It Took 6+ Years For Linux’s “New” Mount API To Be Properly Documented In Man Pages
In demonstrating one of the gaps of man pages in modern times and likely having hindered the adoption of the Linux kernel’s new mount API, it took more than six years for those system calls to be properly documented within man pages. The Linux “new” mount API was introduced back in mid-2019 with Linux 5.2 and since supported by key file-systems after several years but not until weeks ago was this file descriptor based mount API sco … ⌘ Read more

Fedora Continued At The Forefront Of Upstream Linux Innovations In 2025
Phoronix’s Michael Larabel is “reliving some of the best moments for Fedora Linux in 2025” by highlighting the year’s most popular news around the distro. Throughout 2025, Fedora continued to lead upstream Linux innovation with bold changes like Wayland-only GNOME, newer kernels, architecture cleanups, and experimental features – … ⌘ Read more

Great article about how #Wikimedia runs on metal and not someone else’s cloud - and why. Includes other interesting tidbits, like software decisions, AI, et cetera…

https://wikimedia.brussels/wikipedia-is-running-on-its-own-metal-the-power-and-limits-of-self-hosted-infrastructure/

VC Sees AI-generated Video Gutting the Creator Economy
AI-generated video tools like OpenAI’s Sora will make individual content creators “far, far, far less valuable” as social media platforms shift toward algorithmically generated content tailored to each viewer, according to Michael Mignano, a partner at venture capital firm Lightspeed and who cofounded the podcasting platform Anchor before Spotify acquired it.

Speaki … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m toying with the idea of making a widget/window system on top of Python’s ncurses. I’ve never really been happy with the existing ones (like urwid, textual, pytermgui, …). I mean, they’re not horrible, it’s mostly the performance that’s bugging me – I don’t want to wait an entire second for a terminal program to start up.

Not sure if I’ll actually see it through, though. Unicode makes this kind of thing extremely hard. 🫤

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I can tell you this right now, writing assembly / machine code is fucking hard work™ 😓 I’m sure @movq@www.uninformativ.de can affirm 🤣 And when it all goes to shit™ (which it does often), man is debugging fucking hard as hell! Without debug symbols I can’t use the regular tools like lldb or gdb 😂

Linux 7.0 Expected To Bring IO_uring IOPOLL Polling Improvements
The next Linux kernel cycle, which will be known as Linux 6.20 or more than likely Linux 7.0, is expected to land some IO_uring improvements for better IOPOLL polling… ⌘ Read more

SuperTux 0.7 Reaches Beta For Reviving An Open-Source Classic
Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of SuperTux as the open-source jump-n-run game that used to be included on some early Linux live CD/DVDs for this Super Mario Bros inspired game. There hasn’t been a new release of SuperTux in over four years but out today is the beta of SuperTux 0.7 as a major overhaul to the free software, family-friendly game title… ⌘ Read more

New Runtime Standby ABI Proposed for Linux Like Microsoft Windows’ ‘Modern Standby’
Phoronix reports on “an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list” proposing “a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the ‘Modern Standby’ functionality found with Microsoft Windows…”

Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain co … ⌘ Read more

HarfBuzz 12.3 Released - Nice Performance Improvements To This Text Shaping Engine
HarfBuzz 12.3 was just released for ending out 2025 with some nice performance improvements to this widely-used text shaping engine. HarfBuzz in turn is used by the prominent Linux desktop environments, Java, Flutter, various game engines, and apps like Chrome and Firefox for text shaping needs with OpenType fonts and more… ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Nah it’s more like there’s a lot of repeated code, because when you go from source language to intermediate representation to machine code, well you just end up writing a lot of the same patterns over and over again. I need to dedupe this I think.

Taiwan’s iPass Releases Floppy Disk Pre-Paid Cash Card
Taiwan’s iPass has released a limited-edition prepaid payment card shaped exactly like a 3.5-inch floppy disk. The company, perhaps rightly so, felt the need to include a warning on the product listing: “This product only has a card function and does not have a 3.5mm [sic] disk function, please note before purchasing.”

The NFC-enabled novelty card went on sale start … ⌘ Read more

My little toy operating system from last year runs in 16-bit Real Mode (like DOS). Since I’ve recently figured out how to switch to 64-bit Long Mode right after BIOS boot, I now have a little program that performs this switch on my toy OS. It will load and run any x86-64 program, assuming it’s freestanding, a flat binary, and small enough (< 128 KiB code, only uses the first 2 MiB of memory).

Here I’m running a little C program (compiled using normal GCC, no Watcom trickery):

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/los86%2D64.mp4

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/c.png

Next steps could include:

• Use Rust instead of C for that 64-bit program?
  
• Provide interrupt service routines. (At the moment, it just keeps interrupts disabled.)

Ubuntu’s Rust Infatuation, New Optimizations & Other Ubuntu Linux 2025 Highlights
It was a very interesting year for Ubuntu Linux. Ahead of the important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out this coming April, Ubuntu Linux this year was expeditiously migrating to new Rust-based system tools like sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils, new performance optimizations continued to be explored for bettering the out-of-the-box Ubuntu performance, better ARM64 support with its desktop ISO, and enhancing the Snapdragon X Elite laptop supp … ⌘ Read more

New Linux Patches Improve exFAT Read Performance Via Multi-Cluster Mapping
For those using Microsoft’s exFAT file-system under Linux for the likes of flash drives and SD cards, a new patch series posted today aims to enhance the read performance. The new patches are shown to improve performance by about 10% while also heaving lower overhead… ⌘ Read more

The Phone-Based Retirement Is Here
Adult children across the United States are increasingly reporting that their aging parents have developed what looks remarkably like the smartphone addiction [non-paywalled source] typically associated with teenagers, a phenomenon The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel has dubbed “phone-based retirement.” A 2019 Pew Research Center study found people 60 and older spend more than half their daily leisure time – … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.20~7.0 To Bring Prep Changes For CXL Soft Reserve Recovery & Accelerator Memory
The next kernel cycle that will be known as either Linux 6.20 or Linux 7.0 depending upon how Linus Torvalds handles the versioning for this next x.20 milestone. More than likely it will be Linux 7.0 given his historical versioning scheme, but whatever the case, ahead of this next kernel cycle some initialization changes for the CXL subsystem are building up… ⌘ Read more

What Might Adding Emojis and Pictures To Text Programming Languages Look Like?
theodp writes: We all mix pictures, emojis, and text freely in our communications. So why not in our code? That’s the premise of “Fun With Python and Emoji: What Might Adding Pictures to Text Programming Languages Look Like?” (two-image Bluesky explainer; full slides), which takes a look at what mixing emoji with … ⌘ 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

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Maybe there’s another meaning I’m not aware of, but this doesn’t look like a shitpost to me. Congrats, I guess. ;-)

Intel Linux Driver Preps For Up To 13 Different Panther Lake H SoCs
It looks like the upcoming Intel Panther Lake H SoCs for the next-gen premium/high-end performance laptop market there could be quite a few different SKUs. A new patch for an Intel open-source driver expands the Panther Lake H line-up from three to 13 different IDs… ⌘ Read more

iRobot Founder Says FTC Treated Blocked Deals ‘Like Trophies’ as Bankruptcy Follows Failed Amazon Acquisition
Colin Angle, the founder of iRobot who built the company from his living room over 35 years and sold more than 50 million Roomba vacuums, watched his creation file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this month after what he describes as an “avoidable” regulatory ord … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA’s Quest For A “Safe” Linux Kernel For Automobiles, Robotics
NVIDIA engineer Igor Stoppa presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) earlier this month around using Linux in safety-critical environments like automobiles and the current shortcomings of the upstream Linux kernel and the challenges on achieving Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) certifications around the Linux kernel. It’s an interesting read/watch around the safety of Linux (or not) for such strict safety environments… ⌘ Read more

Apple Developer’s Account Restored After Compromised Gift Card Incident
“It’s all fixed,” says that Apple developer who was locked out of his Apple Account after redeeming a compromised Apple Gift Card.

“A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to r … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Very nice! I often wish other languages had something similar. Sometimes, I use lambdas, but that also looks ugly and feels a bit like a misuse. Other times, just the normal blocks are enough, but it’s not the same. Especially with the mutability aspects as the article explains. Typically, I just put it in a function or ignore it if it’s just a few lines.

Intel Prepares For KVM Guest VMs To Support Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)
Since Linux 6.16 the Intel APX support has been ready for the kernel infrastructure and goes along with the compiler toolchain support for Advanced Performance Extensions with the likes of GCC and LLVM/Clang. The latest element being worked on for APX enablement in the open-source/Linux world is for allowing KVM guest virtual machines (VMs) to make use of APX… ⌘ Read more

Rust’s ‘Vision Doc’ Makes Recommendations to Help Keep Rust Growing
The team authoring the Rust 2025 Vision Doc interviewed Rust developers to find out what they liked about the language — and have now issued three recommendations “to help Rust continue to scale across domains and usage levels.”

— Enumerate and describe Rust’s design goals and integrate them into our processes, helping to ensure they … ⌘ Read more

The phone situation
I need to write something about this or I’ll burst.

I have a new phone. It’s an old iPhone SE 2022. Yes, I know. Evil,
evil Apple. Won’t someone please think of the privacy issues? Right,
well, Apple has at least better reputation about these things than
Google does, but we’ll come to that.

It feels like I’m betraying the FLOSS cause. I feel horrible, although
probably not just because of this.

Let’s recap:

• My main phone has been a de-googled (not even microG) Fairphone 4
  with CalyxOS. CalyxOS … ⌘ Read more

Military Satellites Now Maneuver, Watch Each Other, and Monitor Signals and Data
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here):

The American patrol satellite had the targets in its sights: two recently launched Chinese spacecraft flying through one of the most sensitive neighborhoods in space. Like any good tactical fighter, the American spacecraft, known … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net Assembly is usually the most low-level programming language that you can get. Typical programming languages like Python or Go are a thick layer of abstraction over what the CPU actually does, but with Assembler you get to see it all and you get full control. (With lots of caveats and footnotes. 😅)

I’m interested in the boot process, i.e. what exactly happens when you turn on your computer. In that area, using Assembler is a must, because you really need that fine-grained control here.

Airbus Moving Critical Systems Away From AWS, Google, and Microsoft Citing Data Sovereignty Concerns
Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to move mission-critical systems like ERP, manufacturing, and aircraft design data onto a digitally sovereign European cloud, citing national security concerns and fears around U.S. extraterritorial laws like the CLOUD Act. “I need a so … ⌘ Read more

Intel Readies Nova Lake Display Support For Linux 6.20~7.0
For the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel the initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support was merged for the integrated graphics to be found with Nova Lake processors. There were some initial Xe3P_LPD display patches also merged for Linux 6.19 but it looks like for Linux 6.20 (or what may end up being known as Linux 7.0), the display support will actually be functional for driving monitors from Nova Lake… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Not sure what it had in its beak. It looked a wee bit like a large biscuit. But it must have been rock-hard.

UK Actors Vote To Refuse To Be Digitally Scanned In Pushback Against AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Actors have voted to refuse digital scanning to prevent their likeness being used by artificial intelligence in a pushback against AI in the arts. Members of the performing arts union Equity were asked if they would refuse to be scanned while on set, a common practice in which a … ⌘ Read more

AI’s Water and Electricity Use Soars In 2025
A new study estimates that AI systems in 2025 consumed as much electricity as New York City emits in carbon pollution and used hundreds of billions of liters of water, driven largely by power-hungry data centers and cooling needs. Researchers say the real impact is likely higher due to poor transparency from tech companies about AI-specific energy and water use. “There’s no way to pu … ⌘ Read more

AMD Awarding Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” Laptops To Those Fixing ROCm Bugs
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” is beautifully awesome. Probably my favorite hardware of 2025 whether it’s in desktop form with the likes of the Framework Desktop or for very powerful laptops between the Zen 5 CPU cores and very capable Radeon 8060S Graphics within devices like the HP ZBook Ultra G1a. If you are interested by Strix Halo too and looking for a way to obtain one without the high price, AMD is running a holiday special of those … ⌘ Read more

Another Starship Clone Pops Up In China
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Every other week, it seems, a new Chinese launch company pops up with a rocket design and a plan to reach orbit within a few years. For a long time, the majority of these companies revealed designs that looked a lot like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The first of these copy cats, the medium-lift Zhuque-3 rocket built by LandSpace … ⌘ Read more

English Has Become Easier To Read
The conventional wisdom that English prose has gotten easier to read because sentences have gotten shorter is wrong, according to a new analysis published in Works in Progress by writer and Mercatus Center research fellow Henry Oliver. The real transformation happened centuries ago in the 1500s and 1600s when Bible translators like William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer developed a “plain style” built on logica … ⌘ Read more

Debusine Repositories Enter Beta: Ubuntu PPA-Like User Archives For Debian Linux
Colin Watson announced that Debusine repositories are now available in beta form, which can be used to maintain APT-compatible add-on package repositories for Debian Linux. This comes down to being similar in nature to Personal Package Archives (PPAs) that are popular with Ubuntu Linux… ⌘ Read more

I rewrote all my solutions in Rust (except for day 10 part 2) and these are the runtimes on my i7-3770 from 2013 (this measures CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID, not wallclock):

day01/1 [      00.000501311] Result: 1066
day01/2 [      00.000400298] Result: 6223
day02/1 [      00.000358848] Result: 12586854255
day02/2 [      00.000750711] Result: 17298174201
day03/1 [      00.000106537] Result: 17405
day03/2 [      00.000404632] Result: 171990312704598
day04/1 [      00.000257517] Result: 1626
day04/2 [      00.007495342] Result: 9173
day05/1 [      00.000237212] Result: 505
day05/2 [      00.000142731] Result: 344423158480189
day06/1 [      00.000229629] Result: 4076006202939
day06/2 [      00.000279552] Result: 7903168391557
day07/1 [      00.000204422] Result: 1622
day07/2 [      00.000283816] Result: 10357305916520
day08/1 [      00.029427421] Result: 84968
day08/2 [      00.028089859] Result: 8663467782
day09/1 [      00.000310304] Result: 4764078684
day09/2 [      00.015512554] Result: 1652344888
day10/1 [      00.000796663] Result: 375
day10/2 [      --.---------] Result: 15377 (Z3)
day11/1 [      00.000416804] Result: 753
day11/2 [      00.000660528] Result: 450854305019580
day12/1 [      00.000336081] Result: 577
day12/2 [      00.000000695] Result: no part 2

A little under 90 ms total.

On my Samsung NC10 netbook from 2011 with its Intel Atom N455 at 1.6 GHz:

day01/1 [      00.003771326] Result: 1066
day01/2 [      00.003267317] Result: 6223
day02/1 [      00.003902698] Result: 12586854255
day02/2 [      00.006659479] Result: 17298174201
day03/1 [      00.000747544] Result: 17405
day03/2 [      00.002737587] Result: 171990312704598
day04/1 [      00.001263892] Result: 1626
day04/2 [      00.044985301] Result: 9173
day05/1 [      00.001696761] Result: 505
day05/2 [      00.000978962] Result: 344423158480189
day06/1 [      00.001387660] Result: 4076006202939
day06/2 [      00.001734248] Result: 7903168391557
day07/1 [      00.001295528] Result: 1622
day07/2 [      00.001809659] Result: 10357305916520
day08/1 [      00.277251443] Result: 84968
day08/2 [      00.284359332] Result: 8663467782
day09/1 [      00.003152407] Result: 4764078684
day09/2 [      00.071123459] Result: 1652344888
day10/1 [      00.005279527] Result: 375
day10/2 [      --.---------] Result: 15377 (Z3)
day11/1 [      00.003273342] Result: 753
day11/2 [      00.005139719] Result: 450854305019580
day12/1 [      00.002857552] Result: 577
day12/2 [      00.000004421] Result: no part 2

A little over 700 ms total.

I like this. You get performance that’s more or less in the ballpark of C, but without the footguns.

MI6 Chief: We’ll Be as Fluent in Python As We Are in Russian
The new chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service told officers this week that they must become as fluent in programming languages like Python as they are in foreign languages like Russian as the spy agency adapts to what she described as a space between peace and war. Blaise Metreweli, MI6’s first female chief and previously the service’s direc … ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.0.3 Browser Engine Brings Better Performance, Embedding Improvements
Servo 0.0.3 is out today as the newest update to this Rust-based, open-source web layout engine. Servo 0.0.3 incorporates many enhancements made over the past month from better performance to enhancing its embedding API and other improvements like context menus for more web content… ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2-RC2 Brings Bug Fixes & Minor Refinements
GIMP 3.2-RC2 is out today as what could be the last release candidate of GIMP 3.2 before its stable release. This leading open-source image editor/creation alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop continues becoming much more refined and polished in the GIMP 3 series… ⌘ Read more

LG’s Software Update Forces Microsoft Copilot Onto Smart TVs
LG smart TV owners discovered over the weekend that a recent webOS software update had quietly installed Microsoft Copilot on their devices, and the app cannot be uninstalled. Affected users report the feature appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain models, sitting alongside streaming apps like Netflix and YouTub … ⌘ Read more

Like Australia, Denmark Plans to Severely Restrict Social Media Use for Teenagers
“As Australia began enforcing a world-first social media ban for children under 16 years old this week, Denmark is planning to follow its lead,” reports the Associated Press, “and severely restrict social media access for young people.”

The Danish government announced last month that it had secured an agreement b … ⌘ Read more

The Opt-In Proactive & Crash Time Data Collection On Valve’s Steam Deck
Valve’s Steam Deck with SteamOS features built-in crash data collection as well as for logging other system events worth having knowledge about like the split-lock detection and other events. This is all opt-in by users for data collection by Steam, but for those curious about a bit more insight into this Steam Deck data collection, a presentation at this past week’s Linux Plumbers Conference dove into the matter… ⌘ Read more

I’m having to write my own functions like this in mu just to solve AoC puzzles :D

fn pow10(k) {
    p := 1
    i := 0
    while i < k {
        p = p * 10
        i = i + 1
    }
    return p
}

New York Becomes First State To Require Disclosure of AI Performers in Ads
New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Thursday signed two bills aimed at regulating the use of AI in entertainment, requiring disclosure when ads feature AI-generated performers and mandating consent from heirs before a deceased person’s likeness can be used commercially. Hochul described both measures as “first in the nation” pol … ⌘ Read more

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Anytime! Glad you like it, too. :-)