In any discussion that fixates around how Windows is hoarding your system's resources, memory compression is a recurring item. On the internet, it often shows up in a list of features you can disable to gain some performance, or free up some RAM in an increasingly memory-impoverished economy.

Music startup Thoughtful Things has just launched the Kickstarter campaign for its first instrument, Engram. It's a sampler and groovebox that uses AI to mangle incoming audio and even hallucinate completely new sounds. This isn't Suno in a box, though. This isn't a "push-button, get-song" device, aimed at creating something that sounds ready for top-40 radio. It's about creating experimental, uncanny sounds and pushing AI audio models beyond their limits.Engram isn't connected to the internet. Instead, it runs a "tiny AI" locally. According to the Kickstarter listing, the model is designed in-house and custom-trained. The company says: …Read the full story at The Verge.

A common rule of thumb for PC building was to allocate anywhere between 30% to 40% of the budget towards the GPU for a balanced build, but this advice doesn't really hold much ground anymore. Alongside other hardware, graphics card prices are seeing hikes quite frequently, and mid-range GPUs aren't affordable anymore.

Windows 11 made a bold move with its system requirements and pushed a huge section of legacy hardware into the past. The lack of TPM chips, high baseline memory requirements, and other BIOS features like Secure Boot weren't available on hardware released a decade ago. Surely you can upgrade some elements like memory and storage, but Windows 11 requirements are way more complex than that.

Google Keep has gone from a tool I barely touched to one I can't imagine starting my day without. I'm deep into the Google ecosystem, so it slots into my workflow almost perfectly. It's minimalist, quick to use, and always right there when I need to dump a thought somewhere before I forget it.

Earlier this month, Google and the Janelia Research Campus released the blueprints to a fruit fly's brain. Researchers probably expected people to study the brain, learn about how the neurons worked, and further their interest in neuroscience, but the internet instead played Bad Apple on its neurons and stuffed several of them into The Amazing Digital Circus. You know, the things the internet tends to do with significant scientific findings.

Using power backup for your PC is something most users consider a given. It keeps the system powered on during the occasional power outage and keeps it protected from power surges. You've avoided outage-related interruptions by adding a UPS to your main rig, but what about everything else keeping your network and data accessible?

I hit Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V more times in a day than I realize. Windows' Win + V shortcut makes it easy to access my clipboard history, but it only keeps the latest 25 items. That limit started becoming frustrating when I was working with dozens of snippets, links, screenshots, and pieces of text throughout the day. I didn't want to keep copying something just because I had pushed it out of my clipboard history. So I decided to try a few open-source alternatives and use them during my normal work.

Obsidian has been one of those apps I rarely question. It is fast, works offline, and gives me enough control to build my knowledge system exactly how I want. Then I tried AFFiNE. After spending more time with it, I started noticing several areas where my Obsidian setup suddenly felt more limited than I had realized.

You're comparing routers late at night, and one box says BE19000. It looks like a speed. It looks like your speed, the one your laptop will hit once the new router is plugged in.

One thing I've realized, beyond the fact that AI tools are only getting more expensive by the day, is that every LLM has different strengths. One might be excellent at frontend work, while another is far better at debugging, reasoning through a messy codebase, or handling a completely different kind of task. Beyond code, a model might be great at reasoning but fall short when it comes to writing, research, or working with large amounts of context.

If you were to ask me what game or game series I've sunk the most time into, the answer would be easy: Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP). I have spent roughly 2,300 hours, according to Steam, playing various editions of the game. OOTP isn't like MLB The Show or Super Mega Baseball. It's not graphically impressive. It's not a blast of simple arcade fun. It is basically a spreadsheet pretending to be a video game. It's fantasy baseball, but without having to wait six months to see how disappointing that sleeper draft pick will be, because you can plow through an entire season in as little as a few hours.You can play individual games and dig in …Read the full story at The Verge.