When it comes to simple inference tasks, my locally-hosted large language models are reliable enough to deliver accurate results. But everything falls apart as soon as I start prompting my LLMs about complex errors, new topics, or frequently updated information. By default, the models I run on llama.cpp can only access their training data, meaning they’re completely isolated from real-time information from the Internet.

We're getting to the point with LLMs where we can squeeze them onto an ESP32. Granted, it's not going to take down the bigger, stronger LLM models running on powerful hardware anytime soon, but as a fun thing you can make at home to handle simple queries, they can be a lot of fun. You can even hook up an external LLM to one, too; our own Adam Conway connected a local LLM to a $30 ESP32 display, and it designs a new screen for every question he asks.

When one of our D&D group members couldn't make it to the session, we decided to make a night of it anyway. We headed over to a local pub, only to be told that they were about to start a pub quiz and that we were welcome to join. We had never done a pub quiz before, but we thought we'd give it a go.

A little while ago, Google confirmed that it was scrapping its affordable range of Chromebook laptops. The goal was to pivot more toward on-board AI processing with a new brand of laptops called the Googlebook. At the time, it sounded like Google no longer wanted to support the budget-friendly range, but we didn't know just how budget-unfriendly the Googlebook would be.

When I first got into PC gaming, the only performance metric I really cared about was average FPS. As someone who switched from a PS3 back then, I just wanted AAA titles to average around 50FPS on my GTX 680 at 1080p. I never even knew what 1% lows or frame times were until years later, when I upgraded to the GTX 1070 and started chasing higher frame rates in fast-paced shooters like Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2.

Whenever something gets a lot of attention online, scammers and malware distributors are always quick to capitalise on it. When news broke that a leaker had gotten their hands on a full, working copy of GTA 6, people started to ask questions. For instance, has the leaker uploaded the game files somewhere that everyone can download?

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on GTA VI and the state of the video game industry, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedFour years ago, fans got a long-awaited look at Grand Theft Auto VI with a huge cache of videos that showed off Rockstar's latest open-world epic. There were 90 videos in total, providing a glimpse at the next-generation take on Vice City, introducing the game's new dual protagonists, and generally showing off the crime-fueled mayhem the series is known for. …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's a simple question you might've asked before heading into this article. "What's actually wrong with Google Photos?" For many years, it was the storage limits that kept getting tighter, the shrinking free tiers, and the added monthly cost of paying for one subscription after another. Today, there's an even more compelling reason to leave the ad giant's ecosystem.

You might think the best option when you hit a Wi-Fi dead zone at home is to invest in an expensive multi-node mesh system to ensure full coverage. However, there are downsides to adding consumer mesh nodes around the house, including wireless backward congestion, doubled latency hops, roaming packet drops, and overlapping co-channel interference.

Most smart displays come with a fixed set of screens, and you get whatever the team behind the firmware happened to think of. Usually that's a clock, the weather, a calendar, and after that you're stuck with it. I've used a few of these over the years and the pattern's always the same; they're mostly cookie-cutter devices, nothing more and nothing less.

Even though you have a modern Wi-Fi 6, 6E, or 7 router and high-spec endpoints capable of gigabit wireless throughput, your network might still suffer from random latency spikes, package jitter, and sluggish page loads. This is down to airtime starvation. Wi-Fi is a shared half-duplex medium. It doesn't matter how fast your gaming rig or laptop is if the wireless radio spectrum is tied up waiting for slow legacy transmissions.

I've been using my Galaxy Z Flip 5 for about three years now, so it's easy to blame its age whenever it feels a little slower than it used to. But there's a difference between a phone actually taking longer to do something and Android simply taking its sweet time showing you that it did it. I was recently reminded of that when I started messing around with the animation scale settings in Developer options.