fidzu : computers

Anyone remember the KDE 4.0 themes Oxygen and Air? Well, several KDE developers have been working tirelessly to bring them back, which means they're patching it up, fixing bugs, and generally making these classic themes work well in the current releases of KDE Plasma 6. The last post regarding work on fixing Oxygen was a month and a half ago. With all that's happened in between, it feels like so much more time has actually passed. With this post, I'd like to do a sort of mid-term update summing up all of the improvements done so far. These improvements are not just my work, but also, as you'll see, the work of the lead Oxygen designer Nuno Pinheiro, of several seasoned KDE developers, and of new contributors to Oxygen as well. ↫ Filip Fila The effort to bring these themes back go much beyond just making them nominally work; the developers and designers are also making sure the themes work properly with all the new features that have come to KDE since the 4.x and 5.x days, like adaptive and floating panels, various forms of blur, and a ton more - which includes making sure the themes are fully compatible with Wayland, which introduced a slew of new visual glitches and issues to these old themes in recent years. They are also working on improving, updating, and expanding the Oxygen icon set, which should surely bring back a ton of memories. This work involves not just designing new icons for applications and other things that didn't exist back when Oxygen was current, but also fixing old icons that look blurry on modern setups, addressing cases where monochrome and colourful icons mismatch, and so on. They're clearly taking this very seriously. It seems to be an organic effort more and more people got involved with as time passed, and they're aiming to have these themes ready for Plasma 6.7, to be released in June of this year. You can already try the current versions today, but they do require the absolute latest version of KDE Plasma to work properly. More improvements are planned for the coming weeks. This whole thing brings a massive smile to my face, and is such a perfect illustration of why I love the KDE project and its approach and spirit. At this point in time, I personally can't imagine using any other desktop environment.

06 Apr 2026 11:31pm GMT

OpenAI is proposing (PDF) sweeping policy changes to help manage the societal disruption caused by advanced AI, including taxes on automated labor, a public wealth fund, and experiments with a four-day workweek. The company said the policy document offered a series of "initial ideas" to address the risk of "jobs and entire industries being disrupted" by the adoption of AI tools. Business Insider reports: Among the core policy suggestions is a public wealth fund, which would see lawmakers and AI companies work together to invest in long-term assets linked to the AI boom, with returns distributed directly to citizens. Another is that the government should encourage and incentivize employers to experiment with four-day workweeks with no loss in pay and offer "benefits bonuses" tied to productivity gains from new AI tools. The policy document also suggests lawmakers modernize the tax system and shift the tax base to corporate income and capital gains, rather than relying on labor income and payroll taxes that could be hit by a wave of AI-powered job losses. It also recommends taxes related to automated labor. OpenAI also called for the accelerated expansion of the US's electricity grid, which is already feeling the strain from a wave of data center construction and energy demand for training ever more powerful AI models.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

06 Apr 2026 11:00pm GMT

The charter renewal gives Kennedy broad authority to pick anyone for the panel.

06 Apr 2026 10:34pm GMT

New model can respond to disruptions and figure out moves it wasn't trained for.

06 Apr 2026 10:18pm GMT

A teardown video of LG's never-released Rollable phone helps explain why rollable phones never became a real product category: they were likely too expensive, fragile, and complicated to manufacture at scale. "The complexity of the internals would have made the Rollable extremely expensive to manufacture, and it would have demanded a high price tag," reports Ars Technica. "Durability is also a big concern. There's just a lot going on inside this phone, with multiple motors, springy arms, tracks, and a screen that has to loop around the back. [...] It seems unlikely the LG Rollable could have survived daily use for multiple years." From the report: The LG Rollable is just one of several rollable concept phones that appeared throughout the early 2020s. Flexible OLED screens had finally become affordable, leading to foldable phones like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold. Although, "affordable" is relative here. Foldables were and still are very expensive devices. Based on what we can see of the complex inner workings of the LG Rollable, these devices may have commanded even higher prices. Noted YouTube phone destroyer JerryRigEverything managed to snag a working prototype LG Rollable. It may even be the unit LG demoed at CES 2021. The device looks like a regular phone at first glance, but a quick swipe activates the motor, which unfurls additional screen real estate from around the back. This makes the viewable area about 40 percent larger without the added thickness of a foldable. The device expands with the aid of two tiny motors, which are attached via straight teeth to an internal track. The screen assembly has zipper-like teeth that keep it locked into the frame as it moves. The motors make a surprising amount of noise when operating, so LG designed the phone to play a musical chime to hide the sound. While the motor does the heavy lifting, the phone also has a lattice of articulating spring-loaded arms inside that keep the OLED panel even as the frame slides side to side. The battery and motherboard sit in a tray that allows the back of the phone to expand as the OLED rolls into view. This is a prototype phone, featuring a chunky frame and visible screws. That helped Zack Nelson from JerryRigEverything successfully disassemble and reassemble the phone. So this little bit of mobile history was not destroyed, and the teardown gives us a good look at how LG was hoping to attract new customers before calling it quits.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

06 Apr 2026 10:00pm GMT

Court rules US preempts states from applying gambling laws to prediction markets.

06 Apr 2026 9:56pm GMT

The Associated Press is offering buyouts to U.S. journalists "as part of an acceleration away from the focus on newspaper journalism that sustained the company since the mid-1800s," the not-for-profit outlet reported today. AP says it is making the move from a position of strength, responding to shrinking newspaper revenue and growing demand from digital, broadcast, and tech clients. "The AP is not in trouble," said Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP. "We're making these changes from a position of strength but we're doing so now to recognize our changing customer base." From the report: The news organization is becoming more focused on visual journalism and developing new revenue sources, particularly through companies investing in artificial intelligence, to cope with the economic collapse of many legacy news outlets. Once the lion's share of AP's revenue, big newspaper companies now account for 10% of its income. "We're not a newspaper company and we haven't been for quite some time," [said Pace]. Despite changes -- the company has doubled the number of video journalists it employs in the United States since 2022 -- remnants of a staffing structure built largely to provide stories to newspapers and broadcasters in individual states have remained. That has its roots well back in American history; the AP was started in the mid-19th century by New York newspapers looking to share the costs of reporting outside their immediate territory. The number of AP journalists who will lose jobs is murky, in part intentionally. The AP does not say how many journalists it employs, though it has a large international presence as well as its U.S. staff. Pace said the AP's goal is to reduce its global staff by less than 5%. The Marketing and Media Alliance estimated the AP had 3,700 staffers, but it was not clear when that estimate was made. Since buyouts are being offered now to only U.S. journalists, it stands to reason that the cut among that workforce will be more than 5%. Whether there are layoffs depends on how many people take the offer, Pace said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

06 Apr 2026 9:00pm GMT

This is a great post, but obviously it hasn't convinced me: The folks waving their arms and yelling about recent models' capabilities have a point: the thing works. This project finished in three weeks. Compare that to Ringspace, a similarly-sized project that took me about six months of nights and early mornings to complete, while not doing my day job or being Dad to an amazing, but demanding toddler. I simply could not have built this project as well or as quickly without help. And as other developers have noted, this is the help that's showing up. I'm not entirely onboard with Mike Masnick's optimistic view of this technology's democratizing power. I don't think it's as easy to separate the tech from its provenance or corporate control. But CertGen, my certificate application, exists now. It didn't and couldn't without the help of a tool like Claude Code. Open source in particular needs to reckon with this, because the current situation of demanding developers starve and bleed themselves dry without support isn't tenable. We need to grapple with this. I'm not yet sure how it all breaks down, and anyone who says they do is lying, foolish, or fanatical. ↫ Michael Taggart If you disregard that "AI" models are trained on stolen data, that such data was prepared by exploited workers, that "AI" data centres have a hugely negative impact on the environment, that "AI" data centers are distorting the entire computing market, that "AI" models they feed the endless firehose of intentional misinformation, that they are wreaking havoc in education, that they increase your reliance on American big tech companies, that you pay "AI" companies for taking your work, that "AI" models are a vital component in the technofascist wet dreams of their creators, that they are the cornerstone of politicians' dream of ending anonymity, and that they contribute to racist and abusive policing, then yes, sometimes, they produce code that works and isn't total horseshit. It's a deeply depressing reversed "what have the Romans ever done for us?" that makes me sad, more than anything. I've seen so many otherwise smart, caring, and genuine people just shove all of these massive downsides aside for the mere novelty, the peer pressure, the occasional sense that their "lines of code" metric is going up. It's the digital equivalent of rolling coal.

06 Apr 2026 7:48pm GMT

If you're using Windows or macOS and have Adobe Creative Cloud installed, you may want to take a peek at your hosts file. It turns out Adobe adds a bunch of entries into the hosts file, for a very stupid reason. They're using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed when you visit on their website. When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript: https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png If the DNS entry in your hosts file is present, your browser will therefore connect to their server, so they know you have Creative Cloud installed, otherwise the load fails, which they detect. They used to just hit http://localhost:<various ports>/cc.png which connected to your Creative Cloud app directly, but then Chrome started blocking Local Network Access, so they had to do this hosts file hack instead. ↫ thenickdude at Reddit At what point does a commercial software suite become malware?

05 Apr 2026 1:59pm GMT

I have discovered and shared ~800 open source Rust CLI projects over the past 3 years.

03 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

All I wanted was to learn how to play guitar, but ended up building a DIY kit for it.

28 Mar 2026 12:00am 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