A YouTuber’s $3M Movie Nearly Beat Disney’s $40M Thriller at the Box Office
Mark Fischbach, the YouTube creator known as Markiplier who has spent nearly 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers by playing indie-horror video games on camera, has pulled off something that most independent filmmakers never manage – a self-financed, self-distributed debut feature that has … ⌘ Read more

Experimental Out-Of-Tree Code Aims To Provide HDMI 2.1 FRL For AMD Linux Driver
One of the limitations of the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver has been the lack of its support for HDMI 2.1 and later. AMD has wanted to support HDMI 2.1+ functionality under Linux but it’s been legally blocked by the HDMI Forum. But anxious independent users have been working on open-source patches for wiring up HDMI 2.1 into the AMDGPU driver outside of the realm of AMD and the HDMI Forum’s blessings… ⌘ Read more

Blind Listening Test Finds Audiophiles Unable To Distinguish Copper Cable From a Banana or Wet Mud
An anonymous reader shares a report: A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accu … ⌘ Read more

Micron’s PCIe 6.0 SSD Hits Mass Production at 28 GB/s
Micron has begun mass production of the 9650 series, the industry’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD, capable of sequential read speeds up to 28 GB/s and random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS – roughly double the throughput of the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives available today.

The drive targets AI and data center workloads and ships in E1.S and E3.S form factors across two varia … ⌘ Read more

GhostBSD To Use XLibre Server, MATE vs. Gershwin Desktop Decision In Future
GhostBSD lead developer Eric Turgeon published an update regarding X.Org Server vs. XLibre vs. Wayland planning for the GhostBSD distribution moving forward as well as some future uncertainties to this desktop-focused, FreeBSD-derived OS… ⌘ Read more

99% of Adults Over 40 Have Shoulder ‘Abnormalities’ on an MRI, Study Finds
Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it’s one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem – in fact, it could even cloud it. From a report: In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one … ⌘ Read more

China Once Stole Foreign Ideas. Now It Wants To Protect Its Own
China’s courts are now handling more than 550,000 intellectual-property cases a year – making it the world’s most litigious country for IP disputes – as the nation’s own companies, once notorious for copying foreign designs and technology, find themselves on the defensive against a domestic counterfeiting epidemic fueled by excess factory capacity.

Th … ⌘ Read more

Mazda Finally Admits Its Infotainment System Is the Worst
Mazda, the automaker that for years defended its scroll-wheel infotainment system as a safer alternative to touchscreens, is abandoning the approach entirely in the 2026 CX-5 in favor of a 15.6-inch touchscreen and zero physical buttons.

The current lineup – the CX-50 Hybrid, CX-70 and CX-90 – still relies on a console-mounted scroll wheel and dedicated act … ⌘ Read more

Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids Memory Scaling Performance From 6 To 12 MRDIMMs
With memory pricing being as wild as it is these days and with MRDIMMs on Xeon 6 Granite Rapids offering much more memory bandwidth than conventional DDR5 RDIMMs, you may be wondering about the performance impact when not populating all twelve memory channels on the Xeon 6900 series processors. In this article are benchmarks to demonstrate the performance difference of MRDIMM-8800 memory across using six, eight, ten, and twelve MRDIMMs … ⌘ Read more

‘Software Isn’t Dead, But Its Cosy Business Model Might Be’
The software industry’s decades-old habit of charging companies a flat fee for every employee who uses a product is running into a fundamental problem: AI agents don’t sit in chairs, and they don’t need licences.

As autonomous agents take on tasks that human workers once handled, the per-seat pricing model that made SaaS revenue so predictable is giving way t … ⌘ Read more

Valve’s Steam Deck OLED Will Be ‘Intermittently’ Out of Stock Because of the RAM Crisis
Valve has updated the Steam Deck website to say that the Steam Deck OLED may be out of stock “intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.” From a report: The PC gaming handheld has been out of stock in the US and other parts of the world for a few days, and thanks to this update, we … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft .NET On Linux Patches Use IO_uring For Massive Performance Benefits
A pull request for the Microsoft .NET Runtime build on Linux to use IO_uring for sockets is showing some massive performance benefits… ⌘ Read more

Sony Tech Can Identify Original Music in AI-Generated Songs
Sony Group has developed a technology that can identify the underlying music used in tunes generated by AI, making it possible for songwriters to seek compensation from AI developers if their music was used. From a report: Sony Group’s technology analyzes which musicians’ songs were used in learning and generating music. It can quantify the contri … ⌘ Read more

Nova Lake S Support Added To Intel LPSS Driver In Linux 7.0
The latest Nova Lake enablement work for the Linux kernel to land is adding support for Nova Lake S platforms to the Intel LPSS driver in the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel… ⌘ Read more

DNF 5.4 Released With Some New Options & AI Contributions Policy
DNF 5.4 is out today as the latest release for this next-generation RPM package management solution used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and various other RPM-based Linux distributions… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Released With Many Excellent Improvements
KDE Plasma 6.6 is now officially out as the newest feature update to this prominent open-source desktop environment. Plasma 6.6 is self-described by KDE developers as “the best desktop in the known universe (according to us). Plasma 6.6 is all about making your life as easy as possible without sacrificing any of the flexibility.”.. ⌘ Read more

EU Parliament Blocks AI Features Over Cyber, Privacy Fears
An anonymous reader shares a report: The European Parliament has disabled AI features on the work devices of lawmakers and their staff over cybersecurity and data protection concerns, according to an internal email seen by POLITICO. The chamber emailed its members on Monday to say it had disabled “built-in artificial intelligence features” on corporate tablets … ⌘ Read more

Secondhand Laptop Market Goes ‘Mainstream’ Amid Memory Crunch
Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive. From a report: Stats compiled by market watcher Context show sales of refurbished PCs via distribution climbed 7 percent in calendar Q4 across five of the biggest European markets – Italy, the UK, Germany, Spai … ⌘ Read more

The Music Industry Enters Its Less-Is-More Era
The music industry’s long romance with an ever-expanding catalog of songs appears to be souring, as streaming platforms and rights holders confront a daily deluge that now includes 60,000 wholly AI-generated tracks uploaded to Deezer alone – roughly 39% of the French service’s daily intake, a statistic the company shared during Grammys week last month.

Streaming services … ⌘ Read more

Gentoo Linux Begins Codeberg Migration In Moving Away From GitHub, Avoiding Copilot
The Gentoo Linux project last year announced plans to move their code hosting to Codeberg rather than GitHub. Gentoo’s desire to move away from GitHub was motivated by Microsoft’s Copilot training on GitHub repositories. Those plans are turning into action now with the main Gentoo project up on Codeberg and honoring pull requests… ⌘ Read more

Samsung Ad Confirms Rumors of a Useful S26 ‘Privacy Display’
Samsung has all but confirmed that its upcoming Galaxy S26 will feature a built-in privacy display, releasing an ad that demonstrates a “Zero-peeking privacy” toggle capable of blacking out on-screen content for anyone peering over the user’s shoulder.

The underlying technology is reportedly Samsung Display’s Flex Magic Pixel OLED panel, first shown at MWC … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 CXL Enables AMD Zen 5 Address Translation Feature
A long-in-development feature for AMD EPYC Zen 5 server platforms now merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel is ACPI PRMT-based address translation for the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem… ⌘ Read more

Western Digital is Sold Out of Hard Drives for 2026
Western Digital’s entire hard drive manufacturing capacity for calendar year 2026 is now fully spoken for, CEO Irving Tan disclosed during the company’s second-quarter earnings call, a stark sign of how aggressively hyperscalers are locking down storage supply to feed their AI infrastructure buildouts.

The company has firm purchase orders from its top seven customers … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic’s CEO Says AI and Software Engineers Are in ‘Centaur Phase’ - But It Won’t Last Long
Human software engineers and AI are currently in a “centaur phase” – a reference to the mythical half-human, half-horse creature, where the combination outperforms either working alone – but the window may be “very brief,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on a podcast. He drew on ches … ⌘ Read more

Lutris 0.5.20 Linux Game Manager Brings New Features, Wine Wayland Option
For fans of Lutris as the open-source desktop client for installing and playing many games on Linux, Lutris 0.5.20 is out today with new features that further enhance the integration with different emulators and compatibility layers… ⌘ Read more

India’s Toxic Air Crisis Is Reaching a Breaking Point
New Delhi’s air quality index averaged 349 in December and 307 in January – levels the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies as hazardous – and the months-long smog season that forces more than 30 million residents to endure respiratory illness has this year sparked something new: public protest. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at India Gate on November … ⌘ Read more

RISC-V In Linux 7.0 Brings User-Space CFI & Optimized strlen Assembly
The RISC-V architecture updates have been merged for Linux 7.0 with a few items to note… ⌘ Read more

Instagram Boss Says 16 Hours of Daily Use Is Not Addiction
Instagram head Adam Mosseri told a Los Angeles courtroom last week that a teenager’s 16-hour single-day session on the platform was “problematic use” but not an addiction, a distinction he drew repeatedly during testimony in a landmark trial over social media’s harm to minors.

Mosseri, who has led Instagram for eight years, is the first high-profile tech ex … ⌘ Read more

KPMG Partner Fined Over Using AI To Pass AI Test
A partner at KPMG Australia has been fined $7,000 by the Big Four firm after using AI tools to cheat on an internal training course about using AI. From a report: The unnamed partner was forced to redo the test after uploading training materials into an AI platform to help answer questions on the use of the fast-evolving technology.

More than two dozen staff have been … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Driver Core Changes Bring More Enhancements For Rust Kernel Drivers
Merged a few days ago for the Linux 7.0 kernel were all of the driver core enhancements. As has been the common theme in recent kernel releases, a lot of the driver core code churn revolves around additions for allowing more Rust kernel driver usage… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de There are always some folks who would appreciate that. But I fear they are the minority. The rest just doesn’t give a shit.

The selfcontradiction is that those who proudly use and promote AI also claim to be sustainable and green and so on. I’ve no clue how this is not considered fraud, but there we are.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Our ads are one of these rubbish ones, unfortunately. They just speak about “an attractive salary”. I reckon I will tell my boss about this talk tomorrow (even though I doubt that any of them are from our department).

I’ve got the impression that salary is amongst the most top secret topics in Germany in general. My conspiracy theory is that companies don’t put any numbers in job ads because that would just reveal that most employees are underpaid.

Ireland Launches World’s First Permanent Basic Income Scheme For Artists, Paying $385 a Week
Ireland has announced what it says is the world’s first permanent basic income program for artists, a scheme that will pay 2,000 selected artists $385 per week for three years, funded by an $21.66 million allocation from Budget 2026. The program follows a 2022 pilot – the Irish government’s first l … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19.2 & Other LTS Kernels Released To Fix Systems Not Booting
Linux 6.19.1 was released earlier today while it’s since been replaced by Linux 6.19.2 to address fallout from that first point release with some systems not booting. This also resulted in new LTS kernel releases too due to the problematic code being picked up there too… ⌘ Read more

New EU Rules To Stop the Destruction of Unsold Clothes and Shoes
The European Commission has adopted new measures under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) to prevent the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear. From a report: The rules will help cut waste, reduce environmental damage and create a level playing field for companies embracing sustainable business mod … ⌘ Read more

Arc B390 Graphics With Panther Lake Performing Great On Open-Source Intel Compute Runtime
This month I have been doing a lot of Panther Lake benchmarking under Linux with the Core Ultra X7 358H. One of the areas of much interest has been the Arc B390 Xe3 graphics that have been working nicely out-of-the-box with the Intel open-source driver stack on Linux although there still are some gaps to fill against Windows. Those Intel Arc B390 Linux benchmarks so far have been focused on OpenGL and Vulkan graphics, but wh … ⌘ Read more

Pentagon Threatens Anthropic Punishment
An anonymous reader shares a report: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “close” to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a “supply chain risk” – meaning anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military has to cut ties with the company, a senior Pentagon official told Axios.

The senior official said: “It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Better Segregates Legacy CardBus Code To Avoid On Modern PCs
The PCI subsystem updates for Linux 7.0 are aplenty as usual and contain a wide assortment of different fixes and code improvements… ⌘ Read more

Sony May Push Next PlayStation To 2028 or 2029 as AI-fueled Memory Chip Shortage Upends Plans
Sony is considering delaying the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029 as a global shortage of memory chips – driven by the AI industry’s rapidly growing appetite for the same DRAM that goes into gaming hardware, smartphones, and laptops – squeezes supply and sends p … ⌘ Read more

Firmware Upstreamed For Supporting The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2’s Adreno GPU
Upstreamed last week to the linux-firmware.git repository by Qualcomm was the GPU firmware files needed for enabling the Adreno GPU on the new Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop SoC… ⌘ Read more

Where’s The Evidence That AI Increases Productivity?
IT productivity researcher Erik Brynjolfsson writes in the Financial Times that he’s finally found evidence AI is impacting America’s economy. This week America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 403,000 drop in 2025’s payroll growth — while real GDP “remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter.”

This decoupling — maintaining high output with sig … ⌘ Read more

OpenRISC With Linux 7.0 Improves Out-Of-The-Box Support For More FPGA Dev Boards
While the OpenRISC project began ten years before RISC-V was started, it hasn’t enjoyed the hardware ecosystem successes of the latter but still the upstream Linux kernel support continues moving forward and the ability to run OpenRISC on FPGA developer boards… ⌘ Read more

InputPlumber 0.74 Released With Hardware Support Improvements
InputPlumber 0.74 is now available for this open-source input routing and control daemon for Linux systems. InputPlumber enables combining of multiple input devices, emulating different inputs, and a variety of other features particularly of benefit for Linux gaming… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19.1 Released To Ship Some Early Fixes & Device Quirks
For those preferring to wait for the first point release of a new Linux kernel version before upgrading, Linux 6.19.1 is out today to address some early bugs that made it into the Linux 6.19 kernel stable release one week ago… ⌘ Read more

‘I Tried Running Linux On an Apple Silicon Mac and Regretted It’
Installing Linux on a MacBook Air “turned out to be a very underwhelming experience,” according to the tech news site MakeUseOf:

The thing about Apple silicon Macs is that it’s not as simple as downloading an AArch64 ISO of your favorite distro and installing it. Yes, the M-series chips are ARM-based, but that doesn’t automatically make the whole … ⌘ Read more

Will Tech Giants Just Use AI Interactions to Create More Effective Ads?
Google never asked its users before adding AI Overviews to its search results and AI-generated email summaries to Gmail, notes the New York Times. And Meta didn’t ask before making “Meta AI” an unremovable part of its tool in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

“The insistence on AI everywhere — with little or no option to turn it off — r … ⌘ Read more

Ars Technica’s AI Reporter Apologizes For Mistakenly Publishing Fake AI-Generated Quotes
Sunday Ars Technica apologized for making Scott Shambaugh’s week a little weirder. Last week Shambaugh learned an AI agent published a “hit piece” about him after he’d rejected the AI agent’s pull request. (And that incident was covered by Ars Technica.)

But then Shambaugh realized their article att … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Merges The Code To Replace The Tux Boot Logo At Build Time
Linus Torvalds merged the code this weekend that allows easily replacing the Tux penguin boot logo used during the boot process. This new code optionally allows specifying an alternative boot logo at compile/build time… ⌘ Read more

Rivian’s Stock Spikes 27% After Reporting $144 Million Profit in 2025
Rivian’s stock skyrocketed 27% Friday after the electric car maker “shocked the market with strong earnings results,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “proving itself an outlier in the EV market, which has been struggling with the end of government subsidies and cooling consumer excitement.”

They add that Rivian’s strong earnings results su … ⌘ Read more

exFAT Achieves Better Sequential Read Performance With Linux 7.0
The open-source Linux file-system driver for supporting Microsoft’s exFAT now can deliver better sequential read performance with Linux 7.0 thanks to multi-cluster support… ⌘ Read more