Toilet Maker Toto’s Shares Get Unlikely Boost From AI Rush
An anonymous reader shares a report: Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations. The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto’s electrostatic chucks used in NAND chi … ⌘ Read more

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Wine 11.1 Released In Kicking Off The New Development Cycle
Following the release of Wine 11.0 stable just under two weeks ago, Wine 11.1 is now available as the first of the bi-weekly development snapshots for Wine in leading toward the Wine 12.0 release next January… ⌘ Read more

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The Great Graduate Job Drought
Global hiring remains 20% below pre-pandemic levels and job switching has hit a 10-year low, according to a LinkedIn report, and new university graduates are bearing the brunt of a labor market that increasingly favors experienced candidates over fresh talent.

In the UK, the Institute of Student Employers found that graduate hiring fell 8% in the last academic year and employers now receive 140 applications for each … ⌘ Read more

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Wall Street Pushes Solo 401(k)s as More Americans Work for Themselves
An anonymous reader shares a report: A niche retirement plan favored by freelancers is quickly becoming a hot Wall Street sales pitch, as more and more Americans look for ways to shelter a bigger chunk of their paychecks from taxes. Known as solo 401(k)s, they allow the self-employed to contribute $72,000 a year into tax-advantaged retire … ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » My washing machine is making funny noises and I’m this 🤏 close to just throwing it out and washing everything by hand, instead of buying another expensive enshittified product that’s designed to break down in a couple of years.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de my mum, who hand washed clothes for many, many years, would stare at you, incredulously, and tell you, “have fun with that!”. Hand washing a ton of clothes, including sheets, etc., is a royal, glorious, pain! Now drying it, when you live on the land of eternal sunshine, is a different matter.

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China Makes Too Many Cars, and the World Is Increasingly OK With It
After years of Western governments raising alarms about Chinese automotive overcapacity and erecting tariff barriers, an unexpected pivot is now underway as major economies cautiously open their markets to Chinese electric vehicles, Bloomberg writes. Beijing itself has started acknowledging the problem at home. Chinese regulators last week w … ⌘ Read more

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Firmware Upstreamed For Audio Support With Upcoming Dell & Lenovo Panther Lake Laptops
Similar to the new Intel IPU 7.5 firmware upstreamed for Panther Lake this week, Cirrus has upstreamed their CS42L45 codec firmware for upcoming Dell and Lenovo laptops making use of this audio codec… ⌘ Read more

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Solar and Wind Overtake Fossil Fuels in the EU
Wind and solar power overtook fossil fuels last year as a source of electricity in the EU for the first time, a new report found. Semafor adds: The milestone was hit largely thanks to a rise in solar power, which generated a record 13% of electricity in the EU, according to Ember. Together, wind and solar hit 30% of EU electricity generation, edging out fossil fuels at 29%.

The … ⌘ Read more

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Toronto Man Posed as Pilot To Rack Up Hundreds of Free Flights, Prosecutors Say
A Toronto man posed as a pilot for years in order to fool airlines into giving him hundreds of free flights, prosecutors have alleged, in a case that has prompted comparisons to the Hollywood thriller Catch Me If You Can. From a report: Authorities in Hawaii announced this week that Dallas Pokornik, 33, had been charge … ⌘ Read more

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Apple’s Secret Product Plans Stolen in Luxshare Cyberattack
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Apple supplier subject to a major cyberattack last month was China’s Luxshare, it has now emerged. More than 1TB of confidential Apple information was reportedly stolen.

It was reported in December that one of Apple’s assemblers suffered a significant cyberattack that may have compromised sensitive production-line … ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » My washing machine is making funny noises and I’m this 🤏 close to just throwing it out and washing everything by hand, instead of buying another expensive enshittified product that’s designed to break down in a couple of years.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Maybe ask the guys at CERN whether you can quickly put your soaking wet stuff in their Laundry deHumidifying Centrifuge every so often.

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Linux 6.19 Scheduler Feature Being Disabled Due To Performance Regressions
Queued into tip/tip.git’s “sched/urgent” Git branch today is a patch to disable the kernel scheduler’s NEXT_BUDDY functionality that was re-implemented back during the Linux 6.19 merge window. It turns out to cause some performance regressions that have yet to be otherwise addressed… ⌘ Read more

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Linux 6.19 Scheduler Feature Being Disabled Due To Performance Regressions
Queued into tip/tip.git’s “sched/urgent” Git branch today is a patch to disable the kernel scheduler’s NEXT_BUDDY functionality that was re-implemented back during the Linux 6.19 merge window. It turns out to cause some performance regressions that have yet to be otherwise addressed… ⌘ Read more

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When Two Years of Academic Work Vanished With a Single Click
Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany, lost two years of carefully structured academic work in an instant when he temporarily disabled ChatGPT’s “data consent” option in August to test whether the AI tool’s functions would still work without providing OpenAI his data. All his chats were permanently delete … ⌘ Read more

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VVenC H.266 Encoder Rolls Out More ARM Optimizations For Nice Performance Gains
Fraunhofer HHI this week released a new version of VVenC, their open-source H.266 video encoder. Among the changes this release are more performance optimizations for ARM and I have run some comparison benchmarks using a NVIDIA GB10 SoC with the Dell Pro Max GB10… ⌘ Read more

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Anthropic’s AI Keeps Passing Its Own Company’s Job Interview
Anthropic has a problem that most companies would envy: its AI model keeps getting so good, the company wrote in a blog post, that it passes the company’s own hiring test for performance engineers. The test, designed in late 2023 by optimization lead Tristan Hume, asks candidates to speed up code running on a simulated computer chip. Over 1,000 people have take … ⌘ Read more

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Apple Accuses European Commission of ‘Political Delay Tactics’ To Justify Fines
Apple has accused the European Commission of using “political delay tactics” to postpone new app marketplace policies and create grounds for investigating and fining the iPhone maker, a preemptive response to reports that the commission plans to blame Apple for the announced closure of third-party app store Setapp.

M … ⌘ Read more

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Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone: Variable Rate Shading, Host Image Copies & More
In addition to the release today of Vulkan 1.4.340 with the new descriptor heap “VK_EXT_descriptor_heap” extension and three other new extensions, The Khronos Group’s Vulkan Working Group has also published the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone… ⌘ Read more

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‘Almost Everyone’ Laid Off at Vimeo Following Bending Spoons Buyout
Vimeo is laying off employees around the world just months after Italian software company Bending Spoons completed its $1.38 billion acquisition of the video hosting platform. Dave Brown, Vimeo’s former brand VP, described the cuts on LinkedIn as affecting “a large portion of the company.” One video engineer claimed “almost everyone” was laid off, … ⌘ Read more

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AMD Ryzen AI Software 1.7 Released For Improved Performance On NPUs, New Model Support
AMD today released a new version of Ryzen AI Software, the user-space packages for Microsoft Windows and Linux for making use of the Ryzen AI NPUs for various AI software tasks like Stable Diffusion, ONNX, and more… ⌘ Read more

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US Formally Withdraws From WHO
The United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization on Thursday, making good on an executive order that President Trump issued on his first day in office pledging to leave the international organization that coordinates global responses to public health threats. The New York Times: While the United States is walking away from the organization, a senior official with the Department of Health … ⌘ Read more

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GNU Guix 1.5 Released With RISC-V Support, Experimental x86_64 GNU Hurd Kernel
GNU Guix 1.5 is out today as the latest major release for this platform built around its functional package manager. This is a big upgrade with it having been three years since the GNU Guix 1.4 release… ⌘ Read more

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Linux Lands Fix For Its “Subtly Wrong” Page Fault Handling Code For The Past 5 Years
Merged today for the Linux 6.19 Git kernel and then in turn for back-porting to prior Linux kernel series is making the x86 page fault handling code disable interrupts properly. Since 2020 it turns out the handling was subtly wrong but now corrected by Intel… ⌘ Read more

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TikTok Finalizes Deal To Form New American Entity
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years. The social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture. The new version will … ⌘ Read more

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Zlib-rs 0.6 Released With Improved AVX-512 Support
Zlib-rs is the effort out of the Trifecta Tech Foundation to provide a Zlib compression implementation written in the Rust programming language that can serve as a C dynamic library and Rust crate. The intent here being that zlib-rs is potentially safer than the classic C-based implementation of Zlib… ⌘ Read more

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Vulkan 1.4.340 Released With Descriptor Heap & Other New Extensions
Vulkan 1.4.340 is out today as the first significant new Vulkan API update following the end of year holidays. With Vulkan 1.4.340 comes four new extensions worth talking about… ⌘ Read more

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Servo 0.0.4 Browser Engine Released & Finally Supporting Multiple Windows
Servo 0.0.4 is out today as the newest monthly update to this open-source, Rust-based web browser engine. Building off recent Servo embedding API additions, Servo 0.0.4 introduces support for multiple browser windows… ⌘ Read more

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‘Active’ Sitting Is Better For Brain Health
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A systematic review of 85 studies has now found good reason to differentiate between ‘active’ sitting, like playing cards or reading, and ‘passive’ sitting, like watching TV. […] “Total sitting time has been shown to be related to brain health; however, sitting is often treated as a single entity, without considering the specific … ⌘ Read more

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AI Boosts Research Careers But Flattens Scientific Discovery
Ancient Slashdot reader erice shares the findings from a recent study showing that while AI helped researchers publish more often and boosted their careers, the resulting papers were, on average, less useful. “You have this conflict between individual incentives and science as a whole,” says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who … ⌘ Read more

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South Korea Launches Landmark Laws To Regulate AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Korea Herald: South Korea will begin enforcing its Artificial Intelligence Act on Thursday, becoming the first country to formally establish safety requirements for high-performance, or so-called frontier, AI systems – a move that sets the country apart in the global regulatory landscape. According to the Ministry of Science and IC … ⌘ Read more

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Intel Struggles To Meet AI Data Center Demand
Intel says it struggled to satisfy demand for its AI data-center CPUs while new PC chips squeeze margins. CEO Lip-Bu Tan framed the turnaround as supply-constrained, not demand-constrained, with manufacturing yields (18A) improving but still below targets. Reuters reports: The forecast underscores the difficulties faced by Intel in predicting global chip markets, where the company’s curre … ⌘ Read more

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Epic and Google Have a Secret $800 Million Unreal Engine and Services Deal
A federal judge revealed a previously undisclosed ~$800 million, six-year partnership between Epic Games and Google tied to Unreal Engine services and joint marketing. It raises questions about whether the deal influenced Epic’s willingness to settle its antitrust case over Android. The Verge reports: [California District Judge … ⌘ Read more

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AMD Lands Fresh Performance Improvements For RDNA4 In RadeonSI Driver
While slightly too late for making it into the Mesa 26.0 release that branched yesterday, merged now to Mesa Git for Q2’s Mesa 26.1 release are some new RadeonSI Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver optimizations for the latest AMD Radeon RDNA4 graphics cards… ⌘ Read more

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EU Parliament Calls For Detachment From US Tech Giants
The European Parliament is calling on the European Commission to reduce dependence on U.S. tech giants by prioritizing EU-based cloud, AI, and open-source infrastructure. The report frames “European Tech First,” public procurement reform, and Public Money, Public Code as necessary self-defense against growing U.S. control over critical digital infrastructure. Heise repor … ⌘ Read more

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New Jersey Law Requires E-Bike Drivers To Have License, Insurance
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: As one of his final acts in office, former New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law new requirements for e-bikes in his state. The new legislation signed Monday requires that owners and operators of e-bikes have licenses, registration and insurance. Owners and operators of e-bikes must be at l … ⌘ Read more

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The Microsoft-OpenAI Files
Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: GeekWire takes a look at AI’s defining alliance in The Microsoft-OpenAI Files, an epic story drawn from 200+ documents, many made public Friday in Elon Musk’s ongoing suit accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of abandoning the nonprofit mission (Microsoft is also a defendant). Musk, who was an OpenAI co-founder, is seeking up to $134 billion in damages. “Previously undisclosed emails, … ⌘ Read more

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Waymo Launches Robotaxi Service In Miami, Extending US Lead
Waymo has launched its paid robotaxi service in Miami, marking its sixth U.S. market and the company’s first expansion of 2026. CNBC reports: As U.S. competition has lagged, Waymo’s planned 2026 expansions could lock in rider demand and loyalty in the U.S. To start, Waymo will offer its services within a 60-square-mile area that includes Miami’s Design Dist … ⌘ Read more

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Google Begins Offering Free SAT Practice Tests Powered By Gemini
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It’s no secret that students worldwide use AI chatbots to do their homework and avoid learning things. On the flip side, students can also use AI as a tool to beef up their knowledge and plan for the future with flashcards or study guides. Google hopes its latest Gemini feature will help with … ⌘ Read more

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NASA Eyes Popular PC Hardware Performance Tool for Its Flight Simulators
NASA Langley has initiated the U.S. government software approval process to install CapFrameX, a benchmarking tool popular among PC gaming enthusiasts, on its cockpit simulators used to train test pilots. The space agency reached out to CapFrameX, not the other way around, according to an X post from the company.

NASA builds cu … ⌘ Read more

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Half the World’s 100 Largest Cities Are in High Water Stress Areas, Analysis Finds
Half the world’s 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 38 of these sitting in regions of “extremely high water stress,” new analysis and mapping has shown. The Guardian: Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available … ⌘ Read more

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Linux GPU Driver Loophole Being Fixed For Unprivileged Users Being Able To Tap Unbounded Kernel Memory
An oversight in the Linux kernel’s Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver common code could allow unprivileged users to trigger unbounded kernel memory consumption for a potential system-wide out-of-memory “OOM” situation… ⌘ Read more

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Moderna Curbing Investments in Vaccine Trials Due To US Backlash, CEO Says
An anonymous reader shares a report: Moderna does not plan to invest in new late-stage vaccine trials because of growing opposition to immunizations from U.S. officials, CEO Stephane Bancel said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday. “You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market, … ⌘ Read more

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eBay Bans Illicit Automated Shopping Amid Rapid Rise of AI Agents
EBay has updated its User Agreement to explicitly ban third-party “buy for me” agents and AI chatbots from interacting with its platform without permission. From a report: On its face, a one-line terms of service update doesn’t seem like major news, but what it implies is more significant: The change reflects the rapid emergence of what some are cal … ⌘ Read more

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Workday CEO Calls Narrative That AI is Killing Software ‘Overblown’
Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach on Thursday tried to ease worries that AI is destroying software business models. From a report: “It’s an overblown narrative, and it’s not true,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calling AI a tailwind and “absolutely not a headwind” for the company.

Software stocks … ⌘ Read more

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Schools, Airports, High-Rise Towers: Architects Urged To Get ‘Bamboo-Ready’
An anonymous reader shares a report: An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it’s time we took it seriously as a building material, too.

This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for … ⌘ Read more

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China Lagging in AI Is a ‘Fairy Tale,’ Mistral CEO Says
Claims that Chinese technology for AI lags the US are a “fairy tale,” Arthur Mensch, the chief executive officer of Mistral, said. From a report: “China is not behind the West,” Mensch said in an interview on Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday. The capabilities of China’s open-source technology is “probably stressing the … ⌘ Read more

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