Radeon RADV Vulkan Driver Is On The Verge Of Another Big Ray-Tracing Performance Gain
Natalie Vock as one of the open-source developers on Valve’s Linux graphics team has been spearheading another big ray-tracing performance improvement for the AMD Radeon Vulkan driver. RADV ray-tracing performance improved a lot in 2025 but it’s looking like 2026 could be even more exciting… ⌘ Read more

Compiler-Based Context & Locking Analysis On Deck For Linux 7.0 Paired With Clang 22+
A new feature in the queue for likely introduction with the next version of the Linux kernel (Linux 6.20~7.0) is compiler-based context and locking analysis. This kernel code depends on the yet-to-be-released LLVM Clang 22 compiler but can provide some powerful insights to kernel developers… ⌘ Read more

Acer Laptop Battery Control Driver Looks Toward The Upstream Linux Kernel
For those with Acer laptops running Linux on GitHub there has been an out-of-tree driver providing an experimental “acer-wmi-battery” kernel module to allow controlling battery-related features. Now a cleaned-up version of that driver is working on getting into the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

DRM Splash Screen Updated To Simply Drawing A Colored Background, Displaying A BMP Image
Back in October was an initial proposal for a DRM splash screen client for the Linux kernel that would be primarily useful for embedded systems for rendering a simple “splash screen” when updating the system firmware/software, early display activation at boot, during system recovery, or similar processes. Sent out today was a second revision to the DRM splash screen code… ⌘ Read more

Congressman Introduces Legislation To Criminalize Insider Trading On Prediction Markets
Ritchie Torres has introduced a bill to ban government officials from using insider information to trade on political prediction markets like Polymarket. The bill was prompted by reports that traders on Polymarket made large profits betting on Nicolas Maduro’s removal, raising suspicions that some wage … ⌘ Read more

An AI-Generated NWS Map Invented Fake Towns In Idaho
National Weather Service pulled an AI-generated forecast graphic after it hallucinated fake town names in Idaho. “The blunder – not the first of its kind to be posted by the NWS in the past year – comes as the agency experiments with a wide range of AI uses, from advanced forecasting to graphic design,” reports the Washington Post. “Experts worry that without properly … ⌘ Read more

Creator of Claude Code Reveals His Workflow
Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, revealed a deceptively simple workflow that uses parallel AI agents, verification loops, and shared memory to let one developer operate with the output of an entire engineering team. “I run 5 Claudes in parallel in my terminal,” Cherny wrote. “I number my tabs 1-5, and use system notifications to know when a Claude needs input. … ⌘ Read more

Discord Files Confidentially For IPO
According to Bloomberg, Discord has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO. Reuters reports: The U.S. IPO market regained momentum in 2025 after nearly three years of sluggish activity, but hopes for a stronger rebound were tempered by tariff-driven volatility, a prolonged government shutdown and a late-year selloff in artificial intelligence stocks. Discord, which was founded in 2015, offers voice, video … ⌘ Read more

Linux’s Old Mount API Code On The Chopping Block For The 7.0 Kernel
The Linux kernel’s “new mount API” that has been in the kernel since 2019 and recently made rounds for taking 6+ years to land the man page documentation on it will soon be the the only mount API internally within the kernel. Removing the “old” Linux kernel mount API internals is a candidate for the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net better now, with you around! 🙈

NYC Wegmans Is Storing Biometric Data On Shoppers’ Eyes, Voices and Faces
schwit1 shares a report from Gothamist: Wegmans in New York City has begun collecting biometric data from anyone who enters its supermarkets, according to new signage posted at the chain’s Manhattan and Brooklyn locations earlier this month. Anyone entering the store could have data on their face, eyes and voices collected and stor … ⌘ Read more

Utah Allows AI To Renew Medical Prescriptions
sinij shares a news release from the Utah Department of Commerce: The state of Utah, through the Utah Department of Commerce’s Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy, today announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Doctronic, the AI-native health platform, to give patients with chronic conditions a faster, automated way to renew medications. This agreement marks the first s … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Details New AI Chips and Autonomous Car Project With Mercedes
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: On Monday, [Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip-making giant Nvidia] said the company would begin shipping a new A.I. chip later this year, one that can do more computing with less power than previous generations of chips could. Known as the Vera Rubin, the chip has b … ⌘ Read more

Google Will Now Only Release Android Source Code Twice a Year
Google will begin releasing Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source code only twice a year starting in 2026. “In the past, Google would release the source code for every quarterly Android release, of which there are four each year,” notes Android Authority. From the report: Google told Android Authority that, effective 2026, Google will publish new s … ⌘ Read more

Gentoo Linux Made Progress On RISC-V, WSL, & More While Pulling In Just $12k USD
The Gentoo Linux project published their 2025 retrospective this week with their many accomplishments, including the recruitment of four more developers and now being up to 31,663 ebuilds and a total of 89GB worth of x86_64 binary packages on mirrors… ⌘ Read more

Vietnam Bans Unskippable Ads
Vietnam will begin enforcing new online advertising rules in February 2026 that ban forced video ads longer than five seconds and must allow users to close ads with just one tap. “Furthermore, platforms must provide clear icons and instructions for users to report advertisements that violate the law, and allow them to opt out, turn off, or stop viewing inappropriate ads,” reports a local news outlet (translated to Eng … ⌘ Read more

Intel Is Making Its Own Handheld Gaming PC Chips At CES 2026
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IGN: Last year, Intel had the best iGPU on the market. This year, it’s broken that record by over 70% with Panther Lake and it’s a huge win for handhelds. “We’ve overdelivered” is how Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan categorized the Panther Lake launch during the company’s CES 2026 Keynote address, and that really does se … ⌘ Read more

Study Casts Doubt on Potential For Life on Jupiter’s Moon Europa
Jupiter’s moon Europa is on the short list of places in our solar system seen as promising in the search for life beyond Earth, with a large subsurface ocean thought to be hidden under an outer shell of ice. But new research is raising questions about whether Europa in fact has what it takes for habitability. Reuters: The study assessed the pot … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia’s New G-Sync Pulsar Monitors Target Motion Blur at the Human Retina Level
Nvidia’s G-Sync Pulsar technology, first announced nearly two years ago as a solution to display motion blur caused by old images persisting on the viewer’s retina, is finally arriving in consumer monitors this week. The first four Pulsar-equipped displays – from Acer, AOC, Asus and MSI – hit select retailers on W … ⌘ Read more

Lego Unveils Smart Bricks, Its ‘Most Significant Evolution’ in 50 years
The Lego Group today unveiled Smart Bricks, a tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic 2x4 brick and which the company is calling the most significant evolution in its building system since the introduction of the minifigure in 1978. The Smart Brick contains a custom ASIC smaller than a single Lego stud and includes light and … ⌘ Read more

All Fedora 44 KDE Variants To Use Plasma Login Manager Rather Than SDDM
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved a Fedora 44 change for switching all KDE variants away from using the SDDM display manager to instead use the newer Plasma Login Manager… ⌘ Read more

Elite Colleges Are Back at the Top of the List For Company Recruiters
The “talent is everywhere” approach that U.S. employers adopted during the white-hot pandemic job market is quietly giving way to something much older and more familiar: recruiting almost exclusively from a small set of elite and nearby universities. A 2025 survey of more than 150 companies by Veris Insights found that 26% were exclusiv … ⌘ Read more

HarperCollins Will Use AI To Translate Harlequin Romance Novels
Book publisher HarperCollins said it will start translating romance novels under its famous Harlequin label in France using AI, reducing or eliminating the pay for the team of human contract translators who previously did this work. 404Media: Publisher’s Weekly broke the news in English after French outlets reported on the story in December. Accord … ⌘ Read more

Many Schools Don’t Think Students Can Read Full Novels Anymore
A survey of 2,000 teachers, students and parents conducted by the New York Times found that many high schools have stopped assigning full novels to students, opting instead for excerpts that are often read on school-issued laptops rather than in print. The shift stems from multiple factors: a belief that students have shorter attention spans, pressure … ⌘ Read more

UK Urged To Unplug From US Tech Giants as Digital Sovereignty Fears Grow
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Open Rights Group is warning politicians that the UK is leaning far too heavily on US tech companies to run critical systems, and wants the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill to force a rethink.

The digital rights outfit says the bill, which is due to receive its second reading in the House … ⌘ Read more

Redox OS Begins Developing Its Own Intel Graphics Driver
The Rust-written Redox OS operating system had an exciting end to the year as it began developing its own native Intel graphics driver… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’ll let you guys know when/if it’s ready to get published. 😅 There are still rough edges and, obviously, very few widgets. Most importantly, a list view and a table widget are missing. But my vacation is over now, so things will crawl to a halt.

HP Pushes PC-in-a-Keyboard for Businesses With Hot Desks
HP this week announced the EliteBoard G1a at CES 2026, a Windows computer built into a full-size 93-key desktop keyboard that the company is marketing to businesses where employees use hot desks and need a portable computing environment they can carry between workstations.

The device connects to a USB-C monitor for both video output and power delivery over a single … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Yep! I like that this distillation metaphor makes it explicit: You have to go ahead and actually distill something. It doesn’t happen automatically. The metaphor acknowledges that this is work that needs to be done by someone.

“What is a PC compatible?” https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/blog/p/what-is-a-pc-compatible/

‘NY Orders Apps To Lie About Social Media Addiction, Will Lose In Court’
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed S4505, a law that requires websites to display warnings claiming that features like algorithmic feeds, push notifications, infinite scroll, like counts, and autoplay cause addiction – despite, as TechDirt argues, the absence of scientific consensus supporting such claims.

State Senator Andr … ⌘ Read more

Transparent Hugepage Performance On Linux 6.18 LTS: Madvise vs. Always
With some Linux distributions like Fedora Workstation and Ubuntu defaulting to “madvise” Transparent Hugepages (THP) while others like CachyOS and openSUSE defaulting to “always”, you may be curious about the madvise vs. always THP difference in modern Linux environments. If so this round of benchmarking is for you in looking at the performance impact of madvise vs. always THP. ⌘ Read more

Razer Thinks You’d Rather Have AI Headphones Instead of Glasses
Razer today unveiled Project Motoko, a concept pair of over-ear headphones equipped with dual cameras that the gaming peripherals company believes could serve as an alternative to the smart glasses that have proliferated across the wearable AI market. The headphones feature two 4K cameras positioned on the earcups along with near and far field micro … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net They’re not completely impossible, but C makes it much easier to run into them. I think the key point is that in those “safe” languages, buffer overflows are caught and immediately crash the program (if not handled otherwise) instead of silently corrupting memory, not being noticed right away and maybe only later crashing at a different location, where it can be very hard to find the actual root cause. This is a big improvement in my book.

Some programmers are indeed horrible. I’m guilty myself. :-)

I like the article.

Microsoft Office Is Now ‘Microsoft 365 Copilot App’
Longtime reader joshuark shares a report: As spotted by Bluesky user DodgerFanLA, going to Office.com now greets you with the following helpful explainer: “The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) lets you create, share, and collaborate all in one place with your favorite apps now including Copilot.*”

Never has an asterisk been more relevant to me than following the wor … ⌘ Read more

Stratechery Pushes Back on AI Capital Dystopia Predictions
Stratechery’s Ben Thompson has published a lengthy rebuttal to Dwarkesh Patel and Philip Trammell’s widely discussed winter break essay “Capital in the 22nd Century,” arguing that even in a world where AI can perform all human jobs, people will still prefer human-created content and human connection.

Patel and Trammell’s thesis draws on Thomas Piketty’s wor … ⌘ Read more

Revised Steam Survey For December 2025 Puts Linux Gaming Marketshare At 3.58%
Back on the 1st Valve published the Steam Survey results for December 2025 and they put the Linux gaming marketshare at 3.19%, a 0.01% dip from November. But now the December results have been revised with a nice bump to the Linux marketshare… ⌘ Read more

I came across this on “Why Is SQLite Coded In C”, which I found interesting:

“There has lately been a lot of interest in “safe” programming languages like Rust or Go in which it is impossible, or is at least difficult, to make common programming errors like memory leaks or array overruns.”

If that’s true, then encountering those issues means the programmer is, simply, horrible?

# $YakumoLabs$
# yarnd service file for https://github.com/davmac314/dinit
type = process
command = /usr/pkg/bin/yarnd -b 127.0.0.1:6446
env-file = /usr/pkg/etc/yarnd.conf
working-dir = /var/db/yarnd
restart = on-failure

VW Brings Back Physical Buttons
sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Volkswagen is making a drastic change to its interiors, or at least the interiors of its electric vehicles. The automaker recently unveiled a new cockpit generation with the refreshed ID. Polo – the diminutive electric hatchback that the brand sells in Europe – that now comes with physical buttons. […] The steering wheel gets new clusters of buttons for cruise co … ⌘ Read more

Flatpak Exploring GPU Virtualization To Ease Driver Challenges
Open-source developer Sebastian Wick has written a blog post outlining work to improve the graphics driver situation for Flatpaks. Particularly around situations like the NVIDIA driver stack that may depend upon a specific kernel version or where a Flatpak runtime may be end-of-life, dealing with GPU drivers in Flatpaks can be a burden. A solution being explored is GPU virtualization to deal with those GPU driver handling challenges while still prov … ⌘ Read more

Intel Core Ultra X7 358H + 32GB RAM Laptop Around ~$1300 USD
Yesterday when Intel formally introduced Panther Lake as the Core Ultra Series 3 with pre-orders set to begin today and available globally later this month, one of the key questions remaining was around pricing… I’ve been scouting various Internet retailers today and so far have found a Ultra X7 358H model with the 12 Xe cores for the Xe3 integrated graphics to be priced around $1299 USD with 32GB of RAM… ⌘ Read more

AMD Releases GAIA 0.15 - Positioning It As A Framework/SDK For Building AI PC Agents
Last year AMD announced GAIA as short for “Generative AI Is Awesome”. It started off as a Windows-only AI demo but over time added Linux support along with introducing different AI agents. For going along with AMD’s AI announcements at CES 2026, AMD released GAIA 0.15 where they are now positioning this software as a framework/SDK for building AI PC agents… ⌘ Read more

GStreamer 1.28-RC1 Brings A Rust-Based GIF Decoder, Other New Rust Components
On Monday the first release candidate of the GStreamer 1.28 multimedia framework was released. As is a recurring focus in recent releases, more GStreamer code is written in Rust for memory safety especially around decoding content… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I quite like this part:

Many people write programs, but few stick with a program long enough to distill it.

Dell Admits It Made a Huge Mistake When It Abandoned XPS
Dell has reversed course and resurrected the XPS brand as its “premium consumer” brand of laptops, admitting it was a mistake to kill it in the first place. Slashdot reader joshuark shares a report from Gizmodo: At last year’s CES, Dell made the eyebrow-raising decision to ax all its legacy laptop brand names and instead opt for Apple-like conventions. Inste … ⌘ Read more

I think this is finally a good metaphor to talk about “simple” software:

https://oldbytes.space/@psf/115846939202097661

Distilled software.

I quote in full:

principles of software distillation:

Old software is usually small and new software is usually large. A distilled program can be old or new, but is always small, and is powerful by its choice of ideas, not its implementation size.

A distilled program has the conciseness of an initial version and the refinement of a final version.

A distilled program is a finished work, but remains hackable due to its small size, allowing it to serve as the starting point for new works.

Many people write programs, but few stick with a program long enough to distill it.

I often tried to tell people about “simple” or “minimalistic” software, “KISS”, stuff like that, but they never understand – because everybody has a different idea of “simple”. The term “simple” is too abstract.

This is worth thinking about some more. 🤔

Hyundai and Boston Dynamics Unveil Humanoid Robot Atlas At CES
At CES 2026 today, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics publicly demonstrated its humanoid robot Atlas, showing off fluid movement and announcing plans to deploy a production version in Hyundai’s EV factory by 2028. NBC News reports: “For the first time ever in public, please welcome Atlas to the stage,” said Boston Dynamics’ Zachary Jackowski as a life-s … ⌘ Read more

What a horrible night to have a curse…

AMD Announces Ryzen 7 9850X3D, New Strix Halo SKUs & Ryzen AI 400 Series
Lisa Su’s keynote just wrapped up at CES 2026 and in turn the embargo regarding AMD’s first consumer product announcements for 2026. The AMD Ryzen AI 400 series and new Ryzen 7 9850X3D 3D V-Cache processors are what’s in focus for CES this year. ⌘ Read more