Planet Labs Tests AI-Powered Object Detection On Satellite
BrianFagioli writes: Artificial intelligence has now run directly on a satellite in orbit. A spacecraft about 500km above Earth captured an image of an airport and then immediately ran an onboard AI model to detect airplanes in the photo. Instead of acting like a simple camera in space that sends raw data back to Earth for later analysis, the satellite perfo … ⌘ Read more

Testing Suggests Google’s AI Overviews Tells Millions of Lies Per Hour
A New York Times analysis found Google’s AI Overviews now answer questions correctly about 90% of the time, which might sound impressive until you realize that roughly 1 in 10 answers is wrong. “[F]or Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day,” reports Ars Technica. From the report: The Times … ⌘ Read more

China Flies World’s First Megawatt-Class Hydrogen Turboprop Engine
Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares a report from Fuel Cells Works: China says the AEP100, a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine developed by the Aero Engine Corporation of China, has completed its maiden flight on a 7.5-ton unmanned cargo aircraft in Zhuzhou, Hunan. The 16-minute test covered 36km at 220km/h and 300 meters … ⌘ Read more

Introducing the FreeBSD laptop integration testing project
Recently, the FreeBSD Foundation has been making\
progress on improving the operating system’s support for modern
laptop hardware. The foundation is now looking to expand testing to
encompass a wider range of hardware; it has announced
a laptop integration testing project to allo … ⌘ Read more

NetBSD 11.0 Nears Release With RC3 Released For Testing
For the better part of the past year NetBSD developers have been preparing for the NetBSD 11.0 release and in February NetBSD 11.0-RC1 released followed by 11.0-RC2 and now a third release candidate was announced today… ⌘ Read more

Interesting. Another parsing issue? Let’s test: this should be italics. Then this also should be “italics”. End.

Chrome 148 Will Start ‘Lazy Loading’ Video and Audio to Improve Performance
“Google has announced that it’s currently testing a new feature for Chrome 148 that could speed up day-to-day browsing,” reports PC World:

[T]he browser can intelligently postpone the loading of certain elements. Why load all images at the start when it can instead load images as you get close to them while scrolling? Chrome and … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.1 Makes It Easier To “Fake” A GPU Reset Using LLVMpipe
As a small but interesting addition coming for this quarter’s Mesa 26.1 release is making it easy to simulate a GPU reset with the LLVMpipe software driver. While seemingly mundane, this can be quite handy for compositor developers and other app/software developers wanting to more easily test how their code behaves when encountering a GPU reset… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Pulls Then Re-Issues Windows 11 Preview Update. Also Begins Force-Updating Windows 11
Nine days ago Microsoft released a non-security “preview” update for Windows 11 — not mandatory for the average Windows user, notes ZDNet, “but rather as optional, more for IT admins and power users who want to test them.”
TechRepublic adds that the update “was to bring ‘production-rea … ⌘ Read more

Native Chaos Engineering: Testing Resilience with Fault & Latency Injection
You’ve implemented retries, circuit breakers, and timeouts. Your application is now “resilient.” But how do you know these policies actually work? Waiting for a production meltdown to verify your configuration is a high-stakes gamble. Native Chaos Engineering in Resile allows you to synthetically induce failure and latency directly into your application’s execution path, ensuring your resilien … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” Enjoys Great Performance Gains With Latest Linux Software
With the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out in three weeks, I have been re-testing a number of different devices on this newest Ubuntu release. One of the most significant improvements to note was when running the Framework Desktop with Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” and quantifying the performance gains of the Radeon 8060S Graphics since launch last year. Here’s a look at how the Vulkan and OpenGL performance has evolved for the Ryz … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” Enjoys Great Performance Gains With Latest Linux Software
With the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out in three weeks, I have been re-testing a number of different devices on this newest Ubuntu release. One of the most significant improvements to note was when running the Framework Desktop with Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” and quantifying the performance gains of the Radeon 8060S Graphics since launch last year. Here’s a look at how the Vulkan and OpenGL performance has evolved for the Ryz … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That’s crazy! If you don’t mind me asking, what browser are you using when you see this?

@bender@twtxt.net Glad to hear it, I’ve neglected a Safari test thus far.

Thank you both for checking.

NASA Launches Artemis II Astronauts Around the Moon
NASA’s Artemis II mission has launched four astronauts around the moon and back, marking humanity’s first crewed lunar voyage in 53 years and the first test flight of NASA’s Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) with people on board. Five minutes into the flight, Commander Reid Wiseman saw the team’s target: “We have a beautiful moonrise, we’re headed right at it … ⌘ Read more

For what is worth, I am not experiencing what @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org described. Tested with Firefox on Ubuntu, and Safari on macOS.

Open-Source RadeonSI+Rusticl Nearing Formal OpenCL 3.0 Conformance
The open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with Rusticl for modern Rust-based OpenCL is nearing formal OpenCL 3.0 conformance with all necessary OpenCL test cases passing. Making this all the more interesting is that this is the first modern AMD graphics hardware in a decade likely to see formal recognition for OpenCL conformance with AMD having not submitted any of their own OpenCL conformance results since 2015… ⌘ Read more

Five ways to beat your phone addiction (that actually work)
A jury just ruled social media is designed to addict you. We road-tested five ways to fight back. ⌘ Read more

Transporting Antimatter On a Truck Is Tricky…
Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: … but the CERN Project “Antimatter in motion” just did it. For the first time in history researchers at CERN have transported 92 antiprotons on a truck in a specially designed magnetic enclosure. The test-drive went so well that the researchers spontaneously decided to go another round… The purpose of the experiment was to test the f … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 Addresses 5 Year Old Request For Easier Microphone Testing
It’s been another busy week in the KDE space as Plasma developers continue working on new feature activity for the big Plasma 6.7 release… ⌘ Read more

DRBD Driver Working To Land ~15 Years Worth Of Changes Into The Linux Kernel
Developers behind the Distributed Replicated Block Device “DRBD” for mirroring block devices between multiple host systems are working to resync the upstream Linux kernel DRBD support with the out-of-tree DRBD code they have been maintaining for the past ~15 years out-of-sync. It’s a big undertaking but they have begun staging patches for review and testing to get this massive set of changes up to par for mainline… ⌘ Read more

wlroots 0.20 Released,Sway 1.12-rc1 Available For Testing With Color Management
Released today was wlroots 0.20 as this Wayland support library used by some Wayland compositors for doing much of the “heavy lifting” of compositor bring-up. Following wlroots 0.20, Sway 1.12-rc1 was released for testing as this closely-aligned Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Beta Released: Powered By Linux 7.0 + GNOME 50 + Mesa 26.0
Right on schedule the beta for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is now available for testing. This is a great opportunity to help test this release ahead of the official Long Term Support release due out on 23 April… ⌘ 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

Researchers At CERN Transport Antiprotons By Truck In World-First Experiment
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Physics World: Researchers at the CERN particle-physics lab have successfully transported antiprotons in a lorry across the lab’s main site. The feat, the first of its kind, follows a similar test with protons in 2024. CERN says the achievement is “a huge leap” towards being able … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Delivers An Impressive Edge For Radeon Graphics Over GNOME 50 On Ubuntu 26.04
In testing thus far on Ubuntu 26.04, the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop with the Wayland session is working pretty darn well and delivering a performance edge across many games/graphics workloads compared to the default GNOME 50 desktop. At least as far as AMD Radeon graphics are concerned, Plasma 6.6 is in quite impressive shape for the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release. ⌘ Read more

China Is Mass-Producing Hypersonic Missiles For $99,000
Longtime Slashdot reader cusco writes: A private company in China has developed hypersonic missiles that cost the same as a Tesla Model X. This missile, the YKJ-1000, is being marketed for sale at a reported price of $99,000, and it’s in mass production now after successful tests. That is far below what countries will spend to target and shoot down the missile if it … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic’s Claude Can Now Use Your Computer To Finish Tasks
Anthropic is testing a new Claude feature that lets users send a request from their phone and have the AI carry it out directly on their computer, such as opening apps, using a browser, or editing files. The move follows the viral spread of OpenClaw earlier this year, which has gained cult popularity among devs for the ability to run local, 24/7 personal workf … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net both, but neither directly. I know every workaround there is, including those used by developers, to test apps, while working on them. However if “sideloading” becomes so tedious, even the more technical users, cannot be bothered to do it, competing appstores and independent developers, not wanting to send their money and ID to Google, loose users at such rate, they likely won’t be able to justify continuing to maintain their projects, people like me rely on.

Intel FRED Can Yield Great Performance - FRED Benchmarks On Panther Lake
With Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” laptop SoCs, the Xe3-based Arc B390 graphics and much improved CPU performance capture much of the spotlight. One new capability with Panther Lake that isn’t featured as much though is the new FRED capability with Flexible Return and Event Delivery. Today’s Intel Panther Lake testing is looking at the very interesting performance impact of FRED on Linux. ⌘ Read more

William Shatner Celebrates 95th Birthday, Smokes Cigar, Revisits ‘Rocket Man’ and Tests X Money
It was 60 years ago when William Shatner — born in 1931 — portrayed Captain Kirk in the TV series Star Trek. Shatner turns 95 today — and celebrated by posting a picture of himself smoking a cigar.

“At 95, I’m still smokin’!” Shatner joked, adding that in life he’d learned two th … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Plans to Test Four-Legged Robots on Wheels for Deliveries
CNBC reports:

Amazon has acquired Rivr, a Swiss robotics company developing machines for “doorstep delivery,” the company confirmed Thursday… It announced the deal in a notice sent to third-party delivery contractors… “We believe this technology, when working alongside your [delivery associates], has the potential to further improve sa … ⌘ Read more

Wine-Staging 11.5 Released With A Few New Patches
Building off Friday’s exciting release of Wine 11.5 with Syscall User Dispatch support, Wine-Staging 11.5 is now available for this experimental/testing build of Wine that at the moment is some 228 patches atop the upstream code… ⌘ Read more

Tesla’s Upcoming Electric Big Rig Is Already a Hit with Truckers
“After nearly a decade of delays and industry skepticism, Tesla’s electric big rig is finally rolling out of Nevada’s Gigafactory for mass production starting summer 2026,” writes Gadget Review. And some truckers who tested the vehicles already love them (as reported by the Wall Street Journal):

Dakota Shearer and Angel Rodriguez, among other pil … ⌘ Read more

The best 2026 phones we’ve tested under $1000
From Apple’s new iPhone 17e to Nothing’s stunning 4a Pro, these phones can get you a major upgrade without breaking the bank. ⌘ Read more

Juicier Steaks Soon? The UK Approves Testing of Gene-Edited Cow Feed
“Juicier steaks could soon be served up after barley was given the go-ahead to become Britain’s first gene-edited crop,” reports the Telegraph:
In an effort to fatten up cows and get them to market faster, scientists have altered the DNA of Golden Promise barley to increase its fat content… [Regulators have approved the feeding of th … ⌘ Read more

I’m happy to report that, earlier today, I published an early version of express-twtkpr: an ExpressJS library that enables hosting (and directly posting to) a twtxt.txt file. It works great (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read this), but it’s still in alpha and lacks documentation, examples, tests, installation flexibility, or polish, so please use it at your own risk. Enjoy! https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-twtkpr

Fedora Workstation 44 Beta Benchmarks On The AMD Ryzen AI Max Framework Desktop
Since last week’s Fedora 44 Beta release I have been testing out this upcoming Fedora Linux version on a few systems in the lab, most notably with the Framework Desktop powered by the powerful AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 “Strix Halo”. Fedora Workstation 44 Beta has been looking nice and running stable albeit in some instances seeing lower performance at this point than Fedora Workstation 43 but overall in good shape. ⌘ Read more

Sodium-Ion Battery Tested for Grid-Scale Storage in Wisconsin
“A new type of battery storage is about to be deployed on the Midwestern grid for the first time,” reports Electrek:

Sodium-ion battery storage manufacturer Peak Energy and global energy company RWE Americas will pilot a passively cooled sodium-ion battery system in eastern Wisconsin on the Midcontinent Independent System Operator network — the fi … ⌘ Read more

I’m supporting incremental SQLite schema changes to just upgrade from an older database version to whatever the current software version supports. In the past, I already noticed that this is quite expensive in unit tests when each test case runs through the entire schema patches and applies them one by one.

To speed up test execution I now decided that I finally go through the troubles of maintaining both a set of incremental patches and a full schema setup in one go. A unit test verifies that both ways end up with the same structure. This gives me a set of SQLs to check the structures:

SELECT type, name, tbl_name, sql
FROM sqlite_schema
ORDER BY type, name, tbl_name

Unfortunately, the resulting CREATE TABLE SQL queries are formatted differently, depending on whether the full schema was set up in one big step or the structure had been modified with ALTER TABLE. Mainly, added columns are not on their own lines but appended in one physical line. That’s why I wanted an SQL formatting tool. Since I didn’t find one that works decently, I’m now doing some simple string manipulation. Joining consecutive whitespace into a single space character, removing spaces before commas and closing parentheses and spaces after opening parentheses. This works surpringly good enough. Of course, if it fails, the “diff” is absolutely horrendous.

Now for the cool part, my test execution dropped from around 5:05 minutes to just 1:32 minutes! I call that a win.

I just stumbled across PRAGMA table_info('tablename') https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_table_info, PRAGMA foreign_key_list('tablename') and friends. I guess, I have to play with that, now. It’s probably much better to use than the SQL text approach.

And we’re back! 1st test trip 👌

Gaming Site Editor Jailbreaks an Amazon Echo Show
“A few developers found a way, for now, to turn a few of these increasingly mediocre Amazon Show devices into friendly, useful, open computers,” writes the co-founder of the gaming/tech news site Aftermath. For under $50 each, he bought some used versions of the devices and tested their instructions, partly to escape the full-screen ads Amazon began showing late last year, an … ⌘ Read more

Our first test over night trip 🤞

Meta Delays Rollout of New AI Model After Performance Concerns
Meta has delayed the release of its next major AI model after internal tests showed it lagging behind competing systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The New York Times reports: The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta’s previous A.I. model and did better than Google’s Gemini 2.5 model from March, two of the people said. But it has not … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.12 Through Linux 7.0 File-System Benchmarks For EXT4 + XFS
Earlier this month were various Linux 7.0 file-system benchmarks showing how XFS is leading the race in the overall upstream Linux file-system performance on this forthcoming kernel. Stemming from that testing some premium supporters requested a fresh look at the historical performance of XFS as well as EXT4. So today’s article is a look at how XFS and EXT4 have performed on every kernel release going back to Linux 6.12 LTS. ⌘ Read more

Apple MacBook Neo Beats Ever Single x86 PC CPU For Single-Core Performance
Early benchmarks show the A18 Pro-powered MacBook Neo beating every current x86 CPU in single-core Cinebench performance, including chips from Intel and AMD. Notebookcheck reports: We have performed a couple of benchmarks and were particularly impressed by the single-core performance. Not in the short Geekbench test, but in … ⌘ Read more

Intel Updates LLM-Scaler-vLLM With Support For More Qwen3/3.5 Models
Intel’s LLM-Scaler project that makes it easy to deploy various large language models on modern Arc Graphics hardware is out with a new test release to expand its LLM coverage… ⌘ Read more

Testing…

Testing jenny. You should probably ignore this, and the next twtxt.

Losses growing, staff cut: Atlassian’s billionaire boss faces his AI test
Mike Cannon-Brookes fired 10 per cent of Atlassian’s total workforce over email on Thursday, amounting to 480 jobs in Australia. ⌘ Read more

AlmaLinux To Focus On Increased Testing & Other Goals For 2026
Developers behind AlmaLinux as this popular community alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) have drafted some new goals for 2026… ⌘ Read more