Linux 6.18 Sees Late Improvements For Xbox Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, & Alienware Laptops
We’re closing in on the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release likely in little more than one week (30 November barring any delays) and today’s batch of x86 platform driver updates is bringing some new hardware support as well as some notable consumer device fixes/improvements… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I couldn’t have phrased it any better than @bender@twtxt.net. :-)

Twice or three times the money as before sounds a bit suspicious to me. Of course, I could be wrong, but I always was under the impression, that your last jobs weren’t all that badly salaried. If the new offer is really paid this highly, it might be a shit job. For me, money isn’t everything, I’d rather opt for a lower income where the job is fun than hating to go to work every day. But if the new job ticks all boxes, go for it. :-)

Also: Consult your pillow, don’t rush it.

found this guy in a parking lot, but he has no idea that im going to give him the best life possible ⌘ Read more

Oracle is Already Underwater On Its ‘Astonishing’ $300B OpenAI Deal
An anonymous reader shares a report: It’s too soon to be talking about the Curse of OpenAI, but we’re going to anyway. Since September 10, when Oracle announced a $300 billion deal with the chatbot maker, its stock has shed $315 billion in market value.

OK, yes, it’s a gross simplification to just look at market cap. But equivalents to … ⌘ Read more

Wayland-Only Budgie 10.10 Desktop Preview Released
At the start of the year developers behind the Budgie desktop environment hoped for shipping Budgie 10.10 in Q1-2025. We are now in Q4 without a stable release but at long last a preview version is at least available. Budgie 10.10 is the point at which Budgie is going all-in on Wayland in leaving behind the X11 desktop session support… ⌘ Read more

Take-Two CEO Says Consoles Aren’t Going Away, But Gaming is Moving Toward PCs
Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, which operates publishing labels including GTA-maker Rockstar Games and 2K, said on Monday that although gaming consoles are not going away, the industry is moving toward PCs in the next decade. From a report: “I think it’s moving towards PC and business is moving towards open … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net That’s actually kind of what I was going for, just with a stylized “t” and some blue/purple/red shades 🤣

@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.

Google Begins Aggresively Using the Law To Stop Text Message Scams
“Google is going to court to help put an end to, or at least limit, the prevalence of phishing scams over text message,” reports BGR:

Google said it’s bringing suit against Lighthouse, an impressively large operation that allegedly provides tools customers can buy to set up their own specialized phishing scams. All told, Google estimates that … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net we are not going to get far by blaming the other side. 😅😂

I wound up running 2 out of 3 of the one-shots, both Halloween games based on Ravenloft / Curse of Strahd, and both rousing successes (for the players, not so much for Strahd).

Since I’m on something of a gaming kick, I think I’m going to try and finish plotting out the rest of the fae adventure I’m running for my kids, while also (hopefully) finishing my super secret astral gaming project.

Can I do it? Stay tuned and find out!

I guess I won’t be going on a trip ⌘ Read more

Green raring to go for Ashes
Cameron Green provides his best update yet for the first Ashes Test. ⌘ Read more

A teen promised his victim he’d go back to school. New laws mean he’ll go to jail instead
Those on the front line of Melbourne’s youth crime crisis say bringing teenage criminals face to face with their victims and targeting gang hotspots are more likely to stop reoffending than locking young violent offenders in adult prison. ⌘ Read more

First look: This revamped shopping mall is ditching luxury and going back to basics
The Collins Street site has previously struggled with low tenancy rates. But developers believe this iteration will be a success. ⌘ Read more

I did what the doctor ordered. I introduced myself to a mushroom
If you go down to the woods today … you’ll be better for it, according to an ever-growing body of research into forest bathing. ⌘ Read more

‘No way we’re going back’: Canadians are flying just about anywhere but the US
Ewan Gleadow,  Staff Writer  -  Raw Story

_Stephan: The damage “king” Trump has done to the wellbeing of the United States is historic, and it particularly stands out in international relationships. Canadians, Europeans, Chinese, and others aren’t choosing to visit.   It has affected the tourism business, the importation by other nations of American goods, and the importat … ⌘ Read more

Is your electric bill going up? AI is partly to blame
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Car Size
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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org nginx allows logging per user, via using defined variables on configuration. Not sure, though, if a Tilde would be willing to go to those “extremes”.

If Australia does not host COP31, it’s a strategic surrender
The Coalition and the Herald say money spent on an expensive summit should go to something more useful for Australians. They’re wrong. ⌘ Read more

Kitten going bonkers for milk ⌘ Read more

China Is Trouncing The U.S. In Critical Trillion-Dollar Tech Race
StudyFinds Analysis Staff,    -  Study Finds

_Stephan: Neither Biden and the Democrats, but particularly Trump and the Republicans have properly recognized what is happening in China. By the election of 2028, notably thanks to Trump’s dismantlement of science and medical research – as 60 Minutes covered on Sunday – I predict China is going to be the leading scientific and economic nation in th … ⌘ Read more

In pictures: CCIWA’s Diversity and Inclusion Awards gala night
The Chamber of Commerce and Industry WA’s second annual Diversity and Inclusion Awards gala recognised the businesses that go above and beyond. ⌘ Read more

How we got conned into recycling by Big Plastic
Rinsing that yoghurt tub was never going to solve the problem. We’ve all been fooled. ⌘ Read more

Lol, YouTube supports increasing the playback speed, but when you want to go to 4x, they want you to pay extra:

https://movq.de/v/a1c79485fb/s.png

Android shopping list apps disappointed me too many times, so I went back to writing these lists by hand a while ago.

Here’s what’s more fun: Write them in Vim and then print them on the dotmatrix printer. 🥳

And, because I can, I use my own font for that, i.e. ImageMagick renders an image file and then a little tool converts that to ESC/P so I can dump it to /dev/usb/lp0.

(I have so much scrap paper from mail spam lying around that I don’t feel too bad about this. All these sheets would go straight to the bin otherwise.)

Trump’s dollar delusion: how trade war risks ending the US’s ‘exorbitant privilege’
Eduardo Porter,  Contributing Economic Analyst  -  The Guardian (U.K.)

_Stephan: For as long as you have been alive the U.S. dollar has been the world’s benchmark currency. Now, some in “king” Trump’s administration seem to want that to end. This report in The Guardian, a British publication, describes what is going on, and is almost entirely being missed or not d … ⌘ Read more

When Tesla’s FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn’t, you get blamed
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Password to Louvre video surveillance system was ‘Louvre’, according to employee
Comments ⌘ Read more

Thank you for the encouragement and love and kind words, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt and others along the way I’m not sure of their feed uris 💕 I’ll keep at it, but for the time being I will keep my distance, mostly off IRC, because I don’t have the energy to spare in that kind of engagement (what//if the worst happens, it’s so draining). I need to remember what I ever did any of this for, it was back in ~2020 and I wanted really to build small interconnected communities that any non “tech savvy” person (more or less) could also benefit from ane enjoy. Even if there are aspects of the specs we’ve built/extended over time that aren’t “perfect”™, they’re “good enough”™ that they’ve last 5+ years (I believe this is 6 years running now). I want to spend a bit of time going back to why I did any of this in the the first place, and get a little micro-SaaS offering going (barely covering running costs) so encourage more folks to run pods, and thus twtxt feeds and grow the community ever so slightly. Other than that, I plan to get the specs “in order” to a point (with @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s help) where I hope they’ll stand the test of time – like SMTP.

Thank you all ! 🙏

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org an advent of code, I love it! Go, Lyse, go!

I should work on my client again and add some new features. Like adding a new feed directly in the client and not having to go to the config first. And showing a preview of a feed before actually adding it. Also, a search would be something to add. And finally combining my User-Agent analyzer with my subscription list to spot new feeds automatically.

The Medicaid Program That Saved Money, Turned People’s Health Around — and Got Killed
Lisa Rab,  Contributing Writer  -  Politico

Stephan: As Congress continues to cease to function, and “king” Trump spends his time visting with fellow authoritarians, and going to parties that would make the most debauched Roman emperor envious, the lives of millions of Americans are coming apart, as Medicaid comes apart.

![](https://www.schwartzreport.net/ … ⌘ Read more

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Shifts Bulk of Philanthropy, ‘Going All In on AI-Powered Biology’
The Associated Press reports that “For the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused part of their philanthropy on a lofty goal — ‘to cure, prevent or manage all disease’ — if not in their lifetime, then in their children’s.”

During that decade they also f … ⌘ Read more

Opencloud – an alternative to Nextcloud written in Go
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opencloud - an alternative to nextcloud written in Go
Comments ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Shaving Off 100MB Of Memory Use, Fixing DrKonqi Crash Reporter Crashing
KDE developers were off to a busy start for the month of November. A lot of feature activity continues happening for Plasma 6.6 while a lot of bug fixing is still going on for Plasma 6.5 and related KDE components… ⌘ Read more

Lawmakers are ditching Congress at a record pace
Stef W. Kight , Hans Nichols , Andrew Solender,  Staff Writers  -  Axios

Stephan:

_Tuesday’s election is, I predict, is just the first phase of a trend that is going to restructure Congress. It is not going to be just political parties; it is also going to be a generational change. My hope is that the Democrats, in spite of all the Republican election rigging, are still going to take the majority in both the House and Senate … ⌘ Read more

Amazon lakes hit ‘unbearable’ hot-tub temperatures amid mass die-offs of pink river dolphins – study
Phoebe Weston,  Biodiversity Staff Writer  -  The Guardian (U.K.)

_Stephan: We are beginning to see more and more reports about the effects of climate change. The fact that we have a President, a Vice President, and an entire party – the Republicans – that think climate change is a hoax, is a major reason why the 2040 is going … ⌘ Read more

BREAKING: Supreme Court Blocks Order Requiring Trump to Pay SNAP Benefits
Aaron Parnas,  Commentator  -  The Parnas Perspective

_Stephan: The Supreme Court literally made its ruling on SNAP as I was preparing SR. Here it is. It is just more gray area, and I am increasingly concerned that millions of American families are not going to be able to have a family Thanksgiving dinner. The sheer nastiness of “king” Trump’s attempt to starve tens of millions o … ⌘ Read more

WINE gaming in FreeBSD Jails with Bastille
FreeBSD offers a whole bunch of technologies and tools to make gaming on the platform a lot more capable than you’d think, and this article by Pertho dives into the details. Running all your games inside a FreeBSD Jail with Wine installed into it is pretty neat. Initially, I thought this was going to be a pretty difficult and require a lot of trial and error but I was surprised at how easy it was to get this all working. I was really happy to get … ⌘ Read more

Zelenskyy vows to block Russian oil to Hungary — Hungary’s MOL says it can already go 80% non-Russian ⌘ Read more

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I’m going to bed, but I’ll have a closer read/think tomorrow 🤞

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

US flight cancellations accelerate as airlines comply with government shutdown order
JOSH FUNK and RIO YAMAT,  Reporters  -  Associated Press

_Stephan: I just got an email from a reader who has spent two days trying to get out of Chicago, but her flight has been canceled again and again. I have been warned not to fly because I would have to go through a security check and publishing SR may cause me to be detained, so I don’t have any person … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I am genuinely curious as to why you think Geminis summarization and the categorization of your gopher post was and is as you say misunderstood?

I asked this very genuinely because before reading @bender@twtxt.net’s comments and Gemini summarization I actually went and unplugged your post into flood gaps go for proxy, and then listen to the text intently with my own human ears 👂

My cat is happy when I decided not to leave to go to work today. ⌘ Read more

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Says China ‘Will Win’ AI Race With US
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has warned that China will beat the US in the AI race, thanks to lower energy costs and looser regulations. From a report: In the starkest comments yet from the head of the world’s most valuable company, Huang told the FT: “China is going to win the AI race.” Huang’s remarks come after the Trump administration maintained a ban o … ⌘ Read more

‘I’m not going to represent our country there’ — Trump to skip G20 summit, dashing hopes of brokering meeting between Zelensky, Putin ⌘ Read more