AI’s Water and Electricity Use Soars In 2025
A new study estimates that AI systems in 2025 consumed as much electricity as New York City emits in carbon pollution and used hundreds of billions of liters of water, driven largely by power-hungry data centers and cooling needs. Researchers say the real impact is likely higher due to poor transparency from tech companies about AI-specific energy and water use. “There’s no way to pu … ⌘ Read more

Intel ISPC 1.29 Drops Gen9 GPU Targets, Add New Optimizations & Experimental RISC-V
Intel ISPC 1.29 released on Wednesday as the newest feature update to this Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as a C variant able to target Intel hardware from their CPUs to GPUs for SIMD programming… ⌘ Read more

AMD Awarding Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” Laptops To Those Fixing ROCm Bugs
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” is beautifully awesome. Probably my favorite hardware of 2025 whether it’s in desktop form with the likes of the Framework Desktop or for very powerful laptops between the Zen 5 CPU cores and very capable Radeon 8060S Graphics within devices like the HP ZBook Ultra G1a. If you are interested by Strix Halo too and looking for a way to obtain one without the high price, AMD is running a holiday special of those … ⌘ Read more

Video Game Hardware Sales Had a Historically Bad November In the US
U.S. video game hardware spending fell 27% year over year in November to $695 million, according to market analyst company Circana. “This is the lowest video game hardware spending total for a November month since the $455 million reached during the November 2005 tracking period,” Circana says. Furthermore, only 1.6 million units of hardwa … ⌘ Read more

Meta ‘Pauses’ Third-Party Headset Program
Meta has paused its third-party Horizon OS headset program, effectively canceling planned VR headsets from Asus and Lenovo as it refocuses on “building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market.” Road to VR reports: A little over a year and a half ago, Meta made an “industry-altering announcement,” as I called the move in my reporting: the company wa … ⌘ Read more

GitHub Is Going To Start Charging You For Using Your Own Hardware
GitHub will begin charging $0.002 per minute for self-hosted Actions runners used on private repositories starting in March. “At the same time, GitHub noted in a Tuesday blog post that it’s lowering the prices of GitHub-hosted runners beginning January 1, under a scheme it calls ‘simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions,’” … ⌘ Read more

Intel XPU Manager Updated With BMG-G31 GPU Support
Intel XPU Manager 1.3.5 released today as the newest version of this open-source software for monitoring and managing Intel GPU hardware with a focus on their data center products. Notable with this revision is adding BMG-G31 GPU support… ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 25.48.36300.8 Brings More Performance Optimizations & Xe3 Fixes
Intel this week released their last planned feature update to their open-source Compute Runtime for 2025. The Intel Compute Runtime 25.48.36300.8 delivers the latest OpenCL and Level Zero performance optimizations, Xe3 workarounds, and other fixes for those on Intel integrated and discrete graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more

Senators Count the Shady Ways Data Centers Pass Energy Costs On To Americans
U.S. senators are probing whether Big Tech data centers are driving up local electricity bills by socializing grid upgrade costs onto residents. Some of the tactics they’re using include NDAs, shell companies, and lobbying. Ars Technica reports: In letters (PDF) to seven AI firms, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ch … ⌘ Read more

Dual-PCB Linux Computer With 843 Components Designed By AI Boots On First Attempt
Quilter says its AI designed a complex Linux single-board computer in just one week, booting Debian on first power-up. “Holy crap, it’s working,” exclaimed one of the engineers. Tom’s Hardware reports: LA-based startup Quilter has outlined Project Speedrun, which marks a milestone in computer design by AI. The … ⌘ Read more

Linux Exposing Support For Lenovo ThinkPads Being Able To Detect Hardware Damage
Newer Lenovo ThinkPads are adding the ability to detect and report varying degrees of hardware damage. The Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver for Linux is being adapted for being able to communicate said hardware damage to user-space Linux software… ⌘ Read more

Utah Leaders Hinder Efforts To Develop Solar Energy Supply
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed two bills this year that ended solar development tax credits and imposed a new tax on solar generation despite solar power accounting for two-thirds of the new projects waiting to connect to the state’s power grid. The legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature has already had an impact.

Since May, when the … ⌘ Read more

Ford Ends F-150 Lightning Production, Starts Battery Storage Business
Ford has effectively pulled the plug on the all-electric F-150 Lightning, pivoting away from full-size BEV pickups toward hybrids, range-extended EVs (EREVs), and even data-center battery storage. Ars Technica reports: Ford’s announcements today can’t be said to have come out of the blue. Rumors of the F-150’s demise have been circul … ⌘ Read more

Electricity Is Now Holding Back Growth Across the Global Economy
Grid constraints that were once a hallmark of developing economies are now plaguing the world’s richest nations, and new research from Bloomberg Economics finds that rising electricity system stress is directly hurting investment. The analysis examined all G20 countries and found that a one-standard-deviation increase in grid stress relative … ⌘ Read more

Roomba Maker ‘iRobot’ Files for Bankruptcy After 35 Years
Roomba manufacturer iRobot filed for bankruptcy today, reports Bloomberg.

After 35 years, iRobot reached a “restructuring support agrement that will hand control of the consumer robot maker to Shenzhen PICEA Robotics Co, its main supplier and lender, and Santrum Hong Kong Compny.”

Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive th … ⌘ Read more

America Adds 11.7 GW of New Solar Capacity in Q3 - Third Largest Quarter on Record
America’s solar industry “just delivered another huge quarter,” reports Electrek, “installing 11.7 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in Q3 2025. That makes it the third-largest quarter on record and pushes total solar additions this year past 30 GW…”

According to the new “US Solar Market Insight Q4 2025” rep … ⌘ Read more

Trump Ban on Wind Energy Permits ‘Unlawful’, Court Rules
A January order blocking wind energy projects in America has now been vacated by a U.S. judge and declared unlawful, reports the Associated Press:

[Judge Saris of the U.S. district court for the district of Massachusetts] ruled in favor of a coalition of state attorneys general from 17 states and Washington DC, led by Letitia James, New York’s attorney gener … ⌘ Read more

Startup Successfully Uses AI to Find New Geothermal Energy Reservoirs
A Utah-based startup announced last week it used AI to locate a 250-degree Fahrenheit geothermal reservoir, reports CNN. It’ll start producing electricity in three to five years, the company estimates — and at least one geologist believes AI could be an exciting “gamechanger” for the geothermal industry.

[Startup Zanskar Geotherma … ⌘ Read more

Exciting Laptop & Gaming Handheld Device Improvements Merged For Linux 6.19
Merged during this second week of the Linux 6.19 feature merge window were the many x86 platform driver changes. As usual, much of the x86 platform driver activity surrounds bettering Linux hardware laptop support but also a growing number of handheld computers / gaming devices… ⌘ Read more

The World’s Electric Car Sales Have Spiked 21% So Far in 2025
Electrek reports:

EV and battery supply chain research specialists Benchmark Mineral Intelligence reports that 2.0 million electric vehicles were sold globally in November 2025, bringing global EV sales to 18.5 million units year-to-date. That’s a 21% increase compared to the same period in 2024.

Europe was the clear growth leader in November, whil … ⌘ Read more

How a 23-Year-Old in 1975 Built the World’s First Handheld Digital Camera
In 1975, 23-year-old electrical engineer Steve Sasson joined Kodak. And in a new interview with the BBC, he remembers that he’d found the whole photographic process “really annoying…. I wanted to build a camera with no moving parts. Now that was just to annoy the mechanical engineers…”

“You take your picture, you have to … ⌘ Read more

More of America’s Coal-Fired Power Plants Cease Operations
New England’s last coal-fired power plant “has ceased operations three years ahead of its planned retirement date,” reports the New Hampshire Bulletin.

“The closure of the New Hampshire facility paves the way for its owner to press ahead with an initiative to transform the site into a clean energy complex including solar panels and battery storage system … ⌘ Read more

Germany Covers Nearly 56 Percent of 2025 Electricity Use With Renewables
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Clean Energy Wire: Renewable energy sources covered nearly 56 percent of Germany’s gross electricity consumption in 2025, according to preliminary figures by energy industry group BDEW and research institute ZSW. Despite a ‘historically weak’ first quarter of the year for wi … ⌘ Read more

Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices By 50% For DIY Laptops
Framework Computer raised DDR5 memory prices for its Laptop DIY Editions by 50% due to industry-wide memory shortages. Phoronix reports: Framework Computer is keeping the prior prices for existing pre-orders and also is foregoing any price changes for their pre-built laptops or the Framework Desktop. Framework Computer also lets you order DIY laptops with … ⌘ Read more

Google Translate Expands Live Translation To All Earbuds On Android
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google has increasingly moved toward keeping features locked to its hardware products, but the Translate app is bucking that trend. The live translate feature is breaking out of the Google bubble with support for any earbuds you happen to have connected to your Android phone. The app is … ⌘ Read more

New Patches Lay Out Linux Kernel Adjustments For RISC-V RVA23 Hardware
With the first of RISC-V RVA23-compatible hardware expected to be released in 2026, we are beginning to see more Linux developers prepare for this RVA23 profile and the now-mandated extensions. Sent out this week was an initial “request for comments” patch series on RVA23 adjustments for the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm 7.10 Released - Strix Point APUs Now Officially Supported
Sure enough, yesterday’s inaugural TheRock 7.10 release tag ended up being a precursor to ROCm 7.10 as predicted in the earlier article. Overnight ROCm 7.10 was released as a new developer preview and with it comes expanded hardware support – including for Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point APUs finally being officially mentioned… ⌘ Read more

AMD GAIA 0.14 Released With Native Support For Linux & macOS
Early this year AMD announced the open-source GAIA project for “Generative AI Is Awesome” as a showcase of AI support atop their Ryzen AI NPUs and other hardware. That began as a Windows-only project but in September AMD added Linux support to GAIA but only using Vulkan acceleration for AI on Radeon GPUs. Now today GAIA 0.14 is available with “native” support for both macOS and Linux… ⌘ Read more

Intel llm-scaler-vllm Beta 1.2 Brings Support For New AI Models On Arc Graphics
Following yesterday’s release of a new llm-scaler-omni beta there is now a new beta feature release of llm-scaler-vllm that provides the Intel-optimized version of vLLM within a Docker container that is set and ready to go for AI on modern Arc Graphics hardware. With today’s llm-scaler-vllm 1.2 beta release there is support for a variety of additional large language models (LLMs) and other improvements… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Networking Delivers 4x Improvement For Heavy Transfer Workloads, New Hardware
The big set of networking subsystem updates was recently merged for the ongoing Linux 6.19 merge window. There are some enticing core networking improvements like a big performance improvement for heavy transfer workloads, Bluetooth PAST enablement, and more. Plus a lot of wired and wireless networking driver activity and new hardware enablement… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Vulkan Linux Driver Merges Shader VMA Allocator For Ray-Tracing Capture/Replay
Merged today to the Intel open-source “ANV” Vulkan driver in Mesa 26.0 is introducing a shader VMA allocator. Long story short this new allocator steps toward enabling Vulkan ray-tracing capture/replay support, which can come in hand for debugging issues with Vulkan ray-tracing on Intel graphics hardware under Linux and similarly to assist in optimizing for better performance… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Acquires RISC-V Chip Designer Ventana Micro Systems
Qualcomm has acquired RISC-V startup Ventana to strengthen its CPU ambitions beyond mobile, “reinforcing its commitment and leadership in the development of the RISC-V standard and ecosystem,” the company said in a press release. CRN Magazine reports: The San Diego-based company said Ventana’s expertise in RISC-V, a free and open alternative to the A … ⌘ Read more

RoboCrop: Teaching Robots How To Pick Tomatoes
alternative_right quotes a report from Phys.org: To teach robots how to become tomato pickers, Osaka Metropolitan University Assistant Professor Takuya Fujinaga, Graduate School of Engineering, programmed them to evaluate the ease of harvesting for each tomato before attempting to pick it. Fujinaga’s new model uses image recognition paired with statistical analysis to evaluate … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Can Sell H200 Chips To China For 25% US Cut
The Trump administration will allow Nvidia to resume selling H200 chips to China, but only if the U.S. government takes a 25% cut. Axios reports: Trump said on Truth Social that he’ll allow Nvidia to sell H200 chips – the generation of chips before its current, more-advanced Blackwell lineup – to China, with the U.S. government pocketing a quarter of the revenue. He sa … ⌘ Read more

Idaho Lab Produces World’s First Molten Salt Fuel for Nuclear Reactors
America’s Energy Department runs a research lab in Idaho — and this week announced successful results from a ground-breaking experiment. “This is the first time in history that chloride-based molten salt fuel has been produced for a fast reactor,” says Bill Phillips, the lab’s technical lead for salt synthesis. He calls it “a major … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, shit, you might be right. You can even buy these slot plates on Amazon. I didn’t even think to check Amazon, I went straight to eBay and tried to find it there, because I thought “it’s so old, nobody is going to use that anymore, I need to buy second-hand”. 🤦🤦🤦

It really shows that I built my last PC so long ago … I know next to nothing about current hardware. 😢

Can This Simple Invention Convert Waste Heat Into Electricity?
Nuclear engineer Lonnie Johnson worked on NASA’s Galileo mission, has more than 140 patents, and invented the Super Soaker water gun.
But now he’s working on “a potential key to unlock a huge power source that’s rarely utilized today,” reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. [Alternate URL here.]

Waste heat…

The Johnson Thermo-Electrochemi … ⌘ Read more

No Rise in Radiation Levels at Chernobyl, Despite Damage from February’s Drone Strike
UPDATE (12/7): The New York Times clarifies today that the damage at Chernobyl hasn’t led to a rise in radiation levels:

“If there was to be some event inside the shelter that would release radioactive materials into the space inside the New Safe Confinement, because this facility is no longer sealed t … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Insists Target Links in ChatGPT Responses Weren’t Ads But ‘Suggestions’ - But Turns Them Off
A hardware security response from ChatGPT ended with “Shop for home and groceries. Connect Target.”

But “There are no live tests for ads” on ChatGPT, insists Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT. Posting on X.com, he said “any screenshots you’ve seen are either not real or not ads.” … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Introduces PCIe Link Encryption & Device Authentication, AMD SEV-TIO Enabling
One of the most exciting merges this weekend to the Linux 6.19 kernel is establishing the infrastructure for supporting PCI Express link encryption and device authentication. Multiple vendors are working on PCIe link encryption for their hardware while this initial pull begins laying the foundation of AMD SEV-TIO Trusted I/O support for the mainline kernel… ⌘ Read more

A 1950s Material Just Set a Modern Record For Lightning-fast Chips
“Researchers engineered a strained germanium layer on silicon that allows charge to move faster than in any silicon-compatible material to date,” reports Science Daily. “This record mobility could lead to chips that run cooler, faster, and with dramatically lower energy consumption.

“The discovery also enhances the prospects for silicon- … ⌘ Read more

Chernobyl’s Protective Shield Can No Longer Confine Radiation, UN Nuclear Watchdog Says
“A structure designed to prevent radioactive leakage at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine is no longer operational,” reports Politico, “after Russian drones targeted it earlier this year, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog has found.”

[T]he large steel structure “lost its primary safety fun … ⌘ Read more

The AI Boom Could Increase Prices for Phones and Tablets Next Year
CNN’s prediction for 2026? “Any device that uses memory, from phones to tablets and smartwatches, could get pricier.” But will it be a little or a lot?

The article cites an analysis from multinational strategy/management consulting firm McKinsey & Company which found America’s data center demand could continue growing by 20 to 25 percent … ⌘ Read more

Tenstorrent Blackhole Support & Other New RISC-V + ARM64 Hardware In Linux 6.19
The set of six branches containing SoC and platform updates/additions for the Linux 6.19 kernel have been merged for enabling a lot of new RISC-V and ARM 64-bit hardware as well as enhancing some existing SoCs/platforms… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Supporting Per-DRM-Plane Color Pipelines, More Hardware Quirks/Fixes
It was a busy start of December for KDE Plasma developers in working out several hardware fixes for the current Plasma 6.5 series while also working on new Plasma 6.6 features like the per-DRM-plane color pipelines… ⌘ Read more

Meta Acquires AI Wearable Company Limitless
Meta is acquiring AI wearable startup Limitless, maker of a pendant that records conversations and generates summaries. “We’re excited that Limitless will be joining Meta to help accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. CNBC reports: Limitless CEO Dan Siroker revealed the deal on Friday via a corporate blog post but did not disclose … ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Says It Blocked 416 Billion AI Scraping Requests In 5 Months
Cloudflare says it blocked 416 billion AI scraping attempts in five months and warns that AI is reshaping the internet’s economic model – with Google’s combined crawler creating a monopoly-style dilemma where opting out of AI means disappearing from search altogether. Tom’s Hardware reports: “The business model of the internet has … ⌘ Read more

Why One Man Is Fighting For Our Right To Control Our Garage Door Openers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A few years ago, Paul Wieland, a 44-year-old information technology professional living in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, was wrapping up a home renovation when he ran into a hiccup. He wanted to be able to control his new garage door with his smartphone. But the o … ⌘ Read more

Intel Nova Lake Audio Support Merged For Linux 6.19
The sound subsystem updates were merged on Thursday for enabling a variety of new audio hardware with the Linux 6.19. Among the hardware standing out is getting Intel Nova Lake audio support in order… ⌘ Read more

Plane Crashed After 3D-Printed Part Collapsed
A light aircraft crashed in Gloucestershire after a 3D-printed plastic air-induction elbow softened from engine heat and collapsed, cutting power during final approach and causing the plane to undershoot the runway. Investigators say the part was made from “inappropriate material” and safety actions will be taken in the future regarding 3D printed parts. The BBC reports: Followin … ⌘ Read more