@kiwu@twtxt.net Assembly is usually the most low-level programming language that you can get. Typical programming languages like Python or Go are a thick layer of abstraction over what the CPU actually does, but with Assembler you get to see it all and you get full control. (With lots of caveats and footnotes. 😅)

I’m interested in the boot process, i.e. what exactly happens when you turn on your computer. In that area, using Assembler is a must, because you really need that fine-grained control here.

@kiwu@twtxt.net I’m doing great, how’re ya going? Just two more days and then I never have to work anymore. In this year.

I just baked two trays of gingerbread. One definitely good one and another experiment.

This morning was also super pretty: https://lyse.isobeef.org/morgensonne-2025-12-19/

GitHub Is Going To Start Charging You For Using Your Own Hardware
GitHub will begin charging $0.002 per minute for self-hosted Actions runners used on private repositories starting in March. “At the same time, GitHub noted in a Tuesday blog post that it’s lowering the prices of GitHub-hosted runners beginning January 1, under a scheme it calls ‘simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions,’” … ⌘ 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

Uber and DoorDash Try To Halt NYC Law That Encourages Tipping
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Two of the largest food-delivery app companies have made a last-ditch effort to overturn tipping laws in New York City that go into effect in January just as its next mayor, who has been highly critical of the companies and the app industry, takes office. Tips to delivery workers have plummet … ⌘ Read more

AMD Wants Your Logs To Help Optimize PyTorch & ComfyUI For Strix Halo, Radeon GPUs
If you are not satisfied with the current performance for PyTorch or ComfyUI / Stable Diffusion on your Strix Halo APU system or with other consumer RDNA3/RDNA4 Radeon consumer GPUs, AMD engineers are interested in your logs to help better optimize the performance going forward… ⌘ Read more

I finished all 12 days of Advent of Code 2025! #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com — did it in my own language, mu (Go/Python-ish, dynamic, int/bool/string, no floats/bitwise). Found a VM bug, fixed it, and the self-hosted mu compiler/VM (written in mu, host in Go) carried me through. 🥳

I just completed “Printing Department” - Day 4 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/4 – Again, I’m doing this in mu, a Go(ish) / Python(ish) dynamic langugage that I had to design and build first which has very few builtins and only a handful of types (ints, no flots). 🤣

I just completed “Lobby” - Day 3 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/3 – Again, I’m doing this in mu, a Go(ish) / Python(ish) dynamic langugage that I had to design and build first which has very few builtins and only a handful of types (ints, no flots). 🤣

Polar Bears are Rewiring Their Own Genetics to Survive a Warming Climate
“Polar bears are still sadly expected to go extinct this century,” with two-thirds of the population gone by 2050,” says the lead researcher on a new study from the University of East Anglia in Britain.

But their research also suggests polar bears “are rapidly rewiring their own genetics in a bid to survive,” reports NBC News, in … ⌘ Read more

FamFS Hopes To Go Upstream In 2026
The FamFS file-system being developed by Micron hopes to go upstream for Linux in “early-ish 2026”… ⌘ Read more

Ahh that’s because I forgot to call main() at the end of the source file. mu is a bit of a dynamic programming language, mix of Go(ish) and Python(ish).

$ ./bin/mu examples/aoc2025/day1.mu 
Execution failed: undefined variable readline

Applets Are Officially Going, But Java In the Browser Is Better Than Ever
“The entire java.applet package has been removed from JDK 26, which will release in March 2026,” notes Inside Java.

But long-time Slashdot reader AirHog links to this blog post reminding us that
“Applets Are Officially Gone, But Java In The Browser Is Better Than Ever.”

This brings to an official end the era of applets, w … ⌘ Read more

Haiku OS Sees Port Of Go 1.18 Programming Language
The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has received a recent port of the Go programming language to the platform. Plus Haiku also saw app improvements and more over the month of November… ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe is that https://github.com/owncloud/ocis (Go based, instead of PHP 🤮)?

Intel llm-scaler-vllm Beta 1.2 Brings Support For New AI Models On Arc Graphics
Following yesterday’s release of a new llm-scaler-omni beta there is now a new beta feature release of llm-scaler-vllm that provides the Intel-optimized version of vLLM within a Docker container that is set and ready to go for AI on modern Arc Graphics hardware. With today’s llm-scaler-vllm 1.2 beta release there is support for a variety of additional large language models (LLMs) and other improvements… ⌘ Read more

Why is Elon Musk in a war of words with the European Union?
The latest target of Elon Musk’s ire is the European Union, which he has called a “bureaucratic monster” that “should be abolished”. So, what’s going on? ⌘ Read more

Calls to protect victims of financial abuse caught in $11 billion debt trap
Perpetrators of financial abuse commit fraud by impersonating their partners, making them company directors in secret and putting business and tax debts in their names. The government wants to fix the problem, but will its proposed reforms go far enough? ⌘ Read more

Minimum wage should not go any higher, suggests Badenoch
Badenoch claimed Labour had tipped the balance too far against workers and in favour of welfare. ⌘ Read more

Minimum wage should not go any higher, suggests Badenoch
Badenoch claimed Labour had tipped the balance too far against workers and in favour of welfare. ⌘ Read more

**Boulter misses out on Australian Open main draw **
Former British number one Katie Boulter will have to go through qualifying in January to secure a place at the Australian Open. ⌘ 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.

Why are Thailand and Cambodia fighting at the border?
The roots of the South East Asian neighbours’ dispute go back more than a century. ⌘ Read more

‘Time to go’: Calls for UTS VC to resign after staff no confidence vote
The union-run vote comes as controversial, consultant-designed redundancies continue and politicians call for resignations. ⌘ Read more

Sydney greyhound track to be bulldozed to make way for parkland
After more than 90 years, greyhound racing will end at Wentworth Park in Glebe, with the public land to be be transferred to the City of Sydney. ⌘ Read more

Paramount Skydance Launches Hostile Bid For WBD After Netflix Wins Bidding War
Paramount Skydance is launching a hostile bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery after it lost out to Netflix in a months-long bidding war for the legacy assets, the company said Monday. CNBC: Paramount will go straight to WBD shareholders with an all-cash, $30-per-share offer. That’s the same bid WBD rejected last … ⌘ Read more

Student stabbed in ‘targeted’ knife attack at Perth high school
A teenage boy is taken to hospital after being stabbed in the arm in a “targeted” knife attack that that saw a Perth high school go into lockdown on Monday afternoon. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, shit, you might be right. You can even buy these slot plates on Amazon. I didn’t even think to check Amazon, I went straight to eBay and tried to find it there, because I thought “it’s so old, nobody is going to use that anymore, I need to buy second-hand”. 🤦🤦🤦

It really shows that I built my last PC so long ago … I know next to nothing about current hardware. 😢

How the internet reacted to the Aussies going 2-0 up
Mitchell Starc was the hero, again, as the English were comprehensively outplayed in Brisbane — but how did the internet react? ⌘ Read more

Looking back on 25 years of hitchhiking in the Pilbara, Kevin has many tales to tell
At 12 years old, Kevin Guiness was rebuilding engines on an outback cattle station. Now, the Yindjibarndi elder reflects on what kept him going. ⌘ Read more

Is Netflix Trying to Buy Warner Bros. or Kill It?
Why does Netflix want to buy Warner Bros, asks the chief film critic at the long-running motion-picture magazine Variety. “It is hard, at this moment, to resist the suspicion that the ultimate reason… is to eliminate the competition.”

[Warner Bros. is] one of the only companies that’s keeping movies as we’ve known them alive… Some people think movies are going t … ⌘ Read more

As Stokes questions England’s toughness, McCullum warns of ‘glass jaw’
England’s famed captain-coach duo aren’t going to let their relationship fray in the face of the biggest test of their polarising tenure. ⌘ Read more

Netflix deal puts Gary Lineker in podcast super league - but can he succeed?
In a big money move, Lineker will go head-to-head with his old employer with The Rest Is Football. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Well, to be fair, if you show me any picture of a penguin (or in fact any bird), I’ll go “awwwwwww 😍” for a little while. 😅

What life’s like when you’re Deaf and blind
Living with vision impairment throws up many challenges. Being Deaf on top of that requires you to go to even greater lengths just to fit in with the modern world. This is how one Deafblind woman does it. ⌘ Read more

Cummins ‘good to go’ for third Ashes Test
Australia captain Pat Cummins says he will be “good to go” for the third Ashes Test against England after recovering from injury. ⌘ Read more

Day 6 of AoC, and I’m all caught up. 12 puzzles down, 12 more to go!

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe yeah, that’s the only reason why I use sub-domains when trying anything federated (I believe Matrix has the same problem), in case things didn’t go as planned I can just migrate and take it down.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com not to mention you wouldn’t be able to, anyway (if you’re going to use the same domain between backends)

The World Cup draw is here - this is how it will work
Pots, quadrants, confederation constraints, group position grids … the World Cup draw is not going to be straightforward. ⌘ Read more

Chevron’s Gorgon stage 3 backfill development gets $3b go-ahead
The works will connect gas fields in the Greater Gorgon Area to existing infrastructure on Barrow Island. ⌘ Read more

Australia’s red-tipped bananas go viral after cheeky social media post
Red-tipped bananas are not new to Australian consumers, but they have gone viral on social media this month after an inquisitive post from two bewildered British backpackers. ⌘ Read more

RAM Is So Expensive, Samsung Won’t Even Sell It To Samsung
A severe spike in global DRAM prices has pushed Samsung Semiconductor to refuse a long-term RAM order from its own sibling, Samsung Electronics. The move is forcing the smartphone division into short, expensive renegotiations, which will likely mean higher costs for consumer devices. PCWorld reports: Samsung subsidiaries are, naturally, going to look to Sa … ⌘ Read more

Alleged manslaughter victim told classmate she was ‘treated like a slave’, court hears
A girl who was allegedly criminally neglected at the hands of her mother before she died told a friend she was “treated like a slave” and was “scared to go back home”, a court has heard. ⌘ Read more

Marles ‘going through’ Trump AUKUS review
Richard Marles says the government has received the Pentagon’s much-anticipated review into the $368 billion AUKUS submarine pact, declaring Washington is “fully supportive” of the deal. ⌘ Read more

Cost of living still a sore point for voters as politicians go on holiday
A mammoth year in politics ended with a focus on what is worrying most Australians ahead of Christmas: the cost of living. ⌘ Read more

White House Rolls Back Fuel Economy Standards
Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: [T]he Trump administration announced less stringent Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in an effort to bring down the price of new vehicles. The administration says that rules put in place by the Biden administration broke the law by going beyond the requirements mandated by Congress when the CAFE prog … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org no wonder I picked that cake (albeit coincidentally), I adore almonds, and hazelnuts! Your teammates are absolutely amazing, dude! A very nice project farewell! On leaving places I have a small anecdote.

I know someone who on 3 February 2004 left his job to go elsewhere. At the time his teammates threw a party, and gave him a very nice portable storage. Twenty days later, he returned, and jokingly they asked him for the storage, and money spent on farewell party back. I heard, from a close source, that he gave them his middle finger, but don’t quote me on that. 😂😂😂

Smith says Australia is taking an adapt-and-conquer mentality to the Gabba
Steve Smith reveals the mindset Australia is taking into the second Test as the Aussies look to go up 2–0 in the Ashes. ⌘ Read more

Trump says he doesn’t want Somali migrants in US
The president says the US will “go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country”. ⌘ Read more