Google Chrome Is Switching To a Two-Week Release Cycle
Google is accelerating Chrome’s major release cadence from four weeks to two starting with version 153 on September 8th. “…our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes and new capabilities,” says Google. “Building on our history of adapting our release process to match the demands of a modern web, C … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Snapshot 4 Released
The fourth and final monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.04 “Resolute Raccoon” is now available for testing. This alternative to the Ubuntu 26.04 daily ISOs is a monthly test release that also helps exercise the Ubuntu Linux release automation processes… ⌘ Read more

NXP Posts New Linux Accelerator Driver For Their Neutron NPU
The Linux kernel continues seeing more open-source kernel drivers emerge for supporting different AI accelerators / NPUs. The newest open-source driver breaking cover today is from NXP and is for enabling their Neutron neural processing unit… ⌘ Read more

b4’s Review TUI With AI Integration Nearing Pre-Alpha Release
The b4 tool used for managing patch workflows to the Linux kernel has been seeing a lot of work recently on b4 review as the text user interface (TUI) to help expedite the patch review process for the Linux kernel. The b4 review TUI has been integrating AI agent code review helpers powered by the likes of Claude Code too for trying to help enhance the efficiency for Linux kernel patch reviews. That b4 review work is quickly approaching a pre-alpha sta … ⌘ Read more

Uber Previews Its Dubai Air Taxi Service
An anonymous reader shares a report: Uber is one step closer to going airborne. On Wednesday, the company previewed its air taxi booking service ahead of an expected launch in Dubai later this year. The inaugural Uber Air program will let travelers book Joby Aviation’s electric air taxis through a familiar process in the Uber app.

The experience of booking an air taxi will be much like reserv … ⌘ Read more

AI Now Helps Manage 16% of America’s Apartments
Imagine a 280-unit apartment complex offering no on-site leasing office with a human agent for questions. “Instead, the entire process has been outsourced to AI…” reports SFGate, “from touring to signing the lease to completing management tasks once you actually move in.”

Now imagine it’s far more than just one apartment complex…

At two other Jack London Square apartment buildings … ⌘ Read more

GNU Gawk 5.4 Released With New MinRX Regex Matcher, Faster Reading Of Files
Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4… ⌘ Read more

Ask Slashdot: What’s Your Boot Time?
How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and “You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?”

And more importantly, why is it all taking so long?
In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU’s that are thousands of times faster than they were, … ⌘ Read more

ollama 0.17 Released With Improved OpenClaw Onboarding
The open-source ollama project that makes it easy to get up and running with a variety of LLMs under Windows, macOS, and Linux is out with a new release. The ollama v0.17.0 release is driven by new functionality around enhancing the OpenClaw onboarding process… ⌘ Read more

US Particle Accelerators Turn Nuclear Waste Into Electricity, Cut Radioactive Life By 99.7%
Researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are advancing Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) that use high-energy proton beams to transmute long-lived nuclear waste into shorter-lived isotopes. “The process also generates significant heat, which can be harnessed to produce … ⌘ Read more

Trump Directs US Government To Prepare Release of Files on Aliens and UFOs
US President Donald Trump says he will direct US agencies, including the defence department, to “begin the process of identifying and releasing” government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life. From a report: Trump made the declaration in a post on Truth Social, after he accused Barack Obama earlier in the day of revealin … ⌘ Read more

A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments
India’s digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it’s a cheap plastic speaker that sits o … ⌘ Read more

A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments
India’s digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it’s a cheap plastic speaker that sits o … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Merges The Code To Replace The Tux Boot Logo At Build Time
Linus Torvalds merged the code this weekend that allows easily replacing the Tux penguin boot logo used during the boot process. This new code optionally allows specifying an alternative boot logo at compile/build time… ⌘ Read more

X.Org Server’s “Master” Branch Now Closed With Cleaned Up State On “Main”
This Valentine’s Day there is a lot of red on the screen for the X.Org Server with the code delta as a result of renaming of their main Git development branch and in the process selectively dropping questionable patches to the prior “master” codebase… ⌘ Read more

Intel Is Making It Easier In Linux 7.0 To Monitor Energy Use For A Group Of Tasks
Intel has upstreamed some Resource Control “resctrl” improvements to Linux 7.0 for enhanced telemetry monitoring. This is the good kind of telemetry with this new code being useful for being able to monitor how much energy or work is attributed to a group of tasks / process IDs on the system… ⌘ Read more

Siri’s AI Overhaul Delayed Again
Apple’s long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting.

The new Siri – first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 – struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and s … ⌘ 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

Qualcomm QUPv3 Firmware Upstreamed For Snapdragon X1 Elite Linux Users
One of the headaches right now when dealing with the Snapdragon X Elite on Linux is that for a majority of the devices you need to fetch firmware files from the Windows 11 on ARM partition as the necessary firmware bits for Linux use aren’t upstreamed to linux-firmware.git. That has gradually improved over time from the qcom-firmware-extract making the process easier to more firmware bits eventually being added to linux-firmware.git… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Plans To Use AI To Speed Up TV and Film Production
Amazon plans to use AI to speed up the process for making movies and TV shows even as Hollywood fears that AI will cut jobs and permanently reshape the industry. From a report: At the Amazon MGM Studio, veteran entertainment executive Albert Cheng is leading a team charged with developing new AI tools that he said will cut costs and streamline the cre … ⌘ Read more

Ultra-Processed Foods Should Be Treated More Like Cigarettes Than Food, Study Says
Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report. The Guardian: UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the pa … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net That’s the plan! Once I’m happy with this v1 (and we find no other obvious bugs/issues) updating “Changes” with user-facing / human-freidnyl changes is part of the release process!

Microsoft Admits Windows 11 Has a Trust Problem, Promises To Focus on Fixes in 2026
Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system’s performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls “swarming.”

” … ⌘ Read more

Kernel Community Drafts a Plan For Replacing Linus Torvalds
The Linux kernel community has formalized a continuity plan for the day Linus Torvalds eventually steps aside, defining how the process would work to replace him as the top-level maintainer. ZDNet’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: The new “plan for a plan,” drafted by longtime kernel contributor Dan Williams, was discussed at the latest Linux Kernel Maint … ⌘ Read more

New California Law Means Big Changes For Photos of Homes in Real Estate Listings
California house hunters now have legal protection against the kind of real estate photo trickery that has long plagued the home-buying process, as a new state law requiring disclosure of digitally altered listing images took effect on January 1.

Assembly Bill 723 mandates that real estate agents and brokers inclu … ⌘ Read more

Gasoline Out of Thin Air? It’s a Reality!
Can Aircela’s machine “create gasoline using little more than electricity and the air that we breathe”? Jalopnik reports…

The Aircela machine works through a three-step process. It captures carbon dioxide directly from the air… The machine also traps water vapor, and uses electrolysis to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen… The oxygen is released, leaving hydrogen and carbon di … ⌘ Read more

The Case Against Small Modular Nuclear Reactors
Small modular nuclear reactors (or SMRs) are touted as “cheaper, safer, faster to build and easier to finance” than conventional nuclear reactors, reports CNN. Amazon has invested in X-Energy, and earlier this month, Meta announced a deal with Oklo, and in Michigan last month, Holtec began the long formal licensing process for two SMRs with America’s Nuclear Regulatory Commis … ⌘ Read more

A Decade In The Making, Time Slice Extension Could Be Merged For Linux 7.0
With the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle it looks like the time slice extension work could finally been merged, which has seen various attempts over the past decade. Time slice extension for the Linux kernel implemented using Restartable Sequences “RSEQ” allows user-space processes to request a temporary, opportunistic extension of their CPU time slice without being preempted… ⌘ Read more

NASA Eyes Popular PC Hardware Performance Tool for Its Flight Simulators
NASA Langley has initiated the U.S. government software approval process to install CapFrameX, a benchmarking tool popular among PC gaming enthusiasts, on its cockpit simulators used to train test pilots. The space agency reached out to CapFrameX, not the other way around, according to an X post from the company.

NASA builds cu … ⌘ Read more

Updated Intel Panther Lake IPU Firmware Published With New Features & Bug Fixes
Ahead of the first Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake laptops expected to hit retail channels next week, Intel has published updated IPU7 (IPU 7.5) firmware for the image processing unit used by the web cameras on the higher-end Panther Lake laptops… ⌘ Read more

How Much Do AI Models Resemble a Brain?
At the AI safety site Foom, science journalist Mordechai Rorvig explores a paper presented at November’s Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference:

[R]esearchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Georgia Tech revisited earlier findings that showed that language models, the engines of commercial AI chatbots, sh … ⌘ Read more

Patches Positioned Ahead Of Linux 7.0 Cycle For Easy Custom Boot Logo In Place Of Tux
The Linux kernel patches talked about at the start of the year for more easily changing the boot logo of Tux are now queued into a “for-next” branch and thus expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. Those wanting to replace the Tux icon with an alternative logo during the Linux kernel boot process could already patch the file manually but this new code allows for an easy replacement via Kconfig op … ⌘ Read more

Warhammer Maker Games Workshop Bans Its Staff From Using AI In Its Content or Designs
Games Workshop, the owner and operator of a number of hugely popular tabletop war games, including Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar, has banned the use of generative AI in its content and design processes. IGN reports: Delivering the UK company’s impressive financial results, CEO Kevin Rountree address … ⌘ Read more

Dell Tells Staff To Get Ready For the ‘Biggest Transformation in Company History’
Dell’s chief operating officer Jeff Clarke has informed employees that the company is preparing for what he calls the “biggest transformation in company history,” a sweeping systems overhaul scheduled to launch on May 3 that will standardize processes across nearly every major division.

The initiative, dubbed One D … ⌘ Read more

McKinsey Asks Graduates To Use AI Chatbot in Recruitment Process
McKinsey is asking graduate applicants to “collaborate” with an AI tool as part of its recruitment process, as competence with the technology becomes a requirement in competing for top-level jobs. From a report: The blue-chip consultancy is incorporating an “AI interview” into some final-round interviews, according to CaseBasix, a US company that helps … ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases Open3D 0.19 With Experimental Cross-Platform GPU Support Using SYCL
Not to be confused with the Open 3D game engine, Intel’s Intelligent Systems Lab Organization released Open3D 0.19 as the latest iteration of this open-source library for 3D data processing in Python and C++… ⌘ Read more

Linux Working Around Audio Problems On The ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X
For those loading Linux on the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X gaming handheld, there is currently audio quality issues, including gaps/dropouts in audio playback. A workaround is in the process of making its way to the Linux kernel until a proper solution can be sorted out… ⌘ Read more

Intel Is ‘Going Big Time Into 14A,’ Says CEO Lip-Bu Tan
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the company is “going big time” into its 14A (1.4nm-class) process, signaling confidence in yields and hinting at at least one external foundry customer. Tom’s Hardware reports: Intel’s 14A is expected to be production-ready in 2027, with early versions of process design kit (PDK) coming to external customers early this year. To that end … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Wants To Know What Every Corporate Employee Accomplished Last Year
Amazon is now requiring its corporate employees to submit a list of three to five accomplishments that represent their best work as part of an overhauled performance review process, according to Business Insider, which cites internal documents.

The company’s internal Forte review system previously asked employees softer questions li … ⌘ Read more

TV Makers Are Taking AI Too Far
TV manufacturers at CES 2026 in Las Vegas this week unveiled a wave of AI features that frequently consume significant screen space and take considerable time to deliver results – all while global TV shipments declined 0.6% year over year in Q3, according to Omdia. Google demonstrated Veo generating video from a photo on a television, a process that took about two minutes to produce eight seconds of f … ⌘ Read more

DRM Splash Screen Updated To Simply Drawing A Colored Background, Displaying A BMP Image
Back in October was an initial proposal for a DRM splash screen client for the Linux kernel that would be primarily useful for embedded systems for rendering a simple “splash screen” when updating the system firmware/software, early display activation at boot, during system recovery, or similar processes. Sent out today was a second revision to the DRM splash screen code… ⌘ Read more

# $YakumoLabs$
# yarnd service file for https://github.com/davmac314/dinit
type = process
command = /usr/pkg/bin/yarnd -b 127.0.0.1:6446
env-file = /usr/pkg/etc/yarnd.conf
working-dir = /var/db/yarnd
restart = on-failure

Spent most of the long weekend working on a few coding projects… specifically, I pushed some updates for TwtKpr to my test instance before spending some time working on the build process and demo page for my new twtxt-parsing library… which lead to me make some changes to my existing fluent-dom-esm library.

So, nothing actually got finished, but the incremental updates continue…

Spent most of the long weekend working on a few coding projects… specifically, I pushed some updates for TwtKpr to my test instance before spending some time working on the build process and demo page for my new twtxt-parsing library… which lead me to make some changes to my existing fluent-dom-esm library.

So, nothing actually got finished, but the incremental updates continue…

Archboot Adds COSMIC Desktop as a New Install and Rescue Option
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Linux news site Linuxiac:

Archboot, a guided, user-friendly, menu-driven installer for Arch Linux that automates much of the traditional manual installation process (while still allowing advanced users to intervene when needed), has added the COSMIC desktop environment as a new selectable option. The … ⌘ Read more

The US Effort to Break China’s Rare-Earth Monopoly
The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility:

There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup … ⌘ Read more

Mu (µ) is now getting much closer to where I want it to be, it now has:

• A process stdlib module (very basic, but it works)
  
• An ffi stdob module that supports dlopen / dlsym and calling C functions with a nice mu-esque wrapper ffi.fn(...)
  
• A sqlite stdlib module (also very basic) that shows off the FFI capabilities
  

😅

Shotcut 25.12 Released With 10-bit Video CPU Pipeline, Linear Color Processing
December happens to be a busy month for video editor releases in the open-source world. This month there’s been the release of Flowblade 2.24, OpenShot 3.4, Kdenlive 25.12, and now there is Shotcut 25.12 before closing out the month and year… ⌘ Read more

X.Org IMAKE Updated For Those Not Yet Transitioned To Autoconf/Automake Or Meson
X.Org package wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle announced today the release of imake 1.0.11, the newest version of this utility that 20+ years ago was used extensively as part of the X Window System build process for generating Makefiles from a template. With this first imake point release in two years, imake itself can now be built via Meson and there is now support for RISC-V and LoongArch architectures… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net That might be a challenge, at least in 16-bit Real Mode: The OS follows the model of COM files on DOS, i.e. the size of the binary cannot exceed 64 KiB and heap+stack of the running program will have to fit into that same 64 KiB. 😅 (The memory layout is very rigid, each process gets such a 64 KiB slice.)

And in 64-bit Long Mode, there is no “kernel” yet. The thing in the video is literally just a small bare-metal program.

But some day, maybe. 😃