accounts on X both posted "A new era of PC" earlier today, and now Arm has followed up with an identical post. All three posts include coordinates pointing to where Computex is hosted in Taipei. Nvidia is holding a Computex keynote in Taipei at 8PM PT / 11PM ET on Sunday night, where it's rumored to be announcing its new N1 and N1x laptop chips.A new era of PC. 25.0528, 121.5990- Windows (@Windows) May 29, …Read the full story at The Verge.

A good time with old maps. | Image: Past Maps Craig Campbell walked away from the river of investor money flowing into AI to create, of all things, a website.Sure, Campbell probably could have started an AI company. He's a former engineer at Meta and an experienced tech founder who in 2022 sold his last venture - an e-commerce tool for businesses that use Shopify - right as the AI boom was booming. "I had my prior VC investors breathing down my neck, going 'start something else. We'll write you a blank check.'" He had other ideas.People generally aren't rushing to get into the website business, what with the Google Zero event horizon approaching. Campbell was undeterred and has gro …Read the full story at The Verge.

NotebookLM has been one of the most reliable tools in my stack for over a year now. Like most of you probably, it's where I go when I've got a pile of, well, anything to make sense of. However, reliability and versatility aren't the same things. NotebookLM is built around a fairly rigid idea of how research should go - you bring it a clean set of sources and it works strictly within them. When you veer off that path the sessions can start to get frustrating pretty quickly.

Slots & Daggers, a low-key, fantasy-themed slot machine roguelike, was one of my favorite games last year. That may sound like a complicated description, but the game mixes ideas from deckbuilding roguelikes with slot machines to create an engrossing loop, and there's steady meta-progression that helps you push further with just about every run. Perhaps the best part is that Slots & Daggers is short: Solo developer Friedemann describes the game as a mini roguelike, and I completed it, including all 12 achievements, in just under six hours. This month, Slots & Daggers came out on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X / S, and …Read the full story at The Verge.

I wanted the problem to be almost anything except the obvious one. My 3D printer was tuned well enough, my bed was clean, my filament was dry, and my slicer profile looked respectable at a glance. Yet print after print came out with ugly walls, rough top surfaces, and seams that looked more like damage than a normal part of the process. I kept changing everything around the failure instead of admitting that my extrusion settings might be wrong.

Considering how many AI tools and features have launched in the past three years, we've all gotten into the habit of using them all the same way: sending a prompt and hoping for the best. For a lot of AI products, especially conversational chatbots that are meant to generate an answer and nothing more, that's basically fine. The worst case is a reply you don't like, and you try again.

Whenever something doesn't feel right with your body, it's always tempting to reach for Google to see what might be wrong. It's quick, it's free, and it can sometimes make you feel at peace (and sometimes make you panic even more). LLMs have only accelerated this behaviour, with people flocking to AIs to share malaises, upload photos of injuries, and ask about conditions.

There's no question about AI's effect on coding. It has huge ramifications on how people create apps and systems, and curators of software have had to consider whether or not they allow AI-generated code in their projects. Linus Torvalds has already given the green light to AI-generated code (although it still has to be good code), but a maintainer at Flathub has gone the opposite way and banned it, because people just can't behave.