KDE Plasma 6.6 Shaving Off 100MB Of Memory Use, Fixing DrKonqi Crash Reporter Crashing
KDE developers were off to a busy start for the month of November. A lot of feature activity continues happening for Plasma 6.6 while a lot of bug fixing is still going on for Plasma 6.5 and related KDE components⊠â Read more
Lawmakers are ditching Congress at a record pace
Stef W. Kight , Hans Nichols , Andrew Solender,  Staff Writers -  Axios
Stephan:
_Tuesdayâs election is, I predict, is just the first phase of a trend that is going to restructure Congress. It is not going to be just political parties; it is also going to be a generational change. My hope is that the Democrats, in spite of all the Republican election rigging, are still going to take the majority in both the House and Senate ⊠â Read more
Amazon lakes hit âunbearableâ hot-tub temperatures amid mass die-offs of pink river dolphins â study
Phoebe Weston,  Biodiversity Staff Writer -  The Guardian (U.K.)
_Stephan: We are beginning to see more and more reports about the effects of climate change. The fact that we have a President, a Vice President, and an entire party â the Republicans â that think climate change is a hoax, is a major reason why the 2040 is going ⊠â Read more
BREAKING: Supreme Court Blocks Order Requiring Trump to Pay SNAP Benefits
Aaron Parnas,  Commentator -  The Parnas Perspective
_Stephan: The Supreme Court literally made its ruling on SNAP as I was preparing SR. Here it is. It is just more gray area, and I am increasingly concerned that millions of American families are not going to be able to have a family Thanksgiving dinner. The sheer nastiness of âkingâ Trumpâs attempt to starve tens of millions o ⊠â Read more
WINE gaming in FreeBSD Jails with Bastille
FreeBSD offers a whole bunch of technologies and tools to make gaming on the platform a lot more capable than youâd think, and this article by Pertho dives into the details. Running all your games inside a FreeBSD Jail with Wine installed into it is pretty neat. Initially, I thought this was going to be a pretty difficult and require a lot of trial and error but I was surprised at how easy it was to get this all working. I was really happy to get ⊠â Read more
Zelenskyy vows to block Russian oil to Hungary â Hungaryâs MOL says it can already go 80% non-Russian â Read more
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Iâm going to bed, but Iâll have a closer read/think tomorrow đ€
@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
US flight cancellations accelerate as airlines comply with government shutdown order
JOSH FUNK and RIO YAMAT,  Reporters -  Associated Press
_Stephan: I just got an email from a reader who has spent two days trying to get out of Chicago, but her flight has been canceled again and again. I have been warned not to fly because I would have to go through a security check and publishing SR may cause me to be detained, so I donât have any person ⊠â Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de I am genuinely curious as to why you think Geminis summarization and the categorization of your gopher post was and is as you say misunderstood?
I asked this very genuinely because before reading @bender@twtxt.netâs comments and Gemini summarization I actually went and unplugged your post into flood gaps go for proxy, and then listen to the text intently with my own human ears đ
My cat is happy when I decided not to leave to go to work today. â Read more
Nvidiaâs Jensen Huang Says China âWill Winâ AI Race With US
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has warned that China will beat the US in the AI race, thanks to lower energy costs and looser regulations. From a report: In the starkest comments yet from the head of the worldâs most valuable company, Huang told the FT: âChina is going to win the AI race.â Huangâs remarks come after the Trump administration maintained a ban o ⊠â Read more
âIâm not going to represent our country thereâ â Trump to skip G20 summit, dashing hopes of brokering meeting between Zelensky, Putin â Read more
we.loveprivacy.club yarn instance down? đ€ I've been getting a 502 the last couple of days.
@prologic@twtxt.net that poke will go no where. It is 502d. đ
I miss my deceased Ollie so much. I canât go on â Read more
Gov Shutdown: US Army is advising its soldiers in Germany to go to food banks
Comments â Read more
The US Army is advising its soldiers in Germany to go to German food banks because of the shutdown. â Read more
âNo one is entitled!â MAGA congressman shames SNAP recipients for âlife choicesâ
Alexander Willis,  Staff Writer -  Raw Story
Stephan:Â This is the heartless Republican scum the Americans in Floridaâs 6th District chose to represent them.
As 42 million Americans go without federal food assistance, including 16 million children, Rep. Randy Fine ⊠â Read more
10 Fictional Kings Who Go from Good to Bad
Itâs always sad when heroes fall from the light. They often start with the best intentions, but in trying to act on them, they clash with the world at large. That clash mires their journey in hardship. The heroes grow to resent their circumstances, turning to extreme measures to right those wrongs. This fate can [âŠ]
The post 10 Fictional Kings Who Go from Good to Bad ⊠â Read more
@kiwu@twtxt.net wanna trade? I would be willing to become celibate to go back to my 20s, and believe me, if there is something I donât want to do is becoming celibate, so that ought to tell you something! đ
The Emissions Gap Report 2025 brings us no news, but unfortunately that means it just confirms the very bad trajectory we keep choosing to take.
https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2025
Words fail sometimes, but I think this graphic summarizes well the situation and my current mood.
Charmâs Fantasy: Build AI agents with Go. Multiple providers, multiple models, one API
Comments â Read more
@prologic@twtxt.net Nothing, yet. It was sent in written form. Thereâs probably little point in fighting this, they have made up their minds already (and AI is being rolled up en masse in other departments), but on the other hand, there are â truthfully â very few areas where AI could actually be useful to me.
There are going to be many discussions about this âŠ
This is completely against the âspiritâ of this company, btw. We used to say: âItâs the goal that matters. Use whatever tools you think are appropriate.â Thatâs why Iâm allowed to use Linux on my laptop. Maybe they will back down eventually when they realize that trying to push this on people is pointless. Maybe not.
Linux 6.19 Will Finally Support Intelâs Adaptive Sharpness Filter âCASFâ With Lunar Lake
Going all the way back to early 2024, Intel Linux engineers have been working on supporting an Adaptive Sharpening Filter new to Lunar Lake. While Lunar Lake later launched in September 2024, the Linux patches for this feature remained under review and discussion. Besides the Intel driver implementation itself for Lunar Lake and newer, it also ushers in a new DRM sharpness property to help standardize such functionality ⊠â Read more
No high-level US representatives will go to UN climate talks, Trump officials say
Oliver Milman,  Environment Reporter -  The Guardian (U.K.)
_Stephan: âThe Trump administration has confirmed that no high-level representatives will be sent by the US to upcoming UN climate talks in Brazil, underscoring the administrationâs hostile stance towards action on the climate crisis.â Think ab ⊠â Read more
Merz Says Syrian Refugees in Germany Must Go Home â Read more
The Fantastic Chemistry Behind Why 10 Popular Foods Taste So Good
We all enjoy eating foods that taste good, but we often donât fully understand the chemistry that makes them so delicious. In this list, weâre going to take a deep dive into ten foods that everybody loves. Weâll look at the chemistry that creates incredible flavors, textures, and ultimately, unforgettable dining experiences. Eating is an [âŠ]
The post [The Fantastic Chemistry Behind Why 10 Popular Food ⊠â Read more
10 Futuristic Fungal Technologies
Fungi are miraculous. They provide us with food, alcohol, medicine, and the essential decomposition that keeps life going. And yet, their potential may be far greater. Fungi can be made into computer chips, bio-batteries, circuit boards, insulation, self-repairing building materials, and reactive clothing. They can even devour plastic, absorb heavy metals, and clean pollution. Make [âŠ]
The post [10 Futuristic Fungal Technologies](https://listverse.com/2025/11/03/1 ⊠â Read more
@kiwu@twtxt.net I wouldnât go that far haha đ€Ł Iâm not sure Iâm all that wise đ
** Autumnal week notes **
Someone I grew up with happened to go to the same college as me, and now we happen to live in the same relatively small city. Weâve been totally casual but pretty consistent mainstays of each othersâ lives for going on 20 years at this point. Sheâs also one of the few people that I run into who knows that I canât actually see well enough to reliably tell people apart from any further away than like 4 or 5 feet, and I always feel really appreciative whenever she waves that she also always saysâhiâ and who ⊠â Read more
Donald Trump: âI doubtâ US going to war with Venezuela, but Maduroâs days numbered â Read more
Debian to add hard Rust dependency to APT
It seems like a number of Debian ports are going to face difficult times over the coming months. Debian developer Julian Andres Klode has sent a message to the Debian mailing lists that APT will very soon start requiring Rust. I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem. In particular, our code to parse .deb, . ⊠â Read more
Microsoft breaks Task Manager in Windows 11, hard
Letâs take a look at how things are going at Microsoft, whose CEO claimed a few months ago that 30% of their code was generated by âAIâ. After installing Windows Updates released on or after October 28, 2025 (KB5067036), you might encounter an issue where closing Task Manager using the Close (X) button does not fully terminate the process. When you reopen Task Manager, the previous instance continues running in the background even th ⊠â Read more
Bath time didnât go as planned. â Read more
ProcessOne: AI Bots Canât Use WhatsApp Anymore. So⊠Who Are They Going to Talk To?
Meta just closed the gates on AI chatbots. I think this is an early warning.
Starting January 15, 2026, [WhatsApp will ban all third-party general-purpose AI chatbots from its platform](https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18 ⊠â Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, give it a shot. At worst you know that you have to continue your quest. :-)
Fun fact, during a semester break I was actually a little bored, so I just started reading the Qt documentation. I didnât plan on using Qt for anything, though. I only looked at the docs because they were on my bucket list for some reason. Qt was probably recommended to me and coming from KDE myself, that was motivation enough to look at the docs just for fun.
The more I read, the more hooked I got. The documentation was extremely well written, something Iâve never seen before. The structure was very well thought out and I got the impression that I understood what the people thought when they actually designed Qt.
A few days in I decided to actually give it a real try. Having never done anything in C++ before, I quickly realized that this endeavor wonât succeed. I simply couldnât get it going. But I found the Qt bindings for Python, so that was a new boost. And quickly after, I discovered that there were even KDE bindings for Python in my package manager, so I immediately switched to them as that integrated into my KDE desktop even nicer.
I used the Python KDE bindings for one larger project, a planning software for a summer camp that we used several years. Itâs main feature was to see who is available to do an activity. In the past, that was done on a large sheet of paper, but people got assigned two activities at the same time or werenât assigned at all. So, by showing people in yellow (free), green (one activity assigned) and red (overbooked), this sped up and improved the planning process.
Another core feature was to generate personalized time tables (just like back in school) and a dedicated view for the morning meeting on site.
It was extended over the years with all sorts of stuff. E.g. I then implemented a warning if all the custodians of an activitiy with kids were underage to satisfy new the guidelines that there should be somebody of age.
Just before the pandemic I started to even add support for personalized live views on phones or tablets during the planning process (with web sockets, though). This way, people could see their own schedule or independently check at which day an activity takes place etc. For these side quests, they donât have to check the large matrix on the projector. But the project died there.
Hereâs a screenshot from one of the main views: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/k3man.png
This Python+Qt rewrite replaced and improved the Java+Swing predecessor.
Cool. I think Iâve improved this abit. Update going out shortly⊠Also added optional support for displaying gravatar(s) if you supply your email address (optional of course).
Feel Guilty Leaving My Clingy Boy When Going to Work â Read more
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Go complain to the BeerCSS đ» developers đ€Ł
Removing obfuscation in Minecraft: Java Edition
Gaming isnât something we talk about very often here on OSNews, but I think this piece of news is actually a rare piece of good, welcome news from this industry. Mojang, the Microsoft-owned company behind Minecraft, has announced itâs going to stop obfuscating the code behind the Java edition of Minecraft. A refresher: the Java edition of Minecraft is the original version of the game, which exists alongside the Bedrock Edition, which is ⊠â Read more
And maybe I should go back to using GUI designers. Havenât used those since the Visual Basic days. đ€ It wasnât pretty, but you got results very quickly and efficiently.
(When I switched to Linux, I quickly got stuck with GTK and that only had Glade, which wasnât super great at the time, so I didnât start using it ⊠and then I never questioned that decision âŠ)
@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, Iâll have to take a look. Appears to be Go only, doesnât it?
Iâm not quite sold yet on the idea of âimmediate modeâ GUIs. đ€
@bender@twtxt.net You are totally correct! The thing is: The Caveman within was thinking how minimal can one go before things start to get too uncomfortable? And if cavemen werenât supposed to be too self-conscious about their spelling, I could have just ssh remote echo "$(date -Is)\tTwt Twt Mother-Lover! đ€Łđ€Ł" >> /path/to/twtxt.txt and called it a day.
Trump administration wonât tap emergency funds to pay food aid
Grace Yarrow and Meredith Lee Hill,  Staff Writers -  Politico
Stephan:Â The sheer nastiness of Trump and the Republican Party is beyond my comprehension. What kind of person doesnât care that fellow Americans wonât get enough to eat? Yet that is what is going to happen Saturday unless something changes.
![Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and President Donald Trump sit at a table at the White H ⊠â Read more
The Rightâs Secret Plan to Help Billionaires Buy Elections
David Sirota, Jared Jacang Maher, Â Â - Â rsn | Rolling Stone
_Stephan: Trump and the Republican fascists, aided by the Supreme Court fascist majority, are doing everything in their power to rig the outcome of the 2026 election. The only thing that is going to stop this is an overwhelming majority of American voters voting only for Democrats. If that doesnât happen, you can kiss American democracy goodbye. B ⊠â Read more
Navy helicopter, fighter jet both go down in South China Sea: US Navy â Read more