@bender@twtxt.net It’s fun living in the future isn’t it 🤣

The Phone-Based Retirement Is Here
Adult children across the United States are increasingly reporting that their aging parents have developed what looks remarkably like the smartphone addiction [non-paywalled source] typically associated with teenagers, a phenomenon The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel has dubbed “phone-based retirement.” A 2019 Pew Research Center study found people 60 and older spend more than half their daily leisure time – … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net merry Christmas! I keep forgetting you live in our future. 😅

👋 Merry Xmas 🎄 🎅

Spotify Disables Accounts After Open-Source Group Scrapes 86 Million Songs From Platform
After Anna’s Archive published a massive scrape containing 86 million songs and metadata from Spotify, the streaming giant responded by disabling the nefarious accounts responsible. A spokesperson for Spotify told Recorded Future News that it “has identified and disabled the nefarious user … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Says It’s Not Planning To Use AI To Rewrite Windows From C To Rust
Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company’s goal was to “eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030.”

Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for sever … ⌘ Read more

Italy Tells Meta To Suspend Its Policy That Bans Rival AI Chatbots From WhatsApp
Italy’s antitrust regulator Italian Competition Authority ordered Meta to suspend a policy that blocks rival AI chatbots from using WhatsApp’s business APIs, citing potential abuse of market dominance. “Meta’s conduct appears to constitute an abuse, since it may limit production, market access, or technical developm … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Faces ‘Leader’s Dilemma’ - Fight AI Shopping Bots or Join Them
Amazon finds itself caught between two competing impulses as AI shopping agents from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft mushroom across the e-commerce space – block them to protect its dominant position, or partner with them to avoid being left behind. The company has largely played defense so far. Amazon recently updated its website cod … ⌘ Read more

China Is Worried AI Threatens Party Rule
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Concerned that artificial intelligence could threaten Communist Party rule, Beijing is taking extraordinary steps to keep it under control. Although China’s government sees AI as crucial to the country’s economic and military future, regulations and recent purges of online content show it also fears AI could destabilize society. … ⌘ Read more

An Amateur Codebreaker May Have Just Solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac Killings
Los Angeles Times (non-paywalled source): When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short – who became known as the Black Dahlia – he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with … ⌘ Read more

European Leaders Condemn US Visa Bans as Row Over ‘Censorship’ Escalates
European leaders including Emmanuel Macron have accused Washington of “coercion and intimidation,” after the US imposed a visa ban on five prominent European figures who have been at heart of the campaign to introduce laws regulating American tech companies. From a report: The visa bans were imposed on Tuesday on Thierry Breton, the … ⌘ Read more

QEMU 10.2 Released With IO_uring Support For Helping Allow For Greater Performance
As a wonderful gift to open-source Linux virtualization users this Christmas Eve is the release of the QEMU 10.2 emulator… ⌘ Read more

Russia Plans a Nuclear Power Plant on the Moon Within a Decade
Russia plans to put a nuclear power plant on the moon in the next decade to supply its lunar space programme and a joint Russian-Chinese research station, as major powers rush to explore the earth’s only natural satellite. Reuters: Ever since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space in 1961, Russia has prided itself as … ⌘ Read more

Some of DOJ’s Careful Redactions Can Be Defeated With Copy-Paste
The Justice Department justified its delayed release of sensitive files by citing the need to carefully redact information that could identify victims, but at least some of those redactions have proven to be technically ineffective and can be bypassed by simply copying and pasting the blacked-out text into a new document.

A 2022 complaint filed b … ⌘ Read more

What Rules Govern Hallmark Christmas Movies?
Hallmark has released more than 300 Christmas-themed TV movies since 2000, and a detailed internal rulebook obtained by film data analyst Stephen Follows explains how the company manages to produce nearly one new holiday film per week during the final quarter of each year without the whole operation collapsing into creative chaos.

The document, referred to as Hallmark’s “bible … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, this is hilarious! :‘-D

Lab report: Reading a 4th Edition Research Unix tape image on Plan 9 — http://a.9srv.net/reports/index.html#v4

@prologic@twtxt.net 🎄 Merry Christmas and stuff 😅🎅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Lovely! We also just had some snow. 😃 Not a lot, but still. 😅

(Lol, I totally read that as “rootfs”. 🤪)

25.2% of Energy EU Used in 2024 Came From Renewables
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2024, 25.2% of gross final energy consumption in the EU came from renewable sources, up by 0.7 percentage points compared with 2023. This share is 17.3 pp short of meeting the 2030 target (42.5%), which would require an annual average increase of 2.9 pp from 2025 to 2030.

Among the EU countries, Sweden recorded the highest shar … ⌘ Read more

Snadragon X Elite Laptop Performance On Linux Ends 2025 Disappointing
As part of my various end-of-year benchmarking comparison articles for looking at the performance evolution of Linux is a fresh look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop experience when using Ubuntu 25.10 with the latest X1E Concept packages, which includes taking the X1 Elite optimized kernel to the latest Linux 6.18 stable series. Unfortunately, there are significant performance regressions observed compared to a few months ago … ⌘ Read more

👋 Merry (2025) Xmas y’all 🎄 Ho ho ho! 🎅

YouTube Has a Firm Grip on Daytime TV
YouTube has been winning the streaming wars for years, but its real competitive advantage comes not from prime-time viewing but from its stranglehold on daytime hours when Americans are meditating, exercising, cooking, or simply looking for background noise. At 11 a.m. in October, YouTube commanded an average audience of 6.3 million viewers compared to Netflix’s 2.8 million, according to Nielsen dat … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Only the roofs are a little white. It’s also windy here. https://lyse.isobeef.org/weisse-weihnachten-2025-12-24/01.jpg

Why Are There No Large Market Cap Companies Globally in Edtech?
Goldman Sachs, in a note this week, via India Dispatch: There are various reasons that explains this: (i) A large part of the global education spend goes towards formal education (schools, colleges and universities), which are typically either run by governments or are not-for-profit institutions;

(ii) It is difficult to replicate education quality … ⌘ Read more

Wayback 0.3 Released For Advancing This X11 Compatibility Layer
One of the interesting open-source projects to come about this year was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer using Wayland. Wayback could be used by default on Alpine Linux next year among other distributions. For ending out 2025 development, Wayback 0.3 is now available… ⌘ Read more

US Bars Five Europeans It Says Pressured Tech Firms To Censor American Viewpoints Online
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The State Department announced Tuesday it was barring five Europeans it accused of leading efforts to pressure U.S. tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints. The Europeans, characterized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as “r … ⌘ Read more

A Recap Of The Top AMD Linux News Of 2025: Strix Halo, AI, Kernel Improvements
As part of our various “year end” articles, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news and hardware reviews of 2025… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.20~7.0 To Bring Prep Changes For CXL Soft Reserve Recovery & Accelerator Memory
The next kernel cycle that will be known as either Linux 6.20 or Linux 7.0 depending upon how Linus Torvalds handles the versioning for this next x.20 milestone. More than likely it will be Linux 7.0 given his historical versioning scheme, but whatever the case, ahead of this next kernel cycle some initialization changes for the CXL subsystem are building up… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm’s Xqci RISC-V Extension Now Deemed Non-Experimental For LLVM 22
In LLVM Git yesterday for next year’s LLVM 22 release the Qualcomm Xqci RISC-V vendor extension is no longer deemed experimental… ⌘ Read more

Page Cache Sharing Looks To Be Very Beneficial For EROFS Containers
One of the features being worked on for a while with the read-only EROFS file-system is page cache sharing. Besides EROFS being popular on some mobile/embedded devices, this open-source read-only file-system has been quite popular for container usage and there this page cache sharing functionality can provide some significant reductions in RAM usage… ⌘ Read more

2015 Radio Interview Frames AI As ‘High-Level Algebra’
Longtime Slashdot reader MrFreak shares a public radio interview from 2015 discussing artificial intelligence as inference over abstract inputs, along with scaling limits, automation, and governance models, where for-profit engines are constrained by nonprofit oversight: Recorded months before OpenAI was founded, the conversation treats intelligence as math plus in … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oooh, nice! ⛄ We only have cold stormy weather over here. 🥴

Indeed, tiny, tiny snowflakes coming down.

Oh, that’s cute: https://movq.de/v/046fb6ee70/s.png DuckDuckGo puts a little helmet on the duck when you search for Skyrim. (Katria is a Skyrim character.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks. 😅 (Do I say that? The WM can’t answer. 🤣)

What Might Adding Emojis and Pictures To Text Programming Languages Look Like?
theodp writes: We all mix pictures, emojis, and text freely in our communications. So why not in our code? That’s the premise of “Fun With Python and Emoji: What Might Adding Pictures to Text Programming Languages Look Like?” (two-image Bluesky explainer; full slides), which takes a look at what mixing emoji with … ⌘ Read more

Inside Uzbekistan’s Nationwide License Plate Surveillance System
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Across Uzbekistan, a network of about a hundred banks of high-resolution roadside cameras continuously scan vehicles’ license plates and their occupants, sometimes thousands a day, looking for potential traffic violations. Cars running red lights, drivers not wearing their seatbelts, and unlicens … ⌘ Read more

iOS 26.3 Brings AirPods-Like Pairing To Third-Party Devices In EU Under DMA
Under pressure from the Digital Markets Act, Apple’s iOS 26.3 adds AirPods-style proximity pairing and notification support for third-party accessories in the EU. The changes will roll out to European users in 2026. MacRumors reports: The Digital Markets Act requires Apple to provide third-party accessories with the same c … ⌘ Read more

John Carreyou and Other Authors Bring New Lawsuit Against Six Major AI Companies
A group of authors led by John Carreyrou has filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the AI firms of training models on pirated copies of their books. TechCrunch reports: If this sounds familiar, it’s because another set of authors already filed a class action suit … ⌘ Read more

KVM Guest VMs Using Intel AMX Can Cause The Linux Host To Kernel Panic
An unfortunate Linux kernel bug coming to light just ahead of Christmas may cause frustration for some server administrators, particularly public cloud providers… It turns out with the Linux kernel releases since 2022, KVM guest virtual machines making use of Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is possible to cause the host to experience a kernel panic/.. ⌘ Read more

Linux’s sched_ext Has Plans For GPU Awareness, Energy-Aware Abstractions
Sched_ext as the extensible scheduler code for the Linux kernel that allows loading schedulers from user-space via eBPF code has shown a lot of interesting possibilities. Andrea Righi of NVIDIA who has been heavily involved in sched_ext development shared some of the future plans being looked at as we move into 2026… ⌘ Read more

Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve’s Steam Deck On Its Servers
Phoronix’s Michael Larabel writes: An interesting anecdote from this month’s Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve’s Steam Deck… On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on t … ⌘ Read more

ServiceNow To Buy Armis For $7.75 Billion As It Bets Big On Cybersecurity For AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: ServiceNow announced a deal to acquire cybersecurity company Armis on Tuesday, marking a new milestone in the software giant’s artificial-intelligence business strategy. The $7.75 billion all-cash transaction is part of ServiceNow’s goal of advancing governance and tru … ⌘ Read more

Ireland’s Diarmuid Early Wins World Microsoft Excel Title
Irish competitor Diarmuid Early, dubbed the “Lebron James of Excel spreadsheets,” has won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship in Las Vegas, dethroning three-time champion Andrew Ngai. The BBC reports: The esport showpiece in December attracted competitors worldwide as 256 spreadsheet heads battled it out across knockout rounds to join the final 24 in Ve … ⌘ Read more

Judge Blocks Texas App Store Age Verification Law
A federal judge blocked Texas’ app store age-verification law, ruling it likely violates the First Amendment by forcing platforms to gate speech and collect data in an overly broad way. The law was set to go into effect on January 1, 2026. The Verge reports: In an order granting a preliminary injunction on the Texas App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), Judge Robert Pitman w … ⌘ Read more

LimeWire Re-Emerges In Online Rush To Share Pulled ‘60 Minutes’ Segment
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: CBS cannot contain the online spread of a “60 Minutes” segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing. The episode, “Inside CECOT,” featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran priso … ⌘ Read more

‘Fragmented’ Microsoft Tools Undercut Efficiency at Amazon and Whole Foods, Internal Deloitte Review Finds
An anonymous reader shares a report: It’s been more than eight years since Amazon bought Whole Foods, but the two companies still haven’t aligned their setup for the Microsoft software their employees use. That disconnect was flagged in an 8-week Deloitte review of W … ⌘ Read more

Is the Dictionary Done For?
In the late 1980s, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 155 consecutive weeks and eventually sold 57 million copies, a figure believed to be second only to the Bible in the United States – but those days are thoroughly gone. Stefan Fatsis’s new book “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary” chronicles what Louis Menand describes in The New Yorker … ⌘ Read more

Open-Source Linux Driver Christmas Surprise For 20~23 Year Old Radeon GPUs
If Linux 6.19 switching from the Radeon legacy to AMDGPU kernel drivers for the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs for those ~13 year old GPUs isn’t nostalgic enough for you, here’s something a bit more nostalgic this holiday season: fresh open-source driver commits to the Radeon R300g driver for supporting those 23 year old ATI R300 GPUs up through the 20 year old R500 class graphics processors… ⌘ Read more