Most local LLM advice spends about 90% of its time on which model to download and almost none on what to do once it's loaded. You just pick a model and a quant, and off you go. It seems a lot of people leave the settings and parameters alone unless something's wrong, which is a shame because half the complaints about local models being slow or weird aren't really the model; they're the settings. And that's a much easier problem to solve than swapping to a different model entirely.

Apple is working on a "revamped" version of its entry-level MacBook Pro that it could launch as soon as the first half of 2027, Bloomberg reports. The company is also testing four new iPad Pros that are set to launch in the spring with a focus on "internal improvements."The updated MacBook Pro, which will keep the 14-inch screen size, will have a design that's "in line" with what Apple is planning for the touch screen MacBooks it also has in the works, Bloomberg says. Those new touch screen laptops are set to be released between "the end of this year and early next year," and Bloomberg has previously reported that they will get a Dynamic I …Read the full story at The Verge.

Payloads of Amazon’s Leo satellites sorted by launch vehicle. | Image: Amazon Amazon says it now has enough satellites operating in low-Earth orbit to light up its Starlink internet competitor. With last night's launch, Amazon Leo has 396 satellites deployed, which is "enough to support continuous service across initial latitudes," according to Chris Weber, VP heading up business and product for Amazon Leo. That puts the company on track to meet its "mid-2026" target for commercial availability. Just don't expect miracles on day one.SpaceX went live with its "Better than nothing beta" back in 2020 when it had almost 900 satellites operating in low-Earth orbit. It initially served a narrow band of users in the upper …Read the full story at The Verge.

Tailscale is one of those services that I added almost casually, and it quickly became part of my workflow. After the initial implementation, it just worked quietly in the background and never asked for attention. I knew WireGuard was handling most of the work under the hood. I even tried replacing Tailscale with raw WireGuard, but CGNAT killed it on my home server.

The last six months have shown that no component that goes into a PC is ever too safe from random price hikes. Unfortunately, it looks like flash storage is next in line. NAND prices have gone up nearly four times over the last nine months, so naturally, everyone's looking at their old hardware a little differently than they used to before.

In the lead up to its eventual launch, Valve weren't shy in labeling the Steam Machine as a system capable of 4K gaming at 60 fps. Mere days before it shipped, that line vanished from the product page with an "up to" qualifier; a hedge that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the "GabeCube."

OpenAI has floated giving the US government a 5 percent ownership stake as a way of easing tensions with the Trump administration and blunting mounting public backlash against AI, according to the Financial Times.CEO Sam Altman argued that giving the public a financial interest in the company would be the best way to share the upside of AI, the FT reported, citing two unnamed people familiar with the talks. He's said to have first pitched the idea to Trump early last year.Altman reportedly suggested the 5 percent figure. Based on OpenAI's latest funding round, which ended with the company valued at $852 billion, that stake would be worth …Read the full story at The Verge.

Instagram is the app I spend the most time on. It's my doomscrolling app during breaks and the one I use before falling asleep. So, naturally, over the last eight years, my Instagram saved posts have accumulated hundreds of movies, TV shows, and anime titles that I wish to watch "someday." When I realized my save count was nearing 1,000, I decided it was time to start reducing my backlog; otherwise, I'll never get around to watching the titles I religiously saved over eight years. The problem was twofold: the 906-post-long save dump was frighteningly long to go through manually, and it also had books, manga, Wallpaper Engine wallpapers, and indie game recommendations mixed in. Separating the movies, shows, and anime from the rest of it in a sensible format meant that I needed help. So, I fed everything into Claude and asked it to create a clean, sortable watchlist that I could actually use. Seeing the results, I realized I should have done this years ago.

Twenty-five years ago today, a young, little-known programmer by the name of Bram Cohen fired off a short message to a mailing list for peer-to-peer enthusiasts. "My new app, BitTorrent, is now in working order, check it out here," Cohen wrote, followed by a link to his personal website."What's BitTorrent, Bram?" the founder of the list asked in response.Cohen never bothered to reply. The world would find out soon enough.In the following years, BitTorrent quickly became the world's most popular file-sharing app, unleashing a massive wave of piracy that upended Hollywood forever. At one point, BitTorrent was said to be responsible for a …Read the full story at The Verge.

Cody Spencer, the co-owner of the small games retail chain Pink Gorilla Games, put it well when I asked about the impact of Sony's recent announcement that it will stop making discs for new games starting January 2028. "It's sad to see. This decision is only a negative for gamers. We're losing the ability to sell games, to share games, and to own games."Sony's announcement has been devastating news for many in the games industry. Not just players, but also groups like independent retail stores and preservationists that try and make gaming more accessible."This is unfortunate news for those who still prefer buying games on physical media, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Back in mid-May, Plex shocked its users by announcing that it was trebling the cost of its lifetime plan from $249.99 to $749.99. Fortunately, the company gave us until July 1st before the change would take effect, meaning that anyone who was on the fence about purchasing one could still grab it before the price spike.

Note-taking apps have been trying to top one another for years by releasing new features. To me, a lot of it feels like unnecessary flash that I didn't ask for. My workflow wasn't suffering because of a lack of GUI features, so I didn't pay much attention to who was revamping their interface. The real bottleneck was switching to the GUI at all. Every time I needed to log a quick thought, it'd require alt+tabbing into the right window and clicking into a certain note before I could jot down my thoughts and get back to what I was doing.