This coming-of-age adventure game made me feel a little too seen
There's a lot about Perfect Tides: Station to Station's Mara that I find relatable. Like me, she's recently moved to a place simply called "the City" from the middle of nowhere, and like me, she's an avid writer. But these biographical details aren't the important thing; it's the way she's painted by the game's incredibly […]
Gemini with Personal Intelligence is awfully familiar
By lots of metrics, Gemini is winning. It has raced ahead of OpenAI, become scarily good at creating convincing imagery, and even won Apple's business. So last week's news that it was enabling something called Personal Intelligence felt like a victory lap. Personal Intelligence allows Gemini to reference past conversations and access your data in […]
Get stuff done by yelling at your phone
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 113, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, please send hot cocoa to my freezing-cold house, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about private garbage collectors and vintage […]
The Loch Capsule dishwasher is small, fast, and efficient — it even sanitizes gadgets
A dishwasher is a luxury item some people can't live without. It's one of the first major kitchen devices I bought just as soon as I could afford one. And now that the kids are grown, it's the appliance I thought I'd miss most in my nomadic vanlife pursuits. Loch sent me its $459.99 / […]
Chromebooks train schoolkids to be loyal customers, internal Google document suggests
Internal documents revealed as part of a child safety lawsuit hint at Google's plan to "onboard kids" into its ecosystem by investing in schools. In this November 2020 presentation, Google writes that getting kids into its ecosystem "leads to brand trust and loyalty over their lifetime," as reported earlier by NBC News. The heavily-redacted documents, […]
Leak: Nvidia is about to challenge ‘Intel Inside’ with as many as eight Arm laptops
Intel and AMD have split the Windows laptop market for years, but the x86 players may be getting outnumbered. It's not just Apple MacBooks and MediaTek-based Chromebooks using Arm chips anymore. There are finally competent Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops running Windows, and - as soon as this spring - Nvidia will finally power Windows consumer laptops […]
Congress doesn’t seem to know if the TikTok deal complies with its law
TikTok finally closed a deal meant to bring it into compliance with the law that should have banned it a year ago, and the lawmakers who passed that law still don't seem to know what's going on. The company announced Tuesday that its US service is now part of the separate TikTok USDS Joint Venture […]
Meta is stopping teens from chatting with its AI characters
Meta is "temporarily pausing" the ability for teens to chat with its AI characters as it develops a "new version" of the characters that will offer a "better experience." The company made the announcement in an update to a blog post from October where the company had detailed more parental controls for teen AI use. […]
What TikTok’s new owners mean for your feed
TikTok is officially under new ownership in the US, and that could spell big changes for the video-sharing app. On January 22nd, ByteDance - TikTok's Chinese parent company - and a group of investors closed a $14 billion deal to spin off the platform's US operations, introducing a new slate of American executives. The Silver […]
Casio teased a retro gaming-inspired sampler
Casio showed up to NAMM (CES for music gear nerds) this year with a prototype sampler called the SX-C1 that looks every bit the lovechild of a Game Boy and an SP-404. The top has a directional pad and four buttons just like you'd find on a game controller, flanking a 1.3-inch OLED screen. But […]