AMD openSIL + Coreboot Being Ported To A Modern AM5 Consumer Motherboard
While we are very eager for the AMD openSIL open-source CPU silicon initialization project to achieve production readiness with Zen 6 platforms for ultimately replacing AGESA, there is some experimental excitement on the way for open-source firmware enthusiasts… OpenSIL and Coreboot are being brought to an AM5 motherboard you can buy retail… ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.1 Lands Raycast Nodes, Blender Adjusting Release Cycle Moving Forward
Two interesting bits of Blender news this week for those fond of this leading open-source 3D modeling software… ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.3 Brings Support For Direct3D 5 On Vulkan
D7VK is a fork of the DXVK project that is an important part of Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 support atop Vulkan. With D7VK the original goal was a Direct3D 7 implementation on Vulkan. D7VK 1.1 brought experimental Direct3D 6 support and now with today’s release of D7VK 1.3 is support for Direct3D 5… ⌘ Read more

Neocities Founder Stuck in Chatbot Hell After Bing Blocked 1.5 Million Sites
Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft’s automated support loop after discovering that Bing quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform, a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013.

Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.3.5 Brings Vulkan Driver Fixes & Other Minor Changes – Even For Old The R600g
While Mesa 26.0 stable will be out soon, the belated Mesa 25.3.5 point release is now available for serving as the current latest stable point release… ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.6 as Its AI Tools Rattle Software Markets
Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 4.6, its most capable model yet, at a moment when the company’s AI tools have already spooked markets over fears that they are disrupting traditional software development and other sectors.

The new model improves on Opus 4.5’s coding abilities, the company said – it plans more carefully, … ⌘ Read more

Western Digital Plots a Path To 140 TB Hard Drives Using Vertical Lasers and 14-Platter Designs
Western Digital this week laid out a roadmap that stretches its 3.5-inch hard drive platform to 14 platters and pairs it with a new vertical-emitting laser for heat-assisted magnetic recording, a combination the company says will push individual drive capacities beyond 140 TB in the … ⌘ Read more

Krita 6.0 Beta Released - Using Qt6 & Wayland Color Management Support
The first beta release of Krita 6.0 is now available for this featureful digital painting program. Krita 6.0 is re-based against the Qt6 toolkit while Krita 5.3 Beta is also being released at the same time for those sticking to Qt5… ⌘ Read more

Loongson 3B6000 Benchmarks: How China’s LoongArch CPU Compares To AMD Zen 5, Intel Arrow Lake & Raspberry Pi 5
Recently I finally got my hands on a LoongArch processor, the ISA developed by China’s Loongson Technology as an evolution from their earlier use of the MIPS64 ISA and inspired by RISC-V and other modern ISAs. The Loongson-3B6000 features 12 cores / 24 threads with dual channel DDR4 ECC memory support. Here is a look at how that latest-generation LoongArch desktop processor compares to the current gen … ⌘ Read more

What Go Programmers Think of AI
“Most Go developers are now using AI-powered development tools when seeking information (e.g., learning how to use a module) or toiling (e.g., writing repetitive blocks of similar code).” That’s one of the conclusions Google’s Go team drew from September’s big survey of 5,379 Go developers.

But the survey also found that among Go developers using AI-powered tools, “their satisfaction with these tools is m … ⌘ Read more

Can We Slow Global Warming By Phasing Out Super-Pollutant HFCs?
“There’s one big bright spot in the fight against climate change that most people never think about,” reports the Washington Post.

“It could prevent nearly half a degree of global warming this century, a huge margin for a planet that has warmed almost 1.5 degrees Celsius and is struggling to keep that number below 2 degrees…”

[M]ore than 170 c … ⌘ Read more

UK’s First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK’s first superfast-charging train running only on battery power will come into passenger service this weekend – operating a five-mile return route in west London. Great Western Railway (GWR) will send the converted London Underground train out from 5.30am to cover the full Saturday timetable on the … ⌘ Read more

The UK Paid $5.65 Million For a Bookmarks Site
The UK government paid consulting firm PwC $5.65 million to build its new AI Skills Hub, a site meant to help 10 million workers gain AI skills by 2030 that functions largely as a bookmarking service, directing users to external training courses that already existed before the contract was awarded.

The hub links to platforms like Salesforce’s free Trailhead learning system rather th … ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC 9755 Delivers Decisive Performance Leadership Over Xeon 6 Granite Rapids With Nearly 500 Benchmarks
Back in December I carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 for these competing 128 core server processors using the latest Linux software stack before closing out 2025. That was done with nearly 200 benchmarks and the AMD EPYC Turin Zen 5 processor delivered terrific performance as we have come to enjoy out of the 5th Gen EPYC line-up over the past year and several mont … ⌘ Read more

Xbox Hardware Revenue Craters 32%
Microsoft’s Xbox hardware revenue fell 32% in the final quarter of 2025 and overall gaming revenue declined 9% year-over-year, according to the company’s latest quarterly earnings, released as part of results showing Microsoft’s total revenue exceeded $80 billion.

Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, dropped 5%.

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Libgcrypt 1.12 Released With VAES/AVX-512 Accelerated AES: 2x Performance On AMD Zen 5
Werner Koch released libgcrypt 1.12 as the newest feature release to this library providing the cryptographic building blocks used by GnuPG and other software like email clients, file encryption utilities, and other software… ⌘ Read more

Intel Thermal Daemon 2.5.11 Released With Wildcat Lake Support
With Intel Panther Lake now shipping, open-source Intel engineers working on the client side are turning to tidying up support for their next target: Wildcat Lake. That more cost effective alternative to Panther Lake now has Intel Thermal Daemon support in getting ready for Linux desktops/laptops… ⌘ Read more

Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us To Take Back the Internet
mspohr shares a report: When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free. Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.

Since Berner … ⌘ Read more

Android’s Full Desktop Mode Surfaces in Accidental Chromium Leak
A bug report filed on the Chromium Issue Tracker inadvertently exposed Google’s desktop Android interface for the first time, revealing a system codenamed “Aluminum OS” running on existing Chromebook hardware. The report, ostensibly about Chrome Incognito tabs, included screen captures from an HP Elite Dragonfly 13.5 Chromebook running Android 16.

The … ⌘ Read more

The Android ‘NexPhone’: Linux on Demand, Dual-Boots Into Windows 11 - and Transforms Into a Workstation
The “NexDock” (from Nex Computer) already turns your phone into a laptop workstation. Purism chose it as the docking station for their Librem 5 phones.

But now Nex is offering its own smartphone “that runs Android 16, launches Debian, and dual-boots into Windows 11,” acco … ⌘ Read more

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Display Support & Old Adreno 225 Enablement For Linux 7.0
Rob Clark this week sent out the latest MSM DRM kernel driver updates for the latest Qualcomm display/graphics enhancements ahead of next month’s Linux 7.0 merge window… ⌘ Read more

(Thank goodness, they turned it off for the weekend! So it’s only 24/5! Whoop, whoop.)

NASA Confident, But Some Critics Wonder if Its Orion Spacecraft is Safe to Fly
“NASA remains confident it has a handle on the problem and the vehicle can bring the crew home safely,” reports CNN.

But “When four astronauts begin a historic trip around the moon as soon as February 6, they’ll climb aboard NASA’s 16.5-foot-wide Orion spacecraft with the understanding that it has a known flaw — on … ⌘ Read more

Campaigner Launches $2 Billion Legal Action In UK Against Apple Over Wallet’s ‘Hidden Fees’
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Guardian: The financial campaigner James Daley has launched a 1.5 billion pound (approximately $1.5 billion) class action lawsuit against Apple over its mobile phone wallet, claiming the U.S. tech company blocked competition and charged hid … ⌘ Read more

Firmware Upstreamed For Audio Support With Upcoming Dell & Lenovo Panther Lake Laptops
Similar to the new Intel IPU 7.5 firmware upstreamed for Panther Lake this week, Cirrus has upstreamed their CS42L45 codec firmware for upcoming Dell and Lenovo laptops making use of this audio codec… ⌘ Read more

GNU Guix 1.5 Released With RISC-V Support, Experimental x86_64 GNU Hurd Kernel
GNU Guix 1.5 is out today as the latest major release for this platform built around its functional package manager. This is a big upgrade with it having been three years since the GNU Guix 1.4 release… ⌘ Read more

Linux Lands Fix For Its “Subtly Wrong” Page Fault Handling Code For The Past 5 Years
Merged today for the Linux 6.19 Git kernel and then in turn for back-porting to prior Linux kernel series is making the x86 page fault handling code disable interrupts properly. Since 2020 it turns out the handling was subtly wrong but now corrected by Intel… ⌘ 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

Blue Origin’s Satellite Internet Network TeraWave Will Move Data At 6 Tbps
Blue Origin has unveiled an enterprise-focused satellite internet network called TeraWave, which promises up to 6 Tbps speeds via a mixed low- and medium-Earth orbit constellation. TechCrunch reports: The TeraWave constellation will use a mix of 5,280 satellites in low-Earth orbit and 128 in medium-Earth orbit, and Blue Origin … ⌘ Read more

CEOs Say AI is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story.
Companies are spending vast sums on AI expecting the technology to boost efficiency, but a new survey from AI consulting firm Section found that two-thirds of non-management workers among 5,000 white-collar respondents say they save less than two hours a week or no time at all, while more than 40% of executives report the technolo … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI and ServiceNow Strike Deal to Put AI Agents in Business Software
According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI and ServiceNow signed a three-year deal to embed AI agents directly into ServiceNow’s enterprise workflows. CNBC reports: As part of the deal, ServiceNow will integrate GPT-5.2 into its enterprise workflow platform and create AI voice technology harnessing these models. “Bringing together our … ⌘ Read more

Adreno Gen 8 Vulkan Graphics Merged For Mesa 26.0 To Support The Snapdragon X2
Merged in time for the upcoming Mesa 26.0 release is the merging of Vulkan driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno Gen 8 graphics support that is notably used by the new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs as well as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5… ⌘ Read more

Threads Usage Overtakes X On Mobile
New data from Similarweb shows Threads has overtaken X in daily mobile users. However, X still dominates on the web with around 150 million daily web visits compared to Threads’ 8.5 million daily visits. TechCrunch reports: Similarweb’s data shows that Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android as of January 7, 2026, after months of growth, while X has 125 million daily active users … ⌘ Read more

China Birth Rate Falls To Lowest Since 1949
China’s birth rate fell to 5.6 per 1,000 people in 2025, the lowest figure since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, and the country’s total population contracted by 3.39 million, the sharpest decline since the Mao Zedong era. The drop marks the fourth straight year of population decline and comes despite government efforts to encourage childbearing, including subsidies of abou … ⌘ Read more

Nearly 5 Million Accounts Removed Under Australia’s New Social Media Ban
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Nearly five million social media accounts belonging to Australian teenagers have been deactivated or removed, a month after a landmark law barring those younger than 16 from using the services took effect, the government said on Thursday. The announcement was the first re … ⌘ Read more

Wow, as I anticipated, this is waaay out of my capabilities to really understand it. But I’m quite happy to just have spotted a mistake in an explanatory comment in section 4.5.2 “The icode Array”. Of course, it should be /e + tc + /i + ni + t\0. Let’s hope that my e-mail with the patch actually makes it into Briam’s inbox. I fear GMail just hides it in the spam folder.

Raspberry Pi’s New Add-on Board Has 8GB of RAM For Running Gen AI Models
An anonymous reader shares a report: Raspberry Pi is launching a new add-on board capable of running generative AI models locally on the Raspberry Pi 5. Announced on Thursday, the $130 AI HAT+ 2 is an upgraded – and more expensive – version of the module launched last year, now offering 8GB of RAM and a Hailo 10H chip with 40 TOPS … ⌘ Read more

oVirt 4.5.7 Released After Two Years With New OS & CPU Support
The oVirt 4.5.7 open-source virtualization management platform released this week after not seeing any new releases in two years. While Red Hat had started the oVirt open-source project for which their Red Hat Virtualization platform is based, since they shifted that to maintenance mode to focus on the Red Hat OpenShift platform and stopped contributing to oVirt, it’s been up to the open-source community to keep it going… ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Invests $1.5 Million in the Python Software Foundation and Open Source Security
Python Software Foundation: We are thrilled to announce that Anthropic has entered into a two-year partnership with the Python Software Foundation (PSF) to contribute a landmark total of $1.5 million to support the foundation’s work, with an emphasis on Python ecosystem security. This investme … ⌘ Read more

5 star reads of 2025 worth mentioning

#bookstodon 🧵

Someone has asked recently on a toot for others to share their ‘list of 2025 books’. Instead of pointing out to the list of what I’ve read, I’ll instead mention a few ‘5 star’ books I’ve read in 2025 that I think is worth pointing out towards.

By no particular order (well, the order in the photo, really…)

• AJ Pearce’s “Yours Cheerfully” and “Mrs Porter Calling”, books 2 and 3 of The Emmy Lake Chronicles. I’d already read the first book in the series and considered it a five stars read, and I plan to eventually read the fourth and last book in the series - the paperback edition is out next August. This isn’t a deep or profound book series - and doesn’t need to be in order to be a good one. It’s a series depicting the life of a young woman in war-time London. Each of these books made me cry and made me laugh, and I have found some comfort reading them in a time where, in many aspects, it feels like we’re living in a pre-war era…

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Exercise is as Effective as Medication in Treating Depression, Study Finds
A major new review by the Cochrane collaboration – an independent network of researchers – evaluated 73 randomized controlled trials involving about 5,000 people with depression and found that exercise matched the effectiveness of both pharmacological treatments and psychological therapies.

The biological mechanisms overl … ⌘ Read more

Personal Info on 17.5 Million Users May Have Leaked to Dark Web After 2024 Instagram Breach
An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:

If you received a bunch of password reset requests from Instagram recently, you’re not alone. As reported by Malwarebytes, an antivirus software company, there was a data breach revealing the “sensitive information” of 17.5 million Instagra … ⌘ Read more

AMD Enabling New GFX12.1 & More RDNA 3.5 Hardware Blocks With Linux 6.20~7.0
AMD today sent out their latest pull request to DRM-Next of new AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes they are looking to get into the next kernel cycle, which will either be known as Linux 6.20 or more than likely be called Linux 7.0. Notable with this week’s pull request is enabling a lot of new GPU hardware IP blocks, including GC/GFX 12.1 as a new addition past the current GFX12.0 / RDNA4… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0 RADV Merges The Big Ray-Tracing Improvement For UE5 Lumen
The RADV ray-tracing improvement covered earlier this week for some big performance gains for Unreal Engine 5 titles running under Linux thanks to Steam Play has been merged for Mesa 25.0… ⌘ Read more

Creator of Claude Code Reveals His Workflow
Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, revealed a deceptively simple workflow that uses parallel AI agents, verification loops, and shared memory to let one developer operate with the output of an entire engineering team. “I run 5 Claudes in parallel in my terminal,” Cherny wrote. “I number my tabs 1-5, and use system notifications to know when a Claude needs input. … ⌘ Read more

André Pestana - redução da idade da reforma, reforma mínima de 1000€, acabar com os 5% da NATO

MVieira - Temos tanto ouro, podíamos financiar um projecto de um botão para cada cidadão, o botão resolver. O botão funciona com ciência e magia, inteligência artificial e estupidez natural.

HCorreia - crise climática vai ser o fim do mundo, precisamos de plantar muito muito.

Pergunta final para cada um:

LMM - comentário de que mais se arrepende - é difícil

GMelo - Já desobedecer por razões de consciência? - Nunca precisou

Ventura - um primo diz-me que se apaixonou com alguém do Bangladesh - achava mal, preferia uma portuguesa

Seguro - se não ganhar - a culpa é dele (acho que foi isso)

Cotrim - onde é que o liberalismo precisa de um travão? - não precisa, há um travão embutido

Martins - a causa fracturante mais importante hoje - ex. a xenofobia

A. Filipe - se já se aborreceu com a disciplina de voto - não

Jorge Pinto - já cedi ao voto útil? - não

Humberto Correia - injustiça vs. falta de respeito, qual pior? - a pobreza

Pestana - Alguma vez achou que uma Greve foi longe de mais? - não

Vieira - Coisa maia série que disse e q não foi levada a sério? Direito à felicidade na constituição

Considerações pessoais: quando os debates começaram tinha dúvidas, hoje tenho certezas.

8/8

Marques Mendes quer imigração regulada. Acha que agora as coisas estão muito melhor do que na altura do PS. Crescimento Económico tem de ser estratégico para um Presidente. Temos de ter no mínimo 3,5% de crescimento ao ano. Com mais liberalização e flexibilidade. Temos de aumentar as pensões.

Gouveia e Melo diz que temos é de falar de transparência e segurança, que isso é que são temas de presidenciais, em vez da economia que é um problema de governo. Mas diz isto para acusar LMM em ser facilitador e Seguro de ser fraco segundo Mário Soares.

LMM defende-se, dizendo que GeM tem feito uma campanha de insinuações e não apresenta um caso de facilitador.

AF - O aumento do salário mínimo é bom para os trabalhadores e economia, a descida do IRC é mau (diz e justifica). É preciso de cumprir a constituição, também na aceitação da entrada de imigrantes legalmente.

HC - A melhor integração a imigrantes é na escola

MV - a questão do território é que é o problema que temos de falar. A solução dele é criar Vieirópolis, no centro do país, uma cidade de ficção científica. Desta vez AV não esconde estar a rir, e é Cotrim a conter-se. Boa altura para ir para intervalo… no regresso será a vez do Pestana responder.

6/n

Vieira sobre a saúde quer proibir a doença. Ventura tapa a cara para não se rir do qie Vieira disse. Quer o direito à felicidade para todos os portugueses inscritos na constituição. O vinho canalizado é uma metáfora, admite. Resolvia o racismo pintando toda a gente.

3 - Crescimento Económico, imigração e legislação laboral:

Ventura diz que o problema da saúde e da habitação é culpa da geringonça porque aceitou imigrantes. Seguro está de trombas, e é acusado de ter deixado entrar criminosos em Portugal. Crescimento não é mais importante que parar a imigração.

Seguro quer disciplinar a imigração, a economia precisa de imigrantes, relembra a Ventura que isto não são as eleições legislativas.

Catarina Martins acha que é precisa integração. Quer uma economia de salários dignos, transição climática justa.

Cotrim é quem crescer mais que todos os outros, segundo ele próprio. Chama o jornalista de ingénuo quando os níveis de crescimento actuais são citados. Quer pensões mais altas(!), ah, mas é só quando tivemos a economia a crescer ainda mais, e a natalidade for maior, e a segurança social for “regenerada” (seja o que isso for).

Jorge Pinto começa por se virar a Ventura para dizer “fraude é o Senhor”. Diz que o Jorge Sampaio foi o melhor presidente e que quer ser como ele.

5/n

Manjaro Linux 26.0 Rolling Out - Xfce Edition Recommended If Wanting To Use X11
Package updates for the Arch Linux powered Manjaro Linux distribution have been pushed out for Manjaro 26.0 “Anh-Linh” while updated ISOs are expected to soon become available. The Manjaro 26.0 milestone brings KDE Plasma 6.5 and GNOME 49 but with both of those you may lose X11 session support so they are recommending their Xfce Edition for wanting wanting to continue using an X.Org desktop session… ⌘ Read more

AV aproveita que o deixam falar para criticar também o AS por ser do PS que é quem foi causador do atraso desta nova lei (AS responde demarcando-se do PS). GM acha que “qualquer Português hoje quer comprar uma habitação minimamente decente tem de dispender perto de 1 milhão de euros”, e eu acho que assim é difícil levá-lo a sério.AV aproveita a crítica ao enriquecimento ilícito feita por GM para defender alterar a constituição - e em quatro jornalistas não há um que o confronte com o papel do PR.

Parece que saltaram um bloco de perguntas (porque as respostas estão a demorar mais do que estava previsto), e com isto CM não tem a oportunidade de ser a primeira a responder a nenhum tema.

1. recusou algum negócio ou reunião por conflito de interesses?: JP, AF, GM, CF - não; MM - negócios não, mas convites sim; AV - negócios não, mas no parlamento sim (relacionado com futebol), e está a ser investigado pelo MP; AS - sim, rejeitou um convite de uma empresa a ir ver a bola, já enquanto candidato; CM - já recusou reuniões com outros estados e embaixadas por motivos de posições sobre direitos humanos.
   

8/n