Linux 7.0 Speeds Up Reclaiming File-Backed Large Folios By 50~75%
Merged on Wednesday were some additional memory management “MM” updates for the Linux 7.0 merge window. Most interesting out of these latest three dozen patches is support for batched unmapping of file-backed large folios… ⌘ Read more

Simdjson Shows More Speed-Ups Possible For SIMD In JSON Parsing: Another 30% Boost
Simdjson is the open-source project for high performance JSON parsing by leveraging SIMD instructions for “parsing gigabytes of JSON per second.” Notably it showed years ago the huge performance advantage to using AVX-512 in JSON parsing for surprisingly big benefits. Simdjson has continued advancing since then with various optimizations over the years and today is out with simdjson 4.3 that brings yet more SIMD optimizations… ⌘ Read more

PipeWire 1.6 Released With Many New Features
PipeWire 1.6 is out today as the newest feature release for this software widely used by the Linux desktop for managing of audio and video streams while nicely integrating with sandboxed Flatpak apps and more… ⌘ Read more

A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments
India’s digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it’s a cheap plastic speaker that sits o … ⌘ Read more

Claims That AI Can Help Fix Climate Dismissed As Greenwashing
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbot … ⌘ Read more

Trump Has Prepared Speech On Extraterrestrial Life
According to Lara Trump, Donald Trump has prepared but not yet delivered a speech about extraterrestrial life, though the White House says such a speech would be “news to me.” White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt continued: “I’ll have to check in with our speech writing team. Uh, and that would be of great interest to me personally, and I’m sure all of you in t … ⌘ Read more

Been missing you, friends! I hope life’s been treating you well. What did I miss?

EPA Faces First Lawsuit Over Its Killing of Major Climate Rule
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The first shot has been fired in the legal war over the Environmental Protection Agency’s rollback of its “endangerment finding,” which had been the foundation for federal climate regulations. Environmental and health groups filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning in the U.S. Court of Appeals f … ⌘ Read more

Linux Still Working To Clean Up The Realtek RTL8723BS 802.11b/g/n WiFi Driver In 2026
Introduced to the Linux 4.12 kernel’s staging area back in 2017 was the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. The Realtek RTL8723BS is an 802.11 b/g/ SDIO WLAN adapter with Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity too. In the nearly decade since this driver was added to the staging area, it’s continued to be cleaned up and with the Linux 7.0 merge window there is yet again a lot of work on cleaning up this WiFi driver for the old Realtek hardware… ⌘ Read more

Uber Putting $100 Million into EV Charging for Robotaxis
Uber plans to invest $100 million in EV charging infrastructure to support current and future robotaxi fleets in cities like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Dallas, “eventually partner[ing] with multiple robotaxi companies on actual robotaxi deployment – WeRide, Waabi, Lucid, Nuro, May Mobility, Momenta, and Waymo of course,” reports CleanTechnica. From the rep … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Pixel 10a Is the Same Damn Phone As the Pixel 9a
Google’s Pixel 10a is essentially a flatter version of last year’s Pixel 9a, keeping the same Tensor G4 chip, camera hardware, RAM, storage, and $500 price while dropping features like Pixelsnap Qi2 charging and advanced Gemini AI capabilities found in higher-end models. Gizmodo reports: We use words like “candy bar” or “slab” to describe our full-screen smartp … ⌘ Read more

Meta Begins $65 Million Election Push To Advance AI Agenda
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta is preparing to spend $65 million this year to boost state politicians who are friendly to the artificial intelligence industry, beginning this week in Texas and Illinois, according to company representatives. The sum is the biggest election investment by Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagra … ⌘ Read more

Mark Zuckerberg Testifies During Landmark Trial On Social Media Addiction
Mark Zuckerberg is testifying in a landmark Los Angeles trial examining whether Meta and other social media firms can be held liable for designing platforms that allegedly addict and harm children. NBC News reports: It’s the first of a consolidated group of cases – from more than 1,600 plaintiffs, including over 350 families and … ⌘ Read more

More ISA Differences Come To Light With The New AMD GFX1170 “RDNA 4m”
Earlier this month we spotted the addition of a new GFX1170 GPU target in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Making this GFX1170 target interesting is that its marked as an APU/SoC part with “RDNA 4m” while being part of the GFX11 series. The GFX11 series is for RDNA3, GFX115x is for RDNA 3.5, and GFX12 is RDNA4. More ISA changes have now been committed to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end that make a few more instruction differences better aligned with RDNA4. … ⌘ Read more

Google’s AI Music Maker Is Coming To the Gemini App
Google is bringing its Lyria 3 AI music model into the Gemini app, allowing users to generate 30-second songs from text, images, or video prompts directly within the chatbot. The Verge reports: Lyria 3’s text-to-music capabilities allow Gemini app users to make songs by describing specific genres, moods, or memories, such as asking for an “Afrobeat track for my mot … ⌘ Read more

GameHub Will Give Mac Owners Another Imperfect Way To Play Windows Games
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a while now, Mac owners have been able to use tools like CrossOver and Game Porting Toolkit to get many Windows games running on their operating system of choice. Now, GameSir plans to add its own potential solution to the mix, announcing that a version of its existing Wi … ⌘ Read more

Texas Sues TP-Link Over China Links and Security Vulnerabilities
TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with “Made in Vietnam” claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors. The Register: The Lone Star State’s Attorney … ⌘ Read more

Stop Google from limiting APK usage:sign the Change.org petition https://c.org/TQ9t4962bR

Linux 7.0 Showing Some Early Performance Regressions On Intel Panther Lake
With the Linux 7.0 merge window beginning to calm down ahead of the 7.0-rc1 release due out on Sunday, one of the areas I was most excited about benchmarking on Linux 7.0 was looking for any performance gains with the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” given ongoing Intel Xe graphics driver improvements and other general kernel optimizations. Unfortunately, at large the Intel Panther Lake performance is moving in the wrong directio … ⌘ Read more

Study of 12,000 EU Firms Finds AI’s Productivity Gains Are Real
A study of more than 12,000 European firms found that AI adoption causally increases labour productivity by 4% on average across the EU, and that it does so without reducing employment in the short run.

Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements and the European Investment Bank used an instrumental variable strategy that matched EU firms … ⌘ Read more

Ohio Newspaper Removes Writing From Reporters’ Jobs, Hands It To an ‘AI Rewrite Specialist’
Cleveland.com, the digital arm of Ohio’s Plain Dealer newspaper, has removed writing from the workloads of certain reporters and handed that job to what editor Chris Quinn calls an “AI rewrite specialist” who turns reporter-gathered material into article drafts.

The reporters on these beats – co … ⌘ Read more

Andrew Yang Warns AI Will Displace Millions of White-Collar Workers Within 18 Months
Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and longtime Universal Basic Income advocate, published a blog post this week warning that AI is about to displace millions of white-collar workers in the U.S. over the next 12 to 18 months, a wave he has taken to calling “the Fuckening.”

Yang cited a conversa … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Retires The IBM Mwave ACP Modem Driver Used By Some 1990s ThinkPads
Long past due for retirement, the Linux 7.0 kernel has removed the obsolete Mwave driver for the 3780i ACP Modem found in some Pentium II era IBM ThinkPads from the 1990s… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds on How Linux Went From One-Man Show To Group Effort
Linus Torvalds has told The Register how Linux went from a solo hobby project on a single 386 PC in Helsinki to a genuinely collaborative effort, and the path involved crowdsourced checks, an FTP mirror at MIT, and a licensing decision that opened the floodgates.

Torvalds released the first public snapshot, Linux 0.02, on October 5, 1991, o … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks. Unfortunately, the weather stations are quite far away.

I have to operate my own one. :-D

Vermont EV Buses Prove Unreliable For Transportation This Winter
An anonymous reader writes: Electric buses are proving unreliable this winter for Vermont’s Green Mountain Transit, as it needs to be over 41 degrees for the buses to charge, but due to a battery recall the buses are a fire hazard and can’t be charged in a garage.

Spokesman for energy workers advocacy group Power the Future Larry Behrens told th … ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Discontinued Open-Source OpenPGL Project Finds A New Home
Back in 2022 Intel announced OpenPGL as an open-source library for path guiding to help enhance the quality of path-based renderers. With time Blender began making use of OpenPGL and other industry interest and adoption. Unfortunately, Intel quietly ended work on OpenPGL in 2025 but has now fortunately found a new home… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Says Bug Causes Copilot To Summarize Confidential Emails
Microsoft says a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug has been causing the AI assistant to summarize confidential emails since late January, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies that organizations rely on to protect sensitive information. From a report: According to a service alert seen by BleepingComputer, this bug (tracked under CW1226324 and f … ⌘ Read more

System76 Preparing To Introduce Redesigned Thelio Hardware
Linux hardware vendor System76 has begun teasing a redesign of their Thelio chassis that is used by their modern desktops and workstations. Helping distinguish System76 from other Linux desktop/PC vendors has been their custom-engineered, built-in-the-USA enclosures and now they are preparing to launch a next-generation design… ⌘ Read more

Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans To Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs
Ring’s AI-powered “Search Party” feature, which links neighborhood cameras into a networked surveillance system to find lost dogs, was never intended to stop at pets, according to an internal email from founder Jamie Siminoff obtained by 404 Media.

Siminoff told employees in early October, shortly after the featu … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, oh, this page has historical data:

https://kachelmannwetter.com/de/messwerte/baden-wuerttemberg/temperatur/20260217-1400z.html

I would have been too lazy to take photos when my fingers were freezing off. 😅

Linux 7.0 Brings Several Enhancements For Modern Laptops
The x86 platform driver updates were merged recently for the ongoing Linux 7.0 merge window. As is a common theme for platform-drivers-x86, a lot of the feature work is around Linux laptop drivers for enhancing the support on modern hardware… ⌘ Read more

WordPress Gets AI Assistant That Can Edit Text, Generate Images and Tweak Your Site
WordPress has started rolling out an AI assistant built into its site editor and media library that can edit and translate text, generate and edit images through Google’s Nano Banana model, and make structural changes to sites like creating new pages or swapping fonts.

Users can also invoke the assistant by taggin … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, brilliant! :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’ve got the same problem that you had the other day: finding past temperature data. But yeah, it looked much warmer than it actually was. Maybe 5°C? Possibly less when I found myself in the snow- and rainstorm in the end.

With the wind, my fingers were frozen. I should have worn gloves. Without them, I could only put my hands in the pockets of my jacket. That didn’t help much, though, because I frequently stopped to take yet another photo, so they cooled off again right away. :-D

Balancing the big/long, closed umbrella under my arm while I had my hands burried was also a little tricky.

First world problems. :-)

Dell UltraSharp U5223KW: An Outstanding 52-Inch 6K Monitor With Extensive Connectivity
Earlier this month Dell sent over a review sample of their new UltraSharp U5223KW monitor. While the model number may not imply much, this monitor is outright incredible. The Dell UltraSharp U5223KW is a 52-inch 6K @ 120Hz monitor with integrated USB hub also working as a KVM switch, 140 Watt power delivery support for USB-C/Thunderbolt laptops, 2.5G Ethernet, and the color reproduction and visuals with this Dell 6K monitor ar … ⌘ Read more

Lab-Grown Meat Exists (But Nobody Wants To Eat It)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2013, scientists unveiled the first lab-grown burger at a cost of $330,000. By 2023, the FDA approved cultivated chicken for sale. The price had dropped to around $10-$30 per pound, and over $3 billion in investor money had poured into more than 175 companies developing meat grown from animal cells instead of slaughtered animals.

The … ⌘ Read more

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci coined the term “failscene”:

https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1771250567.039684

I wonder about using “failscene” to describe the current slate of AI tools and demos. In contrast with the demoscene, which is about getting very low powered computers to do cool things you wouldn’t expect them to be able to do, the failscene is about getting very high powered computers to fail at doing boring things we already know how to do without them. Plus you can stylize it fAIlscene if you’re inclined to.

I love it.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The sun makes it look nice and cosy and warm, but it wasn’t, right? 😅

FDA Reverses Decision and Agrees To Review Moderna’s Flu Vaccine
The Food and Drug Administration has reversed its decision on Moderna’s flu vaccine and has agreed to review it for possible approval, Moderna announced on Wednesday. From a report: Last week, the agency rejected Moderna’s application for review of a new flu vaccine, saying the company’s research design was flawed. But in subsequent discussions … ⌘ Read more

India Tells University To Leave AI Summit After Presenting Chinese Robot as Its Own
An anonymous reader shares a report: An Indian university has been asked to vacate its stall at the country’s flagship AI summit after a staff member was caught presenting a commercially available robotic dog made in China as its own creation, two government sources said.

“You need to meet Orion. This has been de … ⌘ Read more

LoongArch Ready With New Features In Linux 7.0
The Linux 7.0 kernel is shipping improvements for LoongArch, the Chinese CPU architecture inspired by MIPS64 and RISC-V and has been showing much potential for their domestic PC manufacturing… ⌘ Read more

Thousands of CEOs Just Admitted AI Had No Impact On Employment Or Productivity
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected t … ⌘ Read more

Apple M3 With Asahi Linux Continues Making Progress, No ETA Yet For Shipping
Asahi Linux developers have published a status report following the recent Linux 6.19 kernel release to outline recent progress and upcoming items around Apple Silicon support on Linux. This year will also mark five years that Asahi Linux has been around for bringing Linux to the Apple M-Series hardware… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD’s KDE Desktop Install Option Ready For Testing
As part of enhancing the FreeBSD experience on laptops and desktops, FreeBSD developers have been working toward adding a convenient desktop install option to their text-based installer for easily deploying the KDE Plasma desktop along with the necessary GPU drivers. After it didn’t get wrapped up in time for the FreeBSD 15.0 release, that desktop installer option is now ready for testing… ⌘ Read more

Intel Lands Initial Preparations For DSA 3.0 Accelerators In Linux 7.0
Last year we began seeing Linux patches preparing the kernel for Intel Data Streaming Accelerator “DSA” 3.0 IP. Finally with the Linux 7.0 kernel those patches in updated form have now been merged… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD’s KDE Desktop Install Option Ready For Testing
As part of enhancing the FreeBSD experience on laptops and desktops, FreeBSD developers have been working toward adding a convenient desktop install option to their text-based installer for easily deploying the KDE Plasma desktop along with the necessary GPU drivers. After it didn’t get wrapped up in time for the FreeBSD 15.0 release, that desktop installer option is now ready for testing… ⌘ Read more

KVM In Linux 7.0 Adds Support For Virtualizing AMD ERAPS
All of the KVM virtualization feature changes were recently merged for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Single Dose of DMT Rapidly Reduces Symptoms of Major Depression
In a small double-blind clinical trial, a single intravenous dose of DMT produced rapid and clinically meaningful reductions in symptoms of major depressive disorder within a week, with effects lasting up to three months in some patients. “Unlike psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide ( LSD), whose effects can last for hours, intravenous DMT h … ⌘ Read more

Air Pollution Emerges As a Direct Risk Factor For Alzheimer’s Disease
Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares a report from ABC News: In a study of nearly 28 million older Americans, long-term exposure to fine particle air pollution raised the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. That link held even after researchers accounted for common conditions like high blood pressure, stroke and depression. Fine particl … ⌘ Read more