OpenZL 0.2 Released For Meta’s Content-Aware Compression Software
Last October engineers at Meta announced OpenZL as a format-aware compression framework. OpenZL aims to be speedy yet capable of delivering high compression ratios depending upon what is being compressed. OpenZL is viewed as their next leap in data compression beyond their wonderful work on Zstandard (Zstd). This week there’s finally a new OpenZL software release available… ⌘ Read more
AMD K5 CPUs The Latest To Be Retired With Linux’s Aging & Stagnate Hardware Support
Following Linux 7.1 beginning to phase out i486 CPU support and in turn drivers like those for the old AMD Elan SoCs now being removed, for Linux 7.2 the processor support removal is going further to now include some i586 and i686 class processors… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.2 To Support Realtek RTL8159 10GbE USB Ethernet
The Realtek RTL8159 has been appearing in some 10G-rated USB network adapters at online retailers, some for less than $100 USD. But currently the RTL8159 is only supported by Realtek’s out-of-tree Linux kernel driver, but fortunately there will be mainline support coming with the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer… ⌘ Read more
AMD RadeonSI Code Reorganized To Support Multimedia-Only Driver Builds
Merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel was a reorganization of the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code to better separate the graphics and multimedia acceleration code from the rest of the driver… ⌘ Read more
SR-IOV Support Appears To Be Coming For Next-Gen Ryzen AI NPUs
AMD recently upstreamed Linux support for their next-gen AIE4 NPU. That next-gen AMD NPU support is expected to premiere in Linux 7.2 while this week an interesting new patch series has surfaced for SR-IOV support with those upcoming neural processing units… ⌘ Read more
Agog to be the 2,644th backer 😎 on BackerKit Crowdfunding for Old-School Essentials Demonic Grimoire! https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/exalted-funeral/old-school-essentials-demonic-grimoire
Linux 7.2 To Integrate The AMDGPU “Power Module” To Better Align With Windows
Sent out today was a batch of “new stuff” for the AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel drivers that are ready for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 7.2 merge window happens in June. Most notable is the introduction of the AMDGPU DC power module to better align with the Radeon power management behavior under Microsoft Windows… ⌘ Read more
AMD Expands ROCm Support On Windows WSL To More Ryzen Hardware
Back in March AMD announced the open-source ROCDXG library for improved ROCm support on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The ROCDXG-based solution provides better ROCm compatibility within these Linux confines atop Windows 11 compared to their prior, now-legacy-based WSL support. A new ROCDXG release now available further expands the ROCm WSL2 support to more Ryzen hardware… ⌘ Read more
Intel Kernel Graphics Driver Brings Panel Replay Tunneling For Linux 7.2
Now that the Linux v7.1 merge window is well past, Intel kernel graphics driver engineers are busy prepping new feature code for introduction for targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer… ⌘ Read more
Intel Drivers With Mesa 26.2 Ready For Xe’s Support In Linux 7.1 To Better Handle Memory
Merged to the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with Linux 7.1 is an addition to improve the video RAM memory pressure or out-of-memory behavior for Intel graphics with dedicated video memory. Introduced is support for purgeable buffer objects via a new user-space API to provide usage hints for enhancing what is purged under vRAM pressure. Merged this week to Mesa 26.2-devel is support for the Intel Mesa drivers to make … ⌘ Read more
My first game of Magic ended with a truly EPIC TURN yesterday…
It was a 5-player game, and I was running my (unpublished) Superfriends deck (mostly Planeswalkers and counter manipulators). After some ups and downs, I was able to pop the ultimate abilities on a handful of PWs all on a single turn, pumping my Bioessence Hydra to 110/110 (!) before tapping it twice to kill 2 opponents, and then following that by destroying all of the lands of a 3rd opponent and stealing all of the creatures from the 4th, at which point the survivors decided to quit. As I said, EPIC TURN!
Game 2 ran long, so I dropped out. But that first game…
AlmaLinux 10.2 Beta Released With Legacy 32-bit Software Support
AlmaLinux 10.2 Beta released today as their next AlmaLinux 10 release coming down the pipe and derived from the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 state. Plus this AlmaLinux release continues adding more changes on their own… ⌘ Read more
Expanded AMD HDMI 2.1 Support Is Coming To Linux
AMD is preparing expanded HDMI 2.1 support for Linux, following earlier delays after the HDMI Forum rejected an open source implementation of HDMI 2.1 as proprietary technology. As GamingOnLinux reports, AMD developer Harry Wentland submitted a patch series to the Linux kernel mailing list, noting that it brings “HDMI FRL support to the amdgpu display driver” and that “DSC is s … ⌘ Read more
ROCm 7.2.3 Brings Minor Updates, ROCm XIO Documentation
Less than one month after releasing ROCm 7.2.2, the ROCm 7.2.3 is now available with some minor improvements to this open-source AMD GPU compute and AI stack… ⌘ Read more
Ransomware Is Getting Uglier As Cybercriminals Fake Leaks and Skip Encryption Entirely
“Ransomware activity jumped again in Q1 2026,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, “with 2,638 victim posts on leak sites, up 22% year over year,” according to a report from cybersecurity company ReliaQuest.
But the bigger shift is how messy the ecosystem has become. Established groups like Akira and Qil … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.1 Fixes Audio For The Steam Deck OLED After Being Broken 2 Years On The Upstream Kernel
It turns out the Steam Deck OLED gaming handheld has not had working audio support with the mainline (upstream) Linux kernel since a change in late 2023 that was merged for Linux 6.8. There was an AMD ASoC audio change that inadvertently broke audio support for the Steam Deck OLED handheld but not affecting the original LCD model. Valve’s downstream Steam OS kernel has compensated for this known breakage and other dis … ⌘ Read more
AMD Posts HDMI 2.1 FRL Patches For Their AMDGPU Linux Driver
It’s not complete HDMI 2.1 support but to much surprise hitting the mailing list today were official patches from AMD for implementing HDMI Fixed Rate Link “FRL” support for their kernel graphics driver. HDMI FRL as part of HDMI 2.1+ allows for higher bandwidth to support higher refresh rates and resolutions… ⌘ Read more
Mesa Developers Consider Branching Off Some Older GPU Drivers - Including AMD R300/R600
Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve’s Linux graphics team has ignited a discussion over potentially shifting some of Mesa’s older GPU drivers into a new legacy Git branch in order to better support the more modern OpenGL and Vulkan drivers without having to worry about breaking the legacy drivers and to allow for better cleaning of the Mesa codebase. Among the drivers that could be impacted are the ATI/AMD R300 and R600 drivers and man … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.2 To Set Default DRM Scheduler Priority To “Fair”, New AIE4 Hardware In AMDXDNA
Even while the Linux 7.1 merge window was still ongoing this month, the initial “drm-misc-next” pull request to DRM-Next was sent out for beginning to queue new feature material toward the Linux 7.2 kernel coming this summer… ⌘ Read more
Valve Updates GameNetworkingSockets After Nearly Four Year Hiatus
Back in 2018, Valve open-sourced their Steam networking sockets library as a basic network transport layer for games. This library is used by games from Counter-Strike to Dota 2 and since its public open-source drop has been picked up elsewhere. Finally after going nearly four years without a new version, GameNetworkingSockets v1.5 dropped today… ⌘ Read more
Proton 11.0 Beta 2 Updates VKD3D-Proton
Following the release of Proton 11.0 Beta 1 from two weeks ago that updated against Wine 11.0, this heart to Valve’s Steam Play is now out with a second beta release… ⌘ Read more
China Blocks Meta’s $2 Billion Takeover of AI Startup Manus
China has blocked Meta’s planned $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus, ordering the deal withdrawn after months of scrutiny from both Beijing and Washington. “The decision to prohibit foreign investment in Manus was made in accordance with laws and regulations,” reports CNBC, citing the National Development and Reform Commission. “It added that it has … ⌘ Read more
AMD VPE 2.0 Support Merged For Mesa 26.2
Merged overnight to the latest Mesa graphics driver development code is enabling the VPE 2.0 engine to be found with future AMD Radeon GPUs… ⌘ Read more
495 turns and about ~4hrs alter I won! 🙌 Small map, 2-players, myself and an AI player. 😅
– It took forever to beach the island the AI player was on and get enough Galley’s and Swordsmen just to push back and eventually slowly destroy all enemy units and capture all cities! 🤣
Fwupd 2.1.2 Brings Support For Firmware Updates On More Hardware
Fwupd 2.1.2 is out today as the latest update to this open-source firmware updating utility that allows for updating system firmware and device/peripheral firmware under Linux… ⌘ Read more
HDMI FRL Support Achieved With Open-Source Nouveau For NVIDIA GPUs
While the AMDGPU open-source driver has struggled with HDMI 2.1 support due to the HDMI Forum blocking open-source implementations, HDMI Fixed Rate Link (FRL) as a feature of the HDMI 2.1 specification is enjoying success now with the open-source Nouveau graphics driver on Linux for NVIDIA GPUs… ⌘ Read more
Just saw the video. Can’t believe that ladder is that expensive. Even in AUD, it is almost $100. It is also 2.5 stars, with 13 reviews. Gulp. Engineering aside (and you are right, it is pretty interesting, and some, if not most of it went over my head), the ladder is rubbish. This is the one I have. Not super, but have been with me for a while, and used quite a bit, still as good as new.
GCC 16 Compiler Nearly Ready For Release With Zen 6, AVX10.2, APX & Algol 68
GCC 16.1 as the first stable version of the GCC 16 compiler is nearly ready for its official debut as this year’s major feature release for this open-source compiler… ⌘ Read more
Intel LLM-Scaler vllm-0.14.0-b8.2 Released With Official Arc Pro B70 Support
As part of Intel’s LLM-Scaler initiative for AI inferencing on Intel Arc hardware, out today is their vllm-0.14.0-b8.2 update that includes officially supporting the Arc Pro B70 graphics card… ⌘ Read more
HarfBuzz Continues Improving Its New GPU-Accelerated Text Shaping Library
Released at the beginning of the month was a new version of HarfBuzz, a widely-used, open-source text shaping engine. With this HarfBuzz 14.0 release it introduced a GPU-based text rasterization library that supported GLSL shaders as well as HLSL, WGSL, and APple’s Metal MSL. Since then this GPU-accelerated library has been seeing more improvements… ⌘ Read more
Box64 0.4.2 Begins Working On POWER PPC64LE Backend, Support For SteamRT3 + Proton 11
While FEX-Emu has been garnering a lot of attention due to being sponsored by Valve and slated to be used by the Steam Frame for running Linux x86_64 binaries on AArch64, the Box64 project continues moving along with similar goals for x86_64 binaries on other CPU architectures… ⌘ Read more
Git 2.54 Released With New Experimental “git history” Command
Git developers continue working toward Git 3.0 while out today is Git 2.54 with a few interesting additions… ⌘ Read more
LXQt 2.4 Released With More Wayland Fixes/Improvements
The LXQt 2.4 desktop released today for joining the modern open-source desktop party alongside the likes of the recently debuted GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6, and others… ⌘ Read more
GIMP 3.2.4 Released With A Fix For Its XCF Code That Has Existed Since 1999
Following last month’s GIMP 3.2 feature release that was followed by the GIMP 3.2.2 point release at the end of March, out now is GIMP 3.2.4 to ship more fixes to users of this open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop and other imaging applications… ⌘ Read more
As an enjoyer of delightfully bad graphic design, found on most Czech village center cork boards, I’m sad to see the stolen clipart and badly cropped watermarked stock images, gradually replaced with AI slop.
This is far from a serious rant, but generating images of my kind being telepathically hit with sharp rocks, surely gives me a right to complain.

So far these seem the most prominent slop categories, seem to be…
Architecture slop:
- find a sketch of what an old building looked like

- generate an AI version, without correcting any of the perspective errors - this one is diagonally levitating

- generate a recreation of the buildings demise - after going through the AI, for the second time, it is now a completely different building

Moralizing slop:


History slop:

GNOME’s Maps, Graphs, RustConn & Other App Improvements
For pairing nicely with the GNOME 50 desktop release last month, a number of GNOME-associated apps have been seeing new features and refinements… ⌘ Read more
IPv6 Usage Reaches Historic 50% Across Google Services
IPv6 usage briefly reached 50% across Google services for the first time, marking a major milestone for a protocol created in 1998 to solve IPv4’s address shortage. Tom’s Hardware reports: […] IPv6 was dismissed early on as a headache-inducing, hard-to-implement complication that would hardly ever gain any traction – despite offering 2^128 possible numbers, solv … ⌘ Read more
Mir 2.26 Begins Working On Rust-Based Input Platform
Canonical today released Mir 2.26 as the newest feature release for this compositor for building Wayland-based shells. Notable with Mir 2.26 is a Rust-based input platform is in development as part of their broader effort for bringing Rust code into Mir… ⌘ Read more
Arch Linux’s Archinstall 4.2 Fixes Botched Disk Encryption Security
Archinstall 4.2 is now available as the latest update to this very convenient, text-based Arch Linux OS installer… ⌘ Read more
AMD ROCm 7.2.2 Brings Optimization Guide For Ryzen AI / RDNA 3.5 Hardware
ROCm 7.2.2 is out today as a small point release to this open-source AMD GPU compute stack. There are a few code changes but most notable is arguably on the documentation side… ⌘ Read more
Thousands of Rare Concert Recordings Are Landing On the Internet Archive
A Chicago concert superfan Aadam Jacobs who has recorded more than 10,000 shows since the 1980s is working with Internet Archive volunteers to digitize the collection before the cassettes deteriorate. “So far, about 2,500 of these tapes have been posted on the Internet Archive, including some rare gems like a Nirvana performan … ⌘ Read more
KDE Merges Per-Screen Virtual Desktops After 21 Years
A request made a KDE user all the way back in June 2005 on KDE 3.3.2 is finally resolved. After being sought after for 21 years, the latest KWin code now has support for per-screen virtual desktops… ⌘ Read more
Botched IT Upgrade Ended Liquor Sales for the Entire State of Mississippi
Mississippi has one warehouse — run by a contractor — that sells all the liquor for the entire state of 2.9 million people. “If a restaurant or store anywhere in Mississippi wanted a bottle of Jim Beam, they had to order it from the wholesale warehouse,” reports the Washington Post.
But then Mississippi’s warehouse-managing con … ⌘ Read more
Researchers Build a Talking Robot Guide Dog to Help Visually Impaired People Navigate
“Only about 2% of visually impaired people in the United States use guide dogs,” notes StudyFinds.com, “partly because breeding and training takes years and fewer than half the dogs in training actually graduate.”
But someday there could be another option:
What if you could ask your guide dog where … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Upgrades Its WSL2 Kernel Against Linux 6.18 LTS
Microsoft on Friday released linux-msft-wsl-6.18.20.1 as the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) kernel updated against the Linux 6.18 LTS series… ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Upgrades Its WSL2 Kernel Against Linux 6.18 LTS
Microsoft on Friday released linux-msft-wsl-6.18.20.1 as the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) kernel updated against the Linux 6.18 LTS series… ⌘ Read more
Disclaimer: Can’t guarantee that I’m fully awake and I’m being trained at work not to use my brain anymore, so maybe this is complete bullshit. 😪🧟♀️
It says here that SQLite uses signed integers:
https://sqlite.org/datatype3.html
In pure bits, 1 << 63 would be 0x8000000000000000, but as a signed value, it gets interpreted as -9223372036854775808. Subtracting 1 yields -9223372036854775809 – but that doesn’t fit in 64 bits anymore. It’s possible that SQLite doesn’t want to wrap around but instead saturates? Haven’t checked. 🤔
With 62 bits, there is enough room.
With 1 << 64, I have no idea how SQLite wants to handle this, because this should immediately trigger a warning, because it doesn’t fit right away. Maybe it gets truncated to 0?
sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 2 * (1 << 64));
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 2 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0x0 │
╰──────────────────────╯
sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 0 - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 0 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0xffffffffffffffff │
╰──────────────────────╯
sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 0 - 2);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 0 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0xfffffffffffffffe │
╰──────────────────────╯
Eehhh, what the hell is going on here!?
SELECT
printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) - 2),
printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) - 1),
printf("0x%x", 1 << 63 ),
printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) + 1),
printf("0x%x", (1 << 63) + 2)
SQLite yields:
0x8000000000000000 (instead of 0x7ffffffffffffffe)
0x8000000000000000 (instead of 0x7fffffffffffffff)
0x8000000000000000 (correct)
0x8000000000000001 (correct)
0x8000000000000002 (correct)
Huh!? O_o Am I stupid? What am I missing here? Or is this actually a bug? :-?
With 62 bits, everything is spot on:
0x3ffffffffffffffe
0x3fffffffffffffff
0x4000000000000000
0x4000000000000001
0x4000000000000002
And 64 bits rather unsurprisingly also yield:
0xfffffffffffffffe
0xffffffffffffffff
0x0
0x1
0x2
Linux 2026 “Spring Cleaning” To Address Some Code Remnants As Far Back As Linux v0.1
A big kernel patch series was posted today by longtime Linux developer Thomas Gleixner. The set of 38 patches amount to some big time “spring cleaning” with addressing some code remnants still around that originated back in the very early Linux v0.1 kernel while some other code being cleaned up dates back to the Linux 1.3~2.1 kernel series from the 90’s… ⌘ Read more
EFF Is Leaving X
After nearly 20 years on the platform, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it is leaving X. “This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue,” the digital rights group said. “The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.” From the report: We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts gen … ⌘ Read more