Qualcomm QUPv3 Firmware Upstreamed For Snapdragon X1 Elite Linux Users
One of the headaches right now when dealing with the Snapdragon X Elite on Linux is that for a majority of the devices you need to fetch firmware files from the Windows 11 on ARM partition as the necessary firmware bits for Linux use aren’t upstreamed to linux-firmware.git. That has gradually improved over time from the qcom-firmware-extract making the process easier to more firmware bits eventually being added to linux-firmware.git… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Plans To Use AI To Speed Up TV and Film Production
Amazon plans to use AI to speed up the process for making movies and TV shows even as Hollywood fears that AI will cut jobs and permanently reshape the industry. From a report: At the Amazon MGM Studio, veteran entertainment executive Albert Cheng is leading a team charged with developing new AI tools that he said will cut costs and streamline the cre … ⌘ Read more

Ultra-Processed Foods Should Be Treated More Like Cigarettes Than Food, Study Says
Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report. The Guardian: UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the pa … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net That’s the plan! Once I’m happy with this v1 (and we find no other obvious bugs/issues) updating “Changes” with user-facing / human-freidnyl changes is part of the release process!

Microsoft Admits Windows 11 Has a Trust Problem, Promises To Focus on Fixes in 2026
Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system’s performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls “swarming.”

” … ⌘ Read more

Kernel Community Drafts a Plan For Replacing Linus Torvalds
The Linux kernel community has formalized a continuity plan for the day Linus Torvalds eventually steps aside, defining how the process would work to replace him as the top-level maintainer. ZDNet’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: The new “plan for a plan,” drafted by longtime kernel contributor Dan Williams, was discussed at the latest Linux Kernel Maint … ⌘ Read more

New California Law Means Big Changes For Photos of Homes in Real Estate Listings
California house hunters now have legal protection against the kind of real estate photo trickery that has long plagued the home-buying process, as a new state law requiring disclosure of digitally altered listing images took effect on January 1.

Assembly Bill 723 mandates that real estate agents and brokers inclu … ⌘ Read more

Gasoline Out of Thin Air? It’s a Reality!
Can Aircela’s machine “create gasoline using little more than electricity and the air that we breathe”? Jalopnik reports…

The Aircela machine works through a three-step process. It captures carbon dioxide directly from the air… The machine also traps water vapor, and uses electrolysis to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen… The oxygen is released, leaving hydrogen and carbon di … ⌘ Read more

The Case Against Small Modular Nuclear Reactors
Small modular nuclear reactors (or SMRs) are touted as “cheaper, safer, faster to build and easier to finance” than conventional nuclear reactors, reports CNN. Amazon has invested in X-Energy, and earlier this month, Meta announced a deal with Oklo, and in Michigan last month, Holtec began the long formal licensing process for two SMRs with America’s Nuclear Regulatory Commis … ⌘ Read more

A Decade In The Making, Time Slice Extension Could Be Merged For Linux 7.0
With the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle it looks like the time slice extension work could finally been merged, which has seen various attempts over the past decade. Time slice extension for the Linux kernel implemented using Restartable Sequences “RSEQ” allows user-space processes to request a temporary, opportunistic extension of their CPU time slice without being preempted… ⌘ Read more

NASA Eyes Popular PC Hardware Performance Tool for Its Flight Simulators
NASA Langley has initiated the U.S. government software approval process to install CapFrameX, a benchmarking tool popular among PC gaming enthusiasts, on its cockpit simulators used to train test pilots. The space agency reached out to CapFrameX, not the other way around, according to an X post from the company.

NASA builds cu … ⌘ Read more

Updated Intel Panther Lake IPU Firmware Published With New Features & Bug Fixes
Ahead of the first Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake laptops expected to hit retail channels next week, Intel has published updated IPU7 (IPU 7.5) firmware for the image processing unit used by the web cameras on the higher-end Panther Lake laptops… ⌘ Read more

How Much Do AI Models Resemble a Brain?
At the AI safety site Foom, science journalist Mordechai Rorvig explores a paper presented at November’s Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference:

[R]esearchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Georgia Tech revisited earlier findings that showed that language models, the engines of commercial AI chatbots, sh … ⌘ Read more

Patches Positioned Ahead Of Linux 7.0 Cycle For Easy Custom Boot Logo In Place Of Tux
The Linux kernel patches talked about at the start of the year for more easily changing the boot logo of Tux are now queued into a “for-next” branch and thus expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. Those wanting to replace the Tux icon with an alternative logo during the Linux kernel boot process could already patch the file manually but this new code allows for an easy replacement via Kconfig op … ⌘ Read more

Warhammer Maker Games Workshop Bans Its Staff From Using AI In Its Content or Designs
Games Workshop, the owner and operator of a number of hugely popular tabletop war games, including Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar, has banned the use of generative AI in its content and design processes. IGN reports: Delivering the UK company’s impressive financial results, CEO Kevin Rountree address … ⌘ 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

McKinsey Asks Graduates To Use AI Chatbot in Recruitment Process
McKinsey is asking graduate applicants to “collaborate” with an AI tool as part of its recruitment process, as competence with the technology becomes a requirement in competing for top-level jobs. From a report: The blue-chip consultancy is incorporating an “AI interview” into some final-round interviews, according to CaseBasix, a US company that helps … ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases Open3D 0.19 With Experimental Cross-Platform GPU Support Using SYCL
Not to be confused with the Open 3D game engine, Intel’s Intelligent Systems Lab Organization released Open3D 0.19 as the latest iteration of this open-source library for 3D data processing in Python and C++… ⌘ Read more

Linux Working Around Audio Problems On The ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X
For those loading Linux on the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X gaming handheld, there is currently audio quality issues, including gaps/dropouts in audio playback. A workaround is in the process of making its way to the Linux kernel until a proper solution can be sorted out… ⌘ Read more

Intel Is ‘Going Big Time Into 14A,’ Says CEO Lip-Bu Tan
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the company is “going big time” into its 14A (1.4nm-class) process, signaling confidence in yields and hinting at at least one external foundry customer. Tom’s Hardware reports: Intel’s 14A is expected to be production-ready in 2027, with early versions of process design kit (PDK) coming to external customers early this year. To that end … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Wants To Know What Every Corporate Employee Accomplished Last Year
Amazon is now requiring its corporate employees to submit a list of three to five accomplishments that represent their best work as part of an overhauled performance review process, according to Business Insider, which cites internal documents.

The company’s internal Forte review system previously asked employees softer questions li … ⌘ Read more

TV Makers Are Taking AI Too Far
TV manufacturers at CES 2026 in Las Vegas this week unveiled a wave of AI features that frequently consume significant screen space and take considerable time to deliver results – all while global TV shipments declined 0.6% year over year in Q3, according to Omdia. Google demonstrated Veo generating video from a photo on a television, a process that took about two minutes to produce eight seconds of f … ⌘ Read more

DRM Splash Screen Updated To Simply Drawing A Colored Background, Displaying A BMP Image
Back in October was an initial proposal for a DRM splash screen client for the Linux kernel that would be primarily useful for embedded systems for rendering a simple “splash screen” when updating the system firmware/software, early display activation at boot, during system recovery, or similar processes. Sent out today was a second revision to the DRM splash screen code… ⌘ Read more

# $YakumoLabs$
# yarnd service file for https://github.com/davmac314/dinit
type = process
command = /usr/pkg/bin/yarnd -b 127.0.0.1:6446
env-file = /usr/pkg/etc/yarnd.conf
working-dir = /var/db/yarnd
restart = on-failure

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…

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…

Archboot Adds COSMIC Desktop as a New Install and Rescue Option
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Linux news site Linuxiac:

Archboot, a guided, user-friendly, menu-driven installer for Arch Linux that automates much of the traditional manual installation process (while still allowing advanced users to intervene when needed), has added the COSMIC desktop environment as a new selectable option. The … ⌘ Read more

The US Effort to Break China’s Rare-Earth Monopoly
The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility:

There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup … ⌘ Read more

Mu (µ) is now getting much closer to where I want it to be, it now has:

• A process stdlib module (very basic, but it works)
  
• An ffi stdob module that supports dlopen / dlsym and calling C functions with a nice mu-esque wrapper ffi.fn(...)
  
• A sqlite stdlib module (also very basic) that shows off the FFI capabilities
  

😅

Shotcut 25.12 Released With 10-bit Video CPU Pipeline, Linear Color Processing
December happens to be a busy month for video editor releases in the open-source world. This month there’s been the release of Flowblade 2.24, OpenShot 3.4, Kdenlive 25.12, and now there is Shotcut 25.12 before closing out the month and year… ⌘ Read more

X.Org IMAKE Updated For Those Not Yet Transitioned To Autoconf/Automake Or Meson
X.Org package wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle announced today the release of imake 1.0.11, the newest version of this utility that 20+ years ago was used extensively as part of the X Window System build process for generating Makefiles from a template. With this first imake point release in two years, imake itself can now be built via Meson and there is now support for RISC-V and LoongArch architectures… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net That might be a challenge, at least in 16-bit Real Mode: The OS follows the model of COM files on DOS, i.e. the size of the binary cannot exceed 64 KiB and heap+stack of the running program will have to fit into that same 64 KiB. 😅 (The memory layout is very rigid, each process gets such a 64 KiB slice.)

And in 64-bit Long Mode, there is no “kernel” yet. The thing in the video is literally just a small bare-metal program.

But some day, maybe. 😃

NASA Chief Says US Will Return To Moon Within Trump’s Second Term
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who was confirmed by the Senate just last week after a turbulent nomination process that stretched across most of 2025, said Friday that the United States will return to the moon within President Donald Trump’s second term. Isaacman made the comments during an interview on CNBC, calling Trump’s recommitment … ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg Developer Files DMCA Against Rockchip After Two-Year Wait for License Fix
GitHub has disabled Rockchip’s Media Process Platform repository after an FFmpeg developer filed a DMCA takedown notice, nearly two years after the open-source project first publicly accused the Chinese chipmaker of license violations. The notice, filed December 18, claims Rockchip copied thousands of lines of code fr … ⌘ Read more

Almost all photos turned out to be blurred today. That made sorting a very quick process. Delete, delete, delete, … https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-12-26/

Trump Administration To Overhaul Lottery System For H-1B Visas
The Trump administration has announced it would replace the lottery programme used to grant H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers with a system that prioritises higher-paid individuals. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin to implement a “weighted” selection process to give an advantage to higher-skilled and higher- … ⌘ Read more

Apple and Google Asking Some Employees With H-1B Visas To Avoid International Travel
Tech giants Google and Apple are asking some employees with H-1B visas to reconsider international travel, as their legal teams warned that visa processing delays could keep employees abroad for months, according to Business Insider. From a report: Law firms representing the tech giants sent memos advising … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 To Remove Support For AMD’s Never-Released Ryzen AI NPU2
The upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel (unless it ends up being called Linux 6.20) will drop support for the AMD NPU2 as their second-generation neural processing unit that never ended up being released into any retail products… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org These tables get shuffled around every time your OS switches to another process. It’s crazy that so much is going on behind the scenes.

Rust’s ‘Vision Doc’ Makes Recommendations to Help Keep Rust Growing
The team authoring the Rust 2025 Vision Doc interviewed Rust developers to find out what they liked about the language — and have now issued three recommendations “to help Rust continue to scale across domains and usage levels.”

— Enumerate and describe Rust’s design goals and integrate them into our processes, helping to ensure they … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net Assembly is usually the most low-level programming language that you can get. Typical programming languages like Python or Go are a thick layer of abstraction over what the CPU actually does, but with Assembler you get to see it all and you get full control. (With lots of caveats and footnotes. 😅)

I’m interested in the boot process, i.e. what exactly happens when you turn on your computer. In that area, using Assembler is a must, because you really need that fine-grained control here.

Ten Mistakes Marred Firewall Upgrade At Australian Telco, Contributing To Two Deaths
An independent review found that at least ten technical and process failures during a routine firewall upgrade at Australia’s Optus prevented emergency calls from reaching Triple Zero for 14 hours, during which 455 calls failed and two callers died. The Register reports: On Thursday, Optus published an indepen … ⌘ Read more

Apple Becomes a Debt Collector With Its New Developer Agreement
Apple released an updated developer license agreement this week that gives the company permission to recoup unpaid funds, such as commissions or any other fees, by deducting them from in-app purchases it processes on developers’ behalf, among other methods. From a report: The change will impact developers in regions where local law allows them to … ⌘ Read more

Google AI Summaries Are Ruining the Livelihoods of Recipe Writers
Google’s AI Mode is synthesizing “Frankenstein” recipes from multiple creators, often stripping away context and accuracy and siphoning traffic and ad revenue away from food bloggers in the process. Many recipe writers warn this shift amounts to an “extinction event” for ad-supported food sites. The Guardian reports: Over the past few years, bl … ⌘ Read more

Apple Opens iOS To Alternative App Stores, Payment Systems in Japan
Apple has announced a sweeping set of changes to iOS in Japan that will allow alternative app marketplaces, third-party payment processing, and non-WebKit browser engines – all to comply with Japan’s Mobile Software Competition Act, which takes effect December 18. The changes, now available in iOS 26.2, bear a strong resemblance to Apple’s … ⌘ Read more

Intel Video Processing Library Adding AI Assisted Video Encoder Features
Intel’s Video Processing Library “libvpl” is out with a new version ahead of the holidays. The only major change with libvpl 2.16 is adding experimental APIs for AI-assisted video encode functionality… ⌘ Read more

I rewrote all my solutions in Rust (except for day 10 part 2) and these are the runtimes on my i7-3770 from 2013 (this measures CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID, not wallclock):

day01/1 [      00.000501311] Result: 1066
day01/2 [      00.000400298] Result: 6223
day02/1 [      00.000358848] Result: 12586854255
day02/2 [      00.000750711] Result: 17298174201
day03/1 [      00.000106537] Result: 17405
day03/2 [      00.000404632] Result: 171990312704598
day04/1 [      00.000257517] Result: 1626
day04/2 [      00.007495342] Result: 9173
day05/1 [      00.000237212] Result: 505
day05/2 [      00.000142731] Result: 344423158480189
day06/1 [      00.000229629] Result: 4076006202939
day06/2 [      00.000279552] Result: 7903168391557
day07/1 [      00.000204422] Result: 1622
day07/2 [      00.000283816] Result: 10357305916520
day08/1 [      00.029427421] Result: 84968
day08/2 [      00.028089859] Result: 8663467782
day09/1 [      00.000310304] Result: 4764078684
day09/2 [      00.015512554] Result: 1652344888
day10/1 [      00.000796663] Result: 375
day10/2 [      --.---------] Result: 15377 (Z3)
day11/1 [      00.000416804] Result: 753
day11/2 [      00.000660528] Result: 450854305019580
day12/1 [      00.000336081] Result: 577
day12/2 [      00.000000695] Result: no part 2

A little under 90 ms total.

On my Samsung NC10 netbook from 2011 with its Intel Atom N455 at 1.6 GHz:

day01/1 [      00.003771326] Result: 1066
day01/2 [      00.003267317] Result: 6223
day02/1 [      00.003902698] Result: 12586854255
day02/2 [      00.006659479] Result: 17298174201
day03/1 [      00.000747544] Result: 17405
day03/2 [      00.002737587] Result: 171990312704598
day04/1 [      00.001263892] Result: 1626
day04/2 [      00.044985301] Result: 9173
day05/1 [      00.001696761] Result: 505
day05/2 [      00.000978962] Result: 344423158480189
day06/1 [      00.001387660] Result: 4076006202939
day06/2 [      00.001734248] Result: 7903168391557
day07/1 [      00.001295528] Result: 1622
day07/2 [      00.001809659] Result: 10357305916520
day08/1 [      00.277251443] Result: 84968
day08/2 [      00.284359332] Result: 8663467782
day09/1 [      00.003152407] Result: 4764078684
day09/2 [      00.071123459] Result: 1652344888
day10/1 [      00.005279527] Result: 375
day10/2 [      --.---------] Result: 15377 (Z3)
day11/1 [      00.003273342] Result: 753
day11/2 [      00.005139719] Result: 450854305019580
day12/1 [      00.002857552] Result: 577
day12/2 [      00.000004421] Result: no part 2

A little over 700 ms total.

I like this. You get performance that’s more or less in the ballpark of C, but without the footguns.

The Entry-Level Hiring Process Is Breaking Down
The traditional signals that employers used to evaluate entry-level job candidates – college GPAs, cover letters, and interview performance – have lost much of their value as grade inflation and widespread AI use render these metrics nearly meaningless, writes The Atlantic.

The recent-graduate unemployment rate now sits slightly higher than the overall workforce’s, a reversal … ⌘ Read more

How a 23-Year-Old in 1975 Built the World’s First Handheld Digital Camera
In 1975, 23-year-old electrical engineer Steve Sasson joined Kodak. And in a new interview with the BBC, he remembers that he’d found the whole photographic process “really annoying…. I wanted to build a camera with no moving parts. Now that was just to annoy the mechanical engineers…”

“You take your picture, you have to … ⌘ Read more

2/2

Ventura diz que o Livre é um partido de corruptos, fala de “escumalha dos vossos partidos” e chama ao JPinto de pirralho. O debate deve estar para acabar daqui a 2 minutos e sem ser a alteração da constituição ainda não se falou de presidenciais.

JP tem as assinaturas todas, entrega-as a 17 de Dezembro, e anuncia que a sua mandatária é a advogada que processou o Ventura. Ventura fica nervoso, fala da mama de Abril e que vai acabar com o país de Abril qdo ganhar.

Desinformação: JP diz que não se pode ter uma visão de um mundo só com dois lados (Trump ou Putin), porque ambos os lados são maus. AV acha que grave não é o discurso de ódio que leva miúdos a cortar dedos aos outros, mas sim conteúdos LGBT na net.

-

Comentário pessoal: Este debate teve mais 4 minutos do que o previsto, deve ser para dar razão ao Jorge Pinto que diz que Ventura é o menino querido da comunicação social. Não se aprende nada a assistir este debate: Pinto estâ bem como esperado, Ventura é o vilão que já sabíamos. Coisas como LGBT ser pior que dedos decepados já nem choca, nem a troca de posições e catavento, nem o querer acabar com o país de Abril. Igual em todos os debates com AV: qualquer opção é a melhor que o fascismo.