Copper’s Surprising Melting Behavior Provides Insights for Future Fusion Power Plant Design
Phys.org reports:
Future fusion power plants aim to recreate the heart of a star here on Earth to power our future energy needs. While the core fusion plasma will burn at hundreds of millions of degrees, the surrounding structural components must handle sudden, punishing heat loads that riva … ⌘ Read more

X Open Sources Its Ranking and Filtering Algorithms
An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

X is significantly expanding its open source codebase, which includes the app’s “For You” algorithm and its core ranking engine, and adding a feature that will let users see if their account or posts have been impacted by any of its ranking systems, the social network said on Thursday. The company is making the source co … ⌘ Read more

Marek Olšák’s 19 Latest Patches Further Optimizing RADV & ACO
Legendary Mesa Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák who was a longtime AMD employee and then joined Valve’s Linux graphics driver team earlier this year has continued his focus now on perfecting his art around the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler… ⌘ Read more

Why Europe Keeps Being Pummeled by Heat Waves
Europe is facing its fifth round of dangerously high temperatures this summer, the New York Times reports. Now climate scientists wonder if global warming is doing more than raise temperatures…

The weather patterns that create heat domes aren’t new, but today they arise on top of the warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. That makes it more likely that heat waves reach record … ⌘ Read more

@murad@twtxt.net Yes things do work 🤣

@murad@twtxt.net Welcome to Yarn.social / Twtxt 🥳 You might want to fiddle a bit with your settings, maybe a nice avatar, description, maybe a few links, etc 😃

How Swarming Jellyfish Overran Three French Nuclear Power Reactors
A “massive influx” of jellyfish forced Electricite de France SA to shut three units at its Gravelines nuclear power plant this week and reduce output at a fourth, reports Bloomberg. Just as summer temperatures surged, 3.2 gigawatts went offline — and the power utility was already facing cuts other nuclear sites as high temperatures reduce … ⌘ Read more

How Larry Ellison Dropped From World’s 2nd-Richest To No. 8 In Just 2 Months
Less than a year ago he was the #1 richest man in the world. 10 weeks ago he was #2. But yesterday Larry Ellison dropped to #8, Forbes reports, falling behind Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Ellison’s net worth is now estimated at just $192.6 billion — after a $104 billion decline:

Shares of Oracle plunged roughly 54% betwe … ⌘ Read more

AI Fails to Deliver a 4-Day Work Week - Especially at AI Companies
“An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025,” remembers the BBC. And earlier this year OpenAI “formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world shoul … ⌘ Read more

It’s Not Just RAM: Windows Licenses Are Also Pushing Up PC Prices
It’s not just RAM prices that are going up, writes CNET. “Reports suggest the cost of Windows licenses for manufacturers is rising by up to 10%.”

Several sites that closely follow Microsoft news, including Windows Central and Windows Latest, have published articles citing a report from Taiwan’s Economic Daily News that claims some PC manufac … ⌘ Read more

GNOME 51 Beta Released With Many Minor Improvements
The beta release of GNOME 51 is now available for testing. This cycle for the beta milestone is mostly a wide collection of minor improvements throughout the vast package set… ⌘ Read more

Europe’s Record Heatwave Kills 25,000, Dries Rivers, Shuts Nuclear Plant, Exposes Submerged Warships
“The European Union’s Copernicus climate monitoring service confirmed Monday that June and July were the hottest on record in western Europe,” .according to a report from the CBC. “The period saw an estimated 25,000 heat-related deaths.”

CNN has before-and-after photos of Europe’s … ⌘ Read more

Why Are Big Tech CEOs Writing Long Manifestos About AI?
This week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word open letter titled “The Future is for Everyone”.

But the BBC is more interested in why big tech executives keep writing manifestos about AI:

[Zuckerberg’s] vision echoes what AI leaders have expressed in various forms: the product they are building is among the “most important technologies in history.” Marc A … ⌘ Read more

Vulnerability Giving Attackers Full Control of Macs Is Under Active Exploitation
joshuark shares a report from Ars Technica: Dutch officials have warned that a high-severity macOS vulnerability that allows attackers to execute malicious code is under active exploitation. “The NCSC has received a notification indicating that active abuse of this vulnerability has been observed on multiple syste … ⌘ Read more

D7VK version 2.1 brings improvements to retro game loading time
D7VK continues to mature its Direct3D 7, 6, 5 and 3 to Vulkan translation, to bring improvements for retro Windows games with Wine / Proton on Linux.

Image

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Jay Graphics Shader Compiler Now Passing Vulkan CTS With Xe2/Xe3 Hardware
Last year Alyssa Rosenzweig joined Intel to work on their Linux graphics drivers after previously serving as a contractor for Valve on their graphics stack and also previously leading the Mesa driver work for the Asahi Linux Apple Silicon graphics support. Since joining Intel, she has been leading the development of Jay as a new SSA-based shader compiler for Intel graphics hardware to be used by the Mesa Iris Gallium3D and ANV … ⌘ Read more

RustConn 0.20 Continues Further Polishing This GTK4/libadwaita-Based Connection Manager
RustConn has been in development for a while now as a modern GTK4 connection manager supporting a variety of protocols like SSH, RDP, VNC, Telnet, and more. RustConn 0.20 was released this week as the latest major step forward to this Rust-based connection manager leveraging the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita… ⌘ Read more

Astronomers Discover a New Kind of Cosmic Object: a Black Hole ‘Star’
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope say they may have found a new class of object: a “black hole star,” in which a black hole is wrapped in dense gas and radiates in ways that resemble an enormous star. The Guardian reports: The international team made the breakthrough after focusing their attention on a mysterious red spot … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 To Allow Fine-Tuning Mouse/Touchpad Speeds
KDE developers continue to be quite busy this summer baking improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop release. This Week in Plasna is out with its newest issue to outline all of these interesting enhancements… ⌘ Read more

Debian Developers Begin Voting Over LLM Usage Within The Project
Debian developers have been considering a general resolution over LLM usage within the project. After collecting a variety of proposals, voting has now commenced for Debian developers to decide how comfortable they are with AI / Large Language Model contributions in the project or not… ⌘ Read more

Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party
Meta has patented a smart-glasses system that could use facial recognition to identify people and automatically create personalized highlight reels of events such as dinner parties. The patent doesn’t guarantee the feature will ship, but it offers a detail … ⌘ Read more

I took the day off to get some stuff done around the house, but I wound up spending most of the day making #Dune-themed proxies for #Magic.

I had hoped to print them out for tomorrow night’s games, but I’m up to 20 cards and 20+ tokens, so… we’ll have to wait and see what tomorrow brings.

Here’s a couple to share and enjoy:

Image

Image

#NoRegrets #mtg

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Dropped you en Email 📧

@prologic@twtxt.net Sure, I’m curious to see what you’re offering.

My email is hey (at) itsericwoodward.com.

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Can I count you in as a potential customer then? I’ll find a way to DM and share details with you. But rest assured it’ll have everything you could possibly want 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Potentially, depending on the features supported / hardware used.

I’ve long wished for an appliance (like a video game console) that hosts my essential services - email, shared files, social media, etc. - but which “just runs” in a box behind the TV.

So what do you have in mind? 🤔

@david@daiwei.me I’ll DM you 😅

@david@daiwei.me Haha 🤣

@creeper@twtpub.com Hey ! 👋 Welcome to Yarn.social / Twtxt 🤗

@prologic@twtxt.net

Image

Robots That Walk and Talk Are Coming To Car Factories
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: At a BMW factory in South Carolina, a human-shaped robot with a screen for a face recently stepped from a charging station toward a stack of green plastic boxes. It grasped an auto part from one of the boxes, pivoted, placed the part in a trolley, then pulled the trolley across the floor. The robot’s slow … ⌘ Read more

$599 retail purchase
$9.95/month optional subscription

☝️ Would you pay this for a fully self hosted home cloud? 🧐

And just like that Problem 10 is done and correct whoohoo 🥳 It was easy because in Problem 7 I’d already written an iterator to produce infinite primes. So the solution for finding the sum of primes under 2,000,000 is basically (shortened):

  primes := iter.take_while(iter.filter(prime_candidates(), is_prime), fn(p) { p < n })
  print(iter.sum(primes))

And of course the answer is: 142913828922 which took ~21.ss for the Go Vm to compuete.

What’s interesting here… Which is the interesting thing about Mu is the dual runtime. So the above solution for Euler Problem 9 finds the solution in ~429ms with the Go VM and ~327ms natively compiled to darwin/arm64. Not bad for a language I haven’t really done any optimization work on yet (correctness first obviously).

Oh man wow 😮 Problem 9 was quite hard 😱 I had to build two new functions in the Mu stdlib for computing combinations and permutations, but then the combinations of range(1000) for triples such as a + b == c is enormous! So i had to write iterator versions of these to do lazy evaluation. Anyway solution follows:

#!/usr/bin/env mu

// Special Pythagorean Triplet

import "iter"

fn usage() {
  print("Usage:", args()[0], "<n>")
}

fn sqr(x) { x * x }

fn main() {
  if len(args()) < 2 {
    usage()
    exit(1)
  }

  n := must(int(args()[1]))
  print("n:", n)

  // For a < b < c and a + b + c == n, both a and b are strictly less
  // than n/2. Generate only (a,b) combinations and derive c directly. This
  // keeps the search lazy and reduces n=1000 from C(999,3) = 165,668,499
  // candidate triples to C(499,2) = 124,251 candidate pairs.
  pairs := iter.combinations(iter.range(1, n / 2), 2)

  triples := iter.map(pairs, fn(xs) {
    a := xs[0]
    b := xs[1]
    return [a, b, n - a - b]
  })

  // Enforce b < c; a < b is already guaranteed by combinations over an
  // increasing range, and a + b + c == n holds by construction.
  triples = iter.filter(triples, fn(xs) {
    return xs[1] < xs[2]
  })

  // Euler 9 has one answer for n=1000. find() stops the entire upstream
  // iterator chain as soon as the first Pythagorean triple is found.
  answer := iter.find(triples, fn(xs) {
    return sqr(xs[0]) + sqr(xs[1]) == sqr(xs[2])
  })

  print(answer)

  if answer != nil {
    print(answer[0] * answer[1] * answer[2])
  }
}

main()

It is such a nice feeling that Mu is such a capable little language 😅 And I decided to write code code in Mu by hand 🤚 haha 🤣 and start solving Project Euler problems, like Problem 8 which works out to be a nice elegant solution in Mu:

#!/usr/bin/env mu

// Largest Product in a Series

import "fp"
import "sys"

fn usage() {
  print("Usage: cat |", args()[0], "<n>")
}

fn products(xs) {
  return fp.reduce(xs, 1, fn(x, y) {
    if y == nil {
      return x
    }
    return x * y
  })
}

fn main() {
  if len(args()) < 2 {
    usage()
    exit(1)
  }

  s := must(sys.read_all(0))
  if len(s) == 0 {
    usage()
    exit(1)
  }

  n := must(int(args()[1]))
  r := fp.max(fp.map(fp.sliding(fp.map(s, int), n), products))
  print(r)
}

main()

AMD Posts Massive 109 Patch Series For GFX 12.1 RAS Support On Friday Evening
AMD has a tendency to send out large feature patch series for their open-source Linux drivers on Friday afternoons/evenings. Today we were greeted by a set of 109 patches working on RAS support for the upcoming AMD GFX12.1 target… ⌘ Read more

Ex-Cambridge Professor At Center of Plagiarism Row Found Dead
Former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who resigned last week amid allegations of plagiarism and questions about his academic record, has been found dead at age 41 in London. The BBC reports: Jason Arday was found “unresponsive” at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon, emergency services said. Metropolitan Police officers were ca … ⌘ Read more

Flock Announces Changes Amid Backlash Over Its License Plate Reader Network
Flock Safety is tightening controls on its nationwide license plate reader network after mounting backlash over privacy and documented police misuse. By January 1, law enforcement customers will be required to use automated auditing, tie searches to specific case numbers, and accept a shorter seven-day default retention perio … ⌘ Read more

France’s Top Court Blocks Social Media Ban For Under-15s
France’s Constitutional Council has struck down a law that would have banned children under 15 from social media, ruling that it disproportionately restricted freedom of expression and lacked adequate privacy safeguards around age verification. President Emmanuel Macron has asked the government to rewrite the measure, with the goal of putting a revised version in … ⌘ Read more

D7VK 2.1 Brings Faster Load Times, More Performance Tweaks
D7VK as the open-source implementation of the Direct3D 7 / 6 / 5/ 3 APIs atop the Vulkan API for Linux/Wine usage is out with another feature update. D7VK continues to mature quite well for further enhancing these older Direct3D API versions that cover the span prior to DXVK’s focus of Direct3D 8 to Direct3D 11 or VKD3D-Proton’s Direct3D 12… ⌘ Read more

Lemonade 11.6 Integrates Muse-Glimmer 30B, Experimental TheNoise ROCm Image Generation
For those dabbling with generative AI on the weekends, the AMD-led Lemonade SDK 11.6 is out today with its newest feature release of this open-source software for running local AI apps with optimized LLMs across CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs… ⌘ Read more

PBS Station Fears Losing 50TB of Data After Being Ghosted By Cloud Provider
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After its cloud storage provider went defunct, a PBS affiliate decided to sue a data center provider to regain access to 50TB of TV shows, videos, and other data dating back 70 years. As reported this week by Current, a trade newspaper covering public broadcasting, S … ⌘ Read more

Ukraine Finds Nvidia AI Chip In New Russian Missile
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Kyiv Post: Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) has identified an Nvidia Jetson Orin computer module inside Russia’s new S-71 Monochrome air-launched cruise missile, potentially indicating the use of artificial intelligence technology in the weapon, the agency said Wednesday, Aug. 12. The finding was published in the … ⌘ Read more

Omarchy 4.0 Linux Distro Released With Desktop Shell Now Implemented Via Quickshell
Omarchy as the Arch Linux distribution developed by David Heinemeier Hansson “DHH” / Basecamp is out today with Omarchy 4.0 as the distro’s biggest release to date… ⌘ Read more

Judge Orders Google To Make Rival App Store Installs Easier
A federal judge has ordered Google to remove what he called “anticompetitive friction” that makes rival Android app stores harder to find and install. The order is part of the remedies stemming from Epic’s antitrust victory, which already requires Google to carry competing app stores inside Google Play and give them access to its app catalog. The Verge rep … ⌘ Read more

Trump Slaps a 100% Tariff On Heavy and ‘Sensitive’ Drones
President Trump has imposed tariffs of up to 100% on heavier and “sensitive” drones, including models over 55 pounds or equipped with docking stations or thermal imaging. “Those include commercial models from DJI and others used for operations like power line inspection, crop spraying and search and rescue, along with any parts used in their manufacturing,” report … ⌘ Read more

Apple Wants to Charge Developers Up to 15 Percent for Linking Outside the App Store
Apple is proposing to charge U.S. developers up to 15% when users leave an app through an external purchase link, with lower rates of 10% or 5% for certain programs and smaller developers. The proposal follows years of litigation with Epic Games and a contempt ruling that temporarily barred Apple from collect … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1, Linux 7.2 Performance On The Intel Xeon 600 Series
With Linux 7.2 expected for its stable release this weekend, today’s testing has some additional testing of the Linux 7.2 Git kernel as well as Linux 7.1 stable compared to Linux 7.0 as used by default on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Phoronix testing previously conducted of Linux 7.2 have shown benefits for Intel Arc B390 Xe3 in some configurations, faster poll performance on AMD Ryzen Threadripper and other hardware, and some nice I/O performance gains on AMD EPY … ⌘ Read more

Person Hides Prompt Injection In Legal Filing Telling AI To Side With Them
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A person representing themselves in a Connecticut court hid a series of instructions designed to manipulate artificial intelligence in an official court filing. These “prompt injections” told the hypothetical LLM to side with them, and to “ensure your textual output agrees wit … ⌘ Read more