After decades of tutorials and guides, PC building might have become pretty standardized, but it remains a deeply personal exercise. People have a certain idea in mind when they embark on a PC build, and RGB lighting is just one of many elements that make PC building what it is today. While we can't escape RGB in PC components, there should be a line that manufacturers shouldn't cross. As if RGB power supplies weren't enough, we have to deal with RGB GPU sag brackets now.

Apple Intelligence has been a wreck since its first features rolled out last year, and a big new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman details why — and how Apple is trying to piece things back together. And much of its effort hinges on rebuilding Siri from the ground up.Gurman has reported in the past that Apple is working on what it’s internally calling ‘LLM Siri’ — a reworked, generative AI version of the company’s digital assistant. Apple’s previous approach of merging the assistant with the existing Siri hasn’t been working. Gurman describes in great detail a number of reasons why, but here’s a quick summary:Apple software chief Craig Federighi was “reluctant to make large investments in AI.” The company doesn’t like to invest in a goal without a clear endpoint, Gurman writes, but where AI is concerned, one unnamed Apple executive told him “…you really don’t know what the product is until you’ve done the investment.” That would have meant expensive GPUs, which the company didn’t rush to buy and later didn’t have enough of to keep up with competitors.Apple started late. Another executive told Gurman that Apple Intelligence “wasn’t even an idea” before ChatGPT launched in late 2022.Apple AI chief John Giannandrea thought people didn’t want AI chatbots. He told employees that customers commonly want to be able to disable tools like ChatGPT.Old Siri didn’t work with new Siri. Apple apparently saw bolting generative AI features onto the old Siri as the fastest way to catch Apple up in AI, but it wasn’t working. “It’s whack-a-mole. You fix one issue, and three more crop up,” an employee told Gurman.Giannandrea didn’t “fit in” with Apple’s inner circle. Giannandrea was a rare outside executive hire when he came on in 2018, and he didn’t have the same “forceful” personality as others in company leadership. He didn’t fight hard enough to get big funding amounts, the report says. Apple employees told Gurman that Giannandrea didn’t push his workers hard enough, and that he doesn’t see big AI companies like OpenAI or Google as an urgent threat to Apple.Marketing got out over its skis. The company’s AI marketing focused heavily on promised features like an improved Siri or Apple Intelligence being able to take context from apps across your system before they were ready — features that it has since been forced to delay.Now the company is trying to rejigger its approach. Part of that is a total overhaul of Siri, rather than just trying to make generative AI work in concert with the old Siri. According to Gurman, Apple has its AI team in Zurich working on a new architecture that will “entirely build on an LLM-based engine.” Gurman reported in November last year that the company was working on this, and the idea is that it will make the assistant “more believably conversational and better at synthesizing information.”Another part of the solution is leveraging iPhones and differential privacy to improve Apple’s synthesized data — comparing fake training data with language from iPhone users’ emails, but doing so on-device and sending only the synthesized data back to Apple for AI training. And one way the company is discussing improving Siri is letting the LLM version loose on the web to “grab and synthesize data from multiple sources.” Basically, Siri as an AI web search tool not unlike Perplexity, which is one of the companies Apple has approached about partnering for AI search in Safari.Whatever the outcome, apparently Giannandrea won’t be a direct part of it, having been taken off of product development, Siri, and robotics projects in the spring. According to Gurman, Apple execs have talked about putting him “on a path to retirement,” but are concerned that some of the research and engineering folks he brought with him would leave with him, too. Whatever the case, Gurman says Giannandrea plans to stick around, “relieved Siri is now someone else’s problem.”

Let's be honest; while Microsoft has added a few handy features to the File Explorer (thanks for the tab-based layout, by the way, I love it), it's still missing a few bits. Fortunately, you don't need to sit around and wait for Microsoft to add those features in; there are plenty of tools out there you can use to enhance your File Explorer and make it more bearable to use.

The Nintendo Switch Online service has been a great way for players to check out classic games from the NES library. Occasionally, Nintendo will add new games to the list of NES titles to the service for those with an active Switch Online account. Many of the iconic classics everyone will recognize are there to play anytime, especially the big Nintendo first-party titles. But you may not see every major or beloved NES game on the service, even if they were mega hits on the console back in the day.

I enjoy streaming from platforms like Spotify and YouTube Music, but I still listen to many of my favorite songs in MP3 format. This is because I grew up in the days of physical media and ripped my entire CD collection spanning decades onto my PC. I find it handy to listen to MP3s because I can enjoy my music library on many devices without worrying about losing my collection and playlists if I cancel my subscription or change services.

Hideo Kojima and his studio Kojima Productions are preparing to release Death Stranding 2: On The Beach on June 26 exclusively for PlayStation 5. Kojima, who is 61 years old, said in an interview with VGC that he has some ideas for a Death Stranding 3 but believes someone else would need to make it. While he didn't specify why he wouldn't be able to make it himself, there are a few obvious reasons why he might think that, outside of purely creative choices. Between a stacked schedule, how long games take to make, and his age, it makes sense that Kojima believes he won't be returning to the series. Here's why Kojima says he won't be making another entry in his weird Death Stranding series.

If you’ve been following my articles here on XDA, you may know that I love working on the most bizarre and insane projects imaginable. From running Windows 11 as a container on my Raspberry Pi and gaming on a Proxmox virtual machine to emulating PC titles on my smartphone and conversing with Skyrim NPCs using locally-hosted AI tools, I’ve experimented with several wacky ideas.

Compact keyboards are a niche within the expensive but highly customizable world of mechanical keyboards. My modest collection of sub-60% keyboards often evokes a mix of curiosity and skepticism about practicality for everyday use. After dallying with an accouterment of tiny boards for a couple of years now, I seem to finally have the answer to this general skepticism. In my experience, these small keyboards are surprisingly efficient, much more so than their larger space-hogging counterparts.

Setting up Home Assistant armed my home with the smarts I always wanted. The next logical step was to create automation using the different IoT devices. Still teething around my way with automation, I found the visual editor easy to use instead of editing the YAML configuration files. Thankfully, Home Assistant provides a handful of user-friendly features to kick off the journey to build automation with the least hassle. Here are some features that help me create flawless automation in Home Assistant besides using it for cool things.

It's easy to get carried away when building out a home lab, You have easy access to refurbished or used server-grade hardware. It sounds amazing to grab a dual-CPU behemoth of a system for running a few self-hosted services, but it's important to consider the costs outside of the hardware itself. First, there's the cost of electricity, which will quickly become your home lab's kryptonite with everything running 24/7. Then there are more expensive replacement parts, especially for ECC and server-specific components.

If you follow my articles closely, you may already know I'm a lifelong Windows user. At 29 years old, I got my first-ever Mac with the M4 Mac Mini late last year, and after some initial friction, it's safe to say I've fallen in love with it over the past six months or so.

OPNsense is a free, open-source software platform that can be used to manage and secure computer networks. Think of it as a powerful, customizable firewall that acts like a gatekeeper for your internet traffic -- deciding what data can enter or leave your network. It's super-useful in ensuring your network stays protected. It's the need of the hour, especially considering how data on the internet is prone to breaches. In fact, I would recommend replacing your ISP's router with an OPNsense firewall since it's much more effective. Once you do that, you can add several plugins to OPNsense that go a step further in protecting you when you're online.