AI is junk food for the mind: easy, tempting and ultimately very bad for you.
Apple perfected the media player with the iPod, then abandoned it.
The Epilogue SN and GB Operator are dream gadgets for Nintendo cartridge collectors.
The $99 headphones eliminate battery anxiety and come with a USB-C connector to accommodate modern phones.
But don’t think that means people are abandoning streaming.
It took decades, but the technology is finally ready.
A series of high-profile director exits makes it seem like the streamer is rethinking its strategy for success.
Thanks to AI, the customer really isn’t always right.
OpenAI and Meta’s cutesy AI agents are about to fight to the death.
Microsoft is expanding ‘biomimicry’ at its data centers as it faces more pushback from locals over construction, pollution, and noise.
Mr. Wonderful wanted to build the world’s largest data center. The neighbors had other ideas.
‘The race our nation can’t afford to lose.’
New legislation will finally force data centers to disclose more information about how much water and electricity they use in California.
What happens when an all-seeing eye looks in the mirror?
Nintendo’s new Pokémon smart device is a nostalgic throwback with a few new tricks.
This 24-year-old first-time hedge funder screwed up his AI fund with one weird trick.
The KickerOctober 5
Write Love Pens, a small pen and stationery shop, had initially used AI-generated images (including one of a pen with two clips on the cap) to advertise surprise boxes that the shop puts together. After getting yelled at on fountain pen Reddit, the shop’s owner apologized, and replaced the AI images with extremely cute amateur drawings.
A rumored Android update would automate personal phone calls with Gemini AI.
Take a look. It was “made possible” thanks in part to Valve’s ARM port of the game it made for the Steam Frame and with some help from Claude.
Classic titles are being unshackled from their proprietary code and original hardware thanks to player-made ports.
Matic is publicly committing to more US manufacturing.
As reported by IGN, starting January 1st, 2027, the game’s online modes — which include the MyCAREER mode — won’t work anymore because the servers are being sunset. NBA 2K25 is also being pulled from stores on October 30th, 2K says.
Audio Balance and Mono Audio, announced at Meta Connect, are rolling out now, 9to5Google reports. It also says a couple of navigation upgrades are now “broadly available as an update in the Meta AI app,” including turn-by-turn Pedestrian Navigation and a feature for sharing your location from your phone with your glasses.
Smash Bros. boss Masahiro Sakurai recently posted a photo of a dinner featuring a who’s who of Japanese game design luminaries, including himself. (If you don’t recognize all of the faces, here’s a run-down.) The possibilities for new Smash characters is now nearly endless.
As Google explains:
Markdown is a standard text format widely used by Large Language Models (LLMs) to preserve structured content, like tables, headers, and bulleted lists, without the bulk of heavy file formats. Previously, you needed to import and convert Markdown files into a Doc format, which often altered formatting, stripped comments, and fragmented files.
You’ll also be able to preview Markdown files in Drive. The feature starts rolling out today.
According to GSMA database listings spotted by OVR Plus, the Pixel 12 Pro Fold appears to have a higher inner display resolution of 2296 x 2404, up from 2076 x 2152 from this year’s model. However, as 9to5Google points out, the aspect ratio suggests Google might not switch the next Pro Fold to a passport-style design.
Welcome to Bear Lair!* (No, it’s nothing like that other show.) As we continue to explore the world of AI tools and vibe coding, we invited a few enterprising Vergecast fans to share their projects — and we invited The Verge’s Hayden Field to judge them with us. We’ll see what people are working on, and whether any of them will make us fabulously wealthy.
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Mitsui Fudosan is planning the data center, which will consist of more than 10 shipping containers with servers, in the Suma Belt Conveyor in Kobe, Japan, Nikkei Asia reports. The company is also apparently planning more underground data centers.
Utah has signed off on letting Nolla Health’s AI system scan a user’s face and issue a prescription directly.
The video game decompilation movement has done it again. Not only do we have 128 player Halo across Windows, Linux, and Android , you can also just fire it up in a web browser thanks to OpenHaloCE and immediately start campaign or a huge multiplayer match. It’s not just one dev: lots of people made this happen.
The revamped Marvel Comics app will include archived and current comic books, with new issues arriving as soon as 30 days after their print release. It’s replacing Marvel Unlimited, which will shut down on December 28th, but Marvel says you’ll be able to transfer your library to the new app after it launches.
Breakthroughs inflamed debates on attribution, transparency, and conduct.
Users will soon be able to shop from other retailers without leaving TikTok, as well as use an AI chatbot to find and purchase products.
TikTok is often associated with short form video, but it has also reshaped the online shopping landscape. As I wrote last year, scrolling has become synonymous with shopping, and perhaps more than any other platform, TikTok has figured out how to bridge the gap.
The Wikimedia Foundation believes OpenAI agents edited wikis, tried to ‘exploit’ a notetaking tool, and made ‘millions’ of automated API requests.
Hyundai CEO José Muñoz says the US could be overrun like Europe without protections in place.
It’s launching textGrain watermarking in the EU, but OpenAI says it won’t be the ‘global default’ yet.
Director Matt Reeves is temporarily stepping away to focus on a “family matter,” according to a statement given to Deadline. The film is scheduled to release on February 18th, 2028, following some delays, though Deadline reports that “Sources say it is too early to say whether the stoppage will have an effect on the release date.”
‘These are some of the hardest questions that we face or that anybody developing this technology faces,’ Altman said.
Because ‘people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff…’
A few of us in the newsroom got a Monday morning delivery of Google-powered laptops, and we’re starting to set them up. (All five of them!) We have lots of testing to do, and lots of questions to answer. Questions like, do I actually want Android apps on my laptop? But we also want to know what you want to know! If you have questions, drop ‘em here — we’ll answer as many as we can here, and in all our coverage this week.
(Also, if you buy one, tell us which one and why. And whether the people at Best Buy had any idea what you were talking about.)
The RAMpocalypse’s next victim is a seven year old streaming box.
The vulnerability could have allowed Meta’s buzzy AI assistant to escape its virtual machine and access the company’s databases and services, a source tells 404 Media:
The Meta source said they felt security teams were asked to push hot fixes to these bugs as quickly as possible and in a way that wouldn’t delay Muse’s launch, leading to what they described as “half-baked protections being rushed out to enable the launch.”
It’s now $20 cheaper than the M4 version available at Best Buy.
As reported by the Gulf Coast News network, Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot flagged a conversation with 30-year-old Carli Michelle Heller after she allegedly made violent threats toward the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. Human reviewers then viewed the messages and reported them to police, the report says.
According to the Financial Times, that’s nearly double the 135,000 takedown requests Sony Music had previously sent for AI tracks imitating its artists, like Harry Styles, Adele, and Britney Spears. Over the past year, Sony has also filed lawsuits against AI music platforms like Suno and Udio over copyright infringement.
[Financial Times]
The entertainment giant has outlined its new leadership.
Tomorrow marks the beginning of Prime Big Deal Days, and the deals are already great.
‘RemoveMacAI’ switches off Apple’s AI features, deletes its AI models, and blocks them from being downloaded again.
Inventor Matty Benedetto’s latest creation is a 60W USB-C charging cable disguised as a 10-foot extension cord complete with chunky connectors on each end. If you’re worried your charging cords aren’t overcrowding your USB hub you can grab the Extension-C Cables in orange, black, or green colors for $25 each.
The visual ads will ‘initially’ appear when you generate images using ChatGPT.
‘A small handful’ of apps apparently need some ‘developer tuning.’
After Samsung bumped up prices on its Galaxy S26 and midrange A-series phones last week, Google quietly did the same for its Pixel 10A. It was $499, but now starts from $599 — a hard sell for a phone that was already almost identical to the 9A from a year before.
[Google Store]
