LLVM To Begin Offering Zstd-Compressed Binaries For “Significantly Reduced” Downloads
The LLVM project will begin offering Zstd-compressed archives of their binaries in addition to the existing XZ-compressed releases. LLVM developers are finding Zstd working out great with “significantly reduced” download sizes… ⌘ Read more

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Steam Survey For May 2026 After Delay: Linux Just Under 4%
Back in March Steam on Linux skyrocketed to 5.33% with more than double the Steam gaming marketshare of macOS. Then for April Steam on Linux pulled back to a still-great 4.52%, well above the times when Steam on Linux was at 2% or less for many years. Now the May 2026 figures have been published overnight by Valve… ⌘ Read more

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Amazon’s New Stargate Series Is Officially Dead
Amazon has reportedly killed its planned new Stargate series despite giving it a series order in 2025. According to Variety, studio executives were worried it would only appeal to longtime fans. ScreenRant reports: Reports of what became Gero’s Stargate series started in 2022, after Amazon acquired MGM Studios. Dean Devlin, who co-wrote the 1994 Stargate movie with Emmeri … ⌘ Read more

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Demand Is Booming For New No Tech, Repairable Tractor
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The secondary market for decades old, low-tech John Deere tractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere’s repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new … ⌘ Read more

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Widely-Used libinput Updated Due To Arbitrary Root Code Execution
The libinput input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland environments on modern Linux desktops is out with a new security fix release. A new vulnerability is now public allowing for arbitrary root code execution… ⌘ Read more

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3mdeb Keeps Making Progress On Their Coreboot + AMD openSIL Port To Ryzen MSI Board
Following thr 3mdeb consulting firm’s recent release of their Dasharo build of Coreboot and AMD openSIL for the Gigabyte MZ33-ARI1 EPYC 9005 series motherboard, the same engineers continue working on their port of Coreboot and the openSIL CPU silicon initialization library to a Ryzen 9000 series consumer motherboard… ⌘ Read more

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Fedora Linux 43 Exposes 20-Year-Old Microsoft Outlook Security Failure
BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedl … ⌘ Read more

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EU Plots To Abandon US Tech
Ancient Slashdot reader whitroth shares a report from Politico, with the caption: “shutting down Microsoft Office for the International Criminal Court (ICC) was clearly a wake-up call.” From the report: The EU is moving to counter American dominance in technology by reaching for one of the oldest tools in its arsenal: industrial strategy. As the European Commission unveiled a plan Wednesday to reduce Europe’s reliance … ⌘ Read more

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MacBook Neo is So Popular That Apple Reportedly Doubled Production
According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has reportedly doubled 2026 MacBook Neo production from 5 million to 10 million units after stronger-than-expected demand for its $599 budget laptop. MacRumors reports: On an earnings call in late April, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said that customer response to the MacBook Neo was “off the c … ⌘ Read more

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Google Launches ‘Gemma 4 12B’ AI Model That Can Run On Your Laptop
Google has launched Gemma 4 12B, a 12-billion-parameter open AI model designed to run locally on your laptop without depending entirely on cloud infrastructure. WION reports: According to Google, the new model delivers performance close to much larger AI systems while requiring significantly less memory. The company says Gemma 4 12B can run … ⌘ Read more

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Google Shares Fitbit Air Blueprints So Anyone Can 3D-Print Accessories
Google has released (PDF) technical specs and 2D CAD drawings for the Fitbit Air to encourage users to make their own accessories. “These CAD drawings include crucial mating dimensions, tolerances, and mating force specifications – including attach and detach force – to help you build a high-quality accessory band,” Google says … ⌘ Read more

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COSMIC Now Implements Wayland Pointer Constraints For Better Gaming Experience
COSMIC Epoch 1.0.15 was released today and while it doesn’t yet contain the new “Frosted Glass” option for the desktop UI, COSMIC Epoch 1.0.15 does contain some other notable enhancements… ⌘ Read more

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Microsoft Plans Linux Tools, RTX Spark Desktop For Windows Devs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft’s Build developer conference kicked off today, and as with almost everything the company has done in the last few years, Microsoft’s opening keynote focused overwhelmingly on AI and other closely related technologies. […] On the hardware front, we didn’t get any updates for existi … ⌘ Read more

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Meta Workers Can Opt Out of Workplace Tracking for Up to 30 Minutes
Meta is scaling back parts of its employee tracking initiative after staff objected to software that collected mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and other actions for AI training data. According to Reuters, the company will now let workers pause collection for up to 30 minutes and request exemptions. Reuters reports: [Stephane Kasriel, a … ⌘ Read more

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Microsoft Claims New Quantum Chip 1,000 Times Better Than Before
Microsoft says its new Majorana 2 quantum chip is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor, with qubits lasting about 20 seconds instead of milliseconds, and claims it could have a commercially useful quantum machine by 2029. The BBC reports: “We will have a quantum machine in 2029 that can solve commercially viable, reasonable problems,” … ⌘ Read more

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AMD EPYC 8635P “Sorano” Benchmarks: Significant Upgrade Opportunity For EPYC 8004 Servers
After announcing the AMD EPYC 8005 “Sorano” series back in February, AMD recently began shipping these Zen 5 successors to the EPYC 8004 “Siena” line-up. With the EPYC 8005 product stack ranging from 8 to 84 cores and being drop-in upgrades for EPYC 8004 servers after a BIOS update, these are quite some interesting processors for those after a single socket, performant server. Up today are benchmarks of the EPYC 8635P as the flagshi … ⌘ Read more

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Android Gets Fake Call Detection That Uses RCS
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Phone by Google wants to combat the “growing threat of impersonation scams” and protect Android users against “sophisticated, AI-powered deepfake attacks” with fake call detection. […] Fake call detection requires that both parties are on Android and use the Phone by Google app, while Google Messages and Google Contacts also … ⌘ Read more

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Okay. I have lost the “battle” against “AI” at work and I will no longer try to “fight” any of it.

It is simply what people want. They want to use it. And that’s the end of it.

And why do they want it? Because it makes their job easier. And why is that? In very large parts, it’s because we have accumulated a metric fuckton of technical debt due to decades long mismanagement. We were (and are) operating in “emergency mode” all the time. There simply was no time to clean things up or to rethink designs. We always have to go with the cheapest and quickest solution. We are never ahead of things: Earlier this year, I started an initiative and wanted to tackle some issue that I could see coming. I was shut down because this wasn’t “urgent”. Very soon after, this exact thing became that exact problem – but now, there was no time anymore to do it properly because NOW it’s urgent, so, once again, we had to go with a quick and dirty solution.

It’s always like that and I had brought it up again and again. And now we have a huge spaghetti mess that hardly anyone understands anymore.

Nobody – except AI. It can still make some sense of this and, obviously, this is useful to people.

So, any argument I make against AI is completely pointless to begin with. I’m such a fool for not having seen this earlier.

The last argument I made today was: “Look, we already have so much technical debt and spaghetti systems, we really, really must clean this up. If we throw AI on top of this now, it’ll only get so much worse.” And once more, I was shut down. My intentions were “admirable”, but “there’s no time for that”.

Okay. Good luck with that. They’ll keep doing it this way. At some point, it’ll either explode entirely and some poor soul has to clean it up, or it’ll explode and they’ll have no other choice but to throw everything away and start from scratch – assuming they can still afford that.

In other words, none of this about AI, really, nor caused by it. Our department’s massive spike in AI usage is just a symptom of the underlying management issues. And since those aren’t being addressed, nothing will change and this whole mess will only get worse.

(I blame all this on management, because, well, that’s who’s to blame. I do not have a solution for it, though – and assigning blame without constructive criticism always sucks big time. I don’t like doing this. If you had put me into that particular management position, I wouldn’t have been able to solve any of this. The thing is, though, I’m not an expert on management and it isn’t my job – I’m just the “princess” who solves your technical issues.)

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Intel Preps GCC Function Multi-Versioning To Support APX & AVX10.2
Along with some GCC compiler tuning for Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids to deal with some new APX capabilities not proving beneficial for performance, new patch activity today is preparing GCC for function multi-versioning (FMV) for the AVX10.2 and APX instruction set extensions… ⌘ Read more

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Ubuntu To Ship Newer AMD ROCm Updates Via SRUs
As noted back in April, with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS it’s now possible to simply “apt install rocm” on Ubuntu Linux for installing AMD’s open-source GPU compute stack. But as prominently noted there, what’s shipped right now in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is already months out of date compared to upstream ROCm. Fortunately, Canonical shared today that moving forward they plan to ship newer ROCm versions as stable release updates (SRUs)… ⌘ Read more

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Thanks To Robots, Ukraine Is Now Talking About Winning, Not Just Surviving
fjo3 shares a report from Defense One: A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn’t just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory. This isn’t yet captured in headlines – for example, abo … ⌘ Read more

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