How To Not Get Kidnapped For Your Bitcoin
schwit1 shares a report from the New York Times: Pete Kayll, a musclebound veteran of Britain’s Royal Marines, had an unusual instruction for the Bitcoin investors gathered in Switzerland in late October. “Just bite your way out,” he told them. It was the final day of a weekend-long cryptocurrency convention on the shore of Lake Lugano, near the Italian border. A small group of investors had l … ⌘ Read more

We Can Now Track Individual Monarch Butterflies
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico. This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into … ⌘ Read more

Electric Vehicle Sales Are Booming In South America
Chinese automakers are rapidly expanding across South America, boosted by the new Chinese-built Port of Chancay, aggressive pricing, local partnerships, and growing regional demand. Reuters reports: China has been ramping up sales since the opening last year of the Port of Chancay, north of Lima. The Chinese-built megaport has halved trans-Pacific shipping times just as C … ⌘ Read more

NetChoice Sues Virginia To Block Its One-Hour Social Media Limit For Kids
NetChoice is suing Virginia to block a new law that limits kids under 16 to one hour of daily social media use unless parents approve more time, arguing the rule violates the First Amendment and introduces serious privacy risks through mandatory age-verification. The Verge reports: In addition to restricting access to legal speech … ⌘ Read more

systemd 259-rc1 Released With Musl libc Support, New run0 “Empower” Mode
Released a short time ago was systemd 259-rc1 as the first test release toward this next version of this dominant Linux init system and service manager… ⌘ Read more

Bezos Returns To CEO Role With AI Startup Project Prometheus
Jeff Bezos has founded an AI startup called Project Prometheus and will serve as its co-chief executive. This is his first formal operational role since stepping down as chief executive of Amazon in July 2021. The company has raised $6.2 billion in funding, The New York Times reports, partly from Bezos. The funding makes Project Prometheus one of the most wel … ⌘ Read more

Bitcoin Erases Year’s Gain as Crypto Bear Market Deepens
655”Just a little more than a month after reaching an all-time high, Bitcoin has erased the more than 30% gain registered since the start of the year…” reports Bloomberg:

The dominant cryptocurrency fell below US$93,714 on Sunday, pushing the price beneath the closing level reached at the end of last year, when financial markets were rallying following Presiden … ⌘ Read more

Apple Speeds Planning for Replacing CEO Tim Cook Next Year
From the Business Standard:

Apple has accelerated its succession plans as the company prepares for Chief Executive Tim Cook to potentially step down as early as next year, Financial Times reported. Apple’s board and senior leaders have recently increased their focus on a smooth leadership transition after Cook’s more than 14 years at the helm of the $4 tril … ⌘ Read more

Solar and Wind are Covering ALl New Power Demand in 2025
An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek:

Solar and wind are growing fast enough to meet all new electricity demand worldwide for the first three quarters of 2025, according to new data from energy think tank Ember.

The group now expects fossil power to stay flat for the full year, marking the first time since the pandemic that fossil generatio … ⌘ Read more

🕧 The time is now twelve thirty in the afternoon 🌅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @bender@twtxt.net that’s also what Yarn.social’s logo is, and just happens to be the yarnd default. Hmmm figured times for a change? 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think I now remember having similar problems back then. I’m pretty sure I typically consulted the Qt C++ documentation and only very rarely looked at the Python one. It was easy enough to translate the C++ code to Python.

Yeah, the GIL can be problematic at times. I’m glad it wasn’t an issue for my application.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, same startup delay. (Go is not an option for me anyway.)

It’s hard to tell why all this is so slow. Maybe in this particular case it has something to do with fonts: strace shows the program loading the fontconfig configs several times, and that takes up a bulk of the startup time. 🤔 (Qt6 or Java don’t do that, but they’re still slow to start up – for other reasons, apparently.)

To be fair, it’s “just” the initial program startup (with warm I/O caches). Once it’s running, it’s fine. All toolkits I’ve tried are. But I don’t want to accept such delays, not in the year 2025. 😅 Imagine every terminal window needing half a second to appear on the screen … nah, man.

Virtual reality had its chance. It blew it
I’ve spent more time this year thinking about virtual reality than actually using it. That should tell you everything you need to know about VR’s state of play in 2025. ⌘ Read more

13+ years wasn’t enough time ⌘ Read more

Why Solarpunk Is Already Happening In Africa
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a Substack post by economist/entrepreneur Skander Garroum:

You know that feeling when you’re waiting for the cable guy, and they said ‘between 8am and 6pm, and you waste your entire day, and they never show up? Now imagine that, except the cable guy is ‘electricity,’ the day is ‘50 years,’ and you’re one of 600 million people. At some point, yo … ⌘ Read more

88 years on: why are we still so obsessed with finding Amelia Earhart ?
The disappearance of the world-famous aviator remains one of the most enduring mysteries of our time. Natasha Heap: It has been more than 88 years sin… ⌘ Read more

I like to read through old RPG books and zines for inspiration for my games, and lately I’ve been enjoying the Arduin Grimoire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduin), one of the earliest 3rd-party zines (coming out during the initial run of OD&D). It’s filled with a bunch of unique ideas (some better than others), entirely too many charts, and is very much a product of its time, but there’s something about its “raw”-ness (and its variety) that I still find appealing.

Be it Java with Swing or PyQt6, it takes ~300 ms until a basic window with a treeview and a listbox appears. That is a very noticeable delay.

Is it unrealistic to expect faster startup times these days? 🤔

Once the program is running, a new second window (in the same process) appears very quickly. So it’s all just the initialization stuff that takes so long. I could, of course, do what “fat” programs have done for ages: Pre-launch the process during boot, windowless. But I was hoping that this wasn’t needed. 😞 (And it’s a bad model anyway. When the main process crashes, all windows crash with it.)

Report: Tim Cook to Step Down as Apple CEO ‘as Soon as Next Year’
Apple is preparing for Tim Cook to step down as CEO of the company “as soon as next year,” according to the Financial Times.

Image

The company’s board of directors and senior executives “recently intensified preparations for Cook to hand over the reins,” the report said.

Whil … ⌘ Read more

GM Wants Parts Makers To Pull Supply Chains From China
schwit1 shares a report from the Business Times: General Motors (GM) has directed several thousand of its suppliers to scrub their supply chains of parts from China, four people familiar with the matter said, reflecting automakers’ growing frustration over geopolitical disruptions to their operations. GM executives have been telling suppliers they should find altern … ⌘ Read more

Man, @quark@ferengi.one has an absolute gold mine. Having dealt again with different clocks and all sorts of strange time things at work today, this made my day! https://netbros.com/1755172401/ :‘-D

Nouveau Driver To Support Larger Pages & Compression Support With Linux 6.19
While the “Nova” driver continues to be developed as a modern Rust-written, open-source and in-kernel NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux, for the time being Nouveau is what’s working for end-users for those wanting a mainline open-source NVIDIA graphics driver for gaming and other workloads. With Linux 6.19 the Nouveau driver is picking up support for handling larger pages as well as compression support… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Twtxt <-> ActivityPub (2nd time’s the charm? 🤣)

How to Turn Off Journal “Time to Write” Reminders on iPhone & Apple Watch
Once you use the Journal app, it will send a daily notification to your iPhone and Apple Watch (yuck) with a reminder that says “Time to Write”, nudging you to create a new journal entry for the day. If you’re annoyed by the Journal “Time to Write” alerts on your iPhone or Apple Watch, you … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/11/14/how-to-turn-off-journal-time-to-write-re … ⌘ Read more

Family of suspected WA Optus outage victim say they’re still in the dark
Christopher Oliver died about the same time Optus experienced a critical outage of its triple-zero network. Two months later, his family are no closer to finding out if he tried to make a call for help. ⌘ Read more

The sobering numbers behind the death of a 14-year-old WA girl
By 14, a young Perth girl had lived in four group homes, had been hospitalised three times after threatening to kill herself and was bounced between 70 care arrangements. ⌘ Read more

Sheepish Stokes grabs six wicket haul
A sheepish Ben Stokes appeared at times embarrassed as he grabbed a six wicket haul in England’s Ashes warmup match. ⌘ Read more

Netflix’s New Era of TV Games Starts Now
Netflix is launching a new slate of TV-streamed party games that are all playable using your phone as the controller. The Verge reports: To start, Netflix is offering Boggle Party, Party Crasher: Fool Your Friends, Lego Party, Pictionary: Game Night, and Tetris Time Warp. A social deduction game based on the Knives Out series, Dead Man’s Party: A Knives Out Game, is also part of this new slate … ⌘ Read more

New laws in Victoria aim to improve protection for retail workers
As retailers gear up for their busiest time of year, new laws are being introduced in Victoria to crack down on customers who abuse shop staff. ⌘ Read more

It’s that time again, I’ve just rotated my #twtxt feed!

Find last quarter’s twts at the feed: https://tilde.pt/~marado/twtxt-2025Q3.txt , or see them on the web: https://tilde.pt/~marado/twtxt-2025Q3.html

Who sacked Gough Whitlam? Take the Brisbane Times Quiz
Test your knowledge of current events and earth-shattering anniversaries with the weekly trivia challenge. ⌘ Read more

As it happened: Liberals agree to dump 2050 target; Ley promises lower prices, dodges questions on timing; New coal and gas could be funded
Follow along as we bring you the latest live news updates from Australia and around the world. ⌘ Read more

Scientists Watch Supernova Shockwave Shoot Through a Dying Star For First Time
For the first time, astronomers captured the shockwave of a supernova bursting through the surface of a dying red supergiant star, revealing a surprisingly symmetrical, grape-shaped explosion. Space.com reports: Seeing this moment in detail has previously been elusive because it’s rare for a supernova to be spotted … ⌘ Read more

Net zero Australia LIVE updates: Liberals agree to dump 2050 target; Ley promises lower prices, dodges questions on timing; New coal and gas could be funded
Follow along as we bring you the latest live news updates from Australia and around the world. ⌘ Read more

Net zero Australia LIVE updates: Liberals agree to dump 2050 target; Ley promises lower prices, dodges questions on timing; New coal and gas could be funded
Follow along as we bring you the latest live news updates from Australia and around the world. ⌘ Read more

Net zero Australia LIVE updates: Liberals agree to dump 2050 target; Ley promises lower prices, dodges questions on timing; Littleproud welcomes news
Follow along as we bring you the latest live news updates from Australia and around the world. ⌘ Read more

Net zero Australia LIVE updates: Liberals agree to dump 2050 target; Ley promises lower prices, dodges questions on timing; Littleproud welcomes news
Follow along as we bring you the latest live news updates from Australia and around the world. ⌘ Read more

‘Rolled-up cash’: Jail time urged for ex-CFMEU leaders over kickbacks
Father and son duo Darren and Michael Greenfield received bribes from a construction industry figure, concealed as cash handed under the table at the union’s office. ⌘ Read more

Net zero Australia LIVE updates: Liberals agree to dump 2050 target; Ley promises lower prices, dodges questions on timing; Littleproud welcomes news
Follow along as we bring you the latest live news updates from Australia and around the world. ⌘ Read more

Intel Finds Great Performance With PostgreSQL’s AVX-512 Support
Back in April PostgreSQL added AVX-512 support for CRC32 computations. At the time the gains for CRC32 computations with this popular open-source database server were reported to be 50% to 3x faster for x86_64 CPUs able to leverage AVX-512. That AVX-512 support is found with PostgreSQL 18.0 that released in September and now Intel is praising this addition to PostgreSQL for which their developers also had a part in along with AWS and others… ⌘ Read more

AI-Generated Song Tops Country Music Chart
Slashdot readers Tablizer and fjo3 share news that an AI-generated country song has topped the U.S. sales chart for the first time this week. ABC News reports: The new country tune, “Walk my Walk” by Breaking Rust, recently hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, reaching over 3 million streams on Spotify in less than a month. That success has garnered mixed rea … ⌘ Read more

Waymo Robotaxis Are Now Giving Rides On Freeways
Waymo is rolling out robotaxi rides that use freeways across Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix for the first time – “a critical expansion for the company that it says will reduce ride times by up to 50%,” reports TechCrunch. From the report: That stat could help attract a whole new group of users who need to travel between the many towns and suburbs within the greater San … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Fights Order To Turn Over Millions of ChatGPT Conversations
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI asked a federal judge in New York on Wednesday to reverse an order that required it to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat logs amid a copyright infringement lawsuit by the New York Times and other news outlets, saying it would expose users’ private conversations. The artificial … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 Brings Smarter Reasoning and More Personality Presets To ChatGPT
OpenAI today released GPT-5.1, an update to its flagship model line. The update includes two versions: GPT-5.1 Instant, which OpenAI says adds adaptive reasoning capabilities and improved instruction following, and GPT-5.1 Thinking, which adjusts its processing time based on query complexity.

The Thinking model respond … ⌘ Read more

Sex could help wounds heal faster by reducing stress
Mild wounds healed faster if people took a spray containing the “love hormone” oxytocin and set aside time to praise their partner – but they cleared up even quicker if these individuals were also intimate with their other half ⌘ Read more

Huge cloud of plasma belched out by star 130 light years away
A coronal mass ejection from a distant star has been confirmed for the first time, raising questions about how such events could impact exoplanet habitability ⌘ Read more

This looks like a botnet, to be honest. The IPs are all over the place. Ethopia, Brazil, Kenya, Lebanon, Netherlands, … I mean, that’s the logical thing to do, isn’t it? Do your web crawling on infected PCs. Nobody will block those, because those are the same IP ranges as legitimate requests. And obviously you don’t have to pay for computing time.

… and they all send invalid HTTP requests, all answered with HTTP 400 … How silly.

Fighting the New York Times’ invasion of user privacy
Comments ⌘ Read more

Last night, we had to say goodbye to our sweet boy, Paul. He was only 7 years old. I am so completely devastated and so completely grateful for the time we had with him. ⌘ Read more