I'm no stranger to building PCs. As a matter of fact, I've either built a rig from the ground up or purchased a laptop every second year since 2015 for a variety of reasons, either for myself, or for friends and family. The dynamics of a purchase have always been the same. You buy the best you can afford, for the features that you care about.

My entry into self-hosting was never going to run through a terminal, so LM Studio's one-click install and clean GUI is what got me running local models, and it's been my default ever since. But the longer I lean on local AI, the more I run into things LM Studio either doesn't do or makes me set up by hand. That's what pushed me toward llama.cpp recently, and although it does have a GUI, you still need the terminal to launch it.

Unlike cloud-based AI models, locally-hosted large language models are infamous for their sky-high system requirements, with the more powerful ones requiring plenty of tensor cores and ample VRAM. Although I’d argue that with MoE offloading, Mixture of Experts models can run even on ancient systems, you’ll still need a discrete graphics card to run these bulky LLMs.

Squared. Get it? | Image: Mojang The A Minecraft Movie sequel officially has a title: A Minecraft Movie Squared. What's more, we now know that Kirsten Dunst will star as Alex, the game's female character option, and that Matt Berry is set to play an even bigger role in this film. He voiced Nitwit in the first movie, but in this one, he'll be playing a human character. Who exactly he'll be hasn't been revealed yet, but in the clip below, he can be heard dismissing a costume choice because "Steve would not be wearing that," suggesting he might be playing the Herobrine, a creepy pasta evil counterpart to Jack Black's Steve.The director, Jared Hess, and Mojang Chief Creative …Read the full story at The Verge.

Despite headwinds from the current administration, automakers continue to release well-equipped EVs with bigger battery packs and increasingly faster charging speeds. For those who want to travel further between plugging in, the future is still bright, just slightly tinted.But there haven't been many sedans starting around or below $50,000, as crossover SUVs have largely taken up this territory. Now, Mercedes-Benz has released its CLA compact sedan which ticks every box above for the 2026 and 2027 model year, and throws in pleasant interior amenities and fun driving character for good measure. What's insideThe CLA w …Read the full story at The Verge.

An hour in flight UA236 returned to Newark. | Screenshot: The Verge United flight 236 from Newark to Palma de Mallorca on Saturday night was forced to turn around just an hour after takeoff due to security concerns around a Bluetooth signal. Multiple Redditors claimed to be on the flight and reported that the crew repeatedly requested passengers to turn off their Bluetooth. According to one poster, the crew issued a one-minute warning, saying that two devices were still active. One Redditor reported flight attendants making comments like, "This little joke is ruining it for everyone."An archived recording from Air Traffic Control (embedded below) confirms that the root of the issue was the name of a disc …Read the full story at The Verge.

Even the cover revels in a low-bit digital aesthetic. | Image: Saddle Creek / Feeble Little Horse From the opening moments of bitknot, it's obvious that Feeble Little Horse has found an entirely new gear. Where on Girl with Fish the blown-out textures were more '90s indie rock and shoegaze, on their latest LP, there's a more modern edge to the distortion and the riffs cut cleaner. Similarly, where the digital glitchiness was mostly relegated to window dressing on their sophomore record, on bitknot it's integral to the arrangements and a core part of their emerging, distinct sound. We got a preview of this new direction on the one-off single, and one of my favorite songs of 2025, "This Is Real." It blended blast beats, Sonic Youth-esque …Read the full story at The Verge.

IO Interactive’s 007 First Light is here, and it’s just as stunning a James Bond mov — err, video game — as we hoped it would be. Pardon the confusion, the title’s engaging tutorial really feels like you’re watching a great Bond movie at times. Whether you’re a longtime Hitman fan who’s been eagerly waiting for the studio’s latest game or not, there are deals to be had on both the PlayStation 5 and Steam PC versions.007 First LightWhere to Buy: $69.99 $62.99 at Costco (PS5, Standard) $69.99 $60.89 at Fanatical (Steam, Standard) $79.99 $69.59 at Fanatical (Steam, Deluxe)Costco members, for instance, can already take advantage of an online-only deal on the disc-based PS5 version, which knocks it down to $62.99 (originally $69.99). It’s not a big discount, but it’s currently the best out there across major retailers. If you have a desktop PC or handheld gaming PC powerful enough to run the game, the Steam version is a little cheaper at Fanatical. The standard digital edition is going for $60.89, while the deluxe digital edition, which includes in-game cosmetics, is down to $69.59 (about $10 off).First Light is similar in a sense to recent Hitman games. It’s a third-person stealth sandbox game, after all, but it has a little more in common with Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series thanks to its hand-to-hand combat system, quippy protagonist, and wide variety of missions that either have you on foot using fun gadgets or behind the wheel of a muscle car.Read our full 007 First Light review.

Watch the stream below. | Image: NVIDIA NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang is set to take the stage for his GTC Taipei keynote at 8PM PT / 11PM ET. You can watch all the announcements here and embedded below. Rumors have been flying about what to expect from today's presentation, but the big one is the possibility of a partnership with Microsoft and a renewed Windows on ARM push. Microsoft has been teasing a "new era of PC" for its Surface lineup, and expectations are that new ARM processors from NVIDIA, dubbed the N1 and N1X, will be powering these yet-to-be-announced computers. Microsoft actually tapped NVIDIA's Tegra ARM CPUs for the Surface RT way back in 2012. But that machine was l …Read the full story at The Verge.

When I used Windows, Paint.net was my go-to app when I needed an image editor that was more powerful than Paint, but didn't need all the bells and whistles that GIMP or Photoshop had. Despite this, I was always peeved that you couldn't actually download Paint.net from the website 'Paint.net'. You had to go to the GetPaint.net website instead, which always felt weird.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about gadgets and smartphones, follow Dominic Preston. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedIn 2023, the European Union agreed on two landmark pieces of legislation mandating how portable tech products with batteries must be designed, aiming to improve longevity, repairability, and recyclability. Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/1670 came into force last year and applies specifically to smartphones and tablets, while Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 takes effect next year …Read the full story at The Verge.

A speedy 18-inch Mini LED that needs to be seen to be believed. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge My eyes have seen the PC gaming promised land, and it's a beautifully bright world without a shred of blurriness. It's warm, it looks lovely, and it's impeccably sharp. Also, it's expensive as hell.I've dipped my toe in this world by testing a pre-production version of the upcoming Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, which was recently announced ahead of Computex 2026. It's a gigantic 18-inch gaming laptop that comes with a top-of-the-line 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX CPU and can be fully kitted out with an RTX 5090 Laptop GPU and 128GB of RAM. Asus sent me a model to test that's maxed out on all specs except storage (it's got "just" 4TB). And of …Read the full story at The Verge.