Zlib-rs 0.5.3 Expands AVX-512 Usage For Faster Performance
The Trifecta Tech Foundation today released zlib-rs 0.5.3 as the newest version of this Zlib implementation written in the Rust programming language for better memory safety. Zlib-rs is advertised as “a safer Zlib” for use by both C and Rust projects while delivering competitive performance to the C-based zlib-ng… ⌘ Read more

**Second Test begins with four overs of chaos **
How England slumped to 5-2 - and could have been even worse off - in four overs of chaos at the hands of Mitchell Starc. ⌘ Read more

5.4.302: longterm
Version:5.4.302 (EOL) (longterm)Released:2025-12-03Source:linux-5.4.302.tar.xzPGP Signature:linux-5.4.302.tar.signPatch:full ( incremental)ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.4.302 ⌘ Read more

X.Org Server’s xkbcomp Updated For Four Security Issues Dating Back Years
Red Hat’s Peter Hutterer announced the release today of xkbcomp 1.5, the CLI utility used for compiling X Keyboard Extension (XBD) keyboard descriptions for the X.Org Server. Driving this new xkbcomp release are fixes for four security issues… ⌘ Read more

Michael and Susan Dell nearly $10b to ‘Trump accounts’ for children
Tech billionaires Michael and Susan Dell have pledged $US6.25 billion ($9.5 billion) to new investment accounts for children, known as “Trump accounts”. Here’s how the donation will work. ⌘ Read more

Flag planted for Upper Eyre’s proposed $5 billion desalination plant
The long-awaited decision for a Northern Water project has arrived — but it has come with environmental contention. ⌘ Read more

Thinking about doing Advent of Code in my own tiny language mu this year.

mu is:

• Dynamically typed
  
• Lexically scoped with closures
  
• Has a Go-like curly-brace syntax
  
• Built around lists, maps, and first-class functions
  

Key syntax:

• Functions use fn and braces:
  

fn add(a, b) {
    return a + b
}

• Variables use := for declaration and = for assignment:
  

x := 10
x = x + 1

• Control flow includes if / else and while:
  

if x > 5 {
    println("big")
} else {
    println("small")
}

while x < 10 {
    x = x + 1
}

• Lists and maps:
  

nums := [1, 2, 3]
nums[1] = 42

ages := {"alice": 30, "bob": 25}
ages["bob"] = ages["bob"] + 1

Supported types:

• int
  
• bool
  
• string
  
• list
  
• map
  
• fn
  
• nil
  

mu feels like a tiny little Go-ish, Python-ish language — curious to see how far I can get with it for Advent of Code this year. 🎄

Raspberry Pi Announces Price Hikes Due To RAM Demand, 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 Launched
Due to the ongoing RAM shortages in the industry amid ongoing massive demand for AI servers,Raspberry Pi announced today they are having to raise prices on the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers. They have also launched a 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 version too for those not needing much memory and wanting to keep pricing to a minimum… ⌘ Read more

WACA seeks total exemption from paying council rates until 2035
The Western Australian Cricket Association has asked the City of Perth for a 10-year exemption from paying any rates. If granted it would potentially cost the city $2.5 million in revenue. ⌘ Read more

South-east Qld population set to reach 4.5m despite rising property prices
The analysis by KPMG reveals the population in the south-east corner has grown by as much as 2.2 per cent over the past five years, above the national average of 1.5 per cent. ⌘ Read more

When I learn a teammate’s Friday morning release is still going at 5 p.m. ⌘ Read more

This post has been written with UW PICO 5.09 and yarnc

UK To Tax Electric Cars by the Mile Starting 2028
The UK government will levy a pay-per-mile tax on electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles starting April 2028, UK’s finance minister Rachel Reeves announced, a measure designed to offset some of the fuel duty revenue that will disappear as drivers shift away from petrol and diesel cars. Electric vehicles will be charged 3 pence per mile and plug-in hybrids 1.5 pence per mile, pa … ⌘ Read more

Better Technology, Worse Motivation: GenAI’s Mediocrity Trap

While generative AI (GenAI) promises productive efficiency, it can paradoxically lead to lower-quality work. We conducted an experiment with professional illustrators and found that AI assistance flattens the quality curve—it accelerates initial gains but sharply diminishes the returns on sustained effort. Faced with this, a significant number of professionals made a strategic choice: they sacrificed the final quality to save time.

From http://www.jin-li.org/uploads/1/1/4/5/114595093/ai_and_motivation.pdf

I haven’t read this and can’t vouch for it; seems vaguely AI-boostery. Still, the conclusions are interesting. This seems to be the picture that is emerging about generative AI generally: most people don’t like it and find that degrades the quality of work. Coders seem to like it and think that it helps them, but in fact it makes the slower, less productive, and more bug prone.

By all measures it’s a bad technology. We should just be honest about it. There is no need to make excuses for multi-trillion-dollar corporations.

Common Desktop Environment “CDE” 2.5.3 Released After Two Years
Two years and one week since the prior point release, Common Desktop Environment 2.5.3 is now available as the latest iteration of this Unix desktop environment built around the Motif toolkit. CDE has been open-source for more than a decade now but its development not exactly brisk. But for those resisting the likes of Wayland and other modern display tech – especially with KDE announcing today Plasma 6.8 will be Wayland-exclusive – CDE 2.5.3 is now avail … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net AI is slot machines for coders:

• “Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%–AI tooling slowed developers down.” https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
  
• “Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code”: https://venturebeat.com/ai/stack-overflow-data-reveals-the-hidden-productivity-tax-of-almost-right-ai-code
  

The same intermittent reward operant conditioning that gets people addicted to gambling and thinking that if they follow certain rituals they’ll win “next time” drives people’s beliefs that AI tools are making them more productive when they’re making them less productive. I’m going to guess that a side effect of this is that people think they’re typing less when in the longer term they’re typing the same amount or more when you factor in the productivity loss (as far as I’ve read the studies don’t measure this so I’m only guessing).

People are also being rapidly de-skilled by this technology: the more they use it, the more their actual skills atrophy. “Continuous exposure to AI might reduce the ADR (adesoma detection rate) of standard non-AI assisted colonoscopy, suggesting a negative effect on endoscopist behaviour.” (science speak for saying that radiologists get worse at seeing tumors in scans once they’ve used AI): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract

Nobody who cares about the future should be using this stuff for anything.

SA woman suffered permanent brain injury after hospital failed to diagnose stroke, court hears
An Adelaide woman is suing a southern suburbs hospital for $1.5 million in damages alleging she suffered a “permanent neurological injury” when doctors failed to diagnose her with a stroke, court documents reveal. ⌘ Read more

Texas Buys $5 Million In BTC ETF As States Edge Toward First Government Crypto Reserves
Texas has purchased $5 million worth of BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF as an initial step toward creating the first state-level bitcoin reserve in the U.S.
“[O]ther states having previously invested in such funds with public-employee retirement money,” notes CoinDesk. “Michigan has been building such an inve … ⌘ Read more

Adolescence goes into your 30s, new study on the brain shows
The data showed there is “non-linear change across development” in the brain, suggesting it does not continue on one steady progression throughout your life. ⌘ Read more

LMM continua a dar casos concretos sobre a sua opinião e como o presidente pode actuar em matéria de corrupção. Termina a repetir que Ventura é candidato de legislativas e não presidenciais. Ventura responde como respondeu num debate anterior falando a sua posição nas sondagens- não funciona com LMM que tem tido melhores resultados, mas Ventura diz que não, referindo a sondagem falsa com que tem inundado as redes sociais na última semana (a CNE não devia fazer alguma coisa quanto a isso?). Parece que o debate vai-se ficar por aqui em vez de entrar pelos temas a sério das presidenciais, mas realmente com uma pessoa como o Ventura não dá muito para falar a sério.

1. pergunta final: o que mais o preocupa do seu opositor: LMM diz AV não tem soluções, AV diz que LMM é o responsável por haver lesados do BES (WTF)
   

Este debate teve mais 5 minutos porque jornalista não o conseguiu terminar

–

Resumo/opinião pessoal: sem surpresas, AV é o piorio, LMM melhor que AV, muito barulho

Live: Labor grilled on plan to find savings in public service
The government is being questioned about its request for departments and agencies to save as much as 5 per cent of their costs. Follow live. ⌘ Read more

Recurring Events for Meetable
In October, I launched an instance of Meetable for the MCP Community. They’ve been using it to post working group meetings as well as in-person community events. In just 2 months it already has 41 events listed! ⌘ Read more

Amazon Discounts USB-C AirPods Max to $399.99
Amazon today has the USB-C AirPods Max on sale for $399.99 in Starlight, down from $549.00. This is a match of the best price we’ve ever seen on the AirPods Max, and we expect more colors to match this price soon.

Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Probably wouldn’t help, since almost every request comes from a different IP address. These are the hits on those weird /projects URLs since Sunday:

    1 IP  has  5 hits
    1 IP  has  4 hits
   13 IPs have 3 hits
  280 IPs have 2 hits
25543 IPs have 1 hit

The total number of hits has decreased now. Maybe the botnet has moved on …

AMD SDCIAE Working Its Way Into The Linux 6.19 Kernel
A year and a half after the Linux kernel patches were first posted, SDCIAE that is found with AMD Zen 5 server processors is set to finally be supported by the mainline kernel come Linux 6.19… ⌘ Read more

New Research Finds America’s Top Social Media Sites: YouTube (84%) Facebook (71%), Instagram (50%)
Pew Research surveyed 5,022 Americans this year (between February 5 and June 18), asking them
“do you ever use” YouTube, Facebook, and nine of the other top social media platforms. The results?

YouTube 84%

Facebook 71%

Instagram 50%

TikTok 37%

WhatsApp 32%

Reddit 26%

Snapchat 2 … ⌘ Read more

1. democracia - GM é contra os candidatos que querem mudar o regime “para outro que não sabe o que é”. E contra escutas ilegais. CM diz que GM não ser claro no que quer do código laboral tb é um descrédito à democracia. Tb é mau a falta de habitação e a injustiça fiscal que temos. GM vai tendo posições diferentes ao longo do tempo. GM tem a palavra, fala… e não diz nada.

2. poderes presidenciais - GeM diz que só usa os poderes que o Presidente tem (duh.) CMartins dá exemplos de qdo esses poderes foram usados bem e mal.

3. habitação - CM diz que GeM não explica o que quer. GeM quer uma “Economia não estatizada” e depois diz isso várias vezes de maneiras diferentes mas não explica como isso resolve o problema da habitação. CM pergunta “isso é o quê?” Ele diz que são “menos taxas, menos burocracias”. A CM: “mas como?” GeM diz que é tudo muito lento por culpa da burocracia.

2/3

Fark me 🤦‍♂️ I woke up quite late today (after a long night helping/assisting with a Mainframe migration last night fork work) to abusive traffic and my alerts going off. The impact? My pod (twtxt.net) was being hammered by something at a request rate of 30 req/s (there are global rate limits in place, but still…). The culprit? Turned out to be a particular IP 43.134.51.191 and after looking into who own s that IP I discovered it was yet-another-bad-customer-or-whatever from Tencent, so that entire network (ASN) is now blocked from my Edge:

+# Who: Tentcent
+# Why: Bad Bots
+132203

Total damage?

$ caddy-log-formatter twtxt.net.log | cut -f 1 -d  ' ' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1 | head -n 5
  61371 43.134.51.191
    402 159.196.9.199
    121 45.77.238.240
      8 106.200.1.116
      6 104.250.53.138

61k reqs over an hour or so (before I noticed), bunch of CPU time burned, and useless waste of my fucking time.

PHP 8.5 Brings Long-Awaited Pipe Operator, Adds New URI Tools
“PHP 8.5 landed on Thursday with a long-awaited pipe operator and a new standards-compliant URI parser,” reports the Register, “marking one of the scripting language’s more substantial updates… “

The pipe operator allows function calls to be chained together, which avoids the
extraneous variables and nested statements that might otherwise be
inv … ⌘ Read more

780,000 Windows Users Downloaded Linux Distro Zorin OS in the Last 5 Weeks
In October Zorin OS claimed it had 100,000 downloads in a little over two days in the days following Microsoft’s end of support for Windows 10.

And one month later, Zorin OS developers now claim that 780,000 people downloaded it from a Windows computer in the space of a month, according to the tech news site XDA Developers.

… ⌘ Read more

I had to be rushed to hospital 5 days ago due to a painful gallstone episode. Turns out it had caused pancreatitis. Got my gallbladder removed yesterday after some good meds and finally got home today. My little girl hasn’t left my side since 🩷 ⌘ Read more

I just noticed this pattern:

uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Let me add some spaces to make it more clear:

    uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET                       /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Some IP (from Brazil) requests some (non-existing, completely broken) URL from my webserver. But they use the hostname uninformativ.de, so they get redirected to www.uninformativ.de.

In the next step, just a second later, some other IP (from Nepal) issues an HTTP proxy request for the same URL.

Clearly, someone has no idea how HTTP redirects work. And clearly, they’re running their broken code on some kind of botnet all over the world.

How Two Janitors Made One of the Year’s Most Charming RPGs
Adam Marshall spent more than a decade developing Kingdoms of the Dump while working as a custodian at a school in suburban Philadelphia, cleaning floors and hauling trash bags from 3 PM to 11 PM before coming home to work on his turn-based role-playing game until 5 or 6 AM. The game, which Bloomberg has called “one of the year’s most charming RPGs,” came out … ⌘ Read more

Clang 21 Delivering Nice Performance Gains On AMD EPYC Zen 4 With HBM3
One of the areas I’ve been meaning to run more benchmarks on this season has been for the recently released Clang 21 compiler. Back in September when LLVM Clang 21 was debuting I ran some initial benchmarks and found it to deliver some nice performance gains on AMD EPYC Zen 5 but then have been busy with other benchmarks/articles for expanding that testing. Recently with having some spare cycles and gratis access still to the Microsoft A … ⌘ Read more

Homeschooling Hits Record Numbers
An anonymous reader shares a report: “In the 2024-2025 school year, homeschooling continued to grow across the United States, increasing at an average rate of 5.4%,” Angela Watson of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education’s Homeschool Hub wrote earlier this month. “This is nearly three times the pre-pandemic homeschooling growth rate of around 2%.” She added that more than a third of the states fr … ⌘ Read more

Servo Announces Sponsorship Tiers To Get More Organizations Backing This Browser Engine
The Servo open-source web browser engine has been making good progress in recent times. Long outside the confines of Mozilla and working as a Linux Foundation Europe project, Servo has been advancing thanks to Igalia and other open-source developers while getting by on around ~$5.7k USD per month thanks mostly to donations from individuals. Servo has now announced sponsorship tiers in hopefully to solicit more donations from la … ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 25.44.36015.5 Brings More Performance Optimizations & Features
Released tonight was the Intel Compute Runtime 25.44.36015.5 as their roughly monthly update to this open-source GPU compute stack providing Level Zero and OpenCL support for Intel’s integrated and discrete graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more

PHP 8.5 Released With New Pipe Operator, New URI Extension & Clone With
PHP 8.5 is out today as the annual major feature release for this popular scripting language… ⌘ Read more

Max is 16.5 and passing away tomorrow ⌘ Read more

The Growing Problem With China’s Unreliable Numbers
Chinese economist Gao Shanwen told a Washington panel in December that China’s real GDP growth might be around 2% rather than the official figure near 5%. By January, Gao was no longer chief economist at SDIC Securities and went silent for almost a year.
As FT points out in a long piece, China does not publish quarterly GDP breakdowns showing consumption, investment and net exp … ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.0 Released
Blender 5.0 has been released with major upgrades including HDR and wide-gamut color support on Linux via Wayland/Vulkan, significant theme and UI improvements, new color-space tools, revamped curve and geometry features, and expanded hardware requirements. 9to5Linux reports: Blender 5.0 also introduces a working color space for Blend files, a new AgX HDR view, a new Convert to Display compositor node, new Rec.2100-PQ and Rec.2100-HL … ⌘ Read more

1. (cont.) António Filipe quer estabilidade, mas uma outra estabilidade que LMM, AF quer estabilidade na vida das pessoas (salário, saúde, habitação, direitos) e diz como.

2. quem tem melhores condições para ser um bom presidente? LMM acha que tem mais condições porque acha que tem mais experiência política. Quer ambição económica em Portugal, enviando mais mensagens ao parlamento (para usarmos mais IA e etc…). AF diz que realmente não temos uma melhor economia… Por opções políticas das coisas que o LLM defende como as privatizações (uma das coisas que faria era tentar parar o actual plano de privatização da TAP). LMM diz que a TAP tem de ser privatizada porque tem de crescer e só privatizando pode crescer, AF diz “não se aprendeu com o erro do passado”.

3. a deriva para o anti-democrático: LMM diz que vai ser intransigente. AF diz que usaria todos os instrumentos que a constituição conferem ao presidente (e parece ainda mais intransigente).

4. EU, NATO, ONU: AF quer que Portugal tenha voz, LMM diz que o último acordo da NATO foi muito bom. LMM tenta dizer que AF é pró-Putin, AF diz que não e que é e sempre foi contra a invasão Russa, LMM finge que não houve.

FIM: para mim AF mostrou seriedade, LMM mostrou falta dela nalgumas matérias

Klarna Says AI Drive Has Helped Halve Staff Numbers and Boost Pay
Klarna has claimed that AI-related savings have allowed the buy now, pay later company to increase staff salaries by nearly 60%, but hinted it could slash more jobs after nearly halving its workforce over the past three years. From a report: Chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski said headcount had dropped from 5,527 to 2,907 since 2022, mostly as … ⌘ Read more

Google Launches Gemini 3, Its ‘Most Intelligent’ AI Model Yet
Google released Gemini 3 on Tuesday, launching its latest AI model with a breakthrough score of 1501 Elo on the LMArena Leaderboard alongside state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks including 91.9% on GPQA Diamond for PhD-level reasoning and 37.5% on Humanity’s Last Exam without tool usage. The model is available starting today in the Gemi … ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.0 Released With Better Vulkan Support, HDR On Wayland
It’s the Blender 5.0 release day! Blender 5.0 is a big step forward for this open-source 3D modeling software with better Vulkan viewport support across different GPUs/drivers, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other very nice refinements for this popular cross-platform software package… ⌘ Read more

Top 5 hard-earned lessons from the experts on managing Kubernetes
Kubernetes has transformed how modern organizations deploy and operate scalable infrastructure, and the hype around automated cloud native orchestration has made its adoption nearly ubiquitous over the past 10+ years. Yet behind the scenes, most teams… ⌘ Read more

A Simple WhatsApp Security Flaw Exposed 3.5 Billion Phone Numbers
Researchers at the University of Vienna extracted phone numbers for 3.5 billion WhatsApp users by systematically checking every possible number through the messaging service’s contact discovery feature. The technique yielded profile photos for 57% of those accounts and profile text for 29 percent. The researchers checked roughly 100 million numbe … ⌘ Read more

MLPerf Client 1.5 Introduces Experimental Linux Support
MLPerf Client as MLCommons’ machine language inferencing benchmark for client form factors / PCs now has a Linux build. MLPerf Client 1.5 was released yesterday with an experimental Linux build but for now at least is not nearly as full-featured as this AI benchmark on Windows and macOS… ⌘ Read more

Waveshare Pairs RISC-V ESP32-P4 and ESP32-C6 for Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 LE, and PoE Support
Waveshare has released the ESP32-P4-WIFI6-POE-ETH, a compact development board built around the ESP32-P4 along with an ESP32-C6 wireless module. The design combines Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 LE, Ethernet, and optional PoE power delivery in a single platform aimed at multimedia processing, display and camera applications, and general embedded development. Like the earlier W … ⌘ Read more

AMD Releases Additional Zen 5 CPU Microcode For RDSEED Issue
Stemming from AMD’s recently acknowledged Zen 5 issue with the RDSEED instruction and AMD releasing Zen 5 CPU microcode updates to address it, this week brought some additional microcode updates… ⌘ Read more