We’ve seen the first Thunderbolt 5 port, the first cable, and the first dock to theoretically offer its blistering 120Gbps speeds. Now, behold the first TBT5 cards from Gigabyte and from Asus.

Neither one magically adds Thunderbolt to your PC — to create two do-it-all Thunderbolt 5 connectors, you need to plug power, USB, mini-DP video and your motherboard’s existing internal Thunderbolt header into this thing.

Redherring32 says they spent four months figuring out how to trim the motherboard, build 12 custom PCBs (and custom flex ribbon cables, it seems!), put it all together, and open source it.

My dumb question: can I get a full-fat version based on the chonky original Duke instead of the superior but boring Controller S?

A Reuters stream showed the scene in Cuba on Friday, where the power grid crashed completely following a failure at the Antonio Guiteras Power Plant, its largest thermoelectric plant.

CNN’s Havana bureau chief Patrick Oppman writes that after five hours, “Cubans know blackouts all too well but this one feels different.”

Additional reports: CNN, Associated Press, CiberCuba, Granma.

New fear unlocked: that even death will not release me from the Zoom meetings.

The court order just came in, and I’ve corrected our story. Bolding mine:

The Court grants a partial stay of the permanent injunction pending the circuit court’s resolution of the stay requests Google filed there, with the exception of ¶ 8 of the injunction, which is not stayed. 

Paragraph 8 says:

That’s a federal judge ordering Ron DeSantis’ deeply weird surgeon general to stop threatening local TV stations with criminal proceedings if they air an ad in support of Amendment 4, which would restore abortion rights in the state. At least one station stopped airing the ad, but the judge in the cast issued a temporary injunction, saying

By threatening criminal proceedings for broadcasting a “political advertisement claiming that current Florida law does not allow physicians to perform abortions necessary to preserve the lives and health of pregnant women,” Defendant has engaged in viewpoint discrimination.

DeSantis sure does love going to court to learn about the First Amendment!

Though it’s a bit mind-boggling to hear Lionsgate refer to American Psycho as “potent and classic IP,” the news that Luca Guadagnino is directing the studio’s new reboot is definitely intriguing. The question now: who’s gonna be Patrick Bateman?

Microsoft is figuring out how its $14 billion investment in OpenAI will translate into equity when the AI startup transitions into a for-profit company (this transition must occur within two years, or recent investors in the $6.6 billion round can claw back their investment).

To determine the equity distribution, Microsoft and OpenAI have enlisted Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, respectively.

Edmunds conducted one of its U-Drag down-and-back drag races between Lucid’s most expensive car, the 1,234 horsepower Air Sapphire, and a 1,020 horsepower Tesla Model S Plaid ($89,990 today) with the $20k Track Pack upgrade that includes carbon ceramic brakes.

The Lucid won both races. Edmund’s Alistair Weaver concludes that the Lucid feels “faster” and “just feels nicer.”

70 years after he first designed it, a board game from Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle author Kurt Vonnegut is finally being published. Our friends at Polygon have the story on how GHQ came to be.

The Associated Press chief photographer took the indelible photo of Donald Trump right after an assassination attempt that’s since been used (without permission) on everything from cheap t-shirts to digital icons.

$100,000 Trump-themed watches is apparently going too far: AP, which owns the rights to the image, told Wired it sent a cease and desist to the company making the unauthorized timepieces.

Robosen, maker of self-transforming Transformers, has teamed up with Disney to bring its Space Ranger toy to life.

It’s got 23 servo motors, working buttons (save the laser, weirdly!) and even has Buzz’s Spanish mode — plus new “first-of-its-kind micro-servos” to move its eyes and mouth. Mine has a bit of a lazy eye, though! 3.7 pounds, 14.6 inches tall, on sale today.

Nvidia’s beta all-in-one app is set to replace GeForce experience later this year, and it might fully launch with the RTX 50-series. Hardware leaker kopite7kimi says it will be released officially together with Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs. Nvidia is holding a CES 2025 keynote in January, where we’re expecting to see the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080.