Earlier this week, I was trying to build a fun project using Claude Code, and the number of tokens I burned made me realize two things -- I can’t keep spending this much on AI, and Claude is ridiculously expensive. The best frontier models out there, whether you are using Opus 4.8 or Fable 5, are fantastic and can get things done, but they are not built for sustainability. They are token guzzlers, and if you just want to mess around, build things, and break things, these are not the models you should be using. I realized this quite late, but when I did, I replaced Claude with a bunch of specialized tiny local LLMs. That gave me the freedom to build whatever I wanted without constantly worrying about running out of tokens.

Facebook is planning some big changes to try and keep its users from jumping to rival social platforms like TikTok - changes that sound dubiously similar to becoming a TikTok clone. Facebook head Tom Alison announced today that the platform will begin testing a "reimagined experience" later this year that will put a subset of users into a "full-screen video the moment they open the app."Meta didn't share examples of what its experimental new interface will look like, only that it will initially roll out to countries with a noted preference for video content, with a potential expansion planned for the US next year. These tests are driven by …Read the full story at The Verge.

When Nvidia announced the RTX 50-series GPUs at CES last year, I expected to feel like I was going to miss out if I didn't upgrade from my RTX 4090. But then early reviews and benchmarks of the RTX 5090 started coming out on YouTube, and I immediately realized that it didn't make sense to pay 25% more for barely a 30% improvement in performance. That's assuming I could find one at MSRP. Today, it's almost impossible to find it online for under $4,000, which is twice its MSRP.

Valve's Proton layer has been one of the best things to happen to gaming on Linux, but it's by no means perfect. Fortunately, Valve has been working hard at fixing any problems that may arise, while also adding new games into the mix. The latest release candidate build, Proton 11.0-2, has been released, and with it comes a critical fix for fans of Diablo IV.

Internet access has become such a normal part of working that most of us don't notice how much we depend on it until it disappears. I've had moments where unreliable Wi-Fi, travel, or a temporary outage interrupted my workflow at the worst possible time. Instead of looking for better internet, I decided to build a setup that could keep me productive without needing a connection at all. The goal wasn't to replace cloud services, but to make sure they were optional rather than essential. These are the offline tools that now let me work from almost anywhere without missing a beat.

The web and Google once had a deal: Google collects data and indexes webpages and in exchange sends oceans of traffic to websites. The deal wasn't perfect and certainly made Google more money than it made the websites, but it worked for a long time. Now, however, the deal seems to be dead. And the web is being forced to reckon with what happens when the Google traffic dries up.On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay talk about the week's Google Zero news, including Reddit's interest in getting out of an AI training deal, and the publishers considering blocking Google from crawling their sites altogether. (Nilay also takes a bit o …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's something about train departure boards that can be mesmerizing while you're waiting for your train. But why not bring that experience outside the station and make your own board at home? Well, one smart tinkerer hooked up a Pi to their train network's live departure times, and honestly, I could watch it all day.

Microsoft has intervened to stop Windows 11 users with LG monitors from being bombarded with annoying McAfee trial pop-ups. In response to complaints about the LG bloatware, Microsoft's Windows chief, Pavan Davuluri, said that LG has agreed to immediately disable the McAfee pop-up from its LG Monitor App Installer, and pledged that Microsoft will "keep improving here with our ecosystem partners."This crackdown follows backlash about large pop-up ads for McAfee antivirus and LG's own apps appearing on Windows 11 PCs after being connected to LG monitors. Upon connection, a Windows driver update was silently installing LG driver updates and t …Read the full story at The Verge.

Weeks after Anthropic's latest toe-to-toe with the US government, and days after an OpenAI security incident that dominated tech industry discussions, Anthropic on Thursday released its newest model, Claude Opus 5. The company said in a release that Opus 5 "comes close to the capabilities of Claude Fable 5 in many domains" and is much better at complex coding tasks. (Fable 5 is the public-facing Mythos-class model that drew the government's ire, was taken offline for a few weeks along with Mythos 5, and then brought back with even stronger cyber safeguards than before.) The Fable 5 concerns - and the ensuing weeks of negotiations between …Read the full story at The Verge.

When you've noticed that you've got dead zones in your house, it's easy to spend hundreds of dollars on a shiny and multi-node mesh Wi-Fi system to fix them. However, you'll notice that sometimes your speeds are still inconsistent, and ping spikes persist during video calls or gaming sessions. It's easy to feel convinced that dead zones require expensive multi-node mesh grids in order to be rectified.

A few days ago, Microsoft surprised the gaming world when it announced that four original Xbox titles were getting a PC release via the Xbox Store. To ensure the games run properly on a computer, Microsoft bundles the games with an emulator. However, dataminers have since dug through the code, and they discovered that Microsoft actually used an Xbox 360 emulator to get the job done, opening the door for more potential releases in the future.

TikTok has attracted the ire of the European Union over its protection of children who use the video sharing platform. The European Commission announced preliminary findings today under the Digital Services Act (DSA) that offer specific issues to address.The Commission suggests that TikTok should adjust the default settings of minors' "public" accounts so the content they post is only visible to TikTok users the teen has chosen to share it with, and that such content shouldn't be recommended to other users in the For You feed. Even accounts set to private can be easily discovered through the "following" lists of other users, and their prof …Read the full story at The Verge.