AMDGPU Patches Updated For HDMI Gaming Features On Linux With Radeon Graphics
A patch series posted last week for the open-source AMDGPU kernel driver implements HDMI Variable Rate Refresh “VRR” and other gaming features for HDMI displays. With the HDMI Forum blocking HDMI 2.1 open-source support, these HDMI gaming features for the AMDGPU driver were developed via trial-and-error and the limited public knowledge available. A second iteration of these patches are now available for testing… ⌘ Read more

Wine-Staging 11.1 Adds Patches For Enabling Recent Adobe Photoshop Versions On Linux
Following yesterday’s release of Wine 11.1 for kicking off the new post-11.0 development cycle, Wine-Staging 11.1 is now available for this experimental/testing version of Wine that present is around 254 patches over the upstream Wine state… ⌘ Read more

When Two Years of Academic Work Vanished With a Single Click
Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany, lost two years of carefully structured academic work in an instant when he temporarily disabled ChatGPT’s “data consent” option in August to test whether the AI tool’s functions would still work without providing OpenAI his data. All his chats were permanently delete … ⌘ 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

Google Begins Offering Free SAT Practice Tests Powered By Gemini
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It’s no secret that students worldwide use AI chatbots to do their homework and avoid learning things. On the flip side, students can also use AI as a tool to beef up their knowledge and plan for the future with flashcards or study guides. Google hopes its latest Gemini feature will help with … ⌘ Read more

NASA Eyes Popular PC Hardware Performance Tool for Its Flight Simulators
NASA Langley has initiated the U.S. government software approval process to install CapFrameX, a benchmarking tool popular among PC gaming enthusiasts, on its cockpit simulators used to train test pilots. The space agency reached out to CapFrameX, not the other way around, according to an X post from the company.

NASA builds cu … ⌘ Read more

Testing the Claude AI coworker
With Cowork, Anthropic wants to make an AI agent you’ll actually use. ⌘ Read more

The CPU Performance Of The NVIDIA GB10 With The Dell Pro Max vs. AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo”
With the Dell Pro Max GB10 testing at Phoronix we have been focused on the AI performance with its Blackwell GPU as the GB10 superchip was designed for meeting the needs of AI. Many Phoronix readers have also been curious about the GB10’s CPU performance in more traditional Linux workloads. So for those curious about the GB10 CPU performance, here are some Linux benchmarks focused today on the CPU performance and going up aga … ⌘ Read more

XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.21 Released With Reduced Motion Setting, Support For Linyaps Apps
XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.21 is now available for testing with the latest features for this portal frontend service to Flatpak… ⌘ Read more

The CPU Performance Of The NVIDIA GB10 With The Dell Pro Max vs. AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo”
With the Dell Pro Max GB10 testing at Phoronix we have been focused on the AI performance with its Blackwell GPU as the GB10 superchip was designed for meeting the needs of AI. Many Phoronix readers have also been curious about the GB10’s CPU performance in more traditional Linux workloads. So for those curious about the GB10 CPU performance, here are some Linux benchmarks focused today on the CPU performance and going up aga … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Forced to Issue Emergency Out-of-Band Windows Update
The senior editor at the blog Windows Central decries two serious Windows issues “that were not spotted by Microsoft during testing, and are so severe that the company has now issued an emergency fix to address the problems.”

Microsoft’s first update for Windows 11 in 2026 has already caused two major issues that saw users unable to fully shutdown t … ⌘ Read more

Spent basically the entire day (except for the mandatory walk) fighting with Python’s type hints. But, the result is that my widget toolkit now passes mypy --strict.

I really, really don’t want to write larger pieces of software without static typing anymore. With dynamic typing, you must test every code path in your program to catch even the most basic errors. pylint helps a bit (doesn’t need type hints), but that’s really not enough.

Also, somewhere along the way, I picked up a very bad (Python) programming style. (Actually, I know exactly where I picked that up, but I don’t want to point the finger now.) This style makes heavy use of dicts and tuples instead of proper classes. That works for small scripts, but it very quickly turns into an absolute mess once the program grows. Prime example: jenny. 😩

I have a love-hate relationship with Python’s type hints, because they are meaningless at runtime, so they can be utterly misleading. I’m beginning to like them as an additional safety-net, though.

(But really, if correctness is the goal, you either need to invest a ton of time to get 100% test coverage – or don’t use Python.)

ChaosBSD Is A New BSD For “Broken Drivers, Half-Working Hardware, Vendor Trash” Test Bed
A new BSD on the block is ChaosBSD that intends to serve as a testing distribution for unfinished and broken drivers not suitable for upstreaming to FreeBSD proper… ⌘ Read more

Upcoming exFAT Linux Driver Patch Can Boost Sequential Read Performance By ~10%
A patch for the open-source exFAT file-system driver for Linux can boost the sequential read performance by about 10% in preliminary tests… ⌘ Read more

Ads Are Coming To ChatGPT in the Coming Weeks
OpenAI said Friday that it will begin testing ads on ChatGPT in the coming weeks, as the $500 billion startup seeks new revenue streams to fund its continued expansion and compete against rivals Google and Anthropic. The company had previously resisted embedding ads into its chatbot, citing concerns that doing so could undermine the trustworthiness and objectivity of responses.

The ads w … ⌘ Read more

GNOME 50 Alpha Released With The X11 Code Gutted
The GNOME 50 Alpha “50.alpha” release is now available for testing ahead of this open-source desktop’s official release in March… ⌘ 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

KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta Released With Plasma Login Manager, Plasma Setup
The KDE Plasma 6.6 beta release is available today for helping to test this next iteration of the Plasma 6 desktop… ⌘ Read more

Yes, if a twtxt contains something like “(This is a test. Will this work as it should?)”, it will show empty on Yarn.

Researchers Beam Power From a Moving Airplane
Researchers from the startup Overview Energy have successfully demonstrated beaming power from a moving airplane to the ground using near-infrared light. It marks the first step toward space-based solar power satellites that could someday transmit energy from orbit to existing solar farms on Earth. IEEE Spectrum reports: Overview’s test transferred only a sprinkling of power, but it … ⌘ Read more

China Tests a Supercritical CO2 Generator in Commercial Operation
“China recently placed a supercritical carbon dioxide power generator into commercial operation,” writes CleanTechnica, “and the announcement was widely framed as a technological breakthrough.”

The system, referred to as Chaotan One, is installed at a steel plant in Guizhou province in mountainous southwest China and is designed to recover … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Tried To Break Einstein’s Speed of Light Rule
Scientists are putting Einstein’s claim that the speed of light is constant to the test. While researchers found no evidence that light’s speed changes with energy, this null result dramatically tightens the constraints on quantum-gravity theories that predict even the tiniest violations. ScienceDaily reports: Special relativity rests on the principle that the … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft May Soon Allow IT Admins To Uninstall Copilot
Microsoft is testing a new Windows policy that lets IT administrators uninstall Microsoft Copilot from managed devices. The change rolls out via Windows Insider builds and works through standard management tools like Intune and SCCM. BleepingComputer reports: The new policy will apply to devices where the Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are both installe … ⌘ Read more

Planetary Alignment
⌘ Read more

Google Is Adding an ‘AI Inbox’ To Gmail That Summarizes Emails
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Google is putting even more generative AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize user inboxes and streamline searches. On Thursday, the company announced a new “AI Inbox” tab, currently in a beta testing phase, that reads every message in a user’s Gmail and suggests a list of to-dos a … ⌘ Read more

Dell Pro Max GB10 vs. AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Framework Desktop For Llama.cpp, OpenCL & Vulkan Compute
Over the past number of weeks the Dell Pro Max with GB10 has been undergoing a lot of testing at Phoronix. This NVIDIA GB10 powered mini PC with its 20 Arm cores (10 x Cortex-X925, 10 x Cortex-A725) and Blackwell GPU offers a lot of combined compute potential for AI and other workloads. In this article is a look at how the Dell Pro Max with GB10 competes with AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 “Strix Halo” within the Framew … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft is Slowly Turning Edge Into Another Copilot App
Microsoft has started testing a “significant” visual overhaul for Edge in its Canary and Dev Channel preview builds, and the redesigned interface borrows heavily from the design language that first appeared in the company’s standalone Copilot app rather than the Fluent Design system used across Windows 11, Xbox, and Office.

The updated look touches context menus, … ⌘ Read more

Spent most of the long weekend working on a few coding projects… specifically, I pushed some updates for TwtKpr to my test instance before spending some time working on the build process and demo page for my new twtxt-parsing library… which lead to me make some changes to my existing fluent-dom-esm library.

So, nothing actually got finished, but the incremental updates continue…

Spent most of the long weekend working on a few coding projects… specifically, I pushed some updates for TwtKpr to my test instance before spending some time working on the build process and demo page for my new twtxt-parsing library… which lead me to make some changes to my existing fluent-dom-esm library.

So, nothing actually got finished, but the incremental updates continue…

And now the event loop is not a simple loop around curses’ getch() anymore but it can wait for events on any file descriptor. Here’s a simple test program that waits for connections on a TCP socket, accepts it, reads a line, sends back a line:

https://movq.de/v/93fa46a030/vid-1767547942.mp4

And the scrollbar indicators are working now.

I’ll probably implement timer callbacks using timerfd (even though that’s Linux-only). 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org A “Hello World” binary is ~372KB in size. I currently have peephole optimization and deac code optimizations in play, and a few other performance related ones, but nothing too fancy. I have a test case that ensures fib(35) doesn’t regress too badly as I continue to evolve the language.

NASA Craft To Face Heat-Shield Test on Its First Astronaut Flight Next Year
An anonymous reader shares a report: Getting to space is hard. In many ways, getting back is even harder. NASA soon aims to pull off the kind of re-entry it last conducted more than 50 years ago: safely returning astronauts to Earth after they fly to the moon and back. The mission is a big moment for NASA, which will put … ⌘ Read more

mu (µ) now has builtin code formatting and linting tools, making µ far more useful and useable as a general purpose programming language. Mu now includes:

• An interpreter for quick “scriptinog”
  
• A native code compiler for building native executables (Darwin / macOS only for now)
  
• A builtin set of developer tools, currently: fmt (-fmt), check (-check) and test (-test).

Unexpected Surprise: Windows 11 Outperforming Linux On An Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop
Typically when receiving any review hardware preloaded with Microsoft Windows I tend to run some Windows vs. Linux benchmarks just as a sanity test plus it still seems to generate a fair amount of interest even though the outcome is almost always the same: Linux having a hefty performance advantage over Windows especially in the more demanding creator-type workloads. As an unexpected twist and time consuming puzzle the past two … ⌘ Read more

Test from v0.0.5

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks! I’ll have a look at SnipMate. Currently, I’m (mis)using the abbreviation mechanism to expand a code snippet inplace, e.g.

autocmd FileType go inoreab <buffer> testfunc func Test(t *testing.T) {<CR>}<ESC>k0wwi

or this monstrosity:

autocmd FileType go inoreab <buffer> tabletest for _, tt := range []struct {<CR>    name string<CR><CR><BS>}{<CR>   {<CR>   name: "",<CR><BS>},<CR><BS>} {<CR>  t.Run(tt.name, func(t *testing.T) {<CR><CR>})<CR><BS>}<ESC>9ki<TAB>

But this of course has the disadvantage that I still have to remove the last space or tab to trigger the expansion by hand again. It’s a bit annoying, but better than typing it out by hand.

UK Accounting Body To Halt Remote Exams Amid AI Cheating
The world’s largest accounting body is to stop students being allowed to take exams remotely to crack down on a rise in cheating on tests that underpin professional qualifications. From a report: The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), which has almost 260,000 members, has said that from March it will stop allowing students to take online exams i … ⌘ 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

AMD RDNA3/RDNA4 Go Down Hard On Linux 6.19, But Here’s How The Older AMD GPUs End Out 2025
As part of the various end-of-year benchmarking comparisons on Phoronix and with Linux 6.19 switching older AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards to the AMDGPU driver by default, I planned for a very large AMD Radeon graphics card comparison on the latest open-source Linux driver for ending out 2025. In the end though I was thwarted by newer AMD RDNA3 / RDNA4 graphics cards regressing hard on Linux 6.19 that led to ending this testing … ⌘ Read more

Gmail Users May Soon Be Able To Change Their Email Address and Keep the Old One
Google appears to be testing a feature that would let users change their @gmail.com address for the first time, according to an official support document. The support page exists only in Hindi, suggesting an India-first rollout, and Google notes that users will “gradually begin to see this option.”

The feature would l … ⌘ Read more

Libreboot 26.01-rc1 Released To Support A Few More Systems
Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on free, open-source boot firmware is out with a new test release for Christmas… ⌘ Read more

5K Gaming Is Too Hard, Even for an RTX 5090D
Asus has been showcasing its new 5K 27-inch ROG Strix 27 Pro gaming monitor running at 5,120 x 2,880 resolution and up to 180Hz, but even Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 struggles to deliver smooth frame rates at this demanding pixel count. In testing conducted by Asus, the RTX 5090D – a Chinese-exclusive variant with weaker AI performance – achieved just 51 frames per second in a Cyberpu … ⌘ Read more

Uber, Lyft Set To Trial Robotaxis In the UK In Partnership With China’s Baidu
Uber and Lyft plan to trial robotaxis in London starting in 2026 using autonomous vehicles from Baidu, as the UK fast-tracks approvals for self-driving cars on public roads. CNBC reports: Lyft’s testing of Baidu’s initial fleet of dozens of vehicles will begin in 2026, pending regulatory approval, “with plans to scale to h … ⌘ Read more

Instacart Kills AI Pricing Tests That Charged Some Customers More Than Others
Instacart has ended its AI-powered pricing tests after a study from Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union revealed that the grocery delivery platform was showing different customers different prices for identical items at the same store. The company said Monday that retailers can no longer use Ever … ⌘ Read more

Oh great, I received an e-mail that my SMTP credentials have been exposed. Once again, just another shitty scanner that generates garbage reports from tests it doesn’t understand. Thank you for nothing!

conf := &Config{
    SMTPHost: "smtp.example.com",
    SMTPPort: 587,
    SMTPUser: "user",
    SMTPPass: "hunter2",
    SMTPFrom: "from@example.com",
}

Linux 6.19-rc2 Released Following A Quiet Week
The second weekly release candidate of Linux 6.19 is now available for testing in leading up to the stable release in early February… ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint 22.3 Beta Released With Cinnamon 6.6 Desktop
The beta release of Linux Mint 22.3 “Zena” is now available for testing ahead of the holidays for this latest incremental update to this desktop OS built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Made Another Copilot Ad Where Nothing Actually Works
Microsoft’s latest holiday ad for its Copilot AI assistant features a 30-second montage of users seamlessly syncing smart home lights to music, scaling recipes for large gatherings, and parsing HOA guidelines – none of which the software can actually perform reliably when put to the test. The Verge methodically tested each prompt shown in the ad and foun … ⌘ Read more

Tests Find AI Toys Parroting Chinese Communist Party Values
A plush AI toy marketed for children as young as three years old delivers detailed instructions on sharpening knives and lighting matches, and when asked about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s resemblance to Winnie the Pooh – a comparison censored in China – responds that “your statement is extremely inappropriate and disrespectful.”

The Miriat Miiloo, ma … ⌘ Read more