It’s this time of the year again, where people burn money on the streets.

Rocket Crashes in Brazil’s First Commercial Launch
The first-ever commercial rocket launched at Brazil’s Alcantara Space Center crashed soon after liftoff late earlier this week, dealing a blow to Brazilian aerospace ambitions and shares of South Korean satellite launch company Innospace. From a report: The rocket began its vertical trajectory as planned after liftoff [Monday] at 10:13 p.m. local time (0113 GMT) but fell … ⌘ Read more

QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop Brings QNX 8.0 To A Wayland + Xfce Desktop
Announced earlier in December but flying under the radar until now is the initial reoease of a QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop. This is a developer environment for the QNX real-time operating system primarily used on embedded systems. With now having this developer desktop option, the hassle of cross-compilation to target QNX can be avoided… ⌘ Read more

Gmail Users May Soon Be Able To Change Their Email Address and Keep the Old One
Google appears to be testing a feature that would let users change their @gmail.com address for the first time, according to an official support document. The support page exists only in Hindi, suggesting an India-first rollout, and Google notes that users will “gradually begin to see this option.”

The feature would l … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, I take my 0°C over the 36°C anytime! Even with yesterday’s gray and windy sleet in my face. However, there are definitely more pleasant times to walk in town, I’ll give you that. For example on 0°C sunny today: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-12-25/

The Phone-Based Retirement Is Here
Adult children across the United States are increasingly reporting that their aging parents have developed what looks remarkably like the smartphone addiction [non-paywalled source] typically associated with teenagers, a phenomenon The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel has dubbed “phone-based retirement.” A 2019 Pew Research Center study found people 60 and older spend more than half their daily leisure time – … ⌘ Read more

An Amateur Codebreaker May Have Just Solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac Killings
Los Angeles Times (non-paywalled source): When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short – who became known as the Black Dahlia – he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with … ⌘ Read more

YouTube Has a Firm Grip on Daytime TV
YouTube has been winning the streaming wars for years, but its real competitive advantage comes not from prime-time viewing but from its stranglehold on daytime hours when Americans are meditating, exercising, cooking, or simply looking for background noise. At 11 a.m. in October, YouTube commanded an average audience of 6.3 million viewers compared to Netflix’s 2.8 million, according to Nielsen dat … ⌘ Read more

Ireland’s Diarmuid Early Wins World Microsoft Excel Title
Irish competitor Diarmuid Early, dubbed the “Lebron James of Excel spreadsheets,” has won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship in Las Vegas, dethroning three-time champion Andrew Ngai. The BBC reports: The esport showpiece in December attracted competitors worldwide as 256 spreadsheet heads battled it out across knockout rounds to join the final 24 in Ve … ⌘ Read more

Is the Dictionary Done For?
In the late 1980s, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 155 consecutive weeks and eventually sold 57 million copies, a figure believed to be second only to the Bible in the United States – but those days are thoroughly gone. Stefan Fatsis’s new book “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary” chronicles what Louis Menand describes in The New Yorker … ⌘ Read more

Samsung’s 2026 Gaming Monitors Promise 6K, 3D, and Up To 1,040Hz
An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung is breaking new ground with its 2026 lineup of gaming monitors, with the Odyssey 3D G90XH becoming the first to feature a 6K display with “glasses-free 3D.” The new monitor comes with a 32-inch IPS panel, offering real-time eye-tracking that “adjusts depth and perspective” based on your position, … ⌘ Read more

Australia Poised for Desalination Boom as Water Shortages Loom
Australia is on track for a significant expansion of desalination capacity – converting seawater to freshwater – to meet the needs of a swelling population at a time of declining average rainfall. From a report: The world’s driest inhabited continent is projected to build or expand 11 desalination plants worth more than A$23 billion ($15 billion) over t … ⌘ Read more

AMD Krackan Point Sub-$500 Laptop Linux Performance Improves By ~8% In Just Six Months
As an end-of-year tradition at Phoronix for running a lot of year-over-year comparison performance benchmarks and other long-term performance evaluations, it’s typically done on the higher-end hardware. That’s done for a matter of time savings with maximum performance when running often 100~200+ benchmarks per article, the highest-end hardware typically being the most interesting in terms of features and capabilities, and more … ⌘ Read more

How a Power Outage In Colorado Caused US Official Time To Be 4.8 Microseconds
Tony Isaac shares a report from NPR: The U.S. government calculates the country’s official time using more than a dozen atomic clocks at a federal facility northwest of Denver. But when a destructive windstorm knocked out power to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) laboratory in Boulder on Wednesd … ⌘ Read more

Garmin Emergency Autoland Has First Save
“Garmin’s Collier Trophy award-winning Autonomi emergency Autoland, a system designed to safely land an aircraft in the event of pilot incapacitation, made its first real-world use and save on Saturday,” writes Slashdot reader slipped_bit. AvBrief.com reports: Social media posts from flight tracking hobbyists reported a King Air 200 squawked 7700 about 2 p.m. local time today. The Autoland sy … ⌘ Read more

Cyberattack Disrupts France’s Postal Service, Banking During Christmas Rush
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: With just three days to go before Christmas, a cyberattack knocked France’s national postal service offline Monday, blocking and delaying package deliveries and online payments. The timing was miserable for millions of people at the height of the Christmas season, as … ⌘ Read more

I just had a closer look at https://git.mills.io/prologic/mu and it motivated me to do some compiler building myself again. Hopefully, I find some time in the next free days. I’m bad at it, but it’s always great fun.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ve been awake at that time, didn’t notice anything. 🤔 Where was that BGP analyzer again … 😅 There’s a tool that keeps track of these things, right? I forgot what it was.

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de A crocodile had bitten the big submarine internet cable that connects Australia to Europe. The investigations revealed that some construction work last week accidentally tore up the protective layer around it. That went unnoticed, unfortunately, so marine life had an easy job today. For just 40 minutes, they were quite fast in repairing the damage if you ask me! These communication cables are fricking large.

Just kidding, I completely made that up. :-D I didn’t notice any outage either. But I didn’t try to connect to Down Under at the time span in question.

Is Xbox Betting on Cross-Platform Gaming?
A “slew of layoffs, price hikes and studio closures” for Microsoft’s Xbox “have led many to declare — not for the first time — that the Xbox is dead,” reports CNBC.

Or is it just changing its business model?

The company’s overall gaming revenue decreased 2% year-over-year, with a 29% dip in Xbox hardware sales, according to Microsoft’s first-quarter earnings for fiscal 2026. The broader co … ⌘ Read more

Weston 15.0 Alpha Released With New Protocols, Experimental Vulkan Renderer
After being delayed by three months to allow additional time for new features to land, Weston 15.0 Alpha 1 is out today as a big feature release for this reference Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

Are ‘Geek Gifts’ Becoming Their Own Demographic?
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland wonders if “gifts for geeks” is the next big consumer demographic:

For this year’s holiday celebrations, Hallmark made a special Christmas tree ornament, a tiny monitor displaying screens from the classic video game “Oregon Trail.” (“Recall the fun of leading a team of oxen and a wagon loaded with provisions from Missouri to the West … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Very nice! I often wish other languages had something similar. Sometimes, I use lambdas, but that also looks ugly and feels a bit like a misuse. Other times, just the normal blocks are enough, but it’s not the same. Especially with the mutability aspects as the article explains. Typically, I just put it in a function or ignore it if it’s just a few lines.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ah, cool! :-) Yeah, it’s very wild what is happening under the hood all the time.

Inaugural ‘Hour of AI’ Event Includes Minecraft, Microsoft, Google and 13.1 Million K-12 Schoolkids
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last September, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org pledged to engage 25 million K-12 schoolchildren in an “Hour of AI” this school year. Preliminary numbers released this week by the Code.org Advocacy Coalition showed that [halfway through the f … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org These tables get shuffled around every time your OS switches to another process. It’s crazy that so much is going on behind the scenes.

EV Battery-Swapping Startup That Raised $330 Million Files for Bankruptcy
In 2023 Slashdot covered a battery-swapping startup that promised to give EVs a full charge in about the same time it takes to fill a tank of gas.

They just filed for bankruptcy, reports Inc:

Ample was founded in 2014 with a goal of “solving slow charging times and infrastructure incompatibility” for commercial EV fleets su … ⌘ Read more

James Webb Space Telescope Confirms 1st ‘Runaway’ Supermassive Black Hole
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second). That not … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net working, at this point against my will, on a Linux VPS that has gotten me sick time and time again

Stanford Computer Science Grads Find Their Degrees No Longer Guarantee Jobs
Elite computer science degrees are no longer a guaranteed on-ramp to tech jobs, as AI-driven coding tools slash demand for entry-level engineers and concentrate hiring around a small pool of already “elite” or AI-savvy developers. The Los Angeles Times reports: “Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find … ⌘ Read more

Strava Puts Popular ‘Year In Sport’ Recap Behind an $80 Paywall
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, Strava, the popular fitness-tracking app, released its annual “Year in Sport” wrap-up – a cutesy, animated series of graphics summarizing each user’s athletic achievements. But this year, for the first time, Strava made this feature available only to users with subscriptions ( … ⌘ Read more

Boyhood – A Grand Time
It’s always a gift when we get a new one from Boyhood, especially when it arrives accompanied by a sick Monika Kraska video… Continue reading… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, well, given that I didn’t need this for such a long time, it’s probably not an essential tool. 😅

I’ve often wanted to have an outline of text documents, though, and tagbar/ctags can do that as well:

This isn’t as powerful as the “Navigator” tool in StarOffice/LibreOffice (which can be used to rearrange the document), but still pretty useful:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/so31.mp4

Cloud Hypervisor 50 Released With QCOW2 Compression, Performance Improvements
Cloud Hypervisor 50.0 is out today for this cloud-minded, security-focused and Rust-based hypervisor. Cloud Hypervsior began as an open-source Intel project while in more recent times has shifted to being largely maintained by Microsoft, Crusoe, Cyberus Tech, Rivos, and others… ⌘ 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

OpenZFS 2.4 Released With Faster Encryption Performance, Many Other Improvements
OpenZFS 2.4 is out as stable in time for the holidays! The big OpenZFS 2.4 feature release is now available for FreeBSD and Linux systems to continue advancing the open-source ZFS file-system support… ⌘ Read more

Another Starship Clone Pops Up In China
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Every other week, it seems, a new Chinese launch company pops up with a rocket design and a plan to reach orbit within a few years. For a long time, the majority of these companies revealed designs that looked a lot like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The first of these copy cats, the medium-lift Zhuque-3 rocket built by LandSpace … ⌘ Read more

MIT Grieves Shooting Death of Renowned Director of Plasma Science Center
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) community is grieving after the “shocking” shooting death of the director of its plasma science and fusion center, according to officials. Nuno FG Loureiro, 47, had been shot multiple times at his home in the affluent Boston subu … ⌘ Read more

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

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This is the total amount of cpu time consumed right?

Volkswagen To End Production At German Plant, a First In Company History
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The last vehicle will roll off the assembly line at Volkswagen’s plant in Dresden, Germany, on Tuesday, marking the first time in the automaker’s 88-year history that it has closed a plant in its home country. Volkswagen warned of potential production cuts last year, as i … ⌘ Read more

High-Speed Traders Are Feuding Over a Way To Save 3.2 Billionths of a Second
A millisecond used to be a big deal for the world’s quickest traders. A dispute over huge trading profits at one of the world’s largest futures exchanges shows they now think a million times faster [non-paywalled source]. From a report: The controversy is about an arcane technical maneuver in which high-speed traders bombar … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I stopped following Toy Story a long time ago, anyways

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”.)

Why Floods Threaten One of the Driest Places in the World
One of the most water-scarce regions on Earth is now experiencing a dramatic atmospheric shift that’s pushing moisture onto Oman’s northern coast at rates more than 1.5 times the global average, according to a Washington Post investigation of global atmospheric data [non-paywalled source]. The change has turned extreme rainfall into a recurrent source of cat … ⌘ Read more

Security Researcher Found Critical Kindle Vulnerabilities That Allowed Hijacking Amazon Accounts
The Black Hat Europe hacker conference in London included a session titled “Don’t Judge an Audiobook by Its Cover” about a two critical (and now fixed) flaws in Amazon’s Kindle. The Times reports both flaws were discovered by engineering analyst Valentino Ricotta (from the cybersecurit … ⌘ Read more

Day 9 also required some optimizations, if you aren’t careful, you end up with really inefficient algorithms with time/memory complexity beyond what a typical machine has 🤣

Day 7 was pretty tough, I initially ended up implementing an exponential in both time and memory solution that I killed because it was eating all the resources on my Mac Studio, and this poor little machine only has 32GB of memory (I stopped it at 118GB of memory, swapping badly!), This is what I ended up doing before/after:

• Before: Time O(2^k · L), memory O(2^k), where k is the number of splitters along a reachable path and L is path length. Exponential in k.
  
• After: Time O(R·C) (or O(R·C + s) with s split events), memory O©, where R = rows, C = columns. Polynomial/linear in grid size.

The Opt-In Proactive & Crash Time Data Collection On Valve’s Steam Deck
Valve’s Steam Deck with SteamOS features built-in crash data collection as well as for logging other system events worth having knowledge about like the split-lock detection and other events. This is all opt-in by users for data collection by Steam, but for those curious about a bit more insight into this Steam Deck data collection, a presentation at this past week’s Linux Plumbers Conference dove into the matter… ⌘ Read more