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Smart home struggles

The best deals on MacBooks right nowThe best deals on MacBooks right now
Cameron Faulkner and Sheena Vasani
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Jay Peters
Google is trying to make “vibe design” happen.

In a post announcing some updates coming to Stitch, Google’s AI coding tool for UI design, the company is encouraging users to “vibe design,” including with new voice capabilities. I’m so tired of vibing.

ChatGPT did not cure a dog’s cancer

A sick dog, desperate owner, and a bunch of chatbots made for a great story. The actual science was much messier.

Robert Hart
Why Project Hail Mary’s creators were ‘scared’ about making the sci-fi adaptation

Author Andy Weir and screenwriter Drew Goddard talk about turning the book into a cinematic experience.

Andrew Webster
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Terrence O'Brien
How can I make my own kalimba of doom?

Experimental musician and YouTuber Hainbach posted a clip on social media using a humble kalimba to create epic sounds that would make Hans Zimmer jealous. Now he’s explained how to recreate the Earth-shaking drones, but fair warning, it calls for some pretty obscure and expensive gear.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

This is not a fly uploaded to a computer

A lot of buzz, but not much evidence.

Robert Hart
My favorite robot vacuum now supports MatterMy favorite robot vacuum now supports Matter
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
The best AirPods deals you can get right nowThe best AirPods deals you can get right now
Brandon Widder and Sheena Vasani
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Jay Peters
iii III.

The third iteration of the Triple-i Initiative Showcase, a showcase that’s dedicated to indie game news, will air on April 9th at 12PM ET. It will feature “45 minutes of back-to-back trailers.”

Weird Nintendo never went awayWeird Nintendo never went away
Andrew Webster
Live-service games are a mess

These are not normal video games.

Andrew Webster
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Emma Roth
SwiftKey will soon require a Microsoft account to save your typing info.

Starting May 31st, 2026, the Microsoft-owned SwiftKey will stop supporting Google and Apple accounts, according to Windows Central. Though you don’t need an account to use SwiftKey on its own, you’ll need to sign in with Microsoft to continue syncing your most-used words across devices and receive personalized typing suggestions.

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Jay Peters
Xbox has a serious branding problem.

Kiln launches on April 23 for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, PlayStation 5, Steam, and with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. It will be an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and arrive Handheld Optimized.

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Elizabeth Lopatto
Rick Ellis, a TV reporter, says he turned down prediction market money.

Ellis says he was offered money to use a prediction market’s odds to write “a couple of stories each week,” and it was enough money that it was hard to turn down.“Taking money from a Polymarket to hype their gambling odds on a TV show is ethically the same as taking money from a network to write positive things about their programming.,” he wrote.

MacBook Neo review: the Mac for the masses

9

Verge Score

iPhone chip, no problem.

Antonio G. Di Benedetto
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Jay Peters
Double Fine’s new pot-breaking party game launches on April 23rd.

The new game, Kiln, will also get an open beta on Steam from April 9th through April 11th, according to an Xbox Wire post. It looks like a smashing good time.

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Elizabeth Lopatto
This is just to celebrate a hero of the First Amendment, Afroman.

For those of you not familiar, Afroman was raided by the police and then made two music videos (“Will You Help Me Repair My Door“ and ”Lemon Pound Cake”) about it. The officers sued him for using surveillance footage of their raid in the videos. On cross-examination during the trial, Afroman gave a stirring speech on the importance of the First Amendment. He’s also released another video, “Battle Hymn of the Police Whistleblower.”

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Jay Peters
A tiny tease about Silksong’s big expansion.

Team Cherry released a new patch for Hollow Knight: Silksong this week, and in the update notes, the developers say that it is “intended as the last significant update before Silksong’s upcoming major expansion: Sea of Sorrow.” The free expansion is set to launch sometime in 2026.

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Jay Peters
Seems like the new Xbox boss wants to earn some goodwill.

Microsoft announced some new features in testing for Xbox Insiders today, including settings to manage Quick Resume per game and more groups on the home screen, and newly-appointed Microsoft gaming CEO Asha Sharma says work started on the updates just “two weeks ago.”

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Jay Peters
Saros looks like another showcase game for Sony’s DualSense controller.

Housemarque’s previous game, Returnal, used the DualSense’s haptic feedback and adaptive triggers to great effect, and Saros will take advantage of those features too, as shown in a new trailer. The game is set to launch on April 30th.

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Hayden Field
The Pentagon filed a rebuttal to Anthropic’s lawsuit.

Anthropic filed a lawsuit earlier this month over its “supply chain risk” designation, but the Department of Defense held firm in a new court filing, alleging that the company could ostensibly “attempt to disable its technology or preemptively alter the behavior of its model either before or during ongoing warfighting operations” in the event it felt its red lines were “being crossed.” The filing added that the Pentagon “deemed that an unacceptable risk to national security.”

New court filing

[CourtListener]

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Andrew J. Hawkins
Uber’s former head of self-driving almost died using Tesla’s FSD.

Raffi Krikorian, who now serves as Mozilla’s CTO, writes in The Atlantic that he’s rethinking the relationship between humans and machines after a near death experience in his Tesla.

Full Self-Driving works almost all of the time—Tesla’s fleet of cars with the technology logs millions of miles between serious incidents, by the company’s count. And that’s the problem: We are asking humans to supervise systems designed to make supervision feel pointless. A machine that constantly fails keeps you sharp. A machine that works perfectly needs no oversight. But a machine that works almost perfectly? That’s where the danger lies.

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Emma Roth
Wikigacha.

A new digital trading card game called Wikigacha lets you open packs of Wikipedia articles and have them battle each other. (My Pyramid of Neferirkare card lost against the Great Sea Interconnector, in case you were wondering.)

The game isn’t affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, but it could be a whole new way to fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes.

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Stevie Bonifield
Meta’s NYC store is here to stay.

The Tardis-blue Meta Lab NYC store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan is no longer a pop-up shop. Meta announced on Wednesday that the skateboarding-themed glasses store is now a “permanent flagship location,” where it will continue selling its AI smart glasses and Meta Quest headsets.

The interior of Meta’s NYC flagship store
The exterior of Meta’s NYC flagship store
1/2Image: Meta
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Andrew Liszewski
Upgrading the MacBook Neo’s storage is satisfying ASMR, but don’t try this at home.

YouTube’s DirectorFeng has released yet another teardown of the new Apple MacBook Neo but in this video they go one step further and upgrade the laptop’s 256GB NAND chip to 1TB of storage, as spotted by 9to5Mac. The upgrade works, but it’s a complicated process requiring some serious skills and a steady hand.

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Jess Weatherbed
Sony working to fight Ghibli-infringing slop.

Alongside building tools to identify AI song sources, Sony’s R&D division is reportedly training its own “Protective AI” model on content from Studio Ghibli films, which are popular fodder for generated imitation. Sony hasn’t decided what it’ll do with the model (yet), but it’s designed to eventually stop AI from ripping off any protected content.

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Thomas Ricker
“It was just like a BOWM, like that!”

Local news delivers again.

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Dominic Preston
Here for a good time, not a long time.

Samsung has discontinued its TriFold phone after just a few months on sale, amid speculation that it only ever manufactured a few thousand devices. So long, TriFold, we barely knew ye.

macfixer:

RIP Galaxy Z TriFold

2026 — 2026

🫡🫡🫡

Get the day’s best comment and more in my free newsletter, The Verge Daily.

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Jess Weatherbed
Which anti-AI banner should human creators rally around?

BBC News has counted eight different initiatives trying to establish a label that distinguishes human-made products and services from those using AI. Experts say a single standard must be chosen to avoid confusing consumers, but getting everyone to agree on what counts as “human-made” is hard because AI is already integrated into so many tools.

Labels and stamps have been launched by companies and non-profits from the UK, Australia and the US.
These are some of the companies and non-profits from the UK, Australia and the US that have launched anti-AI labels and stamps.
Image: BBC News
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Thomas Ricker
Garmin gets WhatsApp’d.

Garmin users can now compose and reply to WhatsApp messages directly from their watch after downloading the app, just like Apple Watch owners. DC Rainmaker has all the details.

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Jay Peters
Jensen Huang, on the critical reaction to DLSS 5: “Well, first of all, they’re completely wrong.”

“The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the of geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI,” Huang said, according to Tom’s Hardware, and he noted that developers can “fine-tune the generative AI.”

Still, it’s maybe not the best thing to say about the blowback to DLSS 5 right now.

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