15h.org Ships Updated Open-Source Firmware For Aging AMD Bulldozer/Piledriver Hardware
While there is the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU silicon initialization for platforms moving forward with plans to ultimately replace AGESA and be more friendly toward the likes of Coreboot, for those on aging AMD Bulldozer and Piledriver era platforms there is some updated open-source firmware available thanks to an independent free software project⌠â Read more
This new robot has a clever spin on lunar mining
Work continues on designs for robots that can help assist the first human explorers on the moon in over half a century. One of the most important aspects of that future trip will be utilizing the resources available on the moonâs surface, known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). This would give the explorers access to materials like water, structural metals, and propellant, but only if they can recover it from the rock and regolith that make up the moonâs surfa ⌠â Read more
Wiggles company admits âlikelyâ law breach over Emma headband
The company behind The Wiggles has admitted it likely breached consumer law by selling Emma Bow headbands without the mandatory safety warnings required for products containing button batteries. â Read more
The cats have learned my dogâs weakness, and now they guard the stairs like tiny mob bosses â Read more
Meta Is Killing Off the External Facebook Like Button
Meta is retiring Facebookâs external Like and Share buttons for third-party websites on February 10, 2026, officially closing the book on a once-dominant traffic driver as usage declines and Facebookâs role within Meta continues to shrink.Engadget reports: The blog post from Meta explains that site admins shouldnât have to take any additional steps as a result of the ⌠â Read more
@bender@twtxt.net Hahaha! :-D But I actually do like their approach. I donât know what staff should do differently when they are not involved in the channel topic. At least in the general case. Maybe in this specific scenario here they could have cross-checked domains, git repos and stuff like that. But I also reckon that itâs only fair if they treat everybody the same.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, thatâs a hell lot of food! If it doesnât spoil, itâs easily enough for the rest of your life and all your neighbors and surrounding cities, probably more. :-D
Thatâs a great font. I like it. It just suits the print style incredibly well. No offence, to the absolute contrary, I would not have thought that you actually designed that. It looks just so right. Hats off! :-)
EasyEffects 8.0 Released In Porting From GTK4 To Qt / QML / Kirigami
EasyEffects is the open-source application formerly known as PulseEffects that transitioned to using native PipeWire filters for providing simple audio effects on the Linux desktop. EasyEffects makes it easy to apply different audio effects like bass enhancer, compressor, pitch shift, reverberation, and many more. With this weekâs release of EasyEffects 8.0, the user interface has been rewritten in Qt / QML / Kirigami rather than GTK4⌠â Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Have we reached peak enshittification yet?
YouTube is completely broken for me for a week or more. The player doesnât even load anymore. Trying to limit the search results to real videos doesnât do shit, etc. Itâs useless. But downloading the videos with yt-dlp still works like a dream.
Deals: AirPods 4 from $85
AirPods 4 feature the iconic earbud design, and have many great features like gesture support, spatial audio, voice isolation, water and sweat resistance, Siri support, and USB-C charging. Get AirPods 4 for $85 (down 30% from $129) Apple Watch Series 10 from $279 You can get Apple Watch Series 10 for $279 at $120 off, ⌠Read More â Read more
I went to a rental inspection. There was a surprise
When does a âstudio apartmentâ come with extras? Like a person in his underwear? â Read more
Patches Proposed For Radeon GCN 1.1 GPUs To Use AMDGPU Linux Driver By Default
For those still using an AMD GCN 1.1 âSea Islandsâ GPU like the Radeon R9 290/390 series, HD 7790 / 8870, or other Radeon Rx 200 / Rx 300 series GPUs, there is an exciting early Christmas present this year. Timur KristĂłf of Valveâs Linux graphics driver team sent out the patch series on Sunday for enabling the GCN 1.1 GPUs to use the newer AMDGPU driver on Linux by default in place of the existing âRadeonâ driver. This can mean ⌠â Read more
Mysterious holes in Andean mountain may be an Inca spreadsheet
Thousands of holes arranged in a snake-like pattern on Monte Sierpe in Peru could have been a monumental accounting device for trade and tax â Read more
Neurodiverse Professionals 25% More Satisfied With AI Tools and Agents
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:
Neurodiverse professionals may see unique benefits from artificial intelligence tools and agents, research suggests. With AI agent creation booming in 2025, people with conditions like ADHD, autism, dyslexia and more report a more level playing field in the workplace thanks to generative ⌠â Read more
The Linux Kernel Looks To âBite The Bulletâ In Enabling Microsoft C Extensions
Two patches queued into the Linux kernelâs build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the -fms-extensions compiler argument everywhere for allowing GCC and LLVM/Clang to use the Microsoft C Extensions when compiling the Linux kernel. Being in kbuild-next these patches will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window next month but remains to be seen if there will be any last minute objections to this c ⌠â Read more
Americaâs FAA Grounds MD-11s After Tuesdayâs Crash in Kentucky
UPDATE (11/9): Americaâs Federal Aviation Administration has now grounded all U.S. MD-11 and MD-11F aircrafts after Tuesdayâs crash âbecause the agency has determined the unsafe condition is likely to exist or develop in other products of the same type design,â according to an emergency airworthiness directive obtained by CBS News.
American multinatio ⌠â Read more
Rust Is Coming To Debianâs APT Package Manager
A maintainer of Debianâs Advanced Package Tool (APT) âhas announced plans to introduce hard Rust dependencies into APT starting May 2026,â reports the blog Itâs FOSS.
The integration targets critical areas like parsing .deb, .ar, and tar files plus HTTP signature verification using Sequoia. [APT maintainer Julian Andres Klode] said these components âwould strongly benefit from m ⌠â Read more
Hilarious Unused Audio From 2003 Baseball Game Rediscovered by Video Game History Foundation
After popular arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Spy Hunter, Midway Games jumped into the home console market, and in 2003 launched their baseball game franchise âMLB Slugfestâ for Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. But at times it was almost a parody of baseball, including announcers filling the lo ⌠â Read more
Thank you for the encouragement and love and kind words, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt and others along the way Iâm not sure of their feed uris đ Iâll keep at it, but for the time being I will keep my distance, mostly off IRC, because I donât have the energy to spare in that kind of engagement (what//if the worst happens, itâs so draining). I need to remember what I ever did any of this for, it was back in ~2020 and I wanted really to build small interconnected communities that any non âtech savvyâ person (more or less) could also benefit from ane enjoy. Even if there are aspects of the specs weâve built/extended over time that arenât âperfectââ˘, theyâre âgood enoughâ⢠that theyâve last 5+ years (I believe this is 6 years running now). I want to spend a bit of time going back to why I did any of this in the the first place, and get a little micro-SaaS offering going (barely covering running costs) so encourage more folks to run pods, and thus twtxt feeds and grow the community ever so slightly. Other than that, I plan to get the specs âin orderâ to a point (with @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.orgâs help) where I hope theyâll stand the test of time â like SMTP.
Thank you all ! đ
I should work on my client again and add some new features. Like adding a new feed directly in the client and not having to go to the config first. And showing a preview of a feed before actually adding it. Also, a search would be something to add. And finally combining my User-Agent analyzer with my subscription list to spot new feeds automatically.
Looks like twtxt.net is back now!
My biggest (and oddest) complaint about Windows 11 so far: If its connection to the Internet is poor, the entire OS is very slow. Even opening a local offline program like Handbrake takes over a minute. Task Manager does not show any extra load on CPU or RAM in the meantime. Iâve seen it on 3 different installs with various hardware components. I canât explain why it happens.
My cat yawned and it looks like heâs burning in the sun â Read more
Somebody managed to piss @prologic@twtxt.net off, and it looks like he took twtxt.net down with it. Oh dearâŚ
Bombshell Report Exposes How Meta Relied On Scam Ad Profits To Fund AI
âInternal documents have revealed that Meta has projected it earns billions from ignoring scam ads that its platforms then targeted to users most likely to click on them,â writes Ars Technica, citing a lengthy report from Reuters.
Reuters reports that Meta âfor at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that ⌠â Read more
Bacteria use sugar-fueled currents and molecular gearboxes to move without flagella
New studies from Arizona State University reveal surprising ways bacteria can move without their flagellaâthe slender, whip-like propellers that usually drive them forward. â Read more
Meet Bruno: He looks like he owns the whole alley, and honestly, he might. â Read more
The Best Early Black Friday Apple Deals on MacBook, Apple Watch, iPad, and More
Weâre officially in the month of Black Friday, which will take place on Friday, November 28 in 2025. As always, this will be the best time of the year to shop for great deals, including popular Apple products like AirPods, iPad, Apple Watch, and more. In this article, the majority of the discounts will be found on Amazon.
The First New Subsea Habitat In 40 Years Is About To Launch
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Vanguard feels and smells like a new RV. It has long, gray banquettes that convert into bunks, a microwave cleverly hidden under a counter, a functional steel sink with a French press and crockery above. A weird little toilet hides behind a curtain. But some clues hint that you canât just f ⌠â Read more
Why do all(some) mainecoons look like Ron perlman â Read more
like mother like daughter â Read more
@bender@twtxt.net to work through both https and gemini, the site is not written in HTML, but in Gemtext, automatically converted to HTML, when needed. Gemtext is nicely explained for example here: https://garden.bouncepaw.com/hypha/gemtext . In short, it is so limited, no line can be more than one thing, so no links in a list are possible, othar than doing it through something like this primitive workaround.
NILFS2 File-System Seeing Renewed Interest With Additional Maintainer
Itâs been a while since having anything major to talk about with the NILFS2 file-system but it looks like that could be changing. NILFS2 as a reminder is a log-structured file-system with continuous snapshotting with its NILFS predecessor having been in the mainline kernel for two decades since the mid Linux 2.6 days⌠â Read more
My beautiful (former)stray and her insistence to sleep on me or spread out like a rubber chicken. â Read more
Video Gamesâ Hottest New Platform is an Old One
Web-based video games are experiencing an unexpected revival as the broader $189 billion industry stagnates. Sales for browser-based titles like GeoGuessr and chess were expected to triple from 2021 to 2028, reaching $3.09 billion, according to Google and Kantar. Playgama hosted more than 15,000 new web games in the first half of 2025, exceeding the combined total from 2021 throug ⌠â Read more
Linux To Gain ML-DSA/Dilithium Post-Quantum Cryptography For Module Signing
New code likely to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel would introduce ML-DSA/Dilithium post-quantum cryptography to be initially used for dealing with kernel module signing⌠â Read more
@prologic@twtxt.net Letâs go through it one by one. Hereâs a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.
The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.
The AI also said that users must develop âAI literacyâ, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is âAI literacyâ, isnât it?
My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of âAI literacyâ into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.
Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft â okay, fine, a draft is a draft, itâs fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they donât feel like a draft that needs editing.
Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But hereâs the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the âthought processâ behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: âOkay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and thereâs going to be a little house, but for now, Iâll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.â You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of whatâs missing â even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.
Skill Erosion vs. Skill EvolutionYou, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.
In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Geminiâs calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).
What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?
No, youâre something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.
Yes, that is âskill evolutionâ â which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didnât understand my text.
(But what if thatâs our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: Itâs not possible. If you donât know how to program, then you donât know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but youâre not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else â but that wasnât my point, my point was that youâre not a bloody programmer.)
Geminiâs calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., âcomplex problem-solvingâ) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesnât mean itâll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.
What would have worked is this: Letâs say youâre an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, thereâs a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have âbugsâ (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), itâs just a statistical model. So, this modified example (âaccountant with a calculatorâ) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose thereâs an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I donât know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldnât rely on this box now, could she? Sheâd either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.
Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesnât make sense. It just spits out some generic âargumentâ that it picked up on some website.
3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (âbad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itselfâ).
The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didnât. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didnât even question whether itâs okay to break the current law or not. It just said âlol yeah, change the lawsâ. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AIâs âopinionâ, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities â or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasnât part of Geminiâs answer.)
tl;drExcept for one point, I donât accept any of Geminiâs âcriticismâ. It didnât pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, itâs just a statistical model).
And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. Thatâs gaslighting: When Alice says âthe sky is blueâ and Bob replies with âwhy do you say the sky is purple?!â
But it sure looks convincing, doesnât it?
Never againThis took so much of my time. I wonât do this again. đ
@prologic@twtxt.net when I first âfedâ the text to Gemini, I asked for a three paragraphs summary. It provided it. Then I asked to âelaborate on three areas: user experience, moral/political impact, and technical/legal concernsâ. The reply to that is too long for a twtxt.
I then asked to counter the OP opinionsâas in âhow would you counter the authorâs opinion?â. The reply was very long, but started like this:
âThatâs an excellent question, as the post lays out some very strong, well-reasoned criticisms. Countering these points requires acknowledging the valid concerns while presenting a perspective focused on mitigation, responsible integration, and the unique benefits of AI.â
What followed was extensive, so I asked for a summary, which didnât do justice to the wall of text that preceded it.
@prologic@twtxt.net hehehe, yeah, it isnât mine neither. Most obscure TLDs are in small registrars. I like to stick to one register (even though when Google Domains ceased to exist I was forced to have two, as Cloudflare doesnât support the .ONE TLD).
Mesa Lands Fixes For HDR With Vulkan Drivers
Merged overnight to Mesa 26.0-devel and likely to be back-ported for the upcoming Mesa 23.3 release are a few fixes around high dynamic range (HDR) support within the common Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) / display code⌠â Read more
Orange cat observing like heâs Newton â Read more
You do raise very good points though, but I donât think any of this is particularly new because there are many other examples of technology and evolution of change over time where people have forgotten certain skills like for example, changing a car tyre
How the US Cut Climate-Changing Emissions While Its Economy More Than Doubled
alternative_right shares a report from The Conversation: Countries around the world have been discussing the need to rein in climate change for three decades, yet global greenhouse gas emissions â and global temperatures with them â keep rising. When it seems like weâre getting nowhere, itâs useful to step back an ⌠â Read more
I have been at this for like 3 hours, how the hell do i completely disable the information popup window thing in vim-lsp??? i made it not be floating, but thats about it. â Read more
iOS 26.2 to Allow Third-Party App Stores in Japan Ahead of Regulatory Deadline
Japanâs new competition rules are forcing Apple to open the iPhone to third-party app stores, and iOS 26.2 will quietly flip that switch ahead of the December deadline. MacRumors reports: According to a post shared on X by @Tzzlala, iPhones running the beta in Japan are able to install alternative app stores like AltStore PA ⌠â Read more
The secret life of baobabs: How bats and moths keep Africaâs giant trees alive
Baobabs are sometimes called âupside-down trees,â because their branches look like roots reaching skyward. Of the eight species of baobab in the world, six are confined to Madagascar, one to northern Australia and one species, Adansonia digitata, is found across the savanna regions of continental Africa. â Read more
Why does he sleep like that? â Read more
macOS Tahoe 26.1 Improves Battery Life Significantly of MacBook Air & Pro
If you were one of the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro users who found MacOS Tahoe causing excessive battery drain and battery life reductions with MacOS 26.0 and MacOS 26.0.1, then youâll want to update to macOS Tahoe 26.1 right away, as it will likely resolve the most significant battery life problems. Multiple user reports ⌠Read More â Read more