You know, we have a ton of games where you play as someone causing havoc, but we rarely spend a thought towards those who have to clean it up afterwards. Well, maybe not if you play GTA, because you'll see the police and the fire service turn up, but you're still not playing as them.

The Star Wars franchise has been adapted into many different mediums over the decades, including a number of major video games. And while most of the video games based on Star Wars have found a great deal of success, not all of them have been good. Some games have unfortunately dragged down the reputation of the franchise with a low bar of quality that fans have joked about for a long time. Most Star Wars will pick up and support anything that has Star Wars on the label, but they aren't foolish enough to not know when something is just flat out bad. But there is a saving grace for Star Wars games that fit into this type of category.

Japan doesn’t want Apple to give it the EU treatment. We might finally see the first iPhone browsers built on top of third-party engines now that Japanese regulators have taken up the issue. Apple’s malicious compliance in the EU has so far prevented Chrome, and its Blink engine, for example, from coming to iOS, but recently published guidelines related to Japan’s Smartphone Act could change that. Not only do they set a December deadline for restrictions to be lifted, but also specify that Apple can’t enforce alternative rules that make it difficult to adopt alternatives to the company’s own WebKit browser engine.According to a translation provided by the Open Web Advocacy organization, the guidelines prevent Apple from doing the following:“Imposing unreasonable technical restrictions on individual app providers while allowing them to adopt alternative browser engines, placing excessive financial burdens on individual app providers for adopting alternative browser engines, and steering smartphone users away from using individual software that incorporates alternative browser engines.”

The day before the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman surprised employees with a message in the company's Slack."As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we have been looking at comp for our technical teams given the movement in the market," wrote Altman, according to a copy of the message that was shared with me. He announced that OpenAI would give a "special one-time award" to researchers and software engineers in a handful of orgs, including applied engineering, scaling, and safety. "We very much intend to keep increasing comp as we keep doing better and better as a company," he wrote. "But we wanted to be transparent about this one since …Read the full story at The Verge.

Using software to create a "second brain" is a concept I only stumbled across a few months ago, although I have, in essence, been doing the same thing for years. Our brains are skilled at coming up with new ideas, but we have a finite amount of storage to work with. Sure, you might still remember your high school locker code, but it isn't always easy to shove more information into a space. That's where a "second brain" comes in — a way to keep notes that allow us to more easily access learned knowledge and create links between ideas.

Most network-attached storage (NAS) enclosures you can buy from brands like Synology and Asustor come with an Intel CPU and integrated graphics (iGPU). These are similar to what you'd find on a consumer-grade AMD Ryzen or Intel Core processor. The iGPU is not designed for 4K gaming, but rather offloading much of the work from the CPU itself for transcoding and other tasks a GPU can handle. It's a powerful addition to the tool arsenal and is a feature often sought out by those purchasing prebuilt enclosures. Do you need a discrete GPU for NAS? Probably not, even if it's a DIY system.

Corsair's updated Scimitar Wireless Elite SE mouse is a pretty standard gaming mouse designed for MMORPG players with additional buttons positioned on the thumb rest. Having used Razer's Naga V2 over the last several years, I'm pretty familiar with MMO mice. While there are often some trade-offs between one MMO mouse and another, a lot of things are the same. They're usually 12-14-button programmable mice, with low-latency and high DPI for added sensitivity.

You know, as much as I love tinkering with Raspberry Pis, I don't think I can break into one. No, not physically; I could probably snap one in half if it wouldn't fill me with despair for slaying an innocent SBC. I'm talking about the security countermeasures buried deep within the chip. Because, as fun as Raspberry Pis can be in the hands of hobbyists, they're also used in critical, industrial cases too. And the last thing a business wants is weak security in their chips.

Summer's almost over, which means back-to-school sales are in full swing. If you're looking for an affordable large-screen laptop with plenty of power, this one from HP is going to be the one to go with. While it's normally priced at $630, it's now $300 off at Best Buy, dropping it down to just $330. This is a fantastic price for this laptop, which makes it a very good time to pick one up.

Google Docs was my go-to writing tool for years. I used it for everything from article drafts and checklists to full-blown project planning. It worked well enough, but over time, I grew frustrated with the clutter, the reliance on internet access, and the growing list of features I didn’t need. What I really wanted was a more focused writing environment that put me in control of my work.

The Browser Company — the makers of the Arc browser — just launched a $20 per month subscription to its new AI-powered web browser, Dia, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. The new Dia Pro subscription comes with unlimited access to the browser’s chat feature, which lets you ask questions about the content in your tabs.People who use Dia for free will still have access to the same features the browser launched with, including the ability to interact with the browser’s AI chatbot and create custom skills. But free users might run into some limits if they frequently use Dia’s AI chat feature.The Browser Company hasn’t carved out specific limits for non-subscribers, but CEO Josh Miller told The New York Times last month that “the browser will remain free for those who use the A.I. tool only a few times a week.” Miller also hinted at rolling out additional subscription tiers, ranging from $5 to hundreds of dollars per month.The Browser Company first announced the development of Dia late last year before launching it in beta in June. Over the past several months, Google and Microsoft have begun knitting AI more tightly into their browsers, while the AI search startup Perplexity has released an early access version of its AI browser Comet. Rumors also suggest that OpenAI is getting ready to release an AI web browser of its own.

Something’s off with that chart on the left. During its big GPT-5 livestream on Thursday, OpenAI showed off a few charts that made the model seem quite impressive — but if you look closely, some graphs were a little bit off.In one, ironically showing how well GPT-5 does in “deception evals across models,” the scale is all over the place. For “coding deception,” for example, the chart shown onstage says GPT-5 with thinking apparently gets a 50.0 percent deception rate, but that’s compared to OpenAI’s smaller 47.4 percent o3 score which somehow has a larger bar. OpenAI appears to have accurate numbers for this chart in its GPT-5 blog post, however, where GPT-5’s deception rate is labeled as 16.5 percent.who's making these graphs pic.twitter.com/Zt6yhZuUoo— Shrey Kothari (@shreyk0) August 7, 2025With this chart, OpenAI showed onstage that one of GPT-5’s scores is lower than o3’s but is shown with a bigger bar. In this same chart, o3 and GPT-4o’s scores are different but shown with equally-sized bars. It was bad enough that CEO Sam Altman commented on it, calling it a “mega chart screwup,” though he noted that a correct version is in OpenAI’s blog post. An OpenAI marketing staffer also apologized, saying, “We fixed the chart in the blog guys, apologies for the unintentional chart crime.”this screenshot from GPT-5 livestream has to be among the worst chart crimes of the century pic.twitter.com/HXsK2CWCon— Ege Erdil (@EgeErdil2) August 7, 2025OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. And while it’s unclear if OpenAI used GPT-5 to actually make the charts, it’s still not a great look for the company on its big launch day — especially when it is touting the “significant advances in reducing hallucinations” with its new model.