Mesa Begins Seeing Patch Activity For AMD GFX12.1 Graphics
Since last November we’ve begun seeing new open-source driver activity for their next-gen GPU IP with their GFX12.1 graphics engine. GFX12 (12.0) was for the Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 hardware while GFX 12.1 is some new revision for yet-to-be-known products while there is also GFX13 bring-up and GFX12.5 too… ⌘ Read more

Can Investors Trust AI Sales Figures? Asks Wall Street Journal Opinion Piece
A Wall Street Journal opinion piece warns of “a troubling trend” in AI’s growth. “Rather than selling software, some AI companies are paying their partners to use it.”

It cites OpenAI’s $1.5 billion joint venture with private-equity firms, Anthropic’s $200 million contribution to a private-equity firm joint venture, and Google’ … ⌘ Read more

Roblox Blames Age-Verification Rollout for Lowered Growth. Stock Tumbles 22%
Age verification became mandatory for chat access on Roblox in January — and Friday morning Quartz reported it’s apparently impacted the company’s financials:

Roblox cut its full-year 2026 bookings forecast by roughly $900 million at the midpoint on Thursday, blaming stronger-than-expected headwinds from its mandatory age-ve … ⌘ Read more

NetHack 5.0 Released
“So yesterday the Devteam (it is always the Devteam) released version 5.0 of legendary and venerable rogueike compuer game NetHack,” writes the Rogue-like games column @Play. “It is 39 years old…”

MilenCent (Slashdot reader #219,397) writes: In addition to play changes it’s left for players to discover, this version updates the code to compile with C99, makes it much easier to cross compile the code for other systems than the one … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Introduces AI-Generated Pets for Its Codex App
“Vibe coding just got a whole lot more adorable,” writes Engadget:
OpenAI introduced AI-generated pets to the Codex app, its agentic tool that helps with coding. These “optional animated companions” don’t do any coding themselves, but serve as a floating overlay that can tell you what Codex is working on, notify you when Codex completes a task or whether it needs your … ⌘ Read more

AI Cameras are Being Deployed Across the Western US for Early Detection of Wildfires
The Associated Press reports:

On a March afternoon, artificial intelligence detected something resembling smoke on a camera feed from Arizona’s Coconino National Forest. Human analysts verified it wasn’t a cloud or dust, then alerted the state’s forest service and largest electric utility. One of dozens of … ⌘ Read more

Carbon Pollution Is Making Food Less Nutritious, Risking the Health of Billions
A new meta-analysis found nutrients in food decreased over the last 40 years, reports the Washington Post. “Many of humanity’s most important crops — including wheat, potatoes, beans — contain fewer vitamins and minerals than they did a generation ago.”

“The invisible culprit behind this damaging phenomenon? Carbo … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1-rc2 Released With Audio Fix For Steam Deck OLED, Other Fixes
Linux 7.1-rc2 is out for testing with its accumulation of initial bug and regression fixes that have been collected over the past week since the Linux 7.1 merge window was capped off… ⌘ Read more

Robots Are Building Clay Homes In Texas Using Dirt From the Ground
A startup south of Austin is using robots to build homes out of clay pulled directly from the ground, reports a local news station:

The materials are gathered on site, mixed, and placed on a build plate. From there, a robot lowers from above, picks up the clay with a claw, carries it to the wall and drops it into place. Later, the same r … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, nice! I never was brave enough to try to move the OS to a different machine, always reinstalled from scratch. :-S

A mate also had this or a very similar white Samsung netbook. I remember typing on that thing was no fun at all for me, never hit the single right key. :-D

I’m not a fan of netbooks, there’s not remotely enough screen space for my taste. I always had 15 inch notebook. Sure, they are way heavier, but I can actually get work with them done. And yes, glared screens are an invention right from the devil himself. Completely stupid.

It’s Goodbye Time for Jeeves and Ask.com - Relics of Yesterday’s Internet
A 1999 press release bragged “Jeeves” answered 92.3 million questions in just three months. “In the digital wilds of Y2K, we came to him with our most probing questions,” remembers the New York Times — whether it was Britney Spears or tamagotchis:

We asked, and he answered: Jeeves, the digital butler of information, the online va … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s a way much cleaner design. Not so overloaded anymore.

Former Nintendo Executive Says Amazon Once Requested ‘Illegal’ Price Discounts
Amazon once tried to pressure Nintendo to break the law, says former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé. At a recent NYU lecture, he describes a conversation with an Amazon executive, Kotaku reports:

“Amazon was looking to get bigger into the video game space,” said Fils-Aimé. “Amazon’s mentality back then … ⌘ Read more

Many people started to become distrustful of big tech in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. I began feeling pessimistic back in 2016, when AlphaGo beat master Go player Lee Sedol four games to one. Something about that event has soured me on the future of technology ever since.

ChatGPT Became So Obsessed With Goblins That OpenAI Had to Intervene
The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI “recently gave its popular ChatGPT strict instructions. Stop talking about goblins.”

Recent models of the artificial-intelligence chatbot have been bringing up the creatures in conversations with users seemingly out of the blue, as well as gremlins, trolls and ogres. The goblin-speak caught the atte … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Turns out, this actually was a little machine once (small netbook): https://movq.de/blog/postings/2011-04-28/0/POSTING-de.html And then I moved the whole installation to a different laptop later. I love that you can easily do that on Linux.

Brush v0.4 Released As “Significant” Release For This Rust-Based Shell
Brush v0.4 debuted today for this “Bourne Rusty Shell” as a Bash/POSIX-compatible shell written in the Rust programming language… ⌘ Read more

I like the new GitHub:

South Africa’s Draft AI Policy Withdrawn Due to ‘Fictitious’ AI-Generated Citations
An official in South Africa withdrew a draft of the country’s national AI policy, reports a local newspaper, “after it was found the draft policy was compiled using AI, which cited academic articles that were ‘fictitious’.”

Earlier this month, minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni announced cabinet had … ⌘ Read more

Ransomware Is Getting Uglier As Cybercriminals Fake Leaks and Skip Encryption Entirely
“Ransomware activity jumped again in Q1 2026,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, “with 2,638 victim posts on leak sites, up 22% year over year,” according to a report from cybersecurity company ReliaQuest.

But the bigger shift is how messy the ecosystem has become. Established groups like Akira and Qil … ⌘ Read more

ReactOS Introduces Unified Live/Install Media, New Storage Driver
ReactOS as the “open-source Windows” operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows has seen some exciting improvements this week… ⌘ Read more

Many Exciting Google Summer of Code 2026 Projects & A Lot Of AI
This week Google announced the selected Google Summer of Code “GSoC” 2026 projects for providing stipends to student developers for engaging in different open-source projects. This year a lot of open-source projects involve AI/LLM adoption but there are also a number of other interesting student projects at large from GNOME Mutter GPU reset recovery to adding new features to FreeBSD… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Happy birthday, little machine!

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, I didn’t expect that name either. :-D And it’s actually a cave, too.

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh, lol, it’s literally called that: https://www.queensland.com/au/en/places-to-see/experiences/nature-and-wildlife/everything-to-know-about-natural-bridge 😂

Just missed the 15th anniversary of the Linux installation on my laptop:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-04-27 11:38] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

Smuggled Starlink Terminals are Beating Iran’s Internet Blackout
An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:

“If even one extra person is able to access the internet, I think it’s successful and it’s worth it,” says Sahand. The Iranian man is visibly anxious, speaking to the BBC outside Iran, as he carefully explains how he is part of a clandestine network smuggling satellite internet technology — whi … ⌘ Read more

Turtle Beach WaveFront ISA Sound Cards Seeing Suspend/Resume Support On Linux In 2026
It’s been an interesting 2026 in Linux development with beginning to phase out i486 CPU support, dropping ISDN and amateur “ham” radio support, and other code cleaning in the name of a diminishing user base – or perhaps even no users left – for those running such vintage hardware with a modern, up-to-date kernel. Yet ISA sound card drivers have seen an uptick in activity… ⌘ Read more

The GNOME-Aligned RustConn Connection Manager Continues Piling On More Features
One of the interesting GNOME-aligned application developments in recent months has been RustConn as a modern GTK4-based connection manager. RustConn allows managing SSH, RDP, VNC, SPICE, and a variety of other connections from this Rust-written application. It’s been steadily tacking on more features and that effort continued with more features landing… ⌘ Read more

New NTFS Driver Sees More Fixes With Linux 7.1-rc2
One of the most prominent changes with the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel release is the introduction of the new NTFS driver in the Linux 7.1 kernel. This new driver provides more features and better performance than the Paragon NTFS3 driver that’s been in the kernel the past few years and far better off than the original NTFS read-only driver that previously was in the kernel and for which this new driver is based. Needless to say it’s also a big improvement o … ⌘ Read more

Claude, Microsoft Copilot Fail Again to Predict the Winners of the Kentucky Derby
In 2016 an online “swarm intelligence” platform generated a correct prediction for the Kentucky Derby — naming all four top finishers in order. (But its 2017 predictions weren’t even close.) Slashdot checked in again on how modern AI systems performed in 2023, 2024, and 2025 — but their predictions were still pretty ba … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net Dang it! I first thought it was jitters due to your exams. Hang in there!

@bender@twtxt.net Natural Brisge lol 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh yeah, very beautiful! I can hear the roaring of the waterfall and like to be there, too. The first shot makes it look like you’re in the middle of a cave. :-)

@thecanine@twtxt.net Very cute. :-)

Chinese Exports of Green Technologies Surged to Record Levels After Iran War Began
“The war in Iran has sent oil-starved countries scrambling for fuel,” CNN reported this week. And many of those countries now want renewable fuels, the article points out, “leaving them turning to the renewables king of the planet: China.”

Chinese exports of solar technology, batteries and electric vehicle … ⌘ Read more

Former NASA Engineers Create Ingenious Way To Save Homes From Wildfires Using Noise
“Scientists have created a miraculous new way to stop fires from spreading through neighborhoods using nothing but sound,” reports the New York Post:

Former NASA engineers with California-based Sonic Fire Tech found that using sound waves can snuff out blazes and potentially be used to stop another Pacifi … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Fixes Audio For The Steam Deck OLED After Being Broken 2 Years On The Upstream Kernel
It turns out the Steam Deck OLED gaming handheld has not had working audio support with the mainline (upstream) Linux kernel since a change in late 2023 that was merged for Linux 6.8. There was an AMD ASoC audio change that inadvertently broke audio support for the Steam Deck OLED handheld but not affecting the original LCD model. Valve’s downstream Steam OS kernel has compensated for this known breakage and other dis … ⌘ Read more

Looks very nice and fresh. What’s the name of the place?

Ask Slashdot: Are YouTube’s Subtitles ‘Appallingly Bad’?
Long-time Slashdot reader Anne Thwacks frequently uses YouTube’s subtitles “not to disturb others in the room, or because my hearing is not very good.” But they say there’s a new problem.

“The subtitling is terrible!”

Almost every sentence has a huge error. Proper names are more often wrong than right. Non-English place names are almost always mangled to barely rec … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net 😩😩😩

Natural Bridge

FUSEX File-System Being Developed For Extended/Experimental Features
Miklos Szeredi of Red Hat has been developing the FUSEX file-system as an extended/experimental area for File-System in User-Space “FUSE” development… ⌘ Read more

The $19B “Nuclear AI” Energy Startup That Couldn’t Sign a Single Client
“Nuclear AI startup” Fermi had hoped to build power plants generating 17 gigawatts of electricity, remembers Bloomberg, “three times the amount typically consumed by New York City.”

Hyperscalers could install their data centers on the site itself and tap directly into that power, which would come first from natural gas turbines and … ⌘ Read more

Using Drones for Cloud-Seeding Can Trigger Rain, Company Claims
Monday a company called Rainmaker announced their rain-triggering technology had produced 143 million gallons of freshwater for Utah and Oregon residents — making them “the first private company in history to validate the results of cloud seeding operations.”

The Deseret News reports:

Founded in 2023, Rainmaker uses drones to disperse silver iodid … ⌘ Read more

AMD’s GAIA Defaults To Better Model, Continued Improvements For Local AI
AMD software engineers on Friday released a new version of GAIA “Generative AI Is Awesome” as their open-source software for Windows and Linux leveraging the Lemonade SDK and aiming to make it easy to build AI agents on your PC with all local AI processing across AMD’s CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs… ⌘ Read more

What if Tech Company Layoffs Aren’t All About AI?
“Running a Big Tech company during Silicon Valley’s AI mania may not necessarily require fewer workers or cost less,” writes the Washington Post:

Amazon, Google and Meta together have roughly the same number of employees now as they did during an industry-wide hiring binge in 2022, company disclosures show. Growing costs for technical workers and related expenses have often outp … ⌘ Read more

The smallest sitting canine drawn so far, yet more detailed, than some of the previous ones.

An Amateur Just Solved a 60-Year-Old Math Problem - by Asking AI
Slashdot reader joshuark writes: Scientific American reports that a ChatGPT AI has proved a conjecture with a method no human had developed. A 23-year-old student Liam Price just cracked a 60-year-old problem that world-class mathematicians have tried and failed to solve. The new solution that Price got in response to a single prompt to GPT-5. … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1-rc2 Bringing Some More Improvements/Fixes For Older AMD GPUs
Merged on Friday ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc2 kernel release due out tomorrow were this week’s batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics / display / accelerator driver fixes… ⌘ Read more