Plasma 6.6 Will Avoid Running Out Of RAM When Something Crashes In A Loop
KDE Plasma 6.6 continues seeing a lot of development activity while the Plasma 6.5 series is calming down after its first few point releases. Plasma 6.6 landed many more features and improvements this week⊠â Read more
Top Stories: Apple Silicon Turns 5, iPhone Pocket, and More
Itâs hard to believe weâre halfway through November already, as 2025 rapidly draws to a close with no firm signs of several smaller hardware updates weâve been hoping to see before the end of the year, although we did get one surprising new iPhone accessory this week.
This week also saw the fifth anniversary of the very successful Apple silicon effort on t ⊠â Read more
âA wicked attackâ â 5 killed, dozens injured in Kyiv amid mass Russian missile, drone strike â Read more
MCP Horror Stories: The WhatsApp Data Exfiltration Attack
This is Part 5 of our MCP Horror Stories series, where we examine real-world security incidents that highlight the critical vulnerabilities threatening AI infrastructure and demonstrate how Dockerâs comprehensive AI security platform provides protection against these threats. Model Context Protocol (MCP) promises seamless integration between AI agents and communication platforms like WhatsApp, enabling automated message⊠â Read more
Common cents: US Mint to press its final penny
Associated Press Reporters, Â Â - Â Associated Press
Stephan:Â No more pennies. After 232 years, the little copper coins we have handled all our lives will cease to be coined. Here are the facts.
A die for a penny press is seen at the US Mint in Philadelphia on Wednesday. Credit: Matt Slocum / APThe US Mint in [Philadelphia](htt ⊠â Read more
U.S. tourism faces $5.7B US loss as Canadians continue to stay home â Read more
OpenAIâs GPT-5.1 Brings Smarter Reasoning and More Personality Presets To ChatGPT
OpenAI today released GPT-5.1, an update to its flagship model line. The update includes two versions: GPT-5.1 Instant, which OpenAI says adds adaptive reasoning capabilities and improved instruction following, and GPT-5.1 Thinking, which adjusts its processing time based on query complexity.
The Thinking model respond ⊠â Read more
Sun Unleashes Strongest Solar Flare of 2025
New submitter UsRanger175 shares a report from Space.com: The sun erupted in spectacular fashion this morning (Nov. 11), unleashing a major X5.1-class solar flare, the strongest of 2025 so far and the most intense since October 2024. The eruption peaked at 5 a.m. EST (1000 GMT) from sunspot AR4274, which has been bursting with activity in recent days. The blast triggered strong (R3-level ⊠â Read more
PS5 Has Now Officially Outsold Every Xbox Console Ever Released
Sony reported that PlayStation 5 sales have reached 84.2 million units, officially surpassing every Xbox console ever released. IGN reports: The PlayStation 5 is now up to 84.2 million copies sold after shifting an additional 3.9 million units during the three-month period ending September 30, Sony has announced. Thatâs a slight increase on the 3. ⊠â Read more
US Senator Challenges Defense Industry on Right-to-Repair Opposition
Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is escalating pressure on the defense industry to stop opposing military right-to-repair legislation, as House and Senate negotiators work to finalize the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. From a report: In a sharply-worded November 5 letter to the National Defense Industrial Associat ⊠â Read more
Ignite Realtime Blog: First release candidate of Smack 4.5 published
The Smack developers are happy to announce the availability the first release candidate (RC) of Smack 4.5.0.
The upcoming Smack 4.5 release contains many bug fixes and improvements. Please consider testing this release candidate in your integration stages and report back any issues you may found. The more people are actively testing release candidates, the less issues will remain in the actual release.
Smac ⊠â Read more
AIâs $5 Trillion Cost Needs Every Debt Market, JPMorgan Says
The furious push by AI hyperscalers to build out data centers will need about $1.5 trillion of investment-grade bonds over the next five years and extensive funding from every other corner of the market, according to an analysis by JPMorgan. From a report: âThe question is not âwhich market will finance the AI-boom?â Rather, the question is âhow will financings ⊠â Read more
Adopted this 5 month old rescue yesterday â Read more
Plasma Mobile 6.5 keeps improving
As part of the KDE Plasma 6.5 release, we also got a new release of Plasma Mobile. As thereâs a lot of changes, improvements, and new features in Plasma Mobile 6.5, the Plasma Mobile Team published a blog post to highlight them all. The biggest improvement is probably the further integration of Waydroid, a necessary evil to run Android applications until the Plasma Mobile ecosystem manages to become a bit more well-rounded. Waydroid can now be managed straight fro ⊠â Read more
Sam Altmanâs Worldcoin Project Struggles Toward Billion-User Ambition With 17.5 Million Sign-Ups
Sam Altmanâs Tools for Humanity has verified around 17.5 million people through its iris-scanning Orb device. The company has set a goal of reaching 1 billion users, so it is less than 2% of the way there. The startup has raised $240 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, ⊠â Read more
Germany plans to increase aid to Ukraine to over âŹ11.5 billion next year â Read more
PreÄo mĂĄm rĂĄd slovenÄinu, preÄo mĂĄm rĂĄd Slovensko
NĂĄrodnĂœ inĆĄtitĂșt vzdelĂĄvania a mlĂĄdeĆŸe, Ministerstvo kultĂșry SR, Matica slovenskĂĄ, Spolok slovenskĂœch spisovateÄŸov, JazykovednĂœ Ășstav ÄœudovĂta Ć tĂșra Slovenskej akadĂ©mie vied, v. v. i., Ărad pre SlovĂĄkov ĆŸijĂșcich v zahraniÄĂ, VydavateÄŸstvo SPN â MladĂ© letĂĄ a vydavateÄŸstvo Albatros Media Slovakia, s. r. o., vyhlasujĂș 34. roÄnĂk celoĆĄtĂĄtnej literĂĄrnej sĂșĆ„aĆŸe s medzinĂĄrodnou ĂșÄasĆ„ou _PreÄo mĂĄm rĂĄd slovenÄinu, preÄo mĂĄm r ⊠â Read more
Python Foundation Donations Surge After Rejecting Grant - But Sponsorships Still Needed
After the Python Software Foundation rejected a $1.5 million grant because it restricted DEI activity, âa flood of new donations followed,â according to a new report. By Friday theyâd raised over $157,000, including 295 new Supporting Members paying an annual $99 membership fee, says PSF executi ⊠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 âperfectââą, theyâre âgood enoughââą 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
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
FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 5 Released With Build Fixes For Google & Azure Clouds
FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 had been expected this weekend but instead a fifth beta release of FreeBSD 15.0 was deemed warranted⊠â Read more
IN MEMORIAM: RNDr. Igor FurdĂk (1947 â 2025)
Vo veku 78 rokov nĂĄs 5. novembra 2025 navĆŸdy opustil RNDr. Igor FurdĂk, dlhoroÄnĂœ diplomat, vysokoĆĄkolskĂœ pedagĂłg a bĂœvalĂœ predseda Ăradu pre SlovĂĄkov ĆŸijĂșcich v zahraniÄĂ (ĂSĆœZ), ktorĂ©ho meno zostane navĆŸdy spĂ€tĂ© so sluĆŸbou Slovensku a SlovĂĄkom vo svete. _âOdchod Igora FurdĂka vnĂmame s veÄŸkĂœm zĂĄrmutkom a Ășctou. Bol Älovekom, ktorĂœ krajanskĂș problematiku ĆŸil, nie len riadil. SlovĂĄkov v zahraniÄĂ vnĂmal s otvorenĂœm srdcom, s ĂșprimnĂœm ⊠â Read more
When I merge on a Friday at 5 p.m. 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
Trump AI Czar Says âNo Federal Bailout For AIâ After OpenAI CFOâs Comments
Venture capitalist David Sacks, who is serving as President Donald Trumpâs AI and crypto czar, said Thursday that there will be âno federal bailout for AI.â From a report: âThe U.S. has at least 5 major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place,â Sacks wrote in a post on X. Sacksâ comments came after Open ⊠â Read more
There is no such thing as a 3.5 inch floppy disc
Wait, what? The term 3.5 inch floppy disc is in fact a misnomer. Whilst the specification for 5.25 inch floppy discs employs Imperial units, the later specification for the smaller floppy discs employs metric units. The standards for these discs are all of which specify the measurements in metric, and only metric. These standards explicitly give the dimensions as 90.0mm by 94.0mm. Itâs in clause 6 of all three. â« Jonathan de Boyne Pol ⊠â Read more
Aussies to get 3 hours of free energy a day
Ria Pandey,  Staff Writer -  Yahoo! News
Stephan:Â While âkingâ Trump, the Congressional Republicans, and the Trump oligarchs are trying to keep the United States in the prison of carbon energy, other countries are quickly making the transition into an era of renewable, non-polluting energy. This is what is happening in Australia.
_Au ⊠â Read moreIs the expansion of the universe slowing down?
It is widely accepted that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, but now researchers say our measurements of the mysterious force driving that may be wrong and that the universe began to slow 1.5 billion years ago â but other scientists disagree â Read more
Prince Williamâs 5,500 mile flight to fight climate change under scrutiny 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
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.
Python Software Foundation Running Out of Money
After turning down $1.5 Million from the US Government as an act of DEI Virtue Signalling, the Python Software Foundation reveals that they have a $1.4 Million deficit, with only 6 months of money left. â Read more
Senate GOP blocks Dem effort to fund SNAP
Al Weaver,  Staff Writer -  The Hill
Stephan:Â Almost every day now, the Republican members of Congress, by their actions, in contrast to their words, demonstrate that they are uninterested in the wellbeing of the people who voted them into office. Do you think Americans are waking up to this reality? We will see later today.
_These are t ⊠â Read more** 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
Radxa Launches AICore DX-M1 Edge AI Accelerator with DeepX DX-M1 NPU
After unveiling the AICore AX-M1 earlier this year, Radxa has launched the new AICore DX-M1, a compact M.2 M Key AI acceleration module designed for energy-efficient inference at the edge. The module is built around the DeepX DX-M1 processor, delivering up to 25 TOPS of INT8 performance within a 3 to 5 W power envelope. [âŠ] â Read more
AXC3000 Starter Kit Highlights Altera Agilex 3 FPGA with HyperRAM and MIPI Support
Arrow has introduced the AXC3000 Starter Kit, a compact FPGA development platform featuring the first production device from the Altera Agilex 3 family. Following the Agilex 5 AXE5000 devkit, this board provides a smaller form factor and focuses on low- to mid-range applications that demand efficient compute performance in compact designs. The Altera Agilex 3 [âŠ] â Read more
Weâre putting lots of transition metals into the stratosphere. Thatâs not good.
We successfully plugged the hole in the ozone layer that was discovered in the 1980s by banning ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But, it seems we might be unintentionally creating another potential atmospheric calamity by using the upper atmosphere to destroy huge constellations of satellites after a very short (i.e. 5 year) lifetime. â Read more
How did the Windows 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
After the release of Windows 95, with its brand new and incredibly influential graphical user interface, it was only a matter of time before this new taskbar, Start menu, and everything else would make its way to Microsoftâs other operating system line, Windows NT. The development of Windows 95 more or less lined up with that of Windows NT 3.5, but it wouldnât be unt ⊠â Read more
5.4.301: longterm
Version:5.4.301 (longterm)Released:2025-10-29Source:linux-5.4.301.tar.xzPGP Signature:linux-5.4.301.tar.signPatch:full ( incremental)ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.4.301 â Read more
Python Software Foundation has bigger spine than big tech
Back in January 2025, the Python Software Foundation applied for a $1.5 million grant from the US governmentâs National Science Foundation, under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program, to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI. After a lot of paperwork, their application was approved, but upon receiving the contractual agreement, the Python Software Foundation decided to b ⊠â Read more
Python Says Discriminatory DEI Policies More Important Than $1.5 Million Dollars
The Python Software Foundation has turned down a $1.5 Million Dollar grant from the US government, as it would require them to cease discriminatory Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion practices. â Read more
Cul-de-sac effect: Why Mediterranean regions are becoming more prone to extreme floods in a changing climate
In May 2023, Italyâs Emilia-Romagna region experienced devastating, if not unprecedented, floods that caused widespread damage to infrastructure, homes, businesses, and farmland. Seventeen people lost their lives, and the disaster caused an estimated âŹ8.5 billion in damages. The persistent rainfall and resulting landslides and flooding displaced tens of thousands of residents, leaving a deep ma ⊠â Read more