Storage was a luxury back in the day when I bought my first laptop. Slowly, the storage became cheaper, smaller, and faster than a traditional HDD. Before the whole AI crisis that shot up the cost of storage and memory, NVMe SSDs were only slightly more expensive than SATA SSDs, despite a huge difference in read-write speed, primarily due to their connection interface. I have a couple of SSDs that I use and external drives with a SATA enclosure. My main system, a Windows 11 PC, uses a Samsung NVMe SSD.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the time has come to slow down AI development and will give third-party evaluators like METR access to its models to help ensure its "adherence to safety practices and commitments." In a winding essay, Amodei proposed a three-step plan to "pace the frontier" - jargon that simply means to slow the pace of training and development to give companies time to build safeguards and regulators to evaluate models.Amodei says that giving external evaluators wide-ranging access is just the first step, and one it is taking now unilaterally. Step two would involve the industry coming together as a whole, likely with gove …Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed that there would be no OpenAI IPO in 2026 during an interview with Fortune. Over the course of 45 minutes, Altman discussed a variety of subjects including the Hugging Face hacking incident, recursive self-improvement, and the possibility of building an AI that was beyond human control. On the latter, he said it was "absolutely" possible, but vowed to take actions to prevent that from happening, even if it meant pausing training, adding that "there are risks we should not be able to incur on behalf of humanity.""We're not rushing into an IPO. I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, th …Read the full story at The Verge.

In May, hundreds of malicious and spam packages were uploaded to RubyGems, causing a serious disruption for the host. Now independent researchers have said that a swarm of OpenAI agents were responsible for the attack. Not only that, but the AI tried to steal users' API keys. At the time, RubyGems described it as a "major malicious attack" and shut down signups for four days as it tried to mitigate the damage and collect data. Researchers said that the contents of the packages that brought RubyGems to its knees were clearly authored by an LLM, and that the agents submitting those packages self-identified as being from OpenAI. They said the …Read the full story at The Verge.

My home server is the heartbeat of my home office. It acts as my photo and video library backup point, my NAS, my local AI node, and media library, all while being built from parts I already had. This system was collecting dust for many months in my closet, and had sat without a CPU cooler and boot drive until I revived it about a decade after it was initially built. The Skylake-era i7 and Z170 board provide more than enough headroom alone for a decent home server for self-hosting, but I've since built upon it with incremental upgrades that have made it more reliable and capable than anything I'd be able to buy off of a retail shelf right now.

For years, my inbox doubled as a temporary storage space. If I had a file on my iPhone that I needed on my Windows PC, I would simply email it to myself. It worked, but it was hardly an elegant solution.

Sylvan Esso preparing to attend a frutiger aero renfaire. Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn, better known as Sylvan Esso, have been bringing their low-key electro-pop to the masses since 2014, bursting onto the scene with their self-titled debut album and the single "Hey Mami." Over the years, they've put out a number of excellent records, dabbling in dustier, more fragile textures on Free Love, going dancier and glitchier on No Rules Sandy. The two are constantly pushing at the edges of their sound while retaining the core of what makes a Sylvan Esso record sound like a Sylvan Esso record. Their new album Ow ∞, released this past Friday, represents perhaps the boldest reinvention of their sound, how …Read the full story at The Verge.

Before you toss your old Fire TV Stick because it's too old and slow, look for ways to repurpose it. One thing you can do is use it to turn your TV into a digital photo frame. As a Prime member, you get unlimited photo storage at no extra cost.

I recently acquired a Bambu Labs A2L to design parts for all my hobby projects as well as home improvement tools. Looking at the sheer breadth of options and designs over on websites like MakerWorld and Thingiverse has also helped me discover solutions to problems I didn't even know I had. Part of that is a series of kitchen fixes that solve everyday practical problems. Some are things I could probably purchase; others not,

I've tried plenty of Android launchers over the years, but I rarely found a reason to change the one I was already using. Niagara Launcher had become my default, so switching to something unfamiliar wasn't high on my list. Then I came across Escape Launcher, an open-source project that takes a noticeably different approach to the Android home screen. I installed it mostly out of curiosity, expecting to test it briefly and move on. Instead, I kept coming back to it. The experience made me look differently at what I actually want from a launcher, and whether a simpler approach can work better for me.

Blizzard originally tried to bring the StarCraft universe to the world of 3D shooters way back in 2002 with StarCraft: Ghost. It sat in development hell for years until Blizzard president Mike Morhaime confirmed that it had been canceled in 2014. Now Blizzard is giving it another go with the simply titled StarCraft. Dan Hay, a VP at Blizzard, took the stage at BlizzCon today to reveal that after more than a decade of lying dormant, StarCraft would be returning in 2030. But, rather than another top-down real-time strategy installment, the new title would be an open-world shooter. He then showed off a cinematic trailer for the title that fo …Read the full story at The Verge.

For so many smart home builders, the reality is you're sat at your desk or on the sofa reading an article or watching a movie, and suddenly the room plunges into pitch-black darkness. You're forced to vigorously wave your arms around just to trick a wall sensor into turning the lights back on.