Lego’s Smart Brick Gives the Iconic Analog Toy a New Digital Brain
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: At CES in Las Vegas today, Lego has unveiled its new Smart Play platform, aimed at taking its distinctly analog plastic blocks and figures into a new world of tech-powered interactive play – but crucially one without any reliance on screens. Smart Play revolves around Lego’s patented sensor- and … ⌘ Read more

Intel Talks Up Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” & Arc B390 Graphics
Intel just hosted their CES keynote where they formally launched Panther Lake as the Core Ultra Series 3 SoCs… ⌘ Read more

GNOME and Firefox Consider Disabling Middle Click Paste By Default
Both GNOME and Firefox are considering disabling middle-click paste by default, arguing it’s a confusing, accident-prone X11 relic that dumps clipboard contents without warning. Phoronix reports: A merge request for GNOME’s gsettings-desktop-schemas was opened this weekend to disable the primary-paste functionality by default that allows usin … ⌘ Read more

what did I miss, the logo breaking again, and apparently I cannot rid of it if I don’t want it, yikes

Viral Reddit Post About Food Delivery Apps Was an AI Scam
A viral Reddit “whistleblower” post accusing a major food delivery app of systemic exploitation is “most likely AI-generated,” reports the Verge. From the report: The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delays customer orders, calls couriers “human assets,” and exploits their “desperation” for cas … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s AI Assistant Comes To the Web With Alexa.com
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon’s AI-powered overhaul of its digital assistant, now known as Alexa+, is coming to the web. On Monday, at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced the official launch of a new website, Alexa.com, which is now rolling out to all Alexa+ Early Access customers. The site will allow c … ⌘ Read more

SanDisk Says Goodbye To WD Blue and Black SSDs, Hello To New ‘Optimus’ Drives
SanDisk is retiring the WD Blue and WD Black SSD brands and replacing them with a new “Optimus” line that carries the same model numbers as its predecessors. The move follows Western Digital’s late-2023 decision to split into two companies – one retaining the WD name for hard drives sold to NAS and data center customer … ⌘ Read more

VSCode IDE Forks Expose Users To ‘Recommended Extension’ Attacks
An anonymous reader shares a report: Popular AI-powered integrated development environment solutions, such as Cursor, Windsurf, Google Antigravity, and Trae, recommend extensions that are non-existent in the OpenVSX registry, allowing threat actors to claim the namespace and upload malicious extensions.

These AI-assisted IDEs are forked from Microso … ⌘ Read more

Radeon Linux Driver Patches For Next-Gen Hardware Point To New NPU Integration
Back in November AMD began posting open-source Linux graphics driver patches for some next-gen graphics IP. Those IP block patches were for MMHUB, PSP, and other blocks making up modern AMD GPUs. The GFXHUB patch pointed it to being part of the GFX12 / RDNA4 family. Out today are new patches for enabling the SMU15 IP and an interesting takeaway there is some apparent NPU integration for future Radeon graphics… ⌘ Read more

UK Government’s New Pension Portal Operator Tells Users To Wait for AI Before Complaining
Capita, the UK outsourcer that won a $323 million contract to administer the nation’s Civil Service Pension Scheme for 1.7 million members, has responded to a disastrous portal launch by asking users to hold off on complaints until its new AI chatbots go live.

The service launched on December 1 and … ⌘ Read more

Google To Kill Gmail’s POP3 Mail Fetching
Google is quietly killing Gmail’s ability to fetch mail from third-party email accounts using POP3, a long-standing feature that has allowed users to consolidate multiple inboxes into a single Gmail interface. The change takes effect this month and also ends Gmailify, the companion feature that applied Gmail’s spam filtering and inbox organization to linked third-party accounts.

Google buried … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft is Slowly Turning Edge Into Another Copilot App
Microsoft has started testing a “significant” visual overhaul for Edge in its Canary and Dev Channel preview builds, and the redesigned interface borrows heavily from the design language that first appeared in the company’s standalone Copilot app rather than the Fluent Design system used across Windows 11, Xbox, and Office.

The updated look touches context menus, … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yiha! Even autoscroll, very nice! The naming certainly drew inspiration from Urwid. I like it. Looking forward to eventually checking out its inner workings. :-)

Flu Is Relentless. Crispr Might Be Able to Shut It Down
Scientists at Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity are working on a Crispr-based treatment – delivered as a nasal spray or injection – that could stop influenza infections by targeting the virus’s RNA and disrupting its ability to replicate inside human cells.

The approach uses the Cas13 enzyme, a lesser-known cousin of the DNA-cuttin … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net Given the age, they must mean Kopernikus! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DFS_Kopernikus

GNOME & Firefox Consider Disabling Middle Click Paste By Default: “An X11’ism…Dumpster Fire”
Both the GNOME desktop and Mozilla Firefox browser projects are considering disabling middle-click-paste functionality by default… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de :-D

‘The College Backlash is a Mirage’
Public opinion surveys paint a picture of Americans souring dramatically on higher education, as Pew found that the share of adults calling college “very important” dropped from 70% in 2013 to just 35% today, and NBC polling shows that 63% now believe a degree is “not worth the cost,” up from 40% over the same period. Yet enrollment data tells a different story.

Four-year institutions awarded 2 million bac … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net I also went back to my duty today and fixed a problem I created right before vanishing into the holidays. Of course, I discovered more problems while fixing the one thing. Luckily, another public holiday tomorrow. :-)

During my time off, I was a very lazy rat. I planned on doing some woodworking again, but instead I started watching Itchy Boot’s Africa season: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMvfS5mbsiI&list=PL8M9dV_BySaXNvQ_V1q4UU-DirPQlX0ZP

Valve & AMD Developers Delivered The Most Code Contributions To Mesa In 2025
A developer from Valve working on the RADV Vulkan driver was once again the most prolific contributor to Mesa in 2025 followed by AMD’s Marek Olšák with continued improvements around RadeonSI and Gallium3D… ⌘ Read more

Radeon RADV Driver Lands Another Ray-Tracing Improvement: 30% Faster On RDNA2
Konstantin Seurer as one of the open-source developers working on the RADV driver for Valve has landed another ray-tracing performance optimization for the upcoming Mesa 26.0 release… ⌘ Read more

Influencers and OnlyFans Models Dominate US ‘Extraordinary’ Artist Visas
The O-1B visa, a work permit reserved for individuals deemed to possess “extraordinary ability” in the arts, has become the pathway of choice for social media influencers and OnlyFans models seeking to build careers in the United States. Immigration attorneys told the Financial Times that influencers now make up more than half their … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Yup, it’s been a while since I played that. 😅 Hardly rememberd it, to be honest. And apparently I did everything wrong, because that monster just came along and trashed my city, no way to stop it. 🤪

@bender@twtxt.net No, I had my break/holiday earlier. I chose to work through, except the public holidays of course.

Samsung’s CES Concepts Disguise AI Speakers as Turntables and Cassette Players
Samsung is bringing a pair of retro-styled speaker concepts to CES 2026 that combine old-school aesthetics with OLED screens and AI-powered music recommendations, and the company is positioning them as alternatives to conventional Bluetooth speakers that typically depend on a paired smartphone or tablet for con … ⌘ Read more

People of Dubious Character Are More Likely To Enter Public Service
A new working paper from researchers at the University of Hong Kong has found that Chinese graduate students who plagiarized more heavily in their master’s theses were significantly more likely to pursue careers in the civil service and to climb the ranks faster once inside.

John Liu and co-authors analyzed 6 million dissertations from CNKI, a … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net I am so prepared and ready for retirement. 🤣 (Not gonna happen for a while, though. If ever.)

@prologic@twtxt.net so, you were not giving time off during the end of year? The company you work for didn’t give a break?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de hear hear! If anything, holiday breaks help to validate the fact that we are prepared for retirement. At least, I am!

Apple SMC Power Driver Posted For Linux To Expose Battery Stats
The newest open-source Apple Silicon driver being submitted for review in working toward its inclusion in the mainline Linux kernel is the Apple Silicon SMC power driver for being able to expose MacBook battery power metrics as well as AC power adapter status reporting under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Stack Overflow Went From 200,000 Monthly Questions To Nearly Zero
Stack Overflow’s monthly question volume has collapsed about 300 – levels not seen since the site launched in 2009, according to data from the Stack Overflow Data Explorer that tracks the platform’s activity over its sixteen-year history.

Questions peaked around 2014 at roughly 200,000 per month, then began a gradual decline that acceler … ⌘ Read more

Patches Posted Seeking To Mainline Support For The Acer Swift SFA14-11 Snapdragon Laptop
Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are hoping to provide mainline support for the Acer Swift SFA14-11 laptop powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite X1E78100 SoC… ⌘ Read more

Samsung Co-CEO Says Soaring Memory Chip Prices Will ‘Inevitably’ Impact Smartphone Costs
Samsung’s co-CEO TM Roh has warned that product price increases are “inevitable” as an unprecedented global memory chip shortage squeezes margins across the company’s consumer electronics lineup – from smartphones to televisions and home appliances.

The South Korean giant, one of the top two larges … ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Driver Preps THP Support For “Significant” SVM Performance Gains
Intel engineer Francois Dugast today sent out the new patch series for enabling Transparent Hugepages (THP) support within the drm_pagemap code with a focus on the Intel Xe kernel driver usage. This enabling of THP support and in turn 2MB pages by the Xe driver is yielding “significant” performance improvements when using Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) such as for GPU compute workloads… ⌘ Read more

As US Communities Start Fighting Back, Many Datacenters are Blocked
America’s tech companies and data center developers “are increasingly losing fights in communities where people don’t want to live next to them, or even near them,” reports the Associated Press:

Communities across the United States are reading about — and learning from — each other’s battles against data center proposals that are fast multi … ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel AES Library Seeing Improvements For Better Performance & More
A set of 36 patches sent out overnight is making big improvements to the Linux kernel’s AES library. The patches allow for making use of the kernel’s existing architecture-optimized AES code for better performance, that code is also constant-time, lower memory use, and all-around a nice improvement over the status quo… ⌘ Read more

There Is No One Left On Debian’s Data Protection Team
Besides Debian’s aging bug tracker interface, another challenge as the Debian Linux distribution project begins 2026 is that all volunteers have left their Data Protection Team. The Debian Data Protection Team deals with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) issues and related data protection/privacy related matters… ⌘ Read more

GCC 16 Lands Support For Using Picolibc
While veteran open-source developer Keith Packard is known for his X.Org Server contributions over many years, another more recent open-source creation of his is Picolibc as a C library for embedded systems. As the latest achievement on that front, merged this weekend to the GCC 16 compiler codebase is support for using Picolibc… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ahh nice! It’s been several decades since I’ve played that! Probably 3 actually come to think of it 🤣

2025 Ends With Release of J. R. R. Tolkein’s Unpublished Story
2025’S final months finally saw the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Bovadium Fragments, writes the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Anyone who has read Tolkien’s letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien’s fury — specifically, ire over mankind’s obsession with … ⌘ Read more

Spent most of the long weekend working on a few coding projects… specifically, I pushed some updates for TwtKpr to my test instance before spending some time working on the build process and demo page for my new twtxt-parsing library… which lead me to make some changes to my existing fluent-dom-esm library.

So, nothing actually got finished, but the incremental updates continue…

Spent most of the long weekend working on a few coding projects… specifically, I pushed some updates for TwtKpr to my test instance before spending some time working on the build process and demo page for my new twtxt-parsing library… which lead to me make some changes to my existing fluent-dom-esm library.

So, nothing actually got finished, but the incremental updates continue…

Workstation Owner Sadly Marks the End-of-Life for HP-UX
Wednesday marked the end of support for the last and final version of HP-UX, writes OSNews.

They call it “the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux.”

I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net SimCity 2000 in DOSBox 😅

39 Million Californians Can Now Legally Demand Data Brokers Delete Their Personal Data
While California’s residents have had the right to demand companies stop collecting/selling their data since 2020, doing so used to require a laborious opting out with each individual company,” reports TechCrunch.
But now Californians can make “a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers … ⌘ Read more

North Dakota Law Included Fake Critical Minerals Using Lawyers’ Last Names
North Dakota passed a law last May to promote development of rare earth minerals in the state. But the law’s language apparently also includes two fake mineral names, according to the Bismarck Tribune, “that appear to be inspired by coal company lawyers who worked on the bill.”

The inclusion of fictional substances is being cal … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de what game is that?

I basically worked through the Christmas break last year. I already had my holidays in Vietnam a few weeks earlier. 😆

Are Hybrid Cars Helping America Transition to Electric Vehicles?
America’s electric car subsidies expired at the end of September, notes Bloomberg. Yet in those last three months, “while fully electric cars and trucks made up 10% of all auto sales in the US… another 15% of transactions were for hybrid vehicles.”

The EV market is slowing in the U.S., but analysts expect hybrid sales to continue accelerati … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc4 Released Following A Quiet Holiday Week, 6.19-rc8 Already Planned
Following the holidays, Linux 6.19-rc4 was released today in working toward the Linux 6.19 stable kernel release in early February… ⌘ Read more