Technology

If you've ever been in a minor fender bender and wished you had footage to back you up, you'll understand why dashcams have gone from niche accessory to near-essential kit. The VIOFO A329S 3CH takes that logic further than most—it doesn't just cover the front, it covers the front, the cabin, and the rear simultaneously—all in 4K, 2K, and 2K.

Replacing a polished, multi-billion dollar service like Spotify or Apple Music with self-hosted software seems daunting, but it actually isn't.

At the Summer Games Fest in Los Angeles, Capcom teased the release of the much-anticipated remake of Resident Evil: Code Veronica, a game that was originally released on the Sega Dreamcast in the year 2000, before many of the franchise's modern fans were even born.  

In classic Capcom fashion, the trailer hints at far more than it reveals, opening with a high-angle night shot of Paris before descending into first-person POV as a woman (Claire Redfield, we assume, the heroine of the original game and of the beloved Resident Evil 2) enters a quaint French hotel where it's heavily hinted that her brother Chris has been staying. We get a brief glimpse of the disheveled hotel room (look closely, and you can see the iconic Resident Evil lighter on the coffee table) before an unknown person knocks on the door and the music turns ominous. 

SEE ALSO: 'Alien: Isolation 2' trailer hints at the terror to come

Our first-person character opens the door only to be accosted by an unseen stranger, and suddenly both the music and the visuals switch up, giving us glimpses of factories, dead insects, gold-encrusted pistols, and a scary-looking island being approached by helicopters before the camera takes us back to Paris in a third-person perspective, showing us Claire Redfield with a knife to her neck. 

When the title screen emerges, we're given another important clue: the new game is going to be called Resident Evil: Veronica rather than Code Veronica, which indicates that Capcom will probably treat this title more like a reimagining rather than a straight remake, which is more or less how they treated the next-gen remakes of Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4.

The last thing we see, after a shot of some menacing zombies, is the year 2027, which suggests the game has been in development for some time and that fans still have a wait ahead of them. But given the fan reaction across social media, Capcom might have another hit on its hands.

Most homelabs begin with dashboards because dashboards help manage mess and make things look clear. Most people use things like Grafana panel, Portainer, a Proxmox summary tab, and an uptime monitor to make a bunch of services look like infrastructure until you realize that the system only helps when you are already looking at it. That is where Gotify started to make sense. A dashboard waits for me to check it, but a good alert tells me when something needs a look.

You might think that an all-SSD NAS is a waste of money—and you'd be right. However, I still find a use for one in my homelab. Here's how I use my all-SSD NAS when I have several other storage systems already in my homelab.

The most exciting part of building a smart home is adding new gadgets. Whether it's a cool new sensor, smart plug, camera, or light bulb, it's easy to keep expanding your setup over time—especially now that even inexpensive devices are Matter-compatible.

If your Linux system is running low on storage, you don't need to spend hours going through files and deleting what you don't need. There's an easier way to do it. Let me show you what I do when I need to declutter and clear up space.

Are you in the mood for a rom-com this weekend? Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein star in Office Romance, a new movie now streaming on Netflix.

Bluetooth is one of those convenient features we all use so much that we often take for granted. In recent years, Bluetooth quality, range, and reliability have greatly improved, but we still deal with frustrating disconnections at times. We've all been there, forgetting a device and trying to re-pair it, but there's one setting that should eliminate most of those problems.

Supports are a necessary but often frustrating part of 3D printing. These structures serve as a base for overhanging elements, so that your model doesn’t warp or sag in unexpected ways.

Building an Excel dashboard usually means spending an entire afternoon on layout design. So, I pitted ChatGPT against Gemini to see which tool automates the grunt work best—and only one came close to what I hoped for.

From swarms of lovebugs along the Gulf Coast to dust storms on the Southern Plains and pollen blanketing nearly the entire country, keeping your car clean this time of year is a real challenge. And that’s not even counting the daily barrage of rain, mud, and road grime.

Who’s up for a weekend full of thrilling, pulse-pounding entertainment on Amazon Prime Video? These types of shows thrive on tension, unexpected twists, and complex characters to pull audiences into worlds where danger lurks around every corner and nothing is ever quite what it seems, and that's where we're heading.

Buying an ESP32 development board can be a little confusing for a newcomer. These dev kits are available from a variety of different manufacturers at slightly different prices, and some even come embedded in other devices.

Hulu tends to fly under the radar next to its flashier rivals like Netflix and Prime Video (it also pumps out fewer titles each month), but tucked inside that Disney+ bundle is one of the best catalogs in streaming, including stunning FX shows like Alien: Earth and The Bear, a bottomless true-crime well, comedies, thrillers, and more.

Excel and other spreadsheets are ubiquituous in business because they let you create simple graphics. If you want to take your reports and presentations to the next level, you might want to consider learning Python to create powerful visualizations that will help you stand out from the crowd.

Windows on Arm is finally maturing to the point of being truly usable, and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X Gen 11 only helps its case. With a fantastic build quality, great performance, and a gorgeous screen, this is one of my favorite 14-inch Windows laptops I've ever used.

You've heard of AI vibe coding, one dictionary's phrase of the year for 2025. As of this week, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the AI vibe shift.

You wouldn't know the shift existed from the tech world's top pronouncements of late; it is, after all, always sunny in Silicon Valley. Microsoft's Build conference, like Google I/O in May, featured tons of techies talking about tokens, the metric by which AI prompts and answers are measured (a token, weirdly, is about three-quarters of a word on average).

Both conferences also centered claims about frontier AI that are dubious to say the least. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at Google I/O: "Artificial General Intelligence is just a few years away... we are standing in the foothills of the Singularity." Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman: "scaling laws are holding... we are building towards what we call Humanist Superintelligence."

Investors, too, showed little sign of losing their AI optimism this week. Nvidia stock tumbled for a few days, but rallied after CEO Jensen Huang insisted AI agents will run everything, everywhere in the future (presumably once they've stopped deleting databases). Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX continue to chase trillion-dollar IPOs, the latter based in large part on the untested concept of AI data centers in space.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk found the cheat code for capitalism. The SpaceX IPO proves it.

But outside the AI bubble, a backlash is brewing, and not only among students booing pro-AI commencement speakers.

Just 10 percent of Americans say they're thrilled about the future of AI, a Pew poll found in March; that same month, some 80 percent of registered U.S. voters in an NBC poll said neither Democrats nor Republicans are doing a good job on the AI front. That number also appears in an April survey of white-collar workers: 80 percent are straight-up refusing to use AI even when it's mandated. In the last 30 days, 54 percent of workers reported bypassing company AI tools and completing jobs themselves.

Those numbers suggest general strike-levels of discontent with AI across every industry, out there in the real America beyond Silicon Valley and Wall Street, if not an outright revolutionary mood.

Data center protests, fueled by the 70 percent of Americans who say they don't want data centers near them, are only likely to grow going forward — especially now that they are producing tangible results. At least 48 data center projects were blocked or delayed in 2025, according to Data Center Watch, and the fight is only getting more fierce.

Take the planned Stratos data center in Utah, where local opposition just forced VC and Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary to downsize his land usage by 75 percent. "We screwed up," O'Leary told local TV news Friday. "We pissed off a lot of people."

And the threat of electoral guillotines may explain why politicians are starting to propose serious action.

This week alone, Senator Bernie Sanders came out in favor of the U.S. public owning a 50 percent stake in AI companies, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed an AI tax, and President Trump finally signed an executive order on AI regulation that his AI czar, Silicon Valley titan David Sacks, has long opposed. Finally, on Friday, New York State legislators sent a one-year data center moratorium to the governor's desk.

The White House's AI executive order was even announced while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was making rosy pronouncements on AI at Build, adding to the surreal sense that we're watching a tale of two worlds — the anti-AI people versus an out-of-touch AI regime that says, essentially, let them eat tokens.

But hold the revolution: Just below the surface (and the Microsoft Surface Ultra), the AI regime is showing signs of cracking all on its own — and it's all down to those tokens.

Silicon Valley's AI backlash begins

When it comes to AI true-believer companies, they don't get much truer than Uber. The rideshare giant says 90 percent of its engineers use AI tools, mostly Anthropic's Claude Code. As much as 10 percent of Uber's codebase is written by AI agents. Uber had leaderboards that encouraged as much usage of AI tokens as possible; in Silicon Valley, this is known as tokenmaxxing, and it was really hot in 2025.

Then the tokenmaxxing bill came due. "The budget I thought I would need [for 2026] is blown away already,” CTO Neppalli Naga told The Information on April 14 — less than four months into the year.

At the time, however, the information didn't make much of a dent in the AI news cycle — not until Uber's COO confirmed what it meant at the end of May. Naga's busted budget was a "head-exploding moment," Andrew MacDonald told the Rapid Response podcast. Such spending "becomes harder to justify because AI is not free...we're going to have to start talking about token consumption."

Just like that, we started talking about token consumption. Axios reported an unnamed company had burned through half a billion dollars of tokens in a single month "after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses." Next, we learned Amazon and Meta had shut down their own internal AI leaderboards; other companies like Walmart and Starbucks have scaled back their AI agent plans.

In a leaked email, one Amazon senior vice president told employees to "stop using AI just for the sake of using AI." You'd be forgiven for thinking this obliterates a large chunk of OpenAI and Anthropic's business model. Both companies have spent years building models that, for the most part, consume more tokens. Now they're promoting agents who can consume tokens on steroids — often as much as 24 times as a regular model.

As high-minded as their missions might be, both companies are in it to sell tokens.

Why tokenmaxxing died A scene from a data center protest in Tucson, Arizona. Credit: Mamta Popat/Arizona Daily Star via Getty Images

Some AI leaders, sensing the shift in the wind, are starting to say that sort of thing openly. Ravi Kumar S., CEO of AI IT firm Cognizant, called tokenmaxxing "a vanity metric" at a Fortune conference on Monday. Kumar took aim at OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, accusing them of "fearmongering." Altman and Amodei have walked back previous predictions of an AI jobs apocalypse now that they have IPOs in the offing.

The two CEOs are also beneficiaries of user confusion over the complex cost of AI. Earlier this year, Anthropic quietly changed the price of Claude for many customers, charging them per token. OpenAI is looking at dropping its "unlimited" ChatGPT plans — quite a change from a year ago, when Altman promised "intelligence too cheap to meter."

The shift isn't just happening at the two AI giants. Microsoft started cutting token costs for itself and raising token prices for everyone else — even before those rosy pronouncements at Build.

SEE ALSO: Thank the AI industry for tech price increases: See the full list

Microsoft began revoking developers' access to Claude Code, pushing them to Microsoft Copilot instead, in May. On June 1, Github Copilot users were switched from a fixed subscription to a per-token subscription model. Reddit filled with angry users noting how expensive their AI prompts have suddenly become. In one extreme case, a Claude user blew 50 percent of his monthly credits on a single prompt.

"At the beginning of the year," Altman said in an OpenAI livestream this week, "people were totally happy with the amount they were spending... now, all of a sudden [it's] a huge issue." In a CNBC interview Monday, Altman admitted to a "ton of waste" in AI spending, and said companies were asking, "how long do I have to wait for [AI benefits] to show up in revenue?" This was, Altman said, a "fair issue."

And the closest Altman came to an answer to the fair issue? "The industry will figure that out pretty quickly... in another year or two."

Will the vibe shift burst the AI bubble?

How long OpenAI and Anthropic have to figure out this issue, however, depends largely on what happens in their IPOs.

"Nobody knows when this will all collapse, but 2026 will be remembered in hindsight as the year in which retail investors were left holding the bag," Gary Marcus, a professor and leading generative AI critic, predicted Monday.

Marcus, who has been increasingly proven right in the AI problems he's foreseen since 2022, may yet be off base here. But he does have a hunch, based on comments from Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei, that both companies had burned so much money they were "months from bankruptcy" and had "run out of options" other than to file for trillion-dollar IPOs.

In particular, OpenAI has long been losing more than a billion dollars a month — the cost of serving ChatGPT for free to hundreds of millions of people.

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Financial bubbles built around technologies invariably end with an Emperor's New Clothes moment. Eventually, enough people are pointing and laughing that courtiers can't carry off the hype any longer.

That's what happened to end the dotcom bubble in 2000. A business deal came along that was so ridiculous on its surface (the world's largest media empire, snapped up by the guys who gave away dial-up internet via CDs?!) that markets couldn't help but point and laugh. The vibe shifted. Overhyped, profitless dotcom companies began to look naked, and a stock collapse soon followed.

Human hiring and hallucinations

Times have changed, and the AI bubble is a hardier thing than its dotcom predecessor. It is built atop the one company currently making a fortune out of all this. NVIDIA has sold the picks and shovels to AI gold rush seekers for so many years now that they've started to seem invulnerable. Yet even Nvidia is learning lessons about the prohibitive growing cost of AI.

"The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees," one Nvidia executive told Axios in April. So even Nvidia is vulnerable to tokenmaxxing. And that's why the hottest thing in AI these days is hiring humans, because they're getting to be cheaper than AI — and are needed for quality control on AI's output anyway. Cognizant's Kumar boasted about his AI company hiring 20,000 graduates last year, and more this year — a vibe shift if ever we've seen one.

So the jobspocalypse vibe has shifted. The tokens vibe has shifted. And the AI data center-building vibe has shifted, too — not just in terms of public and environmental opposition, but in the fact that there aren't as many data centers under construction as we'd been led to expect. (Gadfly journalist Ed Zitron has done yeoman's work here, scouring satellite photos of data center sites for signs of construction).

What's left? Arguably, the only vibe that hasn't shifted is the hallucination vibe, in that users still aren't aware how often most AI models hallucinate. Google, for example, won't say how often Gemini 3.5 Flash hallucinates, but a December Google study found that Gemini may only be accurate 68.8 to 83.8 percent of the time.

SEE ALSO: How often does Gemini 3.5 Flash hallucinate or lie? Google isn't saying.

And hallucinations aren't hard to find these days. The hallucination that OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are genuine trillion-dollar AI giants that deserve to be listed in top index funds despite being unprofitable (breaking news: as I wrote this, the S&P 500 officially opted out of that hallucination).

The hallucination that Nvidia will always remain on top, even as companies making up a majority of its business are developing their own AI chips (which is exactly why Michael Burry, the Big Short guy, continues to short the stock).

The hallucination that customers want AI in everything, when survey after survey says the opposite. The hallucination that AI content will dominate the future, when the generation that will take us there points and laughs at AI slop.

If these hallucinations fade from the fevered brains of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the great AI vibe shift of 2026 will be complete.

This article reflects the opinion of the author.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Portable fans are a hot-weather staple. When I got married on a sweltering July day, one of my bridesmaids passed me a portable fan, which didn't leave my side all day. So it's no surprise that personal fans are coming back in even bigger ways this summer.

Personal fans can be found for under $20, but this year, some big names in appliances are joining the trend. Dyson dropped its $99 personal fan, but not before Shark launched the ChillPill this year. Shark's personal fan features the most unique and elaborate design of any personal fan. Even Justin Bieber collaborated with Shark on a special edition of the ChillPill just in time for Coachella.

So I put the Shark ChillPill to the test on the hottest day of the year, and spoiler, my cats might love this fan more than I do.

Dyson HushJet Mini Cool $99.99 at Best Buy
  Shop Now at Best Buy Shop Now at Dyson Shop Now at Amazon Shark ChillPill $149.99 at Shark
  Shop Now at Shark Shop Now at Best Buy Shop Now at Amazon An innovative design, but is it practical? The Shark ChillPill fan looks like a a small pair of binoculars, but twists so you can hold one side while the other blows cool air. Credit: Samantha Mangino / Mashable

The design is unlike any fan I've encountered IRL. It's two cylinders stacked on top of each other. The piece with the actual fan can twist to work from different angles. Rather than a wand-like grip, it's bulkier, which makes it feel awkward to hold. That said, the design makes it exceptionally easy to set down on surfaces. Suddenly, I had a mini desktop fan. I liked it best when stationary and imagined that, if I had used it while walking, it might have felt too big to hold.

The ultimate test will be when I take it on my European honeymoon and see how it holds up in the peak summer heat, whether I'm walking through ruins or lounging in a cabana.

It comes with three swappable fan heads

The ChillPill comes with three different attachments. The basic fan head, a misting fan head, and a metal cooling plate — each of which felt particularly useful in my time testing it on a sweltering day.

The Shark ChillPill comes with three swappable heads, including a cooling plate. Credit: Samantha Mangino / Mashable

The standard head doesn't need explanation, while the other two have a little more flair. The attachment with a stainless steel surface is a cooling plate that claims to lower skin temperature by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit. While I can't confirm that exact amount, I can say that on a 90-degree day when I was sweating without air conditioning, it was an incredible relief when pressed to my wrists, neck, and temples.

For those in dry heat, the misting head is particularly attractive. I tried it out in the New England humidity, and I have to say, it was still so refreshing, especially in the hottest temperatures. For as much as I love it, my two water-loving cats love it more, eagerly running over whenever I turn it on.

The only downside to the misting head is that it has a mini tank and runs out fast, especially when you turn up the speed. You can shut off the misting to conserve water, and then it operates like a standard fan head.

10 speeds of cool that's most effective up close The screen displays what speed the fan is set to and as you can see, also displays the battery status, too. Credit: Samantha Mangino / Mashable

The Shark ChillPill is secretly pretty smart. It has slightly different controls based on which fan head you use, and it automatically registers when you swap them. On the side of the ChillPill is an on/off switch, but to start it, you need to press the digital screen, which turns on the cooling function.

There are 10 speeds to choose from, and on sweaty days, I found I never needed to go beyond level three for a nice breeze. But I also didn't necessarily want to, as the ChillPill gets loud fast. If you were to crank it up to 10 in a public space, it would be making a scene. However, you do need to turn up the fan strength if you have it positioned far away, as I didn't find it had a very long reach.

Battery life made for summer travels The Shark ChillPill's misting function in action. Credit: Samantha Mangino / Mashable

When fully charged, the fan lasts up to 11 hours. Using it intermittently over a few weeks, the battery held strong. The battery's strength is pretty impressive, and I'd feel confident bringing it on summer travels, knowing it will last all day and only need to be charged overnight. It recharges via USB-C, which most phones and tech use these days, meaning you won't need to pack an extra charger.

Let's talk about the price

Part of the appeal and widespread use of portable fans is their affordability. Most options on Amazon are under $20, and even Shein and Temu sell them alongside festival wear (though we're not sure we recommend them). So it's startling to see the Shark ChillPill's price of $149.99. It's more expensive than Dyson's portable fan ($99.99) and/or even a home fan like the super powerful Vornado 660 ($89.99). It's the same price as Shark's larger, more powerful FlexBreeze HydroGo Pro.

Even with its features and extra fan heads, and even though I love the fan, I still think it's way too expensive. If it were just $100, I'd say it was a good value, but for such a small, limited-use device, I don't think it's a great value, especially when you can get a much larger fan for much less than $150.

Is the Shark ChillPill worth it? Is the Shark ChillPill worth $149.99? We're undecided. Credit: Samantha Mangino / Mashable

The Shark ChillPill is the most unique take on the personal fan that I've ever encountered. With 10 speeds, it's effective at cooling you down, even on the hottest of days. With special attachment heads like the mister and cooling plate, it goes above and beyond most portable fans. Even with powerful settings and long battery life, it isn't without its downsides. Its innovative design may serve more as a hindrance, especially when you're on the go. But more importantly, is it worth its $149.99 price tag? I'm not so sure.

If you're eager to spend the money, the Shark ChillPill is an effective and useful way to stay cool, but I think you should wait to buy it until it's on sale.

Shark ChillPill $149.99 at Shark
Available in haze, matcha, carbon, glacier, iced latte, dragon fruit, and rose gold colorways Shop Now at Shark Shop Now at Best Buy Shop Now at Amazon

Paul Rudd (Anaconda, Friendship) Nick Jonas (The Jonas Brothers), and legendary filmmaker John Carney (Once, Sing Street) meet up with Mashable Executive Producer Mark Stetson and to discuss their new film Power Ballad.

Out of SXSW, Power Ballad got a lot of love from critics, who cheered its feel-good comedy vibe. Paul Rudd stars as Rick Power, a middle-aged American who came to Dublin 15 years ago on tour with his rock band. What might have been a path to fame and fortune was rerouted when Rick met the cool girl who'd become his wife (Marcella Plunkett), and they had a daughter (Beth Fallon) together. Nowadays, he still rocks, but as the lead of a wedding band called the Bride and Groove. As such, he mostly plays cover songs, though he still yearns to make music of his own. So, when one wedding gig throws him in the path of former boy bander Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), his life has the potential to change forever. The two spend the night jamming, sharing songs, and connecting on all things songwriting. What starts as potential buddy film, quickly takes a turn towards the unexpected. Power Ballad becomes a cautionary tale of what happens when ambition overtakes the pure love of making music.

In the interview with Mashable, Rudd, Jonas, and Carney talk about the creative process and the songs they wish they had been lucky enough to write.

Power Ballad is now in theaters.