Every home lab enthusiast reaches a point where ‘functional’ no longer feels ‘optimal,’ and my setup was no exception. Instead of spending an entire weekend optimizing the home lab, I decided to see if an AI could do a better job than I could, so I handed the keys to my infrastructure over to Claude.

Mark Zuckerberg. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Meta says it may be forced to pull Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp from New Mexico if the attorney general gets his way. The state is demanding a host of changes that the company says are impossible to achieve. After winning a $375 million jury award against Meta in a trial that argued the company misled users in the state about the safety of its products, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is asking the state court to order sweeping changes to the platforms. Among the asks are a prohibition on end-to-end encryption for minors, implementing age verification, and detecting 99 percent of new child sexual abuse material uploaded to its …Read the full story at The Verge.

LXCs are one of the reasons Proxmox feels so good in a home lab. They’re light, fast, easy to clone, and usually much less wasteful than spinning up a full VM for every small service. When something only needs a basic Linux environment and a few predictable ports, an LXC can feel like the obvious answer. That convenience is exactly what makes it so tempting to use them for everything.

Except for Google's AI responses to searches, I've never used AI before, not once. Most people I know, when they hear this, say, "You haven't used AI? But it's so useful!" I disagreed; I'd seen the results Google's AI gave, and it honestly seemed overhyped. Then I thought about it and realized I couldn't really judge it without testing it. However, being into tech, I didn't want to risk my privacy, knowing the impact that can have, so I wanted to install the AIs locally instead.

Microsoft is now rolling out its Xbox mode to all Windows 11 PCs. The new Xbox mode adds a full-screen interface to the Xbox PC app, much like Steam's Big Picture Mode, and originally debuted as the Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) with Asus' Xbox Ally devices."Some players in select markets will be able to download the Xbox mode experience today, with availability expanding to more players in those markets over the next several weeks," says the Xbox team. You'll be able to get the Xbox mode by installing the latest Windows update for Windows 11.Xbox mode aims to try and bridge the gap between Xbox consoles and Windows, but its original …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most of us first noticed GPU upscaling through games because of the cleaner edges, the sharper image quality, and, well, the "free" performance. Features like DLSS and FSR have made upscaling feel like magic, powered by dedicated hardware like tensor cores that reconstruct detail faster than brute force rendering ever did.

OpenAI is preparing to launch a new frontier cybersecurity model, GPT-5.5-Cyber. CEO Sam Altman said the model will not be available to the general public, but will be first rolled out to a select group of trusted "cyber defenders" in order for institutions to shore up their cyberdefenses. The limited rollout will take place "in the next few days," Altman said on X. "We will work with the entire ecosystem and the government to figure out trusted access for Cyber."It's not clear who will get access to the model first, though previous "trusted access" schemes involved vetted professionals and institutions. Details of the model and its capa …Read the full story at The Verge.

It is generally frowned upon to care too much about appearances. We have a lot of little aphorisms discouraging this - books and their covers, beauty being skin deep, style over substance, that sort of thing. Vanity is a risk. Should one put a disproportionate effort into how a thing looks, then said work may very well be considered shallow. But in the world of big-budget video games? That's how you win. Visual fidelity is video game shorthand for progress: how meticulously rendered a mountain is, how dynamically the snow behaves, how a player character raises their hands to touch a wall when the player approaches it just so. This pursuit …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's been almost three years since Silicon Valley started aggressively pushing large language model-based chatbots like ChatGPT as the supposedly inevitable future of everything, and there's no group that has felt the pressure quite like Gen Z.Like with many tech trends before it, it's no surprise that young people are among the biggest adopters of AI chatbot tools. But contrary to the tales spun by tech companies like OpenAI and Google, polling data shows that Gen Z students and workers are a big part of the wider cultural backlash against AI. And even as they utilize these tools, vast swaths of young people are deeply acrimonious and eve …Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta is planning to pump billions more into AI investments this year, despite noting that millions of users have seemingly started to abandon its platforms. In an earning call on Wednesday, Meta reported that figures for "Family daily active people" - the term Meta has coined for all collective users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger - declined by 20 million this quarter compared to the previous three months.Meta attributes this fall to "internet disruptions in Iran, as well as a restriction on access to WhatsApp in Russia." It's up to you whether you take Meta on its word, given that by bundling the user stats together across …Read the full story at The Verge.

Dallas-based genetics and biotech startup Colossal has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capitalists, the CIA, and Peter Thiel, among others. Its buzzy "de-extinction" projects aim to "bring back" lost animals like the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dire wolf - although it isn't creating copies of extinct creatures from ancient DNA, as the "de-extinction" tagline may suggest. In the case of the "dire wolves" presented to the world in 2025, the pups were gray wolves spliced with a few genetic traits to somewhat resemble the dire wolves. This ambitious branding opened the company up to questions about its conser …Read the full story at The Verge.

The internet is full of copycat, stolen, reposted, and low-effort content - and Meta, at least publicly, has said it is working to cut off some of the reach.Beginning in 2024, the company has made incremental announcements saying it would begin limiting "unoriginal" content from being recommended on Instagram. It meant that if you were downloading and reposting someone's Reels, or spamming the same clip over and over, your content wouldn't show up in recommendation feeds or places like the Explore tab. Similar rules were later announced for Facebook, where "unoriginal" accounts risk losing their ability to monetize content. The idea is tha …Read the full story at The Verge.