@david@daiwei.me sorry you got caught in my 403 mess. My tiny tin box is being hammered at by some BS AI bot for a ~week now, so I might have gone a bit too defensive with my WAF & Co. 🤭 I’ll investigate in the morning.

The Brain Is Actually Two Completely Separate Organs
“New research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years,” Stanford Medicine announced this week:

The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our heart … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3-rc4 To Address Two Unfortunate Bugs With Btrfs
Merged today were this week’s set of Btrfs file-system fixes for the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel, which include two notable bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

Developer Abandons ‘PS5 Linux’ Project After Sony Patches AI-Discovered Exploit
“In April this year, we saw Andy Nguyen turning the PS5 into a Linux-powered gaming PC,”
writes the blog It’s FOSS.

It ran Steam games and emulators using the PS5’s on-board hardware. But this week Andy announced he’s “stopping all my work on PS5 Linux” and “stepping away from the PS5 scene.”
stopping work on porting … ⌘ Read more

GNOME OS Turns To Zswap To Deal With OOM Issues, Progress On Geary Email Client Fork
In addition to this week’s GNOME 51 release were several other exciting developments in the GNOME desktop space… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Driver For Linux 7.4 Adds vRAM Health Check, Degraded Memory Handling
Sent out this week were more Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle. The theme this week was around dealing with video memory health and also being able to better deal with hardware degraded video RAM… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Seeing More Polishing & Fixes, Plasma 6.9 Begins Seeing More Activity
Following last week’s Plasma 6.8 beta release, KDE desktop developers have spent this week mostly working on bug fixes as well as some early changes toward Plasma 6.9… ⌘ Read more

AI Insiders Issue New Warnings - Including Former Anthropic Engineer Jacob Coxon
Neither OpenAI or Anthropic is acting responsibly, warned AI researcher Jacob Coxon when resigning last week from Anthropic. But just hours earlier, OpenAI VP of Research Aidan Clark had posted “For the first time, I am asking myself if things are moving too fast. I’m honestly not sure, but I am sure that it would be go … ⌘ Read more

AMD Strix Halo Enjoys Some Performance Gains On Ubuntu 26.10, Especially With amd64v3
Ahead of next week’s Ubuntu 26.10 beta release I have been testing the “Stonking Stingray” on a variety of systems. Ubuntu 26.10 is performing well overall with some nice upgrades over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, especially if opting to use the new snapshot/daily ISOs of Ubuntu 26.10 in amd64v3 form for x86_64-v3 packages. In today’s tests are a look at the performance benefits of Ubuntu 26.10 on an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo”. ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel Build Times Ready To Be Significantly Reduced With Latest Patches
The past few weeks we have eagerly been following a Linux kernel patch series after AI found some major bottlenecks in the Linux kernel build code. With AI helping to address these bottlenecks, Linux kernel build times are substantially reduced. These optimizations might be ready in time for Linux 7.4 for reducing incremental kernel build times as much as around 70%. This week the latest iteration of these patches were posted by Arm engi … ⌘ Read more

AMD Sends In More HDMI FRL Updates For Linux 7.4, Fixes For Upcoming Hardware
Linux 7.4 is set to be a very exciting holiday gift for AMD Radeon graphics customers. As covered last week on Phoronix, with this next kernel AMD Is enabling HDMI 2.1 support by default now that FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM support is included too. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were sent out ahead of the Linux 7.4 merge window in October… ⌘ Read more

Intel Appears To End Its Bug Bounty Program
Amid a boom of bug reporting in general due to AI/LLMs across the entire software ecosystem, Intel this week appears to have ended its paid bug bounty program. They have (re)launched a new bug reporting program but with the bounties removed… ⌘ Read more

America Acknowledges for the First Time: It Has Deployed Weapons In Space
Tuesday U.S. Space Force chief Douglas Schiess said his branch of the U.S. military operates “on-orbit weapons,” reports Reuters, to defend “against space-enabled attacks.” He promised “disciplined and responsible choices” when scaling America’s orbital defense arsenal in the coming years.

NPR calls this week’s reveleations “rem … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 4 ISOs Published
The fourth monthly-ish snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 “Stonking Stingray” is now available for testing and comes ahead of next week’s Ubuntu 26.10 beta milestone… ⌘ Read more

Fujitsu Formally Announces Their MONAKA 144 Core CPU
For two years now we have been curious about the Fujitsu MONAKA CPU since some slides about this Arm-based server processor first appeared and they upstreamed compiler support in GCC 15. This week Fujitsu formally announced the MONAKA CPU and with availability beginning in November… ⌘ Read more

Math Professor Accuses OpenAI of Copying His Work, Says AI Compute Power Makes Racing to Publish ‘Pointless’
The New York Post wrote that OpenAI “stunned the mathematics world” last week when it announced its AI model “cracked a legendary math problem left unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours.”

But a New York University professor “has come forward alleging … ⌘ Read more

Intel Reverses Decision To Cancel Their Open-Source Font Project
Amid Intel cutting back on open-source projects over the past two years as cost cutting measures at the company, their latest open-source project on the chopping block was the peculiar font they developed a few years back. The project was archived this week only to change course two days later… ⌘ Read more

GTK 4.24 Released With Better Fractional Scaling, More Precise GDK Frame-Clock
GTK 4.24 released on Friday as the newest stable feature release to the GTK4 toolkit. It’s quite a nice update to GTK4 for pairing with next week’s GNOME 51 desktop release… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Remote Desktop To Enjoy Lower Latency Performance
Along with KDE Plasma 6.8 beta releasing this week, there were some other interesting Plasma changes this week worthy of a shout-out… ⌘ Read more

I’ve been away with the scouts in our district summer camp. The nearly two weeks were absolutely amazing, mentally a great vacation. On the other hand, physically not so much. But I’ve still got Monday to recover from my holiday. :-)

Here’s a sunset from the setup before the kids arrived the next day: https://lyse.isobeef.org/2026-08-30-abendhimmel/

Male Fruit Fly Brain Trained to Play Doom
Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly’s brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. “Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons,” says Alex Wormuth. “Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimu … ⌘ Read more

Gitte As Git Client For GNOME Continues Maturing Quite Nicely
For those in pursuit of a graphical Git client for GNOME or the Linux desktop at large, the GTK4-powered Gitte continues advancing rather well and out this week is its v0.10 release… ⌘ Read more

Linux’s IO_uring Sees Some “Crazy” Patches That Deliver Very Nice Improvements
Linux block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe continues to uncover new opportunities for making the wonderful IO_uring framework even more performant within the Linux kernel. For ending out the week he’s posted some “crazy” patches delivering some significant gains… ⌘ Read more

Boy Developed ‘Toasted Skin’ Condition From Using a Laptop Every Day
A medical report published earlier this week says a boy in the U.K. developed erythema ab igne, or “toasted skin syndrome,” after resting a laptop on his abdomen for up to eight hours a day, often while it was charging. “The marks were described as being in a patch about 15 centimeters (six inches) wide, made of flat, reddish-brown ‘inter … ⌘ Read more

I recently installed Quake on my laptop (via vkQuake), and have really been enjoying playing it again.

When I was at University, we had a lab full of shiny new Windows NT 4.0 workstations that we immediately installed it on, and spent many a late evening fragging each other.

But tonight, when I defeated Chthon for the first time, it occurred to me that I had never actually played the single player mode all the way though (not even the first episode). So now I’m 2 missions into Episode 2 with plans to finish it over the next week or so. #LifeGoals

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GNOME 51 Adds Support For Custom Pointer Acceleration Profiles
As a last minute change ahead of next week’s GNOME 51 desktop release, changes to Mutter and gsettings-desktop-schemas have now landed for supporting custom pointer acceleration profiles… ⌘ Read more

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Yeah, time flies. My last post was Friday, almost a week ago … Sigh.

systemd 262-rc2 Adds An AI Canary For Detecting Unreviewed AI/LLM Code Contributions
One week after releasing systemd 262-rc1, systemd 262-rc2 is now available with further fixes and refinements for this init system and service manager. Systemd is also the latest open-source project introducing an AI canary for aiming to detect AI/LLM-based code contributors that weren’t reviewed by an actual person in advance of the pull request… ⌘ Read more

AMD Working To ‘Push Rust Deep into the GPU Stack’
Phoronix reports:

AMD is building out what they are describing as an “elite” team of developers for driving Rust code “deep into the GPU stack” from firmware to drivers, shader compilers, and other GPU software in Rust. AMD Senior Fellow Harsh Meno posted this week to LinkedIn about this new effort…

And note this AMD job posting that’s active for hiring a software de … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 To Support Realtek RTL8127atf & RTL8116af Networking
Queued this past week into the net-next development tree of the latest networking additions for the Linux kernel is enabling support for Realtek’s newer RTL8127atf and RTL8116af wired networking ASICs… ⌘ Read more

Nouveau Preparations For HDMI 2.1 DSC, AMD HDMI FreeSync Fixes For Linux 7.4
Last week’s set of DRM-Misc-Next changes submitted to DRM-Next with targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle features HDMI 2.1 related work for both the AMDGPU kernel driver as well as the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3-rc2 Released Following Another Busy Week
After the Linux 7.3 merge window concluded last weekend, today we are up to the Linux 7.3-rc2 test kernel release in working toward the stable v7.3 kernel during the second half of October… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3-rc2 Scheduler Fix For Cache Aware Load Scheduling Misfits On Hybrid CPUs
Ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc2 kernel being released later today, a set of scheduler fixes have been sent out for this week’s kernel test release. Most notable with the scheduler fixes are dealing with possible misfits for Cache-Aware Load Scheduling on hybrid CPUs like Intel Core (Ultra) processors… ⌘ Read more

FSF is Now on Bluesky - But Won’t Advocate Signing Up Due to Nonfree JavaScript
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is now on Bluesky, they announced this week. But “We can’t advocate that you sign up for a Bluesky account like we do with Mastodon or PeerTube since signing up for Bluesky means loading the registration page’s nonfree JavaScript…”

While federated, Bluesky is generally not conside … ⌘ Read more

Hundreds More Flock Cameras Removed in the US This Week. Flock Caught Repackaging Traffic Data
Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis said this week he’s removing Flock cameras from state roadways. And according to a local news report, that led sheriff’s departments in at least three other Florida counties to also “announce they’re ending their own license plate reader programs. … ⌘ Read more

Nouveau Lands Display Fixes For NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs As It Works Toward HDMI 2.1
This week’s Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes that were merged ahead of Sunday’s Linux 7.3-rc2 release contain a number of fixes to the open-source Nouveau driver’s display support for current-generation NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs… ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Posted For Initial Enablement Of The Apple A18 Pro + MacBook Neo
In addition to Linux developers focused on Apple Silicon being busy enabling functionality for the M3 and newer SoCs under the Linux kernel, there are also developers working on enabling the A18 Pro SoC used by the new, budget-friendly MacBook Neo laptop. Patches were posted this week for initial enablement of the A18 Pro and the MacBook Neo Device Tree… But even with these patches, the Linux support is still severely limited … ⌘ Read more

Google Releases Gemini 3.8 Flash, Its Third Flash Model In Six Weeks
Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third Flash model in six weeks, claiming it’s their best reasoning and coding model yet (topping the DeepSWE leaderboard). Ars Technica reports: Gemini 3.8 Flash comes in two variations. There’s the standard Flash, which Google describes as a “workhorse” model that’s good for anything from agentic tasks … ⌘ Read more

Early Benchmarks Of AMD EPYC On Linux 7.3 Show Some Performance Gains On The Horizon
With Linux 7.3-rc1 out this week and marking the end of the merge window, it’s onto a lot of Linux 7.3 performance testing at Phoronix and looking at all the new features of Linux 7.3. In today’s article is a first look at the AMD EPYC Turin server performance on Linux 7.3-rc1 compared to Linux 7.2 stable with a few nice performance improvements to show. ⌘ Read more

Greg KH Forewarns Of “Rough” Linux 7.3 Kernel Cycle Due To Continued AI Churn
While Linux 7.3-rc1 only released this week and there are another roughly seven weeks to go until the official kernel release, Linux’s second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman is already warning that it’s likely to be another “rough” kernel cycle given the ongoing noise caused by AI/LLM with the increase in bug reports and kernel patches… ⌘ Read more

EDAC Changes Merged For Linux 7.3 After Being Forgotten About During The Merge Window
While the Linux 7.3 merge window officially closed on Sunday with the Linux 7.3-rc1 release, the Error Detection And Correction “EDAC” subsystem changes were mistakenly forgotten about during the two week window. The pull request ended up being sent out on Monday evening and the late feature changes were already merged to Git… ⌘ Read more

Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
According to The Information (paywalled), Apple reportedly moved up the release of new Mac mini and Mac Studio models after unexpectedly strong enterprise demand for Macs capable of running AI workloads. MacRumors reports: Apple normally releases new Mac models in the autumn, closer to October or November, making this week’s announcement unusua … ⌘ Read more

@david@daiwei.me

I wish I knew

Just give it a go. This stuff is super cheap. All you need is a “pen”, some nibs, ink, and paper. Costs like 20-30 bucks and lasts for several years. The hardest part is finding good paper, really, because most paper these days isn’t made for ink anymore. 🥴

And since social media is always only full of good results, here’s something “shitty”:

These are my first experiments in 2016 – and that’s after having practiced with a graphics tablet on a PC for a couple of weeks. 😅

Linux 7.3 Features Many Exciting Improvements, New Hardware Support & Faster Btrfs
With Linux 7.3-rc1 released to cap off the two week merge window, here is a look at the many exciting changes merged for the Linux 7.3 kernel that is working its way toward release in the second half of October. ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3-rc1 With AMD Zen 6 Additions, Better Btrfs Performance & 2026 Steam Controller
Like clockwork, the Linux 7.3 merge window has concluded after two weeks and the Linux 7.3-rc1 kernel now available for testing… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Lands More Audio Workarounds For Laptops & Other Devices
Following last week’s main set of sound subsystem updates for Linux 7.3 that brought a lot of new audio hardware support, a second round of sound updates were merged this weekend ahead of today’s Linux 7.3-rc1 release… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Introduces 8250_mxpcie Driver For Moxa PCIe Multi-Port Serial Boards
The TTY/Serial code changes for Linux 7.3 were merged this week and include dropping the dated IPWireless driver while introducing the new 8250_mxpcie driver… ⌘ Read more

Debian Decides: Contributors Can Use Generative AI ‘Responsibly’
This week Debian voted on whether to ban AI-assisted contributions. The winning proposal? “Debian neither endorses nor prohibits the use of generative AI tools” in its projects, documentation, and packaging… Generative AI “is neither exempt from nor subject to special rules beyond the standards already expected of Debian contributors.”

“The resp … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Improving Performance & Efficiency For Some Full Screen Content
In addition to the Union QtWidgets initial release happening this week, a number of other improvements also landed in the past few days in making Plasma 6.8 all the more exciting… ⌘ Read more

GNOME’s Very Exciting Week From Flatpak Funding To Reset Recovery Plus Apps
This week was extremely eventful in the GNOME space with GPU reset recovery for GNOME Mutter now largely wrapped up and the merge request opened to facilitate the code review. There was also the announcement of the half million Euro Sovereign Tech Agency investment into Flatpak. Plus on the application side were a few more interesting advancements this week.‘.. ⌘ Read more