2025 Brought “Transformative Changes” For FreeBSD On Laptops
As we have been covering over the past year, major investments have been made to better the outlook for running FreeBSD on laptop hardware. From WiFi driver improvements to enhancing suspend/resume, power management, graphics drivers, and other features, it’s been a big undertaking to make FreeBSD work better on laptops. The FreeBSD Foundation calls 2025 as having brought “transformative changes” for the FreeBSD laptop experience… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.337 Debuts With Long Vector & 3D ASTC Compression Extensions
Vulkan 1.4.337 released a short time ago as what could be the last Vulkan API spec update of 2025 depending upon how much time the working group takes off or not around the holidays. In any case, it’s a nice holiday treat with the new VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_3d and VK_EXT_shader_long_vector extensions… ⌘ Read more

North Korean Infiltrator Caught Working In Amazon IT Department Thanks To Lag
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom’s Hardware: A North Korean imposter was uncovered, working as a sysadmin at Amazon U.S., after their keystroke input lag raised suspicions with security specialists at the online retail giant. Normally, a U.S.-based remote worker’s computer would send keystroke data within tens … ⌘ Read more

Qt 6.11 Beta Released With New Canvas Painter, OpenAPI & TaskTree Modules
Qt 6.11 Beta 1 is out on-schedule with the code having entered its feature freeze and code branching earlier this month. This toolkit is working toward the stable Qt 6.11 stable debut in March… ⌘ Read more

How China Built Its ‘Manhattan Project’ To Rival the West in AI Chips
Chinese scientists have built a working prototype of an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine in a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, a development that represents exactly what Washington has spent years and multiple rounds of export controls trying to prevent: China’s path toward semiconductor independence and an end to the West’s monopoly o … ⌘ Read more

English Has Become Easier To Read
The conventional wisdom that English prose has gotten easier to read because sentences have gotten shorter is wrong, according to a new analysis published in Works in Progress by writer and Mercatus Center research fellow Henry Oliver. The real transformation happened centuries ago in the 1500s and 1600s when Bible translators like William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer developed a “plain style” built on logica … ⌘ Read more

Asahi Linux Gets Microphone Working For M2 Pro/Max, Eyes Installer Improvements
The Asahi Linux project is out with their latest status report to highlight upstream improvements made for the newly-minted Linux 6.18 kernel as well as some of their efforts going on downstream within Asahi Linux itself… ⌘ 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

US Threatens Penalties Against European Tech Firms Amid Regulatory Fight
U.S. officials excoriated the European Union for discriminating against American technology companies and threatened to penalize European tech companies in return, in a social media post on Tuesday. From a report: The pronouncement appeared to signal a rockier period for U.S.-E.U. trade relations, as the two governments work to fi … ⌘ Read more

Got a nice conspiracy theory for you:

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115670290552252848

Actually wait I just thought about this and realized that the precise timing of the ACTUAL GitHub seed bank, by which I mean the Arctic Code Vault, on 2020-02-02, makes it more or less a perfect snapshot of pre-Copilot GitHub. Also precisely timed before we all got brain damage from COVID. This is the only remaining archive of source code by people with a fully working sense of smell

(Bonus points because the Arctic World Archive is located in Svaldbard and that’s the name of the AI in Stacey Kade’s “Cold Eternity”.)

Fedora 44 Could Work Nicely “Out Of The Box” On Snapdragon-Powered Windows ARM Laptops
Longtime Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede who worked on many Intel/AMD laptop enhancements over the years left Red Hat and ended up joining Qualcomm. Now it turns out one of his projects at Qualcomm is enhancing the Fedora Linux support for running nicely out-of-the-box on Snapdragon-powered Windows on ARM laptops… ⌘ Read more

Flatpak Adds Support For Building OCI Bundles Using Zstd Compressed Layers
Back in November Flatpak 1.17 released with support for sideloading from OCI images and other improvements in working toward the Flatpak 1.18 stable release. Out today is Flatpak 1.17.1 and was then followed quickly by Flatpak 1.17.2 to fix a mistake in the release artifacts… ⌘ Read more

Google To Retire ‘Dark Web Report’ Tool That Scanned for Leaked User Data
Google has decided to retire its free dark web monitoring tool, saying it wasn’t as helpful as the company hoped. From a report: In a support page, Google announced the discontinuation of the “dark web report” tool, two years after offering it as a free perk to Gmail users before expanding it more broadly. The feature worked by sca … ⌘ Read more

Igalia’s Work Improving Futex For Helping Steam Play Gaming On ARM64 Linux
Besides Valve funding FEX-Emu for x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 Linux as part of their Steam Play (Proton) efforts in being able to get Windows x86/x64 games running on AArch64 SteamOS for the Snapdragon-powered Steam Frame, there is also work happening in kernel-space to help this emulated gaming experience on AArch64… ⌘ Read more

Comment on Two Ubuntu Flavours Won’t Be LTS Releases Next Year by Naszenaturalne
Your work has such a lasting positive impact on everyone who discovers it ⌘ Read more

“If COP30 cannot deliver the mechanisms for decarbonisation or social protection, then the hope must lie in movements of people: workers, peasants, indigenous people, women, youth, and the urban poor. Outside of a global mass movement rooted in national realities, the necessary steps to confront the climate crisis will not occur. Yet such a movement cannot be built if it fails to address the immediate needs of the working classes and the poor. The fight for climate protection and ecological justice must therefore begin with the fight for life itself — for clean water, decent housing, jobs, food, and security against the elements.

Right-wing climate denialists exploit the desperation of the poor to drive a wedge between ordinary people and climate action. They present environmentalism as a threat to livelihoods rather than the path to survival. To win the majority, our movement must link ecological transformation with social justice. We must demand the redistribution of wealth and power away from the billionaire class, big tech, and ruling elites who plunder the planet for profit.”

#climatecrisis

Bought more cheap slot plates (with bad reviews and people complaining about the pin order, because I could’nt find a product without such reviews), but those are simply correct now and just work. 🤪

And I’m back from my holidays! 🥳 Back to work boo 😒

Oracles Releases Updated “bpftune” For BPF-Based Auto-Tuning Of Linux Systems
The past few years Oracle has been working on bpftune as a solution for BPF-based, automatic tuning of Linux systems. Bpftune has been available via Oracle Linux and GitHub while finally their open-source GitHub code has seen the first new tagged release in a while… ⌘ Read more

Doom Studio id Software Forms ‘Wall-To-Wall’ Union
id Software employees voted to form a wall-to-wall union with the CWA, covering all roles at the Doom studio. “The vote wasn’t unanimous, though a majority did vote in favor of the union,” notes Engadget. From the report: The union will work in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), which is the same organization involved with parent company ZeniMax’s … ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.0-rc2 Released With 28 Known Bug Fixes
Following last week’s Wine 11.0-rc1 release that marked the feature freeze as well in working toward Wine 11.0 in January, out today is Wine 11.0-rc2… ⌘ Read more

Cache Aware Scheduling Raises Performance For Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids
Over the past year Intel engineers have worked a lot on Cache Aware Scheduling for the Linux kernel. The yet-to-be-merged functionality allows for the Linux kernel to better aggregate tasks sharing data to the same last level cache (LLC) domain to reduce cache misses and cache bouncing. The Cache Aware Scheduling development was led by Intel but helps other CPU vendors too for processors with multiple cache domains. Back in October I show … ⌘ Read more

Blender Working On KosmicKrisp Support For Vulkan On macOS
The Blender 3D modeling software could enjoy better macOS support with better cross-platform code paths thanks to in-development work for leveraging KosmicKrisp for Vulkan API usage on macOS via Metal… ⌘ Read more

LibreOffice 26.2 Beta 1 Now Available For This Free Software Office Suite
LibreOffice 26.2 Beta 1 is now available for testing in working toward the stable release in February for this cross-platform, open-source office suite solution… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Is Back To Working On “Hornet” Security For eBPF Programs On Linux
Earlier in the year Microsoft proposed the “Hornet” Linux security module to provide signature verification capabilities for eBPF programs to provide for better system security. It’s been months since hearing anything more about it and not being merged, but yesterday they “reintroduced” it to the Linux kernel community… ⌘ Read more

India Proposes Charging OpenAI, Google For Training AI On Copyrighted Content
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Tuesday, India’s Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade released a proposed framework that would give AI companies access to all copyrighted works for training in exchange for paying royalties to a new collecting body composed of rights-holding organ … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net If it works, why even bother fixing it?

Webp, though it has been around for a long while, wasn’t fully supported on all browsers until recently. The other formats have been in use for such a long time, proving to work just fine, that the advantages Webp provides haven’t been seemingly enough to merit a switch.

Google is also the one behind Webp, and, well, people don’t trust, nor like, them much.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, but isn’t it from 2010? No widespread adoption after 15 years? Is there that much inertia? 🤔 On my box, everything just works – browser, GIMP, ImageMagick, imlib2, … 🤔

SA prisons remain locked down indefinitely, as home detention officers step off job
The union representing correctional officers has voted to strike indefinitely, while officers who monitor 1,500 people on home detention will stop work for 24 hours ⌘ Read more

Gaza named deadliest place for journalists in 2025
Gaza has been named the deadliest place in the world to work as a journalist by French-based press freedom advocates Reporters Without Borders. ⌘ Read more

Canonical To Distribute AMD ROCm Libraries With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
AMD previously talked of simplifying the in-box Linux support for ROCm during the second half of 2025. So far we haven’t seen any groundbreaking changes from that initiative besides AMD working on various package archives/repositories to make it easier to install the latest ROCm on different Linux distributions. But today a big announcement is now public that Canonical with next year’s Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release will provide official ROCm packages al … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Here you go:

(LTT = “Linus Tech Tips”, that’s the host.)

LTT: There was a recent thing from a major tech company, where developers were asked to say how many lines of code they wrote – and if it wasn’t enough, they were terminated. And there was someone here that was extremely upset about that approach to measuring productivity, because–

Torvalds: Oh yeah, no, you shouldn’t even be upset. At that point, that’s just incompetence. Anybody who thinks that’s a valid metric is too stupid to work at a tech company.

LTT: You do know who you just said that about, right?

Torvalds: No.

LTT: Oh. Uh, he was a prominent figure in the, uh, improved efficiency of the US government recently.

Torvalds: Oh. Apparently I was spot on.

We’ve finally cracked how to make truly random numbers
From machine learning to voting, the workings of the world demand randomisation, but true sources of randomness are surprisingly hard to find. Now quantum mechanics has supplied the answer ⌘ Read more

Alter Boy’s NRG is up for vocalist of the year — yet he doesn’t sing
Luke Eastman’s interpretation work using Auslan in the band Alter Boy is recognised in this year’s WA Music Awards, with a nomination for vocalist of the year. ⌘ Read more

Live Update Orchestrator “LUO” Merged For Linux 6.19
Google engineers for the past number of months have been working on the Live Update Orchestrator as a new way of applying live Linux kernel updates. The Live Update Orchestrator “LUO” builds atop the Kexec Handover “KHO” functionality already within the kernel. Google has since been deplyoing LUO in their production environments for faster security updates to kernels, especially when involving VMs. LUO is now upstream in Linux 6.19… ⌘ Read more

Google Says First AI Glasses With Gemini Will Arrive in 2026
Google said it’s working to create two different categories of artificial intelligence-powered smart glasses to compete next year with existing models from Meta Platforms: one with screens, and another that’s audio focused. From a report: The first AI glasses that Google is collaborating on will arrive sometime in 2026, it said in a blog post Monday. Sam … ⌘ Read more

AMD Working On Push-Based Load Balancing For Linux To Further Enhance Performance
One of the new Linux engineering initiatives out of AMD is working to further enhance Linux performance on today’s large core count systems by introducing push-based load balancing… ⌘ Read more

Primary school teacher jailed for ‘calculated’ abuse of young girls
A former Cairns state primary school teacher has been jailed for 17 years for dozens of child exploitation offences involving children from the school where he worked. ⌘ Read more

But it is weird that none of the slot plates (that I can find) appear to have the correct pin order. 🤔

The two mainboards I have here use this order:

2468x
13579

But the slot plates use this:

12345
6789x

I tripped over this at first and wondered why it didn’t work.

Has this changed recently or what? 🥴

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

Water leak at the Louvre damages hundreds of works
The leak occurred after a valve was accidentally opened in a heating and ventilation system, allowing water to seep through the ceiling of the Mollien wing. ⌘ 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

@prologic@twtxt.net Bwahahaha! I tried to establish some form of “convention” for commit messages at work (not exactly what you linked to, though), but it’s a lost cause. 😂 Nobody is following any of that. Nobody wants to invest time in good commit messages. People just want to get stuff done.

I’m just glad that 80% are at least somewhat useful – instead of “wip” or “shit i screwed up”.

My current PC is from 2013, so I never even bothered to check, but as it turns out: My motherboard still has a serial port. 🤯 I thought these had long died out by then. To be honest, I didn’t have the need for one, either, not until recently … So I completely lost track if PCs have these things or not.

All I needed was one of those slot-cable-thingies. (And if the order of pins is correct, then it actually works. 🤦)

Cool! One less USB device. 😃

Backed by his family, propelled by his talent: the rise of Lando Norris
F1 world champion Lando Norris has long seemed destined for the top of his sport, as key figures who worked with him through the junior categories tell BBC Sport. ⌘ Read more

Young people to lose benefits if they turn down work, says minister
Pat McFadden says they would need a “good reason” to decline one of 55,000 new work placements. ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Delivers Working USB3 Support For Apple Silicon Devices
Merged last night for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window were all of the USB and Thunderbolt driver changes. Standing out this cycle is Apple Silicon devices like the M1 Macs now having working USB3 support on the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Delivers Working USB3 Support For Apple Silicon Devices
Merged last night for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window were all of the USB and Thunderbolt driver changes. Standing out this cycle is Apple Silicon devices like the M1 Macs now having working USB3 support on the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Using AI To Modernize The Ubuntu Error Tracker Produced Some Code That Was “Plain Wrong”
A week ago I wrote about AI being used to help modernize Ubuntu’s Error Tracker. Microsoft GitHub Copilot was tasked to help adapt its Cassandra database usage to modern standards. It’s worked in some areas but even for a rather straight forward task, some of the generated functions ended up being “plain wrong” according to the developer involved… ⌘ Read more