HHS Announces New Study of Cellphone Radiation and Health
An anonymous reader quotes a report from U.S. News & World Report: U.S. health officials plan a new study investigating whether radiation from cellphones may affect human health. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said the research will examine electromagnetic radiation and possible gaps in current science. The initiati … ⌘ Read more

UK Mulls Australia-Like Social Media Ban For Users Under 16
The UK government has launched a public consultation on whether to ban social media use for children under 16, drawing inspiration from Australia’s recently enacted age-based restrictions. “It would also explore how to enforce that limit, how to limit tech companies from being able to access children’s data and how to limit ‘infinite scrolling,’ as well as … ⌘ Read more

New Linux Patch Improved NVMe Performance +15% With CPU Cluster-Aware Handling
Intel Linux engineers have been working on enhancing the NVMe storage performance with today’s high core count processors. Due to situations where multiple CPUs could end up sharing the same NVMe IRQ(s), performance penalties can arise if the IRQ affinity and the CPU’s cluster do not align. There is a pending patch to address this situation. A 15% performance improvement was reported with the pending patch… ⌘ Read more

Majority of CEOs Report Zero Payoff From AI Splurge
A PwC survey of more than 4,500 CEOs found that over half report no revenue growth or cost savings from their AI investments so far, despite massive spending. Of the 4,454 business leaders surveyed, only 12% saw both lower costs and higher revenue, while 56% saw neither benefit. “26% saw reduced costs, but nearly as many experienced cost increases,” adds The Register. From the … ⌘ Read more

Meta’s Oversight Board Takes Up Permanent Bans In Landmark Case
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta’s Oversight Board is tackling a case focused on Meta’s ability to permanently disable user accounts. Permanent bans are a drastic action, locking people out of their profiles, memories, friend connections, and, in the case of creators and businesses, their ability to market and communicate wi … ⌘ Read more

56% of Companies Have Seen Zero Financial Return From AI Investments, PwC Survey Says
More than half of companies haven’t seen any financial benefit from their AI investments, according to PwC’s latest Global CEO Survey [PDF], and yet the spending shows no signs of slowing down. Some 56% of the 4,454 chief executives surveyed across 95 countries said their companies have realized neither higher … ⌘ Read more

Setapp Mobile To Close in February as Alternative iOS App Store Economics Prove Untenable
MacPaw, the Ukraine-based developer, has announced that Setapp Mobile – its alternative iOS app store for European Union users that launched in open beta in September 2024 – will shut down on February 16, 2026, citing “still-evolving and complex business terms” for alternative marketplaces that … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 ATA Fixes Address Power Management Regression For The Past Year
It’s typically rare these days for the ATA subsystem updates in the Linux kernel to contain anything really noteworthy. But today some important fixes were merged for the ATA code to deal with a reported power management regression affecting the past number of Linux kernel releases over the last year. ATAPI devices with dummy ports weren’t hitting their low-power state and in turn preventing the CPU from reaching low-power C-states … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic CEO Says Government Should Help Ensure AI’s Economic Upside Is Shared
An anonymous reader shares a report: Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei predicted a future in which AI will spur significant economic growth – but could lead to widespread unemployment and inequality. Amodei is both “excited and worried” about the impact of AI, he said in an interview at Davos Tuesday. “I don’t think … ⌘ Read more

AI Agents ‘Perilous’ for Secure Apps Such as Signal, Whittaker Says
Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker warned that AI agents that autonomously carry out tasks pose a threat to encrypted messaging apps [non-paywalled source] because they require broad access to data stored across a device and can be hijacked if given root permissions.

Speaking at Davos on Tuesday, Whittaker said the deeper integrat … ⌘ Read more

System76 Continues Driving More Improvements Into The COSMIC Desktop
Following the December launch of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and the first major COSMIC desktop release, System76 software engineers have continued making improvements to their Rust-based desktop environment… ⌘ Read more

Palantir CEO Says AI To Make Large-Scale Immigration Obsolete
AI will displace so many jobs that it will eliminate the need for mass immigration, according to Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Bloomberg: “There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” said Karp, speaking at a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday. “I do think these trends re … ⌘ Read more

Crypto News Outlet Cointelegraph Loses 80% of Traffic After Google Penalty For Parasitic Blackhat SEO Deal
Cointelegraph, once one of the most-visited cryptocurrency news sites, has seen its monthly traffic plummet from roughly 8 million visits to 1.4 million – an 80% drop in three months – after Google issued a manual penalty in October 2025 for the outlet’s partnersh … ⌘ Read more

AMD Making It Easier To Install vLLM For ROCm
Deploying vLLM for LLM inference and serving on NVIDIA hardware can be as easy as pip3 install vllm. Beautifully simple just as many of the AI/LLM Python libraries can deploy straight-away and typically “just work” on NVIDIA. Running vLLM atop AMD Radeon/Instinct hardware though has traditionally meant either compiling vLLM from source yourself or AMD’s recommended approach of using Docker containers that contain pre-built versions of vLLM. Finally there is now a blessed P … ⌘ Read more

He Went To Prison for Gene-Editing Babies. Now He’s Planning To Do It Again
He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who served three years in prison after creating the world’s first gene-edited babies in 2018, is now preparing for another attempt at germline editing – this time to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. In an interview, He said he has established an independent lab in south Beijing and raised $7 m … ⌘ Read more

LLVM Adopts “Human In The Loop” Policy For AI/Tool-Assisted Contributions
Following recent discussions over AI contributions to the LLVM open-source compiler project, they have come to an agreement on allowing AI/tool-assisted contributions but that there must be a human involved that is first looking over the code before opening any pull request and similar. Strictly AI-driven contributions without any human vetting will not be permitted… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Very interesting!

Europe Must Invest in Open Source AI or Cede To China, Schmidt Says
An anonymous reader shares a report: Europe must invest in its own open source artificial intelligence labs and address soaring energy prices, or it will quickly find itself dependent on Chinese models, former Google chief executive and tech investor Eric Schmidt said.

“In the US, the companies are largely moving to closed source, which means th … ⌘ Read more

Ukraine To Share Wartime Combat Data With Allies To Help Train AI
An anonymous reader shares a report: Ukraine will establish a system allowing its allies to train their AI models on Kyiv’s valuable combat data collected throughout the nearly four-year war with Russia, newly appointed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has said. Fedorov – a former digitalisation minister who last week took up the post to drive ref … ⌘ Read more

Energy Costs Will Decide Which Countries Win the AI Race, Microsoft’s Nadella Says
Energy costs will be key to deciding which country wins the AI race, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. CNBC: As countries race to build AI infrastructure to capitalize on the technology’s promise of huge efficiency gains, Nadella told the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday that “GDP growth in any place … ⌘ Read more

Support For More Bluetooth Guitars & Other HID Changes Ahead Of Linux 6.20~7.0
A lot of HID subsystem updates have been queuing up ahead of the Linux 6.20~7.0 merge window in February. There is a lot of new hardware support on the way along with quirks for some existing hardware support ranging from laptop keyboard issues to enabling support for more PS4/PS5 guitars under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Amazon CEO Jassy Says Tariffs Have Started To ‘Creep’ Into Prices
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs are starting to be reflected in the price of some items, as sellers weigh how to absorb the shock of the added costs. From a report: Amazon and many of its third-party merchants pre-purchased inventory to try to get ahead of the tariffs and keep prices low for customers, but mos … ⌘ Read more

Patches Ready For Linux 7.0 To Enable Intel GPU Firmware Updates On Non-x86 Systems
Patches are now positioned to go into the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle for supporting Intel discrete GPU firmware updating on non-x86 systems… ⌘ Read more

Sony Is Ceding Control of TV Hardware Business To China’s TCL
Sony plans to spin off its TV hardware business to a new joint venture controlled by Chinese electronics giant TCL, the two said Tuesday, a significant retreat for the Japanese giant whose Bravia line has long occupied the premium end of the television market. TCL would hold a 51% stake in the venture and Sony would retain 49% under a nonbindin … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Only missing roots would trigger that kind of sync IIRC. And that only works if another peering pod has the root twt. What you’re remembering, possibly, is an attempt to do what you were thinking of… But I tried it, turned out to be too expensive of an operation to do auotmatically.

Fedora 44 Feature Approved For Better Windows On ARM Laptop Experience
A change proposal has been cleared by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee “FESCo” for providing a nice out-of-the-box experience for Windows on ARM laptops namely the recent Snapdragon X1 laptops and will also be important for the upcoming Snapdragon X2 laptops too… ⌘ Read more

‘Just Because Linus Torvalds Vibe Codes Doesn’t Mean It’s a Good Idea’
In an opinion piece for The Register, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that while “vibe coding” can be fun and occasionally useful for small, throwaway projects, it produces brittle, low-quality code that doesn’t scale and ultimately burdens real developers with cleanup and maintenance. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Vibe co … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net what has changed? Before anyone replying to a feed would pull it in, no? Am I remembering incorrectly?

Adreno Gen 8 Vulkan Graphics Merged For Mesa 26.0 To Support The Snapdragon X2
Merged in time for the upcoming Mesa 26.0 release is the merging of Vulkan driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno Gen 8 graphics support that is notably used by the new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs as well as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5… ⌘ Read more

DragonFlyBSD Now Allows Optional AMD GCN 1.1 Support In AMDGPU Driver
DragonFlyBSD’s AMDGPU kernel graphics driver continues to be a port of the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. Their latest porting effort for AMD graphics on DragonFlyBSD is now enabling optional support for the GCN 1.1 “Sea Islands (CIK) graphics processors on this modern alternative to the prior Radeon kernel driver… ⌘ Read more

Ocean Damage Nearly Doubles the Cost of Climate Change
A new study from Scripps Institution of Oceanography finds that factoring ocean damage into climate economics nearly doubles the estimated global cost of climate change, adding close to $2 trillion per year from losses to fisheries, coral reefs, and coastal infrastructure. “It is the first time a social cost of carbon (SCC) assessment – a key measure of economic ha … ⌘ Read more

Bank of England ‘Must Plan For a Financial Crisis Triggered By Aliens’
A former Bank of England analyst has urged contingency planning for a potential financial shock if the U.S. government were to confirm the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The argument is that “ontological shock” alone could destabilize confidence and trigger crisis dynamics. The Independent reports: [Helen McCaw, w … ⌘ Read more

The Fastest Human Spaceflight Mission In History Crawls Closer To Liftoff
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad. The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle … ⌘ Read more

The World’s Longest-Running Lab Experiment Is Almost 100 Years Old
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: It all started in 1927, when physicist Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland in Australia filled a closed funnel with the world’s thickest known fluid: pitch, a derivative of tar that was once used to seal ships against the seas. Three years later, in 1930, Parnell cut the funne … ⌘ Read more

X.Org Server May Create A New Selective Git Branch With Hopes Of A New Release This Year
A proposal has been laid out for a new X.Org Server “main” Git branch to house their development going forward and cleaning up the development lapses over the past few years. Ultimately the hope is for having a new cleaned-up X.Org Server and XWayland Git branch for shipping new releases in 2026… ⌘ Read more

Germany’s EV Subsidies Will Include Chinese Brands
Germany is reinstating EV subsidies after a sharp sales drop, rolling out a 3 billion-euro program offering 1,500-6,000 euros per buyer starting in May and running through 2029. Unlike some neighboring countries, the incentives are open to all manufacturers with a focus on low- and middle-income households. From a report: “I cannot see any evidence of this postulated major i … ⌘ Read more

A Second US Sphere Could Come To Maryland
Sphere Entertainment plans to build a second U.S. Sphere near Washington, D.C., with a smaller 6,000-seat “mini-Sphere” proposed for National Harbor in Maryland. The venue would retain the signature LED exterior and immersive 4D tech of the Las Vegas Sphere, just at a more compact scale. The Verge reports: The second US sphere would be built in an area known as National Harbor in Prince Geor … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Contacted Anna’s Archive To Secure Access To Millions of Pirated Books
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: NVIDIA executives allegedly authorized the use of millions of pirated books from Anna’s Archive to fuel its AI training. In an expanded class-action lawsuit that cites internal NVIDIA documents, several book authors claim (PDF) that the trillion-dollar company directly … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI CFO Says Annualized Revenue Crosses $20 Billion In 2025
According to CFO Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s annualized revenue surpassed $20 billion in 2025, up from $6 billion a year earlier with growth closely tracking an expansion in computing capacity. Reuters reports: OpenAI’s computing capacity rose to 1.9 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 from 0.6 GW in 2024, Friar said in the blog, adding that Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s … ⌘ Read more

Threads Usage Overtakes X On Mobile
New data from Similarweb shows Threads has overtaken X in daily mobile users. However, X still dominates on the web with around 150 million daily web visits compared to Threads’ 8.5 million daily visits. TechCrunch reports: Similarweb’s data shows that Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android as of January 7, 2026, after months of growth, while X has 125 million daily active users … ⌘ Read more

Congress Wants To Hand Your Parenting To Big Tech
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF): Lawmakers in Washington are once again focusing on kids, screens, and mental health. But according to Congress, Big Tech is somehow both the problem and the solution. The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing [Friday] on “examining the effect of technology on America’s youth.” Witnesses war … ⌘ Read more

Rackspace Customers Grapple With ‘Devastating’ Email Hosting Price Hike
Rackspace’s new pricing for its email hosting services is “devastating,” according to a partner that has been using Rackspace as its email provider since 1999. From a report: In recent weeks, Rackspace updated its email hosting pricing. Its standard plan is now $10 per mailbox per month. Businesses can also pay for the Rackspace Email P … ⌘ Read more

New Patches From Valve Bring AMDGPU Power Management Improvements For Old GCN 1.0 GPUs
Last year Valve contractor Timur Kristóf managed to improve the AMDGPU driver enough for old GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPUs that with Linux 6.19 AMDGPU is now the default for those GPUs with better performance, RADV Vulkan out-of-the-box, and other benefits. He isn’t done though improving the old GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPU support on this modern AMDGPU kernel driver - a new patch series posted today brings som … ⌘ Read more

The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture
The American monoculture – the era when three television networks, seven movie studios, and a handful of record labels determined virtually everything the country watched and heard – is collapsing under the weight of algorithmic recommendation engines and infinite streaming options. An estimated 200 million tickets were sold for “Gone With the Wind” in 1939 when the U.S. population … ⌘ Read more

Asus Confirms It Won’t Launch Phones in 2026, May Leave Android Altogether
Asus won’t release any new smartphones this year, and that may signal the brand’s exit from the Android space altogether. From a report: Asus Chairman Jonney Shih confirmed the news at an event in Taiwan on Jan. 16. According to a machine-translated version of quotes reported by Inside, Shih said, “Asus will no longer add new … ⌘ Read more

OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE To Provide A Security & Performance Win For Dealing With Containers
A new feature expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel cycle is adding an OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE flag for the open_tree() system call. This OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE option can provide a nice performance win with added security benefits if you are dealing a lot with containerized workloads on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Great article by Ploum about chatbots/AI and education: https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html

WhatsApp Texts Are Not Contracts, Judge Rules in $2M Divorce Row
A British painter who argued that her ex-husband had signed over their $2 million north London home through WhatsApp messages has lost her High Court appeal after the judge ruled that the sender’s name appearing in a chat header does not constitute a legal signature.

Hsiao-mei Lin, 54, presented messages from her former husband Audun Mar Gudmundsso … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming May Soon Let You Stream Your Own Games for Free - If You Watch Ads
Microsoft appears to be preparing an ad-supported tier for Xbox Cloud Gaming that would let players stream games they’ve purchased digitally without needing a Game Pass subscription, according to a Windows Central report citing sources familiar with the plans. Users last week began n … ⌘ Read more

ERP Isn’t Dead Yet - But Most Execs Are Planning the Wake
Seven out of ten C-suite executives believe traditional enterprise resource planning software has seen its best days, though the category remains firmly entrenched in corporate IT and opinion is sharply divided on what comes next. A survey of 4,295 CFOs, CISOs, CIOs and CEOs worldwide found 36% expect ERP to give way to composable, API-driven best-of-breed systems, w … ⌘ Read more