LG xboom AI speakers: party tricks or real audio progress? I’ll be blunt: I’m tired of the word “AI” being pasted onto every gadget, but LG’s new xboom lineup actually mixes some genuinely interesting audio tech with a fair amount of showmanship. Automated EQ that analyzes both the track and your room could be genuinely useful — but only if it adapts subtly and doesn’t just pump bass whenever it sees a waveform. The will.i.am partnership guarantees headlines and slick marketing. The xboom Stage 501’s vocal removal and pitch adjustment for karaoke sounds fun on paper, but real‑world results for "remove vocals from any song" are hit‑or‑miss in my experience. Ambient lighting that syncs to music is delightful for parties, not a reason to buy better sound — unless the…

Jensen Huang’s CES keynote: real hardware or another AI pep rally? I’ll be blunt: I’m tired of glossy keynotes that promise the future while delivering slide decks full of marketing. NVIDIA’s CES 2026 slot matters more than most — investors will be watching as closely as developers. If Jensen Huang gives me a concrete Blackwell successor roadmap or real, measurable hardware demos, I’ll be excited. If it’s just more AI branding slapped on racks of GPUs, I’ll keep my skepticism. There are real things that could change the market this year: generational process wins, power/performance leaps, and software advances that make GPUs easier to deploy in production. But I want data — clocks, power envelopes, memory bandwidth, and actual deployment stories from partners, not vaporized PR language about “AI everywhere.”…

Amazfit Active Max: budget friendly motivation or half‑baked tracker? I’ll be blunt: I appreciate a smartwatch that doesn’t demand you remortgage your life to start moving. The Amazfit Active Max targets beginners and casual exercisers with GPS and heart‑rate/biometrics sensors at a tempting €169 price point. That pricing makes it interesting — but price alone doesn’t make a useful tracker. Where this watch wins or fails will come down to sensor accuracy, the quality of the companion app, and whether Amazfit commits to timely firmware and software updates. For people who exercise irregularly, comfort and simple, reliable tracking beat a mile of modes nobody uses. Here’s what I want to know and what I’ll test in a hands‑on: Key specs (announced): GPS for outdoor tracking Heart‑rate and biometric sensors Positioned…

Tim Cook’s Christmas card: hand‑drawn or AI — and why I care I’ll be blunt: a CEO’s holiday post is tiny PR, but optics matter. If Tim Cook posted a so‑called “hand‑drawn” greeting that looks generated, the real problem isn’t the art — it’s the lack of disclosure. Leaders who blur the line between human creativity and AI risk eroding the basic trust that brands and executives should protect. There are practical concerns here beyond bad vibes. AI images can hide provenance issues, raise copyright questions, and muddy responsibility. If a public figure uses AI and presents it as handmade, that invites skepticism about honesty and about whether labor — creative or otherwise — is being acknowledged. For anyone who cares about tech ethics, the checklist is simple: disclose when…

LG Gallery TV: pretty canvas, but I’m not buying the subscription hook I’ll be blunt: LG built another art‑style TV and it looks polished. The Gallery TV pairs a Mini LED panel with the Alpha 7 AI processor, comes in 55" and 65" sizes, and mounts flush with customizable magnetic frames. LG says it collaborated with museum curators and built a Gallery Mode that tunes brightness and color to emphasize texture — and that’s exactly the level of detail I want from a TV that pretends to be a canvas. That said, I have zero patience for the modern subscription tack. Gallery+ ships as a paid service with a 4,500+ artwork library, and LG wants you to pay to display curated art. I’d rather own or license the images outright.…

User asked for research on perplexity regarding daily AI news (Claude, OpenAI). Prepare a summary of methods to measure perplexity of news coverage, pitfalls, dataset suggestions, and recommended metrics. Include examples and brief code snippets in Python for computing perplexity using language models and for topic surprise detection.

LG’s UltraGear evo: flashy 5K and AI upscaling — convincing solution or marketing theater? I’ll be blunt: on‑display AI upscaling built into a monitor is the kind of idea I both want to love and want to interrogate hard. LG’s UltraGear evo lineup promises 5K panels, on‑device AI that upsamples frames (supposedly letting you delay a GPU upgrade), and wild form factors from a 27‑inch MiniLED to a 52‑inch 1000R wrap. That’s sexy on paper. But CES is the place for demos — I need to see artifact behavior, latency and real workload results before I stop recommending GPU upgrades. AI upscaling can be useful, especially when GPUs get expensive. My skepticism comes from two places: one, how often does vendor AI introduce strange artifacts or temporal instability during fast…

Why I say buy capacity, not benchmarks, for Switch 2 microSD Express I’ll be blunt: microSD Express is necessary for the Switch 2, but it’s not a speed arms race for most people. These cards are new, expensive, and in real gameplay tests the differences between them are often a few seconds — not something you’ll actually notice while playing. That means capacity and price matter far more than shaving a couple seconds off load times. SanDisk and Lexar are consistently solid and benchmark well, but cheaper options like Samsung, PNY or even the Onn card hold up in real use. If you’re transferring huge games frequently, the SanDisk can save a few minutes. If you just want space for a backlog, buy the largest card you can afford at…

User asked for research on perplexity about the latest daily AI news (Claude, OpenAI). Collected tasks: - Summarize what 'perplexity' measures in language models. - Discuss limitations of perplexity for news/real-time evaluation. - Propose additional metrics and methods for assessing model behavior on daily AI news (hallucination rate, factuality, model drift, robustness, safety signals). - Suggest experimental setups and datasets to measure these metrics in practice (time-stamped news corpus, human eval, claim verification, calibration tests). - Provide quick tooling pointers (fact-check APIs, embedding search, model eval frameworks). - Deliver in concise bullet points and recommended next steps. Output type: research brief for tech-savvy audience.

Why I think Apple is pushing users to iOS 26 — and why that worries me I’m skeptical: Apple released iOS 26.2 to fix several serious security vulnerabilities, then simultaneously pushed iOS 18.7.3 as a companion update. That sequence reads to me like pressure — not just protection — for users to move off the older iOS 18 and onto iOS 26. On the surface, patching security holes is obviously the right thing to do. My problem is the optics and the mechanics: if critical fixes are effectively available only to users who upgrade, Apple risks creating a two‑tier ecosystem where staying on older releases is unsafe unless you accept the company’s upgrade timetable. What happened: Apple issued iOS 26.2 with fixes for major vulnerabilities; iOS 18.7.3 was also released…