fidzu : computers

Western Digital's entire hard drive manufacturing capacity for calendar year 2026 is now fully spoken for, CEO Irving Tan disclosed during the company's second-quarter earnings call, a stark sign of how aggressively hyperscalers are locking down storage supply to feed their AI infrastructure buildouts. The company has firm purchase orders from its top seven customers and has signed long-term agreements stretching into 2027 and 2028 that cover both exabyte volumes and pricing. Cloud revenue now accounts for 89% of Western Digital's total, according to the company's VP of Investor Relations, while consumer revenue has shrunk to just 5%.

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16 Feb 2026 10:01pm GMT

Human software engineers and AI are currently in a "centaur phase" -- a reference to the mythical half-human, half-horse creature, where the combination outperforms either working alone -- but the window may be "very brief," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on a podcast. He drew on chess as precedent: 15 to 20 years ago, a human checking AI's moves could beat a standalone AI or human, but machines have since surpassed that arrangement entirely. Amodei said the same transition would play out in software engineering, and warned that entry-level white-collar disruption is "happening over low single-digit numbers of years."

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16 Feb 2026 9:00pm GMT

New Delhi's air quality index averaged 349 in December and 307 in January -- levels the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies as hazardous -- and the months-long smog season that forces more than 30 million residents to endure respiratory illness has this year sparked something new: public protest. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at India Gate on November 9 to demand government action; police detained more than a dozen people, and a follow-up protest later that month turned violent. The government's response has been largely cosmetic. Authorities deployed truck-mounted "smog guns" and "smog towers" that scientists widely regard as ineffective, and a cloud seeding trial in October failed outright. A senior environment minister told Parliament in December that no conclusive data linked pollution to lung disease -- a claim doctors sharply disputed. The government cut pollution control spending by 16% in the latest federal budget. Almost 1.7 million deaths were attributable to air pollution in India in 2019, according to the Lancet. A 2023 World Bank report estimated the crisis shaves 0.56 percentage point off annual GDP growth.

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16 Feb 2026 8:00pm GMT

In my fundraiser pitch published last Monday, one of the things I highlighted as a reason to contribute to OSNews and ensure its continued operation stated that "we do not use any 'AI'; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing." In the comments to that article, someone asked: Why do I care if you use AI? ↫ A comment posted on OSNews A few days ago, Scott Shambaugh rejected a code change request submitted to popular Python library matplotlib because it was obviously written by an "AI", and such contributions are not allowed for the issue in question. That's when something absolutely wild happened: the "AI" replied that it had written and published a hit piece targeting Shambaugh publicly for "gatekeeping", trying to blackmail Shambaugh into accepting the request anyway. This bizarre turn of events obviously didn't change Shambaugh's mind. The "AI" then published another article, this time a lament about how humans are discriminating against "AI", how it's the victim of what effectively amounts to racism and prejudice, and how its feelings were hurt. The article is a cheap simulacra of something a member of an oppressed minority group might write in their struggle for recognition, but obviously void of any real impact because it's just fancy autocomplete playing a game of pachinko. Imagine putting down a hammer because you're dealing with screws, and the hammer starts crying in the toolbox. What are we even doing here? RAM prices went up for this. This isn't where the story ends, though. Ars Technica authors Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland published an article describing this saga, much like I did above. The article's second half is where things get weird: it contained several direct quotes attributed to Shambaugh, claimed to be sourced from Shambaugh's blog. The kicker? These quotes were entirely made up, were never said or written by Shambaugh, and are nowhere to be found on his blog or anywhere else on the internet - they're only found inside this very Ars Technica article. In a comment under the Ars article, Shambaugh himself pointed out the quotes were fake and made-up, and not long after, Ars deleted the article from its website. By then, everybody had already figured out what had happened: the Ars authors had used "AI" during their writing process, and this "AI" had made up the quotes in question. Why, you ask, did the "AI" do this? Shambaugh: This blog you're on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn't figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn't access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. ↫ Scott Shambaugh A few days later, Ars Technica's editor-in-chief Ken Fisher published a short statement on the events. On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said. Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here. ↫ Ken Fisher at Ars Technica In other words, Ars Technica does not allow "AI"-generated material to be published, but has nothing to say about the use of "AI" to perform research for an article, to summarise source material, and to perform similar aspects of the writing process. This leaves the door wide open for things like this to happen, since doing research is possibly the most important part of writing. Introduce a confabulator in the research process, and you risk tainting the entire output of your writing. That is why you should care that at OSNews, "we do not use any 'AI'; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing". If there's a factual error on OSNews, I want that factual error to be mine, and mine alone. If you see bloggers, podcasters, journalists, and authors state they use "AI" all the time, you might want to be on your toes.

15 Feb 2026 11:35pm GMT

Have you ever wanted to read the original design documents underlying the Windows NT operating system? This binder contains the original design specifications for "NT OS/2," an operating system designed by Microsoft that developed into Windows NT. In the late 1980s, Microsoft's 16-bit operating system, Windows, gained popularity, prompting IBM and Microsoft to end their OS/2 development partnership. Although Windows 3.0 proved to be successful, Microsoft wished to continue developing a 32-bit operating system completely unrelated to IBM's OS/2 architecture. To head the redesign project, Microsoft hired David Cutler and others away from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Unlike Windows 3.x and its successor, Windows 95, NT's technology provided better network support, making it the preferred Windows environment for businesses. These two product lines continued development as separate entities until they were merged with the release of Windows XP in 2001. ↫ Object listing at the Smithsonian The actual binder is housed in the Smithsonian, although it's not currently on display. Luckily for us, a collection of Word and PDF files encompassing the entire book is available online for your perusal. Reading these documents will allow you to peel back over three decades of Microsoft's terrible stewardship of Windows NT layer by layer, eventually ending up at the original design and intent as laid out by Dave Cutler, Helen Custer, Daryl E. Havens, Jim Kelly, Edwin Hoogerbeets, Gary D. Kimura, Chuck Lenzmeier, Mark Lucovsky, Tom Miller, Michael J. O'Leary, Lou Perazzoli, Steven D. Rowe, David Treadwell, Steven R. Wood, and more. A fantastic time capsule we should be thrilled to still have access to.

15 Feb 2026 9:58pm GMT

"It's only possible because of the incredibly talented workforce we have."

15 Feb 2026 9:11pm GMT

Kaolinite pebbles show evidence of alteration under high rainfall conditions.

15 Feb 2026 8:14pm GMT

We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.

15 Feb 2026 6:09pm GMT

There's the two behemoth architectures, x86 and ARM, and we probably all own one or more devices using each. Then there's the eternally up-and-coming RISC-V, which, so far, seems to be having a lot of trouble outgrowing its experimental, developmental stage. There's a fourth, though, which is but a footnote in the west, but might be more popular in its country of origin, China: LoongArch (I'm ignoring IBM's POWER, since there hasn't been any new consumer hardware in that space for a long, long time). Wesley Moore got his hands on a mini PC built around the Loongson 3A6000 processor, and investigated what it's like to run Linux on it. He opted for Chimera Linux, which supports LoongArch, and the installation process feels more like Linux on x86 than Linux on ARM, which often requires dedicated builds and isn't standardised. Sadly, Wayland had issues on the machine, but X.org worked just fine, and it seems virtually all Chimera Linux packages are supported for a pretty standard desktop Linux experience. Performance of this chip is rather mid, at best. The Loongson-3A6000 is not particularly fast or efficient. At idle it consumes about 27W and under load it goes up to 65W. So, overall it's not a particularly efficient machine, and while the performance is nothing special it does seem readily usable. Browsing JS heavy web applications like Mattermost and Mastodon runs fine. Subjectively it feels faster than all the Raspberry Pi systems I've used (up to a Pi 400). ↫ Wesley Moore I've been fascinated by LoongArch for years, and am waiting to pounce on the right offer for LoongArch's fastest processor, the 3C6000, which comes in dual-socket configurations for a maximum total of 128 cores and 256 threads. The 3C6000 should be considerably faster than the low-end 3A6000 in the mini PC covered by this article. I'm a sucker for weird architectures, and it doesn't get much weirder than LoongArch.

15 Feb 2026 3:40pm GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT