Google Releases Gemini 3 Flash, Promising Improved Intelligence and Efficiency
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google began its transition to Gemini 3 a few weeks ago with the launch of the Pro model, and the arrival of Gemini 3 Flash kicks it into high gear. The new, faster Gemini 3 model is coming to the Gemini app and search, and developers will be able to access it immed … ⌘ Read more

Intel XPU Manager Updated With BMG-G31 GPU Support
Intel XPU Manager 1.3.5 released today as the newest version of this open-source software for monitoring and managing Intel GPU hardware with a focus on their data center products. Notable with this revision is adding BMG-G31 GPU support… ⌘ Read more

Reporter Suggests Half-Life 3 Will Be a Steam Machine Launch Title
A veteran games journalist claims Half-Life 3 is real and still planned as a Spring 2026 launch title tied to Valve’s next Steam Machine push. Ars Technica reports: On the contrary, veteran journalist Mike Straw insisted on a recent Insider Gaming podcast that “everybody I’ve talked to are still adamant [Half-Life 3] is a game that will be … ⌘ Read more

High-Speed Traders Are Feuding Over a Way To Save 3.2 Billionths of a Second
A millisecond used to be a big deal for the world’s quickest traders. A dispute over huge trading profits at one of the world’s largest futures exchanges shows they now think a million times faster [non-paywalled source]. From a report: The controversy is about an arcane technical maneuver in which high-speed traders bombar … ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.0.3 Browser Engine Brings Better Performance, Embedding Improvements
Servo 0.0.3 is out today as the newest update to this Rust-based, open-source web layout engine. Servo 0.0.3 incorporates many enhancements made over the past month from better performance to enhancing its embedding API and other improvements like context menus for more web content… ⌘ Read more

OpenShot 3.4 Video Editor Released: One Of Their Largest Updates Ever
OpenShot 3.4 is now available as the latest feature update to this open-source video editor app. OpenShot 3.4 happens to be “one of our largest updates we’ve ever done” with a variety of improvements in tow… ⌘ Read more

China, Iran Are Having a Field Day With React2Shell, Google Warns
A critical React vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182) is being actively exploited at scale by Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, and criminal groups to gain remote code execution, deploy backdoors, and mine crypto. The Register reports: React maintainers disclosed the critical bug on December 3, and exploitation began almost immediately. According to Amazon … ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2-RC2 Brings Bug Fixes & Minor Refinements
GIMP 3.2-RC2 is out today as what could be the last release candidate of GIMP 3.2 before its stable release. This leading open-source image editor/creation alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop continues becoming much more refined and polished in the GIMP 3 series… ⌘ Read more

I just completed “Lobby” - Day 3 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/3 – Again, I’m doing this in mu, a Go(ish) / Python(ish) dynamic langugage that I had to design and build first which has very few builtins and only a handful of types (ints, no flots). 🤣

GPT-5.2 Arrives as OpenAI Scrambles To Respond To Gemini 3’s Gains
OpenAI on Thursday released GPT-5.2, its latest and what the company calls its “best model yet for everyday professional use,” just days after CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” internally to marshal resources toward improving ChatGPT amid intensifying competition from Google’s well-received Gemini 3 model. The GPT-5.2 series ships in three tiers: … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.0 vs. Ubuntu Linux For AMD EPYC Server Performance
Given the recent release of FreeBSD 15, I started off my testing in looking at how FreeBSD 15.0 improves performance versus FreeBSD 14.3. Now it’s onto the next important question: how is FreeBSD 15.0 performing relative to Linux on servers? Here are some benchmarks exploring that topic today. ⌘ Read more

Microsoft To Invest $17.5 Billion in India
Microsoft announced on Tuesday its largest-ever investment in Asia – $17.5 billion over four years starting in 2026 – to expand cloud and AI infrastructure across India, fund skilling programs, and support ongoing operations in the country. The commitment adds to a $3 billion investment the company announced in January 2025 that is on track to be spent by the end of 2026. A new hyperscale cloud … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Nice! And foggy as heck, very beautiful! Or is this smog?

India’s Aviation Crisis Is All About Too Big to Tame
India’s dominant airline IndiGo has cancelled roughly 3,000 flights since last week after new pilot fatigue regulations collided with technical issues and the seasonal schedule shift, stranding more than half a million passengers and forcing aviation authorities to reverse course on the safety rules they had just implemented.

InterGlobe Aviation, IndiGo’s parent company, … ⌘ Read more

Breaking: RBA keeps rates on hold in December at 3.6pc
The Reserve Bank of Australia keeps rates on hold in December at 3.6pc ⌘ Read more

Fuck me, soooooooo beautiful! Awwww! :‘-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYfKgi133qo

This focuses more on the landscape part, other episodes also have amazing interactions with the locals. I cannot recommend the Itchy Boots channel enough. It’s in my top three channels of all time I believe. I hardly get the travel bug, but this has now changed. Watching Noraly’s videos brings me great joy. It also shows humanity is not lost, contrary to what one might think in this crazy world. :-)

Caution, this channel gets very addictive!

China’s Growth Is Coming at the Rest of the World’s Expense
China has contributed less to global growth this year than the U.S. despite Beijing’s frequent criticism of protectionism, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis citing new research from Goldman Sachs economists. U.S. imports are up 10% so far this year compared to a year earlier, while China’s imports have fallen 3% in dollar terms. Goldman’s economists fou … ⌘ Read more

Live: RBA tipped to keep rates on hold as market awaits clues to next move
The cash rate is expected to be left steady at 3.6 per cent as the central bank board wraps up its final meeting of 2025. Follow the day’s events and insights from our business reporters on the ABC News live markets blog. ⌘ Read more

Japan Issues Tsunami Warning After Magnitude 7.6 Earthquake
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake has shaken Japan, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. From a report: A tsunami as high as 3 metres (10ft) could hit the country’s north-eastern coast after the earthquake occurred offshore at 11.15pm local time (2.15pm GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued f … ⌘ Read more

Extreme heat hampers children’s early learning
Children regularly exposed to temperatures over 30°C (86°F) have lower scores on literacy and numeracy tests at age 3 to 4, according to UNICEF data from six countries ⌘ Read more

‘Disrespectful’ Salah comments threw club under bus - Rooney
Wayne Rooney says the critical comments made by Mohamed Salah after Liverpool’s 3-3 draw with Leeds were “disrespectful” and have thrown the club “under the bus”. ⌘ Read more

College Students Flock To A New Major: AI
AI is the second-largest major at M.I.T. after computer science, reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) Though that includes students interested in applying AI in biology and health care — it’s just the beginning:

This semester, more than 3,000 students enrolled in a new college of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
At the Unive … ⌘ Read more

Chevron’s Gorgon stage 3 backfill development gets $3b go-ahead
The works will connect gas fields in the Greater Gorgon Area to existing infrastructure on Barrow Island. ⌘ Read more

RoboCop Statue Rises In Detroit
alternative_right quotes a report from the Guardian: The statue looms and glints at more than 11 feet tall and weighing 3,500 pounds, looking out at the city with, how to put it … a characteristically stern expression? Despite its daunting appearance and history as a crimefighter of last resort, the giant new bronze figure of the movie character RoboCop is being seen as a symbol of hope, drawing fan … ⌘ Read more

V Kulpíne predstavili publikáciu Kulpín – dejiny, matrika, rodokmene
V stredu 3. decembra 2025 v priestoroch Kultúrno-umeleckého spolku Zvolen v Kulpíne predstavili publikáciu Kulpín – dejiny, matrika, rodokmene. Večierok otvorila a moderovala Katarína Pucovská, ktorá priblížila vznik a štruktúru knihy a vysvetlila aj to, ako vznikla spolupráca s Občianskym združením pre genealogický výskum dolnozemských Slovákov v Galante – vydavateľom tejto výnimoč … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.0 Benchmarks Versus FreeBSD 14.3 On AMD EPYC
This week brought the official release of FreeBSD 15.0 as the latest major update to this BSD operating system. In being eager to test out this new FreeBSD release, for this first round of FreeBSD 15.0 benchmarking is seeing how it compares to the former FreeBSD 14.3 release on a Supermicro + AMD EPYC Turin server. ⌘ Read more

‘A rumbling sound and a loud bang’ - small earthquake hits homes in north-west England
Lancashire residents say the 3.3-magnitude tremor felt like “an underground explosion”, but there are no reports of damage. ⌘ Read more

Zlib-rs 0.5.3 Expands AVX-512 Usage For Faster Performance
The Trifecta Tech Foundation today released zlib-rs 0.5.3 as the newest version of this Zlib implementation written in the Rust programming language for better memory safety. Zlib-rs is advertised as “a safer Zlib” for use by both C and Rust projects while delivering competitive performance to the C-based zlib-ng… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.3.1 Released With Initial Set Of Fixes, Mesa 25.2 Comes To An End
Mesa 25.3.1 was released overnight as the first point release of the Mesa 25.3 series. The Mesa point releases are typically bi-weekly but this one dragged out to nearly three weeks. In turn this also marks an end to the Mesa 25.2 series… ⌘ Read more

Earthquake ‘felt like someone driving into house’
Lancashire residents say the 3.3-magnitude tremor felt like “an underground explosion”, but there are no reports of damage. ⌘ Read more

Earthquake shakes homes in north-west England
Lancashire residents say the 3.3-magnitude tremor felt like “an underground explosion”, but there are no reports of damage. ⌘ Read more

Working on day 3 of the Advent of Code 2025: https://adventofcode.com/

My solutions repo: https://git.itsericwoodward.com/eric/aoc-2025

Trump through to UK Championship quarters with ‘edgy’ win
World number one Judd Trump claims a 6-3 victory over Si Jiahui to move into the quarter-finals of the UK Championship in York. ⌘ Read more

$1.6m art installation, including 3-metre gorilla, gets town talking
A statue of a 30-year-old eastern lowland gorilla named Mina is one of 22 donated to Eurobodalla Shire Council by internationally recognised artists Gillie and Marc. ⌘ Read more

Alpine Linux 3.23 Released With APK Tools v3 For Package Management
Alpine Linux 3.23 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built around musl libc and BusyBox that has become quite popular for containers and embedded uses… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org no wonder I picked that cake (albeit coincidentally), I adore almonds, and hazelnuts! Your teammates are absolutely amazing, dude! A very nice project farewell! On leaving places I have a small anecdote.

I know someone who on 3 February 2004 left his job to go elsewhere. At the time his teammates threw a party, and gave him a very nice portable storage. Twenty days later, he returned, and jokingly they asked him for the storage, and money spent on farewell party back. I heard, from a close source, that he gave them his middle finger, but don’t quote me on that. 😂😂😂

@bender@twtxt.net Mate, I don’t know how you do it, but the frequency of words I haven’t come across before is actually quite high in your work. I noticed it in your twtxt messages in the past, but your notes are also full of them. I love it, always learning something new. Thank you for teaching me without knowing. In case you’re wondering, “yesternight” and “squalid” are the ones I stumbled across today. :-)

@bender@twtxt.net That’s the best one of them. An almonds cake with hazelnut chocolate glaze. The one in front is similar, but with chocolate only. Gingerbread on the right. But it develops the best flavor and consistency only in a few weeks, right now it’s quite hard like a rock, but it will soften up.

All those years I always said that my teammates are THE VERY BEST I ever had. Fuck me, look at that, I didn’t leave the company, just changed projects and this is my farewell present: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/abschiedsgeschenk-2025-12-03.jpg How absolutely beautiful is that, I’m in awe! Now I feel even worse deserting. :‘-(

This emblem is the fleur-de-lis of the world scout movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Organization_of_the_Scout_Movement#WOSM_emblem I reckon I must have mentioned casually that I’m a scout. ;-)

Chinese Reusable Booster Explodes During First Orbital Test
schwit1 shares a report from CNN: A private Chinese space firm successfully sent its Zhuque-3 rocket to orbit but failed in its historic attempt to re-land the rocket booster Wednesday – the first such trial by a Chinese firm as the country’s growing commercial space sector races to catch up with American rivals like SpaceX. The rocket entered orbit as … ⌘ Read more

AES-GCM Optimizations Land In Linux 6.19 - Benefiting AMD Zen 3, AVX-512 CPUs Too
Google engineer Eric Biggers who is known for his many Linux crypto subsystem performance optimizations has seen his latest pull requests land in Linux 6.19. Notable among them are some AES-GCM optimizations benefiting AMD Zen 3 processors and separately AVX-512 processors also benefit too from this latest round of optimization work… ⌘ Read more

LandSpace Could Become China’s First Company To Land a Reusable Rocket
China’s private launch firm LandSpace is preparing the debut flight of its Zhuque-3 rocket, aiming to become the country’s first to land a reusable orbital-class booster using a Falcon-9-style return profile. Ars Technica reports: Liftoff could happen around 11 pm EST tonight (04:00 UTC Wednesday), or noon local time at the Jiuquan … ⌘ Read more

Live: Debate to determine future of Hobart AFL stadium
The future of Hobart’s proposed AFL stadium is set to be decided by a vote in Tasmania’s upper house of parliament, which begins today. Follow live. ⌘ Read more

How a gas cloud killed thousands in world’s worst industrial disaster
It started with a cloud of gas in the dead of night, silently submerging the city in a toxic soup. By morning on December 3, 1984, an Indian city awoke to a nightmare. ⌘ Read more

Can you guess how far it is to these Australian islands? Harder than you think
Do you know how far away Heard Island is? What about Christmas Island? Try your hand at today’s quiz. ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux Hits An All-Time High In November
Steam’s November 2025 survey shows Linux gaming climbed to its highest share in a decade “thanks to the success of the Steam Deck, the underlying Steam Play (Proton) software, and now further excitement thanks to the upcoming Steam Machine and Steam Frame,” writes Phoronix’s Michael Larabel. From the report: A decade ago in the early Steam days the initial use was around 3% an … ⌘ Read more

Thinking about doing Advent of Code in my own tiny language mu this year.

mu is:

• Dynamically typed
  
• Lexically scoped with closures
  
• Has a Go-like curly-brace syntax
  
• Built around lists, maps, and first-class functions
  

Key syntax:

• Functions use fn and braces:
  

fn add(a, b) {
    return a + b
}

• Variables use := for declaration and = for assignment:
  

x := 10
x = x + 1

• Control flow includes if / else and while:
  

if x > 5 {
    println("big")
} else {
    println("small")
}

while x < 10 {
    x = x + 1
}

• Lists and maps:
  

nums := [1, 2, 3]
nums[1] = 42

ages := {"alice": 30, "bob": 25}
ages["bob"] = ages["bob"] + 1

Supported types:

• int
  
• bool
  
• string
  
• list
  
• map
  
• fn
  
• nil
  

mu feels like a tiny little Go-ish, Python-ish language — curious to see how far I can get with it for Advent of Code this year. 🎄

Intel Gaudi 3 Driver Support Already Rejected For Linux 6.19
Last night Intel finally posted their Gaudi 3 accelerator open-source driver support for the mainline Linux kernel with hopes of getting that long-delayed AI accelerator support into the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. But as I pointed out, the pull request was coming unusually late for being such a large set of patches and would face an uphill battle to make it for the Linux 6.19 merge window. Sure enough, the pull request was already rejected an … ⌘ Read more

$3.4b Coomera Connector stage one to open after construction cracks probed
Motorists will be able to use the first 4-kilometre stretch of the new Coomera Connector as an alternative to the busy Pacific Motorway from Tuesday. ⌘ Read more

Intel Finally Posts Open-Source Gaudi 3 Driver Code For The Linux Kernel
The good news is that Intel tonight posted a pull request for open-source Gaudi 3 accelerator support for the mainline Linux kernel! The bad news is that it’s coming quite late in the product cycle, much later than the former excellent Habana Labs open-source track record, and their hopes of squeezing this code into the Linux 6.19 kernel may be dashed… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Damn. That was stupid of me. I should have posted examples using 2026-03-01 as cutoff date. 😂

In my actual test suite, everything uses 2027-01-01 and then I have this, hoping that that’s good enough. 🥴

def test_rollover():
    d = jenny.HASHV2_CUTOFF_DATE
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(days=7), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(seconds=3), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(seconds=2), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(seconds=1), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d, TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(seconds=1), TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(seconds=2), TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(seconds=3), TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(days=7), TEXT)) == 12

(In other words, I don’t care as long as it’s before 2027-01-01. 😏😅)