Microplastics From Washing Clothes Could Be Hurting Your Tomatoes
A new study from Cornell and University of Toronto researchers has found that polyester microfibers shed from synthetic clothing during laundry can interfere with cherry tomato plant development [non-paywalled source] when these particles accumulate in agricultural soil. Plants grown in contaminated soil were 11% less likely to emerge, gre … ⌘ Read more

PhD Students’ Taste For Risk Mirrors Their Supervisors’
A researchers’ propensity for risky projects is passed down to their doctoral students – and stays with trainees after they leave the laboratory, according to an analysis of thousands of current and former PhD students and their mentors. From a report: Science involves taking risks, and some of the most impactful discoveries require taking big bets. However, scient … ⌘ Read more

Linux ThinkPad Driver Ready For Reporting Damage Device - Starting With Bad USB-C Ports
Queued yesterday into the platform-drivers-x86.git’s “for-next” branch are the patches for the Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver to begin reporting damaged device detection. This code being in the “for-next” branch makes it material for the next version of the Linux kernel and initially will be able to report to the user on damaged USB-C ports… ⌘ Read more

Partly AI-Generated Folk-Pop Hit Barred From Sweden’s Official Charts
An anonymous reader shares a report: A hit song has been excluded from Sweden’s official chart after it emerged the “artist” behind it was an AI creation. I Know, You’re Not Mine – or Jag Vet, Du Ar Inte Min in Swedish – by a singer called Jacub has been a streaming success in Sweden, topping the Spotify rankings.

However, th … ⌘ Read more

Wow, as I anticipated, this is waaay out of my capabilities to really understand it. But I’m quite happy to just have spotted a mistake in an explanatory comment in section 4.5.2 “The icode Array”. Of course, it should be /e + tc + /i + ni + t\0. Let’s hope that my e-mail with the patch actually makes it into Briam’s inbox. I fear GMail just hides it in the spam folder.

Ads Are Coming To ChatGPT in the Coming Weeks
OpenAI said Friday that it will begin testing ads on ChatGPT in the coming weeks, as the $500 billion startup seeks new revenue streams to fund its continued expansion and compete against rivals Google and Anthropic. The company had previously resisted embedding ads into its chatbot, citing concerns that doing so could undermine the trustworthiness and objectivity of responses.

The ads w … ⌘ Read more

Seattle is Building Light Rail Like It’s 1999
Seattle was late to the light rail party – the city rejected transit ballot measures in 1968 and 1971, missing out on federal funding that built Atlanta’s MARTA, and didn’t approve a plan including rail until 1996 – but the Pacific Northwest city is now in the middle of a multibillion-dollar building boom that has produced the highest post-pandemic ridership recovery of any US light … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net gemini-cli, something something https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16723

I recently got an email with this byte sequence:

\xf0\x9f\x8e\x81\xf0\x9f\x95\xaf\xef\xb8\x8f

That’s U+1F381, U+1F56F, U+FE0F. The last one is a “variation selector”:

https://unicodeplus.com/U+FE0F

My toolkit renders this incorrectly – and so do tmux and GNU screen.

Unicode ain’t easy. 🥴

/me clones the repository, calls gemini-cli, and asks for an executive summary. Gemini-CLI replies “Don’t bother!” LOL.

Verizon Offers $20 Credit After Nationwide Outage Stranded Users in SOS Mode For Hours
Verizon is offering affected customers a $20 account credit following a nationwide network outage on Wednesday that left users across the US unable to connect, forcing phones into SOS mode for roughly ten hours before the carrier restored service around 10:15PM ET.

Customers will receive a text message w … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Just 323 pages! That’s cool, let’s have a look. :-)

AI Has Made Salesforce Engineers More Productive, So the Company Has Stopped Hiring Them, CEO Says
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said this week that his company’s software engineering headcount has remained “mostly flat” over the past year as internal AI tools have delivered substantial productivity gains.

Speaking on TBPN, Benioff said he has about 15,000 engineers who are “more p … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Tada! Maybe one day I might look into this lowlevel stuff, too. But I can’t see it on the horizon yet. Happy hacking! :-)

AMD EPYC 8004 “Siena” Shows Some Nice Linux Performance Gains Over The Past Two Years
As part of my various end-of-year benchmarks, recently I looked at the Linux LTS kernel performance on AMD EPYC 9005 over the past year, the AMD EPYC Milan-X performance over the past four years, and various other performance comparisons over time to look the evolution of the Linux software performance. Another run I had carried out was looking at the AMD EPYC 8004 “Siena” series since its launch just over two years ago. Her … ⌘ Read more

https://github.com/unix-v4-commentary/unix-v4-source-commentary

A comprehensive, line-by-line commentary on the UNIX Fourth Edition source code (released November 1973; tape recovered from June 1974 distribution).

Ruby on Rails Creator Says AI Coding Tools Still Can’t Match Most Junior Programmers
AI still can’t produce code as well as most junior programmers he’s worked with, David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of 37 Signals, said on a recent podcast [video link], which is why he continues to write most of his code by hand. Hansson compared AI’s current coding … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d love to take a look at the code. 😅

I’m kind of curious to know how much Assembly I need vs. How much of a microkernel can I build purely in Mu (µ)? 🤔

Can’t really answer that, because I only made a working kernel for 16-bit real mode yet. That is 99% C, though, only syscall entry points are Assembly. (The OpenWatcom compiler provides C wrappers for triggering software interrupts, which makes things easier.)

But in long mode? No idea yet. 😅 At least changing the page tables will require a tiny little bit of Assembly.

I’m kind of curious to know how much Assembly I need vs. How much of a microkernel can I build purely in Mu (µ)? 🤔

I’ve only got a handful of syscalls working right now. Taking inspiration from the calling convention of the Linux kernel and even made the service/interrupt handler int 0x80h 🤣 I’ve only got read, write, alloc and exit working righ tnow 🥲

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes!

Did you do the whole dance with BIOS boot and everything?

Yup! Fark’n LBA shit and all, loading up the GDT, TSS and switching to x86_64 long mode 🤣

China Clamps Down on High-Speed Traders, Removing Servers
An anonymous reader shares a report: China is pulling the plug on a key advantage held by high-frequency traders, removing servers dedicated to those firms out of local exchanges’ data centers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Commodities futures exchanges in Shanghai and Guangzhou are among those that have ordered local brokers to shift servers f … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Damn, nice! I know exactly what you mean – the output/screenshot looks trivial, but there’s so much going on behind the scenes. 😃

Did you do the whole dance with BIOS boot and everything?

Whohoo! 🥳 You have no idea how great a feeling this is! This includes the Mu stdlib and runtime as well, not just some simple stupid program, this means a significant portion of the runtime and stdlib “just works”™ 🤣

Hard Drive Prices Have Surged By an Average of 46% Since September
Tom’s Hardware: Extensive research into the pricing of some of the best hard drives on the market for large capacity, economical storage indicates that prices are beginning to increase sharply, with some of the most popular models on the market seeing increases upwards of 60%. According to research from ComputerBase, pricing analysis on 12 … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Looks To Enable Intel TSX By Default On Capable CPUs For Better Performance
A patch queued up into tip/tip.git’s x86/cpu Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle enables the Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) functionality by default on the mainline kernel for capable CPUs and those not affected by side-channel attacks due to TSX Async Abort (TAA) and similar vulnerabilities. For newer Intel CPUs with safe TSX support, this change can mean better performance with … ⌘ Read more

Code.org: Use AI In an Interview Without Our OK and You’re Dead To Us
theodp writes: Code.org, the nonprofit backed by AI giants Microsoft, Google and Amazon and whose Hour of AI and free AI curriculum aim to make world’s K-12 schoolchildren AI literate, points job seekers to its AI Use Policy in Hiring, which promises dire consequences for those who use AI during interviews or take home assignments without … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 Aims To Deliver Better NVIDIA Wayland Performance Atop GNOME
If all goes well the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release will further enhance the NVIDIA graphics performance under its default GNOME Wayland session. The improvements might be upstreamed to GNOME 50 in time but otherwise it’s looking like Ubuntu 26.04 will carry its own patch(es) for improving the NVIDIA Wayland performance… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Is Buying America’s First New Copper Output In More Than a Decade
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Amazon is turning to an Arizona mine that last year became the first new source of U.S. copper in more than a decade, to meet its data centers’ ravenous appetite for the industrial metal.
The mine was restarted as a proving ground for Rio Tinto’s new method of unlocking l … ⌘ Read more

Btw @movq@www.uninformativ.de you’ve inspired me to try and have a good ‘ol crack at writing a bootloader, stage1 and customer microkernel (µKernel) that will eventually load up a Mu (µ) program and run it! 🤣 I will teach Mu (µ) to have a ./bin/mu -B -o ... -p muos/amd64 ... target.

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club haha! I read as Golang the first time too. It is just the way our minds work. :-P

@kiwu@twtxt.net problems are aplenty everywhere, Kiwu. As we all know, ups and downs flare often times when we least expect them. When downs come, don’t despair: nothing lasts forever, and ups will soon come, one way or another. Pa’lante!

@kiwu@twtxt.net me too, me too! Thank you for sharing! 🫶

Took me nearly all week (in my spare time), but Mu (µ) finally officially support linux/amd64 🥳 I completely refactored the native code backend and borrowed a lot of the structure from another project called wazero (the zero dependency Go WASM runtime/compiler). This is amazing stuff because now Mu (µ) runs in more places natively, as well as running everywhere Go runs via the bytecode VM interpreter 🤞

Patches Positioned Ahead Of Linux 7.0 Cycle For Easy Custom Boot Logo In Place Of Tux
The Linux kernel patches talked about at the start of the year for more easily changing the boot logo of Tux are now queued into a “for-next” branch and thus expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. Those wanting to replace the Tux icon with an alternative logo during the Linux kernel boot process could already patch the file manually but this new code allows for an easy replacement via Kconfig op … ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases Updated LLM-Scaler-vLLM With Continuing To Expand Its LLM Support
One of the initiatives launched by Intel in 2025 was LLM-Scaler as part of Project Battlematrix. The open-source LLM Scaler is a Docker-based solution for helping to deploy Generative AI “GenAI” workloads on Intel Battlemage graphics cards with frameworks like vLLM, ComfyUI, SGLang, and more. There continues to be routine new feature releases of LLM Scaler for broadening the large language models supported and other improvemen … ⌘ Read more

Wild 0.8 Linker Adds SFrame Support, LoongArch64 & More Performance
Wild 0.8 is now available as this speedy linker focused on iterative development, a goal of incremental linking, and written in the Rust programming language… ⌘ Read more

‘Star Wars’ Boss Kathleen Kennedy Steps Down From Lucasfilm
After more than 13 years leading Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down. “When George Lucas asked me to take over Lucasfilm upon his retirement, I couldn’t have imagined what lay ahead,” said Kennedy. “It has been a true privilege to spend more than a decade working alongside the extraordinary talent at Lucasfilm.” The Associated Press reports … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net Always stay positive! 🙏

US Carbon Pollution Rose In 2025, a Reversal From Prior Years
In a reversal from previous years, U.S. carbon emissions rose 2.4% in 2025 compared with the year before. NBC News reports: The increase in greenhouse gas emissions is attributable to a combination of a cool winter, the explosive growth of data centers and cryptocurrency mining and higher natural gas prices, according to the Rhodium Group, an independent … ⌘ Read more

Study Finds Weak Evidence Linking Social Media Use to Teen Mental Health Problems
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study. […] Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their s … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Is Making a Fallout Shelter Competition Reality TV Show
Amazon is expanding the Fallout universe with Fallout Shelter, a ten-episode reality competition show where contestants face survival-style challenges and moral dilemmas for a cash prize. Engadget reports: Prime Video has greenlit a unscripted reality show titled Fallout Shelter. It will be a ten-episode run with Studio Lambert, the team beh … ⌘ Read more

GNOME 50 Alpha Released With The X11 Code Gutted
The GNOME 50 Alpha “50.alpha” release is now available for testing ahead of this open-source desktop’s official release in March… ⌘ Read more

New York Introduces Legislation To Crack Down On 3D Printers That Make Ghost Guns
New York Governor Kathy Hochul is proposing first-of-its-kind legislation that would require 3D printers sold in the state to include built-in software designed to block the printing of gun parts used to make “ghost guns.” The plan would also add criminal penalties for making 3D-printed firearms and hold prin … ⌘ Read more

Iran’s Internet Shutdown Is Now One of the Longest Ever
Iran has imposed one of the longest nationwide internet shutdowns in its history, cutting more than 92 million people off from connectivity for over a week as mass anti-government protests continue. TechCrunch reports: As of this writing, Iranians have not been able to access the internet for more than 170 hours. The previous longest shutdowns in the country lasted … ⌘ Read more

Astronauts Splash Down To Earth After Medical Evacuation From ISS
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Four astronauts evacuated from the International Space Station (ISS) have landed back on Earth after their stay in space was cut short by a month due to a “serious” medical issue. The crew’s captain, Nasa astronaut Mike Fincke, exited the spacecraft first, smiling and wobbling slightly on his … ⌘ Read more

ASUS Stops Producing Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti and 5060 Ti 16GB
Reports suggest ASUS has effectively ended production of NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 Ti and 5060 Ti 16GB GPUs due to a severe memory crunch driven by AI infrastructure demand, even as NVIDIA insists it’s still shipping all GeForce SKUs. YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed broke the news in its most recent video where it states ASUS “explicitly” told them the RTX 5070 Ti is “ … ⌘ Read more

Italy’s Privacy Watchdog, Scourge of US Big Tech, Hit By Corruption Probe
The powerful data privacy watchdog in Italy long known for aggressively policing U.S. and Chinese AI giants is under investigation for possible corruption and embezzlement. Reuters reports: Rome prosecutors are investigating the agency’s president, Pasquale Stanzione, and three other board members over alleged excessive spending and … ⌘ Read more

EndeavourOS 2026.01.12 Released With Linux 6.18 LTS Kernel, NVIDIA Open Modules
EndeavourOS 2026.01.12 “Ganymede Neo” is out as the first update of the year to this Arch Linux based distribution… ⌘ Read more

Oracle Trying To Lure Workers To Nashville For New ‘Global’ HQ
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Oracle is trying – and sometimes struggling – to attract workers to Nashville, where it is developing a massive riverfront headquarters.
The company is hiring for more roles in Nashville than any other US city, with a special focus on jobs in its crucial cloud infrastructure unit. Oracle cloud … ⌘ Read more