Social Media Sites Got Information from Ad Trackers on US State Health Insurance Sites
All 20 of America’s state-run healthcare marketplace sites “include advertising trackers that share information with Big Tech companies,” reports Gizmodo, citing a report from Bloomberg:

Per the report, seven million Americans bought their health insurance through state exchanges in 2026, and many of them ma … ⌘ Read more

FEX 2605 Brings Performance Improvements, Initial Snapdragon X2 Elite Fixes
FEX 2605 is out this weekend as the newest monthly feature release to this emulator for running Linux x86_64 binaries on ARM64 (AArch64) devices. This is the open-source project sponsored by Valve and planned for use with the upcoming Steam Frame as well as being relevant to Linux gaming on other 64-bit ARM laptops and other devices… ⌘ 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

Linux Erroneously Thinks Intel Bartlett Lake CPUs Run At 7GHz
With Intel’s recently-launched Bartlett Lake P-core-only processors intended for the embedded market, there is a rather surprising oversight under Linux: the Intel P-State driver reporting a 7.0+ GHz clock speed. While many would yearn for a 7GHz CPU, the Core 9 273PE where this issue was discovered in reality can only boost up to 5.7GHz for its maximum turbo frequency… ⌘ Read more

Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: As the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI ended its second week, the Tesla CEO started scoring points against Sam Altman. His witnesses landed three solid punches in testimony about how Altman runs OpenAI as CEO, raising concerns about his dedication to AI safety, the nonprofit’s mission, and his honesty as a leader of the organization. […] This … ⌘ Read more

Rust-Written Redox OS Sees Improvements For Running On Real Hardware
Redox OS is out with its status report for April 2026. During the past month this open-source, Rust-based operating system written from scratch has seen improvements for running on real hardware as well as a wide variety of other improvements for bettering this original OS project… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net It’s been a while (6.5 years) since I’ve done this. I’d do it like this:

• Boot some Linux from a USB stick on the new machine. Preferably Arch Linux, since that is what I’m running and that’ll make the upcoming chroot easier.
  
• Partition the new disk, create LUKS devices, filesystems, …
  
• Mount the new filesystems and copy all data (user data and the system itself – everything). Do this either over the network or by hooking up the old disk directly.
  
• chroot into the new system (Arch has an arch-chroot tool for that which is used during normal installation, if I’m not mistaken). Inside the chroot, install the bootloader.
  
• Do some fixups, like adjusting /etc/fstab or /etc/crypttab.
  

And I think that should be it. 🤔

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…

GCC 16 Compiler Delivering Some Decent Performance Gains Over GCC 15
With the GCC 16.1 compiler released last Thursday, I have begun running more compiler benchmarks on this first GCC 16 stable feature release. GCC 16 comes heavy on new changes in being the annual feature release and delivering changes from AMD Zen 6 and Arm AGI CPU support to new C++ features and even the Algol 68 programming language front-end. It’s also looking quite good in the performance department relative to the GCC 15 compiler from last year. ⌘ Read more

Turtle Beach WaveFront ISA Sound Cards Seeing Suspend/Resume Support On Linux In 2026
It’s been an interesting 2026 in Linux development with beginning to phase out i486 CPU support, dropping ISDN and amateur “ham” radio support, and other code cleaning in the name of a diminishing user base – or perhaps even no users left – for those running such vintage hardware with a modern, up-to-date kernel. Yet ISA sound card drivers have seen an uptick in activity… ⌘ Read more

What if Tech Company Layoffs Aren’t All About AI?
“Running a Big Tech company during Silicon Valley’s AI mania may not necessarily require fewer workers or cost less,” writes the Washington Post:

Amazon, Google and Meta together have roughly the same number of employees now as they did during an industry-wide hiring binge in 2022, company disclosures show. Growing costs for technical workers and related expenses have often outp … ⌘ Read more

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

I completely forgot, I saw my very first badger in the wild the day before yesterday. :-) That was absolutely cool! <3

I heard something comparatively large rustling in the bush right next to me and thought that it must be dear. Naturally, I stopped and tried to see what’s in there. The rustling went up the bank and it suddenly came down again towards the road I was on. That’s when I first layed eyes on it and identified it as a badger. For a split second I thought that it’s going to get after me and was ready to get running. But it just hadn’t noticed me yet. When it eventually spotted me, it froze for a few seconds and ran off uphill. My camera took too long to boot, so it was already gone by the time the photo machine was good to go.

Steam On Linux In April Pulled Back From Its Record High Marketshare
Steam on Linux use in March had skyrocketed to 5.33%, a 3.1% boost month-over-month and easily the highest level we’ve seen Steam on Linux at since its inception more than a decade ago. This record growth came amid the ongoing success of the Steam Deck handheld and Steam Play (Proton) for enabling more Windows games to run well on Linux. The April numbers are in and the Linux gaming marketshare pulled back somewhat but still remaining healthy… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.8 Improves VBScript Compatibility, Finally Fixes Microsoft Golf 1999
Wine 11.8 delivers the latest and greatest support for running Windows applications and games under Linux and other platforms. This newest bi-weekly development release brings several more enhancements in working toward Wine 12.0 stable due out in early 2027… ⌘ Read more

IBM Updates Linux Patches For Introducing ARM64 KVM Virtualization On s390
At the start of April was the peculiar announcement of IBM collaborating with Arm on “dual architecture” hardware. The initial fruits of that collaboration at least are Linux kernel patches for enabling ARM64 virtualization acceleration on IBM Z servers. As we approach the end of the month, IBM has now posted a second iteration of those patches for enabling AArch64 software to run on IBM s390 via the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)… ⌘ Read more

Open Source Developer Brings Linux to Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME
Microsoft released the “Windows Subsystem for Linux” in 2016, adding an optional Linux environment into every operating system since Windows 10. But now an open source developer has brought Linux to Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me, reports the blog It’s FOSS, “with Linux kernel 6.19 running alongside the Windows 9x ker … ⌘ Read more

White House Pushed Out New AI Official After Just Four Days on the Job
It’s the U.S. government’s main link to the AI industry, reports The Washington Post, working to assess national security risks of new models like Anthropic’s “Mythos”.

To run it they’d hired Collin Burns, who’d worked at OpenAI and then Anthropic. But Burns started work Monday at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation — and then … ⌘ Read more

Meta Is Laying Off 10% of Its Workforce
Meta is reportedly cutting about 10% of its workforce, or roughly 8,000 jobs, while closing thousands of open roles it had intended to fill. “We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” said Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer. The company had almost 79,000 employees at the start of the y … ⌘ Read more

KMSCON Continues Improving For VT Terminal Emulator In User-Space
KMSCON 9.3.4 is out today for this virtual terminal (VT) emulator in user-space that runs atop the Linux DRM/KMS APIs for those wanting to enjoy a CONFIG_VT=n Linux kernel experience… ⌘ Read more

Amazon To Invest Up To Another $25 Billion In Anthropic
Amazon is expanding its Anthropic partnership with a deal to invest up to another $25 billion, while Anthropic commits to spending more than $100 billion on AWS infrastructure over the next decade to power Claude. “Anthropic’s commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we’ve made together on custom silicon, as we … ⌘ Read more

AMD’s GAIA Makes It Easier To Import/Export Custom AI Agents Across PCs
AMD on the software side continues investing heavily in GAIA “Generative AI Is Awesome” as their cross-platform solution built around the Lemonade SDK for running local AI agents on your AMD-powered hardware from CPUs to GPUs and NPUs. With today’s GAIA update, custom-generated AI agents are now portable with easy import and export support… ⌘ Read more

Former Palantir Employee Running For Congress Unveils ‘AI Dividend’ Plan
Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee and current Democratic House candidate in New York, is proposing an “AI dividend” that would send direct payments to Americans if AI drives major job losses. “At its core, the AI Dividend is simple: if AI dramatically increases productivity and concentrates wealth, the American people have a stak … ⌘ 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

Allbirds’ Move To AI Has Echoes of the Dot-Com Frenzy
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by writer Austin Carr: Allbirds is pivoting to artificial intelligence. The San Francisco brand, whose wool running shoes were once the sneaker du jour among the tech crowd, announced last week that it was expanding into AI computing infrastructure. The bizarre strategic shift was immediately greeted with a surpris … ⌘ Read more

Voyager 1 is Running Out of Power. NASA Just Switched Part of It Off
After 49 years of space travel, Voyager 1 “is running out of power,” reports NPR:

The spacecraft runs on a radioisotope thermoelectric generator — a device that converts heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. It carries no solar panels, no rechargeable batteries. Just the slow, steady release of nuclear warmth, which diminishe … ⌘ Read more

New Debian Project Leader Elected For 2026
Sruthi Chandran has been elected the new Debian Project Leader “DPL” after running unopposed in this year’s elections… ⌘ Read more

30 WordPress Plugins Turned Into Malware After Ownership Change
Wednesday BleepingComputer reported that more than 30 WordPress plugins “have been compromised with malicious code that allows unauthorized access to websites running them.”

A malicious actor planted the backdoor code last year but only recently started pushing it to users via updates, generating spam pages and causing redirects, as per the instruct … ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.7 Brings VBScript Fixes, DirectSound 7.1 Channel Support
For those using upstream Wine for running your Windows games/apps on Linux rather than the likes of the Proton 11.0 beta, out today is Wine 11.7 as the newest bi-weekly development release… ⌘ 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

Glibc Lands A Big Optimization For LoongArch CPUs
Loongson’s LoongArch processors are running decent in our recent Loongson 3B6000 benchmarks but even better performance is on the way with the next GNU C Library “glibc” release… ⌘ 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

AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 Adds i686 User-Space Packages
The community-based AlmaLinux OS alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) continues exploring ways to better differentiate it from upstream RHEL and other derivatives. The latest difference is AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 adding i686 user-space packages for those wanting to run on a RHEL 10 based platform but still needing x86 32-bit user-space software compatibility… ⌘ Read more

UK Households To Be Urged To Use More Power This Summer As Renewables Soar
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Guardian: Households will be called on to boost their consumption of Great Britain’s record renewable energy this summer to help balance the power grid and lower energy bills. Under the new plans, people could be encouraged to run dishwashers and washing machines or … ⌘ Read more

Rivian’s Illinois Factory Will Run On Recycled EV Batteries
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Rivian is joining with Redwood Materials to reuse EV batteries for energy storage – the largest repurposed-battery energy storage system for an automotive manufacturer in the U.S., executives told The Wall Street Journal. Redwood Materials is a battery-recycling firm started by Tesla co- … ⌘ Read more

LLM-Assisted Patches For Linux 7.1 May Have Negative Impact On 32-bit Systems
Code now merged for the Linux 7.1 kernel may provide some negative performance implications for those still running modern Linux kernels on 32-bit hardware. A fundamental change can present cache line alignment and slab sizing implications for 32-bit Linux OS users but will provide for cleaner code with modern 64-bit computing… ⌘ Read more

Chrome Now Lets You Turn AI Prompts Into Repeatable ‘Skills’
Google is rolling out a Chrome feature called “Skills” that lets users save Gemini prompts as reusable one-click workflows they can run across multiple tabs. The feature also includes preset Skills from Google. It’s launching first for Chrome desktop users set to US English. The Verge reports: Once you have access to the feature, it can be managed by t … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 Delivers Great Performance Improvements For AMD Strix Point, Especially For RDNA 3.5 Graphics
As part of my ongoing testing around the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 release I have been running a lot of benchmarks. After recently showing some nice performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” with Ubuntu 26.04, several Phoronix readers inquired about any performance uplift from the more modest but still powerful Strix Point laptops like the popular Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 SKU. Here are benchmarks showing the … ⌘ Read more

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

How Good is Windows on Arm With Snapdragon X?
A new powerful chipset has arrived to take on x86 CPUs and Apple’s M5, writes Wccftech.

The blog Windows Central writes that “Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 processors are here” — and they run Windows:

Microsoft has done a massive amount of work to improve compatibility and has also convinced developers to embrace Windows 11 on Arm. Users of Windows 11 on Arm PCs spend 90% of their ti … ⌘ 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

Greg Kroah-Hartman Tests New ‘Clanker T1000’ Fuzzing Tool for Linux Patches
The word clanker — a disparaging term for AI and robots — “has made its way into the Linux kernel,” reports the blog It’s FOSS “thanks to Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer and the closest thing the project has to a second-in-command.”

He’s been quietly running what looks like an AI-assisted fuzzing tool o … ⌘ Read more

Trisquel 12.0 Released For Free Software Foundation Endorsed Distribution
For those sticking to absolute free software ideals, Trisquel 12.0 was released this weekend for this Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved distribution for only containing free software and foregoing loadable microcode/firmware and running on the Linux-libre kernel even with its reduced scope in hardware support… ⌘ Read more

AI That Bankrupted a Vending Machine is Now Running a Store in San Francisco
Remember that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters “systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free”? It was Anthropic’s experiment, with setup handled by a startup named Andon Labs (which also built the hardware and software integration). But for th … ⌘ Read more

Judge Pauses Arizona’s Prosecution of Kalshi, Bars Arizona from Regulating Prediction Markets
Arizona state prosecutors allege Kalshi is running an illegal gambling operation, charging the prediction market with 20 “wagering” misdemeanors. But Friday a federal judge “temporarily barred Arizona from enforcing its gambling laws against predictive market operators,” reports the Associated … ⌘ Read more

Firefox vs. Chrome: Which Performs Better on a Linux Laptop?
Phoronix staged “a showdown” between Firefox and Chrome, testing them both on an Intel Panther Lake laptop running Ubuntu 26.04.

JetStream 3.0 was announced at the end of March as the latest major web browser benchmark. This updated version of JetStream is focused on intensive portions of modern JavaScript and WebAssembly web applications… Google Chrome … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org AI result ahead, feel free to ignore.

I “asked” the AI at work the same question out of morbid curiousity. It “said” that SQLite converts that integer to floating point internally on overflows and then, when converting back, the x86 instruction cvttsd2si will turn it into 0x8000000000000000, even if the actual floating point value is outside of that range. So, yes, it allegedly actually saturates, as a side effect of the type conversion.

I couldn’t find anything about that automatic conversion in SQLite’s manual, yet, but an experiment looks like it might be true:

sqlite> select typeof(1 << 63);
╭─────────────────╮
│ typeof(1 << 63) │
╞═════════════════╡
│ integer         │
╰─────────────────╯

sqlite> select typeof((1 << 63) - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ typeof((1 << 63) ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ real                 │
╰──────────────────────╯

As for cvttsd2si, this source confirms the handling of 0x8000000000000000 on range errors: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/cvttsd2si

The following C program also confirms it (run through gdb to see cvttsd2si in action):

<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdint.h>
<a href="https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdio.h>

int
main()
{
    int64_t i;
    double d;

    /* -3000 instead of -1, because `double` can’t represent a
     * difference of -1 at this scale. */
    d = -9223372036854775808.0 - 3000;

    i = d;
    printf("%lf, 0x%lx, %ld\n", d, i, i);

    return 0;
}

(Remark about AI usage: Fine, I got an answer and maybe it’s even correct. But doing this completely ruined it for me. It would have been much more satisfying to figure this out myself. I actually suspected some floating point stuff going on here, but instead of verifying this myself I reached for the unethical tool and denied myself a little bit of fun at the weekend. Won’t do that again.)

Firefox 149 vs. Chrome 147 Web Browser Performance On Linux
It has been a while since featuring a showdown of the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers on Linux. With some fresh benchmarks being overdue plus the new JetStream 3 browser benchmark having been announced last week, here is some fresh data for how these two dominant web browsers are competing on the modern Linux desktop from an Intel Panther Lake system running Ubuntu 26.04. ⌘ 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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