Fail File: Warwick Mortimer, businessman and investor
Each fortnight, Victoria Carter speaks to someone about failure, disappointment and what they learned. This week, she talks to Warwick Mortimer, a business owner, property owner/investor in New Zealand and Rarotonga. He describes himself as “seeing opportunities and going for them, and more than 50% of the time being right about them”.

I was really disappointed when: Well, there are usually reasons for disappo … ⌘ Read more

Linux Networking Still Seeing “Significantly Bigger” Pull Requests Due To AI
Last week’s collection of networking subsystem fixes for Linux 7.1 noted craziness continuing with no end in sight with a large pull request of fixes with many of them spurred on by AI/LLM coding agents. This week it’s “significantly bigger” than prior kernel cycles for this late stage of kernel development due to this assistance of large language models… ⌘ Read more

Radeon Software For Linux 26.12 Brings Ubuntu 26.04 Support
While most Linux enthusiasts and desktop users/gamers are comfortable just riding the latest upstream Linux kernel and Mesa drivers shipped by their distribution, for those enterprises preferring the officially blessed and QA’ed driver packages from AMD, last week marked the release of the Radeon Software for Linux 26.12 driver… ⌘ Read more

NZ sharemarket rises nearly 2% for the week
The New Zealand sharemarket had a frantic end to the week, with Tourism Holdings fielding a renewed takeover bid and leading stocks buffeted by a world index rebalancing.

The S&P/NZX 50 Index and the blue-chips were enjoying a solid day but suffered a late fall due to the largest quarterly rebalancing of the MSCI Equity indices. ⌘ Read more

Budget 2026’s thorny political issues
This week’s pre-election Budget suggests the Government believes it will have done just enough to win on Nov 7 this year and is instead setting itself up for the 2029 election, promising looser purse strings then.

That is a confident call. ⌘ Read more

NZ’s early AI adopters are already reaping the benefits
When Air New Zealand updated its uniforms last year, it faced a large and potentially expensive job: updating its library of 18,000 brand images.

“So, what are we going to do?” the airline’s data and AI lead, Mike Parsons, asked rhetorically at one of the last formal Techweek26 sessions in Auckland last week. ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc Pro B70 BMG-G31 Linux Gaming Performance
In recent weeks we have been exploring different areas of the Intel Arc Pro B70 graphics performance on Linux from various OpenCL and Vulkan to Level Zero compute benchmarks, scaling up to four Arc Pro B70 graphics cards, comparing to NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell, and other relevant tests. While not intended for gaming, many Phoronix readers keep raising requests for seeing the Arc Pro B70 performance for Linux gaming given the lack of any consumer BMG-G31 GPU. So fo … ⌘ Read more

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 28, 2026
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Dirk and Linus talk; BPF and GCC; private memory modes; BPF page-cache policies; major page faults; LLM kernel review; tiered-memory support; transparent huge pages; page mappings; Model Openness Tool.

• Briefs: Stenberg security stress; GTK PDF problems; Morton 2004 keynote; OpenBSD 7.9; Bambu’s AGPLv3 violations; Quotes; …

• [Announcements](https://lwn.net/Ar … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net Couldn’t agree more. I’ll check my list tomorrow that I started a few weeks ago.

DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
Article URL: [https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/duckduckgos-ai-free-search-saw-nearly-28-percent-more-visits-in-the-week-following-googles-insistence-that-people-love-ai-mode/](https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/duckduckgos-ai-free-search-saw-nearly-28-percent-more-visits-in-the-week-following-googles-insistence-that-people-love-ai-mode/ … ⌘ Read more

The long game: how F&P Healthcare shrugged off a 52-week low
Few New Zealand companies have grown their capital expenditure by 89% in a single year, and there would be even fewer who, having done that, have plans to grow it further.

It is all part of what Fisher & Paykel Healthcare (FPH) CEO Lewis Gradon sees as taking the longer-term view of thing … ⌘ Read more

Meet Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand man
By Meghan Bobrowsky

Tensions were running high at Meta Platforms.

For weeks, rumours circulated that the company was planning a large layoff as it poured tens of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence. Then, employees were told their keystrokes and mouse clicks would be recorded to help train AI agents to use computers. ⌘ Read more

AI, job cuts and a very fragile mandate
In a week when the Government announced 8,700 public sector roles will go and AI will help fill the gaps, a lunchtime event at Parliament turned into something of a reality check on how fragile trust in AI has become in New Zealand.

One NZ’s second annual AI in Trust report, a nationally representative survey of 1,001 New Zealanders, shows 76% of us have interacted with AI-powered services in the past … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA 610.43.02 Linux Driver Released With Vulkan Improvements, DRM Color Pipeline API
NVIDIA is kicking off the new week with their first Linux driver beta in the R610 driver series that is succeeding the current R595 release branch… ⌘ Read more

I Spent a Week Recording Myself Doing Chores for Money. Who’s the Robot Now?
Cooking. Doing laundry. Tidying up. All your household tasks can be turned into data to train future humanoids—if you’re prepared for the consequences. ⌘ Read more

Commerce Commission’s gas pipe ruling to test who pays for system’s decline
The Commerce Commission’s final decision on gas pipeline regulation this week will test how far it is prepared to go in letting network owners recover costs earlier as gas demand weakens and the future of the network becomes more uncertain.

On Wednesday, the regulator will set the default price-quality path for gas pipeline businesses from Oct 1, 2026 (DPP4). The decision cover … ⌘ Read more

AI ‘capability leap’: 80% of software developers now using it
Late last year, AWS senior engineer Mike Nooney noticed a flurry of activity on social media that indicated something exciting had happened in his field: AI had taken what we described as a “capability leap”.

“So, I thought, let’s get in and have a look at Claude Code and some of the other tools,” he recounted to an audience at last week’s Techweek26 summit. ⌘ Read more

Results are in: BusinessDesk subscribers are a good-looking bunch
When we rolled out our subscriber survey, I thought it would take a few weeks to reach 500 respondents.

It took barely two days. ⌘ Read more

A visual push to start the week ⌘ Read more

NZ sharemarket trades flat, down 0.1%
The New Zealand sharemarket was a little hesitant as it entered a pivotal week for company earnings releases and economic moves.

The S&P/NZX 50 Index reached an intraday high of 13,101.27 but then fell late, closing at 12,970.80, down 21.03 points, or 0.16%. ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD Foundation Executive Director Tries Daily Driving FreeBSD On Laptop
Phoronix reports on a presentation about trying FreeBSD on modern Framework laptop from last week’s Open Source Summit hosted by the Linux Foundation:

With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBS … ⌘ Read more

Trump says he is in no rush for an Iran deal that is far from finished
By Summer Said, Anat Peled and Alexander Ward

President Trump said Sunday he was in no hurry to complete an end-of-war agreement with Iran after spending weeks insisting Tehran had to quickly make nuclear concessions or face renewed attacks. ⌘ Read more

Canonical Is Shutting Down Ubuntu Pastebin
“Canonical says Ubuntu Pastebin will be decommissioned at the end of May 2026,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, “as part of an infrastructure modernization effort.”

The announcement only appeared this week, giving the Linux community barely any warning before a service that has been tied to Ubuntu support culture for years suddenly disappears.

Ubuntu Pastebin has long been used for … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Brings Web Serial Workflows to Firefox, Collaborates With Adafruit
The Web Serial API lets websites write to (and read from) serial devices using JavaScript, including USB and Bluetooth devices with virtual serial ports. And this week’s Firefox 151 release introduced support for the Web Serial API on desktop.

“Most folks won’t use this API,” acknowledges Mozilla’s blog, “but for our community … ⌘ Read more

I turn 33 this week, my tits are still pretty nice ⌘ Read more

GitHub Copilot & Claude Code Helped With Graphics, WiFi Linux Driver Issues This Week
For those curious about the growing use of AI and coding agents within the Linux kernel, this week there was another large batch of new patches fixed that were generated or co-authored by agents like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot… ⌘ Read more

I really dig #caturday on the Fediverse, so I thought I would start doing it here as well.

For this week, I’d like to introduce my spirit animal, Bowie.

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May his supreme laziness (and fuzzy-chunky-monkey cuteness) serve as an inspiration to you, too.

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Linus Torvalds on How AI is Impacting the Hunt for Linux Kernel Bugs
Linus Torvalds spoke this week at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America, reports ZDNet — and described how AI is impacting Linux kernel development:

“In the last six months, we’ve seen a lot more commits,” Torvalds noted, estimating that “the last two releases, it’s been about 20% more commits than we had in the previo … ⌘ Read more

Free Software Foundation’s Call for ‘LibreLocals’ Answered on Six Continents - With More Coming
The Free Software Foundation announced this week that “its global call for free software supporters to organize LibreLocals this May resulted in free software supporters organizing forty-six LibreLocal events on six continents thus far.” (And new dates and locations are being added daily. … ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint Making Improvements To Its File Manager, Theme & Dialogs
The Linux Mint project today published their May 2026 status report to outline recent work done to this Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux platform and much of their focus in recent weeks on enhancements to their Cinnamon desktop environment… ⌘ Read more

AV2 Codec Looks Like It Will Be Officially Released Next Week
For years already AV2 has been in development as the successor to AV1 for this wonderful open-source, royalty-free video codec. While there was talk about releasing AV2 by the end of 2025, that didn’t happen but now latest indicators are pointing toward its formal debut next week… ⌘ Read more

The FBI Wants ‘Near Real-Time’ Access to US License Plate Readers
Plus: Google publishes a live exploit for an unpatched flaw, the feds arrest two men accused of creating thousands of nonconsensual deepfake nudes, and more. ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Merges AMD Dynamic EPP Fixes, Intel Bartlett Lake Scaling Fix
Merged today for Linux 7.1 was this week’s power management fixes with a few notable fixes for both AMD and Intel platforms… ⌘ Read more

This Cannes Film Cost $500,000 to Make. $400,000 Was AI Compute Costs.
Higgsfield AI is debuting a 95-minute fully AI-generated film at Cannes called “Hell Grind” that reportedly cost $500,000 to make, $400,000 of which was spent on compute alone. The project took just two weeks to produce and is intended to showcase the startup’s AI production tools. But it also underscores the current limits of AI f … ⌘ Read more

On the Money: Grant Baker’s book launch, Ray Smith, Nikhil Ravishankar, a great AI speech, and more
On the Money (OTM) is our column of general frippery we observed within the worlds of business and government this week.

It was not the easiest week to be a departmental chief executive. Minister for the Public Service Nicola Willis signalled 9,000 public-sector jobs might go, and several agencies might be folded into on … ⌘ Read more

Linux Sound Subsystem Also Seeing Many Fixes Driven By AI/LLMs
It’s not only the Linux networking subsystem where many fixes have been appearing – including several notable security fixes for local privilege escalation issues – leading to “craziness” from AI / LLMs. The Linux sound subsystem has also been seeing an uptick in activity with many “assisted-by” patches coming about in recent weeks… ⌘ Read more

At Least 80% Responsibility For Ill Health In Old Age Down to Individual, Study Says
A new Oxford Longevity Project report argues that individuals bear at least 80% of the responsibility for ill health in old age. “The report (PDF), launched at the Smart Ageing Summit in Oxford last week, argues that individuals have far greater control over their longevity than is commonly understood,” re … ⌘ Read more

NZ sharemarket down almost 4% year to date
The retirement village stocks stole the show as the New Zealand sharemarket ended a volatile week with a gain of nearly 1%.

The S&P/NZX 50 Index climbed strongly in the late afternoon and closed at 12,991.31, up 113.24 points or 0.88%. ⌘ Read more

CHUWI’s $449 USD Wildcat Lake Laptop Should Work Fine With Linux
CHUWI this week announced their UniBook laptop as a ~$449 USD laptop that aims to compete with Apple’s MacBook Neo. While shipping with Microsoft Windows 11, it should be Linux-friendly and we’ll soon be putting it to the test at Phoronix… ⌘ Read more

Palantir Held a Hack Week to Add New Controls to Software Used by ICE
The hackathon, held to build user-auditing tools for Palantir customers, comes as the company struggles to address employee concerns over its relationship with ICE. ⌘ Read more

For the love of a Marsden Point rail spur: Winston and Wayne write to one another
For the love of a Marsden Point rail spur, Rail Minister Winston Peters and Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown have been penning polite but corrective letters to one another.

Peters wrote to Brown last week after … ⌘ Read more

Zespri benefits from more kiwifruit, better value
Zespri has improved its profitability by selling more fruit at a higher value, its chief executive says.

The grower-owned kiwifruit marketer released its full-year results for the 2025/26 season this week. ⌘ Read more

WasteCo crisis deepens as chair abroad during WorkSafe fatality probe
WasteCo chair and acting CEO Roger Gower has been overseas for several weeks while the company faces a health and safety and leadership crisis.

Last week BusinessDesk reported that WorkSafe was investigating a second fatality at the NZX-listed company, less than a year af … ⌘ Read more

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 21, 2026
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: OpenSUSE site age restrictions; Lots of LSFMM+BPF coverage; The tenth OpenPGP email summit.

• Briefs: Firefox 151.0; pgBackRest funding; RIP Peter G. Neumann; Quotes; …

• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more. ⌘ Read more

OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO very soon
By Corrie Driebusch, Annamaria Andriots and Berber Jin

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has been working with bankers to prepare to file for an initial public offering in the coming days or weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. ⌘ Read more

Software startup Factor bursts out of Taiawa tech hub into the big time
Wellington technology hub Taiawa is celebrating the first exit of one of its in-house startup companies in a $24 million deal announced this week.

The day before BusinessDesk visited Taiawa, NZ company Gentrack revealed it was acquiring Taiawa’s resident startup Factor for $ … ⌘ Read more

The Government’s billion-dollar frigate question
Sailing from Wellington Harbour on Wednesday morning was a 5,500-tonne example of what could be a multibillion-dollar Budget item for the Government in the coming decade.

The 130m-long JS Kumano, a Japanese Mogami-class frigate built for stealth with flat steel panels and few distinguishable features other than a sensor-filled mast and 54-calibre cannon at its bow, spent four days tied up at Wellington’s wharf this week. ⌘ Read more

Google’s AI Studio Now Lets Anyone Build Android Apps In Minutes
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The AI coding boom is now coming directly for Android app development. On Tuesday at Google IO 2026, the company announced new native Android app creation capabilities in its web-based Google AI Studio, shrinking a process that takes weeks of setup and coding down to minutes. The company also sa … ⌘ Read more

Greg KH Calls For More Rust Linux Developers
Greg Kroah-Hartman took time away from his duties as Linux’s second-in-command as stable maintainer, various subsystem maintainer, and recent hobby of using AI/LLMs for uncovering Linux kernel bugs to present at the Rust Week conference… ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg Introduces Vulkan Accelerated Decoding For APV Video
FFmpeg already supports CPU-based decoding for Samsung’s APV as the Advanced Professional Video Codec. FFmpeg also has APV encode support too while now an interesting addition was merged this week: Vulkan-based acceleration for APV… ⌘ Read more