A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide
One line tucked into a federal highway bill would strip funds from cities and states unless they kill their automated plate tracking programs—effectively banning the tech for all but toll collection. ⌘ Read more

The Linux Kernel Working On A Rust-Based Untrusted Data API
One of the newest interfaces being worked on for the Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel is an Untrusted Data API for data received into the kernel from user-space… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Expected To Introduce “OPENAT2_REGULAR” To Avoid Tricking Secure Programs
Among the VFS patches queued into “-next” branches ahead of next month’s Linux 7.2 merge window is the code for introducing the new OPENAT2_REGULAR flag for the openat2 system call… ⌘ Read more

Python Stays #1, R Rises in Popularity, Says TIOBE
Are statistical programmers coalescing around a handful of popular languages? That’s the question asked by the CEO of software assessment site TIOBE, which every month estimates the popularity of programming languages based on their frequency in search results:

This month, the programming language R matched its all-time high by reaching position #8 in the TIOBE index on … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Forms $200 Million Partnership With the Gates Foundation
Anthropic announced today that it is partnering with the Gates Foundation to “commit $200 million in grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support for programs in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility over the next four years.”

“This commitment is central to Anthropic’s efforts to extend the benefits of A … ⌘ Read more

IBM s390 Is The Latest Architecture Seeing Rust Linux Kernel Support
An IBM engineer posted the first set of patches enabling the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel to be built on the s390 architecture… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Releases CUDA-Oxide 0.1 For Experimental Rust-To-CUDA Compiler
A new NVIDIA Labs project is greatly improving the capabilities of using the Rust programming language for developing CUDA kernels for NVIDIA GPUs… ⌘ Read more

Richard Dawkins ‘Convinced’ AI Is Conscious
Mirnotoriety shares a report from The Telegraph: Richard Dawkins has said chatbots should be considered conscious (source paywalled; alternative source) after spending two days interacting with the Claude AI engine. The evolutionary biologist said he had the “overwhelming feeling” of talking to a human during conversations with Claude, and said it was hard not to treat the program as “a genuine … ⌘ Read more

GCC 16 Compiler Delivering Some Decent Performance Gains Over GCC 15
With the GCC 16.1 compiler released last Thursday, I have begun running more compiler benchmarks on this first GCC 16 stable feature release. GCC 16 comes heavy on new changes in being the annual feature release and delivering changes from AMD Zen 6 and Arm AGI CPU support to new C++ features and even the Algol 68 programming language front-end. It’s also looking quite good in the performance department relative to the GCC 15 compiler from last year. ⌘ Read more

Brush v0.4 Released As “Significant” Release For This Rust-Based Shell
Brush v0.4 debuted today for this “Bourne Rusty Shell” as a Bash/POSIX-compatible shell written in the Rust programming language… ⌘ Read more

Light Phone Is Making Its Dumb Phone More Useful With Third-Party ‘Tools’
A new developer program for LightOS allows anyone to create tools for the Light Phone, whether that’s a local public transit app for your city or a way to read ebooks. ⌘ Read more

First Tesla Semi Rolls Off High-Volume Production Line
Tesla has produced the first Semi from its new high-volume production line at Gigafactory Nevada, a milestone for the long-delayed electric Class 8 truck program after years of pilot builds and delays. Electrek reports: The Tesla Semi has had one of the longest gestation periods in Tesla’s history. First unveiled in 2017, the truck was originally promised for produc … ⌘ Read more

[$] Strawberry is ripe for managing music collections
There are dozens of music-player applications for Linux; the options range
from bare-bones programs that only play local files to full-blown
music-management projects with a full suite of tools for managing (and playing)
a music collection. Strawberry
is in the latter category; it has a bumper crop of features, including smart
playlists, support for editing music metadata tags, the ability to organize music
files, and more. ⌘ Read more

[$] Zig explores structured concurrency
Version 0.16.0 of the Zig programming language was
recently announced, and with
it an expanded version of the new Io interface that we
covered in December.
The new interface is based on an idea called structured concurrency that makes writing
correct concurrent applications easier. Zig’s implementation of
the idea is more explicit and verbose than other languages, however, which could
offer an oppor … ⌘ Read more

The Latest Push to Extend Key US Spy Powers Is Still a Mess
A US surveillance program that lets the FBI view Americans’ communications without a warrant is up for renewal. A new bill aims to address mounting lawmaker concerns—with smoke and mirrors. ⌘ Read more

Newly Deciphered Sabotage Malware May Have Targeted Iran’s Nuclear Program—and Predates Stuxnet
Researchers have finally cracked Fast16, mysterious code capable of silently tampering with calculation and simulation software. It was created in 2005—and likely deployed by the US or an ally. ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Plans First-Ever Voluntary Employee Buyout
Microsoft plans to offer voluntary buyouts for the first time. According to CNBC, “about 7% of U.S. employees are eligible,” with the program being “available to U.S. workers at the senior director level and below whose years of employment and age add up to 70 or higher.” Further details will be provided on May 7. From the report: Last year Microsoft removed some costs throu … ⌘ Read more

LilyPond 2.26.0 released
Version\
2.26.0 of the LilyPond
music-engraving program has been released. Major\
changes include the ability to use the Cairo library to generate
output and improvements in spacing between clefs and time
signatures. See the release notes for a full list of [miscellaneous\
improvements](https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.26/Documentation/changes/miscellan … ⌘ Read more

Popular Rust-Based Database Turns To AI For Up To 1.5x Speedup, Other Improvements
Redb is one of the open-source, embed-friendly key-value databases written in the Rust programming language. Redb is ACID-compliant while known for being high performance and with its new Redb 4.1 release is even faster thanks to some improvements authored by Claude (AI)… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 sched_ext Brings cgroup Sub-Scheduler Groundwork, Idle SMT Sibling Improvement
The extensible scheduler “sched_ext” code for allowing Linux scheduling behavior to be defined via BPF programs is seeing some useful improvements with the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Rust 1.95 Released With Several Improvements
Rust 1.95 was released to the wild today as the latest feature update to this popular programming language… ⌘ Read more

Zig 0.16.0 released
The Zig project has announced version
0.16.0 of the Zig programming language.

This release features 8 months of work: changes
from 244 different contributors, spread among
1183 commits.

Perhaps most notably, this release debuts I/O\
> as an Interface, but don’t sleep on the [Language\
> Chan … ⌘ Read more

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

NVIDIA Hiring More LLVM Engineers To Work On CUDA Tile
Last year NVIDIA announced the new CUDA Tile programming model as one of the biggest updates ever to the CUDA platform. CUDA Tile brings a virtual ISA for tile-based parallel programming and they subsequently open-sourced the CUDA Tile IR as an intermediate representation built atop LLVM’s MLIR. Now they are looking to hire additional LLVM compiler engineers to help foster their CUDA Tile initiatives… ⌘ Read more

Has the Rust Programming Language’s Popularity Reached Its Plateau?
“Rust’s rise shows signs of slowing,” argues the CEO of TIOBE.
Back in 2020 Rust first entered the top 20 of his “TIOBE Index,” which ranks programming language popularity using search engine results. Rust “was widely expected to break into the top 10,” he remembers today. But it never happened, and “That was nearly six years ago….”

… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org AI result ahead, feel free to ignore.

I “asked” the AI at work the same question out of morbid curiousity. It “said” that SQLite converts that integer to floating point internally on overflows and then, when converting back, the x86 instruction cvttsd2si will turn it into 0x8000000000000000, even if the actual floating point value is outside of that range. So, yes, it allegedly actually saturates, as a side effect of the type conversion.

I couldn’t find anything about that automatic conversion in SQLite’s manual, yet, but an experiment looks like it might be true:

sqlite> select typeof(1 << 63);
╭─────────────────╮
│ typeof(1 << 63) │
╞═════════════════╡
│ integer         │
╰─────────────────╯

sqlite> select typeof((1 << 63) - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ typeof((1 << 63) ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ real                 │
╰──────────────────────╯

As for cvttsd2si, this source confirms the handling of 0x8000000000000000 on range errors: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/cvttsd2si

The following C program also confirms it (run through gdb to see cvttsd2si in action):

<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdint.h>
<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdio.h>

int
main()
{
    int64_t i;
    double d;

    /* -3000 instead of -1, because `double` can’t represent a
     * difference of -1 at this scale. */
    d = -9223372036854775808.0 - 3000;

    i = d;
    printf("%lf, 0x%lx, %ld\n", d, i, i);

    return 0;
}

(Remark about AI usage: Fine, I got an answer and maybe it’s even correct. But doing this completely ruined it for me. It would have been much more satisfying to figure this out myself. I actually suspected some floating point stuff going on here, but instead of verifying this myself I reached for the unethical tool and denied myself a little bit of fun at the weekend. Won’t do that again.)

Relicensing versus license compatibility (FSF Blog)
The Free Software Foundation has published
a short article on relicensing versus license compatibility.

The FSF’s Licensing and\
> Compliance Lab receives many questions and license violation reports
related to projects that had their license changed by a downstream
distributor, or that are combined from two or more programs under
different licenses. We collaborated wit … ⌘ Read more

被 AI 编程坑过两次后，我终于做出了一个上架的微信小程序
被 AI 编程坑了两次之后，我终于做出了一个上架的微信小程序：不靠“让 AI 一句话生成微信小程序”，而是换了一种方式：给数据 → 做设计 → 再开发 → 拆任务 → 多对话。 来自 @阿童木先森 的 vibe coding 作品，如果你也觉得 AI 编程“不太靠谱”，可以看看他的方法。 想直接体验 ⌘ Read more

Meta has found its footing on AI. Its rival found something much scarier
Meta spent billions rebuilding its AI program and finally has something to show for it. Anthropic, meanwhile, has something it’s not sure anyone should see. ⌘ Read more

LinkedIn Faces Spying Allegations Over Browser Extension Scanning
LinkedIn is facing allegations that it quietly scans users’ browsers for installed Chrome extensions. The German group Fairlinked e.V. goes so far as to claim that the site is “running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history.”

“The program runs silently, without any visible indicator to the user,” the group says. “It … ⌘ Read more

Internet Bug Bounty Pauses Payouts, Citing ‘Expanding Discovery’ From AI-Assisted Research
The Internet Bug Bounty program “has been paused for new submissions,” they announced last week.

Running since 2012, the program is funded by “a number of leading software companies,” reports InfoWorld, “and has awarded more than $1.5m to researchers who have reported bugs “

Up to now, 80% of its p … ⌘ Read more

How I vibe-coded a web tool in three days with no programming experience
AI chatbots make it possible for people who can’t code to build apps, sites and tools. But it’s decidedly problematic. ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oops, I guess the new text is a bit obscure. If you follow the link, the text is a bit more explicit, but you still need to know what a lexical scope is. Anyway, this is part of Perl moving very carefully toward being UTF-8 by default while also not breaking code written in the 90s. If you name a recent version like “use v5.42;” then Perl stops letting you use non-ASCII characters unless you also say “use utf8;”. The “lexically” part basically means that strictness continues until the next “}”, or the end of the program. That lets you fix up old code one block at a time, if you aren’t ready to apply the new strictness to a whole file at once.

MidnightBSD 4.0.4 Released With Aged & Agectl For Age Verification/Attestation
MidnightBSD 4.0.4 is out today as the newest update to this desktop-minded BSD operating system. Notable with this update is introducing the Aged daemon and Agectl program for handling age verification and age attestation given the increasing number of US states pursuing laws around age verification at the OS user level… ⌘ Read more

A Lot Of Rust Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 7.1, NVIDIA Nova Driver Additions
Sent out yesterday were the DRM Rust feature changes for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window coming in April. The Rust graphics/display driver code for Linux 7.1 includes more programming language abstractions and other Rust infrastructure work to make graphics drivers written in Rust more capable… ⌘ Read more

After 16 Years and $8 Billion, the Military’s New GPS Software Still Doesn’t Work
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last year, just before the Fourth of July holiday, the US Space Force officially took ownership of a new operating system for the GPS navigation network, raising hopes that one of the military’s most troubled space programs might finally bear fruit. The GPS Next- … ⌘ Read more

What Made Bell Labs So Successful?
Bell Labs “created many of the foundational innovations of the modern age,” writes Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation — from transistors and telecommunications satellites to Unix and the C programming language.

But what was the secret to its success? he asks in a new article for the Wall Street Journal. Start with its lucky arrival in a “problem-ri … ⌘ Read more

Krita 6.0 Released With Qt6 Port & Better Wayland Support
Krita 6.0 debuted today as the Qt6 port of this digital painting program aligned with KDE/Qt development. Krita 6.0 also brings improved Wayland support while Krita 5.3 is being simultaneously released for running on the mature Qt5 toolkit… ⌘ Read more

Canonical Joins Rust Foundation
BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member, signaling a deeper investment in the Rust programming language and its role in modern infrastructure. The company already maintains an up-to-date Rust toolchain for Ubuntu and has begun integrating Rust into parts of its stack, citing memory safety and reliability as key drivers. By joining at a higher tier, Canonical is not just ad … ⌘ Read more

Linux’s sched_ext Will Prioritize Idle SMT Siblings For Better Performance
A change to the Linux kernel’s extensible scheduler class “sched_ext” for allowing nifty scheduler implementations via BPF programs will begin to prioritize SMT siblings to help with better performance… ⌘ Read more

Will AI Force Source Code to Evolve - Or Make it Extinct?
Will there be an AI-optimized programming language at the expense of human readability? There’s now been experiments with minimizing tokens for “LLM efficiency, without any concern for how it would serve human developers.”

This new article asks if AI will force source code to evolve — or make it extinct, noting that Stephen Cass, the special projects edi … ⌘ Read more

Intel, NVIDIA, AMD GPU Drivers Finally Play Nice With ReactOS
ReactOS aims to be compatible with programs and drivers developed for Windows Server 2003 and later versions of Microsoft Windows.

And Slashdot reader jeditobe reports that the project has now “announced significant progress in achieving compatibility with proprietary graphics drivers.”

ReactOS now supports roughly 90% of GPU drivers for Windows XP and … ⌘ Read more

EU Cloud Lobby Asks Regulator To Block VMware From Terminating Partner Program
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A lobbying trade body for smaller cloud providers is asking the European Commission to impose interim measures blocking Broadcom from terminating the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, calling the decision a death sentence for some tech suppliers and an illegal … ⌘ Read more

Google Details New 24-Hour Process To Sideload Unverified Android Apps
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is planning big changes for Android in 2026 aimed at combating malware across the entire device ecosystem. Starting in September, Google will begin restricting application sideloading with its developer verification program, but not everyone is on board. Android Ecosy … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Acquires Developer Tooling Startup Astral
OpenAI announced it’s acquiring developer tooling startup Astral to strengthen its Codex AI coding assistant, which has over 2 million weekly users and has seen a three-fold increase in user growth since the start of the year. CNBC reports: “Through it all, though, our goal remains the same: to make programming more productive. To build tools that radically change what it … ⌘ Read more

SaaS Apocalypse Could Be OpenSource’s Greatest Opportunity
Longtime Slashdot reader internet-redstar writes: Nearly a trillion dollars has been wiped from software stocks in 2026, with hedge funds making billions shorting Salesforce, HubSpot, and Atlassian. At FOSDEM 2026, cURL maintainer Daniel Stenberg shut down his bug bounty program after AI-generated slop overwhelmed his team. A new article on HackerNoon argues … ⌘ Read more

New ‘Vibe Coded’ AI Translation Tool Splits the Video Game Preservation Community
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” just over a year ago, we’ve seen a rapid increase in both the capabilities and popularity of using AI models to throw together quick programming projects with less human time and effort than ever before. … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 sched_ext To Add “SCX_ENQ_IMMED” For Tighter Control When Tasks Land On A CPU
The Linux kernel’s extensible scheduler class “sched_ext” to allow for custom CPU scheduling policies as BPF programs continues enabling new functionality. Queued up in the sched_ext development code ahead of next month’s Linux 7.1 cycle is the new SCX_ENQ_IMMED capability for enabling tighter control over when tasks land on a CPU… ⌘ Read more

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

Two Long-Lost Episodes of ‘Doctor Who’ Found
Longtime Slashdot reader tsuliga writes: Two new episodes of Doctor Who that were previously lost have been found. The original Doctor Who episodes were wiped or deleted by the BBC because they were not aware of the future use of re-runs of these shows. Ninety-five of the 253 episodes from the program’s first six years are currently missing. How many more episodes are out there … ⌘ Read more