“AMD Loves Omarchy” Linux With More Collaboration Coming
In addition to organizations like Alibaba, SpaceXSI, DigitalOcean, Meta SuperIntelligence Labs, and others contributing millions of dollars toward the development of the Omarchy Linux distribution, it turns out AMD also has a thing for this Linux distribution built around the Hyprland compositor… ⌘ Read more

Snap Reaches Settlement In Social Media Addiction Lawsuit Ahead of Trial
Snap has settled a lawsuit brought by two teenagers who alleged Snapchat was deliberately designed to be addictive and contributed to their mental health problems, avoiding a trial that was scheduled to begin this week. Snap was the last defendant to settle after Meta, Alphabet and TikTok resolved claims in the same case. CBS News … ⌘ Read more

In more frustrating news, I did something to my primary laptop, and now it crawls along like a 2005 Celeron trying to run Windows Vista.

My laptop is nothing too special (a Lenovo powered by an i7-1255U (4+8) @ 4.70 GHz with integrated “Iris Xe” graphics), but I’ve been running Manjaro Linux (with KDE Plasma) on it for the past couple of years, and apart from the odd pamac / pacman / “Add Remove Software” inconsistency (or Plasma widget issue), it’s been running pretty well.

Then, a few days ago, it started bugging about updates, and yesterday it added complaints about an unsupported kernel, so I finally pulled the trigger on it, and boy do I regret it.

I initially kept having issues downloading all of the updates (it was trying to download some kind of non-existent Quake-related library, which I had to remove), and I also had issues getting rid of the unsupported 7.1 kernel (due to some “meta” packages that had been installed), but in the end, I resolved both issues, got the kernel removed and the updates installed, and everything seemed fine after the post-update reboot… for about 10 minutes.

And that’s when the machine just decided to start moving at 1/3 speed: typing, moving the cursor, changing windows - everything started acting like it was 2008.

When I first tried to diagnose it, top showed kwin_wayland eating 50% of the CPU, and plasmashell another 10%, but it wasn’t consistent (they both came and went). I disabled all of the desktop effects, which helped some, as did blanking my plasma config (setting my desktop back to default), but things are still noticeably laggier than they were a few days ago.

Someone online suggested freeing up 25% space total on my root drive (which typically runs 90-95% full), so I’ve been cleaning up (and offloading) as much as I can. If that doesn’t work and I don’t find a solution by the end of the week, I’ll probably have to backup my data, wipe the machine clean, and start fresh. 🙃

Meta Discussed ‘Whisper Strategy’ to Discredit Social Media Critic Jonathan Haidt, Files Show
The Guardian reports:
Meta staff discussed deploying a “whisper strategy” to undermine the influential US academic whose work has inspired a global social media crackdown, according to court documents. Employees at the parent group of Facebook and Instagram sought to discredit Jonathan Haidt, … ⌘ Read more

French Lawmakers Back Per-Gigabyte Internet Traffic Tax
Companies like Google, Netflix, TikTok, and Meta may soon owe the French government, reports Tom’s Hardware:

France has approved a proposed tax that aims to tax the amount of internet data per gigabyte sent to French users in the country… According to minutes released by the National Assembly, members voted 11-10 in support of the motion on October 30 — which n … ⌘ Read more

Two US Senators Raise Privacy Concerns About Meta’s ‘Pervert Glasses’
Meta’s smart glasses face new questions from two U.S. Senators, reports Gizmodo.
Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey “are requesting that Meta provide more information before Thanksgiving on whether it conducted detailed human rights due diligence and safety testing on the product before releasing it,” reports Gizmod … ⌘ Read more

Meta Settles Another Social Media Addiction Case Just Before Trial
Meta has reached an undisclosed settlement in another social media addiction lawsuit, avoiding a trial scheduled for next month and leaving Snap as the sole remaining defendant. Engadget reports: The lawsuit was brought by an 18-year-old woman from Mississippi known as K.D.B who, according to Reuters, has “described staying awake for hours scro … ⌘ Read more

‘Please Let the Internet Die’
Slashdot reader fjo3 shares an article from Wired: The internet must be put out of its misery. Any rational observer can admit that the current iteration of the web – and the social fabric woven there – is not what they signed up for. Symptoms of advanced cultural decay can no longer be ignored. This thing is eating itself. Giants including Meta and Google have been forced to settle massive consumer lawsuits brought … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Takes On Muse With Claude Duet
Anthropic has launched Claude Duet, an AI agent aimed at professionals and small businesses that competes with Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots. Here’s Anthropic’s description of what it can do: Each morning, it sends you a short brief on the most important items across your connected apps. Throughout the day, it keeps tabs on those apps and messages you only when something needs your attention. You c … ⌘ Read more

Meta Ordered to Pay New Mexico $25 Billion for Deceiving Users About Privacy On Facebook
A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found Facebook liable for deceiving users about privacy during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. State Attorney General Raul Torrez called it “one of the largest, if not the single largest state verdict against a company in American his … ⌘ Read more

Meta Makes Improvements To Kernfs Scalability With Linux 7.4
Kernfs as the functions/frameworks used for creating pseudo file-systems on Linux like sysfs and configfs have seen some nice scalability work carried out by Meta. After Meta engineers discovered some system daemons getting stuck for minutes on their massive fleet of servers, they uncovered some scalability bottlenecks within Kernfs that now look to be resolved for Linux 7.4… ⌘ Read more

Judge Orders Meta To Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting Anna’s Archive, Libgen
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books. These logs would presumably reveal how Meta’s torrent clients were set up, including any changes to their upload setting … ⌘ Read more

Meta Muse Exposes Users’ Personal, Business Secrets When They Share Conversations
Security researchers say Meta’s Muse AI assistant exposed thousands of users’ shared conversations because conversation titles were placed in subdomains that could be discovered through public DNS records. Meta has since suspended the sharing feature while it considers making changes. Ars Technica reports: Like many … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds’ AI Code Improved: Huge Performance Wins With Reworked Code
Last week I wrote about Linus Torvalds leveraging AI to come up with a hefty Linux kernel improvement using Claude Code. The code is for reading from the page cache without folio references to help workloads of small reads from a single file across many CPU threads. Meta engineer Kiryl Shutsemau has taken that code and reworked it and showing extremely promising performance results… ⌘ Read more

Websites Are Closing Their Doors to AI Agents
The Verge reports:

OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won’t play nice?

In recent weeks, users of services like Meta’s Muse, xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s Dots, and Instinct have reporte … ⌘ Read more

More Details on Arrested Saudi OpenAI Employee, Who is Seeking Release on Bail
More details are emerging about Saudi OpenAI employee Abdulrahman Alfozan, who was arrested by the FBI for allegedly planting a recording device in an executive conference room. Previously Alfozan “was an engineer at Meta,” notes the New York Times, “before joining a start-up that went through Y Combinator, the Silicon V … ⌘ Read more

There appears to be a rush a disgruntled Linux users switching to NetBSD:

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/117451701775023949

They even got a ton of new donations (which, funnily, broke their little progress bar):

https://cannot.understand.computer/kunev/p/1791449917.947134

So… donations for @netbsd@netbsd over the last few years look like this:

2020 - $46k
2021 - $52k
2022 - $44k
2023 - $60k
2024 - $40k
2025 - $79k

And in 2026 $120k so far!

And why is all that? Because of this:

Do not commit tainted code to the repository.

If you commit code that was not written by yourself, double check that the license on that code permits import into the NetBSD source repository, and permits free distribution. Check with the author(s) of the code, make sure that they were the sole author of the code and verify with them that they did not copy any other code.

Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta’s Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

This official guideline is much more “tame” and “diplomatic” than the overall “vibe” (sic) on the Fediverse: NetBSD basically says no to AI as much as possible.

And, apparently, this attracts lots of users and donors. Maybe there’s still some hope after all?

Meta May Use Sweeping New Commercial TOS to Avoid Millions In AI Licensing Fees
Meta is facing criticism over updated commercial terms taking effect October 30 that could give the company broad permission to scrape content from websites linked to business accounts and use it to train AI. Legal experts warn the changes could undermine lucrative AI licensing deals for news publishers, with no dire … ⌘ Read more

Meta and Apple Bring Muse Spark Open AI Model to Mac Studio
Meta has released Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter open-weight model optimized to run locally across two 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studios using Apple’s MLX framework. Meta says it’s the “most capable U.S. open-weight model to date.” MacRumors reports: Muse Spark Open has 816 billion total parameters with 42 billion active parameters and a 1 million-toke … ⌘ Read more

US Tech Giants Warn Europe That Data Sovereignty Requirements Could Cost $128 Billion
A study commissioned by CCIA Europe, whose members include Amazon, Google, and Meta, estimates that the EU’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act could impose 115 billion euros ($128 billion) in costs over a decade as governments and companies migrate workloads and rewrite software. The figure is more tha … ⌘ Read more

Mark Zuckerberg Says Meta Has Reached AI ‘Frontier’, Rejects Calls For Slowdown
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company has reached the AI “frontier” with its new Muse Wonder model and will be offered as a closed, paid product for businesses. Zuckerberg also rejected calls for an industry-wide slowdown, arguing that AI can be managed with conventional guardrails as Meta continues spending heavily … ⌘ Read more

Meta Developing Compressed RAM ‘CRAM’ For Linux: Better Than ZRAM and Zswap?
Phoronix reports on a presentation this week by Meta engineer Gregory Price at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague:

With today’s memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM (“CRAM”) for Linux.

This hardware-offloaded compression still al … ⌘ Read more

Meta Engineer’s Linux Patches For Boosting AMD P-State / Steam Deck Gaming Performance
Back in July I wrote about AMD P-State driver patches boosting 1%-low frame rates for gaming by as much as 31%. That work was done by David Vernet who is a Linux kernel engineer/hacker at Mesa. This week Vernet presented on the topic at the Linux Plumbers Conference happening in Prague… ⌘ Read more

Meta Developing Compressed RAM “CRAM” For Linux: Better Than ZRAM & Zswap
With today’s memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM “CRAM” for Linux. This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM… ⌘ Read more

Meta Rushed To Fix Muse ‘VM Escape’ Vulnerability Soon Before Launch
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: In the immediate weeks before Muse’s launch, Meta engineers found several security vulnerabilities in the company’s viral AI agent product, at least one of which could have allowed malicious users to break outside of Muse’s intended environment and access Meta’s own sensitive databases and … ⌘ Read more

New Mexico Wants Meta To Pay $40 Billion In Penalties For Cambridge Analytica Scandal
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The state of New Mexico asked a judge on Thursday to order Meta Platforms to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion in penalties after a jury found the company had misled consumers about the privacy of their data on Facebook in a case that came out of the C … ⌘ Read more

Apple Tightens macOS ‘Full Disk Access’ Controls As AI Agents ‘Substantially’ Increase Risk
Apple says it will tighten macOS Full Disk Access controls as increasingly capable AI agents raise the risks of apps gaining broad access to users’ files, messages, mail, and browsing history. TechCrunch reports: Days after a journalist claimed that Meta’s Muse app on Mac read their private me … ⌘ Read more

Social Media Harms Democracy By Spreading Rumors, Survey Shows
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A growing number of people think social media manipulates and divides people and harms democracy, Pew Research Center said on Thursday, echoing rising concern and tighter scrutiny across the world. Companies running popular social platforms, including Meta, Snap, and TikTok, have faced thousands of law … ⌘ Read more

Trump Hosts AI CEOs to Discuss Safety Standards, Rebrands AI as ‘Super Intelligence’
hcs_$reboot writes: Trump hosted executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Nvidia, and other tech companies at the White House. They agreed to voluntary AI-safety standards, including independent audits and safeguards aimed at preventing AI systems from accessing or hacking technical systems in uni … ⌘ Read more

Meta Releases OpenZL 0.3 With Decompression Speed 144% Faster Than Zstd
Just shy of one year ago Meta announced OpenZL as a format-ware compression framework focused on delivering both high compression ratios and high speed compression/decompression. OpenZL has continued making more optimizations and out today is OpenZL v0.3 and advertising some huge gains over Zstandard (Zstd) that is also worked on by Meta engineers… ⌘ Read more

Meta Taps MongoDB CEO Desai to Drive Enterprise AI Push
Meta has hired MongoDB CEO Chirantan “CJ” Desai to lead a new enterprise AI business aimed at turning Meta’s models, agents and tools into products companies can deploy themselves. Reuters reports: Desai, a veteran technology executive, took over the role from Dev Ittycheria. MongoDB has appointed Ittycheria as interim CEO as it searches for a permanent repl … ⌘ Read more

Meta Made 43M Misleading Statements, New Mexico Jury Finds, Including on Its Cambridge Analytica Response
A New Mexico jury on Friday “found Facebook liable for deceiving users” about its privacy protections, reports the Associated Press.

A New Mexico newspaper calls it “another massive legal victory” against Facebook, reporting that the jury found Facebook “had committe … ⌘ Read more

Meta’s New ‘Personal AI Agent’ Muse Beats ChatGPT in Downloads - and Get Blocked by Amazon
Meta’s AI “personal agent” Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC — and it’s still showing more downloads as of Monday night.

Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower…

[Mu … ⌘ Read more

Australia Considers Smart Glasses Ban in Government Workplaces, While 70 People Sue Meta Over Unknowing Data Collection
“Australia is considering barring the use of camera-equipped smart glasses in government workplaces…” reports Reuters, “in what it said could be the first ban of its kind.”

But meanwhile “more than 70 people who bought, used or were reco … ⌘ Read more

Ex-Google DeepMind Researcher Also Warns AI Could ‘Kill All Humans’. But Meta’s Zuckerberg Believes Safety is Up to Each AI Company
Reuters reports that a former Google DeepMind employee “became the latest AI researcher to warn that the technology could ‘kill all humans’, saying time could be running out to avoid the outcome:

Public alarm about the po … ⌘ Read more

Jemalloc 5.4 Released With Portability Improvements, Code Cleanups
Earlier this year Meta announced a renewed investment into the jemalloc memory allocator that’s been popular for server and HPC use among various desktop use-cases too. After stagnating a bit in recent years, Jemalloc has been off to seeing new developments since Meta’s announcement and out today is Jemalloc 5.4 as the latest step forward… ⌘ Read more

‘Zuckoff’ App Detects Meta Smartglasses, as Meta Plans Camera-Free Version, Loses Money, and Offers Social Media Subscriptions
The New York Post reports:

A new app called Zuckoff can detect if a user is near someone with Meta’s creepy AI-powered glasses, which have drawn criticism for enabling creeps to record video of women without their consent. Progra … ⌘ Read more

Meta Debuts Muse, Its Long-Planned Personal AI Agent
Meta has launched Muse, a personal AI agent developed under chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. “The product, long in development, was touted as a key next step by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his recent 6,500-word manifesto,” reports Axios. From the report: Muse, as the agent is known, exists in a chat interface, similar to a text thread. It’s designed to be more proactive and lo … ⌘ Read more

Chris Mason Steps Down As Btrfs Co-Maintainer, Departing Meta
Longtime Linux kernel developer Chris Mason is departing Meta. In the process of doing so, he is also stepping down from his co-maintainership role of the Btrfs file-system… ⌘ Read more

How Meta’s Plan To Replace Workers With AI Agents Fell Apart
Reuters reports that Meta explored shrinking some teams by as much as 60% as part of an “AI native” restructuring plan that would shift much of employees’ day-to-day work to AI agents and smaller teams of human “builders.” But the effort quickly ran into employee revolt and disappointing productivity gains, leading Zuckerberg to scrap a planned second wav … ⌘ Read more

Meta Reaches $18 Billion of Settlements Over Children’s Social Media Addiction
Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and make major changes to Facebook and Instagram to settle claims from most U.S. states that the platforms were designed to addict children and misled users about their safety. For the next decade, teens will be limited to two hours a day and blocked from using the apps between mid … ⌘ Read more

Emptied the CSS, removed the <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">, now it’s just plain HTML and it still happens.

Whistleblower Arturo Bejar Leads Testimony In Landmark Trial Against Meta
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Meta was infused with a culture in which employees obsessed over user numbers and consistently pushed safety to the side, according to Arturo Bejar, a former employee turned whistleblower, who testified today in the landmark child safety trial against the social media company. Only o … ⌘ Read more

Meta Faces $1.4 Trillion Reckoning In Latest Trial Over Social Media Addiction
Meta is heading to trial in a case brought by dozens of states accusing it of deliberately designing addictive features, misleading users about safety, and illegally collecting data from children under 13. Meta says the states are seeking penalties as high as $1.4 trillion, though the judge has already called that figure … ⌘ Read more

Why Are Big Tech CEOs Writing Long Manifestos About AI?
This week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word open letter titled “The Future is for Everyone”.

But the BBC is more interested in why big tech executives keep writing manifestos about AI:

[Zuckerberg’s] vision echoes what AI leaders have expressed in various forms: the product they are building is among the “most important technologies in history.” Marc A … ⌘ Read more

Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party
Meta has patented a smart-glasses system that could use facial recognition to identify people and automatically create personalized highlight reels of events such as dinner parties. The patent doesn’t guarantee the feature will ship, but it offers a detail … ⌘ Read more

Big Tech Wants to Harvest Your Thoughts
Wired reports that consumer neurotechnology is rapidly moving from the lab into workplaces and homes, with companies including Apple, Meta, and Snap developing products that can monitor or interpret brain activity. Researchers warn that as these systems improve, neural data could become the next major privacy battleground. Some neuroscientists are already calling for a series of core rights, coi … ⌘ Read more

German Advocacy Group Lodges Criminal Complaint Over Meta AI Glasses
A German digital-rights group has filed a criminal complaint against Meta, Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica, and several retailers over Meta’s AI smart glasses, arguing the devices can enable covert recording in violation of German privacy law. Prosecutors have begun a preliminary review, while Germany’s network regulator says smart glasses … ⌘ Read more

Up To 12.8x Improvement Observed For gup_test With New Linux MM Patches
Linux developer Rik van Riel has pulled off some nice Linux kernel optimizations over the years and the Meta engineer has been working on another one around batching of look-ups with Linux’s follow_page_mask() that is used for translating virtual addresses to the corresponding struct page… ⌘ Read more

Meta’s ‘Open’ Muse Glimmer Model Can Run On a Single Computer
Meta has released Muse Glimmer, a slimmed-down open-weight AI model designed to run locally on a single GPU for agent tasks such as scheduling, file management, coding, and tool use. The release is based on Meta’s closed Muse Spark 1.2 model and appears to be aimed at attracting developers who want capable AI agents without relying entirely on cloud-hosted … ⌘ Read more