The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline
The U.S., whose population the Census Bureau did not expect to start shrinking until 2081, may record its first-ever decline as early as this year because of the Trump administration’s accelerating immigration crackdown. Census data released in late January showed US population growth slowed to just 0.5% in the year prior to July 2025 – the lowest rate since t … ⌘ Read more
Autodesk Takes Google To Court Over AI Movie Software Named ‘Flow’
Autodesk has sued Google in San Francisco federal court, alleging the search giant infringed its “Flow” trademark by launching competing AI-powered software for movie, TV and video game production in May 2025.
Autodesk says it has used the Flow name since September 2022 and that Google assured it would not commercialize a product under the sam … ⌘ Read more
Age Bias is Still the Default at Work But the Data is Turning
A mounting body of research is making it harder for companies to justify what most of them still do – push experienced workers out the door just as they’re hitting their professional peak. A 2025 study published in the journal Intelligence analyzed 16 cognitive, emotional and personality dimensions and found that while processing speed declines after … ⌘ Read more
Intel Recently Shelved Numerous Open-Source Projects
After discovering this morning that Intel archived/discontinued its On Demand “SDSi” GitHub project around that controversial feature, it was a slippery slope in noticing Intel recently archived around two dozen other open-source projects they previously maintained… ⌘ Read more
Why Is China Building So Many Coal Plants Despite Its Solar and Wind Boom?
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from the Associated Press:
Even as China’s expansion of solar and wind power raced ahead in 2025, the Asian giant opened many more coal power plants than it had in recent years — raising concern about whether the world’s largest emitter will reduce carbon emissions enou … ⌘ Read more
Waymo is Having a Hard Time Stopping For School Buses
Waymo’s robotaxis have racked up at least 24 safety violations involving school buses in Austin since the start of the 2025 school year, and a voluntary software recall the company issued in December after a federal investigation has not fixed the problem.
Austin Independent School District initially reported at least 19 incidents of Waymo vehicles failing to stop fo … ⌘ Read more
Hollywood’s AI Bet Isn’t Paying Off
Hollywood’s recent attempts to build entertainment around AI have consistently underperformed or outright flopped, whether the AI in question is a plot device or a production tool. The horror sequel M3GAN 2.0, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and Disney’s Tron: Ares all disappointed at the box office in 2025 despite centering their narratives on AI.
The latest casualty is Mercy, a Jan … ⌘ Read more
Memory Prices Have Nearly Doubled Since Last Quarter
Memory prices across DRAM, NAND and HBM have surged 80 to 90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, according to Counterpoint Research’s latest Memory Price Tracker. The price of a 64GB RDIMM has jumped from a Q4 2025 contract price of $450 to over $900, and Counterpoint expects it to cross $1,000 in Q2.
NAND, relatively stable last quarter, is tracking a parallel increase. De … ⌘ 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
The Switch is Now Nintendo’s Best-Selling Console of All Time
The original Switch is officially Nintendo’s best-selling console of all time after surpassing the DS handheld in lifetime sales. From a report: In its latest earnings release, Nintendo reports that the Nintendo Switch has, as of December 31, 2025, sold 155.37 million units since its launch in 2017, compared to 154.02 million units for the 2004 Nintend … ⌘ Read more
Is Meta’s Huge Spending on AI Actually Paying Off?
The Wall Street Journal says that Meta “might be reaping some of the richest benefits from the AI boom so far.”
Meta’s revenue grew 22% year over year in 2025 to $201 billion, and the company expects even bigger gains in the current quarter, potentially as high as 34%. That is huge growth for a company that brought in nearly $60 billion in the latest three-month period. And … ⌘ Read more
Bitcoin Drops 40% in Four Months. Bloomberg Blames Absence of Buyers and Belief
October saw Bitcoin reach $123,742. But less than four months later, “The world’s largest cryptocurrency slipped below $76,000…” Bloomberg reports, “dropping about 40% from its 2025 peak…”
“What began as a sharp crash in October has morphed into something more corrosive: a selloff shaped not by panic, but by absence … ⌘ Read more
99% of New US Will Be Green in 2026
This year in America, renewables and battery storage “will account for 99.2% of net new capacity — and even higher if small-scale solar were included,” reports Electrek, citing EIA data reviewed by the SUN DAY Campaign:
EIA’s latest monthly “Electric Power Monthly” report (with data through November 30, 2025), once again confirms that solar is the fastest-growing among the major sources of US electri … ⌘ Read more
AMD EPYC 9755 Delivers Decisive Performance Leadership Over Xeon 6 Granite Rapids With Nearly 500 Benchmarks
Back in December I carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 for these competing 128 core server processors using the latest Linux software stack before closing out 2025. That was done with nearly 200 benchmarks and the AMD EPYC Turin Zen 5 processor delivered terrific performance as we have come to enjoy out of the 5th Gen EPYC line-up over the past year and several mont … ⌘ Read more
Comcast Keeps Losing Customers Despite Price Guarantee, Unlimited Data
Comcast’s attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn’t stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports: The Q4 net l … ⌘ Read more
Xbox Hardware Revenue Craters 32%
Microsoft’s Xbox hardware revenue fell 32% in the final quarter of 2025 and overall gaming revenue declined 9% year-over-year, according to the company’s latest quarterly earnings, released as part of results showing Microsoft’s total revenue exceeded $80 billion.
Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, dropped 5%.
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](http://twitter.com … ⌘ Read moreSeven of the World’s Ten Best-Selling Smartphones in 2025 Were iPhones
Apple sold seven of the ten best-selling smartphones globally in 2025, a lopsided dominance that underscores how thoroughly the company controls the premium end of the mobile market.
The iPhone 16 was the single best-selling phone worldwide, and Apple’s presence extended all the way down to the tenth spot where the iPhone 16e – its … ⌘ Read more
Nothing CEO Says Company Won’t Launch New Flagship Smartphone Every Year ‘For the Sake of It’
Android smartphone maker Nothing won’t release a Phone 4 this year, the company’s founder and chief executive said, and that the 2025 Phone 3 will remain the brand’s flagship device throughout 2026.
“We’re not just going to churn out a new flagship every year for the sake of it, we want ev … ⌘ Read more
Amazon Cuts Another 16,000 Jobs
Amazon announced on Wednesday that it is eliminating approximately 16,000 roles across the company as part of organizational changes that began in October 2025 and are only now being finalized by certain teams. Senior Vice President Beth Galetti shared the news in a memo to employees, framing the reductions as an effort to reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy. The memo follows another memo that t … ⌘ Read more
Linux Kernel Continuity Document Added: What Happens If Torvalds’ Git Repo Goes Away?
Following discussions from the 2025 Linux Maintainer Summit, merged overnight for the Linux 6.19 kernel is documentation concerning the Linux kernel project’s continuity in the event that Linus Torvalds’ official Git repository were to disappear or otherwise be inaccessible for continuing the upstream development of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more
Morts de cryptos : renforcement du Bitcoin
Un article de Henry Bonner Une statistique sur le sort de la majorité des crypto-monnaies permet de rapeller les dangers de pertes dans les cryptos. En effet, les nouvelles cryptos créent parfois beaucoup de gains, surtout pour les créateurs des jetons, et prêtent le flanc à des arnaques. Ainsi, BFM explique : “2025 restera une année […] ⌘ Read more
Intel Xeon 67980E “Sierra Forest” Linux Performance ~14% Faster Since Launch
As part of my end-of-year 2025 benchmarking I looked at how the Intel Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids performance evolved in the year since launch and seeing some nice open-source/Linux optimizations during that time. On the other side of the table were also benchmarks of how AMD EPYC 8004 Sienna evolved in its two years, the AMD EPYC Milan-X in its four years since launch, and also a look at the performance evolution lower down the st … ⌘ Read more
‘No Reasons To Own’: Software Stocks Sink on Fear of New AI Tool
The new year was supposed to bring opportunities for beaten-down software stocks. Instead, the group is off to its worst start in years. From a report: The release of a new artificial intelligence tool from startup Anthropic on Jan. 12 rekindled fears about disruption that weighed on software makers in 2025.
TurboTax owner Intuit tumbled 16% last w … ⌘ Read more
Ubisoft Cancels Six Games, Slashes Guidance in Restructuring
Ubisoft is canceling game projects, shutting down studios and cutting its guidance as the Assassin’s Creed maker restructures its business into five units. From a report: The French gaming firm expects earnings before interest and tax to be a loss of $1.2 billion the fiscal year 2025-2026 as a result of the restructuring, driven by a one-off writedown of … ⌘ Read more
Crypto News Outlet Cointelegraph Loses 80% of Traffic After Google Penalty For Parasitic Blackhat SEO Deal
Cointelegraph, once one of the most-visited cryptocurrency news sites, has seen its monthly traffic plummet from roughly 8 million visits to 1.4 million – an 80% drop in three months – after Google issued a manual penalty in October 2025 for the outlet’s partnersh … ⌘ Read more
OpenAI CFO Says Annualized Revenue Crosses $20 Billion In 2025
According to CFO Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s annualized revenue surpassed $20 billion in 2025, up from $6 billion a year earlier with growth closely tracking an expansion in computing capacity. Reuters reports: OpenAI’s computing capacity rose to 1.9 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 from 0.6 GW in 2024, Friar said in the blog, adding that Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s … ⌘ Read more
China Birth Rate Falls To Lowest Since 1949
China’s birth rate fell to 5.6 per 1,000 people in 2025, the lowest figure since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, and the country’s total population contracted by 3.39 million, the sharpest decline since the Mao Zedong era. The drop marks the fourth straight year of population decline and comes despite government efforts to encourage childbearing, including subsidies of abou … ⌘ Read more
China Consumed 10.4 Trillion Kilowatt-Hours of Electricity In 2025 - Double the US
Slashdot reader hackingbear summarizes this report from Bloomberg: China consumed totally 10.4 trillion kilowatt hours (10.4 petaWh) in 2025 according to data from the National Energy Administration. That’s the highest annual electricity use ever recorded by a single country, and doubled the amount used by th … ⌘ Read more
53% of Crypto Tokens Launched Since 2021 Have Failed, Most in 2025
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”More than half of all cryptocurrencies ever launched are now defunct,” reports CoinDesk, citing a new analysis by cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinGecko.
And most of those failures occurred in 2025:
The study looked at token listings on GeckoTerminal between mid-2021 and the end of 2025. Of the nearly 20.2 million tokens that entered … ⌘ Read more
Adobe Photoshop 2025 Installer Now Working On Linux With Patched Wine
An open-source developer has worked through the last of the issues preventing the Adobe Creative Cloud installers for Windows from running on Linux via Wine. With pending patches, Adobe Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025 are expected to install and run on Linux… ⌘ Read more
Ainda na minha saga de leitura de sondagens (sim, há malucos para tudo…):
Nas “letras pequininas”, isto é, naquilo que é depositado na ERC e só porque a Lei manda, lê-se na sondagem do ISCTE de Dezembro que o número de “votos simulados” que três das possibilidades tiveram foram: Cardoso, 1 voto (0.1%), Joana Amaral Dias, 9 votos (1.0%), Jorge Pinto, 10 votos (1.1%). Estes valores a cru são depois ponderados e distribuídos, o que é normal… o que não se entende é o resultado depois da ponderação.
Em princípio, a ponderação distribui, e portanto devia dar mais para toda a gente, mas na realidade não foi isso que foi parar à comunicação social… Porquê? Ora, no documento para os resultados ponderados, eles começam por pegar na tabela de votos por ponderar, para depois fazer a ponderação. Saber como a ponderação foi feita é coisa que não vamos descobrir neste toot - lamento - mas é que o documento em questão é um documento de 66 páginas, que apresenta os dados por ponderar na página 33, e depois apresenta as páginas 34 e seguintes todas em branco… o que também me leva a perguntar se a ERC faz o mínimo de validação dos documentos que lhe são entregues.
½
Intel Releases Updated LLM-Scaler-vLLM With Continuing To Expand Its LLM Support
One of the initiatives launched by Intel in 2025 was LLM-Scaler as part of Project Battlematrix. The open-source LLM Scaler is a Docker-based solution for helping to deploy Generative AI “GenAI” workloads on Intel Battlemage graphics cards with frameworks like vLLM, ComfyUI, SGLang, and more. There continues to be routine new feature releases of LLM Scaler for broadening the large language models supported and other improvemen … ⌘ Read more
US Carbon Pollution Rose In 2025, a Reversal From Prior Years
In a reversal from previous years, U.S. carbon emissions rose 2.4% in 2025 compared with the year before. NBC News reports: The increase in greenhouse gas emissions is attributable to a combination of a cool winter, the explosive growth of data centers and cryptocurrency mining and higher natural gas prices, according to the Rhodium Group, an independent … ⌘ Read more
Anthropic’s Index Shows Job Evolution Over Replacement
Anthropic’s fourth installment of its Economic Index, drawing on an anonymized sample of two million Claude conversations from November 2025, finds that AI is changing how people work rather than whether they work at all. The study tracked usage across the company’s consumer-facing Claude.ai platform and its API, categorizing interactions as either automation (where AI co … ⌘ Read more
NASA Acknowledges Record Heat But Avoids Referencing Climate Change
An anonymous reader shares a report: Global temperatures soared in 2025, but a NASA statement published Wednesday alongside its latest benchmark annual report makes no reference to climate change, in line with President Donald Trump’s push to deny the reality of planetary heating as a result of human activities.
That marks a sharp break … ⌘ Read more
ZLUDA Boasts Full Llama.cpp Support, Better Windows Handling For CUDA On Non-NVIDIA GPUs
The open-source ZLUDA project for bringing CUDA to non-NVIDIA hardware that can run unmodified is out with a new progress report. ZLUDA had a productive fourth quarter with now enjoying better Microsoft Windows support, full support for running Llama.cpp atop ZLUDA, AMD ROCm 7 support, and other enhancements… ⌘ Read more
Global Tech-Sector Layoffs Surpass 244,000 In 2025
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Network World: The global technology sector eliminated some 244,851 jobs in 2025, according to a report from RationalFX. The U.K.-based financial services company says the worldwide downsizing reflects how companies in 2025 restructured their operations to focus on efficiency, profitability, and AI-driven productivity. The RationalFX … ⌘ Read more
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics Explained, with John Martinis ⌘ Read more
@kirschner@kirschner ’s “Ada & Zangemann: A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream” was a wonderful surprise – I knew I’d like this book since I’ve heard he had written it, but I’ll admit I only actually read it once I had the actual physical book in my hands… and ended up being surprised by it a couple of times, the book has plenty more depth than I assumed! Sure, it is what I thought it would be, “a book for children about free software”, but it is so much more than that…
@o_sarilho@o_sarilho is a webcomic - and fortunately it is also collected in physical format. There are versions in Portuguese and English, but this is a SciFi comic book from a Portuguese author, and that alone would get my attention… the fact that part of the action happens on the region where I actually live just made it even more interesting! So, well, I knew I would need to read it, and I bought the books, but only in 2025 did I actually started reading it… and, well - all I can say is that I glad I have the rest of the series so far, so I can catch up!
5 star reads of 2025 worth mentioning
Someone has asked recently on a toot for others to share their ‘list of 2025 books’. Instead of pointing out to the list of what I’ve read, I’ll instead mention a few ‘5 star’ books I’ve read in 2025 that I think is worth pointing out towards.
By no particular order (well, the order in the photo, really…)
- AJ Pearce’s “Yours Cheerfully” and “Mrs Porter Calling”, books 2 and 3 of The Emmy Lake Chronicles. I’d already read the first book in the series and considered it a five stars read, and I plan to eventually read the fourth and last book in the series - the paperback edition is out next August. This isn’t a deep or profound book series - and doesn’t need to be in order to be a good one. It’s a series depicting the life of a young woman in war-time London. Each of these books made me cry and made me laugh, and I have found some comfort reading them in a time where, in many aspects, it feels like we’re living in a pre-war era…
Haiku OS Pulls In Updated Drivers From FreeBSD 15
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project just published a new status report to detail how they ended out the year… ⌘ Read more
Your colleague that’s happy to do the mundane parts of work: AWS announces frontier AI agents
In Las Vegas, AWS’s re:Invent 2025 conference showcased AI that doesn’t just assist, but acts autonomously, highlighting a profound shift in enterprise technology. ⌘ Read more
Norway Reaches 97% EV Sales as EVs Now Outnumber Diesels On Its Roads
Norway has released its December and full year 2025 automotive sales numbers and the world’s leading EV haven has broken records once again. The country had previously targeted an end to fossil car sales in 2025, and it basically got there. From a report: In 2017, Norway set a formal non-binding target to end fossil car sales in the coun … ⌘ Read more
Linux Hit a New All-Time High for Steam Market Share in December
A year ago the Steam Survey showed a 2.29% marketshare for Linux. Last May it reached 2.69%, its highest level since 2018. November saw another all-time high of 3.2%.
But December brought a surprise, reports Phoronix:
Back on the 1st Valve published the Steam Survey results for December 2025 and they put the Linux gaming marketshare at 3.19%, a … ⌘ Read more
Finnish Startup IXI Plans New Autofocusing Eyeglasses
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNET:
Finland-based IXI Eyewear has raised more than $40 million from investors, including Amazon, to build glasses with adaptive lenses that could dynamically autofocus based on where the person wearing them is looking. In late 2025, the company said it had developed a glasses prototype that weighs just 22 grams. It include … ⌘ Read more
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says AI Doomerism Has ‘Done a Lot of Damage’
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang “said one of his biggest takeaways from 2025 was ‘the battle of narratives’ over the future of AI development between those who see doom on the horizon and the optimists,” reports Business Insider.
Huang did acknowledge that “it’s too simplistic” to entirely dismiss either side (on a recent episode of the “No Priors” pod … ⌘ Read more
Gentoo Linux Plans Migration from GitHub Over ‘Attempts to Force Copilot Usage for Our Repositories’
Gentoo Linux posted its 2025 project retrospective this week. Some interesting details:
Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contrib … ⌘ Read more
C# (and C) Grew in Popularity in 2025, Says TIOBE
For a quarter century, the TIOBE Index has attempted to rank the popularity of programming languages by the number of search engine results they bring up — and this week they had an announcement.
Over the last year the language showing the largest increase in its share of TIOBE’s results was C#.
TIOBE founder/CEO Paul Jansen looks back at how C++ evolved:
From a language … ⌘ Read more
#MaradoWeekly #WeeklyShirt Week 01
After an year of posting a #WeeklyRecord (2024) and another a #WeeklyPlant (2025), in 2026 I plan to post a weekly t-shirt: and encourage you to do the same!
Like with the records and the plants, these aren’t my favorite t-shirts or need to be important, or meaningful, and there aren’t there any rules. Why t-shirts? Well, as time passes a person collects t-shirts: sometimes we bought them for a reason (like this first one), others we got on conferences or festivals, maybe they are from a favorite band… in a way, many of this shirts end up telling a story. And I do have more t-shirts than an year has weeks, so I hope I won’t have to repeat any! 😇
Usually I keep my Weekly photos text-free or explanation free, with some insights on their alt text.
Record Ocean Heat is Intensifying Climate Disasters, Data Shows
The world’s oceans absorbed yet another record-breaking amount of heat in 2025, continuing an almost unbroken streak of annual records since the start of the millennium and fueling increasingly extreme weather events around the globe. More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s carbon emissions ends up in the oceans, making ocean heat content one … ⌘ Read more