US Formally Withdraws From WHO
The United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization on Thursday, making good on an executive order that President Trump issued on his first day in office pledging to leave the international organization that coordinates global responses to public health threats. The New York Times: While the United States is walking away from the organization, a senior official with the Department of Health … ⌘ Read more

TikTok Finalizes Deal To Form New American Entity
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years. The social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture. The new version will … ⌘ Read more

‘Active’ Sitting Is Better For Brain Health
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A systematic review of 85 studies has now found good reason to differentiate between ‘active’ sitting, like playing cards or reading, and ‘passive’ sitting, like watching TV. […] “Total sitting time has been shown to be related to brain health; however, sitting is often treated as a single entity, without considering the specific … ⌘ Read more

Le piège de la Complexité Médiocre
À présent, les semi-habiles sont partout, ils se sont saisis des leviers du pouvoir et comme ce sont des demi-débiles, ils nous emmènent à la catastrophe avec l’assurance des somnambules. Comment en est-on arrivé là ? Au fil des années, le sphère académique, médiatique et politique a tout fait pour réduire le débat, et notamment le […] ⌘ Read more

AI Boosts Research Careers But Flattens Scientific Discovery
Ancient Slashdot reader erice shares the findings from a recent study showing that while AI helped researchers publish more often and boosted their careers, the resulting papers were, on average, less useful. “You have this conflict between individual incentives and science as a whole,” says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who … ⌘ Read more

US Measles Cases Surpass 2,000, Highest in 30 Years: CDC
The U.S. has surpassed 2,000 measles cases for the first time in more than 30 years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From a report: As of Dec. 23, a total of 2,012 cases have been reported in the U.S. Of those cases, 24 were reported among international visitors to the U.S.

[

Image

Nvidia Takes $5 Billion Stake In Intel Under September Agreement
Nvidia has completed its previously announced $5 billion investment in Intel, buying over 214 million shares at a fixed price after the deal received clearance from Federal Trade Commission. “The leading AI chip designer said in September it would pay $23.28 per share for Intel common stock, in a deal that is seen as a major financial lifeline for the … ⌘ Read more

2015 Radio Interview Frames AI As ‘High-Level Algebra’
Longtime Slashdot reader MrFreak shares a public radio interview from 2015 discussing artificial intelligence as inference over abstract inputs, along with scaling limits, automation, and governance models, where for-profit engines are constrained by nonprofit oversight: Recorded months before OpenAI was founded, the conversation treats intelligence as math plus in … ⌘ Read more

Inside Uzbekistan’s Nationwide License Plate Surveillance System
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Across Uzbekistan, a network of about a hundred banks of high-resolution roadside cameras continuously scan vehicles’ license plates and their occupants, sometimes thousands a day, looking for potential traffic violations. Cars running red lights, drivers not wearing their seatbelts, and unlicens … ⌘ Read more

iOS 26.3 Brings AirPods-Like Pairing To Third-Party Devices In EU Under DMA
Under pressure from the Digital Markets Act, Apple’s iOS 26.3 adds AirPods-style proximity pairing and notification support for third-party accessories in the EU. The changes will roll out to European users in 2026. MacRumors reports: The Digital Markets Act requires Apple to provide third-party accessories with the same c … ⌘ Read more

John Carreyou and Other Authors Bring New Lawsuit Against Six Major AI Companies
A group of authors led by John Carreyrou has filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the AI firms of training models on pirated copies of their books. TechCrunch reports: If this sounds familiar, it’s because another set of authors already filed a class action suit … ⌘ Read more

Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve’s Steam Deck On Its Servers
Phoronix’s Michael Larabel writes: An interesting anecdote from this month’s Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve’s Steam Deck… On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on t … ⌘ Read more

ServiceNow To Buy Armis For $7.75 Billion As It Bets Big On Cybersecurity For AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: ServiceNow announced a deal to acquire cybersecurity company Armis on Tuesday, marking a new milestone in the software giant’s artificial-intelligence business strategy. The $7.75 billion all-cash transaction is part of ServiceNow’s goal of advancing governance and tru … ⌘ 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

Judge Blocks Texas App Store Age Verification Law
A federal judge blocked Texas’ app store age-verification law, ruling it likely violates the First Amendment by forcing platforms to gate speech and collect data in an overly broad way. The law was set to go into effect on January 1, 2026. The Verge reports: In an order granting a preliminary injunction on the Texas App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), Judge Robert Pitman w … ⌘ Read more

LimeWire Re-Emerges In Online Rush To Share Pulled ‘60 Minutes’ Segment
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: CBS cannot contain the online spread of a “60 Minutes” segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing. The episode, “Inside CECOT,” featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran priso … ⌘ Read more

‘Fragmented’ Microsoft Tools Undercut Efficiency at Amazon and Whole Foods, Internal Deloitte Review Finds
An anonymous reader shares a report: It’s been more than eight years since Amazon bought Whole Foods, but the two companies still haven’t aligned their setup for the Microsoft software their employees use. That disconnect was flagged in an 8-week Deloitte review of W … ⌘ 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

Open-Source Linux Driver Christmas Surprise For 20~23 Year Old Radeon GPUs
If Linux 6.19 switching from the Radeon legacy to AMDGPU kernel drivers for the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs for those ~13 year old GPUs isn’t nostalgic enough for you, here’s something a bit more nostalgic this holiday season: fresh open-source driver commits to the Radeon R300g driver for supporting those 23 year old ATI R300 GPUs up through the 20 year old R500 class graphics processors… ⌘ Read more

Europe’s Public Institutions Are Quietly Ditching US Cloud Providers
European public institutions are quietly migrating away from American cloud providers and office software, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data.

Austria’s Federal Ministry for Economy, Energ … ⌘ Read more

Happy birthday Katrina! https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-23/0/POSTING-en.html :-)

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

Remote Work is Officially Dead, Says the World’s Largest Recruiter
The great return-to-office battle has effectively concluded and a clear pecking order has emerged, according to Sander van ’t Noordende, the CEO of Randstad, a staffing giant that places around half a million workers in jobs every week. Remote work is becoming a status symbol reserved for star performers and those possessing rare skills. “You have t … ⌘ 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

5K Gaming Is Too Hard, Even for an RTX 5090D
Asus has been showcasing its new 5K 27-inch ROG Strix 27 Pro gaming monitor running at 5,120 x 2,880 resolution and up to 180Hz, but even Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 struggles to deliver smooth frame rates at this demanding pixel count. In testing conducted by Asus, the RTX 5090D – a Chinese-exclusive variant with weaker AI performance – achieved just 51 frames per second in a Cyberpu … ⌘ Read more

Ryanair Fined $301M Over ‘Abusive Strategy’ To Limit Ticket Sales By Online Travel Agencies
Speaking of Italy’s competition authority , it has fined Ryanair $301 million for abusing its dominant market position to limit sales of tickets by online travel agents. The Guardian: The authority said Europe’s largest airline had “implemented an abusive strategy to hinder travel agencies” via an “el … ⌘ Read more

Apple and Google Asking Some Employees With H-1B Visas To Avoid International Travel
Tech giants Google and Apple are asking some employees with H-1B visas to reconsider international travel, as their legal teams warned that visa processing delays could keep employees abroad for months, according to Business Insider. From a report: Law firms representing the tech giants sent memos advising … ⌘ Read more

Apple Fined $116 Million Over App Privacy Prompts
Apple has been fined $116 million by Italy’s antitrust regulator over the “excessively burdensome” privacy rules it imposes on third-party apps. From a report: The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) says that Apple abused its dominant app store market position by burdening developers with “disproportionate” terms around data collection that exceed privacy law requirements, c … ⌘ Read more

US To Impose Tariffs on Chips From China
An anonymous reader shares a report: The United States will take action against China’s semiconductor industry, setting new tariffs on chips from China from June 23, 2027, that have 0% duties currently, the US Trade Representative said.

The announcement comes following a year-long investigation into China’s chip imports into the United States, launched by the Biden administration and led by t … ⌘ Read more

China Bans E-commerce Platforms From Forcing Lowest Prices or Abusing Algorithms
China has unveiled new rules to rein in aggressive pricing tactics by online platforms, prohibiting e-commerce operators from forcing merchants to offer discounts or setting different prices based on user demographics without consent. The 29-article regulation – jointly issued over the weekend by the National Developme … ⌘ Read more

Safety Panel Says NASA Should Have Taken Starliner Incident More Seriously
joshuark shares a report from Ars Technica: For the better part of two months last year, most of us had no idea how serious the problems were with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. A safety advisory panel found this uncertainty also filtered through NASA’s workforce. […] The Starli … ⌘ 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

FCC Bans Foreign-Made Drones Over National Security, Spying Concerns
The FCC has banned approval of new foreign-made drones and components, citing “an unacceptable risk” to national security. The move will most heavily impact DJI but it “does not affect drones or drone components that are currently sold in the United States.” Reuters reports: The tech was placed on the commission’s “Covered List,” barring D … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft To Replace All C/C++ Code With Rust By 2030
Microsoft plans to eliminate all C and C++ code across its major codebases by 2030, replacing it with Rust using AI-assisted, large-scale refactoring. “My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de From 2:50 PM to 3:23 PM AEST (+10 UTC) there was an outage. Everything went “up” on Down Detector, my EU region went offline, numerous sites were unavailable, and so on. Basically everything to/from the EU appeared to basically go kaput.

Intel Releases VA-API libva 2.23 Adds AV1 Profile 2 Support
Intel today released libva 2.23 as the newest feature release for this Video Acceleration API “VA-API” reference library implementation. Most significant with libva 2.23 is adding AV1 Profile 2 support… ⌘ Read more

Funny Numbers
⌘ 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

How a 23-Year-Old in 1975 Built the World’s First Handheld Digital Camera
In 1975, 23-year-old electrical engineer Steve Sasson joined Kodak. And in a new interview with the BBC, he remembers that he’d found the whole photographic process “really annoying…. I wanted to build a camera with no moving parts. Now that was just to annoy the mechanical engineers…”

“You take your picture, you have to … ⌘ Read more

Why Meetings Can Harm Employee Well-Being
Phys.org republishes this article from The Conversation:

On average, managers spend 23 hours a week in meetings. Much of what happens in them is considered to be of low value, or even entirely counterproductive. The paradox is that bad meetings generate even more meetings… in an attempt to repair the damage caused by previous ones…

A 2015 handbook laid the groundwork for the nascent fiel … ⌘ Read more

At least 23 people killed in Goa nightclub fire, official says
The fire was caused by a gas cylinder exploding in the club’s kitchen, authorities say, with the nationalities of those killed not yet known. ⌘ Read more

International student’s killer sentenced to life behind bars
A Tiwi Islands man who murdered a 23-year-old Bangladeshi student during a Darwin home invasion in 2023 has been sentenced to life behind bars. ⌘ Read more

Alpine Linux 3.23 Released With APK Tools v3 For Package Management
Alpine Linux 3.23 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built around musl libc and BusyBox that has become quite popular for containers and embedded uses… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org no wonder I picked that cake (albeit coincidentally), I adore almonds, and hazelnuts! Your teammates are absolutely amazing, dude! A very nice project farewell! On leaving places I have a small anecdote.

I know someone who on 3 February 2004 left his job to go elsewhere. At the time his teammates threw a party, and gave him a very nice portable storage. Twenty days later, he returned, and jokingly they asked him for the storage, and money spent on farewell party back. I heard, from a close source, that he gave them his middle finger, but don’t quote me on that. 😂😂😂

Breaking: Jury finds man accused of killing student in Darwin guilty of murder
The man accused of murdering a 23-year-old international student in Darwin in 2023 has been found guilty following a week-long trial in the NT Supreme Court. ⌘ Read more

After a 13-year search, researchers discover a ‘magical’ rare flower bloom
A team of researchers have described the “magical” experience of finding a rare species of flower in bloom deep in the Sumatran rainforest after a 23-hour trek. ⌘ Read more

23 weeks later…
https://ciberlandia.pt/@marado/115611458935308209

Murder trial jury shown video of Darwin share house where student died
A man accused of murdering 23-year-old student is facing trial in the NT Supreme Court, with the jury shown video footage of the home where Md Isfaqur Rahman died. ⌘ Read more

ACT private schools announce fee increases, leaving some families ‘distraught’
Financial errors are being blamed for one school being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and hiking school fees by 23 per cent. ⌘ Read more