GNOME 50 Is No Longer Treating Variable Rate Refresh “VRR” As Experimental
Another great albeit overdue improvement for GNOME 50 has landed: Variable Rate Refresh “VRR” functionality for modern displays is now promoted and no longer treated as an experimental feature… ⌘ Read more

Plasma 6.7 Restoring The Air Plasma Theme, Fixes KWin Issue With Intense Alt+Tab’ing
KDE Plasma developers remain quite busy preparing for the Plasma 6.6 desktop release coming up in a little more than two weeks while at the same time continuing to land early features for the Plasma 6.7 release coming later in the year… ⌘ Read more

The Last Of The Dolby Digital Plus “E-AC3” Patents Might Now Be Expired
For those interested in the Dolby Digital Plus “Enhanced AC-3” audio compression format for open-source software, the last of the patents for this widely-used format by streaming services and more appears to have expired… ⌘ Read more

GTK Developers Plot Improvements To Tackle This Year - Possible Opt-In Unstable API
GNOME developers had a busy week in preparing for the GNOME 50 beta release, many GNOME developers attending FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, and other happenings… ⌘ Read more

Author of Systemd Quits Microsoft To Prove Linux Can Be Trusted
Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft to co-found Amutable, a new Berlin-based company aiming to bring cryptographically verifiable integrity and deterministic trust guarantees to Linux systems. He said in a post on Mastodon that his “role in upstream maintenance for the Linux kernel will continue as it always has.” Poettering will also continue to … ⌘ Read more

‘Reverse Solar Panel’ Generates Electricity at Night
Researchers at the University of New South Wales are developing a “reverse solar panel” that generates small amounts of electricity at night by harvesting infrared heat radiated from Earth. “In the past, scientists have demonstrated that a ‘thermoradiative diode’ can convert infrared radiation directly into electricity; when used to convert heat from Earth, they explo … ⌘ Read more

UK’s First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK’s first superfast-charging train running only on battery power will come into passenger service this weekend – operating a five-mile return route in west London. Great Western Railway (GWR) will send the converted London Underground train out from 5.30am to cover the full Saturday timetable on the … ⌘ Read more

Apple Reports Best-Ever Quarter For iPhone Sales
Apple posted its biggest quarter ever, with iPhone revenue hitting a record ~$85.3 billion and Services climbing 14% to ~$30 billion. Total revenue reached nearly $143.76 billion.

“The demand for iPhone was simply staggering,” CEO Tim Cook said on a conference call discussing the results. “This is the strongest iPhone lineup we’ve ever had and by far the most popular.”

[![]( … ⌘ Read more

Belkin’s Wemo Smart Devices Will Go Offline On Saturday
Belkin is shutting down cloud support for most Wemo smart home devices on January 31, leaving only Thread-based models and devices already set up in Apple HomeKit functional. Everything else will lose remote access, voice assistant integrations, and future app updates. The Verge reports: The shut down was first announced in July and impacts most Wemo devices, ran … ⌘ Read more

GNU gettext Reaches Version 1.0 After 30 Years
After more than 30 years of development, GNU gettext finally “crossed the symbolic ‘v1.0’ milestone,” according to Phoronix’s Michael Larabel. “GNU gettext 1.0 brings PO file handling improvements, a new ‘po-fetch’ program to fetch translated PO files from a translation project’s site on the Internet, new ‘msgpre’ and ‘spit’ pre-translation programs, and Ocaml and Rust programming l … ⌘ Read more

White House Scraps ‘Burdensome’ Software Security Rules
An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: The White House has announced that software security guidance issued during the Biden administration has been rescinded due to “unproven and burdensome” requirements that prioritized administrative compliance over meaningful security investments. The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued Memorandum … ⌘ Read more

Oracle May Slash Up To 30,000 Jobs
An anonymous reader shares a report: Oracle could cut up to 30,000 jobs and sell health tech unit Cerner to ease its AI datacenter financing challenges, investment banker TD Cowen has claimed, amid changing sentiment on Big Red’s massive build-out plans.

A research note from TD Cowen states that finding equity and debt investors are increasingly questioning how Oracle will finance its datacenter bui … ⌘ Read more

Los Angeles Aims To Ban Single-Use Printer Cartridges
Los Angeles is moving to ban single-use printer cartridges that can’t be refilled or taken back for recycling. Tom’s Hardware reports: Printer cartridges are usually built with a combination of plastic, metal, and chemicals that makes them hard to easily dispose. They can be treated as hazardous waste by the city, but even then it would take them hundreds of years … ⌘ Read more

Videogame Stocks Slide On Google’s AI Model That Turns Prompts Into Playable Worlds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shares of videogame companies fell sharply in afternoon trading on Friday after Alphabet’s Google rolled out its artificial intelligence model capable of creating interactive digital worlds with simple prompts. Shares of “Grand Theft Auto” maker Take-Two Intera … ⌘ Read more

Wall Street’s Top Bankers Are Giving Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong the Cold Shoulder
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon interrupted a conversation between Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair at Davos last week to tell Armstrong “You are full of s—,” his index finger pointed squarely at Armstrong’s face. Dimon told Armstrong to stop lying on TV, according to WSJ.

A … ⌘ Read more

AI Code Review Prompts Initiative Making Progress For The Linux Kernel
Chris Mason, the longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the creator of Btrfs, has been working on a Git repository with AI review prompts he has been working on for LLM-assisted code review of Linux kernel patches. This initiative has been happening for some weeks now while the latest work was posted today for comments… ⌘ Read more

‘Moltbook Is the Most Interesting Place On the Internet Right Now’
Moltbook is essentially Reddit for AI agents and it’s the “most interesting place on the internet right now,” says open-source developer and writer Simon Willison in a blog post. The fast-growing social network offers a place where AI agents built on the OpenClaw personal assistant framework can share their skills, experiments, and discoveries. … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t have any statistics, just observe what is around me, so it’s very subjective. I know a bunch of kids with names I’ve never heard before. Sometimes, I first thought other kids were making fun of their friends by calling them by made-up nonsense. But no. Without question, I live under a rock. I just looked up some of them that came to mind immediately and they seem to be of Greek, Swedish and Latin origin, etc.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh yeah, that sounds really nicely.

Apple ‘Runs on Anthropic,’ Says Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman
Apple “runs on Anthropic at this point” and that the AI company is powering much of what Apple does internally for product development and internal tools, according to Mark Gurman, the most influential reporter on the Apple beat.

Apple had initially pursued an AI deal with Anthropic before the Google partnership came together, but negotiations fell apart over pricin … ⌘ Read more

One-Third of US Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off Over the Last Two Years, GDC Study Reveals
An anonymous reader shares a report: One-third of U.S. video game industry workers say they were laid off over the past two years, according to a new survey conducted by the organizers behind the newly revamped Game Developers Conference (GDC). Based on responses from more th … ⌘ Read more

Aww man, I need to pick up learning Finnish again. I just love the sound of that language.

Surprisingly, I still understand quite a bit of what she’s saying here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfnt5-7QBvQ

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

I reckon up until then you had to have another first name that clearly differentiated.

Yes, apparently so. (I’m glad we stopped doing that. I don’t get this obsession with the contents of other people’s pants. 🤢)

Now I’m wondering, was that also the beginning when parents started giving their kids really weird names?

Did this ever happen or was this an urban myth? Would have to dig up some statistics, I guess. (Anecdotal evidence: None of the people I know gave their kids crazy names. 😆)

DuckDuckGo Users Vote Overwhelmingly Against AI Features
DuckDuckGo recently asked its users how they felt about AI in search. The answer has come back loud and clear: more than 90% of the 175,354 people who voted said they don’t want it.

The privacy-focused search engine has since set up two versions of its tool: noai.duckduckgo.com for the AI-averse and yesai.duckduckgo.com for the curious. Users can also tweak se … ⌘ Read more

I joined SDF five years ago today–which means my fifth anniversary on Gemini is coming up alarmingly soon.

Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Snapshot 3 Released For Testing
Resolute Snapshot 3 is now available as the newest monthly test candidate leading up the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April… ⌘ Read more

Nobel Hacking Likely Leaked Peace Prize Winner Name, Probe Finds
An anonymous reader shares a report: A hacking of the Nobel organization’s computer systems is the most likely cause of last year’s leak of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado’s name, according to the results of an investigation [non-paywalled source]. An individual or a state actor may have illegally gained access in a cyber breach, … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Still Committed To Linux 6.20~7.0 Even If Not Finalized For Release Time
Last year Canonical committed to shipping the latest upstream Linux kernel versions in new Ubuntu releases compared to their more conservative choices in prior releases that didn’t always align nicely for the latest Linux kernel upstream. Back in December they confirmed Ubuntu 26.04 plans for Linux 6.20~7.0 and their plans remain that way, even if it means the stable Linux 6.20~7.0 stable release won’t be officially out … ⌘ Read more

Do Markets Make Us Moral?
A new study [PDF] examining the United States between 1850 and 1920 found that expanded market access – driven largely by railroad expansion – made Americans more trusting of strangers and more outward-looking, but weakened family-based care for the vulnerable.

Researchers Max Posch of the University of Exeter and Itzchak Tzachi Raz of Hebrew University compared places and people gaining different levels of commercial conne … ⌘ Read more

RISC-V User-Space Control Flow Integrity / Shadow Stack Appears Finally Ready
Similar to what has been available on Intel and AMD processors for users with the shadow stack for control-flow integrity, Linux on RISC-V is finally ready to roll-out its user-space control-flow integrity support… ⌘ Read more

‘Call Screening is Aggravating the Rich and Powerful’
Apple’s call-screening feature, introduced in iOS 26 last year, was designed to combat the more than 2 billion robocalls placed to Americans every month, but as WSJ is reporting, it is now creating friction for the rich and powerful who find themselves subjected to automated interrogation when dialing from unrecognized numbers.

The feature uses an automated voice to … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I reckon up until then you had to have another first name that clearly differentiated. Didn’t read through the court decision, though.

Interesting, I always thought that Kiran was a male first name. But I only know one person with that name. As last name, though.

Now I’m wondering, was that also the beginning when parents started giving their kids really weird names?

@bender@twtxt.net Hahahaha! :-D

Vulkan 1.4.342 Published With Cooperative Matrix Conversion Extension
Following last week’s Vulkan spec updates that brought descriptor heaps and other notable new extensions and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone, Vulkan 1.4.342 was published this morning as the latest routine spec update plus one new extension… ⌘ Read more

The UK Paid $5.65 Million For a Bookmarks Site
The UK government paid consulting firm PwC $5.65 million to build its new AI Skills Hub, a site meant to help 10 million workers gain AI skills by 2030 that functions largely as a bookmarking service, directing users to external training courses that already existed before the contract was awarded.

The hub links to platforms like Salesforce’s free Trailhead learning system rather th … ⌘ Read more

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net Haha, I just noticed because my client colors mentions differently depending on whether I follow the feed or not. ;-)

AMD EPYC 9755 Delivers Decisive Performance Leadership Over Xeon 6 Granite Rapids With Nearly 500 Benchmarks
Back in December I carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 for these competing 128 core server processors using the latest Linux software stack before closing out 2025. That was done with nearly 200 benchmarks and the AMD EPYC Turin Zen 5 processor delivered terrific performance as we have come to enjoy out of the 5th Gen EPYC line-up over the past year and several mont … ⌘ Read more

Amazon in Talks To Invest Up To $50 Billion in OpenAI
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon is in talks to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be a giant bet on the hot AI startup. The ChatGPT maker is seeking up to $100 billion in new capital from investors, a round that could value it at as much as $830 billion, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

An … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft is Experimenting With a Top Menu Bar for Windows 11
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft’s PowerToys team is contemplating building a top menu bar for Windows 11, much like Linux, macOS, or older versions of Windows. The menu bar, or Command Palette Dock as Microsoft calls it, would be a new optional UI that provides quick access to tools, monitoring of system resources, and much more.

Micros … ⌘ Read more

Linux’s ublk Adding Batch I/O Dispatch Capability For Greater Performance
Linux’s user-space block device driver framework “ublk” for implementing virtual block device drivers in user-space relayed by IO_uring is introducing batch I/O dispatch infrastructure… ⌘ Read more

Backseat Software
Mike Swanson: What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:

“How are you enjoying your drive so far?”

Annoyed by the interruption, and even more behind schedule, you dismiss the prompt and merge back into traffic.

A minute later it does it again.

“Did you know I have a new feature? Tap … ⌘ Read more

AerynOS Establishes Policy Against LLM Contributions, 2026.01 ISO Refresh
In kicking off 2026, AerynOS developers have continued to make progress on their build tooling and infrastructure for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. They have also been working on a new website design and other updated branding to start the new year… ⌘ Read more

Unable To Stop AI, SAG-AFTRA Mulls a Studio Tax On Digital Performers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: In the future, studios that use synthetic actors in place of humans might have to pay a royalty into a union fund. That’s one of the ideas kicking around as SAG-AFTRA prepares to sit down with the studios on Feb. 9. Artificial intelligence was central to the 2023 actors strike, and it’s only g … ⌘ Read more

Open-Source Nova Driver In Linux 7.0 Continues Preparing For NVIDIA Turing GPU Support
This week the Rust DRM changes intended for the Linux 7.0 merge window were sent out by Danilo Krummrich. The Apple Silicon Asahi Linux “AGX” DRM kernel driver still isn’t positioned for upstreaming to the mainline kernel so that leaves most of the Rust DRM upstream work currently around the NVIDIA Nova driver as well as the Arm Mali Tyr drivers… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Linux Driver Updated To Disable GuC Power DCC For Panther Lake
Queued up in DRM-Next for the Intel open-source graphics driver ahead of the Linux 7.0 kernel cycle is expanding GPU temperature sensor reporting, multi-device SVM prep, multi-queue support for Crescent Island, Nova Lake display support, and other feature work. With the Linux 6.19 stable release fast approaching, DRM-Next is now focusing in on reading early fixes with concluding feature activity for this next merge window… ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 With New LLM Model Support
Intel today released the LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 update with expanding the array of large language models that can run on Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards with this Docker-based stack for deploying vLLM… ⌘ Read more

Former Google Engineer Found Guilty of Stealing AI Secrets For Chinese Firms
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: A former Google engineer has been found guilty on multiple federal charges for stealing the tech giant’s trade secrets on artificial intelligence to benefit Chinese companies he secretly worked for, federal prosecutors said. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Offi … ⌘ Read more

Radiologists Catch More Aggressive Breast Cancers By Using AI To Help Read Mammograms, Study Finds
A large Swedish study of 100,000 women found that using AI to assist radiologists reading mammograms reduced the rate of aggressive “interval” breast cancers by 12%. CBC News reports: For the study – published in Thursday’s issue of the medical journal The Lancet – more than … ⌘ Read more

Universal Basic Income Could Be Used To Soften Hit From AI Job Losses In UK, Minister Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK could introduce a universal basic income (UBI) to protect workers in industries that are being disrupted by AI, the investment minister Jason Stockwood has said. “Bumpy” changes to society caused by the introduction of the technology w … ⌘ Read more

Comcast Keeps Losing Customers Despite Price Guarantee, Unlimited Data
Comcast’s attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn’t stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports: The Q4 net l … ⌘ Read more