Technology

On December 31st, a brand-new account on Polymarket placed a bet: Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, would be out of office by the end of January. It was the first in a series of increasing bets. On January 3rd, the US bombed the Venezuelan capital, kidnapped Maduro and his wife, and killed at least 80 people along the way. The account cashed out with almost half a million dollars.It would be a misread to describe the surprise invasion of Venezuela as imperial expansion driven by the dictates of capitalism; it is, somehow, worse. Normal capitalism requires a working relationship with reality. Normal capitalism thrives on predictability. The Trump administration is behaving like gambling addicts chasing clout in an attention economy. Venezuela is a fucking meme stock.And as with me...

Character.AI and Google have reached settlements with several families whose teens harmed themselves or died by suicide after interacting with Character.AI’s chatbots, according to new court filings.The details of the settlements are still unknown. The parties notified a federal court in Florida that they had reached a “mediated settlement in principle to resolve all claims,” and asked to pause the case to finalize the agreement. A spokesperson for Character.AI, Kathryn Kelly, declined to comment. Google and a lawyer from the Social Media Victims Law Center, representing some of the victims’ families, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The settled cases include a high-profile lawsuit filed by Megan Garcia, who claimed in an October 2024 complaint that Character.AI’s Gam...

Sony’s first PlayStation announcement of 2026 is all about color. The new Hyperpop Collection includes colorful neon console covers and controllers that really add a pop of color to a PS5.There are three colors available: techno red, remix green, and rhythm blue (RGB!). All three are very different to the console covers that Sony has shipped for the PS5 so far, and they certainly look like they’d fit in well with RGB lights. Sony says the collection is designed with RGB in mind and to “take over” your room. “Inspired by the glow of the RGB lights of your impressive gaming setups, these new colors go LOUD in the best possible way,” says Leo Cardoso, from Sony’s color, material, and finish design team.The Hyperpop Collection launches on March 12th, with preorders kicking off at 10AM local...

If you’re among the macOS users experiencing some weird issues with your Logitech mouse, then good news: Logitech has now released a fix. This comes after multiple Reddit users reported yesterday that Logi Options Plus — the app required to manage and configure the controls on Logitech accessories — had stopped working, preventing them from using customized scrolling features, button actions, and gestures.One Reddit user said that the scroll directions and extra buttons on their Logitech mouse “were not working as I intended” and that the Logi Options Plus app became stuck in a boot loop upon opening it to identify the cause. Logitech has since acknowledged the situation and said that its G Hub app — a similar management software for gaming devices under the Logitech G brand — was also ...

Color-changing lights are a lot of fun, but it can be hard to figure out how to best use them in your home. Most smart lighting companies offer pre-designed scenes to help you light your space, but the lights don’t know where they are physically in your home, and the effect can get diluted. Philips Hue has a solution to this problem: SpatialAware.SpatialAware knows your room’s layout and the placement of your Hue lights, so it can determine the best way to distribute the scene’s colors and effects across them.1/4Some of the newly remastered Hue lighting scenes designed to work with SpatialAware.It gets the data when you scan your space with your smartphone in the Hue app. Using your phone’s AR capabilities, the system can create a 3D model of the placement of Hue lights in your room.Tha...

While most attention in the AI race is focused on model builders and cloud platforms, Lenovo sits closer to millions of users than most companies. As the world’s top PC maker by volume, Lenovo ships tens of millions of devices every year. What it decides to ship, bundle, and integrate can directly shape how AI shows up in many everyday lives.That’s what made Lenovo’s announcement today at CES notable. At a flashy event on Tuesday at The Sphere in Las Vegas, it introduced Qira, a system-level, cross-device AI assistant designed to live across Lenovo laptops and Motorola phones. It’s Lenovo’s most ambitious AI effort to date and a rare look at how a hardware giant with global reach is thinking about integrating AI more deeply.Jeff Snow, Lenovo’s head of AI product, told me how Qira came t...

Artificial intelligence doesn’t always want to optimize your life or steal your job. Sometimes, AI just wants to be your friend. And while robot pets weren’t the biggest stars of CES 2026, they’ve become more than just noise and are signaling how AI is apparently leaving our screens and taking on a physical presence in our lives.To be clear, there’s no shortage of purpose-built machines on display in Las Vegas: there’s Samsung’s voice-controlled refrigerator, Bosch’s Alexa Plus-powered AI barista, and smarter robovacs like Narwal’s earring-finding Flow 2 or Anker’s Eufy S2, which moonlights as an aromatherapy diffuser – all promising to automate the drudgery of daily life. Humanoid robots like LG’s CLOiD and SwitchBot’s Onero H1 stole much of the spotlight, too, taking that logic a step...

Tapo, the smart home brand owned by networking giant TP-Link, is launching an AI assistant at CES this year — because isn’t everyone?Aireal is designed to “bring AI into real life” (geddit?), according to the company, and will help you “understand your home, quickly fix Wi-Fi issues and control your devices using natural language.” The assistant will work across TP-Link’s smart home products and Wi-Fi networking devices and will live in the Tapo and Deco apps.This should allow you to use natural language (via dictation in the app) to create new smart home routines or control devices by describing what you want to happen. For example, “Start vacuuming after I leave the house.” You can also ask questions such as “Why is this device offline?” and get troubleshooting help.Aireal is also com...

Stolen electric bikes built around Bosch motors will be harder to sell, service, and ride at the end of January. That’s when Bosch is rolling a new digital theft feature that lets owners mark the bike as stolen in the Bosch Flow app — no subscription required. Bosch rolled out a similar feature for expensive Bosch batteries last year, but it stupidly required a subscription to Flow Plus.“If an e-bike or a battery is marked as stolen, it can be identified as such throughout the entire digital ecosystem of Bosch eBike Systems,” says the company in a press release. “This makes reselling the e-bike difficult and increases the chances of the owner getting the e-bike back.”Bikes marked as stolen will send a warning to buyers and authorities when they attempt to connect to it via the Flow app....

Nvidia is announcing its next major update to its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) feature at CES today. DLSS 4.5 includes Nvidia’s second-generation Super Resolution transformer model and a new 6x Multi Frame Generation mode for RTX 50-series GPUs that uses AI to generate up to five additional frames for every single rendered one.DLSS 4.5 will be available for all RTX GPUs today, but will run the fastest on Nvidia’s latest RTX 40- and 50-series cards. The latest transformer model is designed to improve image quality overall and reduce some of the artifacting that we saw with DLSS 4.“This second-generation model is our most sophisticated yet,” says Henry Lin, director of product management at Nvidia, in a briefing with The Verge. “It utilizes 5x the compute power over the original tr...