Newly Deciphered Sabotage Malware May Have Targeted Iran’s Nuclear Program—and Predates Stuxnet
Researchers have finally cracked Fast16, mysterious code capable of silently tampering with calculation and simulation software. It was created in 2005—and likely deployed by the US or an ally. ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Says Its New GPT-5.5 Model Is More Efficient and Better At Coding
OpenAI released its new GPT-5.5 model today, which the company calls its “smartest and most intuitive to use model yet, and the next step toward a new way of getting work done on a computer.” The Verge reports: OpenAI just released GPT-5.4 last month, but says that the new GPT-5.5 “excels” at tasks like writing and debugging code, doing … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Removes Some Obsolete PCMCIA Drivers That Likely Haven’t Been Used In Years
In addition to some network drivers on the chopping block due to AI bug reports for obsolete hardware/drivers and Linux 7.1 dropping various drivers for Russia’s Baikal CPUs, the Linux 7.1 kernel as of today also dropped some obsolete PCMCIA host controller drivers… ⌘ Read more

I hope you líke me from this angle :p ⌘ Read more

Job Cuts Driven By AI Are Rising On Wall Street
Firms like Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, and others are reporting strong profits while reducing head count and automating more work. “All of them credited A.I. to some degree … in areas ranging from the so-called back office, where tens of thousands of employees fill out paperwork to comply with various laws and regulations, to the front office, where seven-figure salaried … ⌘ Read more

Framework Previews The OCuLink Dev Kit
In addition to announcing the Framework Laptop 13 Pro today, Framework Computer at their next-gen hardware event also previewed the OCuLink Dev Kit for attaching high throughput peripherals like external GPUs (eGPUs) to Framework Laptops… ⌘ Read more

Google’s Internal Politics Leave It Playing Catch-Up On AI Coding
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: At Google, leaders are anxious about falling behind in the race to offer AI coding tools, especially as rivals like Anthropic PBC offer more effective and popular tools to businesses, according to people familiar with the matter. The search giant is now working to unite some of its coding … ⌘ Read more

Who is new Apple CEO John Ternus?
After 15 years in charge Tim Cook has named well-liked Apple engineer John Ternus as his successor. ⌘ Read more

PlayStation To Require Age Verification For Messages and Voice Chat
A new email from Sony says that PlayStation will require players to verify their age later this year to keep using communication features like messages and voice chat. Insider-Gaming reports: The initiative comes from the goal of providing “safe, age-appropriate experiences for players and families while respecting their privacy” and provi … ⌘ Read more

Palantir Posts Bond Villain Manifesto On X
DeanonymizedCoward writes: Engadget reports that Palantir has posted to X a summary of CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska’s 2025 book, The Technological Republic, which reads like a utopian idealist doodled on a Bond villain’s whiteboard. While the post makes some decent points, it also highlights the Big-AI attitude that the AI surveillance state is in fact a good thing, and strongly i … ⌘ Read more

LXQt 2.4 Released With More Wayland Fixes/Improvements
The LXQt 2.4 desktop released today for joining the modern open-source desktop party alongside the likes of the recently debuted GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6, and others… ⌘ Read more

Brave Browser Introduces ‘Origin’, a Pay-Once ‘Minimalist’ Browser
The Brave browser “has introduced Brave Origin, a stripped-down version of its browser that removes built-in monetization features like Rewards and other extras tied to its business model,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli”

The stripped-down browser is available either as a separate browser download or as an upgrade to the existing Brave install, u … ⌘ Read more

Tech expert Trevor Long tips Apple to launch folding smartphone
It seems more likely than ever that Apple will introduce a foldable smartphone this year, says tech expert Trevor Long. ⌘ Read more

Tech expert Trevor Long tips Apple to launch folding smartphone
It seems more likely than ever that Apple will introduce a foldable smartphone this year, says tech expert Trevor Long. ⌘ Read more

Is the Iran War Driving a Surge of Interest in Electric Cars?
In October and through November, America’s EV sales reached their lowest point since 2022 after government subsidies expired, remembers Time. “But first-quarter data for 2026 shows that used EV sales were 12% higher than the same time last year and 17% higher than the previous quarter.

“One factor likely helping push buyers toward these cars is hig … ⌘ Read more

GNOME Fixes Screencasting Issue With H.264 Recordings Being ~18x Larger Than VP8
A fix today for GNOME Shell’s screen casting/recording service was merged after it was reported that H.264 recordings using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) are around 18x larger than they should be like when using the VP8 software fallback… ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net Thanks, mate! I’m glad you like them. :-)

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:

Fructose Isn’t Just Sugar. It Acts More Like a Hormone
Slashdot reader smazsyr writes: A new review says we’ve had fructose wrong for decades. The nine authors, led by Richard Johnson at the University of Colorado Anschutz, argue that fructose “is not just another calorie.” It is a signal. It tells the liver to make fat and brace for a famine that never comes. That made sense for a bear fattening up on autumn berries. … ⌘ Read more

Critical Atlantic Current Significantly More Likely To Collapse Than Thought
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a c … ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.7 Brings VBScript Fixes, DirectSound 7.1 Channel Support
For those using upstream Wine for running your Windows games/apps on Linux rather than the likes of the Proton 11.0 beta, out today is Wine 11.7 as the newest bi-weekly development release… ⌘ Read more

Online Personalities and Comedians Overtake TV and Newspapers as Primary News Sources
A new Ipsos poll finds Americans are increasingly getting news from online personalities and comedians instead of traditional TV or newspapers. The survey says nearly 70% get news online in a given week, versus 55% from TV and 25% from newspapers, with figures like Joe Rogan, Greg Gutfeld, Sean Hannity, a … ⌘ Read more

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net I should cancel Netflix as well. Back when they started their streaming service, it was a revelation: Finally, I could watch interesting shows in English, without having to wait for years, and legally (I like to be a paying customer, if it’s good). But this is long over. The interesting shows are gone or, once again, I have to wait for years until they’re available on Netflix. So, why bother anymore? 🤷‍♀️

Newly Unsealed Records Reveal Amazon’s Price-Fixing Tactics
Newly unsealed records in California’s antitrust case against Amazon allegedly show the company pressured third-party sellers to raise prices on rival sites like Walmart, Target, and Wayfair so Amazon could maintain the appearance of offering the lowest price. California says Amazon used tools like Buy Box suppression to punish cheaper listings elsewhere. T … ⌘ Read more

[$] The 7.0 scheduler regression that wasn’t
One of the more significant changes in the 7.0 kernel release is to use the lazy-preemption mode by default in the CPU
scheduler. The scheduler developers have wanted to reduce the number of
preemption modes for years, and lazy preemption looks like a step toward
that goal. But then there came this report
from Salvatore Dipietro that lazy preemption caused a 50% performance
regression on … ⌘ Read more

Intel’s New Core Series 3 Is Its Answer To the MacBook Neo
Intel has launched a new budget-focused Core Series 3 processor line for lower-cost laptops – “Intel’s response to budget CPUs that are appearing in laptops like the Apple MacBook Neo,” writes PCWorld’s Mark Hachman. From the report: Intel unexpectedly launched the Core Series 3, based on its excellent “Panther Lake” (Core Ultra Series 3) architecture and 1 … ⌘ Read more

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

OpenAI’s Big Codex Update Is a Direct Shot At Claude Code
OpenAI is updating Codex with more agent-like capabilities, positioning it as a more direct rival to Anthropic’s Claude Code. Some of the new features include the ability to operate macOS desktop apps, browse the web inside the app, generate images, use new workplace plug-ins, and remember useful context from past tasks. The Verge reports: Codex will now … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Rolls Out Claude Opus 4.7, an AI Model That Is Less Risky Than Mythos
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7, calling it its strongest generally available model and an improvement over Opus 4.6 in areas like software engineering, instruction-following, tool use, and agentic coding. But the company says it is “less broadly capable” than the restricted Claude Mythos Preview, “which Anthropic rolled … ⌘ Read more

AMD Linux Graphics Driver Introducing “Power Module” To Better Match Windows Behavior
With the set of today’s AMDGPU kernel graphics driver Display Core (DC) patches is a rather curious addition with wiring up the Linux code to a “power module” that looks like it will better match Microsoft Windows behavior with the AMD Radeon driver around display-related power savings features… ⌘ Read more

Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dog Can Now Read Gauges, Spot Spills, and Reason
Boston Dynamics has integrated Google DeepMind into its robotic dog Spot, giving it more autonomous reasoning for industrial inspections like spotting spills and reading gauges. Spot can also now recognize when to call on other AI tools. IEEE Spectrum reports: Boston Dynamics is one of the few companies to commercially deploy legge … ⌘ Read more

AMD EDAC Driver In Linux 7.1 Adds Support For Zen 3 Rembrandt Hardware With ECC
The Error Detection And Correction “EDAC” subsystem updates have been merged for Linux 7.1 that deal with reporting of ECC memory errors and the like from various hardware drivers… ⌘ Read more

Thousands of Rare Concert Recordings Are Landing On the Internet Archive
A Chicago concert superfan Aadam Jacobs who has recorded more than 10,000 shows since the 1980s is working with Internet Archive volunteers to digitize the collection before the cassettes deteriorate. “So far, about 2,500 of these tapes have been posted on the Internet Archive, including some rare gems like a Nirvana performan … ⌘ Read more

I recon I might be still missing your point. I see it more like a semi-organised ramble, than a rant. LOL. Sooooorryyyyy!

Ubuntu 26.04 Delivers Great Performance Improvements For AMD Strix Point, Especially For RDNA 3.5 Graphics
As part of my ongoing testing around the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 release I have been running a lot of benchmarks. After recently showing some nice performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” with Ubuntu 26.04, several Phoronix readers inquired about any performance uplift from the more modest but still powerful Strix Point laptops like the popular Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 SKU. Here are benchmarks showing the … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de it went over my head, sorry. Someone wanted you to vet their instruction files, correct? People writing them should know what they are doing, otherwise they should engage with LLMs like that at all (unless it is a hobby, outside the enterprise).

Nginx 1.30 Released With Multipath TCP, ECH & More
Nginx 1.30 was just released as the newest stable version of this popular web server. Nginx 1.30 incorporates all of the changes from the Nginx 1.29.x mainline branch to provide a lot of new functionality like Multipath TCP (MPTCP)… ⌘ Read more

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com at least that encouraging in a gentle way. Imagine how do I feel waking up in the middle of the night to take a piss, and within seconds get a message from my watch “It is time to stand up!”. Like, wth?! 😅

jemalloc 5.3.1 Released With Many Improvements After Nearly Four Year Hiatus
Jemalloc 5.3.1 was released today with next month marking four years since the prior release, jemalloc 5.3.0. While the version bump may not seem like much, jemalloc 5.3.1 comes with many performance improvements, new features, and other enhancements… ⌘ Read more

Stacked massage therapist likes happy endings ⌘ Read more

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

‘Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ and ‘Project Hail Mary’ Combine for Best Box Office in 7 Years
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie “is officially the year’s highest-grossing film to date with $629 million at the global box office,” reports Variety — and it will likely earn over $1 billion. Project Hail Mary now becomes the year’s second highest-grossing movie, with four-week ticket sales over … ⌘ Read more

Greg Kroah-Hartman Tests New ‘Clanker T1000’ Fuzzing Tool for Linux Patches
The word clanker — a disparaging term for AI and robots — “has made its way into the Linux kernel,” reports the blog It’s FOSS “thanks to Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer and the closest thing the project has to a second-in-command.”

He’s been quietly running what looks like an AI-assisted fuzzing tool o … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m afraid my ability to share photos like you do aren’t quite up to scratch 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Clearing legally? You must have an amazingly efficient legal team – there’s like 10 new tools every week. 🤣

The AI RAM Shortage is Also Driving Up SSD Prices
In 2024 the Verge’s consumer tech reporter paid $173 for a WD Black SN850X 2TB SSD. But “now that same SSD costs $649…”

“Like with RAM, demand from the AI industry is swallowing up supply from a limited number of manufacturers, leading to a drastic reduction in the inventory that’s available to consumers” — and skyrocketing prices:

The price on my WD Black drive nearl … ⌘ Read more

@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.)

CPUID Site Hijacked To Serve Malware Instead of HWMonitor Downloads
Attackers briefly hijacked part of CPUID’s backend and swapped legitimate download links on its site with malware-laced ones. “The issue hit tools like HWMonitor and CPU-Z, with users on Reddit and elsewhere starting to notice something wasn’t right when installers tripped antivirus alerts or showed up under odd names,” reports The Register. F … ⌘ Read more

Lovely pics, mate! Looks like the weather cooperated nicely too! 😍 Take more, share, but, most importantly, continue having fun! 🙏🏻

Thank you, @prologic@twtxt.net, that looks really stunning! Seeing forests reaching beyond the horizon always amazes me. This does not exist around here. I also like those balancing rocks.

Keep ‘em coming. Looking forward to see more. But most importantly, enjoy your trip, mate! :-)