The Sega Saturn was an impressive console, but it just couldn’t match the popularity of the PlayStation and its massive game library. Despite this, the Saturn had plenty of standout titles that never got the attention they deserved.

In an era of social media-based restaurant reviewers, local neighborhood influencers, and an urgent need for trustworthy on-the-ground reports during moments of crisis, a crowdsourced hyperlocal platform like Nextdoor seems like a no-brainer. Yet something wasn’t clicking. Some people were installing Nextdoor and finding a flood of irrelevant updates and notifications. Others were realizing that, as with other neighborhood-based platforms, their community feeds had devolved into paranoid watch groups, where fear, anger, and negativity were a primary driver of engagement.As CEO and cofounder Nirav Tolia describes it, there were three key issues with the platform. The first was a lack of content — something Nextdoor had tried to fix by pulling in posts from a larger geographic area, to some users’ chagrin. The second was that useful notifications for things like a construction delay, power outage, or tornado tended to be too slow because users were posting about them once they’d already happened. And finally, the content was simply not high-value enough. “I’m sure that if you use the product, you’re not using it every day the way that you’re using Instagram and the way you’re using TikTok,” Tolia says. To try and turn things around, the company is overhauling its offerings and flooding the zone with new — and hopefully more useful — content and features. First, the platform is adding a new interactive neighborhood map called Alerts, which displays nearby emergency situations: fires, severe weather, power outages, and more. Rather than being self-reported by neighbors, the Alerts page pulls information from authoritative sources like power companies, police and fire departments, emergency services, and Weather.com, according to Nextdoor.Getting reliable, trustworthy information to the public in emergency situations is difficult: social media prioritizes engagement over safety, and government alert systems are sometimes spotty. During the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year, a small, nonprofit-powered app called Watch Duty became a life-saving resource for residents. Tolia says that user engagement was “through the roof” during the LA fires, and the hope is that Nextdoor can use its precise data to send better emergency alerts. If a power company reports that a few hundred households are affected by an outage, Nextdoor (which has precise home address data from when users signed up) could send an alert to just those people, Tolia says.Nextdoor has never licensed (and still isn’t licensing) its content to AI companiesTo help bring more high-quality content to the platform, Nextdoor is also partnering with more than 3,500 local news outlets in the US, UK, and Canada to prominently feature their work in the app. A rotating carousel of news stories will appear at the top of the landing page, and news coverage will get sprinkled into the main feed of individual posts and the alerts map. The partnership, which has been rolling out over the past few months, is currently unpaid — news outlets just get traffic and engagement from Nextdoor users. It’s likely too early to assess whether the platform can be a major driver of engagement and traffic, but it could help smaller newsrooms get in front of local audiences who care about what’s happening around them. Tolia says Nextdoor will eventually bring in neighborhood influencers, schools, and other community groups — in other words, something akin to a Facebook feed with geographic constraints.Finally, Nextdoor is taking more than a decade of user data and rolling it into a new feature called Faves, which is an AI-powered recommendations chatbot. Tolia says Nextdoor has never licensed (and still isn’t licensing) its content to AI companies, and its hyperlocal conversations and recommendations aren’t indexed by Google like, say, Reddit threads. But the in-app Faves chatbot uses Nextdoor user data and allows people to ask for things like local yoga studios or places for families to go cycling, for example; the bot pulls and summarizes suggestions from previous conversations. Nextdoor users will see other AI-generated content creep in, too: news articles shared to the platform will have an AI comment posted to prompt conversation related to the story. Nextdoor is reevaluating one of its fundamental ideological questions here: who counts as a neighbor? What used to be a platform just for individuals now is courting news outlets, community groups, and influencers, as well as adding bespoke AI chatbots to neighborhood groups. “We’re going to recommit to hyperlocal. We are going to focus on utility,” Tolia says. “We don’t want to be the place where people are just bitching about what they don’t like about the neighborhood.”

When the RTX 20 series was announced, the gaming community was beyond stoked about the real-time ray tracing support on consumer GPUs. While photorealistic lighting was (and still is) a game-changing feature, my nerd self couldn’t stop gushing over DLSS. The initial implementation of Nvidia’s deep learning utility only supported upscaling, but it seemed like the ideal way to get some extra FPS when the Turing series cards grew obsolete.

Obsidian is widely known as a powerful tool for knowledge management and note-taking, but its true potential goes far beyond just capturing ideas. After growing tired of the same old habit tracker apps, I wanted something more personal, more rewarding, and honestly … more fun. That's why I developed a system that transforms daily routines into an engaging, rewarding game-likefeel right within my favorite app, Obsidian. I’ve fully gamified my habit tracker and created a personalized RPG for my life. This entire system is powered by Obsidian's incredible Dataview and Templater plugins.

Reddit users in the United Kingdom will now be blocked from accessing “certain mature content” unless they complete the platform’s new age verification process. Reddit announced on Monday that UK users will need to upload a selfie or a photo of their government ID in order to view content that’s restricted for under-18s by the UK Online Safety Act (OSA), including abusive, violent, and sexually explicit materials.The age verification process is performed by Persona, a third-party provider that won’t have access to users’ Reddit data or retain photos for longer than seven days. Reddit says it also won’t have access to uploaded photos, and that it will only store birthdates and verification statuses so that users don’t need to re-verify their account. I managed to complete the process myself this morning using a selfie in under a minute, though the photo tool had some difficulty detecting when my face was correctly framed.“Reddit was built on the principle that you shouldn’t need to share personal information to participate in meaningful discussions,” Reddit said in its announcement. “While we still don’t want to know who you are on Reddit, there are certainly situations where it would be helpful if we knew a little more about you.”Reddit noted that there is a “growing number of jurisdictions” that have passed or are considering laws that require online platforms to verify the ages of their users. As such, the platform says it’s also introducing a global option for users to provide their birthdate “to help ensure that content and ads are age-appropriate,” and may roll out age verification requirements in other regions.More information about the verification process can be found here. A list of content categories that are restricted to minors — some of which could be considered subjective, such as content that “romanticizes” depression, hopelessness, and despair — can also be found here.Like a similar age check introduced on Bluesky last week, Reddit’s age verification mandate is being introduced to comply with rules under the OSA that require online platforms to implement measures that protect children from seeing harmful and age-inappropriate content by July 25th. According to a report published by British communications regulator Ofcom last year, Reddit was the fastest-growing large social media platform in the UK in 2024, experiencing a 47 percent year-on-year increase in reach for adult users.“The UK’s online safety rules are coming into force and change is happening. Society has long protected youngsters from products that aren’t suitable for them, from alcohol to smoking or gambling,” Ofcom said in a statement to The Verge. “Now, children will be better protected from online material that’s not appropriate for them, while adults’ rights to access legal content are preserved. We expect other companies to follow suit, or face enforcement if they fail to act.”The announcement also mentioned Reddit “would like to be able” to confirm whether users are human or not in the new age of AI. Reddit said that it has “more to come about that later,” suggesting the platform is planning to crack down on AI bot accounts.

It's always a bit of a conundrum when I discover a new, cool way to randomly generate the results of a die without actually using a die. On one hand, they're often very cool and use inventive ways to ensure the result is random, but on the other hand, I didn't buy way too many dice for my D&D campaigns for nothing. Something about rolling the dice just feels right, you know?

Video games have been getting more expensive in recent years, both at a base price and for the more expensive versions of games. Not only has the base price of games risen to $70, but some games like Mario Kart Worldand The Outer Worlds 2 cost $80, and some games don't even actually come on the disc, if there is even a disc to buy. One aspect of this has been the increase in $100 "premium" editions of games. While the name might make this sound like the expensive collector's editions that have existed in the past, these are quite different, and those differences make it clear that these versions only exist to increase the average sale price of the game.

It feels like Linux is reaching an inflection point. That's not a new sentiment, but for probably the first time since Valve introduced Proton, it's felt like the stars are aligning for the Linux curious to become full-on converts. Support for Windows 10 is ending, and Windows 11 is slowly morphing into a dumping ground for whatever AI features Microsoft wants to push. If there's ever been a time to try out Linux, it's now. Even JayzTwoCents, one of the most popular mainstream PC hardware YouTube channels around, recently published a video about switching to Linux.

Excel can be really intimidating to use. There, I said it. I’m not talking about creating a basic spreadsheet or formatting cells. I mean using Excel as a proper data analysis tool. The kind where you're expected to use complex formulas, manually figure out trends, and build something that actually makes sense. It's a lot, and it's a task I've never been a fan of doing.

The European Union is piloting a blueprint for age verification apps in Denmark, Greece, Spain, France, and Italy that aims to make it easier for online platforms to comply with rules that require them to protect minors. The app prototype was announced on Monday alongside guidelines that online platforms are recommended to adopt in order to comply with the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA).“Making sure our children and young people are safe online is of paramount importance to this Commission,” said EU tech policy leader Henna Virkkunen. “The guidelines on the protection of minors for online platforms, combined with the new age verification blueprint, are a huge step forward in this regard. Platforms have no excuse to be continuing practices that put children at risk.”The age verification app is designed to allow users to prove they are over 18 when accessing restricted adult content online, helping the EU to crack down on platforms that are failing to meet obligations under laws like the DSA, and enabling companies to adopt the bloc’s verification toolbox instead of developing their own. The EU Commission says that app users will retain full control over their personal information, such as their exact age or identity, and that the online content they view will remain private.The verification app prototype will be “tested and further customized in collaboration with Member States, online platforms and end-users,” according to the EU Commission, with Denmark, Greece, Spain, France, and Italy aiming to launch national age verification apps. It’s positioned as a temporary solution that will be superseded by the EU Digital Identity Wallet that’s expected to launch in 2026, which aims to provide a way for “European citizens, residents and businesses to prove who they are when accessing digital services” and a place to “safely store, share and sign important digital documents.”While the bloc’s DSA rulebook doesn’t impose specific age verification requirements, websites and online platforms are obligated to protect the “health, physical, mental, and moral development” of minors who use their services, and provide them with the “highest level of privacy, safety, and security.” The new guidance urges online platforms to address concerns around exposing children to harmful content, cyberbullying, unwanted interactions with strangers, and addictive design features.In May, the EU launched investigations into four large adult content websites — Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX, and XVideos — over concerns that they were failing to have appropriate age verification tools in place to prevent children from accessing pornographic content. The Commission said at the time that it was open to accepting commitments that would remedy these concerns, which may include the implementation of the EU age verification app.

As a DIY enthusiast, I was aware that maintaining a smart home requires time and attention to detail. I use a lot of affordable smart devices that operate over the Zigbee protocol with Home Assistant. Most of my IoT and smart devices utilize the MQTT protocol, also known as Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, to communicate with each other over a network. I chose it since MQTT is lightweight, ideal for low-power devices, and efficient for enabling smart devices to communicate in real-time.

I've admitted — multiple times, in fact — to not being a fan of RPGs (role-playing games) for the longest time. Sure, every once in a while, a title came along that I loved despite its RPG elements, but by and large, I wasn't all that sold on the genre, knowing full well that it was a personal issue. Now, however, things couldn't be more different. Playing Elden Ring, and subsequently, the entire Soulsborne collection, I've grown a deep love for the genre.