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Orchid is a delightfully retro and approachable hipster synth

A modern tribute to electric chord organs which were basically giant harmonicas connected to a fan. | Photo: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge In 2017, I bought an old Magnus chord organ off Craigslist for $10. It's one of my favorite music gear purchases. Electric chord organs let you play full chords with just a press of a button, making them perfect for aspiring singer-songwriters or fooling around at home. But chord organs largely fell out of favor in the '80s, as digital keyboards like those from Casio grew in popularity. The Telepathic Instruments Orchid attempts to recapture some of that simple parlor instrument magic. Just like those vintage electric chord organs, the Orchid allows you to play rich chord progressions without having to master a ton of theory or complex fing … Read the full story at The Verge.

Birdfy’s solar-powered smart feeder is down to one of its best prices

It comes with a solar panel so you don’t need to worry about charging as much during the summer. | Image: Netvue Birdfy has kicked off a midyear sale, taking up to 40 percent off a range of its smart bird feeders. One of the best deals is on Netvue’s Birdfy Feeder AI-Powered Smart Bird Feeder with Camera, which has dropped to $149.99 at Birdfy and is its second-best price to date. The bundle, which includes a solar panel and lifetime AI bird identification at no extra cost, comes with a $259.99 list price, saving you $110. Birdfy Feeder Where to Buy: $259.99 $149.99 at Birdfy (solar-powered) The feeder features a wide-angle 1080p camera with color night vision, allowing you to watch birds in clear detail day or night. It also sends real-time motion alerts to the Birdfy app, where you can watch the livefeed or short, recorded videos, as well as learn more about the birds that visit your feeder. The included AI can identify more than 6,000 bird species without requiring a subscription, a

‘Odyssey’ director Christopher Nolan calls AI an obvious ‘Trojan horse’

"Everybody knows the Greeks are inside."

TechCrunch·Jul 19, 2026

Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all

Current AI, a non-profit building AI that leaves no one culture behind, has made remarkable progress across devices, AI chat and more.

TechCrunch·Jul 19, 2026

DRIVE – Operational Excellence for AI-accelerated engineering

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The Clapper was a bad smart home gadget — and a viral sensation

Clap on. Clap off. Well, more like, Clap, pause for half a beat but no longer because otherwise it'll stop hearing you, clap again because you waited too long, clap louder and faster, that didn't work, clap two more times, and suddenly: on. The Clapper didn't always work - and even when it did, it might fry your gadgets in the process - but it managed to become a big hit anyway. On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of The Clapper, from its beginnings as The Great American Turn-On to its debut alongside one of the great advertising campaigns of all time. The Verge's David Pierce and Victoria Song are joined by Allison Marsh, … Read the full story at The Verge.

The future of physical games is not looking great

Grand Theft Auto VI release won’t offer a disc. | Image: Rockstar Games This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on video games and physical media, follow Jay Peters. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started As a kid, I relished trips to Best Buy, GameStop, and the nearby mall so that I could browse video games. I loved sifting through games and chatting with my friends at the store about upcoming releases. On the lucky days I actually got a new game from the store, I treasured reading through every page of the manual on the drive home. Over the years, I built up a collecti … Read the full story at The Verge.

Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

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Perforce charges $500 for training training videos.. and it's AI narrated

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OpenAI reduces Codex Model Context Size from 372k to 272k

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The cleanup trap: Stop asking RAG to fix bad data

The enterprise technology ecosystem is caught in a costly cycle. Over the past two years, millions of dollars have been funneled into generative AI pilots, yet many of these initiatives stall out before ever reaching a live production environment.When a project fails, the immediate instinct of technical leadership is often to blame the model: The context window was too restrictive, the latency was too high, or the reasoning capabilities simply were not there.But as data engineers building the scaffolding for these systems, we often see a different reality: The model receives the blame, but the pipeline usually contains the root cause. Production gen AI rarely fails because of model limitations alone. More often, it fails because the enterprise data foundation underneath it is fundamentally unready.This is what I call the Cleanup Trap : The false belief that an organization can pipe fragmented, inconsistent, and ungoverned legacy data into a large language model (LLM) orchestrator and s

VentureBeat·Jul 19, 2026