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.
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
Taiwan’s iPass Releases Floppy Disk Pre-Paid Cash Card
Taiwan’s iPass has released a limited-edition prepaid payment card shaped exactly like a 3.5-inch floppy disk. The company, perhaps rightly so, felt the need to include a warning on the product listing: “This product only has a card function and does not have a 3.5mm [sic] disk function, please note before purchasing.”
The NFC-enabled novelty card went on sale start … ⌘ Read more
Hmmm I need to figure out a way to reduce the no. of lines of code / complexity of the ARM64 native code emitter for mu (µ). It’s insane really, it’s a whopping ~6k SLOC, the next biggest source file is the compiler at only ~800 SLOC 🤔
Toll Roads Are Spreading in America
Toll roads are expanding across the U.S. as the traditional gas tax funding model for highways collapses. Indiana became the first state to authorize tolls on all of its existing interstate highways when Governor Mike Braun signed legislation in June.
The federal gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27 billion more on road maintenance than it collected fr … ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think I can get binaries even smaller with a bit more work and effort 🤔 But yeah still working on the native code generation (at least for macOS targets)
@prologic@twtxt.net Oh! 🤔
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh that’s fine, Mu can compile to native code and so far binaries. at least on macOS are in the order of Kb in size 😂
@prologic@twtxt.net That might be a challenge, at least in 16-bit Real Mode: The OS follows the model of COM files on DOS, i.e. the size of the binary cannot exceed 64 KiB and heap+stack of the running program will have to fit into that same 64 KiB. 😅 (The memory layout is very rigid, each process gets such a 64 KiB slice.)
And in 64-bit Long Mode, there is no “kernel” yet. The thing in the video is literally just a small bare-metal program.
But some day, maybe. 😃
Rocket Crashes in Brazil’s First Commercial Launch
The first-ever commercial rocket launched at Brazil’s Alcantara Space Center crashed soon after liftoff late earlier this week, dealing a blow to Brazilian aerospace ambitions and shares of South Korean satellite launch company Innospace. From a report: The rocket began its vertical trajectory as planned after liftoff [Monday] at 10:13 p.m. local time (0113 GMT) but fell … ⌘ Read more
QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop Brings QNX 8.0 To A Wayland + Xfce Desktop
Announced earlier in December but flying under the radar until now is the initial reoease of a QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop. This is a developer environment for the QNX real-time operating system primarily used on embedded systems. With now having this developer desktop option, the hassle of cross-compilation to target QNX can be avoided… ⌘ Read more
Mesh Networks Are About To Escape Apple, Amazon and Google Silos
After more than two decades of promises and false starts in the mesh networking space, the smart home standards that Apple, Amazon and Google have each championed are finally set to escape their respective brand silos and work together in a single unified network.
Starting January 1, 2026, Thread 1.4 becomes the Thread Group’s only certified sta … ⌘ Read more
Driverless Future Gains Momentum With Global Robotaxi Deployments
The global push to put autonomous taxis on public roads is accelerating as ride-hailing companies and technology firms advance from pilot programs toward limited commercial rollouts in cities across China, the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
WeRide and Uber launched Level 4 fully driverless robotaxi operations in Abu Dhabi in Novemb … ⌘ Read more
NASA Chief Says US Will Return To Moon Within Trump’s Second Term
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who was confirmed by the Senate just last week after a turbulent nomination process that stretched across most of 2025, said Friday that the United States will return to the moon within President Donald Trump’s second term. Isaacman made the comments during an interview on CNBC, calling Trump’s recommitment … ⌘ Read more
New York To Require Social Media Platforms To Display Mental Health Warnings
Social media platforms with infinite scrolling, auto-play and algorithmic feeds will be required to display warning labels about their potential harm to young users’ mental health under a new law, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Friday. From a report: “Keeping New Yorkers safe has been my top priority since taki … ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’d be cool if you could get µ (Mu) running in your little toyOS 🤣 You’d technically only have to swap out the syscall() builtin for whatever your toy OS supports 🤔
Wine 11.0-rc4 Brings 22 Bug Fixes
Wine 11.0-rc4 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate in working toward the stable Wine 11.0 release in January… ⌘ Read more
FFmpeg Developer Files DMCA Against Rockchip After Two-Year Wait for License Fix
GitHub has disabled Rockchip’s Media Process Platform repository after an FFmpeg developer filed a DMCA takedown notice, nearly two years after the open-source project first publicly accused the Chinese chipmaker of license violations. The notice, filed December 18, claims Rockchip copied thousands of lines of code fr … ⌘ Read more
Indian IT Was Supposed To Die From AI. Instead It’s Billing for the Cleanup.
Two years after generative AI was supposed to render India’s $250 billion IT services industry obsolete, the sector is finding that enterprises still need someone to handle the unglamorous plumbing work that large-scale AI deployment demands. Less than 15% of organizations are meaningfully deploying the new technology, accordin … ⌘ Read more
As AI Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary
While stock investors have pushed AI-related shares to repeated highs this year, debt markets are telling a more cautious story as newer AI infrastructure companies find themselves paying significantly elevated interest rates to borrow money. Applied Digital, a data center builder, sold $2.35 billion of debt in November at a 9.25% coupon – roughly 3.75% above … ⌘ Read more