OpenAI’s Head of Robotics Resigns, Says Pentagon Deal Was ‘Rushed Without the Guardrails Defined’
In a tweet that’s been viewed 1.3 million times in the last six hours, OpenAI’s head of robotics announced their resignation. They said they “care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together,” so this “wasn’t an easy call,” but offered this reason for resigning:

… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Linux Driver Ready With Fix For Brand New Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 Laptop
This week at MWC 2026, Lenovo announced the ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 as one of their new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” powered laptops alongside other products. With Panther Lake running rather well on Linux, the new ThinkPad T14 G7 should be in good standing on Linux and especially with a pending Xe graphics driver fix that is on the way… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Uuuhhhhhh, this looks incredibly nice! Did you hear anything or was it just a visual thing?

ChatGPT Gets GPT-5.3 Instant Update With Less ‘Cringe,’ Fewer Hallucinations
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: OpenAI today updated its most popular ChatGPT model, debuting GPT-5.3 Instant. GPT-5.3 Instant is supposed to provide more accurate answers and better contextualized results when searching the web. The update also cuts down on unnecessary dead ends, caveats, and overly declarative … ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2 RC3 Released In Preparation For The Stable GIMP 3.2
Ahead of the stable GIMP 3.2 release hopefully happening soon, GIMP 3.2 RC3 was released this evening for testing… ⌘ Read more

Stack Overflow Adds New Features (Including AI Assist), Rethinks ‘Look and Feel’
“At its peak in early 2014, Stack Overflow received more than 200,000 questions per month,” notes the site DevClass.com. But in December they’d just 3,862 questions were asked — a 78 percent drop from the previous year.

But Stack Overflow’s blog announced a beta of “a redesigned Stack Overflow” this week, noting t … ⌘ Read more

AIs Can’t Stop Recommending Nuclear Strikes In War Game Simulations
“Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises,” reports New Scientist:

Kenneth Payne at King’s College London set three leading large language models — GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash — against each other in simulated war games. The s … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Raises $110 Billion in the Largest Private Funding Round Ever
OpenAI has closed what is now the largest private financing in history – a $110 billion round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation that more than doubles the $40 billion raise it completed just a year ago, itself a record for a private tech company at the time.

Amazon invested $50 billion, SoftBank put in $30 billion, and Nvidia committed $3 … ⌘ Read more

Moon’s Ancient Magnetic Field May Have Flickered On and Off
sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: For decades, planetary scientists have pored over a mystery hidden within the Moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and ‘70s. Minerals in the rocks record the imprint of a magnetic field, nearly as powerful as Earth’s, that existed more than 3.5 billion years ago and seemed to persist f … ⌘ Read more

Google Launches Nano Banana 2 Model With Faster Image Generation
Google has launched Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image), a faster, more realistic image generation model that becomes the default across Gemini, Search, Lens, and Flow. TechCrunch reports: The new Nano Banana 2 retains some of the high-fidelity characteristics of the Pro model but produces images faster. The company says you can create images … ⌘ Read more

The AI Case Against Indian IT Ignores What Indian IT Actually Does
A fictional memo set in June 2028, published by short seller Citrini Research, wiped roughly $10 billion off Indian IT stocks in a single trading session on February 24 and sent the Nifty IT index down as much as 5.3% – its worst single-day fall since August 2023 – on the argument that AI coding agents have collapsed the cost advantage of Indian … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Holy cow, I didn’t notice the ice! :-O Thanks for pointing that out! I was just after the bee. :-)

33°C down to 3°C, wow. O_o What a drop. But it raises again dramatically during day, right?

FreeRDP 3.23 Addresses 11 CVEs, Improved SDL Client
For those making use of the open-source FreeRDP project for your Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) needs, FreeRDP 3.23 is out today with 11 CVEs addressed in taking care of various security-related issues that have been uncovered… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net I think I haven’t written a single line of code outside of work in the last ~3 weeks, because I was so distracted by (gestures broadly) everything.

CGIT 1.3 Web Frontend For Git Released After Six Years
Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard and Linux cryptography fame has taken a break from that to release a new version of CGIT, the lightweight web interface for Git repositories. CGIT 1.3 is the first new release in six years and comes with a lot of changes… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Here is a properly formatted version of your message:

Not yet — but that’s probably a good idea.

Instructions:

1. Clone the repository
   

git clone https://git.mills.io/saltyim/saltyim.git
cd saltyim

1. Check out the v2 branch
   

git checkout v2

1. Build and install the CLI/TUI
   

make DESTDIR=$HOME/bin install

After installation, run:

salty-chat

Pro-Gamer Consumer Movement ‘Stop Killing Games’ Will Launch NGOs in America and the US
The consumer movement Stop Killing Games “has come a long way in the two years since
YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft’s
destruction of The Crew in 2024,” writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. “The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group’s petition, mandating its considerati … ⌘ Read more

Cyber Stocks Slide As Anthropic Unveils ‘Claude Code Security’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Shares of cybersecurity software companies tumbled Friday after Anthropic PBC introduced a new security feature into its Claude AI model. Crowdstrike Holdings was the among the biggest decliners, falling as much as 6.5%, while Cloudflare slumped more than 6%. Meanwhile, Zscaler dropped 3.5%, SailPoint s … ⌘ Read more

US Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Global Tariffs
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down on Friday President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs that he pursued under a law meant for use in national emergencies, rejecting one of his most contentious assertions of his authority in a ruling with major implications for the global economy. From a report: The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld … ⌘ Read more

Google Announces Gemini 3.1 Pro For ‘Complex Problem-Solving’
Google has introduced Gemini 3.1 Pro, a reasoning-focused upgrade aimed at more complex problem-solving. 9to5Google reports: This .1 increment is a first for Google, with the past two generations seeing .5 as the mid-year model update. (2.5 Pro was first announced in March and saw further updates in May for I/O.) Google says Gemini 3.1 Pro “represents a st … ⌘ Read more

Intel Vulkan Driver Lands One-Line Change That Can Bring Minor Performance Benefits
Merged today to Mesa 26.1 Git is a one-line change to the Intel “ANV” Vulkan driver that is showing to deliver some slight performance benefits or up to 3% noted in some select games… ⌘ 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

Google’s AI Music Maker Is Coming To the Gemini App
Google is bringing its Lyria 3 AI music model into the Gemini app, allowing users to generate 30-second songs from text, images, or video prompts directly within the chatbot. The Verge reports: Lyria 3’s text-to-music capabilities allow Gemini app users to make songs by describing specific genres, moods, or memories, such as asking for an “Afrobeat track for my mot … ⌘ Read more

More ISA Differences Come To Light With The New AMD GFX1170 “RDNA 4m”
Earlier this month we spotted the addition of a new GFX1170 GPU target in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Making this GFX1170 target interesting is that its marked as an APU/SoC part with “RDNA 4m” while being part of the GFX11 series. The GFX11 series is for RDNA3, GFX115x is for RDNA 3.5, and GFX12 is RDNA4. More ISA changes have now been committed to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end that make a few more instruction differences better aligned with RDNA4. … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Showing Some Early Performance Regressions On Intel Panther Lake
With the Linux 7.0 merge window beginning to calm down ahead of the 7.0-rc1 release due out on Sunday, one of the areas I was most excited about benchmarking on Linux 7.0 was looking for any performance gains with the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” given ongoing Intel Xe graphics driver improvements and other general kernel optimizations. Unfortunately, at large the Intel Panther Lake performance is moving in the wrong directio … ⌘ Read more

Lab-Grown Meat Exists (But Nobody Wants To Eat It)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2013, scientists unveiled the first lab-grown burger at a cost of $330,000. By 2023, the FDA approved cultivated chicken for sale. The price had dropped to around $10-$30 per pound, and over $3 billion in investor money had poured into more than 175 companies developing meat grown from animal cells instead of slaughtered animals.

The … ⌘ Read more

Intel Lands Initial Preparations For DSA 3.0 Accelerators In Linux 7.0
Last year we began seeing Linux patches preparing the kernel for Intel Data Streaming Accelerator “DSA” 3.0 IP. Finally with the Linux 7.0 kernel those patches in updated form have now been merged… ⌘ Read more

Where’s The Evidence That AI Increases Productivity?
IT productivity researcher Erik Brynjolfsson writes in the Financial Times that he’s finally found evidence AI is impacting America’s economy. This week America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 403,000 drop in 2025’s payroll growth — while real GDP “remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter.”

This decoupling — maintaining high output with sig … ⌘ Read more

Analysis of JWST Data Finds - Old Galaxies in a Young Universe?
Two astrophysicists at Spain’s Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias analyzed data from the James Webb Space Telescope — the most powerful telescope available — on 31 galaxies with an average redshift of 7.3 (when the universe was 700 million years old, according to the standard model). “We found that they are on average ~600 million years old old … ⌘ Read more

Small Crowd Pays to Watch a Boxing Match Between 80-Pound Chinese Robots
Recently a small crowd paid to watch robots boxing, reports Rest of World. (Almost 3,000 people have now watched the match’s 83-minute webcast.)

The match was organized by Rek, a San Francisco-based company, and drew hundreds of spectators who had paid about $60-$80 for a ticket to watch modified G1 robots go at each other. M … ⌘ Read more

Libinput 1.31 Released With Configurable Timeouts, Fast 3-Finger Swipes
Red Hat’s leading input expert Peter Hutterer announced the release overnight of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by the Linux desktop on both X.Org and Wayland desktop sessions… ⌘ Read more

Are CDs Making a Comeback? A Statistical Analysis
Reports of the compact disc’s death may have been slightly premature, according to a new analysis from Stat Significant that finds CD sales as a share of U.S. music industry revenue have quietly stabilized after years of steep decline. RIAA data shows CD revenue share fell from 7.15% in 2018 to 3.04% in 2022 but has since flatlined at roughly 3%, coming in at 3.14% in 2023 … ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint Developing New Wayland-Compatible Screensaver
The Linux Mint developers have been hard at work continuing to develop new features following their recent Mint 22.3 release. There is continued enhancements around keyboard support, a new administration tool for users, and there are also considerations being made around moving to a longer development cycle between Linux Mint releases… ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases New Compute Runtime, Upstreams More SYCL Code To LLVM
Intel today released a new version of their Compute Runtime stack and IGC graphics compiler for Level Zero and OpenCL usage with their integrated and discrete graphics. Separately they also upstreamed more SYCL code this week into mainline LLVM… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Azure Linux Adds 6.12 HWE Kernel, ARM64 Kernel Tuning For More Performance
Microsoft overnight released Azure Linux 3.0.20260204 as the latest release of their in-house Linux distribution widely used within their Azure environment and elsewhere… ⌘ Read more

2 To 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It’s Decaf.
If you think your daily doses of espresso or Earl Grey sharpen your mind, you just might be right, new science suggests. The New York Times: A large new study provides evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea – if it’s caffeinated and consumed in moderation: two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea … ⌘ Read more

GNU Binutils 2.46 Released With AMD Zen 6 Support, SFrame Version 3
Following last week’s release of GNU Coreutils 9.10, released today is GNU Binutils 2.46 for these commonly used GNU binary utilities on Linux systems and elsewhere… ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.3 Brings Support For Direct3D 5 On Vulkan
D7VK is a fork of the DXVK project that is an important part of Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 support atop Vulkan. With D7VK the original goal was a Direct3D 7 implementation on Vulkan. D7VK 1.1 brought experimental Direct3D 6 support and now with today’s release of D7VK 1.3 is support for Direct3D 5… ⌘ 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

Mesa 25.3.5 Brings Vulkan Driver Fixes & Other Minor Changes – Even For Old The R600g
While Mesa 26.0 stable will be out soon, the belated Mesa 25.3.5 point release is now available for serving as the current latest stable point release… ⌘ Read more

Western Digital Plots a Path To 140 TB Hard Drives Using Vertical Lasers and 14-Platter Designs
Western Digital this week laid out a roadmap that stretches its 3.5-inch hard drive platform to 14 platters and pairs it with a new vertical-emitting laser for heat-assisted magnetic recording, a combination the company says will push individual drive capacities beyond 140 TB in the … ⌘ Read more

Krita 6.0 Beta Released - Using Qt6 & Wayland Color Management Support
The first beta release of Krita 6.0 is now available for this featureful digital painting program. Krita 6.0 is re-based against the Qt6 toolkit while Krita 5.3 Beta is also being released at the same time for those sticking to Qt5… ⌘ 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. 🤣

GIMP Post-3.2 Will Be Looking At Hardware Acceleration, Full CMYK & More
With GIMP 3.2 releasing soon, GIMP developer Ondřej Míchal presented at FOSDEM 2026 this past weekend on some of the feature work being eyed for post-3.2 developments… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Lead Is Contracting as AI Competition Intensifies
OpenAI’s rivals are cutting into ChatGPT’s lead. From a report: The top chatbot’s market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%.

The data, obtained by Big Technology from mobile insights firm Apptopia, … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, so just half a millimeter then! :-D That’s plenty these days for everything to shut down, I’m afraid. If only the same élan was still in action as back then:

Image

And here I am watching Mattias Björnström’s gas pedal freezing at full throttle around -40°C. Well, falls apart and gets stuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLgmV15XeSY

I’m not an expert on this subject at all, but I reckon an automatic in addition with all its sensors is much worse than a manual one. All wheel drive, studded tires and diff locked is what one wants in icy situations. :-D

Intel Panther Lake Shows Strong Linux CPU Performance & Power Efficiency With Core Ultra X7 358H Benchmarks
For those that have been very eager to hear about the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” performance on Linux, today’s the day! Last Thursday the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Evo laptop arrived that is powered by the Core Ultra X7 358H. Here is a look at how that Intel Core Ultra X7 358H competes for performance and power efficiency against a wide range of other laptops on an up-to-date Linux soft … ⌘ Read more

Git 2.53 Released With More Optimizations, One Step Closer To Making Rust Mandatory
While we might see Git 3.0 released around the end of 2026, Git 2.53 is out today as the latest feature release and continuing to make changes with an eye toward that big Git 3.0 milestone… ⌘ Read more

Intel ISH Firmware Upstreamed For Linux With Dell’s New Panther Lake Laptops
Ahead of Dell’s new XPS 14 and XPS 16 laptops powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” expected to be shipping in volume beginning in March, more of the Linux support for these premium Panther Lake laptops continues to be finished up… ⌘ Read more

Steam Survey Results For January 2026
After Steam on Linux gaming hit a record high in December of 3.58%, the January 2026 numbers are now published… ⌘ Read more