With an IPO looming for Elon Musk's SpaceX / xAI / X combo platter of companies, SpaceX has announced an odd arrangement to either acquire the automated programming platform Cursor for $60 billion or pay a fee of $10 billion. Buying this startup that's focused on AI coding could help xAI's tools compete with market leader Anthropic, as well as the other competitors. A report by The Information this week said Sergey Brin has directed Google's "strike team" to help its agentic AI tools catch up, while Sam Altman reportedly declared a "code red" at OpenAI last year before shutting down Sora to focus on the ChatGPT superapp and its own Codex too …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft 365 is a giant that everyone loves to hate, yet most of us keep paying the bill because we fear the compatibility and inconvenience nightmare. I was in the same boat until the company hiked the prices due to a forced Copilot integration.

I’ve been self-hosting LLMs for many months now, and the journey has been a wild mix of "aha!" moments and late-night troubleshooting sessions. What started as a quest for privacy and local control quickly turned into a deep dive into the mechanics of AI infrastructure. Along the way, I’ve built a robust local lab, but I also made plenty of tactical errors that slowed me down. If I had to wipe my drives and start over tomorrow, my approach would be much more strategic. Here is exactly what I’d do differently to build a smarter, leaner AI stack.

Astronaut Chris Williams and the rest of the Expedition 74 crew are getting new laptops. | Photo: NASA Even astronauts need to level up their laptops once in a while - including the crew of Expedition 74 on board the ISS, which NASA announced last week is in the process of some computer upgrades. According to NASA, the crew met on Friday to review plans to "first replace network servers then activate their new, more powerful laptop computers." In a statement to The Verge, NASA spokesperson Joshua Finch confirmed the new laptops the astronauts will be using: "The International Space Station Program has selected the HP ZBook G9 Mobile Workstation as the next laptop for the space station." According to HP, the custom ZBook Fury G9 …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's a very specific kind of friction that comes with introducing someone to gaming when they didn't grow up with it. My partner is one of those people, and while she's been happy to be a backseat gamer for many years, it's now time for her to take the wheel.

Building out the home lab has been a lot of fun. Going from a single prebuilt network-attached storage (NAS) device to used enterprise gear and a server cabinet, I learned a lot about how best to configure a smart home and what I actually needed in the home office. Turns out, less can be more, which is why I replaced those enterprise beasts with a single AMD Threadripper server. This thing absolutely flew with 64 cores, but the 150W idle power draw was simply ridiculous. That's when I looked at mini PCs, but instead of settling for these small devices, I ended up with a few compact PCs.

Buying your first 3D printer is exciting in and of itself, but the first few accessories around it usually decide whether the hobby feels smooth or constantly annoying. A new machine can print properly out of the box, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready for real everyday use without a few supporting players.

For years, TrueNAS and Proxmox have been seen as two different tools for two different jobs. TrueNAS is the operating system you install when storage is the priority, with ZFS underneath and a feature set built for keeping data intact across drive failures, bitrot, and everything else that can go wrong with spinning drives. Proxmox, on the other hand, is the hypervisor of choice for running virtual machines and LXC containers, backed by a clustering and high availability story that's quietly been the backbone of countless homelabs. It's not uncommon to run TrueNAS inside of a Proxmox VM, so long as you do your drive passthroughs correctly.

Modern graphics cards and gaming CPUs have gotten to the point that achieving high framerates in most titles isn't as challenging as it used to be. Even on budget GPUs, assists like upscaling and frame generation ensure your average FPS remains well above 60, and often above 100. The problem with using average FPS as the sole metric of performance is that it doesn't truly reflect what makes a smooth gaming experience. A game running at 90–120 FPS can still be riddled with microstutters, ruining your immersion despite a "good average FPS." The crucial metric you need to keep an eye on is the frame time. It represents the consistency of your gaming experience. A huge variance in frame time can result in terrible frame pacing, even if the FPS counter shows no apparent problems. Fortunately, you can detect poor frame pacing and fix it to a large degree.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp is a man in charge of one of the most important and frightening companies in the world. Karp's new book, cowritten with Nicholas Zamiska, is called The Technological Republic. After claiming "because we get asked a lot," Palantir posted a 22-point summary of the book that reads like a corporate manifesto. It evokes both weird reactionary shit and also trilby-wearing Reddit comments from the early 2010s.Palantir's summary of the book is ominous. But even the company's name is unironically ominous. The palantíri are crystal balls in The Lord of the Rings that let Middle-earth's worst tyrants spy on the heroes of the st …Read the full story at The Verge.

Computing company Framework is back with the Laptop 13 Pro, an upgraded version of its smaller modular Laptop 13, alongside an update to its Framework Laptop 16, and a few other accessory announcements.

Under Steve Jobs, Apple released the groundbreaking products that defined the company. But the company wouldn't be what it is today without Tim Cook's reign of ruthless efficiency.Jobs' legacy has long been written at this point. He was stubborn, unpleasant, and a generational visionary. He pushed the limits of industrial design and brought technologies together in ways that others laughed off at the time. It's an iconic tenure that's basically unequaled anywhere else in tech. But the radical thinker passed the torch to a very different kind of CEO in Tim Cook in August of 2011. Tim Cook is an inventor of a different kind. The Apple Watc …Read the full story at The Verge.