For the past few weeks, I've been toying around with local AI models of various sizes on two very different kinds of hardware. The first of which is my home lab: an i7-6700K-based system with an RTX 3080 10GB dedicated GPU inside, powering Immich machine learning, Jellyfin transcoding, and now, a llama.cpp instance hosting local AI. I put it head-to-head against a MINISFORUM MS-03, one of their latest "AI workstation" offerings that boasts an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H and 32GB of RAM.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed seven bills designed to prevent AI data centers from passing utility costs onto residents, as reported earlier by the Los Angeles Times. The package of laws requires the California Public Utilities Commission to introduce a new rate classification for data centers while forcing them to pay for upgrades to local power grids and water systems.Other bills included in the package will require proposed data centers to disclose their estimated water use to local governments, along with information about energy efficiency and drought planning. They must also meet certain energy, water, and fuel consumption …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most of the repetitive work in my day takes only a few minutes. For example, creating meeting minutes and turning them into tasks isn’t a major job. Neither is cleaning up the Downloads folder nor switching off the lamps, fans, and TV before going to bed. At any one time, the total is small enough that it barely registers.

Last week, GM announced a new software experience for its upcoming Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra trucks, including a new look for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, the popular phone mirroring systems that the automaker made a big deal about removing from its electric vehicles in 2023. Naturally, this led to some confusion about whether GM was "bringing back" CarPlay and Android Auto to its vehicles. Yahoo Finance reported it that way, calling it an "about-face" by the automaker, while Apple Insider's headline boasted that GM "cave[d]" on its decision to remove the interface from its gas-powered vehicles. Even The Verge's own commenters were …Read the full story at The Verge.

I don't think it's too much of an understatement to say that Valve's Proton layer revolutionized gaming on Linux, which is pretty funny given how it only started because Gabe wanted to get away from Windows 8. Now, it appears the gaming giant wants to do something similar with Android games with a new project called 'Lepton'.

The home lab builds I've been reading about lately share an unlikely hero. It isn't a fancy drive or a shiny rack. It's a small thermometer that costs less than $30. It sits on a shelf next to some of the best hard drives for network storage. Owners calibrate these cheap sensors with real care, and some even add live temperature readouts to their server dashboards.

This Lenovo Legion R34w-30 34-inch gaming monitor is exactly what you need if you're looking for something feature-packed and affordable. Amazon's discount knocks a whopping 36% off. That's a $450 monitor that's now $290. It may show as temporarily out of stock on Amazon, but you can still place an order to lock in the discounted price. If not, go to Lenovo to buy it without delay.

Homelabbing looks straightforward, and it is, until you run into something. Since each setup is different, the solutions aren’t always the same, or documented. A similar thing happened to me a few months ago. While setting up Nextcloud on my homelab Debian server, I faced a permission denied error.

Amazon plans to spend $20 million on water conservation projects along the Colorado River, a crucial but dwindling water supply for 40 million people in the Western US. The initiative comes as Amazon and other tech companies face mounting scrutiny over how much water their data centers use. Amazon has a goal of becoming water positive - replenishing more water than it uses - by the end of the decade. It recently disclosed some information about its water use, but we still have an incomplete picture of the company's impact as a whole.Amazon announced the launch of a Colorado River Basin Collaborative today, with a mission to "create one o …Read the full story at The Verge.

Between tech companies hiking prices, stuffing more features behind subscriptions, and seemingly finding a new way to squeeze money out of users every other week, it’s easy to feel a little cynical about the state of software right now.

When you clean out your dust drawer, you might unearth an old NVMe or SATA SSD that you've pulled from a laptop upgrade two years ago. 500GB or 1TB is too small for a modern primary boot drive, but it's too fast to throw away, so it's sat collecting dust.

Claude Code can inspect a codebase, make changes across several files, and test its own work without needing every step spelled out. That level of autonomy is what makes it such a useful coding tool. Auto memory sounds like a natural addition to all of this. Claude could save useful details from one session and carry them into the next, which means I wouldn’t have to repeat the same preferences, corrections, and project context every time.