AMD Preps More GFX12.1 Enablement For Linux 7.1, Initial VCN 5.0.2 & JPEG 5.0.2 IP
AMD today sent out another batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver changes to DRM-Next ahead of next month’s Linux 7.1 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.1 Delivers Some Nice Gains For CPU Rendering Performance On Linux
With this week’s release of Blender 5.1 I have begun benchmarking it on different CPUs and GPUs. In this article is an initial look at the positive impact Blender 5.1 is having on CPU-based rendering performance on Linux. ⌘ Read more

Gamers React With Overwhelming Disgust To DLSS 5’s Generative AI Glow-Ups
Kyle Orland writes via Ars Technica: Since deep-learning super-sampling (DLSS) launched on 2018’s RTX 2080 cards, gamers have been generally bullish on the technology as a way to effectively use machine-learning upscaling techniques to increase resolutions or juice frame rates in games. With yesterday’s tease of the upcoming DLSS … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft, OpenAI & Others Pony Up $12.5M To Strengthen Open-Source Security
The Linux Foundation announced today that $12.5 million USD in grants from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, and Microsoft have been collected to invest in strengthening the security of the open-source software ecosystem… ⌘ Read more

Mesa & AMDGPU Linux Driver See Patches For The Sony PS5 GPU
Open-source developer Andy Nguyen recently demonstrated porting Linux to the Sony PlayStation 5. The PS5 notably uses a custom AMD SoC and with some patches is able to play nicely with the open-source AMD graphics driver stack… ⌘ Read more

Apple Launches AirPods Max 2 With Better ANC, Live Translation
Apple has quietly announced the AirPods Max 2, featuring improved active noise cancellation, an H2 chip, and new features like adaptive audio and AI-powered real-time translation. Like the original model, these headphones start at $549. The Verge reports: As noted by Apple, the AirPods Max 2 offer active noise-cancellation that’s 1.5 times mo … ⌘ Read more

The UK Will Invest Billions to Build a Nuclear Fusion Industry
The UK’s science minister is announcing details of a five-year, £2.5 billion investment in nuclear fusion, reports the Times of London, “including building one of the world’s first prototype fusion power plants in Nottinghamshire and developing a UK sector projected to employ 10,000 people by 2030.”

Despite the potentially transformative impact … ⌘ Read more

I’m supporting incremental SQLite schema changes to just upgrade from an older database version to whatever the current software version supports. In the past, I already noticed that this is quite expensive in unit tests when each test case runs through the entire schema patches and applies them one by one.

To speed up test execution I now decided that I finally go through the troubles of maintaining both a set of incremental patches and a full schema setup in one go. A unit test verifies that both ways end up with the same structure. This gives me a set of SQLs to check the structures:

SELECT type, name, tbl_name, sql
FROM sqlite_schema
ORDER BY type, name, tbl_name

Unfortunately, the resulting CREATE TABLE SQL queries are formatted differently, depending on whether the full schema was set up in one big step or the structure had been modified with ALTER TABLE. Mainly, added columns are not on their own lines but appended in one physical line. That’s why I wanted an SQL formatting tool. Since I didn’t find one that works decently, I’m now doing some simple string manipulation. Joining consecutive whitespace into a single space character, removing spaces before commas and closing parentheses and spaces after opening parentheses. This works surpringly good enough. Of course, if it fails, the “diff” is absolutely horrendous.

Now for the cool part, my test execution dropped from around 5:05 minutes to just 1:32 minutes! I call that a win.

I just stumbled across PRAGMA table_info('tablename') https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_table_info, PRAGMA foreign_key_list('tablename') and friends. I guess, I have to play with that, now. It’s probably much better to use than the SQL text approach.

US Set To Receive $10 Billion Fee For Brokering TikTok Deal
The deal to take control of TikTok’s U.S. business came with an unusual condition, according to people familiar with the matter. The investors — which include Oracle, Abu Dhabi investor MGX, and private-equity firm Silver Lake — “paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “and are set t … ⌘ Read more

Turns out, I even go down to only 50% quality for my thumbnails: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/galres.txt The difference between 50% and 80/90% is just barely noticeable.

$ convert -strip -quality 50 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 50-stripped.jpg
$ convert -quality 50 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 50.jpg
$ ls -lh 50*jpg | awk '{print $5 " " $9}'
26K 50.jpg
25K 50-stripped.jpg

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org Correct, the two smaller versions are loading perfectly fine. The hickup is only for the originals. But in all reality, the middle ones are sufficient for me personally. Please don’t get me wrong, at least for the people photos, the subjects are large enough. The Japanese landscapes, however, would definitely benefit from a bit more detail. ;-)

I just tried it once more, and now, the tree with the sign (/photo/5Zy4pqVIt0oP/IMG_20251106_035048_448.jpg) fully loaded very quickly. Same with the Japanese dish (/photo/tJbmg8oleYbh/IMG_20251030_091719_086.jpg) and shopping center (/photo/qXG5ucIjpPju/IMG_20251029_045002_778.jpg). But the previous and next ones all ran into the same problems again. When I’m very lucky, I eventually get the upper half. Typically not even that much, a third, a fifth, or even less.

Waiting a bit before making an attempt, the wooden walkway through the forest or park (/photo/ojQpDLfBoGN4/IMG_20251023_043829_011.jpg) eventually also made it. But unlike the other successful attempts, it took a long time.

The more photos you add, the more beneficial it might be to separate the index into several different albums. I didn’t measure it, but it felt like 10 to 20 seconds for all the thumbnails to load. That traffic adds up.

Another idea would be to strip the EXIF data from the thumbnails and reducing quality to 90% or even 80%. Using the famous tree with the sign, I cannot tell the difference between the original thumbnail and the 80% quality one. I’m sure it depends on the subject. Here are the numbers:

$ convert -strip IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg stripped.jpg
$ convert -quality 90 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 90.jpg
$ convert -quality 80 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 80.jpg
$ convert -strip -quality 90 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 90-stripped.jpg
$ convert -strip -quality 80 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 80-stripped.jpg
$ ls -lh *jpg | awk '{print $5 " " $9}' 
46K 80.jpg
45K 80-stripped.jpg
64K 90.jpg
63K 90-stripped.jpg
132K IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg
127K stripped.jpg
$ ls -l *jpg | awk '{print $5 " " $9}'
46160 80.jpg
45064 80-stripped.jpg
65012 90.jpg
63916 90-stripped.jpg
135070 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg
129647 stripped.jpg

Meta Delays Rollout of New AI Model After Performance Concerns
Meta has delayed the release of its next major AI model after internal tests showed it lagging behind competing systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The New York Times reports: The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta’s previous A.I. model and did better than Google’s Gemini 2.5 model from March, two of the people said. But it has not … ⌘ Read more

Intel Updates LLM-Scaler-vLLM With Support For More Qwen3/3.5 Models
Intel’s LLM-Scaler project that makes it easy to deploy various large language models on modern Arc Graphics hardware is out with a new test release to expand its LLM coverage… ⌘ Read more

AMD ZenDNN 5.2 Brings A Major Redesign, AOCC 5.1 Recently Released
AMD today released ZenDNN 5.2 as the latest versio nof their deep nueral network library that now introduces their next-generation runtime architecture. ZenDNN 5.2 is designed to deliver better performance and geater scalability over earlier versions of this AMD library that began as their take on Intel’s open-source oneDNN… ⌘ Read more

Meta To Charge Advertisers a Fee To Offset Europe’s Digital Taxes
Meta will begin charging advertisers a 2-5% “location fee” to offset digital services taxes imposed by several European countries, including the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Turkey. Reuters reports: The fee, for image or video ads delivered on Meta platforms including WhatsApp click-to-message campaigns and marketing messages together w … ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.5 Released With Direct3D 3 Now Implemented Over Vulkan
The open-source D7VK project began to implement Direct3D 7 over Vulkan similar to DXVK and VKD3D-Proton providing support for newer Direct3D APIs atop Vulkan. With succeeding releases D7VK was extended to Direct3D 6 too and then Direct3D 5 support. Now with today’s D7VK 1.5 release, Direct3D 3 is implemented for faster acceleration using Vulkan… ⌘ Read more

AMD Formally Launches Ryzen AI Embedded P100 Series 8-12 Core Models
AMD announced back at CES the Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series with initially the models up to six Zen 5 cores launching while the eight through twelve core models would be available later in H1. Today AMD formally announced those higher-tier Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series parts… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Releases New ChatGPT Model For Working In Excel and Google Sheets
OpenAI today released GPT-5.4, an upgraded ChatGPT model designed to be faster, cheaper, and more accurate for workplace tasks. The update also introduces tools that let ChatGPT work directly inside Excel and Google Sheets. Axios reports: GPT-5.4 is designed to be less error-prone, more efficient and better at workplace tasks like draf … ⌘ Read more

Sony Pulls Back From PlayStation Games on PC
Sony is reportedly abandoning its recent push to bring major PlayStation games to PC and will instead keep most single-player titles exclusive to the PlayStation 5. According to Bloomberg, the shift back toward console exclusivity may be driven by weaker PC sales and concerns about diluting the PlayStation brand. From the report: Online games such as Marathon and Marvel Tokon will sti … ⌘ Read more

Linux Preps IBPB-On-Entry Feature For AMD SEV-SNP Guest VMs
Heading toward the Linux 7.0 kernel and marked for back-porting to current stable Linux kernel versions is employing a new SEV-SNP security feature found on AMD Zen 5 processors for enhancing security of guest virtual machines… ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT Gets GPT-5.3 Instant Update With Less ‘Cringe,’ Fewer Hallucinations
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: OpenAI today updated its most popular ChatGPT model, debuting GPT-5.3 Instant. GPT-5.3 Instant is supposed to provide more accurate answers and better contextualized results when searching the web. The update also cuts down on unnecessary dead ends, caveats, and overly declarative … ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC Turin 128 Core Comparison: EPYC 9745 “Zen 5C” vs. EPYC 9755 “Zen 5”
The AMD EPYC 9755 128-core Zen 5 server processor has been benchmarked a lot at Phoronix since the EPYC 9005 “Turin” launch as their top-end Zen 5 server processor with “full fat” cores compared to the denser Zen 5C cores that extend up to the EPYC 9965 at 192 cores. For those eyeing the 128 core per socket sweet spot, there is also the EPYC 9745 that is made up of 128 Zen 5C cores that allows for a 400 Watt TDP compared to the 500 Watt EPYC … ⌘ Read more

AIs Can’t Stop Recommending Nuclear Strikes In War Game Simulations
“Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises,” reports New Scientist:

Kenneth Payne at King’s College London set three leading large language models — GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash — against each other in simulated war games. The s … ⌘ Read more

Antarctica’s Massive Neutrino Observatory Gets an Upgrade
There’s already 5,000 sensors embedded in Antarctica’s ice to look for evidence of neutrinos, reports the Washington Post. But in November scientists drilled six new holes at least a mile and a half deep and installed cables with hundreds more light detectors — an upgrade to the massive 15-year-old IceCube Neutrino Observatory to detect the charged particles … ⌘ Read more

Servo Browser Engine Starts 2026 With Many Notable Improvements
The Servo project has issued their January 2026 development report that highlights all the interesting changes they made to this open-source browser layout engine last month. With Servo 0.0.5 they have landed many improvements to this engine and also continuing to enhance its ability to embed Servo inside other applications… ⌘ Read more

Moon’s Ancient Magnetic Field May Have Flickered On and Off
sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: For decades, planetary scientists have pored over a mystery hidden within the Moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and ‘70s. Minerals in the rocks record the imprint of a magnetic field, nearly as powerful as Earth’s, that existed more than 3.5 billion years ago and seemed to persist f … ⌘ Read more

The AI Case Against Indian IT Ignores What Indian IT Actually Does
A fictional memo set in June 2028, published by short seller Citrini Research, wiped roughly $10 billion off Indian IT stocks in a single trading session on February 24 and sent the Nifty IT index down as much as 5.3% – its worst single-day fall since August 2023 – on the argument that AI coding agents have collapsed the cost advantage of Indian … ⌘ Read more

Americans Are Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras
An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations.

Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a yea … ⌘ Read more

LLVM Clang 22 Compiler Performance Largely Unchanged Over Clang 21 On AMD Zen 5
With yesterday’s stable release of the LLVM Clang 22 compiler it didn’t take long for Phoronix readers to begin asking about the performance of this half-year feature update to this prominent open-source C/C++ compiler. What I am seeing so far are no big surprises with the performance largely being similar to Clang 21 across various open-source C/C++ workloads in the testing thus far. This initial round of reference benchmark results be … ⌘ Read more

AMD Announces The EPYC 8005 “Sorano” Series
The EPYC 9005 series for high-end Zen 5 server processors is a year and a half old and then at the lower-end of the spectrum is the EPYC 4005 series AM5 server processors that launched last year. On the embedded side is also the EPYC Embedded 2005 series. AMD has now filled the void between with the long-awaited EPYC 8005 series… ⌘ Read more

First British Baby Born Using Transplanted Womb From Dead Donor
A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell – who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women – underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in J … ⌘ Read more

Lutris 0.5.21 Adds Support For Running Games Inside Valve’s Latest Steam Runtime
Lutris 0.5.21 is now available as the latest version of this open-source Linux game manager. With Lutris 0.5.21 comes some new runners for executing games in different environments… ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.4 Released With More Improvements For Old Direct3D On Vulkan Under Linux
D7VK is the open-source project that began implementing the Direct3D 7 APIs atop Vulkan and with time the scope expanded to include Direct3D 6 support as well as Direct3D 5 support. Out today is D7VK 1.4 for continuing to enhance the support for these older D3D versions on Vulkan under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Stressful People in Your Life Could Be Adding Months To Your Biological Age
A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult – whom the researchers call “hasslers” – are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological a … ⌘ Read more

‘Open Source Registries Don’t Have Enough Money To Implement Basic Security’
Google and Microsoft contributed $5 million to launch Alpha-Omega in 2022 — a Linux Foundation project to help secure the open source supply chain. But its co-founder Michael Winser warns that open source registries are in financial peril, reports The Register, since they’re still relying on non-continuous funding from grants … ⌘ Read more

GNU Gawk 5.4 Released With New MinRX Regex Matcher, Faster Reading Of Files
Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4… ⌘ Read more

Ask Slashdot: What’s Your Boot Time?
How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and “You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?”

And more importantly, why is it all taking so long?
In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU’s that are thousands of times faster than they were, … ⌘ Read more

Cyber Stocks Slide As Anthropic Unveils ‘Claude Code Security’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Shares of cybersecurity software companies tumbled Friday after Anthropic PBC introduced a new security feature into its Claude AI model. Crowdstrike Holdings was the among the biggest decliners, falling as much as 6.5%, while Cloudflare slumped more than 6%. Meanwhile, Zscaler dropped 3.5%, SailPoint s … ⌘ Read more

Google Announces Gemini 3.1 Pro For ‘Complex Problem-Solving’
Google has introduced Gemini 3.1 Pro, a reasoning-focused upgrade aimed at more complex problem-solving. 9to5Google reports: This .1 increment is a first for Google, with the past two generations seeing .5 as the mid-year model update. (2.5 Pro was first announced in March and saw further updates in May for I/O.) Google says Gemini 3.1 Pro “represents a st … ⌘ Read more

More ISA Differences Come To Light With The New AMD GFX1170 “RDNA 4m”
Earlier this month we spotted the addition of a new GFX1170 GPU target in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Making this GFX1170 target interesting is that its marked as an APU/SoC part with “RDNA 4m” while being part of the GFX11 series. The GFX11 series is for RDNA3, GFX115x is for RDNA 3.5, and GFX12 is RDNA4. More ISA changes have now been committed to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end that make a few more instruction differences better aligned with RDNA4. … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds on How Linux Went From One-Man Show To Group Effort
Linus Torvalds has told The Register how Linux went from a solo hobby project on a single 386 PC in Helsinki to a genuinely collaborative effort, and the path involved crowdsourced checks, an FTP mirror at MIT, and a licensing decision that opened the floodgates.

Torvalds released the first public snapshot, Linux 0.02, on October 5, 1991, o … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’ve got the same problem that you had the other day: finding past temperature data. But yeah, it looked much warmer than it actually was. Maybe 5°C? Possibly less when I found myself in the snow- and rainstorm in the end.

With the wind, my fingers were frozen. I should have worn gloves. Without them, I could only put my hands in the pockets of my jacket. That didn’t help much, though, because I frequently stopped to take yet another photo, so they cooled off again right away. :-D

Balancing the big/long, closed umbrella under my arm while I had my hands burried was also a little tricky.

First world problems. :-)

Claude Sonnet 4.6 Model Brings ‘Much-Improved Coding Skills’, Upgraded Free Tier
Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 4.6, the first upgrade to its mid-tier AI model since version 4.5 arrived in September 2025. The new model features a “1M token context window” and delivers a “full upgrade of the model’s skills across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge wor … ⌘ Read more

Micron’s PCIe 6.0 SSD Hits Mass Production at 28 GB/s
Micron has begun mass production of the 9650 series, the industry’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD, capable of sequential read speeds up to 28 GB/s and random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS – roughly double the throughput of the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives available today.

The drive targets AI and data center workloads and ships in E1.S and E3.S form factors across two varia … ⌘ Read more

Mazda Finally Admits Its Infotainment System Is the Worst
Mazda, the automaker that for years defended its scroll-wheel infotainment system as a safer alternative to touchscreens, is abandoning the approach entirely in the 2026 CX-5 in favor of a 15.6-inch touchscreen and zero physical buttons.

The current lineup – the CX-50 Hybrid, CX-70 and CX-90 – still relies on a console-mounted scroll wheel and dedicated act … ⌘ Read more

DNF 5.4 Released With Some New Options & AI Contributions Policy
DNF 5.4 is out today as the latest release for this next-generation RPM package management solution used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and various other RPM-based Linux distributions… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 CXL Enables AMD Zen 5 Address Translation Feature
A long-in-development feature for AMD EPYC Zen 5 server platforms now merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel is ACPI PRMT-based address translation for the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem… ⌘ Read more

Lutris 0.5.20 Linux Game Manager Brings New Features, Wine Wayland Option
For fans of Lutris as the open-source desktop client for installing and playing many games on Linux, Lutris 0.5.20 is out today with new features that further enhance the integration with different emulators and compatibility layers… ⌘ Read more

‘Babylon 5’ Episodes Start Appearing (Free) on YouTube
Cord Cutters News reports:

In a move that has delighted fans of classic science fiction, Warner Bros. Discovery has begun uploading full episodes of the iconic series Babylon 5 to YouTube, providing free access to the show just as it departs from the ad-supported streaming platform Tubi… Viewers noticed notifications on Tubi indicating that all five seasons w … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They certainly don’t. 🫤

Had an idea earlier: How about going all in on sustainability and saving money/energy, so how about telling your customers “AI is a bad idea $because_long_list_of_reasons, here are our alternatives, you’ll thank us in 5 years”? (I bet the customers wouldn’t listen either … 🙄)