‘No Happy Ending for Movie Theatres’, Argues WSJ - No Matter Who Wins Warner Bros.
Regardless of who ends up owning Warners Bros., “the outlook for theatrical movies is dimming,” writes a Wall Street Journal tech columnist, noting that this year’s U.S. box office of $8.3 billion (as of December 25) “is a bit below last year’s and well below prepandemic levels of around $11 billion.”

War … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc3 Released With A Holiday’s Week Of Fixes
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.19-rc3 to ship this week’s fixes. Linux 6.19-rc3 is coming in light as expected due to the Christmas week with many corporate developers getting paid time off and others taking part in year-end festivities… ⌘ Read more

Did Tim Cook Post AI Slop in His Christmas Message Promoting ‘Pluribus’?
Artist Keith Thomson is a modern (and whimsical) Edward Hopper. And Apple TV says he created the “festive artwork” shared on X by Apple CEO Tim Cook on Christmas Eve, “made on MacBook Pro.”

Its intentionally-off picture of milk and cookies was meant to tease the season finale of Pluribus. (“Merry Christmas Eve, Carol…” Cook had p … ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.1 Released With An Experimental Direct3D 6 Frontend
Between the DXVK and VKD3D(-Proton) projects there is good support for Direct3D 8 through Direct3D 12 implementations atop the Vulkan API for Linux gaming usage. For those preferring more retro classic gaming, D7VK came about more recently for Direct3D 7 as a DXVK fork. Out today is D7VK 1.1 and besides delivering fixes for its D3D7 implementation has also now tacked on an experimental D3D6 front-end… ⌘ Read more

Texas Father Rescues Kidnapped 15-Year-Old Daughter After Tracking Her Phone’s Location
An anonymous reader shared this report from The Guardian:

A Texas father used the parental controls on his teenage daughter’s cell phone to find and help rescue her after she was kidnapped at knifepoint while walking her dog on Christmas, authorities allege… Her father subsequently located her phon … ⌘ Read more

Up Next for Arduino After Qualcomm Acquisition: High-Performance Computing
Even after its acquisition by Qualcomm, the EFF believes Arduino “isn’t imposing any new bans on tinkering with or reverse engineering Arduino boards,” (according to Mitch Stoltz, EFF director for competition and IP litigation). While Adafruit’s managing editor Phillip Torrone had claimed to 36,000+ followers on LinkedIn that A … ⌘ Read more

Google’s ‘AI Overview’ Wrongly Accused a Musician of Being a Sex Offender
An anonymous reader shared this report from the CBC:

Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he may have been defamed by Google after it recently produced an AI-generated summary falsely identifying him as a sex offender. The Juno Award-winning musician said he learned of the online misinformation last week after a First Nation no … ⌘ Read more

How Will Rising RAM Prices Affect Laptop Companies?
Laptop makers are facing record-setting memory prices next year. The site Notebookcheck catalogs how different companies are responding:

Sources told [Korean business newspaper] Chosun Biz that some manufacturers have signed preliminary contracts with Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. Even so, it won’t prevent DDR5 RAM prices from soaring 45% higher by the end of 2026 … ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe vs. i915 Driver Performance On Linux 6.19 For Arc Alchemist GPUs
Similar to AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs where there was product overlap between the Radeon and AMDGPU kernel drivers (and now using AMDGPU by default for those aging Radeon GPUs with Linux 6.19), the Intel Arc A-Series “Alchenist” graphics cards are in a similar boat. By default the Alchemist and Meteor Lake graphics use the i915 kernel driver by default but they can optionally use the Xe kernel driver instead as what is Intel’s modern open-source … ⌘ Read more

Fedora Continued At The Forefront Of Upstream Linux Innovations In 2025
Fedora Linux this year continued in punctually shipping the very latest upstream Linux innovations from the freshest Wayland components to Linux kernel features and continuing to leverage other improvements in the open-source world… ⌘ Read more

Challenges Face European Governments Pursuing ‘Digital Sovereignty’
The Register reports on challenges facing Europe’s pursuit of “digital sovereignty”:

The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with … ⌘ Read more

New Intel Xe3_LPD Firmware Binaries For Linux Ahead Of Panther Lake Laptops Launching
Ahead of Intel Core Ultra “Panther Lake” laptops expected to be showcased in just over one week at CES in Las Vegas, new Xe3_LPD firmware binaries were upstreamed today to linux-firmware.git in getting ready that production-ready support for Intel Panther Lake on Linux… ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe The CSS 404ing highlights the improvability of the content to noise ratio. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de The asshats are everywhere. Luckily, it has been rather quiet so far. But of course, I now jinxed it.

New Patches Bring Linux Driver Support To 25+ SteelSeries Arctis Gaming Headsets
Within the mainline Linux kernel already is the SteelSeries HID driver for supporting basic battery monitoring on the Arctis 1 and Arctis 9 gaming headsets. But a new patch series posted this morning to the Linux kernel mailing list overhaul this SteelSeries HID driver support. The patches take the support to 25+ different Arctis headset models and provide more comprehensive driver support… ⌘ Read more

Is Dark Energy Weakening?
An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:

There is growing controversy over recent evidence suggesting that a mysterious force known as dark energy might be changing in a way that challenges our current understanding of time and space. An analysis by a South Korean team has hinted that, rather than the Universe continuing to expand, galaxies could be pulled back together by gravity, ending in what astronomers … ⌘ Read more

KDE’s “This Week In Plasma” Will Become Less Frequent Without New Volunteers
The This Week In Plasma series written by KDE developer Nate Graham has been a great way to keep-up with all of the interesting KDE Plasma desktop developments over the past eight years. This Week In Plasma is regularly featured on Phoronix and always provides an interesting weekend look at the very newest innovations to land in Plasma. Unfortunately, This Week In Plasma will become less frequent or even go on hiatus without new volu … ⌘ Read more

Fish 4.3 Brings Scripting & Interactivity Improvements, Enhanced Terminal Support
Fish 4.3 is out today as the newest update to this user-friendly command line shell. Fish 4.0 released at the beginning of this year in porting the codebase from C++ to Rust and now before closing out 2025 they have out Fish 4.3… ⌘ Read more

Sal Khan: Companies Should Give 1% of Profits To Retrain Workers Displaced By AI
“I believe artificial intelligence will displace workers at a scale many people don’t yet realize,” says Sal Kahn (founder/CEO of the nonprofit Khan Academy). But in an op-ed in the New York Times he also proposes a solution that “could change the trajectory of the lives of millions who will be displaced…”

“I believe … ⌘ Read more

Building native compilers is hard 🤣 Building bytecode VM / interpreters is way easier 🤣

Military Planners Dread the Arctic, ‘Where Drones Drop Dead and GPS Goes Haywire’
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:

Sending drones and robots into battle, rather than humans, has become a tenet of modern warfare. Nowhere does that make more sense than in the frozen expanses of the Arctic. But the closer you get to the North Pole, the less useful cutting-edge te … ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Very cool! 😎

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Nice! 👍

OpenAI is Hiring a New ‘Head of Preparedness’ to Predict/Mitigate AI’s Harms
An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:

OpenAI is looking for a new Head of Preparedness who can help it anticipate the potential harms of its models and how they can be abused, in order to guide the company’s safety strategy.

It comes at the end of a year that’s seen OpenAI hit with numerous accusations about ChatG … ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.0 Benchmarks Since Blender 3.0 For CPU Rendering Performance
As part of the many different year-end benchmarks on Phoronix, over the holidays I was curious about how far the Blender 3D modeling software’s performance has evolved over the past few years. So in looking at the CPU rendering performance I ran benchmarks of the major releases since Blender 3.0 through the recently released Blender 5.0… ⌘ Read more

SDL Fixes Support For More Than Five Mouse Buttons For Gaming On Wayland
The Simple DirectMedia Library that is widely-used by many cross-platform games and part of the Steam Runtime now has better support for handling more mouse button events under Wayland… ⌘ Read more

Researchers Show Some Robots Can Be Hijacked Just Through Spoken Commands
An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this story from Interesting Engineering:

Cybersecurity specialists from the research group DARKNAVY have demonstrated how modern humanoid robots can be compromised and weaponised through weaknesses in their AI-driven control systems.

In a controlled test, the team demonstrated that a comm … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks! 🙏

New Runtime Standby ABI Proposed for Linux Like Microsoft Windows’ ‘Modern Standby’
Phoronix reports on “an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list” proposing “a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the ‘Modern Standby’ functionality found with Microsoft Windows…”

Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain co … ⌘ Read more

Is Russia Developing an Anti-Satellite Weapon to Target Starlink?
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:

Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlef … ⌘ Read more

HarfBuzz 12.3 Released - Nice Performance Improvements To This Text Shaping Engine
HarfBuzz 12.3 was just released for ending out 2025 with some nice performance improvements to this widely-used text shaping engine. HarfBuzz in turn is used by the prominent Linux desktop environments, Java, Flutter, various game engines, and apps like Chrome and Firefox for text shaping needs with OpenType fonts and more… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Drops Pascal Support On Linux, Causing Chaos On Arch Linux
NVIDIA has been “gradually dropping support for older videocards,” notes Hackaday, “with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed.”

“What’s more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.?”

On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Ma … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net This is a really cool project, that’s for sure. 👌

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … I was about to write “it really is worse where you live”, then I heard the first bang out on the street. 🤣

Waymo Updates Vehicles to Better Handle Power Outages - But Still Faces Criticism
Waymo explained this week that its self-driving car technology is already “designed to handle dark traffic signals,” and successfully handled over 7,000 last Saturday during San Francisco’s long power outage, properly treating those intersections as four-way stops. But while during the long outage their cars some … ⌘ Read more

It’s this time of the year again, where people burn money on the streets.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of-the-ancient-maintainer/

Open Source Initiative Estimates the ‘Top Open Source Licenses in 2025’
The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers “enriched” license pages with “relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support”.

So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:

mit
(1.5M)
apache-2-0
(344k)
bsd-3-c … ⌘ Read more

Japan Votes to Restart Fukushima Nuclear Plant 15 Years After Its Meltdown
The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima’s nuclear plant “was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986,” CNN remembers.

But this week Japanese authorities “have approved a decision to restart the world’s biggest nuclear power plant,” reports CNN, “which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushim … ⌘ Read more

Should Physicists Study the Question: What is Life?
An astrophysicist at the University of Rochester writes that “many” of his colleagues in physics “have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human.” And it’s a mystery that:

- “Challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries”
- “May even help redefine the field for the next generation”
- “Could answer essential quest … ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Nah it’s more like there’s a lot of repeated code, because when you go from source language to intermediate representation to machine code, well you just end up writing a lot of the same patterns over and over again. I need to dedupe this I think.

Free Software Foundation Receives ‘Historic’ Donations Worth Nearly $900K - in Monero
On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero.

The two donations “are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization,” the FSF said in a statement.

“The donors wi … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net Ooof 😢 That’s rough!

44% Of GNOME Core Apps Are Written In C, 13% In JavaScript & 10% In Rust
GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The “GNOME” codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas… ⌘ Read more

The compiler technique I’m using here is to not “emit” most of the runtime if it’s actually never used in your program, and also dropping dead code in the SSA pass.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’ve managed to bring a simple “Hello World!” in mu (µ) (at least on macOS / Darwin / ARM64) down to ~86KB (previously ~146KB) 🥳

Video Call Glitches Evoke Uncanniness, Damage Consequential Life Outcomes
Those brief freezes and audio hiccups that plague video calls are not the benign nuisances that most people assume them to be, according to a new study published in Nature that found glitches during virtual interactions can meaningfully damage hiring prospects, reduce trust in healthcare providers and even correlate with lower chances … ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel Highlights For 2025: Schedulers, Rust & Torvalds’ Commentary
With the end of the year quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most-viewed Linux kernel news of 2025… ⌘ Read more

Intel Open-Source Software Setback: IWD Development Hiatus
Adding to the unfortunate engineering setbacks at Intel this year as part of cost-cutting measures, the Intel IWD software development has been on a hiatus for the past three months. Going from previously seeing monthly releases and almost constant activity to now development ceasing up with no activity in the past three months… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Lands Fix For ARM64 EFI Systems Crashing On Boot
Adding to the early headaches of Linux 6.19 with some regressions in performance and functionality were ARM64 hosts crashing on this in-development kernel version for those platforms using EFI. But a fix is now merged ahead of Linux 6.19-rc3 due out tomorrow… ⌘ Read more