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Before yesterdayThe Verge

Don’t attempt this RGB Steam Deck mod just yet

By: Emma Roth
12 February 2023 at 14:13
An image showing RGB lighting on the Steam Deck
The RGBDeck mod just isn’t ready yet. | Image: Adam Honse / Reddit

As cool as the Steam Deck looks with RGB lighting, you might not want to attempt to mod your device just yet. One Reddit user who tried the mod found that while adding the RGB LEDs doesn’t draw a significant amount of power from the battery, it can cause pretty big issues with the Steam Deck’s motherboard.

The “RGBDeck” mod started making the rounds on Reddit earlier this month, with u/WUBBSY documenting the process of affixing a small microcontroller and LED strips to the device. They topped it off with a transparent backing from JSAUX, allowing the lights to shine through the case while the Steam Deck’s switched on. The end result gives the Steam Deck a nice pop of color (in a very gamer PC kind of way).

#RGBDeck is assembled! #...

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Ford’s reportedly working on a $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan

By: Emma Roth
11 February 2023 at 18:45
An image showing Ford’s logo
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Ford’s gearing up to announce a $3.5 billion battery plant in Marshall, Michigan, according to a report from Automotive News. In an advisory obtained by the outlet, the automaker says it will reveal the news of the factory on Monday in partnership with China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), a company that creates lithium iron phosphate batteries for electric vehicles (EVs), including the Mustang Mach-E.

While Ford still hasn’t confirmed any of this, the company has since announced a press conference on Monday at 1:45PM ET, where it will share its plans to “rapidly scale EVs and make them more accessible to customers.” Michigan reportedly offered $1 billion in incentives to attract the automaker’s factory, which is expected to...

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Opera’s building ChatGPT into its sidebar

By: Emma Roth
11 February 2023 at 16:59
An image showing Opera’s ChatGPT tool in the sidebar of the browser
Opera’s new tool summarizes webpages, and it apparently works on Verge articles! | Image: Opera

Opera’s adding a ChatGPT-powered tool to its sidebar that generates brief summaries of webpages and articles. The feature, called “shorten,” is part of the company’s broader plans to integrate AI tools into its browser, similar to what Microsoft’s doing with Edge.

As shown in a demo included in Opera’s blog post, you can activate the feature by selecting the “shorten” button to the right of the address bar. From there, a sidebar with ChatGPT will pop out from the left, which will then generate a neat, bulleted summary of the article or webpage you’re looking at.

Opera’s announcement comes just days after Microsoft revealed the AI-powered Bing and Edge. While the company’s search engine will offer access to an AI chatbot that provides...

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Some Googlers reportedly aren’t happy about Bard’s ‘rushed’ announcement

By: Emma Roth
11 February 2023 at 12:32
Illustration of Google’s wordmark, written in red and pink on a dark blue background.
Illustration: The Verge

Googlers are talking all about the company’s announcement of its ChatGPT rival, Bard — and many aren’t happy with how things went. According to a report from CNBC, Google employees are calling the launch of the AI chatbot “rushed” and “botched” in posts across the company’s internal message boards, with many targeting CEO Sundar Pichai.

Google announced Bard earlier this week in a bid to get ahead of Microsoft, which took the wraps off of its ChatGPT-powered Bing a day later. But when the company tweeted out a demo of Bard on Monday, several users pointed out that it contained a factual error. Meanwhile, a presenter at Google’s search event on Wednesday forgot the phone they were going to use to show off one of Bard’s features, and some...

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The AirPods Pro and entry-level Kindle highlight this weekend’s best deals

11 February 2023 at 11:00
A pair of AirPods in an open charging case
The second-gen AirPods Pro have returned to $199.99 once again, their lowest price to date. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Welcome to the weekend, dear readers! Microsoft’s forthcoming, ChatGPT-powered browser and Nintendo’s latest Direct event may have dominated the news cycle as of late, but there were a number of headline-grabbing discounts peppered throughout the week. And while we typically reserve our weekend roundups for new deals, we figured we’d take the opportunity to run through some of the highlights you may have missed — you know, with V-Day coming up and all.

First up is Apple’s second-gen AirPods Pro, which have returned to an all-time low of $199.99 ($50 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. We highlight them often, yes, but that’s namely because they’re a great pair of wireless earbuds if you’re already entrenched in the Apple ecosystem....

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Magic’s latest set has turned me into a monster (and I like it)

11 February 2023 at 09:30
Key art from Phyrexia All Will Be One featuring the creature Elesh Norn
Image: Wizards of the Coast

I need help.

I haven’t logged into Marvel Snap for about a week now — just when the new Quantumania-themed season has begun. Now what, you ask, could be powerful enough to drag me away from a game I have made my ministry since its launch?

The big daddy, the OG, the original Magic: The Gathering.

Magic’s latest set, Phyrexia: All Will Be One, has gotten to me in a way that defies even my expectations. I play paper Magic in casual in-person games with friends pretty regularly and have been content with that. But there’s something that’s irresistible about this set, with its horrifying flesh creatures with too many teeth, that has compelled me to play the digital version, Arena, non-friggin’-stop.

This all started when I told my husband...

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A company is trying to map America’s cell networks using mail trucks

10 February 2023 at 19:49
Map of the US and Canada, with multicolor shading.
Pictured: the FCC’s map of LTE coverage in the US. | Image: FCC

Cell network coverage maps have always been dubiously accurate in the US, and even the ones released by the FCC in 2021 come with a ton of asterisks. A company called Ranlytics is hoping to make a much more accurate picture by attaching equipment to some of the mail trucks that are already driving to many locations in the US to deliver parcels and letters (via Light Reading). The data it collects will provide info on coverage quality “in a given town, on a given road, even at a given address”says the company’s CEO Keith Sheridan in an interview with The Verge.

In a press release earlier this week, Ranlytics says it’s working with the US Postal Service to measure AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon’s 4G and 5G networks in Seattle and that it’s...

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Check out these emulated calculators at the Internet Archive

By: Emma Roth
29 January 2023 at 18:03
An image showing the Calculator Drawer on Internet Archive
Image: Internet Archive

I never thought I’d actually have fun with a calculator emulator. But here I am, toying with the old-school graphing calculators that the Internet Archive has freed from their plastic chassis and put in a digital form for all to enjoy.

The Internet Archive calls this new collection the Calculator Drawer. There are 14 calculators to choose from, including the HP 48GX, TI-82, TI-83 Plus, and even the Electronic Number Muncher, which is an 80s-era toy calculator. The Internet Archive doesn’t just emulate the interface of each device, either; it incorporates their physical design and buttons, making it feel like you have the actual device right in front of you.

Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge
Doing some tough math...

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The latest Super Mario Bros. Movie teaser showcases Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong

By: Emma Roth
29 January 2023 at 17:27
An image showing Donkey Kong in the Super Mario Bros. Movie
Image: Nintendo

The latest Super Mario Bros. Movie teaser lets us hear Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong for the first time. During the clip, Mario faces off against Donkey Kong in an arena of sorts — just like we’ve seen in the previous trailer — but this trailer expands on the scene.

While it seems like Mario’s on the losing side of the battle, this appears to change when the titular plumber hits a question mark block, and (presumably) gets the Super Bell, transforming him into Cat Mario. Seeing Mario in his adorably fuzzy catsuit sends Donkey Kong into a laughing fit, which gives us a chance to hear Rogen’s signature laugh.

Image: Nintendo
Don’t laugh at Cat Mario.

It’s nice to finally hear Rogen as Donkey Kong, and I have to...

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San Francisco wants to slow robotaxi rollout over blocked traffic and false 911 calls

By: Emma Roth
29 January 2023 at 12:57
GM’s Cruise Offers Driverless Rides In San Francisco
Cruise and Waymo are causing traffic issues in San Francisco. | Image: Getty Images

San Francisco transportation officials want Waymo and Cruise to slow the expansion of their robotaxi services in the city due to safety concerns, as reported earlier by NBC News. In two letters written to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the officials on San Francisco County’s Transportation Authority say the expansion of either service “is unreasonable,” citing recent incidents involving stopped driverless vehicles blocking traffic and obstructing emergency responders.

The GM-backed Cruise and Alphabet-owned Waymo are currently the only companies permitted to offer driverless rides to passengers in San Francisco. In June, Cruise won a permit to charge for rides in its autonomous vehicles (AV) between 10PM and 6AM,...

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How to use the Apple HomePod’s temperature and humidity sensors

29 January 2023 at 10:00
Samar Haddad / The Verge

With the latest update to iOS 16.3, your Apple HomePod Mini smart speaker can now monitor the temperature and humidity in your home. No setup or extra hardware needed! The soon-to-be-released HomePod 2 will also have this capability.

In this article, we’ll go over how to use this new feature and show you how to use it with Apple Home smart home automations.

How to check the temperature and humidity in your room using your HomePod

With the new temperature and humidity sensing in the HomePod, you can easily check what the temperature is in the room your smart speaker is situated in just by asking Siri. Say, “hey Siri, what's the temperature in here?” and the voice assistant will reply with its current reading. The same goes for checking...

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Capcom’s major Street Fighter 5 tournament ditches PlayStation consoles for PCs

By: Emma Roth
29 January 2023 at 09:31
A screenshot showing Ryu and M. Bison in Street Fighter 5
Image: Capcom

Capcom will exclusively use PCs to power its upcoming Capcom Cup tournament, which has the world’s top Street Fighter 5 players battling it out for a $300,000 prize pool. In a post on Twitter, Capcom Fighters says all matches will be played on PCs with the displays set to 144Hz.

The company doesn’t provide any information on the hardware going into these PCs (or if they’ll just use gaming laptops), but the move’s expected to reduce input lag — the time it takes for a system to translate your button press on a keyboard or controller to an action displayed on the screen. Low input lag is a necessity for pros in the fighting game scene, where a delayed punch or kick can greatly affect the outcome of a match.

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Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI ask court to throw out AI copyright lawsuit

By: Emma Roth
28 January 2023 at 19:02
An image showing code on a computer
Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI claim the lawsuit doesn’t hold up. | Photo: Jens Büttner/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB (Photo by Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images

Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI want the court to dismiss a proposed class action complaint that accuses the companies of scraping licensed code to build GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot tool, as reported earlier by Reuters. In a pair of filings submitted to a San Francisco federal court on Thursday, the Microsoft-owned GitHub and OpenAI say the claims outlined in the suit don’t hold up.

Launched in 2021, Copilot leverages OpenAI’s technology to generate and suggest lines of code directly within a programmer’s code editor. The tool, which is trained on publicly available code from GitHub, sparked concerns over whether it violates copyright laws soon after its release.

Things came to a head when programmer and lawyer, Matthew Butterick, teamed...

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Japan and the Netherlands join US with tough chip controls on China

28 January 2023 at 15:08
UK Semiconductor Manufacture in Newport
The deal likely won’t be announced publicly. | Image: Getty

Following years of lobbying from Washington, Japan and the Netherlands agreed on Friday to tighten restrictions on the export of chip manufacturing technology to Chinese companies. News of the agreement was reported by Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and The New York Times.

The controls are designed to limit China’s ability to ramp up its own domestic chip production and come after the Biden administration announced similar restrictions in October 2022. The fear is that easier access to advanced semiconductors will allow China to shore up its military and artificial intelligence capabilities.

There aren’t any plans for a public announcement about the agreement, and it may take “months” for Japan and the Netherlands to “finalize legal...

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