Easily taxed grains were crucial to the birth of the first states
The cultivation of wheat, barley and maize, which are easily stored and taxed, seems to have led to the emergence of large societies, rather than agriculture generally ⌘ Read more
Linux Kernel Developers Eye Uses For Extra General Purpose Registers With APX
With Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) on upcoming Intel processors doubling the number of general purpose registers (GPRs) among other advantages, Intel engineers are beginning to think of possible kernel uses for the extra registers… ⌘ Read more
Science-Centric Streaming Service Curiosity Stream is an AI-licensing Firm Now
Curiosity Stream, the decade-old science documentary streaming service founded by Discovery Channel’s John Hendricks, expects its AI licensing business to generate more revenue than its 23 million subscribers by 2027 – possibly earlier. The company’s Q3 2025 earnings revealed a 41% year-over-year revenue increase, dri … ⌘ Read more
The Slow Transformation of Notepad Into Something Else Entirely Continues
Microsoft is rolling out yet another update to Notepad for Windows 11 Insiders that adds table support and faster AI-generated responses, continuing a transformation of the once-minimal text editor that has drawn sustained criticism from users who preferred its original simplicity. The update, version 11.2510.6.0, lets users inser … ⌘ Read more
Ubisoft Shows Off New AI-Powered FPS And Hopes You’ve Forgotten About Its Failed NFTs
Ubisoft has revealed Teammates, a first-person shooter built around AI-powered squadmates that the company is calling its “first playable generative AI research project” – not long after the publisher went all-in on NFTs and the metaverse only to largely move on from both. Built in the Snowdrop Engine th … ⌘ Read more
Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0 Released To Make It Easier Creating OS Media
The Raspberry Pi Imager application that makes it easy to generate install media / OS image flashing for different Raspberry Pi devices is out with a big feature update… ⌘ Read more
Meta Plans New AI-Powered ‘Morning Brief’ Drawn From Facebook and ‘External Sources’
Meta “is testing a new product that would give Facebook users a personalized daily briefing powered by the company’s generative AI technology” reports the Washington Post. They cite records they’ve reviwed showing that Meta “would analyze Facebook content and external sources to push custom updates to its users. … ⌘ Read more
Britain Sets New Record, Generating Enough Wind Power for 22 Million Homes
An anonymous reader shared this report from Sky News:
A new wind record has been set for Britain, with enough electricity generated from turbines to power 22 million homes, the system operator has said.
The mark of 22,711 megawatts (MW) was set at 7.30pm on 11 November… enough to keep around three-quarters of British homes … ⌘ Read more
Google Starts Testing Ads In AI Mode
Google has begun testing sponsored ads inside its Gemini-powered AI Mode, placing labeled “sponsored” links at the bottom of AI-generated responses. Engadget reports: [A] Google spokesperson says the result shown is akin to similar tests it’s been running this year. “People seeing ads in AI Mode in the wild is simply part of Google’s ongoing tests, which we’ve been running for several months,” the … ⌘ Read more
British Army Will Use Call of Duty To Train Soldiers
British soldiers are using computer games such as Call of Duty to sharpen their “war-fighting readiness,” an Army chief has said. From a report: General Sir Tom Copinger-Symes, the deputy commander of Cyber and Specialist Operations Command, said the war in Ukraine, where remote-operated drones have become crucial on the battlefield, proved the worth of having soldiers s … ⌘ Read more
Japan Says World’s Largest Nuclear Plant To Restart
The Japanese government said that the world’s biggest nuclear plant would restart operations. Semafor: The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa site closed in 2012, as Japan – which previously generated 30% of its electricity from nuclear power – shuttered most of its fleet in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown. But like much of the world, it is looking once again to nuclear power for reliable … ⌘ Read more
Intel Linux Driver Working To Enable “CMTG” Feature For Lunar Lake Onwards
With Lunar Lake and newer Intel graphics there is a new feature called the Common Mode Timing Generator (CMTG) that so far hasn’t been enabled by the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver. But patches being worked on are enabling this CMTG feature that will unlock other functionality moving forward… ⌘ Read more
HP and Dell Disable HEVC Support Built Into Their Laptops’ CPUs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Dell and HP laptop owners have been befuddled by their machines’ inability to play HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines’ processors having integrated decoding support. Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for … ⌘ Read more
US Employee Well-Being Hit New Low In 2024, Survey Reveals
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: New research from the Human Capital Development Lab at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School analyzes the state of the American workforce in 2024 and shows an overall decline in employee well-being compared to years prior. […] The latest research confirms a decline in general employee well-being since 20 … ⌘ Read more
Google’s New Nano Banana Pro Uses Gemini 3 Power To Generate More Realistic AI Images
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google’s meme-friendly Nano Banana image-generation model is getting an upgrade. The new Nano Banana Pro is rolling out with improved reasoning and instruction following, giving users the ability to create more accurate images with legible text and mak … ⌘ Read more
Intel Preps Linux KVM For Diamond Rapids’ AVX10.2 & Expanded AMX
The latest feature enablement work happening by Intel for the Linux kernel with next-generation Diamond Rapids server processors are the adjustments to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for readying the new CPU ISA capabilities for a virtualized world… ⌘ Read more
Quantum Teleportation Between Photons From Two Distant Light Sources Achieved
Researchers in Germany achieved a major milestone for the future quantum internet by successfully teleporting quantum information between photons generated by two different, physically separated quantum dots – something never accomplished before due to the difficulty of producing indistinguishable photons from remote … ⌘ Read more
Saudi Makes Big Bet On AI Films As Hollywood Moves From Studios To Datacenters
pbahra writes: Saudi Arabia is betting that the future of Hollywood won’t be built in physical stages but in datacenters. In a push to anchor itself in next-generation film production, Riyadh-based Humain has led Luma AI’s latest Series C round, backing the shift towards cloud-based, AI-generated video rather … ⌘ Read more
AMD Begins Posting Open-Source Linux Patches For Their Next-Gen GPU IP
Beginning yesterday and continuing today are several patch series beginning to lay the foundation in the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver for enabling some next-generation graphics IP. Due to the AMD graphics driver block by block enablement strategy and IP-based discovery adopted by their driver over the past few years, it’s not clear what this new hardware enablement is for whether it’s RDNA5 / UDNA or some RDNA4 refresh. In any event, the … ⌘ Read more
Intel “imh_edac” Driver Being Developed For New Memory Controller With Diamond Rapids
Intel engineers today posted Linux kernel patches for plumbing a brand new Error Detection And Correction “EDAC” driver for the next-generation memory controller design debuting with Xeon Diamond Rapids… ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Announces Cobalt 200 CPU With 132 Arm Neoverse-V3 Cores
Microsoft announced the Cobalt 200 processor as their next-generation cloud-native CPU for the Azure Cloud. The Cobalt 200 will feature 132 Arm Neoverse-V3 based cores… ⌘ Read more
Gen Z Officially Worse At Passwords Than 80-Year-Olds
A NordPass analysis found that Gen Z is actually worse at password security than older generations, with “12345” topping their list while “123456” dominates among everyone else. The Register reports: And while there were a few more “skibidis” among the Zoomer dataset compared to those who came before them, the trends were largely similar. Variants on the “123456” were a … ⌘ Read more
An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week
fjo3 shares a report from TheWrap: There are already at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes on platforms like Spotify and Apple. That’s thanks to Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees cranking out 3,000 episodes a week covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk’s as … ⌘ Read more
How Should the Linux Kernel Handle AI-Generated Contributions?
Linux kernel maintainers “are grappling with how to integrate AI-generated contributions without compromising the project’s integrity,” reports WebProNews:
The latest push comes from a proposal by Sasha Levin, a prominent kernel developer at NVIDIA, who has outlined guidelines for tool-generated submissions. Posted to the kernel mailing list, these … ⌘ Read more
Some Americans Are Trying to Heat Their Homes With Bitcoin Mining
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:
[T]he computing power of crypto mining generates a lot of
heat, most which just ends up vented into the air. According to
digital assets brokerage, K33, the bitcoin mining industry generates about 100 TWh of heat annually — enough to heat all of
Finland.This energy waste within a very energy- … ⌘ Read more
The Internet Archive Now Captures AI-Generated Content (Including Google’s AI Overviews)
CNN profiled the non-profit Internet Archive today — and included this tidbit about how they archive parts of the internet that are now “tucked in conversations with AI chatbots.”
The rise of artificial intelligence and AI chatbots means the Internet Archive is changing how it records the history of t … ⌘ Read more
Could Firefox Be the Browser That Protects the Privacy of AI Users?
Tech entrepreneur/blogger Anil Dash has been critical of AI browsers like ChatGPT Atlas. (He’s written that Atlas “substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it’s showing you the web,” while its prompt-based/command-line interface resembles a clunky text adventure, and it’s true purpose seems to be ingesting more … ⌘ Read more
Qt Moves Away From Direct RDRAND/RDSEED Usage For Better Performance & Less Bugs
The Qt toolkit is moving away from directly relying on the CPU’s RDRAND and RDSEED instructions for random number generation and to instead rely on the OS-supplied entropy… ⌘ Read more
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There are no really good GUI toolkits for Linux, are there?
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FTR, I see one (two) issues with PyQt6, sadly:
- The PyQt6 docs appear to be mostly auto-generated from the C++ docs. And they contain many errors or broken examples (due to the auto-conversion). I found this relatively unpleasent to work with.
- (Until Python finally gets rid of the Global Interpreter Lock properly, it’s not really suited for GUI programs anyway – in my opinion. You can’t offload anything to a second thread, because the whole program is still single-threaded. This would have made my fractal rendering program impossible, for example.)
Copy-and-Paste Now Exceeds File Transferring as the Top Corporate Data Exfiltration Vector
Slashdot reader spatwei writes: It is now more common for data to leave companies through copying and pasting than through file transfers and uploads, LayerX revealed in its Browser Security Report 2025. This shift is largely due to generative AI (genAI), with 77% of employees pasting data into AI … ⌘ Read more
Waveshare Pairs RISC-V ESP32-P4 and ESP32-C6 for Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 LE, and PoE Support
Waveshare has released the ESP32-P4-WIFI6-POE-ETH, a compact development board built around the ESP32-P4 along with an ESP32-C6 wireless module. The design combines Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 LE, Ethernet, and optional PoE power delivery in a single platform aimed at multimedia processing, display and camera applications, and general embedded development. Like the earlier W … ⌘ Read more
Mexico’s new generation takes to the streets, accusing leaders of protecting cartels ⌘ Read more
Ukraine strikes Ryazan oil refinery, hits multiple other Russian military targets, General Staff says ⌘ Read more
Latest Proposed Guidelines For Tool-Generated / AI Submissions To The Linux Kernel
Posted to the mailing list on Friday were the latest proposed guidelines for tool-generated contributions to the Linux kernel. The coding tools in large part being focused on AI generated content… ⌘ 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
AMD GAIA 0.13 Released With New AI Coding & Docker Agents
AMD’s GAIA open-source project as a reminder is their “Generrative AI Is Awesome” quick-setup solution for demonstrating generative AI use on AMD hardware platforms with Ryzen CPUs, Radeon GPUs, and/or Ryzen AI NPUs. GAIA is predominantly Microsoft Windows focused but recently they did introduce limited support for Linux that is currently bound to Vulkan-accelerated GPU support. Out today is AMD GAIA 0.13 as another step forward for this AI demonstrator… ⌘ Read more
Put your general knowledge to the test with the Good Weekend quiz
Trivia buffs: can you get a perfect score in the interactive superquiz? ⌘ Read more
Queensland (and everyone else) reject call to weaken bail laws
The nation’s attorneys-general met today in Brisbane before the release of a report recommending nationwide bail law changes. ⌘ Read more
Jack Dorsey Funds diVine, a Vine Reboot That Includes Vine’s Video Archive
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: As generative AI content starts to fill our social apps, a project to bring back Vine’s six-second looping videos is launching with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s backing. On Thursday, a new app called diVine will give access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos, restor … ⌘ Read more
New Patch Moves AMD GCN 1.0 GPUs Over To AMDGPU Driver By Default
Following the recent patch proposal for moving AMD GCN 1.1 generation GPUs over to the AMDGPU Linux driver by default in place of the legacy Radeon driver, a similar patch has now been proposed for the GCN 1.0 graphics processors. AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs are at parity with the AMDGPU driver to the Radeon driver while needing this newer kernel driver for enjoying RADV Vulkan support, better performance, and overall a better experience… ⌘ Read more
Celtic Club cliffhanger as election shakes up board
The results are in for the board elections – and now the board is setting its sights on the annual general meeting and its legal pursuit of a rebel online newsletter. ⌘ Read more
The Incredible Evolution Of AMD EPYC HPC Performance Shown In The Azure Cloud
Last week the Microsoft Azure HBv5 instances reached general availability as powered by the custom EPYC 9V64H CPUs with HBM3 memory. These very interesting EPYC processors for memory bandwidth intensive workloads were announced last year while have finally reached GA with jaw-dropping results for software able to take advantage of the 6.7 TB/s memory bandwidth thanks to the HBM memory. The Azure HBv5 benchmarks last week showed how th … ⌘ Read more
Victoria vows life sentences for adults who recruit kids into crime gangs
Premier Jacinta Allen has vowed to bring in life sentences for adults who recruit kids into crime gangs, but her Attorney-General was forced to concede it’s never been successfully prosecuted. ⌘ 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
Red Hat’s RHEL 10.1 Released With systemd Soft-Reboots, Easier AI Accelerator Drivers
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 has reached general availability with a number of enhancements to this leading enterprise Linux distribution. As with so many things in 2025, AI is a big focus for RHEL 10.1… ⌘ Read more
Researchers Surprised That With AI, Toxicity is Harder To Fake Than Intelligence
Researchers from four universities have released a study revealing that AI models remain easily detectable in social media conversations despite optimization attempts. The team tested nine language models across Twitter/X, Bluesky and Reddit, developing classifiers that identified AI-generated replies at 70 to 80% ac … ⌘ Read more
27 far-right Trump judge picks caught making ‘dishonest and misleading answers’ to Senate
Julia Conley, Common Dreams Staff Writer - Raw Story
_Stephan: ”king” Trump and his administration, while generally supported by the fascist majority on the Supreme Court, have been reversed or lost in judgments of the lower courts. So what are they doing? Why trying to restructure the lower courts by appointing MAGAts to courts, as this article … ⌘ Read more
Google Posts Device Trees For Booting Pixel 10 Hardware With The Mainline Linux Kernel
A Chromium engineer at Google posted the initial Device Tree (DT) files for being able to boot their latest-generation Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more
Samsung Brings Generative AI-Powered Bixby To Its TVs
Samsung is rolling out new conversational AI across its 2025 TVs that lets users ask questions about what’s on the screen and beyond it. From a report: First announced in September, the generative AI update is rolling out now with support for several languages. Vision AI Companion is based on an upgraded, generative AI-based version of Samsung’s virtual assis … ⌘ Read more