Meta Signs $27 Billion AI Infrastructure Deal With Nebius
AI infrastructure company Nebius signed a deal to provide up to $27 billion in AI computing capacity to Meta over the next five years, including a guaranteed $12 billion purchase by 2027. Reuters reports: Under the agreement, Meta will also buy an additional $15 billion worth of capacity planned by Nebius over the coming five years if it is not sold to other cu … ⌘ Read more

Data Centers Overtake Offices In US Construction-Spending Shift
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Spending on data center projects in the U.S. has exploded, surpassing offices for the first time at the end of last year. It’s a trend Matt Kunz saw early on when Meta built a computing hub outside Columbus, Ohio. Other tech companies soon swarmed into the area, drawn by its stable economy, univer … ⌘ Read more

Fedora Workstation 44 Beta Benchmarks On The AMD Ryzen AI Max Framework Desktop
Since last week’s Fedora 44 Beta release I have been testing out this upcoming Fedora Linux version on a few systems in the lab, most notably with the Framework Desktop powered by the powerful AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 “Strix Halo”. Fedora Workstation 44 Beta has been looking nice and running stable albeit in some instances seeing lower performance at this point than Fedora Workstation 43 but overall in good shape. ⌘ Read more

Court Rules TCL’s ‘QLED’ TVs Aren’t Truly QLED
A German court ruled that TCL misled consumers by marketing certain TVs as “QLED” when they “do not deliver the color reproduction expected from QLED TVs.” It has ordered the company to stop advertising or selling those models in Germany. TechRadar reports: The case was filed by Samsung, which claimed that TCL was running deceptive advertising, and more court cases on the same topic are … ⌘ Read more

Imagination’s Open-Source PowerVR Vulkan Driver Now Plays Nicely With Zink OpenGL
The past several years Imagination Tech has been investing in an upstream and open-source DRM kernel graphics driver as well as a PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa. Their Mesa focus has exclusively been on the PowerVR Vulkan driver with the plans all along to use the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. With next quarter’s Mesa 26.1 release, that goal is being realized with Zink now working nicely atop the PowerVR Vulkan driver … ⌘ Read more

Intel Graphics Driver Preps For UHBR DP Tunnels With Linux 7.1
A round of Intel graphics driver updates were sent today to DRM-Next in staging ahead of April’s Linux 7.1 merge window. The changes in this pull aren’t too particularly exciting with a lot of code refactoring and other work, but there are preparations made for supporting UHBR DP tunnels… ⌘ Read more

Animated ‘Firefly’ Reboot In Development With Nathan Fillion
An animated reboot of Firefly is in early development at 20th Television Animation with Nathan Fillion involved. The project has Joss Whedon’s blessing and will be run by writers Tara Butters and Marc Guggenheim, with early concept art already underway. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “The series would be set in the timeline between the origin … ⌘ Read more

@rrraksamam@twtxt.net They won’t.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That would have been the noble thing to do. It’s more work for me, though. I blocked that idiot and moved on with my life. 🫤

Lenovo Legion Go HID Drivers Queued Ahead Of Linux 7.1
The work by Derek Clark on enhancing the Lenovo Legion Go gaming handheld support for Linux continues panning out nicely. The latest driver effort, the creation of the Lenovo Legion Go and Go S Series HID Drivers to help with controller configuration, is set to be introduced in Linux 7.1… ⌘ Read more

Sodium-Ion Battery Tested for Grid-Scale Storage in Wisconsin
“A new type of battery storage is about to be deployed on the Midwestern grid for the first time,” reports Electrek:

Sodium-ion battery storage manufacturer Peak Energy and global energy company RWE Americas will pilot a passively cooled sodium-ion battery system in eastern Wisconsin on the Midcontinent Independent System Operator network — the fi … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 To Retire UDP-Lite - Allows For Better Performance With Cleansed Code
The upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel cycle is set to retire UDP-Lite support. The UDP-Lite protocol allowed for partial checksums where potentially damaged/corrupted packets are still delivered to the application. Since the Linux 2.6.20 days there has been UDP-Lite support but the kernel is now set to retire it given breakage that has persisted for years and cleaning up the networking code can yield a performance advantage for non-UDP-Lit … ⌘ Read more

RADV Driver Lands Another Optimization: “Missing In RADV For A Very Long Time”
A four year old optimization idea for the RADV driver was scratched off the TODO list last week for next quarter’s Mesa 26.1 release… ⌘ Read more

AMD Preps More Graphics Driver Code For Linux 7.1
Last week yet more AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window happening in April… ⌘ Read more

Android, Epic, and What’s Really Behind Google’s ‘Existential’ Threat to F-Droid
Starting in September, even Android developers not in Google’s Play Store will still be required to register with Google to distribute their apps in Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, with Google continuing “to roll out these requirements globally” four months later. Even developers distributing Android apps on … ⌘ Read more

FSF Threatens Anthropic Over Infringed Copyright: Share Your LLMs Freely
In 2024 Anthropic was sued over claims it infringed copyrights when training LLMs.
But as they try to settle, they may have a problem. The Free Software Foundation announced Friday that Anthropic’s training data apparently even included the book “Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software” — for which the Fre … ⌘ Read more

The UK Will Invest Billions to Build a Nuclear Fusion Industry
The UK’s science minister is announcing details of a five-year, £2.5 billion investment in nuclear fusion, reports the Times of London, “including building one of the world’s first prototype fusion power plants in Nottinghamshire and developing a UK sector projected to employ 10,000 people by 2030.”

Despite the potentially transformative impact … ⌘ Read more

2026’s EV Sales Hit 1.1M - But Europe Surges While North America Slides
Europe’s EV sales for January and February spiked 21% from last year, according to new data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Electrek reports that just in those two months over 600,000 EVs were sold in Europe.

And figures for “rest of world” (which excludes Europe, North America, and China) are up a whopping 84% — with 370,000 EVs … ⌘ Read more

Ask Slashdot: What’s the Best All-Purpose RISC-V System on a Chip Family?
Slashdot reader SysEngineer does embedded/IoT work, but “I want to pick a single system-on-a-chip architecture family and commit to it across multiple product lines — sensor nodes up through edge gateways… I’ve been on one platform for years and want to know what embedded engineers are actually running in production before I comm … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0-rc4 Released With Hang Fixes, Resolves At Least One Performance Regression
We are down to about one month to go until the Linux 7.0 stable release and out today is Linux 7.0-rc4… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Dethrones Arch As ProtonDB’s Top Linux Gamer Desktop Distro
Linux gaming “has gotten to the point where some people claim that Linux runs their games better than Windows does,” according to the Android site XDA Developers. And there’s a new surprise on ProtonDB, an “unofficial” community website with crowdsourced data about videogame compatability with the Linux software/gaming compatability layer P … ⌘ Read more

How One Company Finally Exposed North Korea’s Massive Remote Workers Scam
NBC News investigates North Korea’s “wide-ranging effort to place remote workers at U.S. companies in order to funnel money back to its coffers and, in some cases, steal sensitive information.”

And working with the FBI, one corporate security/investigations company decided to knowingly hire one of North Korea’s remote workers — th … ⌘ Read more

Bcachefs 1.37 Released With Linux 7.0 Support, Erasure Coding Stable & New Sub-Commands
Kent Overstreet today released Bcachefs 1.37 as the newest feature release to this out-of-tree file-system driver and user-space tooling for this next-gen, copy-on-write file-system… ⌘ Read more

Uber Co-founder Travis Kalanick’s Newest Venture? ‘Gainfully Employed Robots’
Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick launched a new venture that “will focus on creating ‘gainfully employed robots’ for the food, mining and transport industries,” Bloomberg reports.

“I left Uber in 2017 heartbroken,” writes Kalanick on the new company’s web site. Kalanick resigned under pressure in 2017, and complains he … ⌘ Read more

Should Banksy Remain Anonymous?
He’s “the most famous anonymous man in the world,” suggests Reuters. But investigating Banksy’s artworks in a bombed Ukrainian village (and other clues in the U.K. and Manhattan) have led them to “a hand-written confession by the artist to a long-ago misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct — a document that revealed, beyond dispute, Banksy’s true identity.”

But Banksy’s long-time lawyer “urged us not to publis … ⌘ Read more

I’m supporting incremental SQLite schema changes to just upgrade from an older database version to whatever the current software version supports. In the past, I already noticed that this is quite expensive in unit tests when each test case runs through the entire schema patches and applies them one by one.

To speed up test execution I now decided that I finally go through the troubles of maintaining both a set of incremental patches and a full schema setup in one go. A unit test verifies that both ways end up with the same structure. This gives me a set of SQLs to check the structures:

SELECT type, name, tbl_name, sql
FROM sqlite_schema
ORDER BY type, name, tbl_name

Unfortunately, the resulting CREATE TABLE SQL queries are formatted differently, depending on whether the full schema was set up in one big step or the structure had been modified with ALTER TABLE. Mainly, added columns are not on their own lines but appended in one physical line. That’s why I wanted an SQL formatting tool. Since I didn’t find one that works decently, I’m now doing some simple string manipulation. Joining consecutive whitespace into a single space character, removing spaces before commas and closing parentheses and spaces after opening parentheses. This works surpringly good enough. Of course, if it fails, the “diff” is absolutely horrendous.

Now for the cool part, my test execution dropped from around 5:05 minutes to just 1:32 minutes! I call that a win.

I just stumbled across PRAGMA table_info('tablename') https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_table_info, PRAGMA foreign_key_list('tablename') and friends. I guess, I have to play with that, now. It’s probably much better to use than the SQL text approach.

New Study Raises Concerns About AI Chatbots Fueling Delusional Thinking
“Emerging evidence indicates that agential AI might validate or amplify delusional or grandiose content, particularly in users already vulnerable to psychosis,” writes Dr Hamilton Morrin, a psychiatrist and researcher at King’s College in London, in a paper published last week in the Lancet Psychiatry. Morrin and a colleague had already … ⌘ Read more

New Documentary Exposes the Truth Behind That 1967 ‘Bigfoot’ Footage
There’s a surprise in a new documentary about that Bigfoot film shot in 1967 by Roger Patterson, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Capturing Bigfoot “builds to a big reveal: freshly surfaced film that appears to show a woodsy dress rehearsal for one of the world’s most enduring hoaxes.”

In the new footage — from a Kodak reel dat … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Lands Improvements To Deal With Upcoming Rust Changes, Build Reproducibility
Merged to mainline yesterday for Linux 7.0 were yet more Rust changes in preparing for upcoming Rust releases as well as enhancing the kernel build reproducibility when engaging the Rust code… ⌘ Read more

Hangs & Performance Regression On Large Systems Fixed For Linux 7.0-rc4
This week’s “sched/urgent” pull request was sent out today of scheduler updates for the ongoing Linux 7.0 cycle. Notable this week are fixing some hangs as well as a possible performance regression on large systems… ⌘ Read more

KDE Linux Adds Apple APFS File-System Support, Workaround For Frustrating AMDGPU Issue
In addition to GNOME OS seeing recent improvements, KDE Linux continues seeing more enhancements too for this leading reference platform for showcasing the KDE Plasma desktop… ⌘ Read more

Does Canada Need Nationalized, Public AI?
While AI CEOs worry governments might nationalize AI, others are advocating for something similar. Canadian security professional Bruce Schneier and Harvard data scientist Nathan Sanders published this call to action in Canada’s most widely-read newspaper (with a readership over 6 million): “Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI.”

While there are Canadian AI companies, they remain for-profit e … ⌘ Read more

SuperTux 0.7 Released With Enhanced Graphics, Level Redesign
SuperTux 0.7 officially released overnight for this nostalgic open-source game now seeing its first new release since December 2021. SuperTux 0.7 brings many significant improvements for this open-source game inspired by Super Mario… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de For sure. Time for an absue report.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks! 🙌

Another vibe coded bot, I guess. 🤦‍♀️

@prologic@twtxt.net Welcome back to your main home! :-)

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me In case you’re into terminal clients, you might like tt. We finally managed to abolished our GitLab instance, so I would need to make the code available to the public differently.

New Freenet Network Launches, Along With ‘River’ Group Chat
Wikipedia describes Freenet as “a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication,” released in the year 2000. “Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke,” Wikipedia adds. (And in 2000 Clarke answered questions from Slashdot’s readers…)

And now Ian Clarke (aka Sanity — Slashdot reader #1,431 … ⌘ Read more

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me Oh boy, what a story! The infrastructure is indeed in need of overhaul. I’m glad you were so lucky in these circumstances.

(Btw. you posted the same message twice with just five seconds apart. I’m replying to the later one. Not sure if this is a client bug (like attempting to edit) or just operator error. ;-))

And we’re back! 1st test trip 👌

Will AI Bring ‘the End of Computer Programming As We Know It’?
Long-time tech journalist Clive Thompson interviewed over 70 software developers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and start-ups for a new article on AI-assisted programming. It’s title?

“Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It.”

Published in the prestigious New York Times Magazine, the article even cites long-time programm … ⌘ Read more

America’s First Large-Scale Offshore Wind Project Finally Finishes Construction
It’s America’s first large-scale offshore wind project, reports WBUR — enough clean energy to power 400,000 homes in Massachusetts from 62 offshore wind turbines generating 800 megawatts.

But it took a while… The plant’s first construction delay happened back in 2019, they point out — and then “Just three months ag … ⌘ Read more

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me I am reasonably happy with jenny. If I find time for a twtxt project, I would like to make a web page that works as follows: you point it to your own twtxt feed (as a URL parameter), and then it shows you all the feeds referenced by your “# follow =” lines. So, if I put this up, anyone could use it to view their own feed, with no login required. (Probably a difficult project. For example, I’d want to make sure the backend couldn’t be tricked into helping ddos a web server by trying to fetch lots of “feeds” from it. Anyway, I have too many other projects.)

Open-Source “GreenBoost” Driver Aims To Augment NVIDIA GPUs vRAM With System RAM & NVMe To Handle Larger LLMs
An open-source, independently developed Linux kernel module called GreenBoost aims to augment the dedicated video memory on NVIDIA discrete GPUs with system memory and NVMe storage. The intent here with GreenBoost is a CUDA caching layer to more easily run larger AI models for LLMs that otherwise won’t fit solely in your graphics card’s dedicated vRAM… ⌘ Read more

How a Raspberry Pi Saved the Super Nintendo’s Infamously Inferior Version Of ‘Doom’
“Just the anachronism of seeing Doom, one of the poster children for the moral panic around violent video games, on a Nintendo console is novel,” writes Kotaku — especially with the console’s underpowered “Super FX” coprocessor

Hampered by a nearly unplayable framerate, especially in later levels, and mired by … ⌘ Read more

Are U.S. Utilities Trying to Delay Easy-to-Use Solar ‘Balcony’ Panels?
Plug-in (or “balcony”) solar panels can also be hung out a window or be set up in a backyard, reports NPR. They channel energy from the sun straight into a home’s electrical outlet, generating enough electricity to power a refrigerator or microwave while “displacing electricity that otherwise would come in from the grid…”

But what’s hol … ⌘ Read more

Gaming Site Editor Jailbreaks an Amazon Echo Show
“A few developers found a way, for now, to turn a few of these increasingly mediocre Amazon Show devices into friendly, useful, open computers,” writes the co-founder of the gaming/tech news site Aftermath. For under $50 each, he bought some used versions of the devices and tested their instructions, partly to escape the full-screen ads Amazon began showing late last year, an … ⌘ Read more

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me https://twtxt.dev/clients.html

Should Keycaps Use Text or Glyphs for Delete, Return, Tab, Caps Lock, and Shift?
“The new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models feature a keyboard change,” reports MacRumors:

On the U.S. English version of the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro keyboards, the tab, caps lock, shift, return, and delete keycaps now have glyphs on them. On previous-generation models, these keys are labeled with text instead … ⌘ Read more