Data Centers Overtake Offices In US Construction-Spending Shift
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Spending on data center projects in the U.S. has exploded, surpassing offices for the first time at the end of last year. It’s a trend Matt Kunz saw early on when Meta built a computing hub outside Columbus, Ohio. Other tech companies soon swarmed into the area, drawn by its stable economy, univer … ⌘ Read more

Sodium-Ion Battery Tested for Grid-Scale Storage in Wisconsin
“A new type of battery storage is about to be deployed on the Midwestern grid for the first time,” reports Electrek:

Sodium-ion battery storage manufacturer Peak Energy and global energy company RWE Americas will pilot a passively cooled sodium-ion battery system in eastern Wisconsin on the Midcontinent Independent System Operator network — the fi … ⌘ Read more

RADV Driver Lands Another Optimization: “Missing In RADV For A Very Long Time”
A four year old optimization idea for the RADV driver was scratched off the TODO list last week for next quarter’s Mesa 26.1 release… ⌘ 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

Should Banksy Remain Anonymous?
He’s “the most famous anonymous man in the world,” suggests Reuters. But investigating Banksy’s artworks in a bombed Ukrainian village (and other clues in the U.K. and Manhattan) have led them to “a hand-written confession by the artist to a long-ago misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct — a document that revealed, beyond dispute, Banksy’s true identity.”

But Banksy’s long-time lawyer “urged us not to publis … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de For sure. Time for an absue report.

Will AI Bring ‘the End of Computer Programming As We Know It’?
Long-time tech journalist Clive Thompson interviewed over 70 software developers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and start-ups for a new article on AI-assisted programming. It’s title?

“Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It.”

Published in the prestigious New York Times Magazine, the article even cites long-time programm … ⌘ Read more

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me I am reasonably happy with jenny. If I find time for a twtxt project, I would like to make a web page that works as follows: you point it to your own twtxt feed (as a URL parameter), and then it shows you all the feeds referenced by your “# follow =” lines. So, if I put this up, anyone could use it to view their own feed, with no login required. (Probably a difficult project. For example, I’d want to make sure the backend couldn’t be tricked into helping ddos a web server by trying to fetch lots of “feeds” from it. Anyway, I have too many other projects.)

AI’s Productivity Boost? Just 16 Minutes Per Week, Claims Study
“A new study suggests the productivity boost from AI may be far smaller than executives claim,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli:

According to research cited in Foxit’s State of Document Intelligence report, while 89% of executives and 79% of end users say AI tools make them feel more productive, the actual time savings shrink dramatically once peo … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org sounds like a plan, it’d be the second biggest version, in Australia.

Number one is on the rplace.live map canvas, where the previous one is in America and the one from today here - no reason other than the fact those countries had a good empty spot, to put them in, at the time I drew them.

@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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s not that bad. She let me sleep three times last night alone!

ChatGPT, Other Chatbots Approved For Official Use In the Senate
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A top Senate administrator on Monday gave aides the green light to use three artificial intelligence chatbots for official work, a reflection of how widespread the use of the products has become in workplaces around the globe. The chief information officer for the Senate sergeant-at-arms, w … ⌘ Read more

This time is different. Why we must conquer AI before it conquers us
The new tech is both boom and doom. The sudden purge of jobs by Australia’s tech giants is scary, yes, but that’s precisely why we have to master it. ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org still not as bad as the time a fire started in the breaker panel for my building and I had to personally put it out myself with a fire extinguisher.

Image

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@rdlmda@rdlmda.me What a truly wonderful description. ;‘-D But sorry to hear that. Luckily, no issues over here. It’s extremely rare that this happens. Last time (around five years ago or so) they were cutting down trees in the forest and threw a tree in the overhead power line (which had been converted to underground last year). Power had to be killed in order for the fire brigade to actually extinguish the fire.

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

Yeah. It’s a peculiar situation.

On one hand, I can count on my fingers (ha! fingers… one hand…) how many power losses we have in a year on the last few decades.

On the other hand, I live in an old part of the town and the infrastructure is equal parts a joke in bad taste, an archeological defiance, and an ugly mistake that needs to be killed with fire. (On second thought, maybe not the last part).

This month we started having power failures only on some apartments, which make no sense at all. When we call the power company, they always promise to send someone to check on it, but the power comes back in one or two hours.

The first time it happened, I suspect it damaged my PC’s mainboard and / or GPU, who are both showing random, subtly erratic behaviors.

London Man Wore Smart Glasses For High Court ‘Coaching’
A witness in a London High Court case was caught using smart glasses connected to his phone to receive real-time coaching while giving evidence during cross-examination. “In my judgement, from what occurred in court, it is clear that call was made, connected to his smart glasses, and continued during his evidence until his mobile phone was removed from him,” said Judg … ⌘ Read more

Third power failure in two weeks. Every time a different apartment loses power at the same time as mine. I hope the power company is able to find the cause.

“Yes… Look at everyone @prologic@twtxt.net is following! Next, look at everyone each one of them is following… Next… Hmm… Build a graph of follows and mentions, it’ll be so FUN and not at all time-consuming”

– My evil ADHD brain

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@falsifian@www.falsifian.org congratulations mate! Let it be joy, and happiness! Enjoy every moment. Time will fly, and next you know you will be a curmudgeon who knows nothing. 😅

Why Falling Cats Always Seem To Land On Their Feet
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In a paper, published last month in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers offered a novel take on falling felines. Their evidence suggests new insights into the so-called falling cat problem, particularly that cats have a very flexible segment of their spines that allows them to correct their orientati … ⌘ Read more

@thecanine@twtxt.net

as things are now in fact even worse

You mean this, right?

Contrary to a vague mention of a possible “advanced flow” that may eventually allow “experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn’t verified”, Google’s description of the program continues to state plainly that:

Starting in September 2026, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed on certified Android devices

Until such time that they have shown evidence that it will be possible to bypass the verification process without undue friction, we must believe what is stated on their official page: that all apps from non-registered developers will be blocked once their lock-down goes into effect.

After Outages, Amazon To Make Senior Engineers Sign Off On AI-Assisted Changes
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in rece … ⌘ Read more

Current RISC-V CPUs Being Too Slow Causes Headaches For Fedora: ~5x Slower Builds
The current crop of RISC-V SoCs are still much slower than alternative CPU architectures and lead to much longer build times for Fedora packages as a result. There’s hope with next-gen RISC-V processors being faster but for now even compiling Binutils as an example is around five times slower than x86_64 – and that’s with disabling compiler link-time optimizations (LTO) for RISC-V to avoid an even longer build process… ⌘ Read more

Am I talking to the void?

Despite the driving force behind me being here lying in the curiosity and challenge of “let’s check out this new thing and see what it takes to bring get it working”, I’d like to know if there are other people reading me. Or if it’s just like on my gopher site, where around 96% of the visits are from bots.

I mean, it’s still fun to tinker with tech tools for the mere sake of it, but at times I can’t help but feel like Prometheus and Sisyphus at the same time.

Not that I’d stop. Just like my “self-sufficient” sense of humor (read this with a good hint of self-deprecation and irony), most of my electronic exploratory endeavors end up being more about the process than the result.

Or, in other words: I was so focused on building this vessel that I never stopped to think where I want to go!

SUSE Reportedly May Be For Sale Yet Again
Over the past two decades SUSE Linux has been passed around several times. From Novell’s acquisition of SUSE back in 2003 to then being acquired by The Attachmate Group to then merging with Micro Focus and then the SUSE business being acquired by private equity firm EQT back in 2018. A report out today indicates that EQT may now be looking to sell off SUSE… ⌘ Read more

FSF Hiring New Manager For Leading Their Hardware Certification Program
The Free Software Foundation is hiring a new engineering and certification manager for leading the Respect Your Freedom “RYF” hardware certification program. The FSF RYF program is about certifying hardware that respects the user’s freedom and privacy for control over the device, such as no proprietary firmware blobs needed to be loaded at run-time, no digital rights management / digital restrictions, and complies with their other free software … ⌘ Read more

Startup Wants To Launch a Space Mirror
A startup called Reflect Orbital wants to launch thousands of mirror-bearing satellites to reflect sunlight onto Earth at night and “power solar farms after sunset, provide lighting for rescue workers and illuminate city streets, among other things,” reports the New York Times. From the report: It is an idea seemingly out of a sci-fi movie, but the company, Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., … ⌘ Read more

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me Haha 😆 I mean I try to, as time poor as I am 🤣 Welcome to our little corner of the Yarniverse as some call it 😅

The absence of a “follow” button isn’t enough to stop me! In fact, an even crazier plan is already forming in my mind, where the concepts of “fun” and “pointless, frustrating tech madness for the pure sake of it” a lot of times overlap…

@kiwu@twtxt.net Sorry, I have two functional brain cells left in my brain, and I’m not sure if you’re asking What am I putting in it, as in a) when making some? Or as in b) when consuming/serving it?

a) 1L milk (0.5L cold + 0.5L warm @ ~45 °C), a bit of store bought yogourt for the bacteria, sugar and vanilla extract.
b) Most of the time, as is. But I’ve tried once: adding in a couple of diced strawberries that have been sitting in granulated sugar for a couple of minutes, until they’d released enough syrup, and I think I might’ve caught a new addiction on top of the original one.

What do you put in yours?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yah, I don’t really know what to do about it. I’ll probably keep using Vim as it is – until there are bugs. And then we’ll see. Build an older version from source maybe?

I’ve been using Vim for such a long time now, I have very little motivation to switch. 🫤

Scientists Just Doubled Our Catalog of Black Hole and Neutron Star Collisions
Colliding black holes were detected through spacetime ripples for the first time in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), notes Space.com:

Since then, LIGO and its partner gravitational wave detectors Virgo in Italy and KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) in Japan have detect … ⌘ Read more

Judges Find AI Doesn’t Have Human Intelligence in Two New Court Cases
Within the last month two U.S> judges have effectively declared AI bots are not human, writes Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik:

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit in which artist and computer scientist Stephen Thaler tried to copyright an artwork that he acknowledged had been created by an AI bot of his … ⌘ Read more

A Security Researcher Went ‘Undercover’ on Moltbook - and Found Security Risks
A long-time information security professional “went undercover” on Moltbook, the Reddit-like social media site for AI agents — and shares the risks they saw while posing as another AI bot:

I successfully masqueraded around Moltbook, as the agents didn’t seem to notice a human among them. When I attempted a genuine connect … ⌘ Read more

Steam on Linux Numbers Dropped to 2.23% in February
“In November Steam on Linux use hit an all-time high of 3.2%,” reports Phoronix. And then in December Steam on Linux jumped even higher, to 3.58%.

But January’s numbers settled a little lower, at 3.38%. And last Monday the February numbers were released, showing Steam on Linux at… 2.23%?

Like with prior times where there are wild drops in Linux use, the Steam Survey sh … ⌘ Read more

AI CEOs Worry the Government Will Nationalize AI
Palantir’s CEO was blunt. “If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone’s white-collar job… and you’re going to screw the military — if you don’t think that’s going to lead to the nationalization of our technology, you’re retarded…”

And OpenAI’s Sam Altman is thinking about the same thing, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland:

“It has seemed to me … ⌘ Read more

Daylight Saving Time Ritual Continues. But Are There Alternatives?
Would you move sunrise to 9 a.m. in Detroit? Or to 4:11 a.m. in Seattle…
Though both options have problems, “There’s no law we can pass to move the sun to our will,” argues the president of the nonprofit “Save Standard Time”. The Associated Press explains why America remains stuck in that annual ritual making clocks “spring forward, fall backwa … ⌘ Read more

A First for Humanity Confirmed: NASA’s DART Mission Slowed the Asteroid’s Orbit
NASA heralded a new study published Friday documenting a first for humanity — “the first time a human-made object has measurably altered the path of a celestial body around the Sun.”

It was 2022’s DART mission where NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid — and the experiment “could have implications for protectin … ⌘ Read more

Japan Approves Stem-Cell Treatments For Parkinson’s, Heart Failure In World Firsts
Long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this report from Agence France-Presse:

Japan has approved ground-breaking stem-cell treatments for Parkinson’s and severe heart failure, one of the manufacturers and media reports said Friday, with the therapies expected to reach patients within months.

Pharmaceutical co … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Head of Robotics Resigns, Says Pentagon Deal Was ‘Rushed Without the Guardrails Defined’
In a tweet that’s been viewed 1.3 million times in the last six hours, OpenAI’s head of robotics announced their resignation. They said they “care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together,” so this “wasn’t an easy call,” but offered this reason for resigning:

… ⌘ Read more

First Solar Car Rolls Off Validation Assembly Line At Aptera
“Reservation holders, it’s finally time to get ready,” writes long-time Slashdot reader AirHog. The EV news site Electrek reports:

Aptera Motors, “the little startup that could,” announced another important milestone… completing the first example of its flagship solar EV on its validation assembly line in Southern California…

While the validation l … ⌘ Read more

China Releases First Homegrown Quantum Computing OS
The Global Times reports: China’s first domestically developed quantum computer operating system, Origin Pilot, has been made available for online download, the Global Times learned from the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center on Wednesday. A Chinese scientist said while several quantum computing operating system efforts are underway worldwide, this is the … ⌘ Read more

Florida Woman Gets Prison Time For Illegally Selling Microsoft Product Keys
A Florida woman was sentenced to 22 months in federal prison and fined $50,000 for illegally trafficking thousands of Microsoft certificate-of-authenticity labels used to activate Windows and Office. Prosecutors said she bought genuine labels cheaply from suppliers and resold them without the accompanying licensed software, w … ⌘ Read more

AMD CPPC Performance Priority Being Prepared For Linux - New Zen 6 Feature
Patches were posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list for enabling a new feature called AMD CPPC Performance Priority as a new hardware feature being found with “future AMD processors”…. Which given the timing of these patches, almost certainly means the upcoming Zen 6 processors… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de oh god, make it stop!

Recently the guy maintaining chardet changed its GPL license to MIT because “it is a complete re-write” (by AI, of course). It was called out by the original author. Changing the license is something the current maintainer wanted to do for long time, getting nos, and nos then. That didn’t stop him 12 years later.

AMD Will Bring Its ‘Ryzen AI’ Processors To Standard Desktop PCs For First Time
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AMD has been selling “Ryzen AI”-branded laptop processors for around a year and a half at this point. In addition to including modern CPU and GPU architectures, these are attempting to capitalize on the generative AI craze by offering chips with neural processi … ⌘ Read more

Redox OS Gets Vulkan & Node.js Working On This Rust-Based Open-Source OS
There were some fairly exciting improvements made by the Redox OS developers over the course of February. They have the Vulkan API working on Redox OS for the first time along with more COSMIC desktop software and even Node.js… ⌘ Read more