Tech Boys

The Game Devs of Color Expo is returning for its 10th year from September 16 to 19. The online conference both celebrates the games industry's developers of color, and acts as a showcase for new upcoming game through its companion GDoCExpo Direct showcase. This year's GDoCExpo Direct kicks off the conference on September 16 at 4PM ET / 1PM ET on the Game Devs of Color Expo YouTube channel . The direct is supposed to feature "more than 30 games" and it'll be paired with a Game Devs of Color Expo Steam Sale with discounts and demos to try for some of the games featured in the showcase. Watching the Direct is free, but to view the Expo's developer interviews and live panels, you'll have to pay for a ticket. A regular ticket costs $50, but the Game Devs of Color nonprofit organization also offers cheaper ways to attend for anyone who can't afford the ticket price. This year's conference includes talks on budgeting, design leadership and "Decol...

Sonos is having overheating issues with a "very low" number of its Roam speakers. Bloomberg reports that some users' portable Bluetooth speakers are overheating around the device's USB-C port. The company has not recalled any products as a result but it aware of the issue happening. "We’ve closely tracked a limited number of reports involving the USB-C charging connection on some first-generation Sonos Roam speakers," Sonos said in a statement shared with Engadget. "While the overall incidence rate is very low, and environmental conditions appear to play a role, we’ve taken several proactive steps to even further reduce the likelihood of this issue, including software updates and accessory improvements." The issue appears to be centered on the original model of the Sonos Roam that debuted in 2021; the Sonos Roam 2 offered some upgrades over that version when it rolled out last spring. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://i...

For the first time since GPT-2 dropped over five years ago , OpenAI is releasing not one, but two open-weight AI reasoning models — and they’re available to download for free right now on Hugging Face. Billed as “state-of-the-art,” the new OpenAI open-weight models were announced Tuesday in a company blog post . OpenAI says they "outperform similarly sized open models on reasoning, excel at tool use, and are optimized for efficient deployment on consumer hardware." This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. There are two versions: gpt-oss-120b , the larger and more powerful model, which can run on a single Nvidia GPU. gpt-oss-20b , a lightweight alternative designed to run on consumer laptops with just 16GB of RAM. To try out the new OpenAI models for yourself, head to the OpenAI gpt-oss page . What does open-weight mean? This release is a nod to OpenAI’s early roots, when the company was more publicly committed to open-sourci...

ChatGPT is getting a health upgrade, this time for users themselves. In a new blog post ahead of the company's reported GPT-5 announcement, OpenAI unveiled it would be refreshing its generative AI chatbot with new features designed to foster healthier, more stable relationships between user and bot. Users who have spent prolonged periods of time in a single conversation, for example, will now be prompted to log off with a gentle nudge. The company is also doubling down on fixes to the bot's sycophancy problem , and building out its models to recognize mental and emotional distress. SEE ALSO: An Illinois bill banning AI therapy has been signed into law ChatGPT will respond differently to more "high stakes" personal questions, the company explains, guiding users through careful decision-making, weighing pros and cons, and responding to feedback rather than providing answers to potentially life-changing queries. This mirror's OpenAI's recently announce...

Web crawlers deployed by Perplexity to scrape websites are allegedly skirting restrictions, according to a new report from Cloudflare . Specifically, the report claims that the company's bots appear to be "stealth crawling" sites by disguising their identity to get around robots.txt files and firewalls. Robots.txt is a simple file websites host that lets web crawlers know if they can scrape a websites' content or not. Perplexity's official web crawling bots are "PerplexityBot" and "Perplexity-User." In Cloudflare's tests, Perplexity was still able to display the content of a new, unindexed website, even when those specific bots were blocked by robots.txt. The behavior extended to websites with specific Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules that restricted web crawlers, as well. Cloudflare Cloudflare believes that Perplexity is getting around those obstacles by using "a generic browser intended to impersonate Google Chrome on macO...

Verizon customers reportedly got double bad news this week: the phone carrier is raising fees and removing loyalty discounts. According to users on the Verizon subreddit, several customers reported receiving an email from Verizon informing them their account discounts are ending. "We are writing to let you know that a discount on your account will soon end," the email said, according a redditor. "This discount will be removed no sooner than September 1, 2025." Several other redditors chimed in on the thread, saying they had a received the same email about losing loyalty perks offered to longstanding customers. Mashable has reached out to Verizon for comment and will update this story with a response. Reddit A few days earlier, Verizon confirmed to Tom's Guide that the company is increasing fees for activations, phone lines, and tablet plans by Sept. 1. SEE ALSO: The fastest mobile services have been ranked, and there’s a clear winner Verizon cust...

Over the weekend, xAI released an updated version of the Grok iOS app with a new tool called Grok Imagine, which lets users quickly create AI images and videos. On X, excited Grok users are eagerly sharing their creations, and xAI founder Elon Musk is retweeting user posts. Grok Imagine is available now to Heavy and Premium+ subscribers on the Grok iOS app, and to Heavy users on the Android app. Grok Imagine features generative AI with text-to-image capabilities as well as the ability to turn images into short video clips with sound. In this way, it's similar to the new Midjourney AI video tool . Rival AI companies have AI tools that allow users to generate original videos based solely on text prompts, such as Veo 3 from Google and Sora from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI . Musk praised Grok Imagine on X, calling it a "meme motherlode." He also teased the NSFW capabilities of the model and said Grok Imagine "should get better almost every day." This Tweet is current...

Oh hey there! If you're here, it must be time for Wordle . As always, we're serving up our daily hints and tips to help you figure out today's answer. If you just want to be told today's word, you can jump to the bottom of this article for today's Wordle solution revealed. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you. SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable SEE ALSO: NYT Connections today: Hints and answers for August 4 Where did Wordle come from? Originally created by engineer Josh Wardle as a gift for his partner, Wordle rapidly spread to become an international phenomenon, with thousands of people around the globe playing every day. Alternate Wordle versions created by fans also sprang up, including battle royale Squabble , music identification game Heardle , and variations like Dordle and Quordle that make you guess multiple words at once .  Wor...

The official Pokémon TV YouTube channel is continuing its summer movie watch party with another classic: Pokémon the Movie 2000 . The entire movie is available to watch now for free, for a limited time. It follows Pokémon: The First Movie , which was temporarily released on the channel in July, and next up will be Pokémon 3: The Movie. I have distinct memories of seeing these movies in theaters, so the nostalgia is hitting pretty hard right about now. In case you need a little refresher on where the second Pokémon movie picks up: In the Orange Islands, far south of Kanto, a Trainer named Lawrence is on a sinister quest: catching Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, the three Legendary bird Pokémon, in an attempt to awaken Lugia, guardian of the sea! When Ash and friends arrive, the islanders ask him to gather three elemental orbs from different islands—and when the weather across the world goes out of control, this task takes on a new importance, as the capture of the Legendary trio ...

We're nearly five years out from the release of the original PlayStation 5 and rumors of Sony's next-gen console are starting to bubble up to the surface. In a YouTube video from Moore's Law is Dead , the leaker shares extensive information about the PlayStation 6's possible specs, starting price and release timing. It's always important to take these early leaks with a large grain of salt and Moore's Law is Dead even adds a disclaimer in the video that the info was sourced from a leaked AMD presentation to Sony back in 2023, adding that some of these specs may have changed by now. While Sony hasn't confirmed anything, the leaks show the company may be prioritizing lower power output and keeping costs in line with previous generations for the upcoming PS6. The video claims the next-gen console will have three times the rasterization, or 3D rendering, performance compared to the base PS5 and roughly two times what's offered by the PS5 Pro . The YouTu...