RADV Driver Lands Another Big Improvement For Early AMD GCN Graphics Cards
Beyond Linux 6.19 switching old AMD GCN 1.0 and 1.1 GPUs to the AMDGPU kernel driver by default for better performance, RADV out-of-the-box, and more, there are still more improvements planned for these aging AMD graphics cards. Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux graphics team has been leading the effort to enhance the old graphics card support and on Friday night merged a big improvement for the RADV Vulkan driver in Mesa 26.0… ⌘ Read more

NYC Phone Ban Reveals Some Students Can’t Read Clocks
New York City’s statewide smartphone ban that went into effect this fall has been largely successful at getting students to focus in class and socialize at lunch, but teachers across the city have discovered an unexpected side effect: many teenagers cannot read analog clocks. “The constant refrain is ‘Miss, what time is it?’” said Madi Mornhinweg, a high school English … ⌘ Read more

Economic Inequality Does Not Equate To Poor Well-Being or Mental Health, Massive Meta-Analysis Finds
A new sweeping meta-analysis has found no reliable link between economic inequality and well-being or mental health, challenging a long-held assumption that has shaped public health policy discussions for decades. The study, led by Nicolas Sommet at the University of Lausan … ⌘ Read more

Dell’s XPS Brand May Return Just a Year After Being Retired, Report Claims
Dell is planning to bring back its XPS laptop branding, according to a news report, just one year after the company retired the storied name in favor of a simplified naming scheme that organized its consumer and professional lineup into Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max tiers. VideoCardz reported this week that Dell has presented an … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft CEO: Time To Move ‘Beyond the Arguments of Slop vs Sophistication’
The tech industry needs to move “beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication” and develop a new “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans now equipped with “cognitive amplifier tools,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a year-end reflection blog. The post frames 2026 as yet another “pivotal year for AI” – but one that “ … ⌘ Read more

MTV’s Music-Only Channels Go Off the Air
An anonymous reader shares a report: MTV shut down many of its last dedicated 24-hour music channels Dec. 31. The move, announced back in October, affected channels around the world, with the U.K. seeing five different MTV stations going dark. These include MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV, and MTV Live. As Consequence notes, MTV Music – which launched in 2011 – notably ended it … ⌘ Read more

Google AI Overviews Put People at Risk of Harm With Misleading Health Advice
A Guardian investigation published Friday found that Google’s AI Overviews – the generative AI summaries that appear at the top of search results – are serving up inaccurate health information that experts say puts people at risk of harm. The investigation, which came after health groups, charities and professionals raise … ⌘ Read more

Trump Signs Defense Bill Prohibiting China-Based Engineers in Pentagon IT Work
President Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that prohibits anyone based in China and other adversarial countries from accessing the Pentagon’s cloud computing systems. From a report: The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law, was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation … ⌘ Read more

AMD Closes in on Intel in Latest Steam Hardware Survey
AMD’s share of processors among Steam users climbed to 47.27% in December 2025, a 4.66% jump in a single month that continues the company’s steady encroachment on Intel’s once-dominant position in the gaming CPU market. Intel held roughly 77% of the Steam Hardware Survey five years ago, and that lead has eroded considerably as AMD broke the 40% threshold in the third qua … ⌘ Read more

Reading is a Vice
The International Publishers Association spent the past year promoting the slogan “Democracy depends on reading,” but Atlantic senior editor Adam Kirsch argues that this utilitarian pitch fundamentally misunderstands why people become readers in the first place.

The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that less than half of Americans read a single book in 2022, and only 38% read a novel or short story. A Universi … ⌘ Read more

A Decade of BBC Question Time Data Reveals Imbalance in Journalist Guests
A new study [PDF] from Cardiff University analyzing a decade of the popular topical debate programme BBC Question Time found that the broadcaster’s flagship political debate show relies disproportionately on journalists and pundits from right-wing media outlets, particularly those connected to The Spectator magazine.

Research … ⌘ Read more

‘Results Were Fudged’: Departing Meta AI Chief Confirms Llama 4 Benchmark Manipulation
Yann LeCun, Meta’s outgoing chief AI scientist and one of the pioneers credited with laying the groundwork for modern AI, has acknowledged that the company’s Llama 4 language model had its benchmark results manipulated before its April 2025 release. In an interview with the Financial Times, LeCun said the … ⌘ Read more

Ghana Tries To Regulate Online Prophecies
Ghana has decided to deal with the viral spread of prophetic content on social media by setting up an official reporting mechanism for sensitive predictions, a move triggered by the August 2025 helicopter crash that killed the country’s defence and environment ministers along with six others.

After the accident, TikTok clips circulated showing pastors who claimed to have foreseen the disast … ⌘ Read more

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Prints Final Newspaper, Shifts To All-Digital Format
CBS News: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has printed its final newspaper, marking the end of a 157-year chapter in Georgia history and officially transitioning the longtime publication into a fully digital news outlet.

The front-page story of the final print edition asks a fitting question: “What is the … ⌘ Read more

How Nokia Went From iPhone Victim To $1 Billion Nvidia Deal
Nokia, the Finnish company whose iconic ringtone was played an estimated 1.8 billion times daily at the height of its mobile phone dominance and whose 3310 “brick” sold 126 million units, has reinvented itself again – this time as a key piece of AI infrastructure. In October, Nvidia announced a $1 billion investment in Nokia and a strategic partnership to incorp … ⌘ Read more

ASUS Announces Price Hikes Starting January 5
ASUS has informed its partners that prices on certain products will increase starting January 5, just days before the company is expected to unveil new hardware at CES. In a letter dated December 30 and obtained by Digitimes, the Taiwanese manufacturer pointed to rising costs for memory and storage components as the primary driver behind the adjustment.

The company specifically called … ⌘ Read more

Australia’s Biggest Pension Fund To Cut Global Stocks Allocation on AI Concerns
Australia’s largest pension fund is planning to reduce its allocation to global equities this year, amid signs that the AI boom in the US stock market could be running out of steam. Financial Times: John Normand, head of investment strategy at the A$400bn (US$264bn) AustralianSuper, told the Financial Times that not only d … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.3.3 Ships Latest Bug Fixes, Intel Vulkan GTK4 Toolkit Workarounds
Mesa 25.3.3 shipped on Thursday as the newest stable point release for Q4’s Mesa 25.3 feature series. Now being into the new quarter, we have Mesa 26.0 to look forward to as stable likely by late February, but for now Mesa 25.3.3 is the latest and greatest stable version… ⌘ Read more

No Standard iPhone 18 Launch This Year, Reports Suggest
MacRumors: Apple is not expected to release a standard iPhone 18 model this year, according to a growing number of reports that suggest the company is planning a significant change to its long-standing annual iPhone launch cycle.

Despite the immense success of the iPhone 17 in 2025, the iPhone 18 is not expected to arrive until the spring of 2027, leaving the iP … ⌘ Read more

IDC Estimates Apple Shipped Just 45,000 Vision Pros Last Quarter
Apple’s Chinese manufacturing partner Luxshare halted production of the Vision Pro headset at the start of 2025, according to market research firm IDC, after the device shipped 390,000 units during its 2024 launch year. The $3,499 headset has also seen its digital advertising budget cut by more than 95% year to date in the US and UK, according to … ⌘ Read more

Some of Your Cells Are Not Genetically Yours
Every human body contains a small population of cells that are not genetically its own – cells that crossed the placenta during pregnancy and that persist for decades after birth. These “microchimeric” cells, named after the lion-goat-serpent hybrid of Greek mythology, have been found in every organ studied so far, though they are exceedingly rare: one such cell exists for every 10 … ⌘ Read more

‘The Cult of Costco’
Costco’s consistency – from its $1.50 hot dog and drink combo to its functional shopping carts and satisfied employees – has produced what The Atlantic calls a “cultlike loyalty” among members at more than 600 locations across the U.S.

Its annual membership costs $65. The model traces back to Fedco, a nonprofit wholesale collective for federal employees founded in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Costco’s private label Kirkland Signature has b … ⌘ Read more

Iran Offers To Sell Advanced Weapons Systems For Crypto
Iran is offering to sell advanced weapons systems including ballistic missiles, drones and warships to foreign governments for cryptocurrency, in a bid to use digital assets to bypass western financial controls. From a report: Iran’s Ministry of Defence Export Center, known as Mindex, says it is prepared to negotiate military contracts that allow payment in digita … ⌘ Read more

‘IPv6 Just Turned 30 and Still Hasn’t Taken Over the World, But Don’t Call It a Failure’
Three decades after RFC 1883 promised to future-proof the internet by expanding the available pool of IP addresses from around 4.3 billion to over 340 undecillion, IPv6 has yet to achieve the dominance its creators envisioned. Data from Google, APNIC and Cloudflare analyzed by The Register shows less tha … ⌘ Read more

DHS Says REAL ID, Which DHS Certifies, Is Too Unreliable To Confirm US Citizenship
An anonymous reader shares a report: Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn’t even work as a national ID. But that’s what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers un … ⌘ Read more

Public Domain Day 2026 Brings Betty Boop, Nancy Drew and ‘I Got Rhythm’ Into the Commons
As the calendar flips to January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 are entering the US public domain alongside sound recordings from 1925, making them free to copy, share, remix and build upon without permission or licensing fees. The literary haul includes William Faulkner’s As I Lay D … ⌘ Read more

European Space Agency Acknowledges Another Breach as Criminals Claim 200 GB Data Haul
The European Space Agency has acknowledged yet another security incident after a cybercriminal posted an offer on BreachForums the day after Christmas claiming to have stolen over 20GB of data including source code, confidential documents, API tokens and credentials.

The attacker claims they gained access … ⌘ Read more

The Man Taking Over the Large Hadron Collider
Mark Thomson, a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge, takes over as CERN’s director general this week, and one of his first major decisions during his five-year tenure will be shutting down the Large Hadron Collider for an extended upgrade. The shutdown starts in June to make way for the high-luminosity LHC – a major overhaul involving powerfu … ⌘ Read more

You Can’t Trust Your Eyes To Tell You What’s Real Anymore, Says Instagram Head
Instagram head Adam Mosseri closed out 2025 by acknowledging what many have long suspected: the era of trusting photographs as accurate records of reality is over, and the platform he runs will need to fundamentally adapt to an age of “infinite synthetic content.”

In a slideshow posted to Instagram, Mosseri wrote that fo … ⌘ Read more

Despite a Record Year, Airlines Are Grappling With Big Challenges
The global airline industry is on track to post an all-time profit high of nearly $40 billion in 2025, according to trade group IATA, surpassing the pre-pandemic 2019 figure of $26 billion, but carriers are still managing a net margin of just 4% – roughly $7.90 per passenger. Economist adds: Not everything has been in the ascent. European and N … ⌘ Read more

Driverless Future Gains Momentum With Global Robotaxi Deployments
The global push to put autonomous taxis on public roads is accelerating as ride-hailing companies and technology firms advance from pilot programs toward limited commercial rollouts in cities across China, the United States, Europe and the Middle East.

WeRide and Uber launched Level 4 fully driverless robotaxi operations in Abu Dhabi in Novemb … ⌘ Read more

NASA Chief Says US Will Return To Moon Within Trump’s Second Term
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who was confirmed by the Senate just last week after a turbulent nomination process that stretched across most of 2025, said Friday that the United States will return to the moon within President Donald Trump’s second term. Isaacman made the comments during an interview on CNBC, calling Trump’s recommitment … ⌘ Read more

New York To Require Social Media Platforms To Display Mental Health Warnings
Social media platforms with infinite scrolling, auto-play and algorithmic feeds will be required to display warning labels about their potential harm to young users’ mental health under a new law, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Friday. From a report: “Keeping New Yorkers safe has been my top priority since taki … ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg Developer Files DMCA Against Rockchip After Two-Year Wait for License Fix
GitHub has disabled Rockchip’s Media Process Platform repository after an FFmpeg developer filed a DMCA takedown notice, nearly two years after the open-source project first publicly accused the Chinese chipmaker of license violations. The notice, filed December 18, claims Rockchip copied thousands of lines of code fr … ⌘ Read more

Indian IT Was Supposed To Die From AI. Instead It’s Billing for the Cleanup.
Two years after generative AI was supposed to render India’s $250 billion IT services industry obsolete, the sector is finding that enterprises still need someone to handle the unglamorous plumbing work that large-scale AI deployment demands. Less than 15% of organizations are meaningfully deploying the new technology, accordin … ⌘ Read more

As AI Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary
While stock investors have pushed AI-related shares to repeated highs this year, debt markets are telling a more cautious story as newer AI infrastructure companies find themselves paying significantly elevated interest rates to borrow money. Applied Digital, a data center builder, sold $2.35 billion of debt in November at a 9.25% coupon – roughly 3.75% above … ⌘ Read more

The Economic Divide Between Big and Small Companies Is Growing
While America’s largest corporations are riding a wave of surging profits and AI-fueled stock market enthusiasm to record highs, small businesses across the country are cutting staff and scaling back operations as years of high inflation, cautious consumers and tariff confusion take their toll.

Private firms with fewer than 50 workers have steadily … ⌘ Read more

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Retreating From EVs Could Be Hazardous For Western Carmakers
Western carmakers retreating from electric vehicles amid softening government mandates could find themselves in a precarious position as Chinese rivals continue gaining ground in the EV market they’re choosing to de-prioritize. The EU on December 16th dropped its earlier plan to ban petrol car sales outright from 2035, instead requiring carmakers to cut e … ⌘ Read more

AI’s Hunger For Memory Chips Could Shrink Smartphone and PC Sales in 2026, IDC Says
The global smartphone and PC markets face potential contractions of up to 5.2% and 8.9% respectively in 2026, according to downside risk scenarios from IDC that trace the problem to memory chip manufacturers shifting production capacity away from consumer electronics toward AI data centers. Samsung Electronics, SK … ⌘ Read more

China Launches $21 Billion Venture Capital Funds To Invest in ‘Hard Technology’
An anonymous reader shares a report: China on Friday launched three venture capital funds to invest in “hard technology” areas, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The capital contribution plans for the funds have been finalised, each with more than 50 billion yuan ($7.14 billion), according to the report. The funds will primar … ⌘ Read more

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

‘Memory is Running Out, and So Are Excuses For Software Bloat’
The relentless climb in memory prices driven by the AI boom’s insatiable demand for datacenter hardware has renewed an old debate about whether modern software has grown inexcusably fat, a column by the Register argues. The piece points to Windows Task Manager as a case study: the current executable occupies 6MB on disk and demands nearly 70MB of … ⌘ Read more

Cursor CEO Warns Vibe Coding Builds ‘Shaky Foundations’ That Eventually Crumble
Michael Truell, the 25-year-old CEO and cofounder of Cursor, is drawing a sharp distinction between careful AI-assisted development and the more hands-off approach commonly known as “vibe coding.” Speaking at a conference, Truell described vibe coding as a method where users “close your eyes and you don’t look at … ⌘ Read more

Apple’s App Course Runs $20,000 a Student. Is It Really Worth It?
Apple’s Developer Academy in Detroit has spent roughly $30 million over four years training hundreds of people to build iPhone apps, but not everyone lands coding jobs right away, according to a WIRED story published this week.

The program launched in 2021 as part of Apple’s $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and costs an esti … ⌘ Read more

Gmail Users May Soon Be Able To Change Their Email Address and Keep the Old One
Google appears to be testing a feature that would let users change their @gmail.com address for the first time, according to an official support document. The support page exists only in Hindi, suggesting an India-first rollout, and Google notes that users will “gradually begin to see this option.”

The feature would l … ⌘ Read more

Apple Settles Brazilian Antitrust Case, Must Allow Third-Party App Stores and External Payment Links
Apple has agreed to a settlement with Brazil’s antitrust regulator that will require the company to allow third-party app stores on iPhones and permit developers to direct users to external payment options, marking another country where Apple’s tightly controlled App Store mo … ⌘ Read more

Libreboot 26.01-rc1 Released To Support A Few More Systems
Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on free, open-source boot firmware is out with a new test release for Christmas… ⌘ 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

LibreOffice 26.2 Gets Rid Of The “Community” Edition Branding
With the upcoming LibreOffice 26.2 open-source office suite release, they are getting rid of the “Community Edition” branding for the standard version of this widely-used cross-platform office suite… ⌘ Read more