The third and final season of the industry-defining Squid Game confidently delivers each new round of the deathly games with spectacularly brutal aplomb - but its attempts at worldbuilding are disappointingly tired and uneven. Some of Squid Game's most interesting dynamics from the first two seasons - the politics among the masked guards, the organ-harvesting operation, the relationship between Front Man/In-ho (played by Lee Byung-hun) and brother Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun), the crew of burly men led by Jun-ho trying to uncover and infiltrate the island hosting the games - screech to frustratingly lackluster conclusions, without enlarging the world beyond what we have already seen so far. A new season of any show should always aim to ask new questions. For Squid Game, there are plenty to choose from. What is the selection process like for guards, and how do they get promoted up the hierarchy into the "triangle" sergeants or, eventually, the "square" leaders? What are their inner politics like? What other things happened between brothers In-ho and Jun-ho before In-ho joined the games? If Jun-ho's crew manages to infiltrate the island, will the games be stopped? How will that happen? Wh …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Kobo Elipsa 2E is our favorite note-taking e-reader. Kobo is discounting two of its best e-readers. The Kobo Elipsa 2E, a competitor to the Kindle Scribe, is available for an all-time low of $349.99 ($50 off) from Rakuten Kobo and Target. Meanwhile, the Kobo Libra Colour is available for $209.99 ($20 off) from Amazon, Target, and Rakuten Kobo. The sale runs through July 10th.The Kobo Elipsa 2E is my top pick for taking notes while reading. Its spacious 10.3-inch display lets you write directly on ebook pages — whether in margins, between lines, or wherever inspiration strikes — giving you a natural, paper-like experience. While Amazon’s Kindle Scribe supports on-page writing, its tools are far more limited; you can’t freely annotate, circle text, or mark up pages with the same ease. For anyone wanting an e-reader that doubles as a digital notebook, the Elipsa 2E offers a more intuitive and versatile experience.Kobo Elipsa 2EThe Kobo Elipsa 2E is an ad-free 10.3-inch e-reader you can write on with the included stylus. It offers a whole host of useful features, like the ability to convert handwriting to typed text and a great selection of pen types.Where to Buy: $399.99 $349.99 at Target $399.99 $349.99 at Rakuten KoboMeanwhile, the Kobo Libra Colour is worth a look if you want something smaller but still feature-packed. Like the Kindle Colorsoft, it features a compact 7-inch color display that makes highlights, annotations, and comics pop compared to monochrome screens. Although the Colorsoft’s hues are slightly more vibrant, the Libra Colour provides a pleasant, easy-on-the-eyes experience. It also includes physical page-turn buttons and stylus compatibility (sold separately), allowing you to mark up text or jot notes — features that the Colorsoft lacks despite costing more.Kobo’s main drawback is the lack of native Kindle book support, but it makes up for this with broader file format compatibility and support for direct borrowing from public libraries through OverDrive. Plus, if you don’t mind a few extra steps, you can always convert Kindle books for use on Kobo devices.Read our review of the Kobo Libra Colour.Kobo Libra ColourThe Libra Colour is one of the newest e-readers from Kobo and one of the first with color. With both OverDrive and Pocket support, it gives readers considerably more options than e-readers from bigger brands like Amazon.Where to Buy: $229 at Amazon $219.99 $209.99 at Target $219.99 $209.99 at Rakuten KoboThree more deals to kickstart your weekendThe Belkin BoostCharge Pro 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Stand with Qi2 15W is on sale for $99.99 ($20 off) at Amazon after clipping the on-page coupon, matching its all-time low price. The sleek stand delivers up to 15W of fast wireless charging to MagSafe-compatible iPhones and includes a 5W Qi pad for charging other Qi-enabled devices, like Android phones or your AirPods. It also features a dedicated 5W charging puck for the Apple Watch, and supports fast charging for models starting with the Series 7.Anker’s 511 Charger is on sale for $12.99 ($10 off) at Amazon, which is its all-time low price. Anker’s also offering the same deal when you apply the code WS7DV2X0GGLZ at checkout. Despite its compact, travel-friendly design — with foldable prongs for easy storage — the charger delivers up to 30 watts of power via USB-C, making it fast and powerful enough to charge everything from smartphones and wireless earbuds to tablets and even some laptops.You can buy the Yeedi Cube robot vacuum for a new all-time low price of $199.99, down from $470, from Amazon as part of a limited-time lightning deal. The self-emptying, self-cleaning robovac offers solid 5,100Pa suction for picking up dirt and debris. While it skips high-end features like AI-powered obstacle avoidance, it can reliably map multiple rooms and lets you designate no-clean zones for more targeted cleaning. 

Reddit has become known as the place to go for unfiltered answers from real, human users. But as the site celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, the company is increasingly thinking about how it can augment that human work with AI.The initial rollout of AI tools, like Reddit Answers, is "going really well," CTO Chris Slowe tells The Verge. At a time when Google and its AI tools are going to Reddit for human answers, Reddit is going to its own human answers to power AI features, hoping they're the key to letting people unlock useful information from its huge trove of posts and communities.Reddit Answers is the first big user-facing piece of the company's AI push. Like other AI search tools, Reddit Answers will show an AI-generated summary to a query. But Reddit Answers also very prominently links to where the content came from - and as a user, you also know that the link will point you to another place on Reddit instead of some SEO-driven garbage. It also helps that the citations feel much more prominent than on tools like Google's AI Mode - a tool that news publishers have criticized as "theft.""If you just want the short summary, it's there," Slowe says. "If you want to …Read the full story at The Verge.

Scorching hot days tend to hit certain neighborhoods harder than others, a problem that becomes more dangerous during record-breaking heat like swathes of the US experienced over the past week. A new online dashboard shows how Latino neighborhoods are disproportionately affected in California.Developed by University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the tool helps fill in gaps as the Trump administration takes a sledgehammer to federal climate, race, and ethnicity data resources. “We want to provide facts, reliable data sources. We don’t want this to be something that gets erased from the policy sphere,” says Arturo Vargas Bustamante, faculty research director at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI).“We don’t want this to be something that gets erased”The Latino Climate & Health Dashboard includes data on extreme heat and air pollution, as well as asthma rates and other health conditions — issues that are linked to each other. High temperatures can speed up the chemical reactions that create smog. Chronic exposure to fine particle pollution, or soot, can increase the risk of a child developing asthma. Having asthma or another respiratory illness can then make someone more vulnerable to poor air quality and heat stress. Burning fossil fuels — whether in nearby factories, power plants, or internal combustion vehicles — makes all of these problems worse. Latino neighborhoods have to cope with 23 more days of extreme heat a year compared to non-Latino white neighborhoods in California, the dashboard shows. LPPI defined extreme heat as days when temperatures climbed to 90 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. If you’ve ever heard about a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect, big differences in temperature from neighborhood to neighborhood probably wouldn’t come as a surprise. Areas with less greenery and more dark, paved surfaces and waste heat from industrial facilities or vehicles generally tend to trap heat. Around 1 in 10 Americans lives in a place where the built environment makes it feel at least 8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it would without that urban sprawl according to one study of 65 cities from last year. And after years of redlining that bolstered segregation and disinvestment in certain neighborhoods in the US, neighborhoods with more residents of color are often hotter than others.  The dashboard includes fact sheets by county to show what factors might raise temperatures in certain areas. In Los Angeles County, for example, only four percent of land in majority-Latino neighborhoods is shaded by tree canopy compared to nine percent in non-Latino white neighborhoods. Conversely, impervious surfaces like asphalt and concrete that hold heat span 68 percent of land in Latino neighborhoods compared to 47 percent in majority non-Latino white areas in LA County. For this dashboard, LPPI defines a Latino neighborhood as a census tract where more than 70 percent of residents identify as Latino. It used the same 70 percent threshold to define non-Latino white neighborhoods. Latino neighborhoods in California are also exposed to twice as much air pollution and have twice as many asthma-related ER visits as non-latino white neighborhoods, according to the dashboard. It brings together data from the Census Bureau, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state’s environmental health screening tool called CalEnviroScreen, and other publicly-available sources. The Trump administration has taken down the federal counterpart to CalEnviroScreen, called EJScreen, as part of its purge of diversity and equity research. Researchers have been working to track and archive datasets that might be targeted since before President Donald Trump stepped back into office. Efforts to keep these kinds of studies going are just as vital, so that people don’t have to rely on outdated information that no longer reflects current conditions on the ground. And other researchers have launched new initiatives to document the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks. The Environmental Defense Fund and other advocacy groups, for instance, launched a mapping tool in April that shows 500 facilities across the US that the Environmental Protection Agency has recently invited to apply for exemptions to air pollution limits. UCLA’s dashboard adds to the patchwork of more locally-led research campaigns, although it can’t replace the breadth of data that federal agencies have historically collected. “Of course, we don’t have the resources that our federal government has,” Bustamante says. “But with what we are able to do, I think that one of the main aims is to keep this issue [at the top of] the agenda and provide reliable information that will be useful for community change.”Data like this is a powerful tool for ending the kinds of disparities the dashboard exposes. It can inform efforts to plant trees where they’re needed most. Or it can show public health officials and community advocates where they need to check in with people to make sure they can find a safe place to cool down during the next heatwave.

In the past week, big AI companies have - in theory - chalked up two big legal wins. But things are not quite as straightforward as they may seem, and copyright law hasn't been this exciting since last month's showdown at the Library of Congress.First, Judge William Alsup ruled it was fair use for Anthropic to train on a series of authors' books. Then, Judge Vince Chhabria dismissed another group of authors' complaint against Meta for training on their books. Yet far from settling the legal conundrums around modern AI, these rulings might have just made things even more complicated.Both cases are indeed qualified victories for Meta and Anthropic. And at least one judge - Alsup - seems sympathetic to some of the AI industry's core arguments about copyright. But that same ruling railed against the startup's use of pirated media, leaving it potentially on the hook for massive financial damage. (Anthropic even admitted it did not initially purchase a copy of every book it used.) Meanwhile, the Meta ruling asserted that because a flood of AI content could crowd out human artists, the entire field of AI system training might be fundamentally at odds with fair use. And neither case a …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Sega Genesis, or the Mega Drive as it was called outside the US, was the height of Sega's power as a console maker. Not only was it home to several all-time Sega games, including some that cemented a certain blue hedgehog as a pop culture icon. It might not be as iconic as the Sega Dreamcast, a console ahead of its time, but the Sega Genesis does feel like the high point for Sega, at least when it comes to making consoles, since modern Sega is firing on all cylinders with franchises like Yakuza, Persona, and, of course, Sonic the Hedgehog. But forget about modern Sega for a bit, and instead check out the 10 best Sega Genesis games, as determined by me. Is this a scientific list? Of course not, that's not how ranking video games works.

Age verification is perhaps the hottest battleground for online speech, and the Supreme Court just settled a pivotal question: does using it to gate adult content violate the First Amendment in the US? For roughly the past 20 years the answer has been "yes" - now, as of Friday, it's an unambiguous "no."Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is relatively straightforward as Supreme Court rulings go. To summarize, its conclusion is that:States have a valid interest in keeping kids away from pornographyMaking people prove their ages is a valid strategy to enforce thatInternet age verification only "incidentally" affects how adults can access protected speechThe risks aren't meaningfully different from showing your ID at a liquor storeYes, the Supreme Court threw out age verification rules repeatedly in the early 2000s, but the internet of 2025 is so different the old reasoning no longer applies.Around this string of logic, you'll find a huge number of objections and unknowns. Many of these were laid out before the decision: the Electronic Frontier Foundation has an overview of the issues, and 404 Media goes deeper on the potential …Read the full story at The Verge.

While the popularity of using Pi-hole to block ads and malware at the DNS level highlights the broken nature of the modern internet experience, I find it equally irritating for different reasons. Sometimes updates break the system, and the only fix is to reinstall it, which thankfully doesn't take long, but it's annoying. Being able to generate DNS overrides for local resolution of self-hosted services is handy, but sometimes it doesn't always work, and my Apple devices complain that Pi-hole doesn't let Private Relay work on the network.

This might be a bigger deal than the robotaxis. Tesla said it completed its first fully autonomous vehicle delivery from factory to customer. A video posted on X shows the vehicle — a Tesla Model Y — leaving the company’s Austin Gigafactory, driving on the highway, passing through suburban sprawl and residential neighborhoods, before arriving at a customer’s apartment building. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had promised the first fully autonomous delivery would take place on June 28th. But on Friday, he announced that the milestone had been achieved a day early.“There were no people in the car at all and no remote operators in control at any point. FULLY autonomous!” Musk wrote on X. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully autonomous drive with no people in the car or remotely operating the car on a public highway.”View LinkThat last part isn’t accurate. Waymo has been operating fully driverless vehicles with passengers on the highway for over a year. The vehicles, which are driving on freeways in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, are only available to employees of the company, with the goal of opening them up to the public at a later date.But Tesla’s achievement is still notable, especially when you consider the rocky rollout of the company’s robotaxi service. The robotaxis launched with safety monitors in the passenger seat with access to a kill switch, and within a few days, the vehicles were recorded committing several safety lapses, including driving over the double-yellow line into the opposite lane of traffic and hard braking in the middle of the road for no apparent reason.By proving it can operate fully autonomous vehicles on highways without a safety monitor present in the vehicle, Tesla is able to demonstrate that its Full Self-Driving system is getting closer to Musk’s promise of “unsupervised” driving. The robotaxis aren’t quite there yet, still requiring safety monitors and remote supervisors. That leaves Tesla in limbo between confidence that its technology can handle the driving without anyone in the vehicle, but less confident when there’s a human being riding inside. Update, June 28th: Added Tesla’s 30-minute “long version” of the trip.

I don’t use Windows as much as I used to since I moved to macOS. But I still rely on it quite a bit, whether it’s for work or testing new software. One of the reasons I stopped using my Windows PC regularly was its terrible performance. I don’t entirely blame it since it’s an old machine, but the slow speed really held me back and affected my productivity.

FBC: Firebreak is one game that I had been waiting for quite a while. In my opinion, Remedy Entertainment has done no wrong, ever, and each game from the Finnish studio has been banger after banger (after banger). I'm all for major game studios taking risks and trying new, weird things, and FBC: Firebreak falls into exactly that category, being Remedy's first-ever FPS game, and that too a co-op, online-only multiplayer experience.

With the dawning of a new era of hybridization in the automotive industry, more and more manufacturers are integrating electric propulsion into their lineups. Mild-hybrid systems are well-established, and more beneficial plug-in hybrid systems keep getting better and better. Even Lamborghini's participating in the latest wave of hybridization, which might come as a surprise to some.That's because this Italian company's outlandish supercars have never been regarded as thrifty, or ever trying to be thrifting. They've always returned old-truck-like fuel economy thanks to their ravenous 10- and 12-cylinder engines. And their innate ability to make those behind the wheel drive them as inefficiently as possible doesn't help, either.But by God, it's a reality in the 2025 Lamborghini Revuelto, the Italian brand's top V12-powered model. Its plug-in hybrid system is mainly there to up the thrills, but surprisingly, it can also return respectable fuel economy with no downsides to its ravenous driving experience. Here's how $612,858 (before costly options) worth of Lambo slots into our current golden age of hybridized high-performance. Doing its partLamborghini …Read the full story at The Verge.