Dates with AI Companions Plagued by Lag, Miscommunications - and General Creepiness
To celebrate Valentine’s Day, EVA AI created a temporary “pop-up” restaurant at a wine bar in Manhattan’s “Hell’s Kitchen” district where patrons can date AI personas.

The Verge notes that looking around the restaurant, “Of the 30-some-odd people in attendance, only two or three are organic users. The rest are EVA … ⌘ Read more

ByteDance’s Seedance 2 Criticized Over AI-Generated Video of Tom Cruise Fighting Brad Pitt
1.5 million people have now viewed a slick 15-second video imagining Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt that was generated by ByteDance’s new AI video generation tool Seedance 2.0.
But while ByteDance gushes their tool “delivers cinematic output aligned with industry standards,” the cinema industry isn’t h … ⌘ Read more

Detroit Automakers Take $50 Billion Hit
The Detroit Big Three – General Motors, Ford and Stellantis – have collectively announced more than $50 billion in write-downs on their electric-vehicle businesses after years of aggressive investment into a transition that, even before Republican lawmakers abolished a $7,500 federal tax credit last fall, was already running below expectations.

U.S. EV sales fell more than 30% in the fourth qua … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Claims DeepSeek Distilled US Models To Gain an Edge
An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US AI models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News.

In the memo, sent Thursday to the House Select Committe … ⌘ Read more

CIA Makes New Push To Recruit Chinese Military Officers as Informants
An anonymous reader shares a report: Just weeks after a dramatic purge of China’s top general, the CIA is moving to capitalize on any resulting discord with a new public video targeting potential informants in the Chinese military. The U.S. spy agency on Thursday rolled out the video depicting a disillusioned mid-level Chinese military o … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic To Cover Costs of Electricity Price Increases From Its Data Centers
AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to “estimate and cover” consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay fo … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Performance Events Prep For Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids
The performance “perf” events changes for the Linux 7.0 kernel are continuing to prepare for next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to current Xeon 6 Granite Rapids… ⌘ Read more

US Hacking Tool Boss Stole and Sold Exploits To Russian Broker That Could Target Millions of Devices, DOJ Says
Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris’s hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers – including the Russian govern … ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc B390 Panther Lake Generational Performance Since The Gen9 Graphics Era
Last week on Phoronix we provided initial Linux graphics benchmarks for the new Xe3-based Arc B390 graphics found with the higher-end Panther Lake SoCs with 12 Xe cores. Those benchmarks showed great gains over recent generations of Intel graphics like with Lunar Lake, Meteor Lake, and even Alder/Raptor Lake… But what if you hold onto your laptop for even longer? In this article is an Intel integrated graphics comparison look … ⌘ Read more

ByteDance Suspends Seedance 2 Feature That Turns Facial Photos Into Personal Voices Over Potential Risks
hackingbear writes: China’s Bytedance has released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator which handles up to four types of input at once: images, videos, audio, and text. Users can combine up to nine images, three videos, and three audio files, up to a total of twelve fi … ⌘ Read more

Intel CPU Microcode 20260210 Brings Security Updates & Functional Fixes
Intel today for Patch Tuesday released several generations worth of CPU microcode updates for addressing multiple security issues and functional issues… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 VFS Changes: Non-Blocking Timestamps, Standardized Generic I/O Error Reporting
In addition to introducing nullfs and the OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE support for containers, there were also a number of other interesting VFS updates merged on Monday for the Linux 7.0 kernel… ⌘ Read more

The Big Money in Today’s Economy Is Going To Capital, Not Labor
The American economy’s most valuable companies are now worth trillions of dollars more than their predecessors were a generation ago, yet they employ a fraction of the workers – and a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal argues that this widening gap between capital and labor is the defining economic story of our time.

Labor received 58% of gross dom … ⌘ Read more

Romance Publishing Has an AI Problem and Most Readers Don’t Know It Yet
The romance genre – long the publishing industry’s earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases – has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, … ⌘ Read more

Debian’s tag2upload Reaches GA For Improving Packaging Workflow
Debian’s tag2upload has finally reached general availability “GA” status for helping Debian developers/maintainers with an improved Git-based packaging workflow… ⌘ Read more

Do Super Bowl Ads For AI Signal a Bubble About to Burst?
It’s the first “AI” Super Bowl, argues the tech/business writer at Slate, with AI company advertisements taking center stage, even while consumers insist to surveyors that they’re “mostly negative” about AI-generated ads.

Last year AI companies spent over $1.7 billion on AI-related ads, notes the Washington Post, adding the blitz this year will be “inescapable” — even … ⌘ Read more

Initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” Support Merged For LLVM/Clang
Merged overnight to the LLVM/Clang compiler’s codebase was initial targeting for next-generation AMD Zen 6 processors using the znver6 target… ⌘ Read more

Initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” Support Merged For LLVM/Clang
Merged overnight to the LLVM/Clang compiler’s codebase was initial targeting for next-generation AMD Zen 6 processors using the znver6 target… ⌘ Read more

New Bill in New York Would Require Disclaimers on AI-Generated News Content
An anonymous reader shares a report: A new bill in the New York state legislature would require news organizations to label AI-generated material and mandate that humans review any such content before publication. On Monday, Senator Patricia Fahy (D-Albany) and Assemblymember Nily Rozic (D-NYC) introduced the bill, called Th … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s Tax Bill Plunges 87% After Tax Cuts
An anonymous reader shares a report: Republicans’ tax cuts shaved billions off Amazon’s tax bill, new government filings show. The company says it ran a $1.2 billion tax bill last year, down from $9 billion the previous year, and even as its profits jumped by 45% to nearly $90 billion.

That’s largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks GOP lawmakers included in their One Big Beau … ⌘ Read more

Pushing The Intel Panther Lake CPU Performance Further On Linux
Earlier this week I published the first Linux benchmarks of Intel’s much anticipated Panther Lake with the Core Ultra X7 358H 16-core 18A processor. The Panther Lake SoC showed very nice generational gains especially with much better performance-per-Watt and the Intel Arc B390 graphics are also fascinatingly fast while continuing to be backed by open-source drivers. In today’s article are more Panther Lake Linux benchmarks on the CPU side in … ⌘ Read more

‘Vibe Coding Kills Open Source’
Four economists across Central European University, Bielefeld University and the Kiel Institute have built a general equilibrium model of the open-source software ecosystem and concluded that vibe coding – the increasingly common practice of letting AI agents select, assemble and modify packages on a developer’s behalf – erodes the very funding mechanism that keeps open-source projects alive.

The core problem … ⌘ 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

‘Reverse Solar Panel’ Generates Electricity at Night
Researchers at the University of New South Wales are developing a “reverse solar panel” that generates small amounts of electricity at night by harvesting infrared heat radiated from Earth. “In the past, scientists have demonstrated that a ‘thermoradiative diode’ can convert infrared radiation directly into electricity; when used to convert heat from Earth, they explo … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Project Genie Lets You Generate Your Own Interactive Worlds
Google is letting outsiders experiment with DeepMind’s Genie 3 “world model” via Project Genie, a tool for generating short, interactive AI worlds. The caveat: it requires a $250/month AI Ultra subscription, is U.S.-only, and has tight limits that make it more of a tech demo than a game engine. Engadget reports: At launch, Project Genie o … ⌘ Read more

US Leads Record Global Surge in Gas-Fired Power Driven by AI Demands
An anonymous reader shares a report: The US is leading a huge global surge in new gas-fired power generation that will cause a major leap in planet-heating emissions, with this record boom driven by the expansion of energy-hungry datacenters to service AI, according to a new forecast.

This year is set to shatter the annual record for new … ⌘ Read more

Apple Launches AirTag 2 With Improved Range, Louder Speaker
Apple has launched a new AirTag 2 that features improved range, a speaker that’s 50% louder, and expanded Apple Watch-based tracking. Pricing stays the same at $29 (or $99 for four). 9to5Mac reports: The new AirTag comes with an upgraded second-generation Ultra Wideband chip for improved range, including when using Precision Finding. From Apple Newsroom: “ … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Latest AI Chip Claims Performance Edge Over Amazon and Google
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Microsoft on Monday announced Maia 200, the second generation of its custom AI chip, claiming it’s the most powerful first-party silicon from any major cloud provider. The company says Maia 200 delivers three times the performance of Amazon’s latest Trainium chip on certain b … ⌘ Read more

Angry Gamers Are Forcing Studios To Scrap or Rethink New Releases
The video game industry is experiencing something that most consumer-facing businesses would consider remarkable: organized online campaigns from players are actually forcing studios to cancel projects or publicly walk back any association with AI-generated content.

Running With Scissors, the publisher behind the Postal shooter franchise, rec … ⌘ Read more

Initial AMD GFX13 Target Merged To LLVM 23 Git - Presumably RDNA5
Added to the LLVM 23 Git codebase minutes ago is a pull request adding the initial AMDGPU GFX13 target for their next-generation graphics core IP. AMD GFX13 is presumably for RDNA5… ⌘ Read more

Google Discover Replaces News Headlines With Sometimes Inaccurate AI-Generated Alternatives
An anonymous reader shared this report from The Verge:

In early December, I brought you the news that Google has begun replacing Verge headlines, and those of our competitors, with AI clickbait nonsense in its content feed [which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones … ⌘ Read more

The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says
This month saw results from a yearlong global study of “potential negative risks that generative AI poses to student”. The study (by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education) also suggests how to prevent risks and maximize benefits:

After interviews, focus groups, and consultations with over 500 students, teachers, parents, education … ⌘ Read more

Study Shows How Earthquake Monitors Can Track Space Junk Through Sonic Booms
A new study shows that earthquake monitoring networks can track falling space debris by detecting the sonic booms produced during atmospheric reentry, sometimes more accurately than radar. The Associated Press reports: Scientists reported Thursday that seismic readings from sonic booms that were generated when a discarde … ⌘ Read more

Solar and Wind Overtake Fossil Fuels in the EU
Wind and solar power overtook fossil fuels last year as a source of electricity in the EU for the first time, a new report found. Semafor adds: The milestone was hit largely thanks to a rise in solar power, which generated a record 13% of electricity in the EU, according to Ember. Together, wind and solar hit 30% of EU electricity generation, edging out fossil fuels at 29%.

The … ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@yume.laidback.moe 🙋 with extra 24/7 noise from the construction site outside (construction guys live in a little “container” and they need power, so they have a diesel generator running 24/7)

Linux Finally Retiring HIPPI: The First Near-Gigabit Standard For Networking Supercomputers
While the Linux kernel has been seeing preparations from NVIDIA for 1.6 Tb/s networking in preparing for next-generation super-computing, the kernel has still retained support to now for the High Performance Parallel Interface. HIPPI was the standard for connecting supercomputers in the late 1980s and a portion of the 1990s with being the first networking standard for near-Gigabit connectivity at 800 Mb/s over distances up to … ⌘ Read more

AMD Sends Out Linux Patches For Next-Gen EPYC Features: GLBE, GLSBE & PLZA
Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list this afternoon were a set of 19 patches in preparing for some new CPU features presumably to be found with AMD’s next-generation EPYC “Venice” processors… ⌘ Read more

Adobe Acrobat Now Lets You Edit Files Using Prompts, Generate Podcast Summaries
Adobe has added a suite of AI-powered features to Acrobat that enable users to edit documents through natural language prompts, generate podcast-style audio summaries of their files, and create presentations by pulling content from multiple documents stored in a single workspace.

The prompt-based editing supports 12 distin … ⌘ Read more

Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback
San Diego Comic-Con changed an AI art friendly policy following an artist-led backlash last week. From a report: It was a small victory for working artists in an industry where jobs are slipping away as movie and video game studios adopt generative AI tools to save time and money. Every year, tens of thousands of people descend on San Diego for Comic-Con, the world’s premier comic book conven … ⌘ Read more

Valve Has ‘Significantly’ Rewritten Steam’s Rules For How Developers Must Disclose AI Use
Valve has substantially overhauled its guidelines for how game developers must disclose the use of generative AI on Steam, making explicit that tools like code assistants and other development aids do not fall under the disclosure requirement. The updated rules clarify that Valve’s focus is not on “ … ⌘ Read more

SPDX SBOM Generation Tool Proposed For The Linux Kernel
For those organizations on the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) bandwagon for increasing transparency around software components with license compliance, vulnerability management, and securing the software supply chain, proposed patches to the Linux kernel would introduce an SPDX SBOM Generation Tool… ⌘ Read more

China Builds ‘Hypergravity’ Machine 2,000X Stronger Than Earth
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from Futurism:

China has unveiled an extremely powerful “hypergravity machine” that can generate forces almost two thousand times stronger than Earth’s regular gravity.

The futuristic-looking machine, called CHIEF1900, was constructed at China’s Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Exper … ⌘ Read more

Partly AI-Generated Folk-Pop Hit Barred From Sweden’s Official Charts
An anonymous reader shares a report: A hit song has been excluded from Sweden’s official chart after it emerged the “artist” behind it was an AI creation. I Know, You’re Not Mine – or Jag Vet, Du Ar Inte Min in Swedish – by a singer called Jacub has been a streaming success in Sweden, topping the Spotify rankings.

However, th … ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases Updated LLM-Scaler-vLLM With Continuing To Expand Its LLM Support
One of the initiatives launched by Intel in 2025 was LLM-Scaler as part of Project Battlematrix. The open-source LLM Scaler is a Docker-based solution for helping to deploy Generative AI “GenAI” workloads on Intel Battlemage graphics cards with frameworks like vLLM, ComfyUI, SGLang, and more. There continues to be routine new feature releases of LLM Scaler for broadening the large language models supported and other improvemen … ⌘ Read more

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

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … I sure hope that they generate these files from the general terminfo database instead of maintaining their own DB. 😳

And tcell seems to support my urxvt in general: https://github.com/gdamore/tcell/blob/v2/terminfo/r/rxvt/term.go#L144

Here am I looking at the different tcell.Key constants and typing different key combinations in the terminal to see the generated tcell.EventKeys in the debug log. Until I pressed Ctrl+Alt+Backspace… :-D Yep, suddenly there went my X…

So far, it appears as if I can have either only Ctrl or Alt as modifiers. But not in combination. And Shift is just never ever set at all. Interesting.

‘White-Collar Workers Shouldn’t Dismiss a Blue-Collar Career Change’
White-collar workers stuck in a cycle of layoffs and stagnant wages might want to look past the traditional tech, finance and media job postings to an unexpected source of opportunity: the blue-collar sector, which faces a labor shortage and is seeing rapid transformation through private-equity investment. These jobs are generally less vulnerable … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Work and the general state of (gestures broadly) everything.