How a Power Outage In Colorado Caused US Official Time To Be 4.8 Microseconds
Tony Isaac shares a report from NPR: The U.S. government calculates the country’s official time using more than a dozen atomic clocks at a federal facility northwest of Denver. But when a destructive windstorm knocked out power to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) laboratory in Boulder on Wednesd … ⌘ Read more

Alphabet Acquires Data Center and Energy Infrastructure Company Intersect For $4.75 Billion
Alphabet is acquiring Intersect for $4.75 billion to accelerate data center and power-generation capacity as AI infrastructure demand surges. CNBC reports: Alphabet said Intersect’s operations will remain independent, but that the acquisition will help bring more data center and generation capaci … ⌘ Read more

Larry Ellison Pledges $40-Billion Personal Guarantee For Paramount’s Warner Bros Bid
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has personally guaranteed $40.4 billion to shore up Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, trying to ease financing doubts as Warner Bros weighs a rival offer from Netflix. Reuters reports: Paramount said the amended terms do not change the $30-per-share all-cash offer eve … ⌘ Read more

Lua 5.5 Released With Declarations For Global Variables, Garbage Collection Improvements
Five years after releasing Lua 5.4, Lua 5.5 debuted today as the newest version of this lightweight and embeddable scripting language… ⌘ Read more

Welcome To America’s New Surveillance High Schools
Beverly Hills High School has deployed an AI-powered surveillance apparatus that includes facial recognition cameras, behavioral analysis software, smoke detector-shaped bathroom listening devices from Motorola, drones, and license plate readers from Flock Safety – a setup the district spent $4.8 million on in the 2024-2025 fiscal year and considers necessary given the scho … ⌘ Read more

Darktable 5.4 RAW Photography Software Reaches Parity Between X11 & Wayland
Darktable 5.4 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source RAW photography software. Besides improving camera support, UI enhancements, and more the Wayland support has been improved with Darktable. With today’s Darktable 5.4 release, the Wayland support should be on par with the X11 support… ⌘ Read more

Is America’s Tech Industry Already Facing a Recession?
America’s unemployment rate for tech jobs rose to 4% in November, and “has been steadily rising since May,” reports the Washington Post (citing data from the IT training/certifications company CompTIA).

Between October and November, the number of technology workers across different industries fell 134,000, while the number of people working in the tech industry decline … ⌘ Read more

The phone situation
I need to write something about this or I’ll burst.

I have a new phone. It’s an old iPhone SE 2022. Yes, I know. Evil,
evil Apple. Won’t someone please think of the privacy issues? Right,
well, Apple has at least better reputation about these things than
Google does, but we’ll come to that.

It feels like I’m betraying the FLOSS cause. I feel horrible, although
probably not just because of this.

Let’s recap:

• My main phone has been a de-googled (not even microG) Fairphone 4
  with CalyxOS. CalyxOS … ⌘ Read more

‘Subscription Captivity’: When Things You Buy Own You
A reporter at Mother Jones writes about a $169 alarm clock with special lighting and audio effects. But to use the features, “you need to pay an additional $4.99 per month, in perpetuity.”

“Welcome to the age of subscription captivity, where an increasing share of the things you pay for actually own you.”

What vexes me are the companies that sell physical products for a hef … ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.337 Debuts With Long Vector & 3D ASTC Compression Extensions
Vulkan 1.4.337 released a short time ago as what could be the last Vulkan API spec update of 2025 depending upon how much time the working group takes off or not around the holidays. In any case, it’s a nice holiday treat with the new VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_3d and VK_EXT_shader_long_vector extensions… ⌘ Read more

OpenZFS 2.4 Released With Faster Encryption Performance, Many Other Improvements
OpenZFS 2.4 is out as stable in time for the holidays! The big OpenZFS 2.4 feature release is now available for FreeBSD and Linux systems to continue advancing the open-source ZFS file-system support… ⌘ Read more

Kdenlive 25.12 Video Editor Brings New Docking System, Menu Restructuring
In addition to the release this week of OpenShot 3.4, released today is a major update to another popular open-source video editing application: Kdenlive. The Kdenlive 25.12 release brings many improvements to help with editing of any year-end / holiday videos… ⌘ Read more

Warner Bros Discovery Board Rejects Rival Bid From Paramount
Warner Bros Discovery’s board spurned Paramount Skydance’s $108.4 billion hostile takeover bid on Wednesday, calling the offer “illusory” as it accused the studio giant of misleading shareholders about its financing. From a report: Paramount has been in a race with Netflix to win control of Warner Bros, and with it, its prized film and televisio … ⌘ Read more

The Significant Performance Gains For Radeon RADV Ray-Tracing Performance In 2025
As part of my various year-end comparison benchmarking, I recently ran some tests looking at how the Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA 4 performance has evolved since its debut near the beginning of the year. The Vulkan ray-tracing performance in particular was standing out this year as having evolved quite nicely while for conventional OpenGL and Vulkan performance the performance has been largely stable this year with its great at-launch su … ⌘ Read more

MidnightBSD 4.0 Brings Many Changes To This FreeBSD 13 Derived OS
While FreeBSD 15 stable was officially released earlier this month, MidnightBSD continues plotting its own course atop its FreeBSD 13 base. Out today is MidnightBSD 4.0 as the latest iteration of this desktop-minded BSD operating system… ⌘ 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

JPMorgan Steps Further Into Crypto With Tokenized Money Fund
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: JPMorgan Chase is joining the list of traditional financial firms seeking to bring blockchain technology to an investing staple: the money-market fund. The banking giant’s $4 trillion asset-management arm is rolling out its first tokenized money-market fund on the Ethereum blockchain. JPMo … ⌘ Read more

I just completed “Printing Department” - Day 4 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/4 – 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). 🤣

Oracles Releases Updated “bpftune” For BPF-Based Auto-Tuning Of Linux Systems
The past few years Oracle has been working on bpftune as a solution for BPF-based, automatic tuning of Linux systems. Bpftune has been available via Oracle Linux and GitHub while finally their open-source GitHub code has seen the first new tagged release in a while… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Lands x2AVIC Patches For AMD SVM Handling Up To 4096 vCPUs
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine “KVM” updates for Linux 6.19 include preparations by AMD for handling up to a possible 4,096 virtual CPUs for VMs… ⌘ Read more

Alright, Advent of Code is over:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-12/0/POSTING-en.html

It’s been quite the time sink, especially with the DOS games on top, but it was fun. 🥳

In case you’re wondering: All puzzles (except for part 2 of day 10) were doable in Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4 and ran in a finite time on the Pentium 133. Puzzle 10/2 might have been doable as well if I had better education. 🤣

Microsoft Excel Turns 40, Remains Stubbornly Unkillable
Microsoft Excel, the 40-year-old spreadsheet application that helped establish personal computers as essential workplace tools and contributed to Microsoft’s current valuation of nearly $4 trillion, has weathered both the rise of cloud computing and the current AI boom largely unscathed. In its most recent quarter, commercial revenue for Microsoft 365 – the bundle i … ⌘ Read more

Man Utd score four as winless Wolves booed
Watch highlights as Wolves lose 4-1 to Manchester United, suffering their eighth-straight loss in the Premier League. ⌘ 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

Murder investigation after child and woman die in house fire
Mary Holt, aged 60, and Tadhg Farrell, aged 4, died in a house fire in County Offaly. ⌘ Read more

Homebrew Can Now Help You Install Flatpaks Too
“Homebrew, the package manager for macOS and Linux, just got a handy new feature in the latest v5.0.4 update,” reports How-To Geek.

Brewfile install scripts “are now more like a one-stop shop for installing software, as Flatpaks are now supported alongside Brew packages, Mac App Store Apps, and other packages.”

For those times when you need to install many software packages at on … ⌘ Read more

Solaris 11.4 SRU 87 Released With New Security Features, GCC 15
For anyone still relying on Solaris in production or just nostalgic Solaris users from the grand Sun Microsystems days, Solaris 11.4 SRU 87 was released by Oracle this week as one of the heavier stable release updates in recent memory… ⌘ Read more

Green makes ‘huge error’ as Carse bowls him for 45 to give England hope
Cameron Green ‘gifts’ England a wicket, opening up and exposing the stumps to Brydon Carse as Australia sit on 291-4 on day two of the second Ashes Test in Brisbane. ⌘ Read more

FWIW, day 03 and day 04 where solved on SuSE Linux 6.4:

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day03.jpg

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day04%2Dv3.jpg

Performance really is an issue. Anything is fast on a modern machine with modern Python. But that old stuff, oof, it takes a while … 😅

Should have used C or Java. 🤪 Well, maybe I do have to fall back on that for later puzzles. We’ll see.

Live: Hobart’s stadium debate continues, with project unofficially approved
The Hobart stadium is unofficially approved after securing enough yes votes, but the $1.13 billion project is still being scrutinised in the Tasmanian parliament. Follow the debate live. ⌘ Read more

Live: Wall St gains as US jobs market weakens, ASX set to follow
Australian shares are set to edge higher as Wall Street keeps gaining on hopes of Fed rate cuts. Follow the day’s events and insights from our business reporters on the ABC News live markets blog. ⌘ Read more

Live: Marles says Australia will stay with Ukraine ‘as long as it takes’
Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles says Australia will stay with Ukraine for as long as it takes, after announcing an additional $95 million in military assistance. Follow live. ⌘ Read more

5.4.302: longterm
Version:5.4.302 (EOL) (longterm)Released:2025-12-03Source:linux-5.4.302.tar.xzPGP Signature:linux-5.4.302.tar.signPatch:full ( incremental)ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.4.302 ⌘ Read more

Breaking: Australia’s economy growing at annual rate of 2.1pc
Australian’s economy grew by 0.4 per cent in the September quarter, following growth of 0.7 per cent in the June quarter. ⌘ Read more

Ex-AFL agent guilty of selling fake footy memorabilia
After facing AFL premiership players in court, a former player agent is fined $4,500 for selling fraudulent memorabilia from the 2021 grand final. ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Announces Price Hikes Due To RAM Demand, 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 Launched
Due to the ongoing RAM shortages in the industry amid ongoing massive demand for AI servers,Raspberry Pi announced today they are having to raise prices on the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers. They have also launched a 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 version too for those not needing much memory and wanting to keep pricing to a minimum… ⌘ 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

South-east Qld population set to reach 4.5m despite rising property prices
The analysis by KPMG reveals the population in the south-east corner has grown by as much as 2.2 per cent over the past five years, above the national average of 1.5 per cent. ⌘ Read more

Advent of Code 2025 starts tomorrow. 🥳🎄

This year, I’m going to use Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4, writing the code on my trusty old Pentium 133 with its 64 MB of RAM. No idea if that old version of Python will be fast enough for later puzzles. We’ll see.

AI Helps Drive Record $11.8B in Black Friday Online Spending
Earlier this month MasterCard noted that even Walmart now allows its customers to make purchases through ChatGPT. And after polling more than 4,000 consumers in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and UAE, they found “more than four in 10 consumers already use AI tools to help them shop, including 61% of Gen Z and 57% of millennials.”

Many (50% of Gen Z and 49% of millenn … ⌘ Read more

Are There More Linux Users Than We Think?
“By my count, Linux has over 11% of the desktop market,” writes ZDNet’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols:

In StatCounter’s latest US numbers, which cover through October, Linux shows up as only 3.49%. But if you look closer, “unknown” accounts for 4.21%. Allow me to make an educated guess here: I suspect those unknown desktops are actually running Linux. What else could it be? FreeBSD? Unix? OS/2? Unl … ⌘ Read more

Solus Linux 4.8 Released With Python 2 Finally Removed, Abandons Solus Software Center
In addition to the releases today of updated Endeavour OS and CachyOS, Solus 4.8 is out as the latest version of another desktop Linux distribution popular with enthusiasts… ⌘ Read more

Police seize $8.4m in assets after alleged illicit tobacco raids in the NT
Police have seized about $8.4 million in assets, including two cars and a jet ski, and almost 1 million cigarettes, following an operation targeting the NT’s illicit tobacco trade. ⌘ Read more

Black Friday Deals: AirPods 4 from $69, M4 MacBook Air from $749, & More
Black Friday Deals are live on tons of great Apple products and there are tons of great deals available from Amazon in particular. Whether you’re shopping for yourself or someone else this holiday season, take advantage of the deals while they last. You’ll find great deals on AirPods, Apple Watch, iPad, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/11/28/black-friday-deal … ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.335 Released With The Very Notable VK_EXT_present_timing
Vulkan 1.4.335 released a few hours ago as the latest iteration of this high performance graphics and compute API. With being just a week since the prior update and given the US Thanksgiving week, it’s on the lighter side in terms of issues addressed. There is one new extension though and it’s a big one: VK_EXT_present_timing is finally merged… ⌘ Read more

Android’s New Dual-Band Hotspot Mode Pairs 6 GHz Speed With 2.4 GHz Compatibility
Google is testing a new Wi-Fi hotspot configuration in the latest Android Canary build that pairs the 6 GHz band’s superior throughput with the 2.4 GHz band’s broad device compatibility, eliminating the trade-off users previously faced when choosing between speed and legacy support. Android’s default hotspot sett … ⌘ Read more

Better Technology, Worse Motivation: GenAI’s Mediocrity Trap

While generative AI (GenAI) promises productive efficiency, it can paradoxically lead to lower-quality work. We conducted an experiment with professional illustrators and found that AI assistance flattens the quality curve—it accelerates initial gains but sharply diminishes the returns on sustained effort. Faced with this, a significant number of professionals made a strategic choice: they sacrificed the final quality to save time.

From http://www.jin-li.org/uploads/1/1/4/5/114595093/ai_and_motivation.pdf

I haven’t read this and can’t vouch for it; seems vaguely AI-boostery. Still, the conclusions are interesting. This seems to be the picture that is emerging about generative AI generally: most people don’t like it and find that degrades the quality of work. Coders seem to like it and think that it helps them, but in fact it makes the slower, less productive, and more bug prone.

By all measures it’s a bad technology. We should just be honest about it. There is no need to make excuses for multi-trillion-dollar corporations.

@prologic@twtxt.net I will share later my GoToSocial 10 lines (or less) config.yaml, and 4 lines Caddyfile, and you will see how easy it is.

HP To Cut About 6,000 Jobs By 2028, Ramps Up AI Efforts
HP plans to cut 4,000-6,000 jobs by 2028 “as part of a plan to streamline operations and adopt artificial intelligence,” reports Reuters. From the report: HP’s teams focused on product development, internal operations and customer support will be impacted by the job cuts, CEO Enrique Lores said during a media briefing call. “We expect this initiative will create $1 billi … ⌘ 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