AI Data Centers Can Warm Surrounding Areas By Up To 9.1C
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues saw that the amount of energy needed to run a data centre had been steadily increasing of late and was likely to “explode” in the coming years, so wanted to quantify the impact. The researchers took satellite measurements of land su … ⌘ Read more

For the first time in years, I managed to get out and throw a round of disc golf. Had a good time playing Vietnam Veterans Park in Kannapolis, throwing +10 over 9 holes, with my only par being thanks to a 40’ “putt” with my MRV. And the weather was perfect.

I hope to play another round soon.

Intel Announces The “Optimization Zone”
Intel today formally announced the Optimization Zone as a new initiative at the company that began last October and is building up a centralized repository for maximizing performance and software optimizations around Intel hardware… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Plans To Build 100% Native Apps For Windows 11
Microsoft is reportedly shifting Windows 11 app development back toward fully native apps. Rudy Huyn, a Partner Architect at Microsoft working on the Store and File Explorer, said in a post on X that he is building a new team to work on Windows apps. “You don’t need prior experience with the platform.. what matters most is strong product thinking and a deep focus … ⌘ Read more

Archinstall 4.0 Released For Improved Arch Linux Installer Using Textual UI
Archinstall 4.0 is out today and just in time for the April 1 monthly refresh to the Arch Linux installer. With Archinstall 4.0, this Arch Linux OS installer is now using the Textual TUI library rather than the Curses library… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de LOL.

After 16 Years and $8 Billion, the Military’s New GPS Software Still Doesn’t Work
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last year, just before the Fourth of July holiday, the US Space Force officially took ownership of a new operating system for the GPS navigation network, raising hopes that one of the military’s most troubled space programs might finally bear fruit. The GPS Next- … ⌘ Read more

AMD Improves GPU Support Under WSL With Production Open-Source ROCDXG
For those wanting to make use of Linux GPU compute software under Windows 11 by way of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), AMD’s ROCDXG “librocdxg” library is now deemed production-ready for delivering open-source ROCm compatibility with WSL… ⌘ Read more

Samsung Is Bringing AirDrop-Style Sharing to Older Galaxy Devices
Samsung is reportedly planning to roll out AirDrop-style file sharing for older Galaxy phones via a Quick Share update. Early reports suggest the feature is appearing on devices from the Galaxy S22 through the S25, though it is not actually working yet. Android Central reports: As spotted by Reddit users (via Tarun Vats on X), a Quick Share a … ⌘ Read more

OkCupid Settles FTC Case On Alleged Misuse of Its Users’ Personal Data
OkCupid and parent company Match Group settled an FTC case dating back to 2014 over allegations that the dating app shared users’ photos and other personal data with a third party without proper disclosure or opt-out rights. Engadget reports: According to the FTC, OkCupid’s privacy policy at the time noted that the company wouldn’t shar … ⌘ Read more

@quark@ferengi.one

talk next to nothing

I could rant about AI a bit and how it ruins every day at work, if that helps? 🤣

and a reply to it, just for giggles. I miss the days all we talked about was twtxt. Now we have vans, and talk next to nothing. ;-) :-P LOL.

First twtxt after upgrading (as I don’t want a reply to count as one).

Life With AI Causing Human Brain ‘Fry’
fjo3 shares a report from France 24: Too many lines of code to analyze, armies of AI assistants to wrangle, and lengthy prompts to draft are among the laments by hard-core AI adopters. Consultants at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have dubbed the phenomenon “AI brain fry,” a state of mental exhaustion stemming “from the excessive use or supervision of artificial intelligence tools, pushed beyond our co … ⌘ Read more

Judge Allows BitTorrent Seeding Claims Against Meta, Despite Lawyers ‘Lame Excuses’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In an effort to gather material for its LLM training, Meta used BitTorrent to download pirated books from Anna’s Archive and other shadow libraries. According to several authors, Meta facilitated the infringement of others by “seeding” these torrents. This we … ⌘ Read more

@quark@ferengi.one Ta-tah 🥳

AMD Sends Out Linux Patches For Their Next-Gen AIE4 NPU
Hitting the mailing list today are patches providing initial support for AMD’s next-gen NPU “AIE4” platform, complete with SR-IOV support… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Copilot Is Now Injecting Ads Into Pull Requests On GitHub
Microsoft Copilot is reportedly injecting promotional “tips” into GitHub pull requests, with Neowin claiming more than 1.5 million PRs have been affected by messages advertising integrations like Raycast, Slack, Teams, and various IDEs. From the report: According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de woot! 🥳

git pull
warning: redirecting to https://movq.de/git/jenny.git/
Fetching objects: 38, done.
From https://uninformativ.de/git/jenny
   ac51ce5..f44424c  main       -> origin/main
 * [new tag]         v26.03     -> v26.03
Updating ac51ce5..f44424c
Fast-forward
 CHANGES |  4 ++++
 LICENSE |  2 +-
 README  | 10 +++++-----
 3 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

Ubuntu 26.04 Showing Nice Gains Over Ubuntu 25.10 On AMD Ryzen 9000 Series
While having the new System76 Thelio Mira in the lab I ran some benchmarks of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS vs. 26.04 development on that AMD Ryzen 9000 series powered desktop. Those results were interesting for how the Ubuntu performance has changed over the past two years, but even if drilling down to just the past six months there have been some nice gains on the AMD Zen 5 desktop. In this article is a look at how Ubuntu 26.04 in its near-final state … ⌘ Read more

Sony Shuts Down Nearly Its Entire Memory Card Business Due To SSD Shortage
For the “foreseeable future,” Sony says it has stopped accepting new orders for most of its CFexpress and SD memory card lines due to the an ongoing memory supply shortage. “Due to the global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors, it is anticipated that supply will not be able to meet demand for CFexpress m … ⌘ Read more

Coreboot 26.03 Released With Support For Intel Panther Lake
Coreboot 26.03 was christened today as the newest quarterly feature release for this open-source system firmware implementation that strives to replace proprietary BIOS/firmware. Most notable with Coreboot 26.03 is full support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake SoCs… ⌘ Read more

Tech CEOs Suddenly Love Blaming AI For Mass Job Cuts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Sweeping job cuts at Big Tech companies have become an annual tradition. How executives explain those decisions, however, has changed. Out are buzzwords like efficiency, over-hiring, and too many management layers. Today, all explanations stem from artificial intelligence (AI). In recent weeks, giants including Google, Amazon, … ⌘ Read more

Open-Source RadeonSI+Rusticl Nearing Formal OpenCL 3.0 Conformance
The open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with Rusticl for modern Rust-based OpenCL is nearing formal OpenCL 3.0 conformance with all necessary OpenCL test cases passing. Making this all the more interesting is that this is the first modern AMD graphics hardware in a decade likely to see formal recognition for OpenCL conformance with AMD having not submitted any of their own OpenCL conformance results since 2015… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de cd ~/jenny && watch -n 25 git pull. :-D

Woah, now this “rain, snow, hail, thunder, wind and sunshine” is truly something! We have started to get our “summer-in-spring” afternoon rains, turning the previously brown lawn super green, and making it grow at an exorbitant pace. Soon I will be force to mow weekly, and I am certainly not looking forward to it. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yay! Time for a new jenny release, then. 😊

@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com Nice. I just wanted to let you know that the black text color on nearly black button background color in the twtHash tab is basically unreadable. I’ve no idea why the dark theme is preferred over the light one in my browser anyway. :-D

Once again, there’s rain, snow, hail, thunder, wind and sunshine today. I have the feeling that this spring we’ve had a significantly higher appearance of hail than in previous years combined. That can only mean one thing, the cloud seeders went on strike!!

The next thunderstorm is already brewing on the horizon. The rolling thunder is getting loader and the wind picks up, too.

Intel FRED Appears Ready To Enable By Default With Linux 7.1
Last week I ran benchmarks quantify the performance benefit to Intel FRED for Flexible Return and Event Delivery initially found with the new Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” processors and also for upcoming Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids CPUs. The FRED performance impact was very beneficial across a variety of workloads but rather strangely was not enabled by default. Mere hours after publishing that article, an Intel engineer posted a patch to en … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com @prologic@twtxt.net These are excellent news! \o/

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com pretty cool!

RVCC Proposed As An LLVM Incubator For High Performance RISC-V Optimizations
A proposal was submitted today for launching the RISC-V Compiler Collaboration “RVCC” as an LLVM Incubator project to focus on compiler optimizations for better performance on RISC-V. But before getting too excited, there is already some opposition to the proposal… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu MATE Leader Stepping Down, Seeking New Contributors
After starting and leading the Ubuntu MATE flavor since 2014, Martin Wimpress announced he’s looking to step down from leading this flavor of Ubuntu Linux with the MATE desktop environment. He’s hoping for new passionate contributors to keep it going… ⌘ Read more

Rspamd 4.0 Released For Open-Source Spam Filtering
Rspamd 4.0 is out today as a big update to this powerful open-source spam filtering system… ⌘ Read more

RADV Vulkan Video Adds Low-Latency Encode/Decode Options
The Mesa Radeon “RADV” Vulkan driver has added new low-latency Vulkan Video encode/decode options for those seeking better performance… ⌘ Read more

New Company Hopes to Build Age-Verification Tech into Vape Cartridges
Their goal is to use biometric data and blockchain to build age-verification measures directly into disposable vape cartridges.

Wired reports on a partnership between vape/cartridge manufacturer Ispire Technology and regulatory consulting company Chemular (which specializes in the nicotine market) — which they’ve named “Ike Tech”:

[U … ⌘ Read more

Intel Graphics Driver For Linux 7.1 Preps Workaround For Dell XPS Panther Lake Laptop
Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-intel-next changes as feature work toward DRM-Next for Linux 7.1 winds down. This week’s drm-intel-next pull is mostly fixes and some low-level code refactoring. The only item really standing out is some new quirk infrastructure for dealing with laptop display panels that may have buggy Panel Replay handling… ⌘ Read more

AMD Revives Linux Kernel Patches For Hardware-Accelerated vIOMMU
Back in 2023 AMD posted hardware-accelerated virtualized IOMMU patches for the Linux kernel as a request for comments (RFC). In 2024 they then posted a second iteration of the AMD vIOMMU patches but then seemingly fell off the radar. This morning is now the first set of updated AMD vIOMMU patches sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list with the RFC tag now removed… ⌘ Read more

SolveSpace 3.2 3D CAD Tool Adds Qt Frontend, Experimental Web Version
SolveSpace 3.2 was released this past week as the newest feature update to this open-source parametric 3D CAD tool for creating 2D/3D parts and other CAD diagrams… ⌘ Read more

Apple’s Early Days: Massive Oral History Shares Stories About Young Wozniak and Jobs
Apple’s 50th anniversary is this week — and Fast Company’s Harry McCracken just published an 11,000-word oral history with some fun stories from Apple’s earliest days and the long and winding road to its very first home computers:

Steve Wozniak, cofounder, Apple: I told my dad when I was in high school, “I’ … ⌘ Read more

Merged 👌

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks for the heads-up.

It lead me to publish an updated version of twtxt-lib (v0.10.0) which supports the v2 hashing algorithm: https://twtxt-lib.itsericwoodward.com/

Rivian and Lucid Win Right to Sell Their EVs Directly to Buyers in Washington State
The Wall Street Journal reports that Rivian “just won a yearslong battle with car dealers in Washington state that threatens the model of how cars are sold.”

After fighting to sell its vehicles directly to buyers, Rivian threatened to take its case to voters with a ballot measure to permit direct sales. The … ⌘ Read more

Will Social Media Change After YouTube and Meta’s Court Defeat?
Yes, this week YouTube and Meta were found negligent in a landmark case about social media addiction.

But “it’s still far from certain what this defeat will change,” argues The Verge’s senior tech and policy editor, “and what the collateral damage could be.”

If these decisions survive appeal — which isn’t certain — the direct outcome would be multi … ⌘ Read more

Is It Time For Open Source to Start Charging For Access?
“It’s time to charge for access,” argues a new opinion piece at The Register. Begging billion-dollar companies to fund open source projects just isn’t enough, writes long-time tech reporter Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols:

Screw fair. Screw asking for dimes. You can’t live off one-off charity donations… Depending on what people put in a tip jar is no way to fu … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0-rc6 Released With The Fixes Still Coming In Heavy
Linux 7.0-rc6 was just released in quickly working toward the stable Linux 7.0 release in mid-April. This was another busy week with lots of bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

‘Project Hail Mary’: Real Space Science, Real Astrophotography
Project Hail Mary has now grossed $300.8 million globally after earning another $54.1 million this weekend from 86 markets, reports Variety, noting that after just nine days it’s now Amazon MGM’s highest-grossing film ever. And last weekend it had the best opening for a “non-franchise” movie in three years, adds the Associated Press — the best … ⌘ Read more

World’s Smallest QR Code - Smaller Than Bacteria - Could Store Data for Centuries
“Scientists have created a microscopic QR code so tiny it can only be seen with an electron microscope,” reports Science Daily. It’s “smaller than most bacteria and now officially a world record.”

“But this isn’t just about size; it’s about durability. By engraving data into ultra-stable ceramic materials, th … ⌘ Read more

This Friendly Robot Just Installed 100 MW of Solar Power
Utility-scale solar construction… by robots! It’s “one of the largest real-world demonstrations,” notes Electrek, with 100 MW of capacity installed by the “Maximo” robots from AES, one of the world’s top power companies.

Maximo uses AI “to automate the heavy lifting of solar panels and accelerate solar installation,” according to their web page, which sho … ⌘ Read more