Researchers Discover How To Lead Dying Coral Reefs To a ‘Fast And Full Recovery’
Gizmodo reports:
Roughly 84.4% of the world’s coral reefs suffered bleaching-levels of heat stress during the last major marine heat wave from January 2023 to September 2025, with over half already lost compared to coral coverage in the 1950s… But there’s some good news, thanks to a new study published this Wed … ⌘ Read more
Websites Are Closing Their Doors to AI Agents
The Verge reports:
OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won’t play nice?
In recent weeks, users of services like Meta’s Muse, xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s Dots, and Instinct have reporte … ⌘ Read more
More Details on Arrested Saudi OpenAI Employee, Who is Seeking Release on Bail
More details are emerging about Saudi OpenAI employee Abdulrahman Alfozan, who was arrested by the FBI for allegedly planting a recording device in an executive conference room. Previously Alfozan “was an engineer at Meta,” notes the New York Times, “before joining a start-up that went through Y Combinator, the Silicon V … ⌘ Read more
LinkedIn Fights AI Slop, Now 40% of Its Long-Form Posts
“Even LinkedIn is getting tired of your AI-written posts,” writes CNN, reporting that the Microsoft-owned, job-oriented social media site “is upping its fight against slop.”
A report published in July by Pangram, a research firm that tracks AI content online, found that more than 40% of long-form posts on the platform were AI-generated, compared to around 30% on X a … ⌘ Read more
@jecxjo@sh0.xyz Pics or it didn’t happen!!
I thought modifying the Caps key was cool. Now I discovered Home Row mods and gave em’ a try … Dear goodness! There’s no going back from this xD
Programming Language Popularity Increases for R, Julia, and Rust (but Not Go)
TechRepublic reports:
The TIOBE Index is a monthly indicator of programming-language popularity based on factors including skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. The October 2026 rankings show a largely stable top 10, with R overtaking SQL and Julia returning to the top 20 for the first time in three yea … ⌘ Read more
Releasing Palm OS Archive, Developer Rediscovers Working Virus After 25 Years
Long-time Slashdot reader ardiri remembers his days writing applications for the Palm OS. And he’s now released approximately 1.5 GB of historical Palm OS development resources, “accumulated during the early days of handheld computing and preserved on hard drive backups for more than 25 years… to preserve the tools and … ⌘ Read more
@jecxjo@sh0.xyz Awwwww! A beardie! 😃
It Turns Out Intel TDX Doesn’t Need So Much Cache Flushing
Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) for confidential computing with VMs has assumed the need to perform cache flushing when transitioning memory between KeyIDs used by the total memory encryption (MKTME) for unique AES encryption keys. But it’s turned out to be unneeded and the Linux kernel is working now to reduce the excessive cache flushing… ⌘ Read more
FSF Criticizes Raspberry Pi DRM Blocking RAM Upgrades
The Free Software Foundation “has never supported Raspberry Pi,” writes their deputy directory Sean O’Brien, “as it depends on nonfree software for the boot process, leaving an important part of the computer outside the user’s control.”
But they’re now decrying “an even more intrusive restriction on user freedom” — the binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your a … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.4 Features Very Exciting With Radeon HDMI 2.1 By Default, AMD PerfOpt, Apple M4
The Linux 7.3 kernel is expected to be released as stable later today and with that version there are many exciting changes and improvements. However, the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window will then open up and there are even more exciting changes expected to be merged for this follow-on kernel cycle. Here is a preview of some of the many exciting feature changes expected for Linux 7.4… ⌘ Read more
Omarchy Gets The Web Browser Launching Faster By Avoiding XDG Overhead
Omarchy 4.0.5 released this weeekend as the newest version of this Arch Linux based distribution built around the Hyprland desktop. Omarchy 4.0.5 pulls in the latest Linux 7.2 stable kernel with BORE scheduler, updates against the Qt 6.12 toolkit, and a variety of smaller improvements… ⌘ Read more
Servo Gets CSS Grid Working, Threadboost Offering Big Speed-Ups
Servo’s August status report has finally appeared for outlining progress made on this open-source, Rust-based browser engine. This follows the recent release of the Servo 0.6 software, including the Servoshell demo browser… ⌘ Read more
Tech Journalist Robert X Cringely has Died
BoingBoing reports:
Mark Stephens, better known under the pen name Robert X. Cringely, died last week at 73. Stephens chronicled the tech industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s — the age of Bill Gates’ rise, Steve Jobs’ repose, the dawn of the world wide web — and produced the famed documetary Triumph of the Nerds, based on his own bestselling Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon … ⌘ Read more
Today’s putt.day (#158) is alot of fun, and has a real mini-golf-in-space vibe (complete with a windmill!) https://putt.day/s/yDg4fWjZgG99
Saudi OpenAI Employee’s Arrest Revives Fears US Tech Companies Are Hiring Spies
That Saudi national working at OpenAI and arrested by the FBI “has not been charged with foreign espionage,” writes the Washington Post, “and the U.S. government has not said whether he was acting alone or as an agent of a foreign government.”
But “there are signs that the U.S. government is exploring the latter possi … ⌘ Read more
Woman Arrested After Blocking Delivery Robot to Protest Job Displacements
A Philadelphia newscast reports on a grey-haired lady who allegedly refused to move out of the path of a delivery robot as a form of protest because “I know they’re taking the jobs of human delivery workers.”
She was arrested, but says her actions were protected speech:
According to police, Marvin repeatedly blocked the ro … ⌘ Read more
🎶 “Like This” - Girl Talk https://youtu.be/vRbMp0IAQvI?is=_E5k7ETg5QW0_JAY
The transition from Karen Carpenter to Metallica + Lil Mama (towards the end) is sublime.
Synchronous Queues For VirtIO-FS Show Huge Performance Potential
VirtIO-FS as the shared file-system for transferring data between guest VMs to/from a host server is showing some promising performance results with pending code for allowing synchronous queues rather than always being asynchronous… ⌘ Read more
Does a Universal Basic Income Bring Long-Term Changes?
For more than a year, The New York Times followed recipients of a universal basic income program who received $1,330 a month for an entire year.
There were benefits, but also the everyday challenges of being poor, and turning their life around “did not turn out to be quite that simple.”
Across Silicon Valley, experimental guaranteed income programs have quietly take … ⌘ Read more
ReactOS Can Now Be Installed & Used With Its NTFS Driver
The ReactOS open-source operating system has seen its NTFS file-system driver mature to the point that it can be finally used for installing and using ReactOS with it. NTFS formatting support is also finally now possible with this driver too… ⌘ Read more
Court Agrees with EFF: Utah’s VPN Law Demands a Technical Impossibility
“When state lawmakers attempt to rewrite how the internet works,” argues an EFF blog post, “users rely on courts to recognize that laws can’t make technical impossibilities a reality.”
“That’s why we were happy to see that a court has blocked Utah’s attempt to outlaw the privacy protections of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).”
In a w … ⌘ Read more
MapQuest Shows Location of Flock (and Other ALPR) Cameras
MapQuest creates a new layer (that can be toggled on and off), Gizmodo reports:
After promising not to comply with the Trump administration’s “Lake America” gimmick, the platform announced a new “Surveillance Layer” that displays the locations of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), including those from Flock Safety. Per MapQuest, its new tool will identify … ⌘ Read more
Blue Origin Announces $330M Upgrades to Rocket Facilities for ‘Multiple Flights Per Week’
“Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin said Friday it plans to make extensive upgrades to its Florida launch facilities,” reports CNBC, “with the goal of supporting multiple flights per week by the end of the decade.”
“The company will add two more launch and landing pads for New Glenn, its heavy-lift, partial … ⌘ Read more
@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Nice video effect work indeed! Such a welcome change to all the overproduced music videos. I didn’t come across Castle Rat before. The Rat Queen has a great voice. If there only was less doom/stoner metal influence in their heavy metal. ;-)
Linux Maintainers Can Now Submit AI-Generated Code Without Declaring It
Linux maintainers “have ruled that people no longer have to declare their LLM usage,” reports XDA Developers, “as Torvalds himself calls a ban on AI ‘utterly stupid.’”
The first part of this story comes via a message sent to the Linux mailing list. It announces one of the major changes decided during the Maintainers Summit on Octo … ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de @itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Thank you! Yeah, riding a balloon into the sunset must be nice. Although, probably also really cold this time of year. On second thought, you got heating up top, so might not be too bad. :-)
@movq@www.uninformativ.de I see. Soft start and soft stop are great features. Probably also helped longevity of the desk itself. Not sure if something could be rigged up with a resistor here to dampen it a bit. Electronics are really not my cup of tea.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m probably also not good enough. I just thought that it might be kinda alright, there’s no shortage of work, one’s hopefully not replaced soon by automation and so on. Not sure.
And yes, there are a myriad of jobs that are extremely underpaid, have awful working hours, ruining your health and where you get treated like shit.
The outlook is poor.
@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com That’s so much more handy. :-)
insert since I never use that one, while Caps got sacrificed for Ctrl.
@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Hahaha, no worries! :-D
All I use Insert for is Shift+Insert to paste sometimes. Other than that, it’s always annoying to switch to replacement mode when I accidentally hit the Insert key it instead of Home or End, depending on the keyboard.
Deno Acquired by Cloudflare, Will Work on Open Source Self-Hosting Platform for Applications
“Cloudflare has acquired Deno, the company behind the [server-side] JavaScript and TypeScript runtime created by Ryan Dahl, the inventor of Node.js,” Forbes reported last week.
But Deno “has no future at Cloudflare, which will maintain the runtime for another year before ending its d … ⌘ Read more
MeshXFS: AI Adapts XFS Into A Clustered File-System
MeshXFS is a clustered open-source file-system in which “no human wrote any of its own code”. Depending upon your views of AI, not necessarily something you want to hear for entrusting your data in an AI-created solution. Instead, Claude Opus was tasked with adapting the XFS file-system driver into a clustered file-system… ⌘ Read more
Personal Data for Millions of California Students Stolen in Massive Breach
Millions of current and former students at California’s public school have had their data stolen — including names, date of birth, and addresses — stolen in a breach, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The breach affects students “who took the state’s mandated standardized tests that annually assess their academic proficiency, ed … ⌘ Read more
Will New Documentary Make Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes More Sympathetic?
TechCrunch writes:
“Isn’t it weird that I, like, did a TV show about kind of a business scam, and you got in trouble for like … a business scam?” comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder gently asks Elizabeth Holmes.
One month before the notorious Theranos CEO surrendered to begin her 11-year criminal fraud sentence in 202 … ⌘ Read more
Scientists Discover Why Microplastics Trigger Inflammation
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Microplastics are a source of extreme concern for health: the presence of these tiny pieces of plastic has been linked to heart attacks, stroke, dementia and brain tumors. But what drives these associations is unclear. Now a study published in Nature offers a tantalizing clue: microplastics int … ⌘ Read more
There appears to be a rush a disgruntled Linux users switching to NetBSD:
https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/117451701775023949
They even got a ton of new donations (which, funnily, broke their little progress bar):
https://cannot.understand.computer/kunev/p/1791449917.947134
So… donations for @netbsd@netbsd over the last few years look like this:
2020 - $46k 2021 - $52k 2022 - $44k 2023 - $60k 2024 - $40k 2025 - $79kAnd in 2026 $120k so far!
And why is all that? Because of this:
Do not commit tainted code to the repository.
If you commit code that was not written by yourself, double check that the license on that code permits import into the NetBSD source repository, and permits free distribution. Check with the author(s) of the code, make sure that they were the sole author of the code and verify with them that they did not copy any other code.
Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta’s Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.
https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html
This official guideline is much more “tame” and “diplomatic” than the overall “vibe” (sic) on the Fediverse: NetBSD basically says no to AI as much as possible.
And, apparently, this attracts lots of users and donors. Maybe there’s still some hope after all?
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m way too clumsy to do actual craftsmanship. 😖 I had this janitor / delivery driver job once, that was great, and I’d love to do that again. Doesn’t exist anymore, though, and paid like shit.
Google Updates Android Earthquake Alerts With 200+ Regions
Google is expanding its Android Earthquake Alerts System from 98 to more than 200 regions worldwide, using smartphone sensors to detect early earthquake activity and warn users before potentially dangerous shaking begins. The update also enhances the system’s “Be Ready” alerts with estimated earthquake magnitudes, epicenter information, maps showing affected … ⌘ Read more
Linux Lands Fix for Rare, Varying SMP Boot Hangs Affecting Kernels Since 2024
Among the flurry of last minute patch activity ahead of tomorrow’s presumed Linux 7.3 stable kernel release is a fix for addressing some rare hangs at boot time. The reports varied but ultimately tracked down to a kernel change made two years ago… ⌘ Read more
GNOME’s New Local/Cloud AI Chat App Gains More Features
Coming about the past few months has been Moose as a GNOME-aligned AI chat application built around GTK4 and libadwaita. It began as a local AI chat app for the GNOME desktop and grew to support cloud AI services as well. This past week marked the latest feature release for Moose… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Lands Last-Minute Fixes For Samsung 990 PRO & 990 EVO Plus SSDs
Ahead of the Linux 7.3 stable kernel expected to be released tomorrow, last minute workarounds were merged for the Samsung 990 PRO and Samsung 990 EVO Plus NVMe solid state drives… ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.1 Brings New Hardware Support & Important Security Fix
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.1 was released on Friday as the latest update to this community-maintained tablet/smartphone Ubuntu Linux platform. Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.5 was also released as a maintenance update for the prior series… ⌘ Read more
Valve fix Zero Company crashing on Steam Machine with the latest major game update
Zero Company recently had a major upgrade, with it crashing on Steam Machine and probably other SteamOS / Linux systems - which Valve have solved.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/valve-fix-zero-company-crashing-on-steam-machin … ⌘ Read more
Steam Client Beta for October 16 brings another round of startup performance improvements
I do love a bit of competition between stores don’t you? Valve’s latest Steam Client Beta for October 16th brings more speed.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/steam-client-beta-for-october-16-brings-another-round-of-startup-pe … ⌘ Read more
SteamOS 3.9.3 Beta arrives with improved support for Steam Frame wireless adapter
Valve released SteamOS 3.9.3 Beta with another set of upgrades, and now the Steam Frame should connect better with the Steam Machine.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/steamos-3-9-3-beta-arrives-with-improved-suppor … ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.20 brings more improvements for ARM64EC, XML validation and CDROMs
The Wine 11.20 development release is out now bringing another set of improvements for running Windows apps / games on SteamOS / Linux.
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more
Astronomers Discover the First Green Star
Astronomers have identified what may be the first genuinely green star, a white dwarf called WD J1330+6435 located about 326 light-years from Earth. Space.com reports: The researchers found that some dead star white dwarfs can go a little green around the gills after snacking on orbiting planets. An example of this is WD J1330+6435, a cool white dwarf located around 326 light-years away, … ⌘ Read more