Germans don’t have humour? Oh, yes we do! Get this:

I was pushing my bike slowly up a hill, coming across an elderly lady.

She goes: “Go slowly!!! 😡”

“???”

“Haha! Just kidding! 😊“

Linux 7.1-rc1 Showing Off Some Wins On AMD Ryzen Threadripper
My initial testing of the Linux 7.1 development kernel on various systems in the lab continues going well. Aside from one main regression in a synthetic micro-benchmark appearing on multiple systems, not seeing much in the way of Linux 7.1 performance concerns thus far and seeing some nice performance gains in select workloads… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net There ya go! 8-)

Valve Updates GameNetworkingSockets After Nearly Four Year Hiatus
Back in 2018, Valve open-sourced their Steam networking sockets library as a basic network transport layer for games. This library is used by games from Counter-Strike to Dota 2 and since its public open-source drop has been picked up elsewhere. Finally after going nearly four years without a new version, GameNetworkingSockets v1.5 dropped today… ⌘ Read more

Electrical Current Might Be the Key To a Better Cup of Coffee
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: University of Oregon chemist Christopher Hendon loves his coffee – so much so that studying all the factors that go into creating the perfect cuppa constitutes a significant area of research for him. His latest project: discovering a novel means of measuring the flavor profile of coffee simp … ⌘ Read more

Valve Confirms Steam Controller Release Date, $99 Price
Valve just announced that their new Steam Controller will be going on sale on 4 May. Pricing in the US is at $99 USD… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I see him on those photos, and his singing starts ringing in my ears. I also thought, “I am going to miss him” because, you know, nothing is everlasting. But then I reproached myself; “enjoy the moment, dude, don’t taint it”. And so I shall.

@prologic@twtxt.net I am going to give it a more serious spin (meaning I am going to go read the help page). I’ve got to tell you though, most successful games do not need a help. But I am fully aware that there is a subset of gamers that would not mind—if not appreciate—a game with help, manual, and the likes.

Fans Angry Over Pokemon Go Champion’s Disqualification For Allegedly Shaking the Table
It’s “the curious case of… the Pokémon Go pro who celebrated too hard,” reports the gaming news site Aftermath. It all started on the first weekend in April…

Firestar73, a competitive Pokémon Go player who placed seventh at last year’s world championships, managed to narrowly cinch a game-five fin … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net Working on my game Frontier Crown – Going to push a new version today hopefully that includes much improved graphics, expanded ruleset and scope.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org maybe they go after the impact. A single? Meh. An album? “Woah! These guy(s)/gal(s) are busy!” Also more possibilities for people liking at least one song. Anyway, that’s my theory, and I am sticking to it! :-P

Oracle To Reduce The Frequency Of Solaris 11.4 Updates
Oracle announced today they are going to be reducing the frequency of software updates for Solaris 11.4 and their ZFS Storage Appliance software… ⌘ Read more

With all these new ways of digital publishing, I’m wondering for years why music artists still release entire albums. I would have imagined that most bands simply publish a new song whenever it’s good to go. But no, at least in my bubble, everybody still collects a bunch of new songs before throwing them as a collection into the crowd. I never used any of these streaming services, though, so maybe I’m just completely uninformed.

Many USB Improvements & New Hardware Merged For Linux 7.1
Ready to go ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window closing at week’s end are numerous new USB device support additions and other USB subsystem enhancements… ⌘ Read more

China’s CATL Reveals 621-Mile EV Battery, Under-7-Minute Charging
CATL unveiled a new wave of EV battery tech, “including a lighter battery pack rated for a 1,000-km (621-mile) driving range and an upgraded fast-charging battery that can go from 10 percent to 98 percent in under seven minutes,” reports Interesting Engineering. From the report: The launches were made during a 90-minute event in Beijing ahead … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Strikes Deal With Coding Startup Cursor For $60 Billion
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company, said on Tuesday that it had struck a deal with the artificial intelligence start-up Cursor that could result in its acquiring the young company for $60 billion. SpaceX is making the deal just as it prepares to go public in what is likel … ⌘ Read more

I don’t know what surprises me the most. Is it the dangerous in red, or the fact we need a 21 minutes video about it. LOL. Sorry, sorry, shouldn’t joke about such safety nightmare. My bad. I will go to my lane now. 🙈

New Lenovo Legion Go Drivers & More Sony HID Device Support In Linux 7.1
The HID subsystem updates landed this week for the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel that includes new hardware support and other changes… ⌘ Read more

Disney Creates Its Own IMAX for ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ After Losing Screens to ‘Dune: Part 3’
Ahead of December’s release of Avengers: Doomsday, Disney has unveiled “Infinity Vision,” reports Kotaku, which they describe as “a new theater-going experience that will be certain to transform your pedestrian $15 night out into an exotic $43 one.” (Though those prices appear to be estimat … ⌘ 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:

Just cancelled my sponsorship of two developers on Github, sorry 😞 – I’m not going to sponsor going forward if no-one else can be bothered to. It seems silly to be the sole sponsor of another’s work or project 🤦‍♂️

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Those are some very colorful shots. 👌 It was pretty warm here as well, health issues prevented me from going out, though.

(Have we established that Azabache is male? 😃)

New NTFS File-System Driver Submitted For Linux 7.1
Making today very exciting in Linux 7.1 merge window land was a pull request being sent out for introducing the new, modern NTFS file-system driver. Linus Torvalds has yet to comment if he’s going to merge the new driver but it looks like it’s ready for providing a better Linux NTFS experience over the current NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed by Paragon Software a few years ago and hasn’t seen too much feature progress… ⌘ Read more

Google, Pentagon Discuss Classified AI Deal
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet’s Google is negotiating an agreement with the Department of Defense that would allow the Pentagon to deploy its Gemini AI models in classified settings, the Information reported on Thursday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. The two parties are discussing an agreement that would allow the Pentagon to use Go … ⌘ Read more

Cal.com Is Going Closed Source Because of AI
Cal is moving its flagship scheduling software from open source to a proprietary license, arguing that AI coding tools now make it much easier for attackers to scan public codebases for vulnerabilities. “Open source security always relied on people to find and fix any problems,” said Peer Richelsen, co-founder of Cal. “Now AI attackers are flaunting that transparency.” CEO Bailey Pumflee … ⌘ Read more

A New Computer Chip Could Finally Withstand The Hellscape of Venus
Researchers at the University of Southern California say they’ve developed a memristor memory device that continued operating at 700 degrees Celsius. “And crucially, 700 degrees was not the limit, it was simply as hot as their testing equipment could go,” adds ScienceAlert. “The device showed no signs of failing.” From the report: The devi … ⌘ Read more

GreenBoost Memory Orchestrator For NVIDIA GPUs Introduces GreenBoost-Proton For Gaming
Last month we showcased GreenBoost as an open-source means of augmenting NVIDIA GPU vRAM with system RAM and NVMe storage. This memory tiering solution for NVIDIA GPUs was developed by an open-source developer with a focus on CUDA and allowing larger LLMs to be handled on graphics cards with smaller vRAM capacities. There was a setback to the project due to NVIDIA legal but now the project is going in new form and also has … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yes, and that’s why I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see a massive brain drain in a couple of years. This will affect young people even more, because they don’t have all the “old” knowledge to fall back on.

It’s concerning, I’ve warned about it many times, nobody listens.

I think the best thing one can do is explicitly not use any AI tools but keep your actual skills intact. Might be out of a (good) job for a while, but once this bubble bursts, this is who is going to get hired again. (I think.)

And considering how insanely expensive all this is, I’m still (mostly) convinced that the bubble will actually burst. This stuff just isn’t sustainable.

… or I might be wrong. And if so, I see an even darker future that I don’t want to put into words right now.

@xuu@txt.sour.is, what’s going on with y’all up in the mountains? The mouse has been mighty quiet for a while!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org AI result ahead, feel free to ignore.

I “asked” the AI at work the same question out of morbid curiousity. It “said” that SQLite converts that integer to floating point internally on overflows and then, when converting back, the x86 instruction cvttsd2si will turn it into 0x8000000000000000, even if the actual floating point value is outside of that range. So, yes, it allegedly actually saturates, as a side effect of the type conversion.

I couldn’t find anything about that automatic conversion in SQLite’s manual, yet, but an experiment looks like it might be true:

sqlite> select typeof(1 << 63);
╭─────────────────╮
│ typeof(1 << 63) │
╞═════════════════╡
│ integer         │
╰─────────────────╯

sqlite> select typeof((1 << 63) - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ typeof((1 << 63) ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ real                 │
╰──────────────────────╯

As for cvttsd2si, this source confirms the handling of 0x8000000000000000 on range errors: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/cvttsd2si

The following C program also confirms it (run through gdb to see cvttsd2si in action):

<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdint.h>
<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdio.h>

int
main()
{
    int64_t i;
    double d;

    /* -3000 instead of -1, because `double` can’t represent a
     * difference of -1 at this scale. */
    d = -9223372036854775808.0 - 3000;

    i = d;
    printf("%lf, 0x%lx, %ld\n", d, i, i);

    return 0;
}

(Remark about AI usage: Fine, I got an answer and maybe it’s even correct. But doing this completely ruined it for me. It would have been much more satisfying to figure this out myself. I actually suspected some floating point stuff going on here, but instead of verifying this myself I reached for the unethical tool and denied myself a little bit of fun at the weekend. Won’t do that again.)

EU Parliament Fails To Renew Loophole Allowing Tech Firms To Report Abuse
Bruce66423 shares a report from the Guardian: The European parliament has blocked the extension of a law that permits big tech firms to scan for child sexual exploitation on their platforms, creating a legal gap that child safety experts say will lead to crimes going undetected. The law, which was a carve-out of the EU Privacy Ac … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Begins Removing Copilot Branding From Windows 11 Apps
Microsoft has started stripping Copilot branding out of Notepad in Windows 11, replacing the old Copilot menu with a more generic “writing tools” label. The AI features themselves aren’t going away, but Microsoft seems to be backing off the heavy-handed Copilot branding and extra entry points. Windows Central reports: As promised, Microsoft is now … ⌘ Read more

Eehhh, what the hell is going on here!?

SELECT
    printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) - 2),
    printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) - 1),
    printf("0x%x",  1 << 63     ),
    printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) + 1),
    printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) + 2)

SQLite yields:

0x8000000000000000 (instead of 0x7ffffffffffffffe)
0x8000000000000000 (instead of 0x7fffffffffffffff)
0x8000000000000000 (correct)
0x8000000000000001 (correct)
0x8000000000000002 (correct)

Huh!? O_o Am I stupid? What am I missing here? Or is this actually a bug? :-?

With 62 bits, everything is spot on:

0x3ffffffffffffffe
0x3fffffffffffffff
0x4000000000000000
0x4000000000000001
0x4000000000000002

And 64 bits rather unsurprisingly also yield:

0xfffffffffffffffe
0xffffffffffffffff
0x0
0x1
0x2

Testing Suggests Google’s AI Overviews Tells Millions of Lies Per Hour
A New York Times analysis found Google’s AI Overviews now answer questions correctly about 90% of the time, which might sound impressive until you realize that roughly 1 in 10 answers is wrong. “[F]or Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day,” reports Ars Technica. From the report: The Times … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org easy come, easy go. They grow so fast! :-) Also, Azabache allows to be seeing when ready for it, you know, just like Gandalf “*a wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to*”. :-D

Perplexity’s ‘Incognito Mode’ Is a ‘Sham,’ Lawsuit Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Perplexity’s AI search engine encourages users to go deeper with their prompts by engaging in chat sessions that a lawsuit has alleged are often shared in their entirety with Google and Meta without users’ knowledge or consent. “This happened to every user regardless of whether or not they signed up for a Perplexity … ⌘ Read more

Gentoo Releases Experimental Images Using GNU/Hurd
Following an April Fools’ Day tease of Gentoo claiming they were going to switch to GNU Hurd as their primary kernel moving forward, they have now acknowledged the joke but in fact also announcing there are now experimental Gentoo GNU/Hurd images available… ⌘ Read more

Python Blood Could Hold the Secret To Healthy Weight Loss
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: CU Boulder researchers are reporting that they have discovered an appetite-suppressing compound in python blood that helps the snakes consume enormous meals and go months without eating yet remain metabolically healthy. The findings were published in the journal Natural Metabolism on March 19, 2026.

Pythons can … ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi 4 3GB Launches, Raspberry Pi Prices Go Up Again Due To RAM
AmiMoJo shares a report from Phoronix: Raspberry Pi prices are going up yet again due to the continued memory squeeze on the industry. To help offset the memory prices for some use-cases, Raspberry Pi also announced the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB model at $83 to help fill the void between the 2GB and 4GB options.

The … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de with the current regime, everything is, to put it politely, rather odd, and in disarray. They have yesterday’s window, otherwise the next one was on the 12 of April, or something like that. We knew it was going up for a few days, but we are used to that kind of thing, so it is not that super exciting any more. LOL.

Yeah, I saw it in person.

This whole thing was pretty weird, btw. I had no idea it was happening until basically yesterday. No news coverage, nobody mentioned it. 🤔 And suddenly, boom, we’re going to the moon. What? 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de pretty cool, thanks for sharing! We saw the rocket go up yesterday, but it didn’t occur to me to pull out the camera and take a shot until it was gone. I mean, the visible window is also quite short! 😅

Proposed Wine Code Uses Zink For OpenGL-On-Vulkan By Default
A CodeWeavers engineer opened a merge request yesterday for Wine to use Mesa’s Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver by default. This would build Zink as a Windows Portable Executable (PE) for allowing OpenGL to go straight to the Vulkan API with the host Vulkan drivers… ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Files To Go Public
Reuters reports that SpaceX has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, reportedly targeting a valuation above $1.75 trillion. Reuters reports: SpaceX puts more rockets in space than any other company and promises a chance to invest in humanity’s return to the moon and attempt to colonize Mars. The company aspires to put artificial intelligence data centers in space, while running a lucrative satellite communications system that o … ⌘ Read more

Sweden Swaps Screens For Books In the Classroom
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2023, the Swedish government announced that the country’s schools would be going back to basics, emphasizing skills such as reading and writing, particularly in early grades. After mostly being sidelined, physical books are now being reintroduced into classrooms, and students are learning to write the old-fashioned way: by … ⌘ Read more

Robotaxi Outage In China Leaves Passengers Stranded On Highways
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour. In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-drivin … ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi 4 3GB Launches, Raspberry Pi Prices Go Up Again Due To RAM
Raspberry Pi prices are going up yet again due to the continued memory squeeze on the industry. To help offset the memory prices for some use-cases, Raspberry Pi also announced the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB model at $83 to help fill the void between the 2GB and 4GB options… ⌘ Read more

Russia Goes After VPNs As ‘Great Crackdown’ Gathers Pace
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Russia is going to further clamp down Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which are used by millions of Russians to get around internet controls and censorship, Russia’s digital minister said. In what has been cast by diplomats as Russia’s “great crackdown,” the authorities have repeatedly blocked mobile internet and … ⌘ Read more

Google Now Lets You Change Your Gmail Address
Google is rolling out a feature in the U.S. that lets some users change their Gmail address without creating a new account or losing their data. TechCrunch reports: Users who have access to this feature can go to their Google Account settings, navigate to Personal info > Email > Google Account email option. Tap on the “Change Google Account email” button to start the process of chang … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu MATE Leader Stepping Down, Seeking New Contributors
After starting and leading the Ubuntu MATE flavor since 2014, Martin Wimpress announced he’s looking to step down from leading this flavor of Ubuntu Linux with the MATE desktop environment. He’s hoping for new passionate contributors to keep it going… ⌘ Read more