Intel Posts 2026 Update For Cache Aware Scheduling On Linux
Not in time for the current Linux 7.0 cycle but posted for another round of review is Intel’s latest work around Cache Aware Scheduling for enhancing the performance of modern CPUs with multiple cache domains. This is the first set of updates to Cache Aware Scheduling for the new year and succeed the v2 patches from early December. This work not only benefits modern Intel CPUs but our testing has shown can also provide some very nice gains too for … ⌘ Read more

The “Are You Sure?” Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind
The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini – will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking “are you sure?,” according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains.

The behavior, known in the … ⌘ Read more

Siri’s AI Overhaul Delayed Again
Apple’s long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting.

The new Siri – first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 – struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and s … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Rejects MMC Changes For Linux 7.0 Cycle: “Complete Garbage”
The Linux MultiMediaCard “MMC” subsystem was set to see some new hardware support, optimized support for secure erase/trim on some eMMCs, and a variety of other improvements. But all of the MMC changes are rejected and will be for the duration of the Linux 7.0 cycle due to an apparent lack of testing and vetting via linux-next that led Linus Torvalds to calling it “complete garbage” and “untested crap”… ⌘ Read more

Chrome 146 Now In Beta With WebNN Origin Trial For Neural Networks In The Browser
Following yesterday’s Chrome 145 release with JPEG-XL support, Chrome 146 today was promoted to the beta channel to help facilitate broader testing of the next round of Chrome/Chromium browser improvements… ⌘ Read more

T-Mobile Will Live Translate Regular Phone Calls Without an App
T-Mobile is opening registration today for a beta test of Live Translation, an AI-powered feature that will translate live phone calls into more than 50 languages when it launches this spring.

The feature operates at the network level, so it doesn’t require any specific app or device – beta participants simply dial 87 to activate it on a call. T-M … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Scores +12% In UDP Network Performance Test From Manually Inlining Function
The core timer changes to the Linux 7.0 kernel score a rather nice performance improvement in a UDP receive network stress test from inlining a function that compilers haven’t been able to tackle with their optimizations… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Starts Running Ads in ChatGPT
OpenAI has started testing ads inside ChatGPT for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers in the United States, the company said. The Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education tiers remain ad-free. Ads are matched to users based on conversation topics, past chats, and prior ad interactions, and appear clearly labeled as “sponsored” and visually separated from ChatGPT’s organic respo … ⌘ Read more

Carmakers Rush To Remove Chinese Code Under New US Rules
“How Chinese is your car?” asks the Wall Street Journal. “Automakers are racing to work it out.”

Modern cars are packed with internet-connected widgets, many of them containing Chinese technology. Now, the car industry is scrambling to root out that tech ahead of a looming deadline, a test case for America’s ability to decouple from Chinese supply chains. New U … ⌘ Read more

Wine-Staging 11.2 Brings More Patches To Help Adobe Photoshop On Linux
Building off Friday’s release of Wine 11.2 is now Wine-Staging 11.2 as this experimental/testing version of Wine with hundreds of extra patches that have yet to be introduced in upstream proper for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications on Linux. Notable in this bi-weekly update are more patches for continuing to improve the Adobe Photoshop installer support on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Free Bi-Directional EV Chargers Tested to Improve Massachusetts Power Grid
Somewhere on America’s eastern coast, there’s an economic development agency in Massachusetts promoting green energy solutions. And Monday the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (or MassCEC) announced “a first-of-its-kind” program to see what happens when they provide free electric vehicle chargers to selected residents, sc … ⌘ Read more

NetBSD 11.0-RC1 Available For Testing With Enhanced Linux Emulation
The first release candidate of the big NetBSD 11.0 release is now available for testing… ⌘ Read more

The European Commission Is Testing an Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Teams
The European Commission is preparing to trial a communications platform built on Matrix, the open source messaging protocol already used by the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces, as a sovereign backup to Microsoft Teams.

Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven to … ⌘ Read more

Intel Driver Disabling Vulkan Video Encode On Newer Hardware Due To Insufficient Testing
While Vulkan Video is a cross-vendor, cross-platform video encode and decode API that is beginning to gain traction by multimedia applications and frameworks, the Intel “ANV” open-source Vulkan driver has for now taken a step-back on its encode support with newer hardware. Newer Intel graphics hardware is seeing Vulkan Video encode support disabled due to insufficient testing… ⌘ Read more

Starbucks Bets on Robots To Brew a Turnaround in Customers
Starbucks has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into AI and automation – testing robots that take drive-through orders, virtual assistants that help baristas recall recipes and manage schedules, and scanning tools that count inventory – as the 55-year-old coffee chain tries to reverse several years of struggling sales.

The company last week … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Snapshot 3 Released For Testing
Resolute Snapshot 3 is now available as the newest monthly test candidate leading up the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Admits Windows 11 Has a Trust Problem, Promises To Focus on Fixes in 2026
Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system’s performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls “swarming.”

” … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net cool! Will test later today. I recommend to keep up with the changes, and make them non-technical user “friendly”.

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks for letting me know it was Mobile Safari! I just did some testing real quick and things are not working very well 🤔 I think I’ve introduced some regressions last night as I was putting this into prod 😅 services me right for late-night deployment 🤣 I’ve taken it down for now, will spend a bit more time on testing making sure things all work properly!

Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp To Test Premium Subscriptions
An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta plans to test new subscriptions that give people access to exclusive features on its apps, the company told TechCrunch on Monday. The tech giant said the new subscriptions will unlock more productivity and creativity, along with expanded AI capabilities.

In the coming months, Meta said it will offer a premium … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Was Routing Example-Domain Traffic To a Japanese Cable Company for Five Years
Microsoft has quietly suppressed an unexplained anomaly on its network that was routing traffic destined for example.com – a domain reserved under RFC2606 specifically for testing purposes and not obtainable by any party – to sei.co.jp, a domain belonging to Japanese electronics cable maker Sumitomo E … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta 2 Released For Testing
Following the KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta from two weeks ago, a second beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.6 desktop is now available for testing. KDE Plasma 6.6 stable remains on-track for a mid-February release… ⌘ Read more

Google Axion CPU Performance With The New Google Cloud N4A Instances
Back in 2024 Google rolled out their Axion in-house ARM processors with the Google Cloud C4A instance type. Today they are expanding their Axion offerings in Google Cloud with the N4A instances now out of preview. The Google Cloud N4A instances are designed for scale-out web servers and microservices, containerized applications, back-end application services, databases, data analytics, and cost-effective development/staging/testing environments. ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Is Refreshing the Xbox Cloud Gaming Web Experience
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thurrott: Microsoft is testing a refresh of the Xbox Cloud Gaming web experience in public preview. “This preview is a first look at our new web interface on your browser and lets you try the updated design and product flow before it is rolled out broadly,” Microsoft’s Patrick Siu explains. “Players who opt in to … ⌘ Read more

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

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

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