KDE Plasma 6.6.5 Fixes Some NVIDIA Performance Issues, More Features Land For Plasma 6.7
We are now just one month out from the planned release of Plasma 6.7 in mid-June. Feature activity continues to be brisk for Plasma 6.7 while KDE developers also continue landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 series… ⌘ Read more

Two mates and I went hiking yesterday. The sun was beating down on us, but luckily, it was also rather windy which helped to cool off. Unfortunately, we also encountered bucketloads of drunk hikers with hardcarts loaded full of beer who had to very loudly please everbody with their shitty taste of music. What a stupid tradition on 1st May public holiday over here. Other than that, it was a great hike.

I was pleasantly surprised that my trains were dead on time, so both super short times to switch connections worked out perfectly on both the way there and back. I did not expect this to happen at all and already braced myself for an additional half hour waiting time. Especially with the stupid Stuttgart Beer Festival right now. Even more drunk idiots everywhere and of course also in the trains. On the return journey, I learned about all sorts of family relations etc. in various Allgäu villages. Oh boy. At least nobody vomited, that’s a bonus.

Also, I sweated more on the first return Sauna-Bahn than on the entire hike combined. It was awfully hot in there.

Anyway, all in all it was a great time in the outdoors with my mates: https://lyse.isobeef.org/monrepos-favoritepark-hungerberg-ruine-hoheneck-2026-05-01/

New Lithium-Plasma Engine Passes Key Mars Propulsion Test
NASA engineers have tested a next-generation lithium-plasma electric propulsion system that reached 120 kilowatts, a new U.S. record and about 25 times the power of the electric thrusters on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft. “Designing and building these thrusters over the last couple of years has been a long lead-up to this first test,” said James Polk, who is a s … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Stuck With Months of Repairs After Drone Strikes On Data Centers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon’s cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the … ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux In April Pulled Back From Its Record High Marketshare
Steam on Linux use in March had skyrocketed to 5.33%, a 3.1% boost month-over-month and easily the highest level we’ve seen Steam on Linux at since its inception more than a decade ago. This record growth came amid the ongoing success of the Steam Deck handheld and Steam Play (Proton) for enabling more Windows games to run well on Linux. The April numbers are in and the Linux gaming marketshare pulled back somewhat but still remaining healthy… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Xbox Mode Is Now Available For All Windows 11 PCs
Microsoft is rolling out Xbox mode to all Windows 11 PCs, bringing a full-screen Xbox PC app interface similar to Steam’s Big Picture Mode. “Some players in select markets will be able to download the Xbox mode experience today, with availability expanding to more players in those markets over the next several weeks,” says the Xbox team. The Verge repo … ⌘ Read more

AI Agent Designed To Speed Up Company’s Coding Wipes Entire Database In 9 Seconds
joshuark shares a report from Live Science: An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane, said that the AI coding agent Cursor –powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model – delet … ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.8 Improves VBScript Compatibility, Finally Fixes Microsoft Golf 1999
Wine 11.8 delivers the latest and greatest support for running Windows applications and games under Linux and other platforms. This newest bi-weekly development release brings several more enhancements in working toward Wine 12.0 stable due out in early 2027… ⌘ Read more

Pentagon Reaches Agreements With Top AI Companies, But Not Anthropic
The Pentagon says it has reached deals with seven AI companies – SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection AI, Microsoft, and AWS – to deploy their tools on classified Defense Department networks. The odd one out is Anthropic, which remains excluded after being labeled a supply-chain risk amid a dispute over military-use guardrails. Reut … ⌘ Read more

EndeavourOS “Trtion” To Ship New Desktop/WM Options, Titan Neo Brings Various Updates
In addition to today’s monthly ISO refresh of Arch Linux that is now pulling in the Linux 7.0 kernel and other updates, the downstream EndeavourOS also happens to be out with a new ISO release for starting the month of May… ⌘ Read more

ICANN Opens Applications For New Generic Top-Level Domains
ICANN has opened applications for new generic top-level domains for the first time since 2012. The Register reports: ICANN hasn’t offered new gTLDs since 2012, but on Thursday opened applications for new domains in 27 scripts. A 439-page Applicant Guidebook explains the process. The Register suggests paying attention to the string evaluation FAQ, which expla … ⌘ Read more

The Case Against an Imminent Software Developer Apocalypse
ZipNada shares a report from ZDNet: Given the dour headlines as of late concerning the diminishing amounts of entry-level software development jobs, coupled with predictions of applications entirely AI-generated, one could be forgiven for assuming that software developers may soon be an endangered species. However, the data tells a different story. Jam … ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.350 Released With Three New Extensions
Vulkan 1.4.350 released earlier today as the newest routine spec update. Beyond the usual minor fixes/clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.350 tacks on three more extensions… ⌘ Read more

GPT-5.5 Matches Heavily Hyped Mythos Preview In New Cybersecurity Tests
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last month, Anthropic made a big deal about the supposedly outsize cybersecurity threat represented by its Mythos Preview model, leading the company to restrict the initial release to “critical industry partners.” But new research from the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) suggests … ⌘ Read more

Spotify Adds ‘Verified’ Badges To Distinguish Human Artists From AI
Spotify is adding “Verified by Spotify” badges to distinguish human artists from AI-generated personas, using signals like linked social accounts, consistent listener activity, merchandise, and concert dates. The BBC reports: The world’s most-used music streaming service said the ‘Verified by Spotify’ text and green checkmark icon wo … ⌘ Read more

Hackers Are Actively Exploiting a Bug In cPanel, Used By Millions of Websites
Hackers are actively exploiting a critical cPanel and WHM vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-41940, that allows remote attackers to bypass the login screen and gain full administrative access to affected web servers. Major hosts including Namecheap, HostGator, and KnownHost have taken mitigation steps or patched systems, bu … ⌘ Read more

The California Government Is Coming For Your E-Bikes
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Standard: If state lawmakers have their way, you’ll have to get a license plate for your e-bike, and if you’re planning to buy one next year, it’ll be slower. Amid growing concerns about e-bike safety, particularly among children in Bay Area suburbs, two bills introduced this year aim to make it easier to ticket … ⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz where are thou?! Haven’t seeing you like, in light years!

AMD Posts HDMI 2.1 FRL Patches For Their AMDGPU Linux Driver
It’s not complete HDMI 2.1 support but to much surprise hitting the mailing list today were official patches from AMD for implementing HDMI Fixed Rate Link “FRL” support for their kernel graphics driver. HDMI FRL as part of HDMI 2.1+ allows for higher bandwidth to support higher refresh rates and resolutions… ⌘ Read more

Linux Support Coming For The ASUS ROG RAIKIRI II: A $160 High-End Gaming Controller
The ASUS ROG RAIKIRI II is a recently-launched wireless gaming controller for both PC and Xbox gaming. This is a premium controller priced at $160 USD and has been receiving positive reviews under Windows while now it will soon be seeing mainline Linux support… ⌘ Read more

The Invisible Force Making Food Less Nutritious
fjo3 shares a report from the Washington Post: Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow – from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc. Experts fear the degradation of Earth’s food supply will cause an epidemic of hidden hunger, in which even p … ⌘ Read more

Mesa Developers Consider Branching Off Some Older GPU Drivers - Including AMD R300/R600
Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve’s Linux graphics team has ignited a discussion over potentially shifting some of Mesa’s older GPU drivers into a new legacy Git branch in order to better support the more modern OpenGL and Vulkan drivers without having to worry about breaking the legacy drivers and to allow for better cleaning of the Mesa codebase. Among the drivers that could be impacted are the ATI/AMD R300 and R600 drivers and man … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Release, Age Verification Laws, Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 & Other April Happenings
A lot happened in the Linux and open-source world during the month of April. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44 shipped, a lot of news around age attestation/verification laws, the Linux 7.0 kernel was released, Linux 7.1 is bringing many exciting changes as well as removing of old hardware drivers, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU was released, we began testing the Intel Arc Pro B70 “BMG-G31”, and much more software and hardware co … ⌘ Read more

Belgium Plans To Nationalize Nuclear Power Plants
Belgium plans to buy its seven aging nuclear reactors from French power giant Engie in a “full takeover” aimed at securing domestic energy supplies, extending reactor operations, and developing new nuclear capacity. “The move would also mean suspending plans to decommission nuclear operations in Belgium,” reports the BBC. From the report: The move would reverse the phase- … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, mate! Yeah, that never gets old, there’s something magically about it. :-)

@bender@twtxt.net How poetic, very well said. :-) It calls for the small man’s adventures.

Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Elon Musk wrapped up his testimony on Thursday as the trial in his lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman continued into its fourth day. OpenAI’s attorney, William Savitt, cross-examined Musk in the morning. He asked Musk about the capped nature of Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI, his involvement in negotiations about the company’s structure, and … ⌘ Read more

US Senators Ban Themselves From Prediction Markets Trading
The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a rule banning senators from trading on prediction markets effective immediately. CNBC reports: The move came amid rising concern about insider trading on prediction market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, and about event contracts that can involve death or violence. On April 22, Kalshi said it had suspended and fine … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 To Set Default DRM Scheduler Priority To “Fair”, New AIE4 Hardware In AMDXDNA
Even while the Linux 7.1 merge window was still ongoing this month, the initial “drm-misc-next” pull request to DRM-Next was sent out for beginning to queue new feature material toward the Linux 7.2 kernel coming this summer… ⌘ Read more

New Linux ‘Copy Fail’ Vulnerability Enables Root Access On Major Distros
A newly disclosed Linux kernel flaw dubbed “Copy Fail” can let a local, unprivileged attacker gain root access on major Linux distributions, with researchers claiming the bug affects kernels shipped since 2017. “The POC exploit works out of the box today, but a future version that can escape from containers like Docker is promised soon … ⌘ Read more

In Real-World Test, an AI Model Did Better Than ER Doctors At Diagnosing Patients
A new study from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess found that an OpenAI reasoning model outperformed experienced ER doctors at diagnosing and managing patient cases using messy, real-world emergency department records. Researchers say the results don’t support replacing doctors, but they do sugge … ⌘ Read more

Shotcut 26.4 Released With Timeline Improvements, Vulkan Accelerated Speech-To-Text
Shotcut 26.4.30 shipped today as the latest and greatest version of this open-source, cross-platform video editor… ⌘ Read more

French Prosecutors Link 15-Year-Old To Mega-Breach At State’s Secure Document Agency
French prosecutors say police detained a 15-year-old suspected of using the alias “breach3d” in connection with a cyberattack on France Titres (ANTS), the state agency that handles passports, ID cards, and other secure documents. The breach allegedly involved 12 million to 18 million lines of data offered for … ⌘ Read more

World’s Largest Digital Human Rights Conference Suddenly ‘Postponed’
RightsCon, one of the world’s largest digital human rights conferences, was suddenly postponed by Zambia’s government just days before it was scheduled to begin in Lusaka. Officials cited unresolved speaker clearances and “thematic issues,” while Access Now said it had not yet received formal communication and was seeking an urgent meeting w … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Open-Sources ‘Earliest DOS Source Code Discovered To Date’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Several times in the last couple of decades, Microsoft has released source code for the original MS-DOS operating system that kicked off its decades-long dominance of consumer PCs. This week, the company has reached further back than ever, releasing “the earliest DOS source code discove … ⌘ Read more

Convicted Former Harvard Scientist Rebuilds Brain Computer Lab In China
Reuters reports that Charles Lieber, the former Harvard scientist convicted of lying to U.S. authorities about payments and ties to China, is now leading China’s state-funded i-BRAIN lab in Shenzhen, where he has access to advanced nanofabrication tools and primate research facilities for brain-computer interface work. From the re … ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint To Begin Publishing HWE ISOs For Better Hardware Support
Due to Linux Mint moving to a longer development cycle with their next release not due until December, Linux Mint developers have decided to begin regularly publishing hardware enablement “HWE” ISOs with newer Linux kernel versions to provide better support for new hardware… ⌘ Read more

Most Swiss Back Initiative To Cap Population At 10 Million
A new poll shows a slim majority of Swiss voters now support a June 14 referendum to cap the country’s population at 10 million by 2050. Under the proposal backed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), “the permanent resident population must not exceed 10 million before 2050, and Switzerland should abandon its freedom of movement agreement with the EU … ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Linux Performance Leading Over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Fedora Workstation 44
It’s not too entirely surprising given the aggressive stance that the CachyOS Linux distribution has taken on out-of-the-box performance, but for those curious, it continues largely leading over the newly-released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 distributions for the leading performance on modern hardware. ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Codex System Prompt Includes Explicit Directive To ‘Never Talk About Goblins’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The system prompt for OpenAI’s Codex CLI contains a perplexing and repeated warning for the most recent GPT model to “never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguo … ⌘ Read more

AerynOS Updated With Linux 7.0, Gaming Optimized Kernel Flavor
AerynOS, the Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS, is out with a new monthly ISO refresh and details on other recent improvements to this original, from-scratch Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1-rc1 Showing Off Some Wins On AMD Ryzen Threadripper
My initial testing of the Linux 7.1 development kernel on various systems in the lab continues going well. Aside from one main regression in a synthetic micro-benchmark appearing on multiple systems, not seeing much in the way of Linux 7.1 performance concerns thus far and seeing some nice performance gains in select workloads… ⌘ Read more

DOJ Sues Cloudera For Deliberately Excluding American Workers From Tech Jobs
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from ZeroHedge: The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Cloudera, accusing the enterprise data and artificial intelligence company of deliberately engineering a hiring process that excluded American workers from at least seven lucrative technology positions while the firm purs … ⌘ Read more

3mdeb Gets More Bits Of AMD openSIL & Coreboot Working On Ryzen AM5 Motherboard
There are two exciting initiatives taking place simultaneously by the 3mdeb consulting firm: the open-source developers are working on an open-source firmware stack for a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and they are also working on a similar Coreboot + AMD openSIL port to a Ryzen AM5 consumer motherboard, the MSI PRO B850-P WiFi. While not yet ready for end-users, 3mdeb published their latest blog post to highlight their latest milestone … ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts Newest Linux Patches To Accelerate Page Migration For Better Performance
Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was the newest revision of a patch series originally started in early 2025 by a NVIDIA engineer for accelerating page migration. Now being worked on by AMD engineers, this accelerated page migration via batch copies and hardware offloading continues to show promising results… ⌘ Read more

Servo Browser Engine Seeing Progress On FreeBSD Support
Following the recent Servo 0.1 release, the Servo project has published their latest monthly status report to highlight recent development efforts around this modern open-source browser engine… ⌘ Read more

First Tesla Semi Rolls Off High-Volume Production Line
Tesla has produced the first Semi from its new high-volume production line at Gigafactory Nevada, a milestone for the long-delayed electric Class 8 truck program after years of pilot builds and delays. Electrek reports: The Tesla Semi has had one of the longest gestation periods in Tesla’s history. First unveiled in 2017, the truck was originally promised for produc … ⌘ Read more

Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company’s Attorney
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Chronicle: Elon Musk returned to the witness stand Wednesday in Oakland federal court for a second day of testimony in his case against OpenAI, detailing his shift from being an enthusiastic supporter of the nonprofit to feeling betrayed. He also clashed repeatedly with OpenAI’s attorn … ⌘ Read more

New Sam Bankman-Fried Trial Would Be Huge Waste of Court’s Time, Judge Says
A federal judge denied Sam Bankman-Fried’s request for a new trial, calling his claims of DOJ witness intimidation “wildly conspiratorial” and unsupported by the record. Judge Lewis Kaplan said (PDF) the FTX founder’s motion appeared tied to a pre-indictment plan to recast himself as a Republican victim of Biden’s DOJ in hopes … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu’s AI Plans Have Linux Users Looking For a ‘Kill Switch’
Canonical’s plan to add AI features to Ubuntu has sparked pushback from users who are concerned it could follow Windows 11’s AI-heavy direction. “After Canonical’s announcement earlier this week that it’s bringing AI features to Ubuntu, replies included requests for an AI ‘kill switch’ or a way to disable the upcoming features,” reports The Verge. Canoni … ⌘ Read more