Elon Musk’s xAI Launches ‘Grok Build’, Its First AI Coding Agent
xAI has launched Grok Build, “a coding agent of its own to serve as competitor to its rivals’ products, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code,” reports Engadget:

As Bloomberg notes, xAI has been trying to catch up to its rival companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, previously admitted that it has fallen behind … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Stops Supporting Pre-2013 Kindles Today. Some Owners Turn to Jailbreaking
Today Amazon ends support for first- and second-generation versions of Kindles and Kindle Fire tablets, along with the Kindle Touch, the 9.7-inch Kindle DX, and other devices released in 2012 or earlier.

Owners can continue reading ebooks that they’ve already downloaded, and they can also still sideload books using … ⌘ Read more

Some Datacenters Divert Power from Homes. Will It Drive Homeowners to Solar and Batteries?
An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek:

A Nevada utility just told 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents that it’s redirecting 75% of their electricity supply to data centers, and they have less than a year to find a new power source. It’s one of the starkest examples yet of the AI boom … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, gsasl, nodejs, postgresql-15, postgresql-17, python3.9, and thunderbird), Fedora (expat, firefox, freerdp, GitPython, kernel, php, rust-podman-sequoia, rust-rpm-sequoia, rust-sequoia-chameleon-gnupg, rust-sequoia-git, rust-sequoia-keystore-server, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-openpgp, rust-sequoia-sop, rust-sequoia-sq, and rust-sequoia-sqv), Mageia (awstats, libreoffice, perl-HTTP-Tiny, and tomcat), Oracle (corosync, freerdp, … ⌘ Read more

Élections en Andalousie: les jeunes socialistes espèrent éviter une débâcle à Pedro Sánchez
Alors que les législatives se profilent, le scrutin régional du 17 mai fait figure de test pour les socialistes espagnols. Une lourde défaite du PSOE face au Parti populaire, de droite et donné favori, fragiliserait davantage le premier ministre, déjà en position précaire. ⌘ Read more

Valie Export ist tot
Die Medien- und Performancekünstlerin, Filmemacherin und feministische Theoretikerin Valie Export ist am Donnerstag wenige Tage vor ihrem 86. Geburtstag in Wien gestorben. Das gab die Valie Export Stiftung gegenüber der APA bekannt. Geboren am 17. Mai 1940 in Linz als Waltraud Lehner erlangte sie unter ihren Künstlerinnennamen Weltruhm und beeinflusste Generationen von Künstlerinnen und Künstlern. ⌘ Read more

Cisco To Cut Almost 4,000 Jobs In AI-Driven Restructuring
Cisco’s stock soared 17% after the company announced it will cut nearly 4,000 jobs as it shifts investment and staffing toward higher-growth AI opportunities. CNBC reports: CEO Chuck Robbins wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that the latest round of job cuts will begin on May 14. Cisco is the latest company to announce head count reductions tied to AI. “The companies … ⌘ Read more

The Top New Features in Google’s Android 17—and Gemini Intelligence—Coming This Summer
You’ll soon be able to generate your own widgets or ask Gemini to finish a booking in Chrome on Android. ⌘ Read more

Hamburg: 17-Jähriger wegen Anschlagsplanung festgenommen ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.17 Fixes Support For GB10 Powered Systems
The open-source, community-developed NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver that provides a Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implementation built atop NVIDIA’s NVDEC video decode interface is out with a new release. This is the open-source project that’s motivated by getting accelerated video decoding to work within Mozilla Firefox and other apps when running with NVIDIA’s packaged Linux driver… ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libsoup and mingw-libtiff), Debian (apache2, chromium, lcms2, libreoffice, and prosody), Fedora (openssl and perl-Starman), Oracle (git-lfs, libsoup, and perl-XML-Parser), Slackware (libgpg, mozilla, and php), SUSE (389-ds, cairo, cf-cli, chromedriver, cri-tools, freeipmi, gnutls, grafana, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, jetty-minimal, libmariadbd-devel, librsvg, mesa, mozjs52, mutt, nix, opencryptoki, python-Django, python-django, p … ⌘ Read more

AMD’s Local, Open-Source AI Can Now Easily Interact With Your Gmail
AMD software engineers continue rapidly advancing their open-source software efforts around local AI/LLM use on consumer-class Radeon and Ryzen hardware. AMD GAIA 0.17.6 was released on Thursday with more improvements for local AI processing on Windows, Linux, and even macOS. For those trusting enough in local LLM pipelines to do the right thing, there is even integration now for AMD GAIA to interface with your Gmail account… ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (corosync, dovecot, image-builder, python-tornado, resource-agents, and systemd), Debian (openjdk-11, openjdk-17, and pyjwt), Fedora (pdns, pyOpenSSL, and squid), Slackware (hunspell), SUSE (alloy, avahi, bubblewrap, cmctl, coredns, curl, dpkg, firefox, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, grafana, libpng12, PackageKit, sed, and xen), and Ubuntu (docker.io-app, nghttp2, python-django, and python-mako). ⌘ Read more

Flatpak 1.17.7 To Track The Age Of Configurations For Providing Much Better Performance
Flatpak 1.17.7 is now available for continuing to advance open-source app sandboxing and distribution on the Linux desktop. Some interesting new features are in tow with this Flatpak update plus there is also an updated XDG-Desktop-Portal release too… ⌘ Read more

The $19B “Nuclear AI” Energy Startup That Couldn’t Sign a Single Client
“Nuclear AI startup” Fermi had hoped to build power plants generating 17 gigawatts of electricity, remembers Bloomberg, “three times the amount typically consumed by New York City.”

Hyperscalers could install their data centers on the site itself and tap directly into that power, which would come first from natural gas turbines and … ⌘ Read more

AMD’s GAIA Defaults To Better Model, Continued Improvements For Local AI
AMD software engineers on Friday released a new version of GAIA “Generative AI Is Awesome” as their open-source software for Windows and Linux leveraging the Lemonade SDK and aiming to make it easy to build AI agents on your PC with all local AI processing across AMD’s CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs… ⌘ Read more

17 Best Graduation Gifts That Aren’t Totally Cringe (2026)
From tech to home goods, these giftable gadgets are as practical as they are cool. ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, giflib, grafana, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, LibRaw, OpenEXR, PackageKit, pcs, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, sudo, tigervnc, vim, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (calibre, firefox-esr, and openjdk-17), Fedora (asterisk, binaryen, buildah, dokuwiki, lemonldap-ng, libexif, libgcrypt, miniupnpd, openvpn, podman, python3.9, rust-rpm-sequo … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, java-17-openjdk, libxml2, python3, python3.11, python3.12, sudo, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (dnsdist, node-tar, pdns, pdns-recursor, and policykit-1), Fedora (chromium, edk2, and vim), Oracle (firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, go-toolset:rhel8, libpng12, LibRaw, libxml2, python, python3, python3.11, python3.12, python3.12-wheel, vim, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-mana … ⌘ Read more

Hygon C86-4G CPU Support Added To The GCC 17 Compiler
Merged today to the GCC Git compiler codebase, which will be for GCC 17 rather than the imminent GCC 16.1 stable release, is adding support for the Chinese-manufactured Hygon C86-4G-M4 / C86-4G-M6 / C86-4G-M7 series x86_64 processors… ⌘ Read more

Is the Iran War Driving a Surge of Interest in Electric Cars?
In October and through November, America’s EV sales reached their lowest point since 2022 after government subsidies expired, remembers Time. “But first-quarter data for 2026 shows that used EV sales were 12% higher than the same time last year and 17% higher than the previous quarter.

“One factor likely helping push buyers toward these cars is hig … ⌘ Read more

Online Personalities and Comedians Overtake TV and Newspapers as Primary News Sources
A new Ipsos poll finds Americans are increasingly getting news from online personalities and comedians instead of traditional TV or newspapers. The survey says nearly 70% get news online in a given week, versus 55% from TV and 25% from newspapers, with figures like Joe Rogan, Greg Gutfeld, Sean Hannity, a … ⌘ Read more

NIST Limits CVE Enrichment After 263% Surge In Vulnerability Submissions
NIST is narrowing how it handles CVEs in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), saying it will only automatically enrich higher-priority vulnerabilities. “CVEs that do not meet those criteria will still be listed in the NVD but will not automatically be enriched by NIST,” it said. “This change is driven by a surge in CVE submissi … ⌘ Read more

Gazing Into Sam Altman’s Orb Could Solve Ticket Scalping
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Sam Altman’s iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they’re a real human, provided they’ve already stared into one of World’s glossy white Orbs … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla ‘Thunderbolt’ Is an Open-Source AI Client Focused On Control and Self-Hosting
BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla’s email subsidiary MZLA Technologies just introduced Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client aimed at organizations that want to run AI on their own infrastructure instead of relying entirely on cloud services. The idea is to give companies full control over their data, models, an … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s New Fire TV Sticks No Longer Support Sideloading
Amazon’s newest Fire TV Sticks are dropping support for normal sideloading, blocking apps from outside the Amazon Appstore unless the device is registered with developers. Cord Cutters News reports: This week, Amazon announced the upcoming launch of a new Fire TV Stick HD. The new model will run on Amazon’s Vega OS, rather than Android, so most streamin … ⌘ Read more

The weathermen just cannot be right with their 20°C today, it must have been more. It was awfully hot, the light breeze was not enough and even absent most of the time. In the shade, it was alright. Other than that, the walk to the dairy farm and back was really beautiful. Very lovely scenery.

Somebody spilled their paintbox at sunset. Unfortunately, I missed to reinsert the SD card into my camera, so I could not take more photos of Azabache and his new mate. They quickly disappeared. He even landed right next to my window, so that would have been a killer shot.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-04-17/

OpenAI Starts Offering a Biology-Tuned LLM
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, OpenAI announced it had developed a large language model specifically trained on common biology workflows. Called GPT-Rosalind after Rosalind Franklin, the model appears to differ from most science-focused models from major tech companies, which have generally taken a more generic approach that works for various fields. … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Increases the FAT32 Limit From 32GB To 2TB
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo writes: Windows has limited FAT32 partitions to a maximum of 32GB for decades now. When memory cards and USB drives exceeded 32GB in size, the only options were exFAT or NTFS. Neither option was well supported on other platforms at first, although exFAT support is fairly widespread now. In their latest blog post, Microsoft announced … ⌘ Read more

Newly Unsealed Records Reveal Amazon’s Price-Fixing Tactics
Newly unsealed records in California’s antitrust case against Amazon allegedly show the company pressured third-party sellers to raise prices on rival sites like Walmart, Target, and Wayfair so Amazon could maintain the appearance of offering the lowest price. California says Amazon used tools like Buy Box suppression to punish cheaper listings elsewhere. T … ⌘ Read more

US To Create High-Tech Manufacturing Zone In Philippines
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: An agreement with the Philippines to establish a high-tech industrial hub is the Trump administration’s latest effort to lessen China’s dominance over global supply chains. The deal to build up American manufacturing across a stretch of the island of Luzon, signed Thursday, will offer U.S. compani … ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake Linux Graphics Performance Up ~17% Over Past Year
Given the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release being imminent and also realizing it’s been nearly one year to the day since reviewing the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition laptop under Linux, I ran some fresh benchmarks for seeing how the integrated Xe2 graphics have evolved on Linux over the past year. ⌘ Read more

Reed Hastings Is Leaving Netflix After 29 Years
Reed Hastings is stepping down from Netflix’s board in June, ending a 29-year run at the company he co-founded and helped transform from a DVD-by-mail business into a global streaming giant. Hastings said in a shareholder (PDF) letter that heâ™s stepping down to focus on “his philanthropy and other pursuits.” Engadget reports: Hastings has served as chairman of Netflix’s board … ⌘ Read more

本周赛博领鸡蛋[4.17~4.23]
本周赛博领鸡蛋桌面端只有一款即时战术潜行游戏《疯狂之石》，手机游戏 1 款但锁区。@Appinn 《疯狂之石｜The Stone of Madness》 这是一款以潜行与策略为核心的战术游戏，背景设定在18世纪，西班牙的一家充满宗教与神秘气息的修道院中。玩家需要操控多名角色，在不同时间段执行潜入、探 ⌘ Read more

La capitulation du 1er Mai
C’était couru d’avance : dans un pays croulant sous 3000 milliards de dette, imaginer des citoyens adultes et consentants travailler librement un jour férié relève de la provocation fasciste. Et sans surprise donc, le feuilleton printanier sur l’assouplissement férié du premier mai vient de s’achever sur une note navrante : la montagne parlementaire n’a pas accouché d’une […] ⌘ Read more

Intel’s New Core Series 3 Is Its Answer To the MacBook Neo
Intel has launched a new budget-focused Core Series 3 processor line for lower-cost laptops – “Intel’s response to budget CPUs that are appearing in laptops like the Apple MacBook Neo,” writes PCWorld’s Mark Hachman. From the report: Intel unexpectedly launched the Core Series 3, based on its excellent “Panther Lake” (Core Ultra Series 3) architecture and 1 … ⌘ Read more

Sperm Whales’ Communication Closely Parallels Human Language, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered … ⌘ Read more

Conscription, réquisition, interdiction de partir : bienvenue en Europe
Depuis décembre 2025, un homme allemand de 17 à 45 ans doit demander la permission de l’État pour quitter le pays plus de trois mois… Et ce, en temps de paix. Auparavant, il existait un article (l’article 3) qui obligeait les hommes allemands entre 17 et 45 ans à demander l’autorisation aux autorités allemandes s’ils […] ⌘ Read more

Omissions, Deceptions, Lying. The New Yorker Asks: Can Sam Altman Be Trusted?
A 17,000-word expose in the New Yorker reveals “several executives connected to OpenAI have expressed ongoing reservations about Altman’s leadership.” Reporters Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke to “a hundred people with firsthand knowledge of how Altman conducts business,” including current and former OpenAI employees and boa … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Awwwwwwww! I love these stripes, very cool!

Oh, I bet these inclines are no joke. I also know one about 200 meters long terribly steep dirt path up a hill around here. Climbing that is super exhausting. I just looked it up on a map. And it’s just ~17° or ~30% incline. Okay, that’s absolutely nothing compared to your adventure. :-D

But you got your exercises for the day then. Which will make for an even greater sleep tonight. ;-)

Sumatra PDF 3.7 预发布版本 – 新增命令行工具，以及 Arm 64、命令面板、深色模式等功能
Sumatra PDF 是一款有着 17 年历史的电子书阅读器，支持 PDF, eBook (epub, mobi), comic book (cbz/cbr), DjVu, XPS, CHM 等格式，甚至支持图片浏览。近日发布 3.6 版本，新增了一些功能。@Appinn 而预发布的 Sumatr ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (crun, kernel, and kernel-rt), Debian (dovecot), Fedora (calibre and nextcloud), Mageia (freerdp, polkit-122, python-nltk, python-pyasn1, vim, and xz), Red Hat (edk2 and openssl), SUSE (avahi, cockpit, python-pyOpenSSL, python311, and tar), and Ubuntu (lambdaisland-uri-clojure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-gcp-fips, linux-oem-6.17, and linux-realtime-6.17). ⌘ Read more

Artemis II Astronauts Pass 100,000 Miles From Earth On Voyage To the Moon
The Artemis II crew has passed 100,000 miles from Earth and is now on a “free-return” path around the moon after a successful “translunar” injection burn. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am so, so excited to be able to tell you that for the first time since 1972 during Apollo 17, human beings have left Earth orbit,” NASA’s Dr Lori Gl … ⌘ Read more

Fan Fiction Website AO3 Exits Beta After 17 Years
Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially dropping its “beta” label after 17 years. The Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit behind the fanfiction site, said the site will keep evolving with new improvements even though it’s no longer technically in beta.

“As the AO3 software has been stable for a long time, the change is mostly cosmetic and does not indicate th … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Imposes 3.5% Fuel Surcharge For Many Online Merchants
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon will start charging sellers who use its shipping services a 3.5% “fuel and logistics” surcharge later this month, joining the ranks of shipping companies raising prices as the war in Iran pushes oil prices higher. The fees take effect on April 17 for customers of the company’s Fulfillment by Amazon … ⌘ Read more

@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com @bender@twtxt.net Well, even hard-reloading doesn’t change anything. I also just noticed that hovering over the tab title makes it completely invisible. In contrast to the buttons, here, the text color is exactly the same as the background color:

Since I prefer the light theme, that’s no big deal for me. 8-)

AMD Introduces GAIA Agent UI For Privacy-First Web App For Local AI Agents
AMD’s GAIA AI agent framework (that previously stood for “Generative AI Is Awesome” albeit they seemed to have dropped promoting it as that name) for Ryzen AI hardware is out with a new version. AMD GAIA 0.17 introduces Agent UI as a new privacy-first web application for local AI agents… ⌘ Read more

Open-Source Nouveau Performance With Linux 7.0 + NVK Mesa 26.1-dev vs. NVIDIA Linux Driver
As a few months have passed since our prior round of testing the fully open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver and Mesa NVK Vulkan driver plus Zink, here is a fresh round of benchmarks using Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.1-dev compared to the open-source stack shipped by Ubuntu 25.10 (Linux 6.17 + Mesa 25.2) for showing how far the open-source NVIDIA driver has progressed the past few months. Plus testing aga … ⌘ Read more

87 milliards gâchés : le scandale ENR que personne ne veut voir
Apparemment, c’est la saison des rapports de la Cour des comptes que la presse enterre très vite. Après celui sur les fraudes aux cartes grises où l’on découvrait les astucieuses méthodes pour transformer, sur le papier, une Porsche Cayenne en baraque à frites, voici celui sur le soutien public aux énergies renouvelables, publié le 17 […] ⌘ Read more

Apple Can Delist Apps ‘With Or Without Cause,’ Judge Says In Loss For Musi App
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Musi, a free music streaming app that had tens of millions of iPhone downloads and garnered plenty of controversy over its method of acquiring music, has lost an attempt to get back on Apple’s App Store. A federal judge dismissed Musi’s lawsuit against Apple with preju … ⌘ Read more