Systemd Founder Lennart Poettering Announces Amutable Company
Systemd founder and lead developer Lennart Poettering announced the creation of a new company called Amutable. The Amutable company being led by Chris Kühl (CEO), Christian Brauner (CTO) and Lennart Poettering (Chief Engineer) will be focused on delivering determinism and verifiable integrity to Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

ThinkPads On Linux Appear Nearly Ready For Improved Trackpoint Doubletap Handling
Being worked on for a while by Lenovo engineer Vishnu Sankar is nicely handling support for double-tap functionality with TrackPoints on ThinkPads under Linux. The sixth iteration of this enablement work was posted today and is just documentation updates, so it’s looking like this new TrackPoint doubletap code could soon be crossing the threshold for the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Updated Linux Patches For Managing Out-Of-Memory Behavior Via BPF
Being worked on since last year by Google engineer Roman Gushchin was the latest attempt for the Linux kernel to support managing the out-of-memory “OOM” behavior using BPF programs. It’s been a while since there has been anything new to report on that front but published overnight is the latest iteration of those patches… ⌘ Read more

AMD Squeezing Out More More ROCm/HIP Performance With New Device-Side PGO
Compiler profile guided optimization (PGO) techniques have paid off well for increasing CPU performance via application/workload-specific profiles fed back to the compiler to make more informed decisions. AMD compiler engineers have been working on crafting device-side PGO for their AMDGPU LLVM back-end for allowing ROCm/HIP workloads to achieve greater GPU performance. An initial merge request is now open for upstream LLVM… ⌘ Read more

Godot 4.6 Ships Many Improvements For This Leading Open-Source Game Engine
Godot 4.6 is officially out today as the newest feature release for this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine… ⌘ Read more

Startup Uses SpaceX Tech to Cool Data Centers With Less Power and No Water
California-based Karman Industries “says it has developed a cooling system that uses SpaceX rocket engine technology to rein in the environmental impact of data centers,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “chilling them with less space, less power and no water.”

Karman has developed a cooling system similar to the heat pumps … ⌘ Read more

KDE’s ‘Plasma Login Manager’ Stops Supporting FreeBSD - Because Systemd
KDE’s “Plasma Login Manager” is apparently dropping support for FreeBSD, the Unix-like operating system, reports the blog It’s FOSS. They cite a recently-accepted merge request from a KDE engineer to drop the code supporting FreeBSD, since the login manager relies on systemd/logind:

systemd and logind look like hard dependencies of the … ⌘ Read more

Has a bit of a long history story behind this, where last year at work we were reading this book called Engineering a Safer World and initially came across a service called Speech Reply that allowed me to upload a PDF copy of the book and start to read it, but unfortunately, the free trial right now before I can finish reading it turns out that Speech Reply service cost a whopping US$30 a month and expected me to pay a full year upfront, which was well over US$300 just for one fucking book! So I sent their sales and support staff a message kindly asking if it were possible to just pay for the audio transcription of just a single book or to change to a monthly subscription fee, to which they refused, so basically in the end I got very angry and told them to go fuck themselves and built my own service. A year later here we are :-)

PowerShell Architect Retires After Decades At the Prompt
Jeffrey Snover, the driving force behind PowerShell, has retired after a career that reshaped Windows administration. The Register reports: Snover’s retirement comes after a brief sojourn at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, following a lengthy stint at Microsoft, during which he pulled the company back from imposing a graphical user interface (GUI) on adminis … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic’s AI Keeps Passing Its Own Company’s Job Interview
Anthropic has a problem that most companies would envy: its AI model keeps getting so good, the company wrote in a blog post, that it passes the company’s own hiring test for performance engineers. The test, designed in late 2023 by optimization lead Tristan Hume, asks candidates to speed up code running on a simulated computer chip. Over 1,000 people have take … ⌘ Read more

‘Almost Everyone’ Laid Off at Vimeo Following Bending Spoons Buyout
Vimeo is laying off employees around the world just months after Italian software company Bending Spoons completed its $1.38 billion acquisition of the video hosting platform. Dave Brown, Vimeo’s former brand VP, described the cuts on LinkedIn as affecting “a large portion of the company.” One video engineer claimed “almost everyone” was laid off, … ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.0.4 Browser Engine Released & Finally Supporting Multiple Windows
Servo 0.0.4 is out today as the newest monthly update to this open-source, Rust-based web browser engine. Building off recent Servo embedding API additions, Servo 0.0.4 introduces support for multiple browser windows… ⌘ Read more

Epic and Google Have a Secret $800 Million Unreal Engine and Services Deal
A federal judge revealed a previously undisclosed ~$800 million, six-year partnership between Epic Games and Google tied to Unreal Engine services and joint marketing. It raises questions about whether the deal influenced Epic’s willingness to settle its antitrust case over Android. The Verge reports: [California District Judge … ⌘ Read more

Schools, Airports, High-Rise Towers: Architects Urged To Get ‘Bamboo-Ready’
An anonymous reader shares a report: An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it’s time we took it seriously as a building material, too.

This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for … ⌘ Read more

Prominent Intel Compiler Engineer Heads Off To AMD
James Brodman worked for the last 15 years at Intel on their ISPC SIMD compiler and then in more recent years on the Intel DPC++ compiler and SYCL support as part of Intel’s oneAPI initiative. Rather interestingly, this compiler expert has now joined AMD… ⌘ Read more

New Patches Aim To Make x86 Linux EFI Stub & Relocatable Kernel Support Unconditional
Prominent Intel Linux engineer H. Peter Anvin has posted a new patch series working to clean-up the Linux x86/x86_64 kernel boot code. Besides cleaning up the code, the kernel configuration would drop options around EFI stub mode and relocatable kernels in making those features now always enabled… ⌘ Read more

New Linux Patch Improved NVMe Performance +15% With CPU Cluster-Aware Handling
Intel Linux engineers have been working on enhancing the NVMe storage performance with today’s high core count processors. Due to situations where multiple CPUs could end up sharing the same NVMe IRQ(s), performance penalties can arise if the IRQ affinity and the CPU’s cluster do not align. There is a pending patch to address this situation. A 15% performance improvement was reported with the pending patch… ⌘ Read more

System76 Continues Driving More Improvements Into The COSMIC Desktop
Following the December launch of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and the first major COSMIC desktop release, System76 software engineers have continued making improvements to their Rust-based desktop environment… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 44 Feature Approved For Better Windows On ARM Laptop Experience
A change proposal has been cleared by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee “FESCo” for providing a nice out-of-the-box experience for Windows on ARM laptops namely the recent Snapdragon X1 laptops and will also be important for the upcoming Snapdragon X2 laptops too… ⌘ Read more

The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture
The American monoculture – the era when three television networks, seven movie studios, and a handful of record labels determined virtually everything the country watched and heard – is collapsing under the weight of algorithmic recommendation engines and infinite streaming options. An estimated 200 million tickets were sold for “Gone With the Wind” in 1939 when the U.S. population … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Now Providing RPM Packages For Firefox Nightly Builds
In late 2023 Mozilla began providing Debian packages of Firefox Nightly builds complete with an APT repository. Those on Debian/Ubuntu distributions have a much easier path for enjoying Firefox Nightly since then and now Mozilla engineers are providing similar RPM builds of Firefox nightly too… ⌘ Read more

NYSE Eyes 24/7 Tokenized Stock Trading With Weekend Access and Same-Day Settlement
BrianFagioli writes: The New York Stock Exchange, owned by Intercontinental Exchange, is developing a platform for trading tokenized versions of U.S. listed stocks and ETFs around the clock, pending regulatory approval. The system would combine the NYSE’s existing matching engine with blockchain-based settlement … ⌘ Read more

Myrlyn 1.0 Released For Package Manager GUI Spawned By SUSE’s Hack Week
Myrlyn 1.0 was released today as the package manager GUI developed by SUSE engineers and started out just over one year ago during a SUSE Hack Week event as a SUSE/Qt package manager program not dependent upon YaST or Ruby… ⌘ Read more

Porsche Sold More Electrified Cars in Europe Last Year than Pure Gas-Powered Models
Porsche made an announcement Friday. In Europe they sold more electrified Porsches last year than pure combustion-engined models, reports Electrek:

in Europe, a majority (57.9%) of Porsche’s deliveries were plug-ins, with 1/3 of its European sales being fully electric. For models that have no fully electric … ⌘ Read more

How Much Do AI Models Resemble a Brain?
At the AI safety site Foom, science journalist Mordechai Rorvig explores a paper presented at November’s Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference:

[R]esearchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Georgia Tech revisited earlier findings that showed that language models, the engines of commercial AI chatbots, sh … ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Acquires Team Behind Open Source Framework Astro
Cloudflare has acquired the core team behind the open source JavaScript framework Astro, bringing its creators in-house while pledging to keep Astro fully open source. The New Stack reports: Astro is used by major brands like IKEA, Unilever, Visa and OpenAI to build fast, content-driven websites. Search engines prioritize fast-loading and clean pages, the … ⌘ Read more

AI Has Made Salesforce Engineers More Productive, So the Company Has Stopped Hiring Them, CEO Says
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said this week that his company’s software engineering headcount has remained “mostly flat” over the past year as internal AI tools have delivered substantial productivity gains.

Speaking on TBPN, Benioff said he has about 15,000 engineers who are “more p … ⌘ Read more

AI Models Are Starting To Crack High-Level Math Problems
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Over the weekend, Neel Somani, who is a software engineer, former quant researcher, and a startup founder, was testing the math skills of OpenAI’s new model when he made an unexpected discovery. After pasting the problem into ChatGPT and letting it think for 15 minutes, he came back to a full solution. He ev … ⌘ Read more

Widespread Verizon Outage Prompts Emergency Alerts in Washington, New York City
Verizon said on Wednesday that its wireless service was suffering an outage impacting cellular data and voice services. From a report: The nation’s largest wireless carrier said that its “engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly.” Verizon’s statement came after a swath of social me … ⌘ Read more

New “Thames” Linux Accelerator Driver Posted Along With Companion Gallium3D Driver
Tomeu Vizoso as the open-source developer behind the “Rocket” driver for reverse-engineered Rockchip NPU support, Teflon as a Mesa framework for TensorFlow Lite and NPU uses, and various Etnaviv driver work, has announced his newest creation: Thames… ⌘ Read more

Signal Creator Marlinspike Wants To Do For AI What He Did For Messaging
Moxie Marlinspike, the engineer who created Signal Messenger and set a new standard for private communications, is now trialing Confer, an open source AI assistant designed to make user data unreadable to platform operators, hackers, and law enforcement alike. Confer relies on two core technologies: passkeys that generate a 32-byte encry … ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases Open3D 0.19 With Experimental Cross-Platform GPU Support Using SYCL
Not to be confused with the Open 3D game engine, Intel’s Intelligent Systems Lab Organization released Open3D 0.19 as the latest iteration of this open-source library for 3D data processing in Python and C++… ⌘ Read more

LLMinus Working On AI/LLM-Powered Merge Conflict Resolution For The Linux Kernel
Building off an initial request for comments (RFC) patch series posted during the winter holidays, an updated RFC patch series was posted this weekend for LLMinus. LLMinus is an effort led by NVIDIA Linux kernel engineer Sasha Levin to provide a large language model (LLM) assisted merge conflict resolution tool focused on Linux kernel development… ⌘ Read more

Cory Doctorow: Legalising Reverse Engineering Could End ‘Enshittification’
Scifi author/tech activist Cory Doctorow has decried the “enshittification” of our technologies to extract more profit. But Saturday he also described what could be “the beginning of the end for enshittification” in a new article for the Guardian — “our chance to make tech good again”.

There is only one reason the world isn’t bu … ⌘ Read more

C# (and C) Grew in Popularity in 2025, Says TIOBE
For a quarter century, the TIOBE Index has attempted to rank the popularity of programming languages by the number of search engine results they bring up — and this week they had an announcement.

Over the last year the language showing the largest increase in its share of TIOBE’s results was C#.

TIOBE founder/CEO Paul Jansen looks back at how C++ evolved:

From a language … ⌘ Read more

Nature-Inspired Computers Are Shockingly Good At Math
An R&D lab under America’s Energy Department annnounced this week that “Neuromorphic computers, inspired by the architecture of the human brain, are proving surprisingly adept at solving complex mathematical problems that underpin scientific and engineering challenges.”

Phys.org publishes the announcement from Sandia National Lab:

In a paper published in Nature M … ⌘ Read more

Google: Don’t Make ‘Bite-Sized’ Content For LLMs If You Care About Search Rank
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a big business. While some SEO practices are useful, much of the day-to-day SEO wisdom you see online amounts to superstition. An increasingly popular approach geared toward LLMs called “content chunking” may fall into that catego … ⌘ Read more

Canonical Builds Steam Snap For Ubuntu ARM64 Leveraging FEX
Canonical is making it easier for ARM64 Ubuntu users like those on the NVIDIA DGX Spark to do a bit of gaming with Steam. Canonical engineers have assembled a Steam Snap for 64-bit ARM that comes complete with the FEX emulator for running Windows/Linux x86-based games on ARM64 Linux… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0 RADV Merges The Big Ray-Tracing Improvement For UE5 Lumen
The RADV ray-tracing improvement covered earlier this week for some big performance gains for Unreal Engine 5 titles running under Linux thanks to Steam Play has been merged for Mesa 25.0… ⌘ Read more

Tailwind CSS Lets Go 75% Of Engineers After 40% Traffic Drop From Google
Adam Wathan, the creator of the popular CSS framework Tailwind CSS, has let go of 75% of his engineering team – reducing it from four people to one – because AI-generated search answers have decimated traffic to the project’s documentation pages.

Traffic to Tailwind’s documentation has fallen roughly 40% since early 2023 despite th … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Optimizes Printing Of Linux Memory Stats For 11% System Time Savings
A NVIDIA engineer restructuring some of the printf-related code within the memory resource controller “memcg” statistics printing code to reduce the system time by 11% for dumping those stats… ⌘ Read more

Etnaviv Driver Wires Up PPU Flop Reset Support Needed By Some Vivante Hardware
Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-misc-next changes to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. The reverse-engineered Etnaviv DRM driver for Vivante graphics/NPU hardware has added a new “PPU flop reset” feature gleaned off studying the downstream vendor kernel driver… ⌘ Read more

Creator of Claude Code Reveals His Workflow
Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, revealed a deceptively simple workflow that uses parallel AI agents, verification loops, and shared memory to let one developer operate with the output of an entire engineering team. “I run 5 Claudes in parallel in my terminal,” Cherny wrote. “I number my tabs 1-5, and use system notifications to know when a Claude needs input. … ⌘ Read more

All Fedora 44 KDE Variants To Use Plasma Login Manager Rather Than SDDM
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved a Fedora 44 change for switching all KDE variants away from using the SDDM display manager to instead use the newer Plasma Login Manager… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Driver Preps THP Support For “Significant” SVM Performance Gains
Intel engineer Francois Dugast today sent out the new patch series for enabling Transparent Hugepages (THP) support within the drm_pagemap code with a focus on the Intel Xe kernel driver usage. This enabling of THP support and in turn 2MB pages by the Xe driver is yielding “significant” performance improvements when using Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) such as for GPU compute workloads… ⌘ Read more

Rust-Based Fjall 3.0 Released For Key-Value Storage Engine Akin To RocksDB
In addition to the release of Stoolap 0.2 as a modern embedded SQL database written in Rust, Fjall 3.0 is available as another Rust-written database solution. Fjall is a log-structured, embedable key-value storage engine akin to RocksDB but with the benefit of being written in Rust. With Fjall 3.0 its performance is now very competitive… ⌘ Read more

Google’s $250M Deal with California to Fund Newsrooms May Be Stalled
Remember how California’s government negotiated a 2024 deal where Google contributed millions to California’s local newsrooms to offset advertisers moving to the search engine?

“A year after it was cemented — and billed as a model that could succeed where entire countries and continents had fallen short — the agreement is tangled in budget … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Lowering Orbits of 4,400 Starlink Satellites for Safety’s Sake
“Starlink is beginning a significant reconfiguration of its satellite constellation focused on increasing space safety,” announced Michael Nicolls, Starlink’s vice president of engineering:

“We are lowering all Starlink satellites orbiting at ~550 km to ~480 km (~4400 satellites) over the course of 2026. The shell lowering is being tig … ⌘ Read more

Trump Signs Defense Bill Prohibiting China-Based Engineers in Pentagon IT Work
President Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that prohibits anyone based in China and other adversarial countries from accessing the Pentagon’s cloud computing systems. From a report: The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law, was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation … ⌘ Read more

Can Colossal’s Genetically Engineered Animals Ever Be the Real Thing?
Colossal Biosciences, the Texas-based startup now valued at more than $10 billion that has attracted investments from Paris Hilton, Peter Jackson and Tom Brady, claimed earlier this year to have resurrected the dire wolf – an animal that disappeared at the end of the last ice age – but a group of leading canid experts concluded the c … ⌘ Read more