Over the years, Tesla has built part of its reputation on hosting big, bold events to generate authentic hype for upcoming releases. The robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas, last week wasn't one of them.Coverage of the rollout was dominated by a close-knit cohort of Tesla influencers and Elon Musk superfans, many of whom are openly supportive of the CEO's vision. Journalists and tech bloggers who might have been more critical of the technology were not only excluded but also actively ridiculed and mocked by Tesla fans and some of their followers for attempting to ask basic questions about the service. In Austin and online, Tesla fans were taking a cue from Musk, who has spent years fomenting a culture of resentment toward critical media.One of the more prominent influencers, who goes by Zack on X, claimed he was approached multiple times by a Reuters journalist, whom he promptly ignored. That post, which has over 2,000 likes, received supportive responses from other users - one wrote that the publication and other legacy media outlets "can go F themselves." Another said they would unfollow any account that simply responded to members of the media.View LinkView LinkView Link"The …Read the full story at The Verge.

You might be wondering exactly what you can get for a NAS that costs $4, let alone what's indispensable at that price. I can't blame you if you are; storage expansions are expensive, and even RAM or add-in cards for networking or cache can be costly, depending on the brand. Yet this one tool has saved my bacon (and my data!) time and time again, and I won't open the drive sleds on my NAS without it around.

If you’ve been a member of the tech community for a while, chances are you’ve already got a spare rig that ended up gathering dust once you moved to a new system. I’ve got a couple of outdated systems, but my Lenovo G510 laptop from 2014 takes the crown as the oldest device in my house that’s still somewhat functional. After unearthing it from the recesses of my home lab last month, I tried using it as my primary Home Assistant node. With the experiment being a huge success, I wanted to see if I could restore my obsolete computing companion to its former glory by arming it with Proxmox.

A screenshot from Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. | Image: Pocket Trap / PM Studios, Inc When I was a kid, there was a moment when it felt like everyone was obsessed with yo-yos. I never got better than just being able to make the yo-yo go up and down. But with Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, I could pretend like I was halfway decent - all while playing a silly game that feels like a spiritual successor to the Game Boy Advance titles I loved growing up.Pipistrello is a top-down adventure game, in which you use your yo-yo to attack enemies and traverse the world. You play as Pippit, a goofy bat who has dreams of yo-yo excellence but is also a freeloader who relies on financial support from his wealthy aunt, an energy magnate. In the opening minutes of the game, the aunt gets merged with your yo-yo as four big baddies steal her Mega Batteries, and your goal is to get the batteries back and help free her.The game is quite charming. Pippit is a lovable doofus, and you'll also be tasked with ridiculous missions like rounding up people for a soccer fan club so you can get easier access to a stadium run by a corrupt boss, who wants people to gamble. The pixel art is great, too - it looks exactly like what I remember from GBA games, even though I played Pipistrello on my …Read the full story at The Verge.

The insights are more repackaging data you already know with common sense advice than deductive analysis. After nearly a decade of wearables testing, I've amassed a truly terrifying amount of health and fitness data. And while I enjoy poring over my daily data, there's one part I've come to loathe: AI summaries. Over the last two years, a deluge of AI-generated summaries has been sprinkled into every fitness, wellness, and wearable app. Strava introduced a feature called Athlete Intelligence, pitched as AI taking your raw workout data and relaying it to you in "plain English." Whoop has Whoop Coach, an AI chatbot that gives you a "Daily Outlook" report summarizing the weather, your recent activity and recovery metrics, and workout suggestions. Oura added Oura Advisor, another chatbot that summarizes data and pulls out long-term trends. Even my bed greets me with summaries every morning of how its AI helped keep me asleep every night. Each platform's AI has its nuances, but the typical morning summary goes a bit like this:Good morning! You slept 7 hours last night with a resting heart rate of 60 bpm. That's in line with your weekly average, but your slightly elevated heart rate suggests you may not be fully recovered. If you feel tired, try going to bed earlier tonight. Health is …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've been running a TrueNAS system for nearly two years at this point, cobbled together out of old parts from previous builds and a desire to learn more about home servers and networking. I had been renting a dedicated Kimsufi box since 2016 or so, running an array of basic services, game servers for friends, and a personal Plex instance, but I wanted something that I controlled and could do what I wanted with. Armed with 24GB of DDR3 RAM, an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, and a GTX 1070 Ti, I put together my first home server, and it's still the center of my home lab operation.

Rematch, the latest game from developer Sloclap, best known for making Sifu, is a multiplayer soccer game which can comedically be described as Rocket League with people instead of cars. While that pitch might sound silly and bland, Sloclap has developed an incredibly deep and intricate multiplayer experience. An experience, despite my own lack of skill, that has me excited about a sports game without the word "Mario" in the title for the first time in a long time. As someone who loves watching sports, but has never loved the experience of playing in the big sports simulation games like Madden and MLB The Show, Rematch feels like a unique experience out of the bunch, mixing arcade sports with deep simulation, and one I would love to see extended to other sports in the future.

It has become almost impossible to browse the internet without having an AI-generated video thrust upon you. Open basically any social media platform, and it won't be long until an uncanny-looking clip of a fake natural disaster or animals doing impossible things slides across your screen. Most of the videos look absolutely terrible. But they're almost always accompanied by hundreds, if not thousands, of likes and comments from people insisting that AI-generated content is a new art form that's going to change the world.That has been especially true of AI clips that are meant to appear realistic. No matter how strange or aesthetically inconsistent the footage may be, there is usually someone proclaiming that it's something the entertainment industry should be afraid of. The idea that AI-generated video is both the future of filmmaking and an existential threat to Hollywood has caught on like wildfire among boosters for the relatively new technology. The thought of major studios embracing this technology as is feels dubious when you consider that, oftentimes, AI models' output simply isn't the kind of stuff that could be fashioned into a quality movie or series. That's an impre …Read the full story at The Verge.

There are a ton of customization apps out there for Windows 11, and many of them stake their identity on bringing back fan-favorite UI elements from years past. Tools such as Start11, StartAllBack, and Open-Shell are all great examples of this, but recently, another project came to light with this purpose, and it's quite an interesting one.

When it comes to seamless task management and ultimate productivity, finding the right tool can make all the difference. I have tried dozens of such all-in-one tools, but none of them really clicked for me. However, during my self-hosting journey, I came across YouTrack, and it ticked all the right boxes for me.

The 25th anniversary of the original Xbox is coming up in 2026, and fans are excited about it. During their June Xbox Games Showcase, the company announced plans to celebrate the quarter-century anniversary of the brand, but didn't elaborate on what exactly that would entail. While many have speculated that a number of new entries to some of the biggest Xbox franchises will be making an appearance sometime that year, Xbox fans are hoping to see a big splash for the console that started it all for them. Whether that means seeing a new Halo game or a remake of something classic is anyone's guess. But that doesn't have to be the only way that Xbox could acknowledge a milestone anniversary for the Xbox brand.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 88, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy heat dome, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about crypto crimes and egg thieves and Gap, watching Last Breath and Tires and The Four Seasons, testing the super simple Min browser, learning a ton from The Magic of Code, playing too much Ridiculous Fishing, vibe-coding a tracker for baby feedings, finally winning a Knockout Tour in Mario Kart World, lusting after the new Teenage Engineering scooter, taking photos with Project Indigo, and listening to Star Wars Lofi all day every day. This is the last Installer for me this summer! It's baby time. Starting next week, you'll be in the very good hands of Jay Peters, who has some awesome stuff lined up for you. He'll be in the Installer inbox, so please, send him emails, hit him up with questions, and tell him everything you're into right now. Y'all are going to have fun together.And in the interest of filling up the Gmail for Jay, I have a question: what's your favorite non-famous app? A few of you have recently reached out to remi …Read the full story at The Verge.