@bender@twtxt.net I misread that sentence and thought that your first crush was called Gisela, and was like “wait, he’s not that old”.

Turns out, Gisela is a much younger name than I thought:

https://namecensus.com/first-names/gisela-meaning-and-history/

A peak in the late 1970is and late 1990ies? What?

But then it turned out that, in Germany, the popularity dropped rapidly in the late 1950ies, which actually matches my expectations:

https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/5203-gisela.htm

In other words, some other countries picked up the name Gisela after it had already faded away in Germany.

What a fun rabbit hole. 😅

Brockman Rebuts Musk’s Take On Startup’s History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: OpenAI President Greg Brockman concluded his testimony on Tuesday, where he largely rebutted Elon Musk’s account of the early years of the startup and negotiations that occurred at the company. Brockman testified that he never made any commitments to Musk about the company … ⌘ Read more

Using Drones for Cloud-Seeding Can Trigger Rain, Company Claims
Monday a company called Rainmaker announced their rain-triggering technology had produced 143 million gallons of freshwater for Utah and Oregon residents — making them “the first private company in history to validate the results of cloud seeding operations.”

The Deseret News reports:

Founded in 2023, Rainmaker uses drones to disperse silver iodid … ⌘ Read more

First Tesla Semi Rolls Off High-Volume Production Line
Tesla has produced the first Semi from its new high-volume production line at Gigafactory Nevada, a milestone for the long-delayed electric Class 8 truck program after years of pilot builds and delays. Electrek reports: The Tesla Semi has had one of the longest gestation periods in Tesla’s history. First unveiled in 2017, the truck was originally promised for produc … ⌘ Read more

53 Nations Gather To Plan a Fossil Fuel Phaseout
Ancient Slashdot reader hwstar shares a report from The Conversation: For the first time ever, more than 50 nations will gather next week in Colombia to hash out how to wind down and end their dependence on coal, oil and gas. The history-making conference was planned before the Iran war. But this year’s energy crisis has greatly raised the stakes. […] Around 80% of the trap … ⌘ Read more

Ping-Pong Robot Makes History By Beating Top-Level Human Players
Sony AI’s autonomous table-tennis robot Ace has become the first robot to compete against top-level human players. Reuters reports: Ace, created by the Japanese company Sony’s AI research division, is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a competitive physical sport, one that requires rapid decisions and precision execution, … ⌘ Read more

Pentagon Wants $54 Billion For Drones
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US military’s massive $1.5 trillion budget request for the next fiscal year includes what Pentagon officials described as the largest investment in drone warfare and counter-drone technology in US history. The proposed spending on drone and autonomous warfare technologies within the FY2027 budget proposal for the US Department of Defense would … ⌘ Read more

Maryland Becomes First State To Pass Bill Banning ‘Surveillance Pricing’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Denver7: Maryland is poised to become the first state in the country to ban “surveillance pricing.” The practice refers to companies using a shopper’s personal data, such as browsing history, location, or purchasing behavior, to tailor prices to individual customers. The Protection From Predat … ⌘ Read more

Git 2.54 Released With New Experimental “git history” Command
Git developers continue working toward Git 3.0 while out today is Git 2.54 with a few interesting additions… ⌘ Read more

As an enjoyer of delightfully bad graphic design, found on most Czech village center cork boards, I’m sad to see the stolen clipart and badly cropped watermarked stock images, gradually replaced with AI slop.

This is far from a serious rant, but generating images of my kind being telepathically hit with sharp rocks, surely gives me a right to complain.

So far these seem the most prominent slop categories, seem to be…

Architecture slop:

1. find a sketch of what an old building looked like
   
   
2. generate an AI version, without correcting any of the perspective errors - this one is diagonally levitating
   
   
3. generate a recreation of the buildings demise - after going through the AI, for the second time, it is now a completely different building
   
   

Moralizing slop:

History slop:

LinkedIn Faces Spying Allegations Over Browser Extension Scanning
LinkedIn is facing allegations that it quietly scans users’ browsers for installed Chrome extensions. The German group Fairlinked e.V. goes so far as to claim that the site is “running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history.”

“The program runs silently, without any visible indicator to the user,” the group says. “It … ⌘ 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

Transporting Antimatter On a Truck Is Tricky…
Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: … but the CERN Project “Antimatter in motion” just did it. For the first time in history researchers at CERN have transported 92 antiprotons on a truck in a specially designed magnetic enclosure. The test-drive went so well that the researchers spontaneously decided to go another round… The purpose of the experiment was to test the f … ⌘ Read more

Arm Announces AGI CPU For AI Data Centers
Arm announced their first silicon product in history with today’s AGI CPU. The Arm AGI CPU complements their existing IP offerings into a production-ready silicon product for AI data centers… ⌘ Read more

US Cable TV Industry Faces ‘Dramatic Collapse’ as Local Operators Shut Down - or Become ISPs
America’s cable TV industry “is undergoing its most dramatic collapse in history,” reports Cord Cutters News, “with operators large and small waving the white flag on traditional TV service and pointing their customers toward streaming platforms instead.” Just in 2025 Comcast lost 1.2 … ⌘ Read more

OpenShot 3.5 Released As One Of Their “Biggest Releases” Ever
OpenShot 3.5 hit the web today for this open-source non-linear video editor that describes the new version as one of their “biggest releases” ever in its 18+ year history… ⌘ Read more

FBI Is Buying Location Data To Track US Citizens, Director Confirms
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The FBI has resumed purchasing reams of Americans’ data and location histories to aid federal investigations, the agency’s director, Kash Patel, testified to lawmakers on Wednesday. This is the first time since 2023 that the FBI has confirmed it was buying access to people’s data collected f … ⌘ Read more

EA Lays Off Staff Across All Battlefield Studios Following Record-Breaking Battlefield 6 Launch
Electronic Arts has laid off staff across multiple Battlefield studios despite Battlefield 6 being the best-selling game in the U.S. in 2025 and the “biggest launch in franchise history.” According to IGN, the layoffs include workers at Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive Studi … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0-rc3 Released: “Some Of The Biggest In Recent History”
Linux 7.0-rc3 is out as the latest weekly test candidate in leading up to the stable Linux 7.0 release in mid-April… ⌘ Read more

Google Chrome Is Switching To a Two-Week Release Cycle
Google is accelerating Chrome’s major release cadence from four weeks to two starting with version 153 on September 8th. “…our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes and new capabilities,” says Google. “Building on our history of adapting our release process to match the demands of a modern web, C … ⌘ Read more

Galileo’s Handwritten Notes Discovered in a Medieval Astronomy Text
In a library in Florence, Italy, historian Ivan Malara noticed handwritten notes on a book printed in the 1500s — and recognized the handwriting as Galileo’s. The finding “promises new insights into one of the most famous ideological transitions in the history of science,” writes Science magazine — since the book Galileo annotated was a r … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Raises $110 Billion in the Largest Private Funding Round Ever
OpenAI has closed what is now the largest private financing in history – a $110 billion round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation that more than doubles the $40 billion raise it completed just a year ago, itself a record for a private tech company at the time.

Amazon invested $50 billion, SoftBank put in $30 billion, and Nvidia committed $3 … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I just watched this. And whilst it’s very good and insightful, good history of MySQL and how Martin helped built a good solid Open Source + Commercial model, I’m not seeing the “why people don’t wanna work at your company” bit? What am I missing? 🤔 In any case, he does talk to great length on the importance of Culture and the insane notion of “centrlaised office working”, which I 100% agree with.

Is the ‘Death of Reading’ Narrative Wrong?
Has the rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies really shattered our attention spans and driven books out of our culture? Maybe not, argues social psychologist Adam Mastroianni (author of the Substack Experimental History):

As a psychologist, I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Acquires xAI in $1.25 Trillion All-Stock Deal
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired his AI startup xAI in an all-stock deal that values the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, ahead of what would be the largest initial public offering in history. SpaceX pegged its own valuation at $1 trillion – a markup from the $800 billion it commanded in a December secondary stock sale – and priced xAI at $250 billion based on a recent $20 … ⌘ Read more

Supreme Court To Decide How 1988 Videotape Privacy Law Applies To Online Video
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court is taking up a case on whether Paramount violated the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by disclosing a user’s viewing history to Facebook. The case, Michael Salazar v. Paramount Global, hinges on the law’s definition of the word “consumer.” … ⌘ Read more

Has a bit of a long history story behind this, where last year at work we were reading this book called Engineering a Safer World and initially came across a service called Speech Reply that allowed me to upload a PDF copy of the book and start to read it, but unfortunately, the free trial right now before I can finish reading it turns out that Speech Reply service cost a whopping US$30 a month and expected me to pay a full year upfront, which was well over US$300 just for one fucking book! So I sent their sales and support staff a message kindly asking if it were possible to just pay for the audio transcription of just a single book or to change to a monthly subscription fee, to which they refused, so basically in the end I got very angry and told them to go fuck themselves and built my own service. A year later here we are :-)

The Fastest Human Spaceflight Mission In History Crawls Closer To Liftoff
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad. The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle … ⌘ Read more

Iran’s Internet Shutdown Is Now One of the Longest Ever
Iran has imposed one of the longest nationwide internet shutdowns in its history, cutting more than 92 million people off from connectivity for over a week as mass anti-government protests continue. TechCrunch reports: As of this writing, Iranians have not been able to access the internet for more than 170 hours. The previous longest shutdowns in the country lasted … ⌘ Read more

Dell Tells Staff To Get Ready For the ‘Biggest Transformation in Company History’
Dell’s chief operating officer Jeff Clarke has informed employees that the company is preparing for what he calls the “biggest transformation in company history,” a sweeping systems overhaul scheduled to launch on May 3 that will standardize processes across nearly every major division.

The initiative, dubbed One D … ⌘ Read more

How Long Does It Take to Fix Linux Kernel Bugs?
An anonymous reader shared this report from It’s FOSS:

Jenny Guanni Qu, a researcher at [VC fund] Pebblebed, analyzed 125,183 bugs from 20 years of Linux kernel development history (on Git). The findings show that the average bug takes 2.1 years to find. [Though the median is 0.7 years, with the average possibly skewed by “outliers” discovered after years of hiding.] The longes … ⌘ Read more

That Bell Labs ‘Unix’ Tape from 1974: From a Closet to Computing History
Remember that re-discovered computer tape with one of the earliest versions of Unix from the early 1970s? This week several local news outlets in Utah reported on the find, with KSL creating a video report with shots of the tape arriving at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum, the closet where it was found, and even its handwrit … ⌘ Read more

Medical Evacuation from Space Station Next Week for Astronaut in Stable Condition
It will be the first medical evacuation from the International space station in its 25-year history. The Guardian reports:

An astronaut in the orbital laboratory reportedly fell ill with a “serious” but undisclosed issue. Nasa also had to cancel its first spacewalk of the year… The agency did not identify th … ⌘ 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

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Prints Final Newspaper, Shifts To All-Digital Format
CBS News: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has printed its final newspaper, marking the end of a 157-year chapter in Georgia history and officially transitioning the longtime publication into a fully digital news outlet.

The front-page story of the final print edition asks a fitting question: “What is the … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Is Paying Employees More Than Any Major Tech Startup in History
OpenAI is paying employees more than any major tech startup in history, with average stock-based compensation hitting roughly $1.5 million per worker in 2025. “That is more than seven times higher than the stock-based pay Google disclosed in 2003, before it filed for an initial public offering in 2004,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “The … ⌘ Read more

Bell Labs ‘Unix’ Tape from 1974 Successfully Dumped to a Tarball
Archive.org now has a page with “the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum’s Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek’s readtape tool.” A Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast has created a page with … ⌘ Read more

‘How Lina Khan Killed iRobot’
iRobot, the Bedford, Massachusetts-based company that brought the Roomba vacuum cleaner into American homes over its 35-year history, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday and will be acquired by Picea, its Chinese contract manufacturer that also produces competing household devices.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board placed blame for the company’s demise on the Federal Trade Commission under Chair Lina Khan, which oppos … ⌘ Read more

Volkswagen To End Production At German Plant, a First In Company History
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The last vehicle will roll off the assembly line at Volkswagen’s plant in Dresden, Germany, on Tuesday, marking the first time in the automaker’s 88-year history that it has closed a plant in its home country. Volkswagen warned of potential production cuts last year, as i … ⌘ Read more

US Could Ask Foreign Tourists For Five-Year Social Media History Before Entry
Tourists from dozens of countries including the UK could be asked to provide a five-year social media history as a condition of entry to the United States, under a new proposal unveiled by American officials. From a report: The new condition would affect people from dozens of countries who are eligible to visit the US for … ⌘ Read more

A Kim Kardashian deepfake appears in new exhibition exploring art and AI
Can you tell what’s real and what’s fake online? Data Dreams: Art and AI at the MCA looks at truth, art and history in the AI age. ⌘ Read more

A rare brain illness couldn’t stop Milly from making country netball history
A rare brain illness left Milly Brock unable to walk or speak, but eight months later, she was back leading her regional netball club on grand final day. ⌘ Read more

How Peter Jackson fought for his Middle-earth dream, armed with a VHS tape
Peter Jackson’s life wouldn’t be the same after that red carpet event on December 10, 2001, but it’s fair to say cinema, and New Zealand, wouldn’t be the same either. ⌘ Read more

Ashes history offers little statistical hope for England - Zaltzman
Comedian and BBC cricket statistician Andy Zaltzman looks at how stats suggest England have little chance of winning this Ashes - but also offers some straws to clutch. ⌘ Read more

Idaho Lab Produces World’s First Molten Salt Fuel for Nuclear Reactors
America’s Energy Department runs a research lab in Idaho — and this week announced successful results from a ground-breaking experiment. “This is the first time in history that chloride-based molten salt fuel has been produced for a fast reactor,” says Bill Phillips, the lab’s technical lead for salt synthesis. He calls it “a major … ⌘ Read more

Trump makes history hosting Kennedy Center Honors — here’s how we got here
Donald Trump has made the Kennedy Center a touchstone in a broader attack against what he claims is “woke”, anti-American culture. ⌘ Read more

Quiz: How well do you remember your December history?
From the world’s first traffic lights to a Sesame Street legend — how well will you do on our history quiz? ⌘ Read more

How one man’s method became the death penalty standard
On this day in history, the US carried out its first execution by lethal injection — a method thought up by one doctor. ⌘ Read more

How a gold toilet became a symbol of Ukraine’s endemic corruption
Ukraine has a history of corruption issues, but the latest allegations include close confidants of the president and many people want answers from Volodymyr Zelenskyy. ⌘ Read more

‘No-one expected what we found’: Martian discovery got us closer to finding life
Scientists said at the time that the flow of water would have filled multiple swimming pools. ⌘ Read more