US Measles Cases Surpass 2,000, Highest in 30 Years: CDC
The U.S. has surpassed 2,000 measles cases for the first time in more than 30 years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From a report: As of Dec. 23, a total of 2,012 cases have been reported in the U.S. Of those cases, 24 were reported among international visitors to the U.S.
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]( … ⌘ Read moreArch Linux Installer Adds CUPS, rEFInd Boot, IWD, COSMIC & Power Management Options
Ahead of the January 2026 ISO refresh for Arch Linux, Archinstall 3.0.15 released today as the newest update to this convenient text-based OS installer… ⌘ Read more
NYC Inauguration Bans Raspberry Pi, Flipper Zero Devices
Longtime Slashdot reader ptorrone writes: The January 1, 2026, NYC mayoral inauguration prohibits attendees from bringing specific brand-name devices, explicitly banning Raspberry Pi single-board computers and the Flipper Zero, listed alongside weapons, explosives, and drones. Rather than restricting behaviors or capabilities like signal interference or unauth … ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.19 Closing Out 2025 With Several Laptop Additions
A New Year’s Eve pull request is ready with several Intel/AMD laptop improvements for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel cycle. An x86 platform drivers pull request sent to Linus Torvalds today brings several notable driver enhancements with expanding the range of supported laptops… ⌘ Read more
GCC & The GNU Toolchain’s Exciting 2025 With New Languages, More Optimizations
The GCC compiler and the GNU toolchain ecosystem at large had a great year. From new language front-ends for the likes of Algol 68 and COBOL to maturing support for GCC Rust, new performance optimizations from GCC to Glibc, initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” support merged for GCC 16, and much more. It’s pretty safe to say GCC and the broader GNU ecosystem enjoyed a very successful 2025… ⌘ Read more
Open-Source Crown Game Engine v0.60 Released
While the Godot Engine receives a lot of attention as a prominent open-source game engine, it’s far from the only one in this space. Another open-source game engine capping out 2025 with a new release is the Crown Engine… ⌘ Read more
OpenCV 4.13 Brings More AVX-512 Usage, CUDA 13 Support, Many Other New Features
OpenCV 4.13 is out this New Year’s Eve in providing the latest open-source computer vision (CV) capabilities. OpenCV 4.13 brings a wide variety of enhancements to this widely-used computer vision library… ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Because they’re just boxes. :-D
Denmark’s Main Postal Carrier Ends Letter Delivery
PostNord is ending letter delivery in Denmark after a 90%+ collapse in mail volume. It marks the first known case of a national postal carrier abandoning letters entirely – a symbolic milestone of a fully digitized society that’s sparking nostalgia even among people who stopped sending mail years ago. The New York Times reports: Denmark has had a postal service for more than … ⌘ Read more
Why have these Unicode smilies never caught on, I wonder? 🤪
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, I see. Just crudely checked on my computer, with around 0.013 seconds, Python 2.7 seems a tad faster than Python 3.14’s 0.023 seconds in this little program.
The lazy imports sound not too bad, but I just skimmed over them. There are surprisingly many exceptions, but yeah, no way around them. :-)
Israel Deploys World’s First Drone Defense Laser
Israel has operationally deployed Iron Beam, a 100,000-watt laser air-defense system capable of shooting down drones, rockets, and mortars at negligible per-shot cost. According to Tom’s Hardware, it marks the first real-world deployment of a high-energy laser as part of a modern, multi-layered missile defense network. From the report: The Iron Beam is a short-range line-of-sigh … ⌘ Read more
mu (µ) now has builtin code formatting and linting tools, making µ far more useful and useable as a general purpose programming language. Mu now includes:
Cheap Solar Is Transforming Lives and Economies Across Africa
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: South Africans … have found a remedy for power cuts that have plagued people in the developing world for years. Thanks to swiftly falling prices of Chinese made solar panels and batteries, they now draw their power from the sun. These aren’t the tiny, old-school solar lanterns that once … ⌘ Read more
‘Foreign Tech Workers Are Avoiding Travel To the US’
In an opinion piece for Computerworld, columnist Steven Vaughan-Nichols argues that restrictive visa policies and a hostile border climate under the Trump administration are driving foreign tech workers, researchers, and conference speakers away from the U.S. The result, he says, is a gradual shift of talent, events, and long-term innovation toward more welcoming regions … ⌘ Read more
First Gaming Handheld With a Folding Screen
One-Netbook has unveiled the OneXSugar Wallet, the first gaming handheld with a folding OLED display. The Verge reports: The OneXSugar Wallet was announced on China’s Weibo yesterday, but with few details about its features and capabilities. That folding OLED screen has a resolution of 2480 x 1860 pixels, and the handheld will be powered by an unspecified “Qualcomm gaming platform flag … ⌘ Read more
Shotcut 25.12 Released With 10-bit Video CPU Pipeline, Linear Color Processing
December happens to be a busy month for video editor releases in the open-source world. This month there’s been the release of Flowblade 2.24, OpenShot 3.4, Kdenlive 25.12, and now there is Shotcut 25.12 before closing out the month and year… ⌘ Read more
‘2025 Was the Year of Creative Bankruptcy’
PC Gamer argues that 2025 was a year full of high-profile AI embarrassments across games and entertainment, with Disney and Lucasfilm serving as the “opening salvo.” From the report: At a TED talk back in April, Lucasfilm senior vice president of creative innovation Rob Bredow presented a demonstration of what he called “a new era of technology.” Across 50 years of legendary innovat … ⌘ Read more
India Overtakes Japan As 4th-Largest Economy
An anonymous reader quotes a report from DW: India has surpassed Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy, according to calculations in the Indian government’s end-of-year economic review. On current trends, India is expected to overtake Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy within the next three years, the review said.
The review said India’s gross domestic pr … ⌘ Read more
Groq Investor Sounds Alarm On Data Centers
Axios reports that venture capitalist Alex Davis is warning that a speculative rush to build data centers without committed tenants could trigger a financing crunch by 2027-2028.
“This critique is coming from inside the AI optimist camp,” notes Axios, as Davis’ firm, Disruptive, “recently led a large investment in AI chipmaker Groq, which then signed a $20 billion licensing deal with Nvidia. I … ⌘ Read more
China Mandates 50% Domestic Equipment Rule For Chipmakers
China is quietly mandating that chipmakers use at least 50% domestically made equipment when expanding capacity, “as Beijing pushes to build a self-sufficient semiconductor supply chain,” according to Reuters. From the report: The rule is not publicly documented, but chipmakers seeking state approval to build or expand their plants have been told by authorities in re … ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Mu (µ)’s startup latency appears to be ~10ms on my machine:
$ time ./bin/mu ./foo.mu
real 0m0.011s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.006s
Unexpected Surprise: Windows 11 Outperforming Linux On An Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop
Typically when receiving any review hardware preloaded with Microsoft Windows I tend to run some Windows vs. Linux benchmarks just as a sanity test plus it still seems to generate a fair amount of interest even though the outcome is almost always the same: Linux having a hefty performance advantage over Windows especially in the more demanding creator-type workloads. As an unexpected twist and time consuming puzzle the past two … ⌘ Read more
Toronto Man Outruns Streetcars To Show Up Sluggish Transit Network
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Mac Bauer is fast, but the city’s trams, weighing more than 100,000lbs and traveling at a maximum speed of nearly 45mph, should be far faster than him. And yet as of late December, in head-to-head races against streetcars, the 32-year-old remains undefeated in his quest to highlight how sl … ⌘ Read more
Cybersecurity Employees Plead Guilty To Ransomware Attacks
Two cybersecurity professionals who spent their careers defending organizations against ransomware attacks have pleaded guilty in a Florida federal court to using ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware to extort American businesses throughout 2023.
Ryan Goldberg, a 40-year-old incident response manager from Georgia, and Kevin Martin, a 36-year-old ransomware negotiator f … ⌘ Read more
Despite a Record Year, Airlines Are Grappling With Big Challenges
The global airline industry is on track to post an all-time profit high of nearly $40 billion in 2025, according to trade group IATA, surpassing the pre-pandemic 2019 figure of $26 billion, but carriers are still managing a net margin of just 4% – roughly $7.90 per passenger. Economist adds: Not everything has been in the ascent. European and N … ⌘ Read more
X.Org IMAKE Updated For Those Not Yet Transitioned To Autoconf/Automake Or Meson
X.Org package wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle announced today the release of imake 1.0.11, the newest version of this utility that 20+ years ago was used extensively as part of the X Window System build process for generating Makefiles from a template. With this first imake point release in two years, imake itself can now be built via Meson and there is now support for RISC-V and LoongArch architectures… ⌘ Read more
The baseline here is about 55 ms for nothing, btw. Python ain’t fast to start up.
$ time python -c 'exit(0)'
real 0m0.055s
user 0m0.046s
sys 0m0.007s
I assume you made the thing load quickly, didn’t you?
That’s the problem with Python. If you have a couple of files to import, it will take time.
I want this to be reasonably fast on my old Intel NUC from 2016 (Celeron N3050 @ 1.60GHz) and I already notice that the program startup takes about 95 ms (or 125 ms when there are no .pyc files yet). That’s still fine, but it shows that I’ll have to be careful and keep this thing very small …
Python 3.14 will bring lazy imports, maybe that can help in some cases.
Singapore Study Links Heavy Infant Screen Time To Teen Anxiety
A study by a Singapore government agency has found that children exposed to high levels of screen time before age two showed brain development changes linked to slower decision-making and higher anxiety in adolescence, adding to concerns about early digital exposure. From a report: The study was conducted by a team within the country’s Agency for … ⌘ Read more
France Pushes Back Plastic Cup Ban By Four Years
An anonymous reader shares a report: The French government on Dec 30 postponed a ban on plastic throwaway cups by four years to 2030 because of difficulties finding alternatives. The ban was meant to start on Jan 1. But the Ministry for Ecological Transition said the “technical feasibility of eliminating plastic from cups” following a review in 2025 justified pushing back the d … ⌘ Read more
Some Meaningful Performance Benefits For Clang + LTO Built Linux Kernels
Over the past few years building the Linux kernel with Clang has matured a lot thanks to upstream improvements to both LLVM/Clang and the Linux kernel. As it’s been a while since our last comparison for GCC vs. Clang built kernels on the resulting system performance, our latest year-end 2025 benchmarking is providing a fresh look at the Linux 6.19 upstream Git kernel built under the latest stable GCC 15 and LLVM Clang 21 compilers. Plus … ⌘ Read more
New York’s MetroCard Era Ends After 31 Years
After more than three decades of service, New York City’s iconic MetroCard is about to retire, as December 31, 2025 marks the final day commuters can purchase or refill the gold-hued plastic cards that replaced subway tokens back in 1994. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been transitioning to OMNY, a contactless payment system introduced in 2019 that lets riders tap a credi … ⌘ Read more
The Problem With Letting AI Do the Grunt Work
The consulting firm CVL Economics estimated last year that AI would disrupt more than 200,000 entertainment-industry jobs in the United States by 2026, but writer Nick Geisler argues in The Atlantic that the most consequential casualties may be the humble entry-level positions where aspiring artists have traditionally paid dues and learned their craft. Geisler, a screenwriter and WGA membe … ⌘ Read more
Malaria Shows No Sign of Stopping
The World Health Organization’s latest annual malaria report paints a grim picture that’s about to get grimmer, as the United States – which has supplied 37% of global malaria funding since 2010 – pulls back its international health commitments under President Donald Trump. Malaria cases have been climbing since 2015, when progress against the mosquito-borne disease stalled due to insecticide resistanc … ⌘ Read more
Nepal To Scrap ‘Failed’ Mount Everest Waste Deposit Scheme
A scheme to encourage climbers to bring their waste down from Mount Everest is being scrapped – with Nepalese authorities telling the BBC it has been a failure. From the report: Climbers had been required to pay a deposit of $4,000, which they would only get back if they brought at least 8kg (18lbs) of waste back down with them. It was hoped it would begin to … ⌘ Read more
Camera Makers Went Weird in 2025 - and That’s Exactly What the Shrinking Industry Needed
The camera industry shipped 6.5 million interchangeable lens cameras last year – a 50% decline from 2010’s peak – yet 2025 may have been the most creatively ambitious year in nearly two decades of digital photography. DPReview’s Richard Butler argues that this year’s releases displayed “invention, … ⌘ Read more
Some Audiobooks Are Outselling Hardcovers
In a year when print book sales have slipped 1% to 679 million copies through early December, according to Circana BookScan, audiobooks continue to carve out territory that once belonged exclusively to hardcovers, and in several notable cases this year, the audio versions have outright outsold their physical counterparts.
S.A. Cosby’s southern crime novel “King of Ashes” moved more copies a … ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s cool! I also like the name of your library. :-) I assume you made the thing load quickly, didn’t you?
Intel’s Xe Linux Driver Ready With Multi-Device SVM To End Out 2025
Intel’s open-source graphics driver engineers are ending out 2025 with a bang. Sent out today was the final drm-xe-next pull request of the year of new feature material ready for the next version of the Linux kernel. Today’s pull adds support for SR-IOV scheduler groups as well as multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support… ⌘ Read more
@prologic@twtxt.net No, that’s Python/curses on Linux. 😅
LLVM 22 Lands NVIDIA Olympus CPU Scheduling Model
NVIDIA’s Olympus are the ARM64 cores found within the upcoming Vera CPU that will be paired with Rubin. Olympus cores are claimed to be twice as fast as NVIDIA’s current CPU cores found in Grace and based on Neoverse-V2. Earlier this year the open-source compilers landed initial support for Olympus while now a proper CPU scheduling model has been upstreamed into LLVM 22… ⌘ Read more
Life in a Shrinking Japan
Japan’s demographic transformation is no longer a distant forecast but an accelerating reality, and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research now estimates the country’s population will fall to roughly 100 million by 2050 – more than 20 million fewer people than today.
The share of residents aged 65 and over stood at 29.4% as of September and is expected to reach 37.1% by midcentury. The dependenc … ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Is this on yout little toy OS? 🤔
Well, you girls and guys are making cool things, and I have some progress to show as well. 😅
https://movq.de/v/c0408a80b1/movwin.mp4
Scrolling widgets appears to work now. This is (mostly) Unicode-aware: Note how emojis like “😅” are double-width “characters” and the widget system knows this. It doesn’t try to place a “😅” in a location where there’s only one cell available.
Same goes for that weird “ä” thingie, which is actually “a” followed by U+0308 (a combining diacritic). Python itself thinks of this as two “characters”, but they only occupy one cell on the screen. (Assuming your terminal supports this …)
This library does the heavy Unicode lifting: https://github.com/jquast/wcwidth (Take a look at its implementation to learn how horrible Unicode and human languages are.)
The program itself looks like this, it’s a proper widget hierarchy:
https://movq.de/v/1d155106e2/s.png
(There is no input handling yet, hence some things are hardwired for the moment.)
‘One of America’s Most Successful Experiments Is Coming to a Shuddering Halt’
The six-decade flow of highly skilled Indian immigrants to the United States – a migration pattern that produced some of the country’s highest-earning households, several Nobel laureates, and the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and Pepsi – appears to be grinding to a halt amid rising anti-Indian rhetoric from Republican offici … ⌘ Read more
22 Million Affected By Aflac Data Breach
An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Insurance giant Aflac is notifying roughly 22.65 million people that their personal information was stolen from its systems in June 2025. The company disclosed the intrusion on June 20, saying it had identified suspicious activity on its network in the US on June 12 and blaming it on a sophisticated cybercrime group. The company said it imme … ⌘ Read more
I just fixed another bug in tt where the language hint in multiline markdown code blocks had not been stripped before rendering. It just looked like it was part of the actual code, which was ugly. I now throw it away. Actually, it’s already extracted into the data model for possible future syntax highlighting.
Linux 6.19 Kernel Benchmarks With X86_NATIVE_CPU Optimization
Added to the Linux kernel earlier this year was the new X86_NATIVE_CPU Kconfig option to enable compiler optimizations for the local/native CPU in use when building the Linux kernel. In effect about ensuring that the “-march=native” compiler flag is set for the kernel build for optimizing the Linux kernel build for your processor being used. Back with Linux 6.16 I ran some benchmarks of the Linux kernel build with X86_NATIVE_CPU to gauge the impac … ⌘ Read more
Phew, it was just a one-time thing. Ta! :-)