Local AI used to ask one big question of you: what can your hardware actually take? The answer determined which models you could run, the context length you could push, and whether vision or audio were even on the table. The question still remains, but it's not as black and white anymore because smaller models keep showing up that don't really care about your specs as much.

China's Zhipu AI (Z.ai) released its open-weight GLM-5.2, and some researchers have claimed that it matches Mythos in certain bug-finding and cybersecurity scenarios. While GLM lags behind models from Anthropic and OpenAI in other, more general tasks, it seems that China has dramatically reduced the gap in the capabilities between its models and those of the US.This level of advancement is particularly concerning to the US government, which has worked to restrict China's access to powerful models like Anthropic's Mythos and Fable, as well as the hardware necessary to train and run them. The Trump administration views Mythos and other advan …Read the full story at The Verge.

After a long wait and a lot of silence, we finally have information about two of the three products Valve said it would release. The Steam Controller is now available to buy, and the Steam Machine is open for pre-orders, even if the price is a little high. However, the elusive third product, the Steam Frame, has yet to materialise. All we really know about it is that it'll be a VR setup, but not much else.

There are countless reasons why AI-assisted coding tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, and so on, are incredible. They've practically removed the barrier there once was to begin coding, and turned what used to be hours of grinding through documentation into a conversation. You can now go from a chaotic idea spiraling in your head into a fully working prototype within seconds, and a non-technical person no longer needs to sign up to a months-long course just to build the thing they have in mind.

Suno has ambitions to be more than just a toy to churn out AI slop, it also wants to be a streaming destination and to break new artists. Spark is their new incubator program for independent artists that provides grants, mentorship, and marketing support.To apply, artists need to be an unsigned singer, songwriter, or producer releasing music under their own name. They also need to agree to some terms and conditions that have raised some eyebrows over on the Suno subreddit. For one, you need to agree to make your songs available on Suno for remixing. That's not necessarily super concerning, but the broad license it grants Suno to your works …Read the full story at The Verge.

Using an aging PC build can feel frustrating. It used to boot silently and handle 4K gaming or heavy code compilation without breaking a sweat. Now the fans sound like a jet engine the second you open a browser tab, and games that used to hit a locked 90FPS are suddenly hitching and dipping into the forties.

I'd been an X11 user for decades, so when I saw that the developers of KDE were dropping support in favor of Wayland, I didn't know how to feel. If you were an early Linux user, you couldn't get away from the X Window System unless you wanted to use the command line without a GUI, and we all grew up knowing how to use and tweak it.

For the majority of gamers, diminishing returns become severe. Moving to 8,000 Hz doesn't give you a competitive edge unless you're a professional player or gaming at an extremely high level. Instead, it just introduces a CPU processing tax for the majority as an expensive solution to a problem that the rest of the input pipeline usually dominates.

One of the most intimidating parts of using Arch is installing it. That's not to say that's a flaw on the distro; rather, it's one of its biggest strengths, as it gives users complete control over their operating system down to the minute detail. However, for the rest of us mere mortals, it can be really challenging.

When I replaced my Ryzen 9 5900X with a 5800X3D a couple of years ago, the performance improvement was obvious almost immediately. Some games, like Valorant and Battlefield 2042, were clearly CPU-limited at 1440p when I had the 5900X, often leaving my RTX 4090 sitting at around 70–80% usage. After the upgrade, both ran significantly better, with GPU usage improving across the board. It was so good that I never felt the need to ditch AM4 unless I wanted the RTX 5090.

One of the coolest things about the Linux community is that, if someone wants to make a distro that achieves a very specific goal, they can roll up their sleeves and make it themselves. We've seen this in the past as developers build distros that put gaming first, but not all of them decided to use Ubuntu as the core.

Attaching gadgets to your Home Assistant network always feels great, but there's something about making your own smart device that nothing else can replicate. When you have the power to build your own intelligence electronics, it really feels like you have no limitations. No walled gardens, no subscription fees, and no need to buy a new one when it breaks; you have total control over what happens in your smart home.