OpenAI Says It Has Cracked One of Math’s ‘Millennium Problems’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: OpenAIsaid on Tuesday that its newest artificial intelligence technology had solved one of the “Millennium Problems,” a collection of important unanswered math questions meant to push the world’s leading mathematicians to new heights. The announcement is an another clear sign that A.I. is f … ⌘ Read more

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I’ve been meaning to post another #Magic update…

Two Sundays ago, I had plans in the evening, so I could only play a single game, which I (surprisingly) won with my new #Dune deck (it played much better this time, but still suffered for the lack of flying defense).

Then, this past Sunday, I won the first game with my tribal Mutant Ninja Turtles deck (which still needs some tweaking, but held its own throughout), only to lose the next two games, both with my Avengers deck (which had been doing very well until this weekend).

Still, a win is a win. Tweaks will be made, and with any luck, the next game(s) will be even better.

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Star Trek Turns 60
“Star Trek” marks its 60th anniversary today, September 8, six decades after the original series premiered in 1966 and went on to become one of the most successful science-fiction franchises in television history. Outlets across the web are commemorating the milestone with full health reports, hot takes, behind-the-scenes retrospectives, and reflections on the franchise’s influence and what may lie ahead. The New York Times rep … ⌘ Read more

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AI Made A Lot Of “Hideous” Code But Found Major Bottlenecks For Faster Linux Compilation
An ARM Linux engineer leveraged AI/LLMs to help uncover some improvements to “significant speed up” the Linux kernel build times. In the process the LLM used generated “a lot of code, much of it hideous” but in the end was used to find some very significant time savings for faster kernel builds via more task parallelization in different areas of the kernel build process… ⌘ Read more

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Google Will ‘Degrade’ Search In Europe to Avoid EU Fines
Google says it will overhaul Search in Europe to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, giving more prominence to comparison services like Expedia and Hotels.com while stripping some real-time features from hotel, airline, and restaurant results. “These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans – boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local … ⌘ Read more

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systemd 262-rc2 Adds An AI Canary For Detecting Unreviewed AI/LLM Code Contributions
One week after releasing systemd 262-rc1, systemd 262-rc2 is now available with further fixes and refinements for this init system and service manager. Systemd is also the latest open-source project introducing an AI canary for aiming to detect AI/LLM-based code contributors that weren’t reviewed by an actual person in advance of the pull request… ⌘ Read more

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Feds Accuse China of ‘Systematic’ Distillation of US AI Models
The NSA, CISA, and FBI are accusing (PDF) several Chinese AI companies of carrying out “industrial-scale” distillation campaigns against leading U.S. models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. Since at least 2024, the companies have allegedly routed millions of requests across accounts, APIs, proxies, cloud providers, and third-party aggregators to ex … ⌘ Read more

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Meta Debuts Muse, Its Long-Planned Personal AI Agent
Meta has launched Muse, a personal AI agent developed under chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. “The product, long in development, was touted as a key next step by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his recent 6,500-word manifesto,” reports Axios. From the report: Muse, as the agent is known, exists in a chat interface, similar to a text thread. It’s designed to be more proactive and lo … ⌘ Read more

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Australia To Let Social Media Users ‘Opt Out’ of Algorithm-Based Feeds
Australia is proposing the “My Feed, My Way” initiative that would force social media platforms to let users over 16 turn off algorithmic recommendations and instead see only posts from people and creators they follow. Platforms that fail to comply could face fines of up to $79 million. CNBC reports: The legislation, which is being draf … ⌘ Read more

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DLSS5VKLayer Wires Up NVIDIA DLSS 5 For Native Linux Games & Steam Play
An interesting new open-source project for those looking to make use of NVIDIA DLSS 5 on Linux is DLSS5VKLayer. The DLSS5VKLayer is a Linux Vulkan layer that works for both native Linux games as well as Steam Play (Proton) Windows games for experimental DLSS 5 support… ⌘ Read more

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A Secret New Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Stuns Telluride
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Telluride just managed one of its best-kept secrets in years, per The Hollywood Reporter. On Sunday night, festival-goers filed into a 650-seat theater with their phones locked away, having no idea what they were about to see, told only that it ran nearly three hours, hadn’t been shown anywhere, and … ⌘ Read more

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LG TVs Caught Spying Even When Offline or On Standby
A Gamers Nexus investigation found that LG smart TVs are almost constantly logging and uploading data about owners and their homes, even while they are offline or in standby mode. “The company’s TV sets scan Wi-Fi networks for nearby devices, record audio logs through their microphones, and use audio and video sampling to recognize exactly what you’re watching from acros … ⌘ Read more

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Google DeepMind Publishes AI-Powered Predictions For Effect of All 9 Billion Mutations to Human DNA
Google DeepMind has released AlphaGenome Atlas, a free research database containing AI-generated predictions for the effects of all 9 billion possible single-letter mutations in the human genome. Built from its AlphaGenome model, the atlas is designed to help scientists interpr … ⌘ Read more

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KDE’s KWin Merges Wayland Commit-Timing Protocol Support
Merged today to the latest KDE KWin compositor development code is support for Wayland’s important commit-timing protocol that is useful for video playback as well as for gamers relying on Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync support… ⌘ Read more

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The Linux Kernel Planning To Remove Around ~55k Lines Of Old ARM Platform Code
For the current Linux 7.3 kernel many older 32-bit ARM platforms are deprecated and in turn orphaning hundreds of drivers only relevant to those out-of-date ARM platforms. The removal of that now deprecated code is planned for the next kernel cycle or two… ⌘ Read more

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Teen Reading Slumps to Worst This Century Due to Surge in Screen Time
Teen reading, math, and science scores have fallen to their lowest levels since international PISA testing began in 2000, with 15-year-olds now reading at roughly the level previously expected of students a year younger. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) linked weaker results to more screen time, less rea … ⌘ Read more

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Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit Is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits, Pulling Them Over
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime … ⌘ Read more

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CHUWI UniBook With Intel Wildcat Lake For A $449 Linux-Friendly Laptop
CHUWI recently launched the UniBook laptop powered by the Intel Core 3 304 “Wildcat Lake” SOC and priced at just $449 USD. Especially with today’s high component pricing, a brand new sub-$500 laptop is extremely rare. Rather than using some dated SoC, it uses Wildcat Lake as Intel’s new value option alternative to the Core 3 Series Ultra “Panther Lake” SoCs. This was our first time testing out Intel Wildcat Lake and that SoC plus the overa … ⌘ Read more

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New Patches Provide HDMI 1.4 3D Mode Support For AMD Radeon Graphics On Linux
It turns out one of the feature limitations of the AMDGPU Linux graphics driver is HDMI 1.4 3D output support with frame packing, top-and-bottom, and side-by-side options for transmitting simultaneous video streams. I wasn’t aware of this limitation for the lack of any 3D displays and many Linux enthusiasts/gamers as well, but if you happen to have a compatible HDMI 1.4 3D display, there are pending patches to finally make this a reality … ⌘ Read more

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AMD Working To ‘Push Rust Deep into the GPU Stack’
Phoronix reports:

AMD is building out what they are describing as an “elite” team of developers for driving Rust code “deep into the GPU stack” from firmware to drivers, shader compilers, and other GPU software in Rust. AMD Senior Fellow Harsh Meno posted this week to LinkedIn about this new effort…

And note this AMD job posting that’s active for hiring a software de … ⌘ Read more

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Linux 7.4 To Support Realtek RTL8127atf & RTL8116af Networking
Queued this past week into the net-next development tree of the latest networking additions for the Linux kernel is enabling support for Realtek’s newer RTL8127atf and RTL8116af wired networking ASICs… ⌘ Read more

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DirectX Support Promoted To Official Target Within LLVM
Over the past four years there has been a lot of work on a DirectX back-end within the LLVM compiler stack. Microsoft has backed the initiative for being able to lower LLVM IR into the DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) for execution by Windows DirectX 12 graphics drivers. This back-end is now officially supported… ⌘ Read more

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FEX 2609 Released With Speedier JIT Performance, JIT Disk Cache Option
FEX 2609 was released overnight as the newest monthly feature release for this open-source emulator that allows running Linux x86_64 binaries on AArch64, including the likes of Steam and Steam Play (Proton) for enabling Windows games to run rather well on ARM64 Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

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LLVM Merges Support For AMD’s RMPCHKD, RMPREAD & RMPOPT Instructions
With the Linux kernel still working toward landing support for AMD’s RMPOPT optimization for helping to reduce overhead on SEV-SNP enabled servers, the LLVM/Clang compiler has in turn prepped for the milestone by landing support for the RMPOPT, RMPREAD, and RMPCHKD instructions for Zen 5 and newer… ⌘ Read more

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Three Cities, 16 Years And $1 Billion Later, ‘Defiant’ Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Opens To Mixed Reviews
It looks like a spaceship hovering over South Los Angeles, writes CNN, with futuristic tube-like elevators and an exhibition of Banksy murals. There’s a room featuring Luke Skywalker’s X-34 Landspeeder, but in its gardens there’s a 19th-century cast of a scu … ⌘ Read more

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Why Google Told Drivers to Drive a Longer Way On Purpose
“A team at Google’s research arm used Google Maps to reroute a small portion of drivers in 10 U.S. cities,” reports SFGate — including San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“Through their experiment, which was published in the journal Nature Cities in June, the researchers sought to evenly spread traffic down more corridors as the drivers head to similar destinations, … ⌘ Read more

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Does Brave Browser Load Faster Than Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge?
The Brave web browser published a new round of benchmarks claiming its desktop browser uses less system resources than Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox — and also loads pages faster.
The blog Linuxiac reports:

According to Brave’s testing, the browser used 44% less CPU, 28% less memory, and 10% less energy on average compared wit … ⌘ Read more

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FreeBSD 14.5 Released With Hardware Support Improvements, Many Bug & Security Fixes
For those that haven’t yet made the move to FreeBSD 15 with still relying on FreeBSD 14 in production, out today is FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE… ⌘ Read more

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Switzerland’s Federal Government Tests Open-Source Alternatives to Microsoft on 3,000 Computers
Switzerland has a population of 9,154,242. And its federal government just launched a pilot program to test open source alternatives to Microsoft 365 on 3,000 workstations, reports the blog It’s FOSS. “That’s about 7% of the federal workforce.”

The target is to complete the migration by … ⌘ Read more

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Instead of Fighting AI, Some Teachers Work It Into Their Lessons
Last year the writing program at the University of Baltimore used an app that tracks students while they’re writing in Google Docs, offering teachers a video playing back revisions “with a scoreboard of all the edits, pastes and minutes spent on it,” writes the Washington Post. “Is it surveillance? Yes, I think obviously,” says the program’s direc … ⌘ Read more

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Mysterious x86 CPU Already Has APX, x86S Where Intel Left Off For Legacy-Free x86
The mystery deepens around an x86 implementation from a corporate entity other than AMD and Intel and has been making some very intriguing changes for coming from a seeming start-up. Beyond 16 tile and 32 tile AMX implementations that already surpass Intel’s current Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) capabilities in shipping Xeon CPUs, new disclosures were made today concerning Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), Flexible Return and E … ⌘ Read more

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A Man Charged His EV at a Dealership - and Was Billed $418
The EV blog Electrek reports:

A Clinton Township, Michigan man was charged $418 for a single EV charging session at Elder Hyundai’s Macomb Township store after finding the charger listed as publicly available on the EVgo app, but didn’t discover the charges until after wrapping up his 40-ish minute charging session. “I was flabbergasted,” explained Stanle … ⌘ Read more

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‘She Lost Her Sight. Her Billionaire Father Bet On a Daring New Treatment.’
“Billionaire Bill Ackman’s life was upended this February when his 26-year-old daughter collapsed in her Brooklyn apartment, suffering a brain hemorrhage that would render her unable to move, speak or see,” writes the Washingon Post. But then…

The hedge fund manager did what any good father would do — at least, any father … ⌘ Read more

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