Anthropic Raises $30 Billion at $380 Billion Valuation, Eyes IPO This Year
Anthropic has raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that values the Claude maker at $380 billion as the company prepares for an initial public offering that could come as early as this year. Investors in the new round include Singapore sovereign fund GIC, Coatue, D.E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, MGX, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund … ⌘ Read more

Palo Alto Chose Not To Tie China To Hacking Campaign For Fear of Retaliation From Beijing
An anonymous reader shares a report: Palo Alto Networks opted not to tie China to a global cyberespionage campaign the firm exposed last week over concerns that the cybersecurity company or its clients could face retaliation from Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter. The sources … ⌘ Read more

AMD Video Decode Now Unified Between RadeonSI & RADV Vulkan Video
Merged today to Mesa 26.1-devel is unifying of the AMD video decode implementation between the RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Plans Smartphone-Style Permission Prompts for Windows 11 Apps
Microsoft is planning to bring smartphone-style app permission prompts to Windows 11, requiring apps to get explicit user consent before they can access sensitive resources like the file system, camera and microphone. The company’s Windows Platform engineer Logan Iyer said the move was prompted by applications increasingly overriding u … ⌘ Read more

SPARC & Alpha CPU Ports Still Seeing Activity In 2026 With Linux 7.0
In addition to all of the exciting Intel and AMD x86_64 enhancements that have been landing this week so far for the Linux 7.0 kernel, the aging SPARC, Alpha, and Motorola 680x0 “m68k” CPU ports have also seen some patches for this new kernel… ⌘ Read more

Border Officials Are Said To Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser
An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso’s airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, … ⌘ Read more

Arch Linux Running Well On LoongArch - Loongson 3B6000 Benchmarks
Earlier this month I posted benchmarks of the Loongson 3B6000 for this 12-core / 24-thread LoongArch Chinese CPU with DDR4 ECC memory. Those initial benchmarks were done with Debian LoongArch64 while since then I’ve shifted over to using Arch Linux on LoongArch. ⌘ Read more

Amazon Engineers Want Claude Code, but the Company Keeps Pushing Its Own Tool
Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company’s in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic’s Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption o … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS Now Available With Linux 6.17 HWE Kernel
Canonical released Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS today as the newest point release to the Noble Numbat… ⌘ Read more

The “Are You Sure?” Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind
The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini – will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking “are you sure?,” according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains.

The behavior, known in the … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Networking: Prepping For WiFi 8 UHR While Dropping Last Parallel Port Ethernet Driver
The Linux 7.0 networking pull request showcases two extremes and the diversity and robustness of the open-source kernel ecosystem. Linux 7.0 is laying the groundwork for WiFi 8 Ultra-High Reliability (UHR) support while this kernel version is also bidding farewell to the last Ethernet driver for use over parallel printer ports… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Brings A Significant Improvement For Workqueue Rescuer
The Linux kernel’s workqueue for async task handling within a dedicated kernel thread is seeing some useful improvements with Linux 7.0… ⌘ Read more

Anthropic To Cover Costs of Electricity Price Increases From Its Data Centers
AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to “estimate and cover” consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay fo … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Performance Events Prep For Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids
The performance “perf” events changes for the Linux 7.0 kernel are continuing to prepare for next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to current Xeon 6 Granite Rapids… ⌘ Read more

Meta Auditor EY Raised Red Flag on Data-Center Accounting
Meta Platforms’ latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant’s auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta’s accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a “critical a … ⌘ Read more

Intel Is Making It Easier In Linux 7.0 To Monitor Energy Use For A Group Of Tasks
Intel has upstreamed some Resource Control “resctrl” improvements to Linux 7.0 for enhanced telemetry monitoring. This is the good kind of telemetry with this new code being useful for being able to monitor how much energy or work is attributed to a group of tasks / process IDs on the system… ⌘ Read more

Media Driver Updates Merged For Linux 7.0 - Still Without The AMD ISP4 Driver
All of the media subsystem driver updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel and brings some new work around AV1 acceleration as well as other driver updates… ⌘ Read more

US Hacking Tool Boss Stole and Sold Exploits To Russian Broker That Could Target Millions of Devices, DOJ Says
Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris’s hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers – including the Russian govern … ⌘ Read more

Siri’s AI Overhaul Delayed Again
Apple’s long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting.

The new Siri – first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 – struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and s … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Safety Researcher Quits, Warning ‘World is in Peril’
An anonymous reader shares a report: An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying the “world is in peril” in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team “constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most,” citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks.

Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO D … ⌘ Read more

With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet
Ring’s Super Bowl ad on Sunday promoted “Search Party,” a feature that lets a user post a photo of a missing dog in the Ring app and triggers outdoor Ring cameras across the neighborhood to use AI to scan for a match. 404 Media argues the cheerful premise obscures what the Amazon-owned company has become: a massive, consumer-deployed surveillance network.

Rin … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Graphics Drivers See New AMD Hardware, Intel Xe SR-IOV + Multi-Device SVM
The massive set of Linux kernel graphics/display driver Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates were sent out and merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel. This also includes the growing work around accelerator “accel” drivers for AI NPUs and the like… ⌘ Read more

Is Linux Mint Burning Out? Developers Consider Longer Release Cycle
BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Mint developers say they are considering adopting a longer development cycle, arguing that the project’s current six month cadence plus LMDE releases leaves too little room for deeper work. In a recent update, the team reflected on its incremental philosophy, independence from upstream decisions like Snap, and … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Rejects MMC Changes For Linux 7.0 Cycle: “Complete Garbage”
The Linux MultiMediaCard “MMC” subsystem was set to see some new hardware support, optimized support for secure erase/trim on some eMMCs, and a variety of other improvements. But all of the MMC changes are rejected and will be for the duration of the Linux 7.0 cycle due to an apparent lack of testing and vetting via linux-next that led Linus Torvalds to calling it “complete garbage” and “untested crap”… ⌘ Read more

A Hellish ‘Hothouse Earth’ Getting Closer, Scientists Say
The world is closer than thought to a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said. From a report: Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate … ⌘ Read more

For several days again, YouTube fucks up all the Atom feeds every European morning. A bunch of hours just 404s. :-(

Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Development Now Experimenting With AI Code Review
Well known open-source Linux graphics driver developer David Airlie of Red Hat, who is the co-maintainer of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display drivers and accelerator “accel” drivers, announced experimental work on AI-drive code/patch review for these open-source kernel drivers… ⌘ Read more

Sabayon Linux Creator Now Developing Gentoo-Based, Immutable matrixOS
Longtime Linux users may recall the Sabayon Linux distribution that was Gentoo-based and focused on a nice out-of-the-box experience from the mid 2000s through 2019 before fading away after 2018. Sabayon Linux creator Fabio Erculiani wrote in to Phoronix today to announce he’s begun working on a new Linux distribution called matrixOS… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de They don’t notice anything at all. :-(

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I also had to laugh. :-D And that’s what crossed my mind for a splitsecond, too. Two decades ago or so, that would have worked. But these days are long over. Wasn’t it even an INI file or something like that?

US Had Almost No Job Growth in 2025
An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. economy experienced almost zero job growth in 2025, according to revised federal data. On a more encouraging note: hiring has picked up in 2026. Preliminary data had indicated that the U.S. economy added 584,000 jobs last year. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number after it received additional state data, and found that the labor market had … ⌘ Read more

We just wanted to play one or the other quick round of Rummikub after quitting time and suddenly it’s now three hours later. :-)

EVs Could Be Cheaper To Own Than Gas Cars in Africa by 2040
Electric vehicles accounted for just 1% of new car sales across Africa in 2025, but a study published in Nature Energy by researchers at ETH Zurich finds that EVs paired with solar off-grid charging systems – solar panels, batteries and an inverter – could become cheaper to own than gas-powered equivalents across most of the continent by 2040.

The analys … ⌘ Read more

Chrome 146 Now In Beta With WebNN Origin Trial For Neural Networks In The Browser
Following yesterday’s Chrome 145 release with JPEG-XL support, Chrome 146 today was promoted to the beta channel to help facilitate broader testing of the next round of Chrome/Chromium browser improvements… ⌘ Read more

UK Orders Deletion of Country’s Largest Court Reporting Archive
The UK’s Ministry of Justice has ordered the deletion of the country’s largest court reporting archive [non-paywalled source], a database built by data analysis company Courtsdesk that more than 1,500 journalists across 39 media organizations have used since the lord chancellor approved the project in 2021.

Courtsdesk’s research found that journa … ⌘ Read more

Are CDs Making a Comeback? A Statistical Analysis
Reports of the compact disc’s death may have been slightly premature, according to a new analysis from Stat Significant that finds CD sales as a share of U.S. music industry revenue have quietly stabilized after years of steep decline. RIAA data shows CD revenue share fell from 7.15% in 2018 to 3.04% in 2022 but has since flatlined at roughly 3%, coming in at 3.14% in 2023 … ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc B390 Panther Lake Generational Performance Since The Gen9 Graphics Era
Last week on Phoronix we provided initial Linux graphics benchmarks for the new Xe3-based Arc B390 graphics found with the higher-end Panther Lake SoCs with 12 Xe cores. Those benchmarks showed great gains over recent generations of Intel graphics like with Lunar Lake, Meteor Lake, and even Alder/Raptor Lake… But what if you hold onto your laptop for even longer? In this article is an Intel integrated graphics comparison look … ⌘ Read more

Okay, so the funniest thing that has happened at work in the realm of AI so far is this:

So this guy (that holds a certain position of power) wants people to use more AI, meaning people are expected to install a set of AI tools on their laptops. But, of course, he doesn’t want to write proper documentation for this, because that would be silly monkey work, right? So he conjures up some AI prompts that are intended to make the AI agent install all this stuff by itself.

Do you see where this is going? Can you see the punchline?

That’s right! Since none of this AI stuff is deterministic, every setup is different. 🤦‍♀️ Like, 10, 20 systems, all set up a little different and people wonder why this or that doesn’t work as expected.

Okay, it’s not funny.

Well it’s ~2am and I finally defeated the AI player in a game of Frontier Crown 👑 – On that note I’m now going to bed, I’ve made so many improvements to the aesthetics (UX) of the game, the mechanics, and it’s now quite nicely playable 👌 G’night! 😴

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … at least this story was entertaining to read. 😅 If only Firefox’s storage format wasn’t so convoluted, you could have just shut it down and removed all the unwanted tabs. 🫤

AMD ROCm TheRock 7.11 Released, Ubuntu Making Progress On Shipping ROCm Packages
Two useful bits of ROCm news today for those interested in AMD’s open-source GPU compute stack… ⌘ Read more

HP Now Rents Gaming Laptops
HP has quietly launched a gaming laptop subscription service called the OMEN Gaming Subscription that lets customers pay a monthly fee to use one of several gaming laptops but never actually own the hardware, even after paying well past the machine’s retail price.

The service ranges from $50 a month for an HP Victus 15-inch laptop with an RTX 4050 to $130 a month for an Omen Max 16 with an RTX 5080. At current sale prices, … ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint Developing New Wayland-Compatible Screensaver
The Linux Mint developers have been hard at work continuing to develop new features following their recent Mint 22.3 release. There is continued enhancements around keyboard support, a new administration tool for users, and there are also considerations being made around moving to a longer development cycle between Linux Mint releases… ⌘ Read more

Sony Will Ship Its Final Blu-ray Recorders This Month
Sony will ship its last batch of Blu-ray recorders this month, according to Kyodo News, ending the company’s decades-long run in a product category it helped create. The recorders targeted exclusively the Japanese domestic market, where households used them to record broadcast television. Sony had already stopped manufacturing the devices and recordable discs about a year … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Now Defaults To Intel TSX Auto Mode For Performance Benefits On Newer CPUs
The x86/cpu changes have been merged for Linux 7.0 and include finally setting the default Intel TSX mode to “auto” rather than being off by default… ⌘ Read more

T-Mobile Will Live Translate Regular Phone Calls Without an App
T-Mobile is opening registration today for a beta test of Live Translation, an AI-powered feature that will translate live phone calls into more than 50 languages when it launches this spring.

The feature operates at the network level, so it doesn’t require any specific app or device – beta participants simply dial 87 to activate it on a call. T-M … ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases New Compute Runtime, Upstreams More SYCL Code To LLVM
Intel today released a new version of their Compute Runtime stack and IGC graphics compiler for Level Zero and OpenCL usage with their integrated and discrete graphics. Separately they also upstreamed more SYCL code this week into mainline LLVM… ⌘ Read more

Moderna Says FDA Refuses To Review Its Application for Experimental Flu Shot
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Food and Drug Administration has refused to start a review of Moderna’s application for its experimental flu shot, the company announced Tuesday, in another sign of the Trump administration’s influence on tightening vaccine regulations in the U.S. Moderna said the move is inconsi … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Scores +12% In UDP Network Performance Test From Manually Inlining Function
The core timer changes to the Linux 7.0 kernel score a rather nice performance improvement in a UDP receive network stress test from inlining a function that compilers haven’t been able to tackle with their optimizations… ⌘ Read more

Upstream Wine Making Progress On Patches For Satisfying Adobe Photoshop
There were recently patches for getting the Adobe Photoshop 2025 installer to work on Linux under Wine. Those patches were picked up by Wine-Staging and now more traction is coming for getting those patches into the upstream Wine codebase, some of which have now been merged… ⌘ Read more