The EU Moves To Kill Infinite Scrolling
Doom scrolling is doomed, if the EU gets its way. From a report: The European Commission is for the first time tackling the addictiveness of social media in a fight against TikTok that may set new design standards for the world’s most popular apps. Brussels has told the company to change several key features, including disabling infinite scrolling, setting strict screen time breaks and changing … ⌘ Read more

Google Warns EU Risks Undermining Own Competitiveness With Tech Sovereignty Push
Europe risks undermining its own competitiveness drive by restricting access to foreign technology, Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker told the Financial Times, as Brussels accelerates efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants. Walker said the EU faces a “competitive parad … ⌘ Read more

Spotify Says Its Best Developers Haven’t Written a Line of Code Since December, Thanks To AI
Spotify’s best developers have stopped writing code manually since December and now rely on an internal AI system called Honk that enables remote, real-time code deployment through Claude Code, the company’s co-CEO Gustav Soderstrom said during a fourth-quarter earnings call this week.

… ⌘ Read more

Nashpaints – Everyone Good is Called Molly
Dublin artist, Princ€ss member, and Maria Somerville collaborator Finn Carraher McDonald aka Nashpaints shares his wonderful new album of hazy, achingly tender, eerily out-of-time-and-place classics, out today on MirrorWorld… [Continue reading…](https://www.gorillavsbear.net/nashpaints-everyone-good … ⌘ Read more

Meta Plans To Let Smart Glasses Identify People Through AI-Powered Facial Recognition
Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, New York Times reported Friday, five years after the social giant shut down facial recognition on Facebook and promised to find “the right balance” for the controversial technology.

The feature, internally … ⌘ Read more

Linux Gets Rid Of Intel 440BX Driver For Old Pentium CPUs After Being Broken For 19+ Years
As some long overdue housekeeping, the Linux 7.0 kernel has removed an Error Detection And Correction “EDAC” driver for the Intel 440BX and 440GX chipset. The driver is being removed not only because that chipset was just used by old Celerons and Pentium II / Pentium III CPUs but that it’s been in the kernel all this time while being known to be broken for 19+ years… ⌘ Read more

Intel Posts 2026 Update For Cache Aware Scheduling On Linux
Not in time for the current Linux 7.0 cycle but posted for another round of review is Intel’s latest work around Cache Aware Scheduling for enhancing the performance of modern CPUs with multiple cache domains. This is the first set of updates to Cache Aware Scheduling for the new year and succeed the v2 patches from early December. This work not only benefits modern Intel CPUs but our testing has shown can also provide some very nice gains too for … ⌘ Read more

Border Officials Are Said To Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser
An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso’s airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, … ⌘ Read more

The “Are You Sure?” Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind
The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini – will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking “are you sure?,” according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains.

The behavior, known in the … ⌘ Read more

Ms Ray – Miss You (feat. Nourished By Time)
Taken from Ms Ray’s Melt EP, coming in March on Scenic Route… Continue reading… ⌘ Read more

We just wanted to play one or the other quick round of Rummikub after quitting time and suddenly it’s now three hours later. :-)

Linux 7.0 Scheduler Updates Land Time Slice Extension, Performance & Scalability Work
Merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel are some pretty exciting scheduler changes: new features and never-ending work around scheduler performance optimizations and greater scalability with today’s increasingly high core count systems… ⌘ Read more

The Big Money in Today’s Economy Is Going To Capital, Not Labor
The American economy’s most valuable companies are now worth trillions of dollars more than their predecessors were a generation ago, yet they employ a fraction of the workers – and a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal argues that this widening gap between capital and labor is the defining economic story of our time.

Labor received 58% of gross dom … ⌘ Read more

Redis 8.6 Released With “Substantial” Performance Improvements & Memory Reduction
The open-source Redis 8.6 release is now available and this GA release has brought “substantial” performance improvements and to memory reduction too. Plus various new features like TLS certificate-based automatic client authentication, time series enhancements, and new eviction policies… ⌘ Read more

Software Poses ‘All-Time’ Risk To Speculative Credit, Deutsche Bank Warns
The software and technology sectors pose one of the all-time great concentration risks to the speculative-grade credit market, according to Deutsche Bank AG analysts. Bloomberg: They comprise $597 billion and $681 billion of the speculative-grade credit universe, or about 14% and 16% respectively, analysts led by Steve Caprio wrote … ⌘ Read more

MythTV 36 Released With Web App Improvements & FFmpeg 8 Support
MythTV 36 is now available for this long-time open-source digital video recorder “DVR” software that has been around now for more than two decades as the leading choice for those wishing to watch and/or record live TV under Linux especially as an HTPC… ⌘ Read more

2 To 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It’s Decaf.
If you think your daily doses of espresso or Earl Grey sharpen your mind, you just might be right, new science suggests. The New York Times: A large new study provides evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea – if it’s caffeinated and consumed in moderation: two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea … ⌘ Read more

Prankster Launches Super Bowl Party For AI Agents
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The world’s biggest football game comes to Silicon Valley today — so one bored programmer built a site where AI agents can gather for a Super Bowl party. They’re trash talking, suggesting drinks, and predicting who will win. “Humans are welcome to observe,” explains BotBowlParty.com — but just like at Moltbook, only AI ag … ⌘ Read more

Why Is China Building So Many Coal Plants Despite Its Solar and Wind Boom?
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from the Associated Press:

Even as China’s expansion of solar and wind power raced ahead in 2025, the Asian giant opened many more coal power plants than it had in recent years — raising concern about whether the world’s largest emitter will reduce carbon emissions enou … ⌘ Read more

Brookhaven Lab Shuts Down Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)
2001: “Brookhaven Labs has produced for the first time collisions of gold nuclei at a center of mass energy of 200GeV/nucleon.”

2002: “There may be a new type of matter according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory.”

2010: The hottest man-made temperatures ever achived were a record 4 trillion degree plasma experiment at Brookhave … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

I can’t remember if the hex viewer back then had these options. Don’t even recall what software that was. :-)

The one that I used during my Windows 95 days was “Hex Workshop”. It had similar features, just not as promimently displayed. It shows them down there in the statusline as “Value”:

Newer versions can probably do more, haven’t checked. 😅 (Assuming this program still exists.)

Apart from selecting text to copy into the clipboard. But that probably has the potential for trouble and interference with button clicks, etc.

Yeah, that’s a big problem: Once you activate mouse mode in the terminal, the terminal loses the ability to select text. 😞 You’d either have to emulate that in the program itself (like Vim does) or give the user an easy way to turn mouse support on/off during runtime.

How did the startup times develop?

They’re pretty stable at around 230 ms on my old NUC. It’s just fast enough so that it doesn’t annoy me.

The World’s First Sodium-Ion Battery in Commercial EVs - Great at Low Temperatures
Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis shared this report from InsideEVs:

Chinese battery giant CATL and automaker Changan Automobile are preparing to put the world’s first passenger car powered by sodium-ion batteries on public roads by mid-2026. And if the launch is successful, it could usher in an era whe … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Nice, it’s coming together! Despite it being ages ago that I used a hex editor or viewer, these different representations of information appear very handy to me. If I had to mess around on binary formats, I’d definitely appreciate them. I can’t remember if the hex viewer back then had these options. Don’t even recall what software that was. :-)

I, too, only very, very rarely use the mouse in the terminal. Apart from selecting text to copy into the clipboard. But that probably has the potential for trouble and interference with button clicks, etc. If one isn’t careful.

How did the startup times develop?

Bitcoin Dropped Nearly 30% This Week. But Why?
Last Sunday, Bitcoin had dropped 13% in three days, to $76,790.

By Thursday it had dropped another 21%, to $60,062.

This morning it’s at $69,549 — up from Thursday, down from Sunday, but 44% lower than its all-time high in October of $123,742. In short, Bitcoin “is down almost 30% this week alone,” reports CNBC:

“This steady selling in our view signals that traditional investors are los … ⌘ Read more

Apple Plans to Allow Outside Voice-Controlled AI Chatbots in CarPlay
Apple “is preparing to allow voice-controlled AI apps from other companies in CarPlay,” reports Bloomberg, citing “people familiar with the matter.”

Bloomberg calls it “a move that will let users query AI chatbots through its vehicle interface for the first time.”

The company is working to support the apps in CarPlay within the coming … ⌘ Read more

Waymo is Having a Hard Time Stopping For School Buses
Waymo’s robotaxis have racked up at least 24 safety violations involving school buses in Austin since the start of the 2025 school year, and a voluntary software recall the company issued in December after a federal investigation has not fixed the problem.

Austin Independent School District initially reported at least 19 incidents of Waymo vehicles failing to stop fo … ⌘ Read more

VRR Improvements Merged To GNOME 50 For Lower Latency, Wayland Commit Timing
While just missing out on the recent Mutter 50 beta release, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of next month’s GNOME 50 desktop release are some improvements to the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support… ⌘ Read more

“DHEI” Proposed For Linux To Help Cloud-Native Orchestrators & High Frequency Traders
Sent out today as a request for comments is a new patch series for Dynamic Housekeeping and Enhanced Isolation (DHEI). DHEI aims to provide run-time adjustments to kernel behavior around CPU isolation for helping with latency-sensitive tasks. The expressed goal is for helping cloud-native orchestrators and high frequency trading platforms dynamically re-partition CPU resources without downtime… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm QUPv3 Firmware Upstreamed For Snapdragon X1 Elite Linux Users
One of the headaches right now when dealing with the Snapdragon X Elite on Linux is that for a majority of the devices you need to fetch firmware files from the Windows 11 on ARM partition as the necessary firmware bits for Linux use aren’t upstreamed to linux-firmware.git. That has gradually improved over time from the qcom-firmware-extract making the process easier to more firmware bits eventually being added to linux-firmware.git… ⌘ Read more

It was so great going to the sauna again, we were looking forward to that the whole week. :-) It’s been over a year, holy cow, time flies. We definitely have to pick up on that tradition again, that’s for sure.

We attended two Aufguss sessions, the first and last one in our four hour visit. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the other two, because the crazy people already occupied the entire sauna 15 minutes before the start. Yeah, no.

Now, the bellies are stuffed with kebabs. Yum! Let’s see how often I wake up tonight to rehydrate.

Krita 6.0 Beta Released - Using Qt6 & Wayland Color Management Support
The first beta release of Krita 6.0 is now available for this featureful digital painting program. Krita 6.0 is re-based against the Qt6 toolkit while Krita 5.3 Beta is also being released at the same time for those sticking to Qt5… ⌘ Read more

Debian’s Challenge When Its Developers Quietly Drift Away
You may recall the news last month around no one was left on Debian’s data protection team and other volunteer staffing challenges with different Debian efforts in the past. Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille has been looking at the issue of the challenges that arise when Debian’s all-volunteer developers quietly drift away either due to time commitments, other interests, or other reasons but don’t properly communicate it to the Debian project… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0-rc3 Released With More Graphics Driver Fixes
Eric Engestrom is out with another on-time Mesa release. Mesa 26.0-rc3 provides the latest week’s worth of bug fixes as we work toward the stable Mesa 26.0 release as soon as next week… ⌘ Read more

‘Everyone is Stealing TV’
A sprawling informal economy of rogue streaming devices has taken hold across the U.S., as consumers fed up with rising TV subscription costs turn to cheap Android-based boxes that promise free access to thousands of live channels, sports events, and on-demand movies for a one-time $200 to $400 purchase.

The two dominant players – SuperBox and vSeeBox – are manufactured by opaque Chinese companies and distributed … ⌘ Read more

Mesa Will Now Prevent Compiling With LTO Due To “Random Impossible-To-Debug Bugs”
While link-time optimizations “LTO” can deliver some nice performance benefits out of this compiler optimization technique, it can make debugging said binaries more challenging. Due to various bugs in Mesa being attributed to the use of compiler link-time optimizations when compiling Mesa, the builds are being blocked on using LTO… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Lead Is Contracting as AI Competition Intensifies
OpenAI’s rivals are cutting into ChatGPT’s lead. From a report: The top chatbot’s market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%.

The data, obtained by Big Technology from mobile insights firm Apptopia, … ⌘ Read more

GNOME 50 Lands Virtual Monitor / Remote Desktop Improvements - Including HiDPI
In time for next month’s GNOME 50 release are some improvements merged today for the Mutter compositor code adding HiDPI and monitor mode emulation support to the screen-casting API and DevKit… ⌘ Read more

The Switch is Now Nintendo’s Best-Selling Console of All Time
The original Switch is officially Nintendo’s best-selling console of all time after surpassing the DS handheld in lifetime sales. From a report: In its latest earnings release, Nintendo reports that the Nintendo Switch has, as of December 31, 2025, sold 155.37 million units since its launch in 2017, compared to 154.02 million units for the 2004 Nintend … ⌘ Read more

Is Our Brain a Time Machine? ⌘ Read more

Experimental Linux Code For 1GB PUD-Level THPs Shows 34% Faster Memory Access Times
Early, experimental code for implementing 1GB PUD-level THPs in the Linux kernel are showing positive benchmark results but other upstream stakeholders were surprised by this patch series appearing and it looking like it could be a while until if/when the patches are mainlined for helping to reduce translaction lookaside buffer (TLB) pressure without resorting to Hugetlbfs… ⌘ Read more

Is AI Really Taking Jobs? Or Are Employers Just ‘AI-Washing’ Normal Layoffs?
The New York Times lists other reasons a company lays off people. (“It didn’t meet financial targets. It overhired. Tariffs, or the loss of a big client, rocked it…”)

“But lately, many companies are highlighting a new factor: artificial intelligence. Executives, saying they anticipate huge changes from the technology, are mak … ⌘ Read more

Groundhog Day Meaning
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EU Deploys New Government Satcom Program in Sovereignty Push
The EU “has switched on parts of its homegrown secure satellite communications network for the first time,” reports Bloomberg, calling it part of a €10.6 billion push to “wean itself off US support amid growing tensions.”

SpaceNews notes the new government program GOVSATCOM pools capacity from eight already on-oribit satellites from France, Spain, It … ⌘ Read more

When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the World’s First Software Pirates
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Just months after his 20th birthday, Bill Gates had already angered the programmer community,” remembers this 50th-anniversary commemoration of Gates’ Open Letter to Hobbyists. “As the first home computers began appearing in the 1970s, the world faced a question: Would its software be free?”
… ⌘ Read more

How to Increase Your Reaction Time ⌘ Read more

Electric Flying Cars Now for Sale by California Company Pivotal
“A future with flying cars is no longer science fiction,” writes the Los Angeles Times.

“All you need to order your own is about $200,000 and some hope and patience.”

The Palo Alto-based company Pivotal has been developing the technology since 2009 and is nearly ready to bring it to market… [Company founder Marcus] Leng engineered an ultralig … ⌘ Read more

Apple Switches to Build-to-Order Systems on Its Web Site
“Apple has gone for a choose-your-own-adventure when shopping for a new Mac,” writes long-time Slashdot reader esarjeant.

Macworld explains:

Apple has shifted from selling pre-configured Mac models to a fully customizable build-to-order system on its website, allowing customers to select display size, chip, memory, and storage options… This change emphasiz … ⌘ Read more

The Bill Gates-Epstein Bombshell - and What Most People Get Wrong
The Daily Beast:
“Salacious claims from Jeffrey Epstein that Bill Gates contracted an STD following ‘sex with Russian girls,’ and colluded with the disgraced financier on a plot to secretly slip his wife antibiotics, were revealed in the latest Epstein files release.”

The New York Times. (Alternate URL)

“A representative of the Gates Foundati … ⌘ Read more

Plasma 6.7 Restoring The Air Plasma Theme, Fixes KWin Issue With Intense Alt+Tab’ing
KDE Plasma developers remain quite busy preparing for the Plasma 6.6 desktop release coming up in a little more than two weeks while at the same time continuing to land early features for the Plasma 6.7 release coming later in the year… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Still Committed To Linux 6.20~7.0 Even If Not Finalized For Release Time
Last year Canonical committed to shipping the latest upstream Linux kernel versions in new Ubuntu releases compared to their more conservative choices in prior releases that didn’t always align nicely for the latest Linux kernel upstream. Back in December they confirmed Ubuntu 26.04 plans for Linux 6.20~7.0 and their plans remain that way, even if it means the stable Linux 6.20~7.0 stable release won’t be officially out … ⌘ Read more