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Kraken Launches Digital Tokens To Offer 24/7 Trading of US Equities
Kraken is launching tokenized versions of U.S. equities for 24/7 trading outside the U.S., giving global investors blockchain-based access to major companies like Apple and Tesla. Reuters reports: Tokenization refers to the process of issuing digital representations of publicly-traded securities. Instead of holding the securities directly, investors hold tokens that represent ownership of the securities. The tokens' launch outside the U.S. comes amid growing interest in blending traditional finance with blockchain infrastructure. While tokenized securities have yet to gain widespread adoption, proponents say they hold the potential to significantly reshape how people access and invest in financial markets.
In a January opinion piece for the Washington Post, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said tokenization could also allow retail investors to access private companies' stocks. Kraken's tokens, called xStocks, will be available in select markets outside the United States, it said, without naming the markets. The move was earlier reported by the Wall Street Journal. The offering is currently not available for U.S. customers.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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Trump Launches Reform of Nuclear Industry, Slashes Regulation
Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a press release from the White House, outlining a series of executive orders that overhaul the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and speed up deployment of new nuclear power reactions in the U.S.. From a report: The NRC is a 50-year-old, independent agency that regulates the nation's fleet of nuclear reactors. Trump's orders call for a "total and complete reform" of the agency, a senior White House official told reporters in a briefing. Under the new rules, the commission will be forced to decide on nuclear reactor licenses within 18 months. Trump said Friday the orders focus on small, advanced reactors that are viewed by many in the industry as the future. But the president also said his administration supports building large plants. "We're also talking about the big plants -- the very, very big, the biggest," Trump said. "We're going to be doing them also."
When asked whether NRC reform will result in staff reductions, the White House official said "there will be turnover and changes in roles." "Total reduction in staff is undetermined at this point, but the executive orders do call for a substantial reorganization" of the agency, the official said. The orders, however, will not remove or replace any of the five commissioners who lead the body, according to the White House. Any reduction in staff at the NRC would come at time when the commission faces a heavy workload. The agency is currently reviewing whether two mothballed nuclear plants, Palisades in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, should restart operations, a historic and unprecedented process. [...]
Trump's orders also create a regulatory framework for the Departments of Energy and Defense to build nuclear reactors on federal land, the administration official said. "This allows for safe and reliable nuclear energy to power and operate critical defense facilities and AI data centers," the official told reporters. The NRC will not have a direct role, as the departments will use separate authorities under their control to authorize reactor construction for national security purposes, the official said. The president's orders also aim to jump start the mining of uranium in the U.S. and expand domestic uranium enrichment capacity, the official said. Trump's actions also aim to speed up reactor testing at the Department of Energy's national laboratories.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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Lidar Can Permanently Damage Your Phone's Camera
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Jalopnik: With the gradual rise of semi-autonomous vehicles, there will likely be multiple cameras pointing back when you pull out a phone to take a photo or record video of a car. One reddit user found out earlier this month that car-mounted lidar sensors can damage a phone camera under certain circumstances. It was the technological equivalent of staring directly into the Sun. Their phone's camera was toast, but only because it was close-up and pointed directly at the lidar sensor.
Reddit user u/Jeguetelli posted worrying footage of a brand new Volvo EX90 from his iPhone 16 Pro Max. Nothing was wrong with the crossover SUV. That was the problem. The lidar sensor mounted in a pod above the windshield shot out a laser barrage of near-infrared light into the camera. The damage was immediate and obvious, leaving behind a red, pink and purple constellation of fried pixels. You can tell the permanent damage was to that specific lens because the image returned to normal after zooming out to a different lens. Jeguetelli didn't seem too concerned about the incident because he had Apple Care. In a statement to The Drive, Volvo confirmed that bad things can happen. "It's generally advised to avoid pointing a camera directly at a lidar sensor," the Swedish manufacturer said. "The laser light emitted by the lidar can potentially damage the camera's sensor or affect its performance."
"Using filters or protective covers on the camera lens can help reduce the impact of lidar exposure. Some cameras are designed with built-in protections against high-intensity light sources."
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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Java Turns 30
Richard Speed writes via The Register: It was 30 years ago when the first public release of the Java programming language introduced the world to Write Once, Run Anywhere -- and showed devs something cuddlier than C and C++. Originally called "Oak," Java was designed in the early 1990s by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. Initially aimed at digital devices, its focus soon shifted to another platform that was pretty new at the time -- the World Wide Web.
The language, which has some similarities to C and C++, usually compiles to a bytecode that can, in theory, run on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The intention was to allow programmers to Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA) although subtle differences in JVM implementations meant that dream didn't always play out in reality. This reporter once worked with a witty colleague who described the system as Write Once Test Everywhere, as yet another unexpected wrinkle in a JVM caused their application to behave unpredictably. However, the language soon became wildly popular, rapidly becoming the backbone of many enterprises. [...]
However, the platform's ubiquity has meant that alternatives exist to Oracle Java, and the language's popularity is undiminished by so-called "predatory licensing tactics." Over 30 years, Java has moved from an upstart new language to something enterprises have come to depend on. Yes, it may not have the shiny baubles demanded by the AI applications of today, but it continues to be the foundation for much of today's modern software development. A thriving ecosystem and a vast community of enthusiasts mean that Java remains more than relevant as it heads into its fourth decade.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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Google's AI Mode Is 'the Definition of Theft,' Publishers Say
Google's new AI Mode for Search, which is rolling out to everyone in the U.S., has sparked outrage among publishers, who call it "the definition of theft" for using content without fair compensation and without offering a true opt-out option. Internal documents revealed by Bloomberg earlier this week suggest that Google considered giving publishers more control over how their content is used in AI-generated results but ultimately decided against it, prioritizing product functionality over publisher protections.
News/Media Alliance slammed Google for "further depriving publishers of original content both traffic and revenue." Their full statement reads: "Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company." 9to5Google's take: It's not hard to see why Google went the route that it did here. Giving publishers the ability to opt out of AI products while still benefiting from Search would ultimately make Google's flashy new tools useless if enough sites made the switch. It was very much a move in the interest of building a better product.
Does that change anything regarding how Google's AI products in Search cause potential harm to the publishing industry? Nope.
Google's tools continue to serve the company and its users (mostly) well, but as they continue to bleed publishers dry, those publishers are on the verge of vanishing or, arguably worse, turning to cheap and poorly produced content just to get enough views to survive. This is a problem Google needs to address, as it's making the internet as a whole worse for everyone.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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College Board Keeps Apologizing For Screwing Up Digital SAT and AP Tests
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Nate Anderson: Don't worry about the "mission-driven not-for-profit" College Board -- it's drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation. Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues.
Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required "Bluebook" testing app couldn't be accessed by many students. Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available. The only "solution" was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get its digital act together. [...] College Board issued a statement on the day of the AP Psych exam, copping to "an issue that prevented [students] from logging into the College Board's Bluebook testing application and beginning their exams at the assigned local start time." Stressing that "most students have had a successful testing experience, with more than 5 million exams being successfully submitted thus far," College Board nonetheless did "regret that their testing period was disrupted." It's not the first such disruption, though. [...]
College Board also continues to have problems delivering digital testing at scale in a high-pressure environment. During the SAT exam sessions on March 8-9, 2025, more than 250,000 students sat for the test -- and some found that their tests were automatically submitted before the testing time ended. College Board blamed the problem on "an incorrectly configured security setting on Bluebook." The problem affected nearly 10,000 students, and several thousand more "may have lost some testing time if they were asked by their room monitor to reboot their devices during the test to fix and prevent the auto-submit error." College Board did "deeply and sincerely apologize to the students who were not able to complete their tests, or had their test time interrupted, for the difficulty and frustration this has caused them and their families." It offered refunds, plus a free future SAT testing voucher.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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Spanish Grid Operator Faults Big Power Plants in Blackout Blame Game
Spain's grid operator has accused some large power plants of not doing their job to help regulate the country's electricity system in the moments before last month's catastrophic blackout across the Iberian peninsula. From a report: Beatriz Corredor, chair of grid operator Red Electrica's parent company, said power plants fell short in controlling the voltage of the electricity system.
However, the heads of Spain's biggest plant owners linked the blackout to a lack of grid investment and insufficient efforts to boost electricity demand. The public blame game over the outage is intensifying as more than three weeks after 60 million people were left without power, Spanish government investigators insisted they needed more time to establish the root cause.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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Only One Country in the World Produces All the Food It Needs, Study Finds
Out of 186 countries, only Guyana produces enough food to self-sufficiently feed all its citizens without foreign imports, according to new research. From a report: The study, published in Nature Food, investigated how well each country could feed their populations in seven food groups: fruits, vegetables, dairy, fish, meat, plant-based protein and starchy staples.
Worldwide, the study found that 65% of countries were overproducing meat and dairy, compared to their own population's dietary needs. It also found that Guyana, located in South America, was the only country that could boast total self-sufficiency, while China and Vietnam were close behind, being able to produce enough food in six out of seven food groups. Just one in seven of the tested countries were judged self-sufficient in five or more categories.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels
Several romance novelists have accidentally left AI writing prompts embedded in their published books, exposing their use of chatbots, 404Media reports. Readers discovered passages like "Here's an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable" in K.C. Crowne's "Dark Obsession," for instance, and similar AI-generated instructions in works by Lena McDonald and Rania Faris.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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'Landmark' Evolution Study Shows How Rice Inherits Tolerance To Cold Without DNA Changes
Rice plants can inherit tolerance to cold without changes to their genomes, according to a decade-long study carried out by researchers in China. From a report: The work, published in Cell this week, strengthens the evidence for a form of evolution in which environmental pressures induce heritable changes that do not alter an organism's DNA. The study conducted experiments that demonstrate, for the first time, the mechanism for these changes -- 'epigenetic' tweaks to chemical markers on the plant's DNA that don't actually tinker with the sequences themselves.
"What they're showing is extremely convincing; I would say that it's a landmark in the field," says Leandro Quadrana, a plant geneticist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris-Saclay. Michael Skinner, who studies epigenetic inheritance at Washington State University in Pullman, says the study adds to the growing body of evidence challenging the prevailing view of evolution that the only way that adaptations emerge is through gradual natural selection of randomly arising DNA mutations. This study shows that the environment isn't just a passive actor in evolution, but a selective force inducing a targeted change.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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America's Leading Alien Hunters Depend on AI to Speed Their Search
Harvard University's Galileo Project is using AI to automate the search for unidentified anomalous phenomena, marking a significant shift in how academics approach what was once considered fringe research. The project operates a Massachusetts observatory equipped with infrared cameras, acoustic sensors, and radio-frequency analyzers that continuously scan the sky for unusual objects.
Researchers Laura Domine and Richard Cloete are training machine learning algorithms to recognize all normal aerial phenomena -- planes, birds, drones, weather balloons -- so the system can flag genuine anomalies for human analysis. The team uses computer vision software called YOLO (You Only Look Once) and has generated hundreds of thousands of synthetic images to train their models, though the software currently identifies only 36% of aircraft captured by infrared cameras.
The Pentagon is pursuing parallel efforts through its All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which has examined over 1,800 UAP reports and identified 50 to 60 cases as "true anomalies" that government scientists cannot explain. AARO has developed its own sensor suite called Gremlin, using similar technology to Harvard's observatory. Both programs represent the growing legitimization of UAP research following 2017 Defense Department disclosures about military encounters with unexplained aerial phenomena.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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Glitch is Basically Shutting Down
Glitch, the coding platform where developers can share and remix projects, will soon no longer offer its core feature: hosting apps on the web. From a report: In an update on Thursday, Glitch CEO Anil Dash said it will stop hosting projects and close user profiles on July 8th, 2025 -- but stopped short of saying that it's shutting down completely.
Users will be able to access their dashboard and download code for their projects through the end of 2025, and Glitch is working on a new feature that allows users to redirect their project subdomains. The platform has also stopped taking new Pro subscriptions, but it will continue to honor existing subscriptions until July 8th.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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Sharp Knives Reduce Onion-Induced Tears By Limiting Droplet Spray, Study Finds
Cornell University researchers have solved a kitchen mystery by demonstrating that sharp knives produce fewer and slower-moving droplets when cutting onions compared to dull blades. The findings used high-speed cameras and particle tracking to analyze droplet formation during onion cutting at speeds up to 20,000 frames per second.
The team discovered that onion droplets form through a two-stage process: an initial violent ejection driven by internal pressure, followed by slower fragmentation of liquid streams in air. Blunter blades create up to 40 times more droplets because the onion's tough outer skin acts as a barrier, allowing the softer interior tissue to compress significantly before rupturing and releasing pressurized liquid.
The research reveals that droplets are ejected at speeds between 1 and 40 meters per second, with the fastest ones posing the greatest risk of reaching a cook's eyes. Beyond tear reduction, the study suggests sharp knives may also limit the spread of foodborne pathogens, since atomized droplets can carry bacteria like Salmonella from contaminated cutting boards.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding
An interesting piece on Construction Physics that examines how Japan transformed discarded American wartime shipbuilding techniques into a revolutionary manufacturing system that captured nearly half the global market by 1970. The story reveals the essential ingredients for industrial dominance: government backing, organizational alignment, relentless will to improve, and the systematic coordination needed to turn existing technologies into something entirely new. A few excerpts: During WWII, the US constructed an unprecedented shipbuilding machine. By assembling ships from welded, prefabricated blocks, the US built a huge number of cargo ships incredibly quickly, overwhelming Germany's u-boats and helping to win the war. But when the war was over, this shipbuilding machine was dismantled. Industrialists like Henry Kaiser and Stephen Bechtel, who operated some of the US's most efficient wartime shipyards, left the shipbuilding business. Prior to the war, the US had been an uncompetitive commercial shipbuilder producing a small fraction of commercial oceangoing ships, and that's what it became again. At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the world's ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%.
But the lessons from the US's shipbuilding machine weren't forgotten. After the war, practitioners brought them to Japan, where they would continue to evolve, eventually allowing Japan to build ships faster and cheaper than almost anyone else in the world.
[...] The third strategy that formed the core of modern shipbuilding methods was statistical process control. The basic idea behind process control is that it's impossible to make an industrial process perfectly reliable. There will always be some variation in what it produces: differences in part dimensions, material strength, chemical composition, and so on. But while some variation is inherent to the process (and must be accepted), much of the variation is from specific causes that can be hunted down and eliminated. By analyzing the variation in a process, undesirable sources of variation can be removed. This makes a process work more reliably and predictably, reducing waste and rework from parts that are outside acceptable tolerances.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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Vietnam Moves To Block Telegram App
An anonymous reader shares a report: Vietnam's technology ministry has instructed telecommunication service providers to block the messaging app Telegram for not cooperating in combating alleged crimes committed by its users, according to a government document reviewed by Reuters.
The document, dated May 21 and signed by the deputy head of the telecom department at the technology ministry, ordered telecommunication companies to take measures to block Telegram and report on them to the ministry by June 2.
Slashdot
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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NewsBone.com
Suggest a feed to syndicate here, or check out what I'm doing over at freshtao.
~Created Fri May 23 20:27:17 2025
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A new PowerPC board with support for Amiga OS 4 and MorphOS is on its way
The Amiga, a once-dominant force in the personal computer world, continues to hold a special place in the hearts of many. But with limited next-gen hardware available and dwindling AmigaOS4 support, the future of this beloved platform seemed uncertain. That is, until four Dutch passionate individuals, Dave, Harald, Paul, and Marco, decided to take matters into their own hands. Driven by a shared love for the Amiga and a desire to see it thrive, they embarked on an ambitious project: to create a new, low-cost next-gen Amiga mainboard. ↫ Mirari’s Our Story page Experience has taught me to be… Careful of news of new hardware from the Amiga world, but for once I have strong reasons to believe this one is actually the real deal. The development story – from the initial KiCad renders to the first five, fully functional prototype boards – seems to be on track, software support for Amiga OS is in development, Linux is working great already, and since today, MorphOS also boots on the board. It’s called the Mirari, and it’s very Dutch. So, what are we looking at here? The Mirari is a micro-ATX board, sporting either a PowerPC T10x2 processor (2-4 e5500 cores) up to 1.5GHz or a PowerPC T2081 processor (4 dual-threaded e6500 cores with Altivec 2.0) up to 1.8GHz, both designed by NXP in The Netherlands. It supports DDR3 memory, PCIe 2.0 (3.0 for the 4x slot when using the T2081), SATA and NVMe, the usual array of USB 2.0 and 3.2 ports, audio jacks, Ethernet, and so on. No, this is not a massive powerhouse that can take on the latest x86 or ARM machines, but it’s more than enough to power Amiga OS 4 or MorphOS, and aims to be actually affordable. Being at the prototype stage means they’re not for sale quite yet, but the fact they have a 100% yield so far and are comfortable enough to send one of the prototypes to a MorphOS developer, who then got MorphOS booting rather quickly, is a good sign. I also like the focus on affordability, which is often a problem in the Amiga world. I hope they make it to production, because I want one real bad.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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Google’s “AI” is convinced Solaris uses systemd
Who doesn’t love a bug bounty program? Fix some bugs, get some money – you scratch my back, I pay you for it. The CycloneDX Rust (Cargo) Plugin decided to run one, funded by the Bug Resilience Program run by the Sovereign Tech Fund. That is, until “AI” killed it. We received almost entirely AI slop reports that are irrelevant to our tool. It’s a library and most reporters didn’t even bother to read the rules or even look at what the intended purpose of the tool is/was. This caused a lot of extra work which is why we decided to abandon the program. Thanks AI. ↫ Lars Francke On a slightly related note, I had to do search the web today because I’m having some issues getting OpenIndiana to boot properly on my mini PC. For whatever reason, starting LightDM fails when booting the live USB, and LightDM’s log is giving some helpful error messages. So, I searched for "failed to get list of logind seats" openindiana, and Google’s automatic “AI Overview” ‘feature’, which takes up everything above the fold so is impossible to miss, confidently told me to check the status of the logind service… With systemctl. We’ve automated stupidity.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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Home Assistant deprecates Core and Supervised installation methods and 32bit systems
We are today officially deprecating two installation methods and three legacy CPU architectures. We always strive to have Home Assistant run on almost anything, but sometimes we must make difficult decisions to keep the project moving forward. Though these changes will only affect a small percentage of Home Assistant users, we want to do everything in our power to make this easy for those who may need to migrate. ↫ Franck Nijhof on the Home Assistant blog Home Assistant is quite popular among the kind of people who read OSNews, and this news might actually hit our little demographic particularly hard. The legacy CPU architectures they’re removing support for won’t make much of a difference, as we’re talking 32bit x86 and 32bit ARM, although that last one does include version 1 and 2 of the Raspberry Pi, which were quite popular at the time. Do check to make sure you’re not running your Home Assistant installation on one of those. The bigger hit is the deprecation of two installation methods: Home Assistant Core and Home Assistant’s Supervised installation method. In Core, you’re running it in a Python environment, and with Supervised, you’re installing the various components that make up Home Assistant manually. Supervised is used to install Home Assistant on unsupported operating systems, like the various flavours of BSD. What this means is that if you are running Home Assistant on, say, OpenBSD, you’re going to have to migrate soon. Apparently, these installation methods are not used very often, and are difficult for Home Assistant to support. These changes do not mean you can no longer perform these installation methods; it just means they are not supported, will be removed from the documentation, and new issues with these methods will not be accepted. Of course, anyone is free to take over hosting any documentation and guides, as Home Assistant is open source. Home Assistant generally wants you to use Home Assistant OS, which is basically a Linux distribution designed to run Home Assistant, either on real hardware (which is what I do, on an x86 thin client) or in a container.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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TrueNAS uses “AI” for customer support, and of course it goes horribly wrong
Let’s check in on TrueNAS, who apparently employ “AI” to handle customer service tickets. Kyle Kingsbury had to have dealings with TrueNAS’ customer support, and it was a complete trashfire of irrelevance and obviously wrong answers, spiraling all the way into utter lies. The “AI” couldn’t generate its way out of a paper bag, and for a paying customer who is entitled to support, that’s not a great experience. Kingsbury concludes: I get it. Support is often viewed as a cost center, and agents are often working against a brutal, endlessly increasing backlog of tickets. There is pressure at every level to clear those tickets in as little time as possible. Large Language Models create plausible support responses with incredible speed, but their output must still be reviewed by humans. Reviewing large volumes of plausible, syntactically valid text for factual errors is exhausting, time-consuming work, and every few minutes a new ticket arrives. Companies must do more with less; what was once a team of five support engineers becomes three. Pressure builds, and the time allocated to review the LLM’s output becomes shorter and shorter. Five minutes per ticket becomes three. The LLM gets it mostly right. Two minutes. Looks good. Sixty seconds. Click submit. There are one hundred eighty tickets still in queue, and behind every one is a disappointed customer, and behind that is the risk of losing one’s job. Thirty seconds. Submit. Submit. The metrics do not measure how many times the system has lied to customers. ↫ Kyle Kingsbury This time, it’s just about an upgrade process for a NAS, and the worst possible outcome “AI” generated bullshit could lead to is a few lost files. Potentially disastrous on a personal level for the customer involved, but not exactly a massive problem. However, once we’re talking support for medical devices, medication, dangerous power tools, and worse, this could – and trust me, will – lead to injury and death. TrueNAS, for its part, contacted Kingsbury after his blog post blew up, and assured him that “their support process does not normally incorporate LLMs”, and that they would investigate internally what, exactly, happened. I hope the popularity of Kingsbury’s post has jolted whomever is responsible for customer service at TrueNAS that farming out customer service to text generators is a surefire way to damage your reputation.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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Linux Mint forks GNOME’s Libadwaita to add theme support
On numerous occasions, we’ve talked about the issue facing non-GNOME GTK desktops, like Xfce, MATE, and Cinnamon: the popularity of Libadwaita. With more and more application developers opting for GNOME’s Libadwaita because of the desktop environment’s popularity, many popular GTK applications now look like GNOME applications instead of GTK applications, and they just don’t mesh well with traditional GTK desktops. Since Libadwaita is not themeable, applications that use it can’t really be made to feel at home on non-GNOME GTK desktops, unless said desktops adopt the entire GNOME design language, handing over control ovr their GUI design to outsiders in the process. The developers of Libadwaita, as well as the people behind GNOME, have made it very clear they do not intend to make Libadwaita themeable, and they are well within their rights to make that decision. I think it’s a bad decision – themeing is a crucial accessibility feature – but it’s their project, their code, and their time, and I fully respect their decision, since it’s really not up to GNOME to worry about the other GTK desktops. So, what are the developers of Xfce, MATE, and Cinnamon supposed to do? Well, how about taking matters into their own hands? Clement Lefebvre, the lead developer of Linux Mint and its Cinnamon desktop environment, has soft-forked Libadwaita to add theme support to the library. They’re calling it LibAdapta. libAdapta is libAdwaita with theme support and a few extra. It provides the same features and the same look as libAdwaita by default. In desktop environments which provide theme selection, libAdapta apps follow the theme and use the proper window controls. ↫ LibAdapta’s GitHub page The reason they consider libAdapta a “soft-fork” is that all it does is add theme support; they do not intended to deviate from Libadwaita in any other way, and will follow Libadwaita’s releases. It will use the current GTK3 theme, and will fallback to the default Libadwaita look and feel if the GTK3 theme in question doesn’t have a libadapta-1.0 directory. This seems like a transparent and smart way to handle it. I doubt it will be long before libAdapta becomes a default part of a lot of user instructions online, GTK theme developers will probably add support for it pretty quickly, and perhaps even of a lot of non-GNOME GTK desktop environments will add it by default. It will make it a lot easier for, say, the developers of MATE to make use of the latest Libadwaita applications, without having to either accept a disjointed, inconsistent user experience, or adopt the GNOME design language hook, line, and sinker and lose all control over the user experience they wish to offer to their users. I’m glad this exists now, and hope it will prove to be popular. I appreciate the pragmatic approach taken here – a relatively simple fork that doesn’t burden upstream, without long feature request threads where everybody is shouting at each other that needlessly spill over onto Fedi. This is how open source is supposed to work.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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GhostBSD: from usability to struggle and renewal
This article isn’t meant to be technical. Instead, it offers a high-level view of what happened through the years with GhostBSD, where the project stands today, and where we want to take it next. As you may know, GhostBSD is a user-friendly desktop BSD operating system built with FreeBSD. Its mission is to deliver a simple, stable, and accessible desktop experience for users who want FreeBSD’s power without the complexity of manual setup. I started this journey as a non-technical user. I dreamed of a BSD that anyone could use. ↫ Eric Turgeon at the FreeBSD Foundation’s website I’m very glad to see this article published on the website of the FreeBSD Foundation. I firmly believe that especially FreeBSD has all the components to become an excellent desktop alternative to desktop Linux distributions, especially now that the Linux world is moving fast with certain features and components not everyone likes. FreeBSD could serve as a valid alternative. GhostBSD plays an important role in this. It offers not just an easily installable FreeBSD desktop, but also several tools to make managing such an installation easier, like in-house graphical user interfaces for managing Wi-Fi and other networks, backups, updates, installing software, and more. They also recently moved from UFS to ZFS, and intend to develop graphical tools to expose ZFS’s features to users. GhostBSD can always use more contributors, so if you have the skills, interest, and time, do give it a go.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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You are not needed
You want more “AI”? No? Well, too damn bad, here’s “AI” in your file manager. With AI actions in File Explorer, you can interact more deeply with your files by right-clicking to quickly take actions like editing images or summarizing documents. Like with Click to Do, AI actions in File Explorer allow you to stay in your flow while leveraging the power of AI to take advantage of editing tools in apps or Copilot functionality without having to open your file. AI actions in File Explorer are easily accessible – to try out AI actions in File Explorer, just right-click on a file and you will see a new AI actions entry on the content menu that allows you to choose from available options for your file. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Blogs What, you don’t like it? There, “AI” that reads all your email and sifts through your Google Drive to barf up stunt, soulless replies. Gmail’s smart replies, which suggest potential replies to your emails, will be able to pull information from your Gmail inbox and from your Google Drive and better match your tone and style, all with help from Gemini, the company announced at I/O. ↫ Jay Peters at The Verge Ready to submit? No? Your browser now has “AI” integrated and will do your browsing for usyou. Starting tomorrow, Gemini in Chrome will begin rolling out on desktop to Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. who use English as their Chrome language on Windows and macOS. This first version allows you to easily ask Gemini to clarify complex information on any webpage you’re reading or summarize information. In the future, Gemini will be able to work across multiple tabs and navigate websites on your behalf. ↫ Josh Woodward Mercy? You want mercy? You sure give up easily, but we’re not done yet. We destroyed internet search and now we’re replacing it with “AI”, and you will like it. Announced today at Google I/O, AI Mode is now available to all US users. The focused version of Google Search distills results into AI-generated summaries with links to certain topics. Unlike AI Overviews, which appear above traditional search results, AI Mode is a dedicated interface where you interact almost exclusively with AI. ↫ Ben Schoon at 9To5Google We’re going to assume control of your phone, too. The technology powering Gemini Live’s camera and screen sharing is called Project Astra. It’s available as an Android app for trusted testers, and Google today unveiled agentic capabilities for Project Astra, including how it can control your Android phone. ↫ Abner Li at 9To5Google And just to make sure our “AI” can control your phone, we’ll let it instruct developers how to make applications, too. That’s precisely the problem Stitch aims to solve – Stitch is a new experiment from Google Labs that allows you to turn simple prompt and image inputs into complex UI designs and frontend code in minutes. ↫ Vincent Nallatamby, Arnaud Benard, and Sam El-Husseini You are not needed. You will be replaced. Submit.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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Jwno: a highly customisable tiling WM for Windows built with Janet
Jwno is a highly customizable tiling window manager for Windows 10/11, built with Janet and ❤️. It brings to your desktop magical parentheses power, which, I assure you, is not suspicious at all, and totally controllable. ↫ Jwno documentation Yes, it’s a Lisp system, so open your bag of spare parentheses and start configuring and customising it, because you’re going to need it if you want to use Jwno to its fullest. In general, Jwno works as a keyboard driven tiling window manager. When a new window shows up, it tries to transform the window so it fits in the layout you defined. You can then use customized key bindings to modify the layout or manipulate your windows, rather than drag things around using the mouse. But, since a powerful generic scripting engine is built-in, you can literally do anything with it. ↫ Jwno documentation It’s incredibly lightweight, comes as a single executable, integrates perfectly with Windows’ native virtual desktop and window management features, has support for REPL, and much more.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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Making video games in 2025 (without an engine)
I genuinely believe making games without a big “do everything” engine can be easier, more fun, and often less overhead. I am not making a “do everything” game and I do not need 90% of the features these engines provide. I am very particular about how my games feel and look, and how I interact with my tools. I often find the default feature implementations in large engines like Unity so lacking I end up writing my own anyway. Eventually, my projects end up being mostly my own tools and systems, and the engine becomes just a vehicle for a nice UI and some rendering… At which point, why am I using this engine? What is it providing me? Why am I letting a tool potentially destroy my ability to work when they suddenly make unethical and terrible business decisions? Or push out an update that they require to run my game on consoles, that also happens to break an entire system in my game, forcing me to rewrite it? Why am I fighting this thing daily for what essentially becomes a glorified asset loader and editor UI framework, by the time I’m done working around their default systems? ↫ Noel Berry Interesting and definitely unique perspective, as I feel most game developers just pick one of the existing big engines and work from there. I’m not saying either option is wrong, but I do feel like the dependence on the popular engines can potentially harm the game industry as a whole, as it reduced diversity, drains valuable knowledge and expertise, and leaves developers – especially smaller ones – at the mercy of a few big players. Perhaps not every game needs to be made in Unity or Unreal.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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On the relationship between Qt and KDE
Volker Hilsheimer, chief maintainer of the Qt project, says he has learned lessons from the painful Qt 5 to Qt 6 transition, the importance of Qt Bridges for using Qt from any language, and the significance of the relationship with the Linux KDE desktop. ↫ Tim Anderson at Dev Class Qt plays a significant role in the open source desktop world in particular, because it’s the framework KDE uses. Hilsheimer notes that KDE’s role in the Qt community is actually quite important, because not only is it a source of people learning how to use Qt and who can thus make contributions to the project, KDE also tends to use the latest Qt versions, creating a lot of confidence among the wider Qt community to also adopt the latest versions. The relationship with KDE and Qt is an interesting one, and sometimes leads to questions about the future availability of the open source edition of Qt since the Qt Company licenses Qt under a dual-license structure (both open and proprietary). To avoid any uncertainty, KDE and Qt have an agreement that covers pretty much every possible scenario and which is worded to ensure the availability of Qt as an open source framework. KDE, through the KDE Free Qt Foundation, has a number rights and options to ensure the availability of Qt as an open source framework. I’m no lawyer, so I might get some of the details wrong, but the main points are that if the Qt Company ever decides to discontinue the open source edition of Qt, the KDE Free Qt Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license within 12 months. The same applies to any addition to Qt which are not released as open source; they must be released under an open source license within 12 months of initial release. This agreement remains valid in the case of buyouts, mergers, or bankruptcies. This agreement has existed in one form or another since the late ’90s, and has survived Qt being owned by Nokia and Digia, as well as various other organisational changes. Despite the issue of Qt’s ownership coming up every now and then, the agreement is pretty airtight, and considering its longevity there’s no reason to be worried about it at all. Still, this structure is clearly more complex and less straightforward than, say, the status of GTK and its relationship to GNOME, so it’s not entirely unreasonable the issue comes up every now and then. I wonder if we’ll ever see this situation become less complex, without the need for special agreements. While it wouldn’t make a practical difference, it would make things less… Legalese.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: mainframe with a unique caching strategy
Mainframes still play a vital role in today, providing extremely high uptime and low latency for financial transactions. Telum II is IBM’s latest mainframe processor, and is designed unlike any other server CPU. It only has eight cores, but runs them at a very high 5.5 GHz and feeds them with 360 MB of on-chip cache. IBM also includes a DPU for accelerating IO, along with an on-board AI accelerator. Telum II is implemented on Samsung’s leading edge 5 nm process node. IBM’s presentation has already been covered by other outlets. Therefore I’ll focus on what I feel like is Telum (II)’s most interesting features. DRAM latency and bandwidth limitations often mean good caching is critical to performance, and IBM has a often deployed interesting caching solutions. Telum II is no exception, carrying forward a virtual L3 and virtual L4 strategy from prior IBM chips. ↫ Chester Lam at Chips and Cheese If you’ve been keeping track, you can possibly deduce that I’m bit of a sucker for IBM’s mainframes and big POWER machines. These Telum II processors are absolutely wild.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android
I recently learned something that blew my mind; you can run a full desktop Linux environment on your phone. That’s a graphical environment via X11 with real window management and compositing, Firefox comfortably playing YouTube (including working audio), and a status bar with system stats. It launches in less than a second and feels snappy. ↫ Hold the Robot In and of itself, this is a neat trick most of us are probably aware of. Running a full Linux distribution on an Android phone using chroot is an awesome party trick, but I doubt many people take this concept to its logical conclusion by connecting it up to a display, keyboard, and mouse, and use it as their mobile workstation. Well, the author of this article did, and he took it even one step further by replacing the display part of the logical conclusion with AR glasses. The AR glasses in question were a pair of Xreal Air 2 Pro, which put a 120Hz 1080p display in front of your eyes using Sony micro-OLED panels. This will create the illusion of a 130″ screen with a 46° field of view, from a pair of glasses that honestly do not feel that much more massive than regular sunglasses or some of the thicker glasses frames some people like. I’m honestly kind of impressed this is possible these days. Add in a keyboard and mouse, and you’ve got a mobile workstation that takes up very little space, especially since you’re carrying your phone with you at all times anyway. Of course, you have to be comfortable with using Linux – no Windows or macOS here – and the software side of the equation requires more setup and fiddling than I thought it would, but the end result is exactly like using a regular Linux desktop, but on your phone and a pair of AR glasses instead of on a laptop or desktop. If I had the cash to throw around on fun side projects like this (you can help with that, actually, through Ko-Fi donations), I would totally order a pair of these Xreal glasses to try this out.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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Microsoft releases WSL as open source, announces CLI text editor to replace the MS-DOS Editor
Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo: Will this be Open Source? · Issue #1 · microsoft/WSL. That means that the code that powers WSL is now available on GitHub at Microsoft/WSL and open sourced to the community! You can download WSL and build it from source, add new fixes and features and participate in WSL’s active development. ↫ Pierre Boulay at the Windows Blogs Windows Subsystem for Linux seems like a relatively popular choice for people who want a modern, Linux-based development environment but are stuck using Windows. I’m happy to see Microsoft releasing it as open source, which is no longer something to be surprised by at this point in time. It leaves one to wonder how long it’s going to be before more parts of Windows will be released as open source, since it could allow Microsoft’s leadership to justify some serious job cuts. I honestly have no idea how close to the real thing Windows Subsystem for Linux is, and if it can actually fully replace a proper Linux installation, with all the functionality and performance that entails. I’m no developer, have no interest in Windows, so I’ve never actually tried it. I’d love to hear some experiences from all of you. Aside from releasing WSL as open source, Microsoft also released a new command-line text editor – simply called Edit. It’s also open source, in its early stages, and is basically the equivalent of Nano. It turns out 32bit versions of Windows up until Windows 10 still shipped with the MS-DOS Editor, but obviously that one needed a replacement. It already has support for multiple documents, mouse support, and a few more basic features.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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With how user-hostile Windows and macOS are, is it any wonder people long for computers from the ’80s and ’90s?
Every so often people yearn for a lost (1980s or so) era of ‘single user computers’, whether these are simple personal computers or high end things like Lisp machines and Smalltalk workstations. It’s my view that the whole idea of a 1980s style “single user computer” is not what we actually want and has some significant flaws in practice. ↫ Chris Siebenmann I think the premise of this entire article is flawed, and borders on being a strawman argument. I honestly don’t think there’s many people out there who genuinely and seriously want to use an ’80s home computer for all their computing tasks, but this article seems to think that there are. Virtually every single person expressing interest in and a desire for classic computers does so from a point of nostalgia, as a learning experience, or as a hobby. They’re definitely not interested in using any of those ’80s machine to do their banking or to collaborate with their colleagues. Additionally, the problems and issues people have with modern computing platforms is not that they are too complex, but that they are no longer designed with the user in mind. Windows, macOS, iOS; they’re all first and foremost designed to extract money from you through ads, upsells, nag screens, and similar anti-user features, and it’s those things that people are sick of. Coincidentally, they are all things we didn’t have to deal with back in the ’80s and ’90s. In other words, remove the user-hostility from modern operating systems, and people wouldn’t complain about them so much. Which seems rather obvious, doesn’t it? It’s why using a Linux desktop like Fedora is such a breath of fresh air. There’s no upsells for cloud storage or streaming services, no restrictions on what I can and cannot install to protect some multitrillion euro company’s revenue streams, no ads and nag screens infesting my operating system – it’s just an operating system waiting for me to tell it what it do, and then it does it. It’s wild how increasingly revolutionary that’s becoming. Whenever I am forced to interact with Windows 11 or whatever the current version of macOS is, I feel such a profound and deep sadness for what they’ve become, and it seems only natural to me that this sadness is fueling a longing for back when these systems weren’t so user-hostile.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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Render a Guitar Pro score in real time on Linux
Tuxguitar is a quite powerful application written in a mixture of Java / C. It is able to render a score in real time either via Fluidsynth or via pure MIDI. The development of Tuxguitar started in 2008 on Sourceforce and after a halt in 2022, the project restarted on Github and is still actively developed. The goal of this article is to try to render a score via Tuxguitar, and various other applications connected to Tuxguitar, via Jack or Pipewire-Jack. The score used throughout this article will be The Pursuit Of Vikings by the band Amon Amarth. It has 2 guitars, a bass and a drum track. ↫ Yann Collette at Fedora Magazine If you’re into audio production and are considering using Linux for your audio needs, this article is a good starting point.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?
Last time, we looked at the legacy icons in progman.exe. But what about moricons.dll? Here’s a table of the icons that were present in the original Windows 3.1 moricons.dll file (in file order) and the programs that Windows used the icons for. As with the icons in progman.exe, these icons are mapped from executables according to the information in the APPS.INF file. ↫ Raymond Chen These icons age like a fine wine. They’re clear, well-designed, easy to read, and make extraordinary good use of the limited amount of available pixels. Icons from Mac OS, BeOS, OS/2, and a few others from the same era also look timeless, and I wish modern designers learned a thing or two from these.
OSnews
~Created Sat May 24 01:06:12 2025
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