Retina Scan for Diabetes Could Also Reduce Deaths During Pregnancy in Developing Countries
This week Bill Gates wrote a blog post about a special camera from medtech startup Remidio, which delivers high-resolution images of a patient’s retina in seconds. The camera plugs into a phone running an AI system that watches for early signs of diabetes — all without needing a blood draw, e … ⌘ Read more

South Korea Police Arrest Man For Posting AI Photo of Runaway Wolf
South Korean police arrested a man accused of spreading an AI-generated image of an escaped wolf, after the fake photo reportedly misled authorities and disrupted the real search operation. The BBC reports: South Korean police have arrested a man for sharing an AI-generated image that misled authorities who were searching for a wolf that had br … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s crazy!

Somehow, your link 403s here, but I just searched it. At least it has the diagonals at the lower two steps. However, the two upper platforms also suffer from the plastic covers, it appears (I cannot tell the material from the low quality images I found). Maybe it is aluminium? I think some joints use machine bolts, though (but again, not enough detail visible).

Happy ladder climbing!

RADV Driver Enables Host Image Copy By Default For RDNA2 & Newer
Introduced back in 2023 with Vulkan 1.3.258 was VK_EXT_host_image_copy to copy data between host memory and images on the host processor without needing to stage the data through a CPU-accessible buffer. This direct CPU-to-GPU image data transfer path can reduce memory usage during asset loads and all around more efficiency and performance. Finally now the RADV open-source Radeon driver is enabling support by default… ⌘ 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:

1. find a sketch of what an old building looked like
   
   
2. generate an AI version, without correcting any of the perspective errors - this one is diagonally levitating
   
   
3. 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:

OpenAI’s Big Codex Update Is a Direct Shot At Claude Code
OpenAI is updating Codex with more agent-like capabilities, positioning it as a more direct rival to Anthropic’s Claude Code. Some of the new features include the ability to operate macOS desktop apps, browse the web inside the app, generate images, use new workplace plug-ins, and remember useful context from past tasks. The Verge reports: Codex will now … ⌘ Read more

Mark Zuckerberg Is Reportedly Building an AI Clone To Replace Him In Meetings
According to the Financial Times, Meta is developing an AI avatar of Mark Zuckerberg that could interact with employees using his voice, image, mannerisms, and public statements, “so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.” The Verge reports: Meta may start allowing creators … ⌘ Read more

TIL that SSH actually stands for Secure Snake Home, a massively multiplayer snake game playable via the SSH protocol: ssh snakes.run

Of course, no one else was online when I was playing, so…

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Christina Koch looking at Earth is my new wallpaper:

(Sorry, forgot where I originally found the image. Some NASA photo collection.)

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

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

Gentoo Releases Experimental Images Using GNU/Hurd
Following an April Fools’ Day tease of Gentoo claiming they were going to switch to GNU Hurd as their primary kernel moving forward, they have now acknowledged the joke but in fact also announcing there are now experimental Gentoo GNU/Hurd images available… ⌘ Read more

CEO of America’s Largest Public Hospital System Says He’s Ready To Replace Radiologists With AI
Mitchell H. Katz, MD, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, said hospitals could already replace many radiologists with AI for some imaging tasks – if regulators allowed it. He argued the technology presents an opportunity to simultaneously cut costs and expand access. Radiology Busin … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org For reasons I can’t fully explain, we have a bunch of courses in the area, most in public parks (they integrate nicely since they can be built with the existing landscape, only adding some yellow baskets, concrete starting pads, and maybe signs).

In my experience, the main difference between a disc golfer and a frisbee thrower is that the disc golfer will often have a bag full of different shapes of discs (including drivers of varying ranges and/or putters). Even in my small bag, I’ve got some long range drivers (a Beast, a Cheetah, a Valkyrie, and a Wraith), my aforementioned MRV (Mid-Range Vector), an ultralight Aero (which feels similar to a “standard” frisbee), and 2 “rubber” putters (softer plastic, less “bouncy”).

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@bender@twtxt.net Thanks, and you are correct: MRV stands for Mid-Range Vector (I think) as it is a stable mid-range driver (it says so on the disc):

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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thank you for the suggestions. I will probably do some of that when I have time. For the thumbnails, I’m also thinking about trying the loading=“lazy” img attribute. Top on my mind is actually understanding why the big images don’t load. Maybe my VPS’s network connection is saturated, for example. I’ve never needed to worry about such things until now. I’m looking forward to spending some time on it.

4Chan Mocks $700K Fine For UK Online Safety Breaches
The UK regulator Ofcom fined 4chan nearly $700,000 (520,000 pounds) for failing to implement age checks and address illegal content risks under the Online Safety Act, but the platform mocked the penalty and signaled it won’t pay. A lawyer representing the company responded with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster, writing in a follow-up post on X: “In the only coun … ⌘ Read more

‘Pokemon Go’ Players Unknowingly Trained Delivery Robots With 30 Billion Images
More than 30 billion images captured by Pokemon Go players have helped train a visual mapping system developed by Niantic. The technology is now being used to guide delivery robots from Coco Robotics through city streets where GPS often struggles. Popular Science reports: This week, Niantic Spatial, part of the tea … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks for letting me know. HTML checkers seem happy now. I’m not sure what to do about the images not loading. The photos have three sizes (thumbnail, photo page, and original if you click the img tag on the photo page); can you at least see the smaller two sizes? Maybe I will do some experimental fetches and/or start measuring things on my web server.

Meta To Charge Advertisers a Fee To Offset Europe’s Digital Taxes
Meta will begin charging advertisers a 2-5% “location fee” to offset digital services taxes imposed by several European countries, including the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Turkey. Reuters reports: The fee, for image or video ads delivered on Meta platforms including WhatsApp click-to-message campaigns and marketing messages together w … ⌘ Read more

After US-Israel Attacks, 90 Million Iranians Lose Internet Connectivity
CNN reports that images from Iran’s capital “have shown cars jammed along Tehran’s street, with heavy traffic on major roads after today’s wave of attacks by the US and Israel.” And though Iran has a population of 93 million, the attacks suddenly plunged Iran into “a near-total internet blackout with national connectivity at 4% of or … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 14.4-RC1 Adds Emacs, Vim & More To DVD Images
For those on the current FreeBSD 14 series with no immediate plans to move to FreeBSD 15 that debuted at the end of 2025, FreeBSD developers have been preparing for the release of FreeBSD 14.4. Released overnight was the first release candidate of FreeBSD 14.4… ⌘ Read more

Google Launches Nano Banana 2 Model With Faster Image Generation
Google has launched Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image), a faster, more realistic image generation model that becomes the default across Gemini, Search, Lens, and Flow. TechCrunch reports: The new Nano Banana 2 retains some of the high-fidelity characteristics of the Pro model but produces images faster. The company says you can create images … ⌘ Read more

Firefox 148 Now Available With The New AI Controls, AI Kill Switches
Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global “AI kill switch” that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser’s AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link preview … ⌘ Read more

AOMedia Open Audio Codec “OAC” Aims To Be The Successor To Opus
While the Alliance For Open Media “AOMedia” is most known for developing the AV1 open video codec, the associated AV1 Image File Format (AVIF), and the next-generation AV2, they are now working on the Open Audio Codec (AOC)… ⌘ Read more

Pinterest Is Drowning in a Sea of AI Slop and Auto-Moderation
Users say Pinterest has become flooded with AI-generated images and heavy-handed automated moderation, with artists reporting wrongful takedowns and their hand-drawn work mislabeled as “AI modified.” As the company doubles down on AI features and layoffs, longtime users argue the platform’s creative ecosystem is being undermined. 404 Media reports: “I … ⌘ Read more

Google’s AI Music Maker Is Coming To the Gemini App
Google is bringing its Lyria 3 AI music model into the Gemini app, allowing users to generate 30-second songs from text, images, or video prompts directly within the chatbot. The Verge reports: Lyria 3’s text-to-music capabilities allow Gemini app users to make songs by describing specific genres, moods, or memories, such as asking for an “Afrobeat track for my mot … ⌘ Read more

WordPress Gets AI Assistant That Can Edit Text, Generate Images and Tweak Your Site
WordPress has started rolling out an AI assistant built into its site editor and media library that can edit and translate text, generate and edit images through Google’s Nano Banana model, and make structural changes to sites like creating new pages or swapping fonts.

Users can also invoke the assistant by taggin … ⌘ Read more

99% of Adults Over 40 Have Shoulder ‘Abnormalities’ on an MRI, Study Finds
Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it’s one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem – in fact, it could even cloud it. From a report: In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one … ⌘ Read more

ByteDance Suspends Seedance 2 Feature That Turns Facial Photos Into Personal Voices Over Potential Risks
hackingbear writes: China’s Bytedance has released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator which handles up to four types of input at once: images, videos, audio, and text. Users can combine up to nine images, three videos, and three audio files, up to a total of twelve fi … ⌘ Read more

Google Chrome 145 Released With JPEG-XL Image Support
Back in 2022 Google deprecated and then removed JPEG-XL image support from the Chrome/Chromium browser codebase and now in 2026 it’s back. Last month I wrote about JPEG-XL decoding merged back to Chromium/Chrome and that has rolled out today as part of today’s Chrome 145 stable debut… ⌘ Read more

GNOME’s Glycin 2.1 Beta Enables JPEG 2000 Support By Default
GNOME’s Rust-based and sandboxed Glycin image loading library focused on safety now supports JPEG 2000 images by default… ⌘ Read more

OpenIndiana Is Porting Solaris’ IPS Package Management To Rust
OpenIndiana as the open-source project built atop Illumos that is continuing to maintain and advance the former OpenSolaris code is working on a big ambitions of modernizing the Image Packaging System (IPS) package management solution. As part of that they are working to move from a C and Python codebase over to Rust… ⌘ Read more

Libcamera 0.7 Released - GPU Acceleration Support For SoftISP Can Deliver 15x Performance
Libcamera 0.7 was published today for this modern software library for image signal processors (ISPs) and embedded cameras under Linux. The standout change with libcamera 0.7 is initial plumbing for GPU acceleration in the software ISP “SoftISP” for delivering better performance than just CPU-based… ⌘ Read more

Mesa NVK Driver Temporarily Disabling Support For Larger Pages Due To Bug
Upstreamed to the Nouveau open-source kernel driver in Linux 6.19 was support for larger pages and with that compression support available with the larger page sizes. Subsequently the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver began making use of the larger pages and compressed image support dependent upon the larger page sizes as it should help with performance. But for now it’s being temporarily disabled due to a discovered issue… ⌘ Read more

New California Law Means Big Changes For Photos of Homes in Real Estate Listings
California house hunters now have legal protection against the kind of real estate photo trickery that has long plagued the home-buying process, as a new state law requiring disclosure of digitally altered listing images took effect on January 1.

Assembly Bill 723 mandates that real estate agents and brokers inclu … ⌘ Read more

Television Turns 100
Television marks its centenary today, exactly 100 years after Scottish inventor John Logie Baird first demonstrated his electro-mechanical system to journalists and members of the Royal Institution in a cramped attic workshop above what is now Bar Italia in London’s Soho.

On January 26, 1926, small groups of visitors climbed to 22 Frith Street and watched fuzzy images of a ventriloquist’s dummy called Stooky Bill appear on … ⌘ Read more

Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone: Variable Rate Shading, Host Image Copies & More
In addition to the release today of Vulkan 1.4.340 with the new descriptor heap “VK_EXT_descriptor_heap” extension and three other new extensions, The Khronos Group’s Vulkan Working Group has also published the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone… ⌘ Read more

Updated Intel Panther Lake IPU Firmware Published With New Features & Bug Fixes
Ahead of the first Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake laptops expected to hit retail channels next week, Intel has published updated IPU7 (IPU 7.5) firmware for the image processing unit used by the web cameras on the higher-end Panther Lake laptops… ⌘ Read more

Senate Passes a Bill That Would Let Nonconsensual Deepfake Victims Sue
The U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act (DEFIANCE Act), giving victims of sexually explicit AI deepfakes the right to sue the individuals who created them. The Verge reports: The bill passed with unanimous consent – meaning there was no roll-call vote, and no Senator objected … ⌘ Read more

JPEG-XL Image Support Returns To Latest Chrome/Chromium Code
After widespread backlash over its 2022 decision to remove JPEG-XL support, Google has quietly restored the image format in the latest Chrome/Chromium codebase. Phoronix reports: Back in December they merged jxl-rs as a pure Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder from the official libjxl organization. At the end of December they did more JPEG-XL plumbing with the en … ⌘ Read more

JPEG-XL Image Support Returns To Latest Chrome / Chromium Code
To the frustration of many developers and end-users, back in 2022 Google deprecated JPEG-XL support in Chrome/Chromium and proceeded to remove the support. That decision was widely slammed and ultimately Google said they may end up reconsidering it. In November there was renewed activity and interest in restoring JPEG-XL within Google’s image web browser and as of yesterday the code was merged… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Fantastic New Open-Source Demonstrator For AMX-BF16: Over 4x The Performance At 69% The Power
When it comes to software leveraging Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) functionality in modern Xeon processors, it’s largely been limited to AI applications/libraries like oneDNN, OpenVINO, DeepRec, etc. But Intel now has another great open-source real-world AMX demonstrator with their Open Image Denoise library. This open-source library providing high quality denoising filters for images rendered using ray-tra … ⌘ Read more

Debian Libre Live 13.3 Images Released For Avoiding Non-Free Firmware
Building off this past weekend’s Debian 13.3 release is now Debian Libre Live 13.3 images for this derivative that ships the install/live media without any of the non-free firmware assets to remain a free software blessed image… ⌘ Read more

AI Fails at Most Remote Work, Researchers Find
A new study “compared how well top AI systems and human workers did at hundreds of real work assignments,” reports the Washington Post.

They add that at least one example “illustrates a disconnect three years after the release of ChatGPT that has implications for the whole economy.”

AI can accomplish many impressive tasks involving computer code, documents or images. That has prompt … ⌘ Read more

AI Is Intensifying a ‘Collapse’ of Trust Online, Experts Say
Experts interviewed by NBC News warn that the rapid spread of AI-generated images and videos is accelerating an online trust breakdown, especially during fast-moving news events where context is scarce. From the report: President Donald Trump’s Venezuela operation almost immediately spurred the spread of AI-generated images, old videos and altered photos ac … ⌘ Read more

DRM Splash Screen Updated To Simply Drawing A Colored Background, Displaying A BMP Image
Back in October was an initial proposal for a DRM splash screen client for the Linux kernel that would be primarily useful for embedded systems for rendering a simple “splash screen” when updating the system firmware/software, early display activation at boot, during system recovery, or similar processes. Sent out today was a second revision to the DRM splash screen code… ⌘ Read more

Nvidia’s New G-Sync Pulsar Monitors Target Motion Blur at the Human Retina Level
Nvidia’s G-Sync Pulsar technology, first announced nearly two years ago as a solution to display motion blur caused by old images persisting on the viewer’s retina, is finally arriving in consumer monitors this week. The first four Pulsar-equipped displays – from Acer, AOC, Asus and MSI – hit select retailers on W … ⌘ Read more

Did you miss today’s event on #PublicDomain ? Or you didn’t, but want more? Don’t miss Natick FOSS’s upcoming event, on the 8th of January, where #PublicDomainDay will be celebrated!

2:45PM NY time
7:45PM GMT

https://natickfoss.org/archive.html#UpcomingMeeting

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