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Luxury cars used to be all about showing you’d made it. Big chrome grilles, soft suspensions, and a badge everyone recognized were the whole point.

We live in a world where video game adaptations are having a renaissance. Sure, there are certainly some that are terribly made and have no substance whatsoever (looking at you, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie), but most modern-day adaptations have really taken the cake for how well-done they are.

Travel is almost always a bit stressful. I'm constantly double-checking that I haven't forgotten anything important, and I'm always juggling too many things in my hands when I reach the security checkpoint.

Before AI became the defining buzzword of the 21st century, algorithms held that crown. And frankly, algorithmic recommendations have always kind of sucked. YouTube, in particular, has long been criticized for serving up low-quality content — and more troublingly, for functioning as a gateway to right-wing rabbit holes.

The best workaround has always been simple: pause your YouTube watch history. Without it running, your recommendations pull from your likes, saved videos, and subscriptions — not from that one iceberg video you clicked at 2 a.m. that suddenly has the algorithm convinced you want an endless stream of "SJW owned" compilations.

That fix, however, appears to be breaking down. Last week, a wave of YouTube users reported that with watch history paused, the platform has stopped serving homepage recommendations entirely — replacing their feeds with a prompt to re-enable watch history so YouTube can "populate" it.

The issue isn't universal. Users who recently paused their history still see recommendations, likely because YouTube has enough residual data to work with. The problem is hitting hardest for users who have kept watch history off for years — a group that, until now, had no issues. For the record, this writer has had watch history paused since 2017 without a single problem — until now, apparently.

This change hasn't gone down well, with many taking to Reddit to voice their complaints. "I've had my watch history off since 2013. Why is this suddenly a requirement? Maliciously incompetent company," says the top comment on one Reddit thread. Another commentor states, "Haven't had watch history on for 9 years. Now they're forcing me to turn it on to get recommended what they recommend me on my PC even though the reason they stated they cant recommend anything is because I don't have watch history on??? Makes no sense and its almost blatant."

While this isn't the first time YouTube has nudged users toward enabling tracking, some see this latest move as a more aggressive push to harvest search histories for ad targeting. There's also a legitimate question worth asking: why does YouTube suddenly need watch history to generate homepage recommendations when it had been doing exactly that for years without it?

Mashable reached out to YouTube with questions about the change and had not received a response by publication time.

Users have already found a workaround. Re-enable your watch history, refresh the page, then immediately pause it again. Your homepage recommendations should repopulate. To access the page to re-pause, head to Settings, click "View or change your Google Account settings," navigate to Data & Privacy, and toggle off YouTube history.

If you’ve just upgraded to a brand-new, lightning-fast boot drive, you don’t have to get rid of the old one. The same goes for those ancient HDDs we all have sitting in a dusty drawer, like the ones we used to boot our Windows XP PCs from.

Modern displays are amazing when it comes to detail, brightness, color, and all the ingredients that make for an impressive picture—except motion clarity.

The Mercedes-Benz GLB-Class was designed to bridge a gap in the automaker's product line and luxury SUV market as a whole. Although the subcompact GLA served as the entry point, its smaller cabin could feel cramped over time for growing families.

Twelve years after the original Alien: Isolation game was released across platforms, on the official "Alien Day" meant to celebrate the beloved franchise, game developers Creative Assembly are returning to the world of xenomorphs and unreliable robots to once again terrify the living daylights out of us.

The teaser trailer, aptly titled "False Sense of Security," does a lot with very little, from the flashing red light in a poorly lit room to the ominous background music and eventual close-up of what looks to be a payphone, with the word "Emergency" appropriately backlit.

As you might expect from the makers of the original game, Creative Assembly is clearly reluctant to over-share, relying on atmosphere and sound to do the heavy lifting, but the brief glimpse we get of the background when the door opens suggests the possibility that, unlike the first game, the sequel might also take place on a planet's surface, perhaps hinting at a much larger game world.

Needless to say, we'll be covering more details about the game's development and progress as they emerge.

Lots of people will use an IDE like VS Code or a regular editor like Vim, but for my work in data science and statistics, I need something different. Here's why I use IPython and Jupyter notebooks for exploring datasets.

Modern Android phones have a number of built-in utilities aside from the ones we've all heard of and used, like the torch. Some of these tools allow you to convert any photo (as well as webpages and emails) into a PDF file, extract text from photos, and more.

My Alexa smart speakers were meant to usher in a future where I controlled everything in my smart home with my voice. Instead, they turned out to be a closed system with limited capabilities and some serious privacy issues. I decided it was time they were replaced.

Every TV today has at least one HDMI port on the side or back. It’s used to stream content from another device to your television—whether that’s a streaming device, tablet, or computer.

Gaming routers are everywhere these days, and they're sold with all the subtlety of a neon-lit race car. Big antennas, aggressive fonts, tri-band this, Wi-Fi 7 that, and a very simple pitch: buy this, and your games will run faster.

A new report from The Midas Project's Model Republic publication has found that news site, The Wire by Acutus, relies almost entirely on AI-generated content. The publication has been operational since the end of 2025 with nearly 100 published articles across tech, energy, media, science, business, and healthcare. Stranger still, their About page describes their work as "collaborative journalism" led by an "editorial team," but the site has no masthead and credits no editors or journalists in its publications.

The official explanation for this anonymity is buried in their How It Works subhead:

Our editorial team identifies timely topics and invites contributors with relevant, firsthand experience to share their perspective through structured conversations. Those perspectives are synthesized and edited into stories that reflect where contributors align, where they diverge, and what it all means — offering depth, balance, and clarity beyond the headline.

But when journalist Tyler Johnston ran the site's content through Pangram, an AI detection tool that boasts a 99.98% accuracy rating, he discovered just how widely AI was relied upon: "Of the 94 articles, 69% came back flagged as fully AI-generated, with another 28% flagged as partially AI-generated. Only three articles were classified as human-authored."

Johnston's suspicions grew when he looked at the content itself, which was both overwhelmingly in favor of the development of artificial intelligence and dismissive of AI's critics. One piece, for example, warns of "Escalating Anti-AI Radicalism," while another chides the reader: "Will Republicans Let Blue States Set America’s AI Rules?" 

The deeper Johnston dug, the clearer the picture got. As a new site with very little social media presence, articles by The Wire are seldom retweeted, but Johnston discovered that half of its engagement on X came from Patrick Hynes, the president of the PR firm Novus Public Affairs. A quick glance at their client list reveals they work on behalf of Targeted Victory, the consulting firm at the very heart of OpenAI's lobbying efforts in Washington on behalf of its regulatory interests. 

Generative artificial intelligence has already created rifts in our collective perception of reality. With enough computing power, you can create fake trailers for films that were never made and never will be, or steal a politician's voice for a deep fake, or even invent an absurd, implausible scenario, like a shark attacking a plane, and fool at least a few credulous internet rookies.

If Johnston's reporting is correct and his inferences are accurate, we may have an instance of an AI firm deliberately mischaracterizing its work as "independent journalism" to lobby on its behalf (something Johnston points out contravenes its own usage policies).

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Everyone dunks on Ubuntu for being bloated, and honestly, they're not wrong. There are far more powerful Linux distros that offer more features while consuming less resources than Ubuntu. In fact, at the time of writing, Ubuntu now demands higher system requirements than Windows 11. So I ran both to find out if that weight actually matters.

Pixel phones aren't exactly known for being adventurous. Google mainly sticks with clean designs and simple features—that’s part of the appeal. However, it did once experiment with nifty touch-less gestures. Now you can bring them back to any Android phone.

Voice typing on desktop computers usually promises efficiency but rarely delivers, despite many wanting to ditch the keyboard for voice typing. Dictation is meant to save time and lower keyboard use, but you constantly have to correct errors, manage software crashes, and fight incompatible interfaces. The primary problem is not that you lack choices, but that these applications do not fit your workflow, vocabulary, or environment. I spent several weeks testing seven different applications on Windows, ranging from free system defaults to expensive enterprise software. I think I've found the one you've been looking for, since it works well for me.

Despite coming from competing companies, Android and Windows are two platforms that are quite compatible and capable of interaction. Here, I'll show you several ways to connect and run Android apps on your Windows PC.

Everyone who uses i3—or any Linux window manager—has some version of the same story: excited going in, and confused right after installing it. People on the internet will show you what’s possible with i3, but very few talk about what it actually takes to get there. I pushed through, figured it out, and now I’m sharing the three things I wish I knew before I started.

A local library of music is almost always cheaper than paying for a subscription, which is why home media servers have become so popular. In a weird way, Google Play Music was the first taste of this concept for many people. Despite what you may think, it still lives on today.