GNU Gawk 5.4 Released With New MinRX Regex Matcher, Faster Reading Of Files
Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4… ⌘ Read more

Ask Slashdot: What’s Your Boot Time?
How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and “You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?”

And more importantly, why is it all taking so long?
In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU’s that are thousands of times faster than they were, … ⌘ Read more

Code.org President Steps Down Citing ‘Upending’ of CS By AI
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:

Last July, as Microsoft pledged $4 billion to advance AI education in K-12 schools, Microsoft President Brad Smith told nonprofit Code.org CEO/Founder Hadi Partovi it was time to “switch hats” from coding to AI. He added that “the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code, but the future involves the Hour of AI.” … ⌘ Read more

NASA Eyes March 6 To Launch 4 Astronauts To the Moon On Artemis II Mission
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: NASA could launch four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon as soon as March 6th. That’s the launch date (PDF) that the space agency is now working towards following a successful test fueling of its big, 322-foot-tall moon rocket, which is standing on a launch pad at th … ⌘ Read more

Mesa KosmicKrisp Driver Is Coming To iOS, More Performance & Vulkan 1.4 Expected
Last year LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan implementation atop Apple’s Metal API. Initially targeting macOS, KosmicKrisp since was merged to Mesa and has evolved quite nicely as a modern implementation of Vulkan-on-Metal for Apple Silicon. It continues moving ahead with an eye for iOS, more performance optimizations, and completing Vulkan 1.4 support… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.344 Released With New Extension From Valve
Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.344 brings a new extension courtesy of Valve engineers… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s New 10,000-Year Data Storage Medium: Glass
Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft’s accelerated aging … ⌘ Read more

LLM-Generated Passwords Look Strong but Crack in Hours, Researchers Find
AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models – Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini – appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only … ⌘ Read more

Simdjson Shows More Speed-Ups Possible For SIMD In JSON Parsing: Another 30% Boost
Simdjson is the open-source project for high performance JSON parsing by leveraging SIMD instructions for “parsing gigabytes of JSON per second.” Notably it showed years ago the huge performance advantage to using AVX-512 in JSON parsing for surprisingly big benefits. Simdjson has continued advancing since then with various optimizations over the years and today is out with simdjson 4.3 that brings yet more SIMD optimizations… ⌘ Read more

Linux Still Working To Clean Up The Realtek RTL8723BS 802.11b/g/n WiFi Driver In 2026
Introduced to the Linux 4.12 kernel’s staging area back in 2017 was the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. The Realtek RTL8723BS is an 802.11 b/g/ SDIO WLAN adapter with Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity too. In the nearly decade since this driver was added to the staging area, it’s continued to be cleaned up and with the Linux 7.0 merge window there is yet again a lot of work on cleaning up this WiFi driver for the old Realtek hardware… ⌘ Read more

Study of 12,000 EU Firms Finds AI’s Productivity Gains Are Real
A study of more than 12,000 European firms found that AI adoption causally increases labour productivity by 4% on average across the EU, and that it does so without reducing employment in the short run.

Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements and the European Investment Bank used an instrumental variable strategy that matched EU firms … ⌘ Read more

Claude Sonnet 4.6 Model Brings ‘Much-Improved Coding Skills’, Upgraded Free Tier
Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 4.6, the first upgrade to its mid-tier AI model since version 4.5 arrived in September 2025. The new model features a “1M token context window” and delivers a “full upgrade of the model’s skills across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge wor … ⌘ Read more

DNF 5.4 Released With Some New Options & AI Contributions Policy
DNF 5.4 is out today as the latest release for this next-generation RPM package management solution used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and various other RPM-based Linux distributions… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Merges Support For Rock Band 4 PS4 / PS5 Guitars Plus More Laptop Quirks
The HID subsystem changes were merged this week for the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Among the Human Interface Devices (HID) work this cycle were supporting more guitars while also adding more device IDs and different laptop quirks… ⌘ Read more

Godot 4.7 Making Progress On Vulkan Ray-Tracing
One of the latest exciting developments for the open-source Godot game engine is beginning to lay out support for Vulkan ray-tracing… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS Now Available With Linux 6.17 HWE Kernel
Canonical released Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS today as the newest point release to the Noble Numbat… ⌘ Read more

Siri’s AI Overhaul Delayed Again
Apple’s long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting.

The new Siri – first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 – struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and s … ⌘ Read more

Sixteen AI Agents Built a C Compiler From Scratch
Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini set 16 instances of Claude Opus 4.6 loose on a shared codebase over two weeks to build a C compiler from scratch, and the AI agents produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V architectures.

The project ran through nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and cost abou … ⌘ Read more

New Raspberry Pi 4 Model Splits RAM Across Dual Chips
The blog OMG Ubuntu reports that a new version of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B has been (quietly) introduced. “The key difference? It now uses a dual-RAM configuration.”

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (PCB 13a) adopts a dual-RAM configuration to ‘improve supply chain flexibility’ and manufacturing efficiency, per a company product change notice document. Earlier versio … ⌘ 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

Are Big Tech’s Nuclear Construction Deals a Tipping Point for Small Modular Reactors?
Fortune reports on “a watershed moment” in American’s nuclear power industry:

In January, Meta partnered with Gates’ TerraPower and Sam Altman-backed Oklo to develop about 4 gigawatts of combined SMR projects — enough to power almost 3 million homes — for “clean, reliable energy” both for Meta’s planne … ⌘ Read more

A New Era for Security? Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 Found 500 High-Severity Vulnerabilities
Axios reports:

Anthropic’s latest AI model has found more than 500 previously unknown high-severity security flaws in open-source libraries with little to no prompting, the company shared first with Axios.

Why it matters: The advancement signals an inflection point for how AI tools can help cyber … ⌘ Read more

Claude Code is the Inflection Point
About 4% of all public commits on GitHub are now being authored by Anthropic’s Claude Code, a terminal-native AI coding agent that has quickly become the centerpiece of a broader argument that software engineering is being fundamentally reshaped by AI.

SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor and AI research firm, published a report on Friday projecting that figure will climb past 20% by the end of 2026. Cl … ⌘ Read more

GNU Nettle 4.0 Released With SLH-DSA Support
The GNU Nettle cryptographic library is out with a major new update that introduces support for SLH-DSA, the post-quantum signature scheme selected by NIST for the FIPS 205 standard… ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.6 as Its AI Tools Rattle Software Markets
Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 4.6, its most capable model yet, at a moment when the company’s AI tools have already spooked markets over fears that they are disrupting traditional software development and other sectors.

The new model improves on Opus 4.5’s coding abilities, the company said – it plans more carefully, … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Found some numbers now, they’re saying it was around 10cm in 3-4 hours. I don’t know, felt like more. 😂 The forecast wasn’t really good either, now that I think about it. They said there’s going to be some snow, okay, fine, but then, boom.

Haha, that old ad is lovely. Those days are over. 🤣

Vulkan 1.4.342 Published With Cooperative Matrix Conversion Extension
Following last week’s Vulkan spec updates that brought descriptor heaps and other notable new extensions and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone, Vulkan 1.4.342 was published this morning as the latest routine spec update plus one new extension… ⌘ Read more

Nothing CEO Says Company Won’t Launch New Flagship Smartphone Every Year ‘For the Sake of It’
Android smartphone maker Nothing won’t release a Phone 4 this year, the company’s founder and chief executive said, and that the 2025 Phone 3 will remain the brand’s flagship device throughout 2026.

“We’re not just going to churn out a new flagship every year for the sake of it, we want ev … ⌘ Read more

Asteroid 2024 YR4 Has a 4% Chance of Hitting the Moon
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Universe Today: There’s a bright side to every situation. In 2032, the Moon itself might have a particularly bright side if it is blasted by a 60-meter-wide asteroid. The chances of such an event are still relatively small (only around 4%), but non-negligible. And scientists are starting to prepare both for the bad (massive r … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla is Building an AI ‘Rebel Alliance’ To Take on Industry Heavweights OpenAI, Anthropic
Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox browser that has spent two decades battling tech giants over control of the internet, is now turning its attention to AI and deploying roughly $1.4 billion in reserves to fund what president Mark Surman calls a “rebel alliance” of startups … ⌘ Read more

Vulkan VK_EXT_present_timing Merged To Mesa 26.1 For X11 & Wayland
The Vulkan EXT_present_timing was in development for years to help avoid game stuttering and released this past November with Vulkan 1.4.335. This significant extension as of today has been wired up in Mesa 26.1-devel for the key Vulkan drivers and working on both X11 and Wayland… ⌘ Read more

Valve’s Proton 10.0-4 Released With More Windows Games Now Running On Linux
Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 10.0-4 as their newest update to this downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Godot 4.6 Ships Many Improvements For This Leading Open-Source Game Engine
Godot 4.6 is officially out today as the newest feature release for this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine… ⌘ Read more

I’ve got sore muscles. The sticky snow couldn’t be pushed, it had to be laborously cleared shovel by shovel. :-D

In my lunch break, I went on a short stroll. Oh boy, walking through deep damp snow is exhausting! There were sections with easily 30 centimeters and more. Some big wind drifts had piled up. Despite melting off quickly in the 4°C, especially turning the trees brown again, the white landscape still looks so nice. I’m glad these road marking sticks finally came in handy for the snow plow guys. :-) The black and orange stripes are 30 cm high.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-01-26/

That’s probably it. There’s no significant snowfall announced for the rest of the week and temperatures are supposed to stay in the 2-4°C range by day.

LACT 0.8.4 Brings Improved Overclocking UI For GPUs On Linux
In the absence of any official GUI control panel from AMD or Intel for their graphics cards on Linux, LACT remains a popular choice particularly for AMD Radeon Linux gamers/enthusiasts to manage various aspects of their GPU from a convenient UI. LACT also supports Intel GPUs and some features on NVIDIA GPUs too. Out today is LACT 0.8.4 for further enhancing this third-party GPU driver user interface… ⌘ Read more

Focusrite Forte USB Audio Interface To Be Supported By Linux 7.0
The Focusrite Forte 2-in, 4-out USB audio interface as a portable audio recording solution will be supported by the mainline Linux 7.0 kernel. The patches are queued in the Linux kernel’s sound subsystem development tree. While a convenient little device, the Focusrite Forte is no longer manufactured but can still be found used online… ⌘ Read more

SVT-AV1 4.0 Released With More Performance Optimizations
SVT-AV1 4.0 is out as the newest major feature release for this open-source AV1 video encoder that was originally started by Intel as an open-source project and now continuining on thanks to the Alliance For Open Media… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone: Variable Rate Shading, Host Image Copies & More
In addition to the release today of Vulkan 1.4.340 with the new descriptor heap “VK_EXT_descriptor_heap” extension and three other new extensions, The Khronos Group’s Vulkan Working Group has also published the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone… ⌘ Read more

GNU Guix 1.5 Released With RISC-V Support, Experimental x86_64 GNU Hurd Kernel
GNU Guix 1.5 is out today as the latest major release for this platform built around its functional package manager. This is a big upgrade with it having been three years since the GNU Guix 1.4 release… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.340 Released With Descriptor Heap & Other New Extensions
Vulkan 1.4.340 is out today as the first significant new Vulkan API update following the end of year holidays. With Vulkan 1.4.340 comes four new extensions worth talking about… ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.0.4 Browser Engine Released & Finally Supporting Multiple Windows
Servo 0.0.4 is out today as the newest monthly update to this open-source, Rust-based web browser engine. Building off recent Servo embedding API additions, Servo 0.0.4 introduces support for multiple browser windows… ⌘ Read more

Majority of CEOs Report Zero Payoff From AI Splurge
A PwC survey of more than 4,500 CEOs found that over half report no revenue growth or cost savings from their AI investments so far, despite massive spending. Of the 4,454 business leaders surveyed, only 12% saw both lower costs and higher revenue, while 56% saw neither benefit. “26% saw reduced costs, but nearly as many experienced cost increases,” adds The Register. From the … ⌘ Read more

56% of Companies Have Seen Zero Financial Return From AI Investments, PwC Survey Says
More than half of companies haven’t seen any financial benefit from their AI investments, according to PwC’s latest Global CEO Survey [PDF], and yet the spending shows no signs of slowing down. Some 56% of the 4,454 chief executives surveyed across 95 countries said their companies have realized neither higher … ⌘ Read more

Crypto News Outlet Cointelegraph Loses 80% of Traffic After Google Penalty For Parasitic Blackhat SEO Deal
Cointelegraph, once one of the most-visited cryptocurrency news sites, has seen its monthly traffic plummet from roughly 8 million visits to 1.4 million – an 80% drop in three months – after Google issued a manual penalty in October 2025 for the outlet’s partnersh … ⌘ Read more

ERP Isn’t Dead Yet - But Most Execs Are Planning the Wake
Seven out of ten C-suite executives believe traditional enterprise resource planning software has seen its best days, though the category remains firmly entrenched in corporate IT and opinion is sharply divided on what comes next. A survey of 4,295 CFOs, CISOs, CIOs and CEOs worldwide found 36% expect ERP to give way to composable, API-driven best-of-breed systems, w … ⌘ Read more

China Consumed 10.4 Trillion Kilowatt-Hours of Electricity In 2025 - Double the US
Slashdot reader hackingbear summarizes this report from Bloomberg: China consumed totally 10.4 trillion kilowatt hours (10.4 petaWh) in 2025 according to data from the National Energy Administration. That’s the highest annual electricity use ever recorded by a single country, and doubled the amount used by th … ⌘ Read more

My mate and I went on a hike earlier. Yesterday, we had lovely 12°C. But today, it was down to at most 4°C. Oh well. At least the sun was out and and there was just a tiny bit of wind. We knew upfont that scarf, beanie and gloves were mandatory. Especially at the more windy sections like up top the hills. The view was absolutely terrible, but we made the best of it.

With the sun shining on us during our lunch break at a forest edge bench, we still enjoyed the lookout in 01. I brought some old carpet scraps to sit on and was happily surprised that they isolated even better than I had hoped for. Some hot tea helped us staying warm.

After five hours we returned just after sunset. I’m quite tired now, completely out of shape.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-01-17/

Wow, as I anticipated, this is waaay out of my capabilities to really understand it. But I’m quite happy to just have spotted a mistake in an explanatory comment in section 4.5.2 “The icode Array”. Of course, it should be /e + tc + /i + ni + t\0. Let’s hope that my e-mail with the patch actually makes it into Briam’s inbox. I fear GMail just hides it in the spam folder.

US Carbon Pollution Rose In 2025, a Reversal From Prior Years
In a reversal from previous years, U.S. carbon emissions rose 2.4% in 2025 compared with the year before. NBC News reports: The increase in greenhouse gas emissions is attributable to a combination of a cool winter, the explosive growth of data centers and cryptocurrency mining and higher natural gas prices, according to the Rhodium Group, an independent … ⌘ Read more

oVirt 4.5.7 Released After Two Years With New OS & CPU Support
The oVirt 4.5.7 open-source virtualization management platform released this week after not seeing any new releases in two years. While Red Hat had started the oVirt open-source project for which their Red Hat Virtualization platform is based, since they shifted that to maintenance mode to focus on the Red Hat OpenShift platform and stopped contributing to oVirt, it’s been up to the open-source community to keep it going… ⌘ Read more