What Happened When Alaska’s Court System Tried Answering Questions with an AI Chatbot?
An AI chatbot to answer probate questions from Alaska residents “was supposed to be a three-month project,” said Aubrie Souza, a consultant with the National Center for State Courts told NBC News. “We are now at well over a year and three months, but that’s all because of the due diligence that was req … ⌘ Read more
Rust-Based Fjall 3.0 Released For Key-Value Storage Engine Akin To RocksDB
In addition to the release of Stoolap 0.2 as a modern embedded SQL database written in Rust, Fjall 3.0 is available as another Rust-written database solution. Fjall is a log-structured, embedable key-value storage engine akin to RocksDB but with the benefit of being written in Rust. With Fjall 3.0 its performance is now very competitive… ⌘ Read more
Google’s $250M Deal with California to Fund Newsrooms May Be Stalled
Remember how California’s government negotiated a 2024 deal where Google contributed millions to California’s local newsrooms to offset advertisers moving to the search engine?
“A year after it was cemented — and billed as a model that could succeed where entire countries and continents had fallen short — the agreement is tangled in budget … ⌘ Read more
Has Microsoft Discontinued Offline Activation of Windows?
An anonymous reader shared
this report from Neowin:
Offline Windows activation has been possible to do using the phone. However, it looks like Microsoft has quietly killed off that method as users online have found that they are no longer able to activate the OS using it… [As documented by Windows user Ben Kleinberg on his YouTube channel], Now when trying … ⌘ Read more
The US Invaded Venezuela and Captured Nicolás Maduro - But ChatGPT and Perplexity Disagree
Why did the U.S. invade Venezuela and capture its leader Nicolás Maduro? “If you asked ChatGPT about it this morning, it told you that youâ™re making it up,” Wired reported Saturday:
WIRED asked leading chatbots ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the same question a little before 9 am ET. In all case … ⌘ Read more
SpaceX Lowering Orbits of 4,400 Starlink Satellites for Safety’s Sake
“Starlink is beginning a significant reconfiguration of its satellite constellation focused on increasing space safety,” announced Michael Nicolls, Starlink’s vice president of engineering:
“We are lowering all Starlink satellites orbiting at ~550 km to ~480 km (~4400 satellites) over the course of 2026. The shell lowering is being tig … ⌘ Read more
Could AI Bring Us Four-Day Workweeks?
“While a growing number of U.S. employers are mandating workers return to the office five days a week,” reports the Washington Post, “some companies say AI is saving them enough time to launch or sustain a four-day workweek.
“More companies may move toward a shortened workweek, several executives and researchers predict, as workers, especially those in younger generations, continue to push for better … ⌘ Read more
Airlines Cancel Hundreds of Flights After U.S. Attack on Venezuela
CNBC reports that U.S. airlines have “canceled hundreds of flights to airports in Puerto Rico and Aruba, according to flight tallies from FlightAware and carriers’ sites.”
JetBlue, Southwest, and American Airlines were among the multiple airlines showing cancelled flights, which “included close to 300 flights to and from San Juan, Puerto Rico’ … ⌘ Read more
Box64 v0.4 Improves Support For DRM Protected Games, Steam Is Now More Stable
While Fex-Emu has been getting a lot of attention lately for being Valve-sponsored and powering the upcoming Steam Frame, Box64 continues making progress as another great open-source project for running x86_64 Linux binaries on AArch64 Linux as well as an eye on other architectures like RISC-V… ⌘ Read more
Interference With America’s GPS System ‘Has Grown Dramatically’
86 aircraft were affected by an incident in Denver ,and 256 more in Dallas-Fort Worth, America’s Federal Aviation Admistrationtold the Washington Post:
The pilots flying into Denver International Airport could tell something was wrong. In urgent calls to air traffic controllers, they reported that the Global Positioning System was going haywire, forc … ⌘ Read more
Linux Audio Quirk Handling On The Way For Dell Panther Lake Laptops
Ahead of the initial batch of Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to be showcased at CES next week in Las Vegas, we’re seeing last minute quirk updates for these products expected to soon come to market… ⌘ Read more
Jobs Vulnerable to AI Replacement Actually ‘Thriving, Not Dying Out’, Report Suggests
AI startups now outnumber all publicly traded U.S. companies, according to a year-end note to investors from economists at Vanguard.
And yet that report also suggest the jobs most susceptible to replacement by AI “are actually thriving, not dying out,” writes Forbes:
“The approximately 100 occupations most ex … ⌘ Read more
Stoolap 0.2 Released For Modern Embedded SQL Database In Rust
Stooplap v0.2 released today as this SQLite alternative for providing embedded SQL database needs while written in the Rust programming language. Stoolap supports both in-memory and persistent storage models… ⌘ Read more
GNOME Glycin Adds XPM/XBM Support To Address Fedora’s Last Unsandboxed Image Loader
GNOME’s Glycin project as the Rust-based sandboxed and extendable image loading library now supports XPM and XBM images. This is notable since those formats were the last unsandboxed image loading formats used on Fedora Linux… ⌘ Read more
After Half a Decade, the Russian Space Station Segment Stopped Leaking
A small section of the International Space Station that has experienced persistent leaks for years appears to have stopped venting atmosphere into space. ArsTechnica: The leaks were caused by microscopic structural cracks inside the small PrK module on the Russian segment of the space station, which lies between a Progress spacecraft … ⌘ Read more
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
KDE Plasma 6.6 Fixes A Common Panel-Related Crash, Improves OpenBSD Support
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with the first issue of This Week in Plasma for 2026. Last week was a warning that This Week in Plasma could become less frequent without new volunteers to help takeover. Nate Graham announced that John Veness has stepped up to help co-author these weekly KDE development posts… ⌘ 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
Aeryn OS Continuing To Focus On Tooling & Infrastructure In 2026
The Aeryn OS Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS has published a 2025 retrospective to recap the project changes over the past year as well as a look ahead to 2026… ⌘ 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
Linux Addressing Out-Of-Memory Killer Inaccuracy On Large Core Count Systems
A patch is on the way to the Linux kernel and looks like it could be ready for the 6.20~7.0 kernel for addressing out-of-memory “OOM” killer inaccuracy behavior when dealing with large core count systems… ⌘ 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
New Linux Patches Allow More Easily Changing The Tux Kernel Boot Logo
A new patch series that was posted this week allow for users to more easily replace the default kernel boot logo. While many of us are long accustomed to seeing the picture of Tux as the kernel boot logo, for those preferring to better customize your console boot experience these patches allow it to be easily manipulated via the kernel configuration “Kconfig” options… ⌘ 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
RadeonSI Starts 2026 With NIR Compilation Refactoring For Better Performance, Lower GLSL Compile Times
Merged on New Year’s Day was a set of 36 patches authored by well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák for refactoring the NIR compilation code for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver… ⌘ 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
Radeon Linux Driver Enhancements, Linux 6.19 Activity & Other December Highlights
During the month of December on Phoronix there was new and original content each and every day, ending the month with 305 original news articles and 25 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here is a look back at the most exciting Linux/open-source hardware content in ending out 2025… ⌘ 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
Debian’s Bug Tracker With No Web UI For Editing Bugs Is Very Obscure For 2026
Debian’s maintainer of the Meson build system package is calling attention to the unfortunate state of Debian’s bug tracker in 2026. Editing bug data within Debian’s bug tracker still relies on writing custom-formatted emails and submitting them via your mail client. There still is no modern web UI for managing the Debian bug tracker as it was largely written in the early 90s… ⌘ Read more
Six Years Since The Reiser5 File-System Was Announced
With the start of the New Year it now marks six years since the unexpected announcement of the Reiser5 file-system being developed as the continuation of the never-upstreamed Reiser4 file-system. But Reiser5 development never saw too much upstream interest and it’s now been several years without any updated patches for Reiser5 or Reiser4… ⌘ 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
Conic Sections
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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
Steam On Linux Ends 2025 With 3.19% Marketshare, AMD Linux CPU Use Approaches 72%
Back in November Steam on Linux use hit an all-time high at 3.2%. With the still increasing popularity around the Steam Deck powered by the Arch Linux based SteamOS, Linux gaming continuing to grow thanks to Steam Play (Proton), and excitement around the upcoming Steam Frame and Steam Machine hardware, the Linux gaming outlook continues to be positive. The Steam Survey results for December 2025 are out tonight and with just a tiny … ⌘ Read more
Devuan 6.1 Released For Latest Debian 13 “Init Freedom” Without systemd
Released back in November was Devuan 6.0 for Debian 13 without systemd dependence in order to provide “init freedom” with letting users instead opt for SysVinit, OpenRC, or Runit as the init system. Devuan 6.1 is out today as the newest stable point release… ⌘ 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
NVIDIA Graphics On Haiku OS Make Progress With NVIDIA Open Kernel Modules + NVK/Zink
As a wonderful New Year surprise, there’s good momentum on NVIDIA graphics support for the BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system… ⌘ 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