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

Open-Source Crown Game Engine v0.60 Released
While the Godot Engine receives a lot of attention as a prominent open-source game engine, it’s far from the only one in this space. Another open-source game engine capping out 2025 with a new release is the Crown Engine… ⌘ Read more

Things I’ve learned along the way:

1. Writing self-contained and barely tied up programs didn’t go as well as I’d have thought
   
2. Reverse engineering (to put it that way) an open source library
   
3. Acceptance of non-Make build systems

Intel’s Xe Linux Driver Ready With Multi-Device SVM To End Out 2025
Intel’s open-source graphics driver engineers are ending out 2025 with a bang. Sent out today was the final drm-xe-next pull request of the year of new feature material ready for the next version of the Linux kernel. Today’s pull adds support for SR-IOV scheduler groups as well as multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support… ⌘ Read more

PhDs Can’t Find Work as Boston’s Biotech Engine Sputters
The Wall Street Journal reports that Boston’s once-booming biotech sector has hit a sharp downturn, leaving newly minted Ph.D.s struggling to find work as venture funding dries up, lab space sits empty, and companies downsize or relocate amid rising costs and policy uncertainty. The Wall Street Journal reports: Boston’s biotech sector, long a vital economic eng … ⌘ Read more

Up Next for Arduino After Qualcomm Acquisition: High-Performance Computing
Even after its acquisition by Qualcomm, the EFF believes Arduino “isn’t imposing any new bans on tinkering with or reverse engineering Arduino boards,” (according to Mitch Stoltz, EFF director for competition and IP litigation). While Adafruit’s managing editor Phillip Torrone had claimed to 36,000+ followers on LinkedIn that A … ⌘ Read more

Researchers Show Some Robots Can Be Hijacked Just Through Spoken Commands
An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this story from Interesting Engineering:

Cybersecurity specialists from the research group DARKNAVY have demonstrated how modern humanoid robots can be compromised and weaponised through weaknesses in their AI-driven control systems.

In a controlled test, the team demonstrated that a comm … ⌘ Read more

HarfBuzz 12.3 Released - Nice Performance Improvements To This Text Shaping Engine
HarfBuzz 12.3 was just released for ending out 2025 with some nice performance improvements to this widely-used text shaping engine. HarfBuzz in turn is used by the prominent Linux desktop environments, Java, Flutter, various game engines, and apps like Chrome and Firefox for text shaping needs with OpenType fonts and more… ⌘ Read more

Intel Open-Source Software Setback: IWD Development Hiatus
Adding to the unfortunate engineering setbacks at Intel this year as part of cost-cutting measures, the Intel IWD software development has been on a hiatus for the past three months. Going from previously seeing monthly releases and almost constant activity to now development ceasing up with no activity in the past three months… ⌘ Read more

Nova Driver Progress & Other NVIDIA Linux News From 2025
This year there was a lot of going on in the NVIDIA Linux world from their official driver stack seeing better Wayland support to a lot on the open-source scene from NVIDIA engineers contributing a lot directly to the Rust-based Nova open-source driver that continues taking shape, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver becoming more performant and capable, and a lot of other happenings. Here is a look back at the most popular NVIDIA content of 2025 on Phoronix… ⌘ Read more

Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite can’t engineer our consent
A decade after Peter Thiel backed Donald Trump, the ascent of the “tech right″⁣ has made billionaire founders “evil geniuses” in the eyes of many. ⌘ Read more

The Death Of Clear Linux, Other Intel Linux Engineering Setbacks In 2025
When it came to the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source news of 2025 there were a lot of accomplishments for the company this year both on the CPU and graphics side of the house and from consumer to server hardware. Today is a look back at the most popular Intel open-source/Linux news of the year, which unfortunately, their layoffs and other cuts to their software engineering were attracting a lot of interest… ⌘ Read more

Google Looks To Upstream Its Propeller Tool To LLVM For More Performance
Google’s Propeller is a profile-guided, reflinking optimizer for large codebases. Propeller is built atop LLVM and can allow for whole-program optimizations. Google compiler engineers are now hoping to bring the Propeller tool into the upstream LLVM codebase… ⌘ Read more

NASA Will Soon Find Out If the Perseverance Rover Can Really Persevere On Mars
With NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission delayed into the 2030s, engineers are certifying the Perseverance rover to keep operating for many more years while it continues collecting and safeguarding Martian rock samples. Ars Technica reports: The good news is that the robot, about the size of a small SUV, is in excelle … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Says It’s Not Planning To Use AI To Rewrite Windows From C To Rust
Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company’s goal was to “eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030.”

Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for sever … ⌘ Read more

2015 Radio Interview Frames AI As ‘High-Level Algebra’
Longtime Slashdot reader MrFreak shares a public radio interview from 2015 discussing artificial intelligence as inference over abstract inputs, along with scaling limits, automation, and governance models, where for-profit engines are constrained by nonprofit oversight: Recorded months before OpenAI was founded, the conversation treats intelligence as math plus in … ⌘ Read more

Micro QuickJS Engine Compiles & Runs JavaScript With As Little As 10kB Of RAM
Very talented open-source developer Fabrice Bellard who already is well known for his work on QEMU, the Tiny C Compiler, and FFmpeg, has another accomplishment: Micro QuickJS. The Micro QuickJS JavaScript engine can compile and run JavaScript programs with as little as 10 kB of RAM… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft To Replace All C/C++ Code With Rust By 2030
Microsoft plans to eliminate all C and C++ code across its major codebases by 2030, replacing it with Rust using AI-assisted, large-scale refactoring. “My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s … ⌘ Read more

Spotify Says ‘Anti-Copyright Extremists’ Scraped Its Library
A group of activists has scraped Spotify’s entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna’s Archive, a search engine for “shadow libraries” that previously focused on books.

Spotify described the activists as “anti-copyright extremists … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA’s Quest For A “Safe” Linux Kernel For Automobiles, Robotics
NVIDIA engineer Igor Stoppa presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) earlier this month around using Linux in safety-critical environments like automobiles and the current shortcomings of the upstream Linux kernel and the challenges on achieving Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) certifications around the Linux kernel. It’s an interesting read/watch around the safety of Linux (or not) for such strict safety environments… ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases GenAI Examples v1.5 - While Validating This AI Showcase On Old Xeon CPUs
Intel engineers as part of the OPEA Project today released the Generative AI Examples v1.5 update. This “GenAIExamples” open-source project is a collection of GenAI examples as part of showing the capabilities of the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA) and also highlighting Intel’s hardware strengths for generative AI… ⌘ Read more

Trump Admin to Hire 1,000 for New ‘Tech Force’ to Build AI Infrastructure
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:

The Trump administration on Monday unveiled a new initiative dubbed the “U.S. Tech Force,” comprising about 1,000 engineers and other specialists who will work on artificial intelligence infrastructure and other technology projects throughout the federal government.

Participants wi … ⌘ Read more

Gemini AI Yielding Sloppy Code For Ubuntu Development With New Helper Script
A few weeks ago it was mentioned by a Canonical engineer how trying to use AI to modernize the Ubuntu Error Tracker yielded some code that was “plain wrong” and other issues raised by that Microsoft GitHub Copilot code. The same Ubuntu developer shifted to trying Gemini AI to generate a helper script to assist in Ubuntu’s monthly ISO snapshot releases. Google’s Gemini AI also generated some sloppy code for a Python script to assist in tho … ⌘ Read more

Google Sues SerpApi Over Scraping and Reselling Search Data
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results. The allegations: Google said SerpApi:

-Circumvented Google’s security measures and industry-standard crawling controls. … ⌘ Read more

Stanford Computer Science Grads Find Their Degrees No Longer Guarantee Jobs
Elite computer science degrees are no longer a guaranteed on-ramp to tech jobs, as AI-driven coding tools slash demand for entry-level engineers and concentrate hiring around a small pool of already “elite” or AI-savvy developers. The Los Angeles Times reports: “Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find … ⌘ Read more

This ROCKET ENGINE WASN’T DESIGNED BY HUMANS ⌘ Read more

Uber is Hiring More Engineers Because AI is Making Them More Valuable, CEO Says
Uber is hiring more engineers rather than fewer because AI tools have made them “superhumans,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, pushing back against the industry trend of using productivity gains to justify headcount cuts. Speaking on the “On with Kara Swisher” podcast, Khosrowshahi noted that other tech executives see AI … ⌘ Read more

Apple Opens iOS To Alternative App Stores, Payment Systems in Japan
Apple has announced a sweeping set of changes to iOS in Japan that will allow alternative app marketplaces, third-party payment processing, and non-WebKit browser engines – all to comply with Japan’s Mobile Software Competition Act, which takes effect December 18. The changes, now available in iOS 26.2, bear a strong resemblance to Apple’s … ⌘ Read more

AMD Wants Your Logs To Help Optimize PyTorch & ComfyUI For Strix Halo, Radeon GPUs
If you are not satisfied with the current performance for PyTorch or ComfyUI / Stable Diffusion on your Strix Halo APU system or with other consumer RDNA3/RDNA4 Radeon consumer GPUs, AMD engineers are interested in your logs to help better optimize the performance going forward… ⌘ Read more

EU Moves To Ease 2035 Ban On Internal Combustion Cars
The EU is moving to soften its planned 2035 ban on internal combustion cars by allowing a small share of low-emission engines. “The less stringent limit would leave room for automakers to continue selling some plug-in hybrids, which have both electric and internal combustion engines and can use the combustion engine to recharge the battery without the need to find a ch … ⌘ Read more

Dual-PCB Linux Computer With 843 Components Designed By AI Boots On First Attempt
Quilter says its AI designed a complex Linux single-board computer in just one week, booting Debian on first power-up. “Holy crap, it’s working,” exclaimed one of the engineers. Tom’s Hardware reports: LA-based startup Quilter has outlined Project Speedrun, which marks a milestone in computer design by AI. The … ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.0.3 Browser Engine Brings Better Performance, Embedding Improvements
Servo 0.0.3 is out today as the newest update to this Rust-based, open-source web layout engine. Servo 0.0.3 incorporates many enhancements made over the past month from better performance to enhancing its embedding API and other improvements like context menus for more web content… ⌘ Read more

Yet another European step back in the fight against the #ClimateCrisis, dooming us all:

The (already watered-down) 2035 ban to combustion engine cars is being scraped.

https://www.ft.com/content/0e16b6ea-bf46-4ea6-820e-244b7a5bae1d

Fedora 44 Could Work Nicely “Out Of The Box” On Snapdragon-Powered Windows ARM Laptops
Longtime Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede who worked on many Intel/AMD laptop enhancements over the years left Red Hat and ended up joining Qualcomm. Now it turns out one of his projects at Qualcomm is enhancing the Fedora Linux support for running nicely out-of-the-box on Snapdragon-powered Windows on ARM laptops… ⌘ Read more

US Tech Force Aims To Recruit 1,000 Technologists
The Trump administration announced Monday the United States Tech Force, a new program to recruit around 1,000 technologists for two-year government stints starting as soon as March – less than a year after dismantling several federal technology teams and driving thousands of tech workers out of their jobs.

The program will primarily recruit early-career software engineers an … ⌘ Read more

Security Researcher Found Critical Kindle Vulnerabilities That Allowed Hijacking Amazon Accounts
The Black Hat Europe hacker conference in London included a session titled “Don’t Judge an Audiobook by Its Cover” about a two critical (and now fixed) flaws in Amazon’s Kindle. The Times reports both flaws were discovered by engineering analyst Valentino Ricotta (from the cybersecurit … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Alleges a Chinese-Deployed Satellite Risked Colliding with Starlink
“A SpaceX executive says a satellite deployed from a Chinese rocket risked colliding with a Starlink satellite,” reports PC Magazine:

On Friday, company VP for Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, tweeted about the incident and blamed a lack of coordination from the Chinese launch provider CAS Space. “When satellite opera … ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Funny you should say that, I designed a new Prolog(ish) Symbolic Reasoning Engine and DSl over the holidays 🤣

Entry-Level Tech Workers Confront an AI-Fueled Jobpocalypse
AI “has gutted entry-level roles in the tech industry,” reports Rest of World.

One student at a high-ranking engineering college in India tells them that among his 400 classmates, “fewer than 25% have secured job offers… there’s a sense of panic on the campus.”

Students at engineering colleges in India, China, Dubai, and Kenya are facing a “jobpo … ⌘ Read more

Is the R Programming Language Surging in Popularity?
The R programming language “is sometimes frowned upon by ‘traditional’ software engineers,” says the CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe, “due to its unconventional syntax and limited scalability for large production systems.” But he says it “continues to thrive at universities and in research-driven industries, and “for domain experts, it remains a power … ⌘ Read more

How a 23-Year-Old in 1975 Built the World’s First Handheld Digital Camera
In 1975, 23-year-old electrical engineer Steve Sasson joined Kodak. And in a new interview with the BBC, he remembers that he’d found the whole photographic process “really annoying…. I wanted to build a camera with no moving parts. Now that was just to annoy the mechanical engineers…”

“You take your picture, you have to … ⌘ Read more

Bill Gates’ Daughter Secures $30 Million For AI App Built In Stanford Dorm
Phoebe Gates, Bill Gates’ youngest daughter, has raised $30 million for the AI shopping app she built in her Stanford dorm room with classmate Sophia Kianni. The app is called Phia and is pitched as a way to simplify price comparison and secondhand shopping. “Its AI-powered search engine – available as an app and as a browser e … ⌘ Read more

Cache Aware Scheduling Raises Performance For Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids
Over the past year Intel engineers have worked a lot on Cache Aware Scheduling for the Linux kernel. The yet-to-be-merged functionality allows for the Linux kernel to better aggregate tasks sharing data to the same last level cache (LLC) domain to reduce cache misses and cache bouncing. The Cache Aware Scheduling development was led by Intel but helps other CPU vendors too for processors with multiple cache domains. Back in October I show … ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Fix eMMC Secure Erase Of 1GB Taking ~10 Minutes To Now Just 2 Seconds
A new patch series from an NXP engineer optimizes the secure erase performance for certain Kingston eMMC devices. Currently with the Linux kernel performing a secure erase on 1GB of data can take around ten minutes. With these new patches that 1GB secure erase can be done in around two seconds… ⌘ Read more

I Built the FIRST VENTURI ROCKET ENGINE ⌘ Read more

AI Hackers Are Coming Dangerously Close to Beating Humans
Stanford researchers spent much of the past year building an AI bot called Artemis that scans networks for software vulnerabilities, and when they pitted it against ten professional penetration testers on the university’s own engineering network, the bot outperformed nine of them. The experiment offers a window into how rapidly AI hacking tools have improved aft … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 2 Released As Latest Monthly ISOs
It was just at the end of month that Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 1 ISOs were published for the first “Resolute Raccoon” milestone. Out already is now Snapshot 2 with Canonical releasing these images ahead of their engineers having time off for end-of-year holidays… ⌘ Read more

Budgie 10.10 Desktop Approved For Fedora 44 Packaging, Fedora Budgie Spin All-Wayland
In addition to approving Fedora Cloud switching /boot to a Btrfs subvolume, another change approved this week by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) is for shipping the Budgie 10.10 desktop packages in Fedora 44… ⌘ Read more

RoboCrop: Teaching Robots How To Pick Tomatoes
alternative_right quotes a report from Phys.org: To teach robots how to become tomato pickers, Osaka Metropolitan University Assistant Professor Takuya Fujinaga, Graduate School of Engineering, programmed them to evaluate the ease of harvesting for each tomato before attempting to pick it. Fujinaga’s new model uses image recognition paired with statistical analysis to evaluate … ⌘ Read more

Fedora Cloud Will Switch To /boot As A Btrfs Subvolume
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee “FESCo” today signed off on a new feature for Fedora Cloud 44 to switch /boot to being as a Btrfs sub-volume rather than a separate partition… ⌘ Read more