November 2024

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge So, you’ve finally decided to give Bluesky a shot. The social network has come a long way since the early bare-bones days of invite-only signups and recently grew past the 15 million user mark. Along the way, it’s gathered a lot of familiar posting platform features, like direct messages,…

Photo: Sarah Stier / Getty Images for Netflix Netflix’s livestream of the Mike Tyson and Jake Paul boxing match was a mess. I’m not talking about the bout itself — although people had their qualms with that, too — it’s the livestream, which people across the internet complained was plagued by buffering, unstable, and unwatchable…

Concept art for Half-Life 2: Episode 3, from the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Documentary. | Screenshot: YouTube Unsurprisingly, yesterday’s big Half-Life release wasn’t the sequel to Half-Life 2 or even the third Half-Life 2: Episode entry, but a 20th-anniversary update to Valve’s legendary 2004 game. And given what studio co-founder Gabe Newell has to say…

The Freo X Ultra packs a lot of features for the price, including the ability to automatically remop your floors when necessary. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Hosting Thanksgiving dinner is fun and all, but the amount of cleaning you have to do afterward can be exhausting. The Narwal Freo X…

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Complaints about unwanted telemarketing calls have dropped for the third straight year, the Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday. Reports of such calls have fallen by over 50 percent versus 2021, according to the FTC — a decline that could be thanks in no small part to stepped-up…

Netflix had a very big night. | Photo: Al Bello / Getty Images for Netflix Netflix peaked at “65 million concurrent streams” during the boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul last night, according to Most Valuable Promotions, the promoter for the fight. Those streams went out to 60 million households globally, the group…

Image: Square Enix We’re in a pretty good moment for sprawling, complex role-playing games. New releases like Metaphor: ReFantazio and Dragon Age Absolution, along with older titles like Elden Ring (including this year’s expansion), Cyberpunk 2077, and Baldur’s Gate 3 have sucked millions of people into their expansive worlds. They can be all-consuming experiences, offering…

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge Ge Wang doesn’t use computers to make music the way most people use computers make music. He uses computers to make… computer music. Wang works at Stanford, as an associate professor in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. He also conducts the school’s famed Laptop Orchestra,…