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

Firefox 146 Now Available With Native Fractional Scaling On Wayland
Firefox 146 has been released with native fractional scaling support on Wayland – finally giving Linux users crisp UI rendering. Other new additions include GPU process improvements on macOS, developer-focused CSS features, and broader access to Firefox Labs. Phoronix reports: Firefox 146 also now makes Firefox Labs available to all users, … ⌘ Read more

Exploitation fears over SA government aged care changes
The South Australian government is trying to speed up the transfer of hospital patients into aged care, but advocates say they are “trampling on the rights of older people” in the process. ⌘ Read more

Aptera’s Solar-Powered EVs Take Another Step Toward Production
To build three-wheeled, solar electric vehicles, Aptera has now launched its “validation” vehicle assembly line, reports the San Diego Business Journal.

“The validation line will set a technical foundation for the company’s eventual low-volume assembly line, ensuring that manufacturing processes are optimized and refined, particularly for the company … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Has Trained Its LLM To Confess To Bad Behavior
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: OpenAI is testing another new way to expose the complicated processes at work inside large language models. Researchers at the company can make an LLM produce what they call a confession, in which the model explains how it carried out a task and (most of the time) owns up to any bad behavior. Figuring out why … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Faces New Complaint For Unlawfully Processing Data On Behalf of Israeli Military
Ancient Slashdot user Alain Williams shares a report from Al Jazeera: The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has announced it filed a complaint against Microsoft, accusing the global tech giant of unlawfully processing data on behalf of the Israeli military and facilitating the killings of … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I couldn’t find the exact blog post from before, one that used redirection directives in its nginx config. but I found [this one ](https://melkat.blog/p/unsafe-pricing#:~:text=Something%20else%20I’ve%20been%20doing%20this%20year,%20fine.) mentioning a similar process but done differently.

Investigation into pre-Budget leaks is under way, MPs told
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has given her “full support” to a review of security processes around the lead-up to the Budget. ⌘ Read more

Here’s what experts say about the Russia–Ukraine peace process
After a flurry of meetings, Russia’s war in Ukraine continues. So where is the peace process at? ⌘ Read more

Sound Open Firmware 2.14 Released With Intel Wildcat Lake & Nova Lake Support
Sound Open Firmware is one of the projects started originally by Intel but has grown into a multi-vendor initiative for open-source audio digital signal processing (DSP) firmware and development tooling for a variety of platforms under the Linux Foundation umbrella… ⌘ Read more

openSUSE Begins Rolling Out Intel NPU Support
Via the openSUSE Innovator Initiative, packaging of the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver for the openSUSE ecosystem has begun. This is helping to jump-start the Intel NPU support within the openSUSE space although user-space applications ready to leverage the Intel NPU still remains very limited… ⌘ Read more

Colleges Are Preparing To Self-Lobotomize
The skills that future graduates will most need in an age of automation – creative thinking, critical analysis, the capacity to learn new things – are precisely those that a growing body of research suggests may be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process, yet universities across the United States are now racing to embed the technology into every dimension of their curricula.

O … ⌘ Read more

‘Kangaroo court’: UK MP lashes Bangladeshi court over corruption conviction
Tulip Siddiq says the decision should be treated with “contempt”, while her political party says she was not afforded due process. ⌘ Read more

Multiple meat workers in hospital after carbon monoxide leak in Melbourne
More than a dozen workers have fallen ill after a carbon monoxide leak at a pork processing plant in Derrimut. ⌘ Read more

Why Google’s custom AI chips are shaking up the tech industry
Google is reportedly in talks to sell its tensor processing units – a type of computer chip specially designed for AI – to other tech companies, a move that could unsettle the dominant chip-maker Nvidia ⌘ Read more

Controversy over City of Perth’s $125,000 workplace culture review
Internal revolt intensifies at the City of Perth over the newly elected lord mayor’s pursuit of a ratepayer-funded workplace culture review, in a process deemed unlawful by his own administration. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net The periodic blacklists updates will be done automatically in the background, as for the different processing mechanisms (rules, collections of rules, remediation …etc) you just install/add the pre-made ones from the hub and call it a day, they’ll get periodic updates when needed. But you could easily create and add your own in case you want to block or white-list a specific behavior

@prologic@twtxt.net The main thing that I tought of is that whomever is abusing your services must be a well known actor (by range/set of IPs) that got reported by other Crowdsec users. So to my simpleton’s understanding, your reverse-proxy/web server passes the requests by crowdsec for processing, they get banned for $N hours if the source has already been blacklisted by the community or violates any of a set of behavior base rules (and even more hours for repeat offenders); otherwise the requests/responses go as per usual. Not sure if I got things right but this might help paint a better picture of the process.

Breaking: US stops processing immigration requests from Afghan nationals
The decision comes hours after US President Donald Trump said he was confident the suspect behind the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington was from Afghanistan. ⌘ Read more

We may need a fourth law of thermodynamics for living systems
The laws of thermodynamics don’t accurately account for the complex processes in living cells – do we need a new one to accurately measure the ways living systems are out of equilibrium? ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Claims ‘Generation Ahead’ Advantage After $200 Billion Sell-off on Google Fears
Nvidia pushed back against investor concerns about Google’s competitive positioning in AI on Tuesday after the chipmaker’s shares tumbled 4.4% and erased nearly $200 billion in market cap on fears that Alphabet’s tensor processing units were gaining ground against its dominance in AI computing. The company said … ⌘ Read more

ProcessOne: Stop Telling Us XMPP Should Use JSON

Image

We hear this too often: “XMPP uses XML. It should use JSON—it’s more modern.”

The logic seems straightforward: JSON came later, so it must be better. But better for what, exactly?

JSON became successful because it’s the standard serialization format for JavaScript. That made it convenient for browser-based applications.

Does that m … ⌘ Read more

CDC Changes Webpage To Say Vaccines May Cause Autism, Revising Prior Language
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage that previously made the case that vaccines don’t cause autism now says they might. WSJ: The contents of the webpage came up during Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Senate confirmation process. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) in February said Kennedy had assured hi … ⌘ Read more

Updated Steam Runtime Switches To Debian 13 Libraries, SDL2 Using Compatibility Layer
An updated version of the Steam Linux Runtime 4 branch was rolled out that has now shifted from Debian 11 to Debian 13 libraries for some significant upgrades. In the process more libraries have gone x86_64 only in foregoing the i386 builds. In addition, the SDL 2 library support for the Steam Runtime is now provided by sdl2-compat as the compatibility layer for SDL2 atop SDL3… ⌘ Read more

Ultra-Processed Food is Global Health Threat, Researchers Warn
Action is needed now to reduce ultra-processed food (UPF) in diets worldwide because of their threat to health, say international experts in a global review of research. From a report: They say the way we eat is changing - with a move away from fresh, whole foods to cheap, highly-processed meals - which is increasing our risk of a range of chronic … ⌘ Read more

Iran Begins Cloud Seeding To Induce Rain Amid Historic Drought
Authorities in Iran have sprayed clouds with chemicals to induce rain, in an attempt to combat the country’s worst drought in decades. From a report: Known as cloud-seeding, the process was conducted over the Urmia lake basin on Saturday, Iran’s official news agency Irna reported. Urmia is Iran’s largest lake, but has largely dried out leaving a vast … ⌘ Read more

Waveshare Pairs RISC-V ESP32-P4 and ESP32-C6 for Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 LE, and PoE Support
Waveshare has released the ESP32-P4-WIFI6-POE-ETH, a compact development board built around the ESP32-P4 along with an ESP32-C6 wireless module. The design combines Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 LE, Ethernet, and optional PoE power delivery in a single platform aimed at multimedia processing, display and camera applications, and general embedded development. Like the earlier W … ⌘ Read more

OAK 4 D and OAK 4 S Standalone Edge Vision Cameras with PoE and 48MP Imaging
Luxonis has opened early access preorders for the OAK 4 D and OAK 4 S, two standalone edge-processing cameras designed for computer vision tasks. Both systems provide a 48MP RGB sensor with optional autofocus or wide-angle variants, USB 3 and PoE connectivity, IP67-rated enclosures, and on-device inference capabilities. Both devices are built around the RVC4 […] ⌘ Read more

Be it Java with Swing or PyQt6, it takes ~300 ms until a basic window with a treeview and a listbox appears. That is a very noticeable delay.

Is it unrealistic to expect faster startup times these days? 🤔

Once the program is running, a new second window (in the same process) appears very quickly. So it’s all just the initialization stuff that takes so long. I could, of course, do what “fat” programs have done for ages: Pre-launch the process during boot, windowless. But I was hoping that this wasn’t needed. 😞 (And it’s a bad model anyway. When the main process crashes, all windows crash with it.)

Apple Cuts App Store Fee In Half For ‘Mini Apps’
Apple is cutting its App Store fee from 30% to 15% for developers who join a new Mini Apps Partner Program, which requires using more of Apple’s built-in technology to power lightweight “mini apps.” “This includes using Apple software to register a user’s purchase history, verify user ages and to process in-app purchases,” reports CNBC. From the report: A “mini app” is a lightwei … ⌘ Read more

Russia’s AI Robot Falls Seconds After Being Unveiled
Russia’s first AI humanoid robot, Aldol, fell just seconds after its debut at a technology event in Moscow on Tuesday. “The robot was being led on stage to the soundtrack from the film ‘Rocky,’ before it suddenly lost its balance and fell,” reports the BBC. “Assistants could then be seen scrambling to cover it with a cloth – which ended up tangling in the process.” … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 Brings Smarter Reasoning and More Personality Presets To ChatGPT
OpenAI today released GPT-5.1, an update to its flagship model line. The update includes two versions: GPT-5.1 Instant, which OpenAI says adds adaptive reasoning capabilities and improved instruction following, and GPT-5.1 Thinking, which adjusts its processing time based on query complexity.

The Thinking model respond … ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg To Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs
FFmpeg, the open source multimedia framework that powers video processing in Google Chrome, Firefox, YouTube and other major platforms, has called on Google to either fund the project or stop burdening its volunteer maintainers with security vulnerabilities found by the company’s AI tools. The maintainers patched a bug that Google’s AI agent discovered in code for decoding a 1995 vi … ⌘ Read more

New Linux Patches To Expose AMD Ryzen AI NPU Power Metrics
New Linux kernel patches currently undergoing review will allow AMD Ryzen AI NPU power metrics to be exposed under Linux. In turn this is useful for helping to gauge the utilization of the neural processing unit and also helping to evaluate the actual power efficiency of leveraging the AMD Ryzen AI NPU… ⌘ Read more

Engicam Showcases Computer Vision AI Kit Based on Renesas RZ/V2H Platform
Engicam has showcased the TIA RZ/V2H System-on-Module and its companion AI.DEV RZ/V2H development kit, both built around Renesas’ RZ/V2H processor. The module targets embedded applications in machine vision, autonomous robotics, and industrial automation, offering onboard AI acceleration and GPU capabilities optimized for real-time processing and advanced imaging. The TIA RZ/V2H module integrates … ⌘ Read more

A universal law explains the chaotic motion of chromosomes
Researchers from Skoltech, the University of Potsdam, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered a fundamental physical law that governs the seemingly chaotic motion of chromosomes inside a living cell. This discovery helps solve a long-standing biological mystery of how two-meter-long DNA molecules, packed into dense chromosomes, remain mobile enough for vital processes such as turning genes on and off. ⌘ Read more

Falling asleep isn’t a gradual process – it happens all of a sudden
Brain activity from more than 1000 people shows a rapid transition from being awake to being asleep, rather than a slow transition between the two states ⌘ Read more

ProcessOne: On Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets

Image

Signal improved its protocol to prepare encrypted messaging for the quantum era.

They call the improvement “Triple Ratchet” (or SPQR = Signal Post-Quantum Ratchet).

[Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets\
\
We are excited to announce a significant advancement in the security … ⌘ Read more