Mesa 26.0-rc2 Released With Numerous AMD, NVIDIA & Intel Driver Fixes
Following last week’s code branching / feature freeze and first release candidate of Mesa 26.0, Mesa 26.0-rc2 is now available with an initial batch of bug fixes for this quarter’s feature update to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers… ⌘ Read more

FreeType Speeds-Up ClearType-Like LCD Filter Rendering By 40%
The widely-used FreeType library used for rendering text onto bitmaps has landed a significant optimization for its LCD filtering code path for Microsoft ClearType-like rendering. Thanks to the improvement, the rendering can be around 40% faster… ⌘ Read more

RFC Patches Posted For Klint Integration With The Linux Kernel: Rust-Based Linting Tool
A request for comments (RFC) patch series was sent out today for providing Klint integration with the Linux kernel. Klint is a new linting tool written in the Rust programming language that helps with static code analysis for errors/bugs as well as code styling inconsistencies… ⌘ Read more

Apple M3 Progress On Linux: Asahi Can Boot To KDE Desktop - But No GPU Acceleration Yet
While the Asahi Linux project has made good progress on bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, much of the success and in turn upstreaming to the Linux kernel has been around the aging M1 and M2 Macs. Apple M3 and newer has been a struggle but progress is being made. One of the Asahi Linux developers shared the ability now to boot to the KDE Plasma desktop with the experimental Asahi Linux code on an M3 MacBook but withou … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Releases Prism, a Claude Code-Like App For Scientific Research
OpenAI has launched Prism, a free scientific research app that aims to do for scientific writing what coding agents did for programming. Engadget reports: Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific docume … ⌘ Read more

New Intel Linux Driver Workaround Halves Initial Game Load Time For MHW
In addition to Mesa 26.1 today seeing Vulkan present timing support finally merged to help reduce game stuttering and separately another long-in-development Mesa merge request for DG2 / Meteor Lake to improve performance as much as 260% in some scenarios, there is another merge today to Mesa Git for enhancing Intel graphics on Linux. For Intel Linux gamers the newest Mesa code adds a new DriConf workaround that is capable of halving the initi … ⌘ Read more

GStreamer 1.28 Released With More Rust Code
GStreamer 1.28 is out today as the newest feature release for this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework… ⌘ Read more

ThinkPads On Linux Appear Nearly Ready For Improved Trackpoint Doubletap Handling
Being worked on for a while by Lenovo engineer Vishnu Sankar is nicely handling support for double-tap functionality with TrackPoints on ThinkPads under Linux. The sixth iteration of this enablement work was posted today and is just documentation updates, so it’s looking like this new TrackPoint doubletap code could soon be crossing the threshold for the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

New Patches Aim To Lower Linux Memory Use For Swap, Slightly Improve Performance
Kairui Song of Tencent sent out a new patch series overnight working on enhancing the Linux kernel’s swap code. With the patches there are some memory savings – and more on the way – while also providing for slightly faster performance… ⌘ Read more

KDE’s ‘Plasma Login Manager’ Stops Supporting FreeBSD - Because Systemd
KDE’s “Plasma Login Manager” is apparently dropping support for FreeBSD, the Unix-like operating system, reports the blog It’s FOSS. They cite a recently-accepted merge request from a KDE engineer to drop the code supporting FreeBSD, since the login manager relies on systemd/logind:

systemd and logind look like hard dependencies of the … ⌘ Read more

Another project where I’m going to use my terminal widget toolkit is a hex editor. This is still very young, obviously, and there’s a lot of work to do (both in the toolkit and this particular application), but I’m making some progress:

https://movq.de/v/2bae14ed16/vid-1769283187.mp4

Since this program is UTF-8 clean (I hope), you can do things like enter multi-byte UTF-8 sequences or paste them from the system clipboard (another hex editor I just tried failed to do this correctly):

https://movq.de/v/e9241034c1/vid-1769283755.mp4

Under the hood, I’m using mmap() with MAP_PRIVATE, which is really cool: I get the entire file as a byte array, no matter how large it is, no need to actually read it upfront; and MAP_PRIVATE means that I can write to this area however I like without changing the underlying file. The kernel does copy-on-write for me. Only when you hit Save, it will write to the filesystem. And it’s just a couple lines of code. The kernel does all the magic. 🥳

AMDGPU Driver Reverts Code For A Number Of Regressions On Linux 6.19
Merged on Friday as part of this week’s DRM kernel graphics driver fixes for the week is addressing a regression affecting many different users with the Linux 6.19 development kernel… ⌘ Read more

Anthropic’s AI Keeps Passing Its Own Company’s Job Interview
Anthropic has a problem that most companies would envy: its AI model keeps getting so good, the company wrote in a blog post, that it passes the company’s own hiring test for performance engineers. The test, designed in late 2023 by optimization lead Tristan Hume, asks candidates to speed up code running on a simulated computer chip. Over 1,000 people have take … ⌘ Read more

Linux Lands Fix For Its “Subtly Wrong” Page Fault Handling Code For The Past 5 Years
Merged today for the Linux 6.19 Git kernel and then in turn for back-porting to prior Linux kernel series is making the x86 page fault handling code disable interrupts properly. Since 2020 it turns out the handling was subtly wrong but now corrected by Intel… ⌘ Read more

EU Parliament Calls For Detachment From US Tech Giants
The European Parliament is calling on the European Commission to reduce dependence on U.S. tech giants by prioritizing EU-based cloud, AI, and open-source infrastructure. The report frames “European Tech First,” public procurement reform, and Public Money, Public Code as necessary self-defense against growing U.S. control over critical digital infrastructure. Heise repor … ⌘ Read more

Linux GPU Driver Loophole Being Fixed For Unprivileged Users Being Able To Tap Unbounded Kernel Memory
An oversight in the Linux kernel’s Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver common code could allow unprivileged users to trigger unbounded kernel memory consumption for a potential system-wide out-of-memory “OOM” situation… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS Celebrates 30 Years In Striving To Be An Open-Source Windows Implementation
The ReactOS project is celebrating today that it marks 30 years since their first code commit in the ReactOS source tree. During the past 30 years now the project has seen more than 88k commits from more than 300 developers as it seeks to be a robust open-source Windows implementation. In their 30 year birthday blog post they also provide a look ahead at what they’re working on… ⌘ Read more

Wikipedia’s Guide to Spotting AI Is Now Being Used To Hide AI
Ars Technica’s Benj Edwards reports: On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic’s Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called “Humanizer,” the simple prompt plugin feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as ch … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0-rc1 Released With RADV Improvements Leading The Way Along With Intel & NVK
Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 26.0-rc1 with the code for this quarter’s Mesa feature release now branched and under a feature freeze leading up to the stable release in February… ⌘ Read more

Adjusting One Line Of Linux Code Yields 5x Wakeup Latency Reduction For Modern Xeon CPUs
A new patch posted to the Linux kernel mailing list aims to address the high wake-up latency experienced on modern Intel Xeon server platforms. With Sapphire Rapids and newer, “excessive” wakeup latencies with the Linux menu governor and NOHZ_FULL configuration can negatively impair Xeon CPUs for latency-sensitive workloads but a 16 line patch aims to better improve the situation. That is, changing one line of actual co … ⌘ Read more

New Patches Aim To Make x86 Linux EFI Stub & Relocatable Kernel Support Unconditional
Prominent Intel Linux engineer H. Peter Anvin has posted a new patch series working to clean-up the Linux x86/x86_64 kernel boot code. Besides cleaning up the code, the kernel configuration would drop options around EFI stub mode and relocatable kernels in making those features now always enabled… ⌘ Read more

PHPStan Now 25~40% Faster For Static Analysis
For those using the powerful PHPStan tool for static analysis on PHP code, this week’s PHPStan 2.1.34 is promoting optimized performance with projects seeing around 25% to 40% faster analysis times… ⌘ Read more

cURL Removes Bug Bounties
Ancient Slashdot reader jantangring shares a report from Swedish electronics industry news site Elektroniktidningen (translated to English), writing: “Open source code library cURL is removing the possibility to earn money by reporting bugs, hoping that this will reduce the volume of AI slop reports,” reports etn.se. “Joshua Rogers – AI wielding bug hunter of fame – thinks it’s a great idea.” cURL maintainer Daniel Stenber … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 ATA Fixes Address Power Management Regression For The Past Year
It’s typically rare these days for the ATA subsystem updates in the Linux kernel to contain anything really noteworthy. But today some important fixes were merged for the ATA code to deal with a reported power management regression affecting the past number of Linux kernel releases over the last year. ATAPI devices with dummy ports weren’t hitting their low-power state and in turn preventing the CPU from reaching low-power C-states … ⌘ Read more

LLVM Adopts “Human In The Loop” Policy For AI/Tool-Assisted Contributions
Following recent discussions over AI contributions to the LLVM open-source compiler project, they have come to an agreement on allowing AI/tool-assisted contributions but that there must be a human involved that is first looking over the code before opening any pull request and similar. Strictly AI-driven contributions without any human vetting will not be permitted… ⌘ Read more

‘Just Because Linus Torvalds Vibe Codes Doesn’t Mean It’s a Good Idea’
In an opinion piece for The Register, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that while “vibe coding” can be fun and occasionally useful for small, throwaway projects, it produces brittle, low-quality code that doesn’t scale and ultimately burdens real developers with cleanup and maintenance. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Vibe co … ⌘ 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

Spent basically the entire day (except for the mandatory walk) fighting with Python’s type hints. But, the result is that my widget toolkit now passes mypy --strict.

I really, really don’t want to write larger pieces of software without static typing anymore. With dynamic typing, you must test every code path in your program to catch even the most basic errors. pylint helps a bit (doesn’t need type hints), but that’s really not enough.

Also, somewhere along the way, I picked up a very bad (Python) programming style. (Actually, I know exactly where I picked that up, but I don’t want to point the finger now.) This style makes heavy use of dicts and tuples instead of proper classes. That works for small scripts, but it very quickly turns into an absolute mess once the program grows. Prime example: jenny. 😩

I have a love-hate relationship with Python’s type hints, because they are meaningless at runtime, so they can be utterly misleading. I’m beginning to like them as an additional safety-net, though.

(But really, if correctness is the goal, you either need to invest a ton of time to get 100% test coverage – or don’t use Python.)

yes, yes that’s right. Mu (µ) now has a built-in LSP server for fans of VS Code / VSCodium 😅 You just go install ./cmd/mu-lsp/... and install the VS extension and hey presto 🥳 You get outlines of any Mu source, Find References and Go to Definition!

Predator Spyware Turns Failed Attacks Into Intelligence For Future Exploits
In December 2024 the Google Threat Intelligence Group published research on the code of the commercial spyware “Predator”. But there’s now been new research by Jamf (the company behind a mobile device management solution) showing Predator is more dangerous and sophisticated than we realized, according to SecurityWeek.

Long-ti … ⌘ Read more

CVE-2026-0915: GNU C Library Fixes A Security Issue Present Since 1996
CVE-2026-0915 was published on Friday as a security issue with the GNU C Library “glibc” for code introduced 30 years ago. The latest Glibc Git code is now patched for this issue introduced in 1996… ⌘ Read more

Le 10ème Homme – Dossier du mois : la génomique
Imaginez un instant que vous déteniez le manuel d’instruction de votre propre vie. Un code secret, logé au cœur de chacune de vos cellules, qui dicte non seulement votre passé, mais aussi votre futur de santé et de résilience. Ce code, c’est votre génome. Longtemps restée le domaine réservé de la science-fiction, la génomique est […] ⌘ Read more

Linux ThinkPad Driver Ready For Reporting Damage Device - Starting With Bad USB-C Ports
Queued yesterday into the platform-drivers-x86.git’s “for-next” branch are the patches for the Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver to begin reporting damaged device detection. This code being in the “for-next” branch makes it material for the next version of the Linux kernel and initially will be able to report to the user on damaged USB-C ports… ⌘ Read more

https://github.com/unix-v4-commentary/unix-v4-source-commentary

A comprehensive, line-by-line commentary on the UNIX Fourth Edition source code (released November 1973; tape recovered from June 1974 distribution).

Ruby on Rails Creator Says AI Coding Tools Still Can’t Match Most Junior Programmers
AI still can’t produce code as well as most junior programmers he’s worked with, David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of 37 Signals, said on a recent podcast [video link], which is why he continues to write most of his code by hand. Hansson compared AI’s current coding … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d love to take a look at the code. 😅

I’m kind of curious to know how much Assembly I need vs. How much of a microkernel can I build purely in Mu (µ)? 🤔

Can’t really answer that, because I only made a working kernel for 16-bit real mode yet. That is 99% C, though, only syscall entry points are Assembly. (The OpenWatcom compiler provides C wrappers for triggering software interrupts, which makes things easier.)

But in long mode? No idea yet. 😅 At least changing the page tables will require a tiny little bit of Assembly.

Code.org: Use AI In an Interview Without Our OK and You’re Dead To Us
theodp writes: Code.org, the nonprofit backed by AI giants Microsoft, Google and Amazon and whose Hour of AI and free AI curriculum aim to make world’s K-12 schoolchildren AI literate, points job seekers to its AI Use Policy in Hiring, which promises dire consequences for those who use AI during interviews or take home assignments without … ⌘ Read more

Took me nearly all week (in my spare time), but Mu (µ) finally officially support linux/amd64 🥳 I completely refactored the native code backend and borrowed a lot of the structure from another project called wazero (the zero dependency Go WASM runtime/compiler). This is amazing stuff because now Mu (µ) runs in more places natively, as well as running everywhere Go runs via the bytecode VM interpreter 🤞

Patches Positioned Ahead Of Linux 7.0 Cycle For Easy Custom Boot Logo In Place Of Tux
The Linux kernel patches talked about at the start of the year for more easily changing the boot logo of Tux are now queued into a “for-next” branch and thus expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. Those wanting to replace the Tux icon with an alternative logo during the Linux kernel boot process could already patch the file manually but this new code allows for an easy replacement via Kconfig op … ⌘ Read more

GNOME 50 Alpha Released With The X11 Code Gutted
The GNOME 50 Alpha “50.alpha” release is now available for testing ahead of this open-source desktop’s official release in March… ⌘ Read more

Another RADV Ray-Tracing Merge Lands Some Additional Gains For Mesa 26.0
Separate from the Mesa merge request talked about earlier today for new RADV code that can deliver 10x faster ray-tracing pipeline compilation for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver, another merge request landed today in Mesa 26.0 that was also carried out by Valve contractor Natalie Vock. That second merge request now in Mesa 26.0 delivers some additional gains for at least some ray-tracing games on RDNA3 and RDNA4 GPUs… ⌘ Read more

New RADV Code Can Deliver 10x Faster Ray-Tracing Pipeline Compilation For Some Games
A new merge request opened today for Mesa’s Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” by Valve contractor Natalie Vock provides another significant boost for the Vulkan ray-tracing performance in multiple titles… ⌘ Read more

Never-Before-Seen Linux Malware Is ‘Far More Advanced Than Typical’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have discovered a never-before-seen framework that infects Linux machines with a wide assortment of modules that are notable for the range of advanced capabilities they provide to attackers. The framework, referred to as VoidLink by its source code, features more than 30 modules … ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.0 Released
BrianFagioli writes: Wine 11.0 has officially landed, wrapping up a year of development with more than 6,000 code changes and a broad set of upgrades that touch gaming, desktop behavior, and long-standing architectural work. The biggest milestone is the completion of the new WoW64 model, which is now considered fully supported and allows 32-bit and even 16-bit applications to run in a cleaner way inside 64-bit prefixes. Wine also gains s … ⌘ Read more

JPEG-XL Image Support Returns To Latest Chrome/Chromium Code
After widespread backlash over its 2022 decision to remove JPEG-XL support, Google has quietly restored the image format in the latest Chrome/Chromium codebase. Phoronix reports: Back in December they merged jxl-rs as a pure Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder from the official libjxl organization. At the end of December they did more JPEG-XL plumbing with the en … ⌘ Read more

JPEG-XL Image Support Returns To Latest Chrome / Chromium Code
To the frustration of many developers and end-users, back in 2022 Google deprecated JPEG-XL support in Chrome/Chromium and proceeded to remove the support. That decision was widely slammed and ultimately Google said they may end up reconsidering it. In November there was renewed activity and interest in restoring JPEG-XL within Google’s image web browser and as of yesterday the code was merged… ⌘ Read more

Bcachefs Ships Latest User-Space Utilities With bcachefs-tools 1.35
Kent Overstreet has shipped the latest version of bcachefs-tools, the user-space code complementing the Bcachefs file-system kernel driver. There are a number of improvements present in this latest version with Overstreet remaining committed to advancing Bcachefs even with its current out-of-tree kernel status… ⌘ Read more

LLVM/Clang 22 Feature Development Ends With Intel Nova Lake, Arm C1 & Ampere1C Support
LLVM/Clang 22 feature development ended overnight with the code now being branched and working toward a stable release likely by the end of February… ⌘ Read more

Even Linus Torvalds Is Vibe Coding Now
Linus Torvalds has started experimenting with vibe coding, using Google’s Antigravity AI to generate parts of a small hobby project called AudioNoise. “In doing so, he has become the highest-profile programmer yet to adopt this rapidly spreading, and often mocked, AI-driven programming,” writes ZDNet’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols. Fro the report: [I]t’s a trivial program called AudioNoise – a recen … ⌘ Read more

I’m trying to implement configurable key bindings in tt. Boy, is parsing the key names into tcell.EventKeys a horrible thing. This type consists of three information:

1. maybe a predefined compound key sequence, like Ctrl+A
   
2. maybe some modifiers, such as Shift, Ctrl, etc.
   
3. maybe a rune if neither modifiers are present nor a predefined compound key exists
   

It’s hardcoded usage results in code like this:

func (t *TreeView[T]) InputHandler() func(event *tcell.EventKey, setFocus func(p tview.Primitive)) {
    return t.WrapInputHandler(func(event *tcell.EventKey, setFocus func(p tview.Primitive)) {
        switch event.Key() {
        case tcell.KeyUp:
            t.moveUp()
        case tcell.KeyDown:
            t.moveDown()
        case tcell.KeyHome:
            t.moveTop()
        case tcell.KeyEnd:
            t.moveBottom()
        case tcell.KeyCtrlE:
            t.moveScrollOffsetDown()
        case tcell.KeyCtrlY:
            t.moveScrollOffsetUp()
        case tcell.KeyTab, tcell.KeyBacktab:
            if t.finished != nil {
                t.finished(event.Key())
            }
        case tcell.KeyRune:
            if event.Modifiers() == tcell.ModNone {
                switch event.Rune() {
                case 'k':
                    t.moveUp()
                case 'j':
                    t.moveDown()
                case 'g':
                    t.moveTop()
                case 'G':
                    t.moveBottom()
                }
            }
        }
    })
}

This data structure is just awful to handle and especially initialize in my opinion. Some compound tcell.Keys are mapped to human-readable names in tcell.KeyNames. However, these names always use - to join modifiers, e.g. resulting in Ctrl-A, whereas tcell.EventKey.Name() produces +-delimited strings, e.g. Ctrl+A. Gnaarf, why this asymmetry!? O_o

I just checked k9s and they’re extending tcell.KeyNames with their own tcell.Key definitions like crazy: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/master/internal/ui/key.go Then, they convert an original tcell.EventKey to tcell.Key: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/b53f3091ca2d9ab963913b0d5e59376aea3f3e51/internal/ui/app.go#L287 This must be used when actually handling keyboard input: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/e55083ba271eed6fc4014674890f70c5ed6c70e0/internal/ui/tree.go#L101

This seems to be much nicer to use. However, I fear this will break eventually. And it’s more fragile in general, because it’s rather easy to forget the conversion or one can get confused whether a certain key at hand is now an original tcell.Key coming from the library or an “extended” one.

I will see if I can find some other programs that provide configurable tcell key bindings.