fidzu : computers

Reddit is overhauling its homepage with separate "For You" and "Following" feeds, with the former combining posts from subscribed communities and algorithmic recommendations based on users' interests and activity. The Verge reports: It's a big shift for the platform, but not an entirely surprising one, as Reddit hasn't been shy about wanting to switch up the homepage. Earlier this year, the company announced it would be deprecating r/all, which surfaced posts that were popular across the platform, as part of its "ongoing efforts to simplify Reddit and improve Home feed personalization." "This new feed experience is a first step in helping drive discovery that leads to something novel and relevant -- an idea, a connection, a unique perspective, or even a new interest," Reddit says. "A more human internet is not just something you sit back and watch, it is something you find value in and want to participate in."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Oct 2026 4:00pm GMT

Slashdot reader fjo3 shares an article from Wired: The internet must be put out of its misery. Any rational observer can admit that the current iteration of the web -- and the social fabric woven there -- is not what they signed up for. Symptoms of advanced cultural decay can no longer be ignored. This thing is eating itself. Giants including Meta and Google have been forced to settle massive consumer lawsuits brought over privacy violations and mental health harms allegedly caused by the addictive mechanisms of their platforms. Schools are banning smartphones as multiple countries institute social media restrictions for under-16s. Parents are in a panic about their kids aspiring to careers as social media celebrities, losing themselves in a vast ecosystem of online casinos, or joining extremist movements. Generative AI, briefly considered an amusing novelty, is now a turbocharged slop engine for the web, filling feeds and comment sections with useless, grotesque content. As humans scroll past headlines about AI taking their jobs, confusing fantasy for reality, and contributing to cognitive decline, any consumer appeal the technology might have is turning to anguish. The data centers that power it have become increasingly unpopular, and politically radioactive. To be online, many now admit, is to be endlessly manipulated and exploited. In December, Oxford University Press declared rage bait to be the word of the year, noting that use of the term had tripled over the previous 12 months. The lexical spike represented a heightened awareness that monetized social accounts churn out bad-faith takes and extremist content, automating this abusive behavior with generative AI, simply to profit off hostile engagement. Billionaire oligarchs have opened the floodgates to such inauthentic activity, conspiracy-mongering, and hate speech by rolling back moderation. In short, when you hang around online in 2026, you see little worth saving. Perhaps a decade ago, you felt that the glimmers of community and joy, of artistic and intellectual exchange, were enough to balance out the toxic junk. No longer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Oct 2026 3:00pm GMT

"NASA desperately needs SpaceX, and SpaceX knows it, and Elon knows it."

29 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

Alphabet shares fell nearly 10% after Google disclosed that searches through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search, even as overall search revenue grew 12% year over year to $63.25 billion. The Register reports: Alphabet on Wednesday reported its Q3 results, which included news that its year-over-year search query growth rate is the highest it's been in the last five years. Some of that growth comes from users adopting "AI Mode" -- Google's latest LLM-powered search system. Google's revenue from search rose 12 percent year-over-year to $63.25 billion, a little lower than the 14.5 percent growth the company reported in last year's Q3. During Alphabet's earnings call, chief business officer Philipp Schindler said the slowdown was caused by "lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode." That's a worry given that Google is spending enormous sums on infrastructure. $51.4 billion went out the door in Q3, around two thirds of it going towards servers and networking equipment. The rest funded datacenter builds. That spending appears to have impacted profitability, as Alphabet reported $26.17 billion net income for the quarter. Last year's Q3, during which Google revenue was $102.35 billion, produced $35 billion net income. Schindler argued that AI search will pay off. "On AI Mode, many of these queries are upper funnel queries, allowing us to capture new, high-value commercial intent," he told investors. "In addition, the majority of AI Mode queries are incremental, creating more monetization opportunities over time." Google tried to seize one of those opportunities today, by turning on ads alongside AI Mode searches around the world, after first testing them in the US only. But for now, AI Mode searches aren't as lucrative as Google's existing search business, which brought in just under half of Alphabet's $125.8 billion quarterly revenue.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

Flag LinuxNetBSD made a seemingly small, but very welcome announcement today: they're adding a more user-friendly, easier to use command-line text editor to the base install. To ease the transition for new users, NetBSD -current now includes an alternative editor to vi(1) and xedit(1) in its base system, atto(1). It is a modeless screen-based editor similar to nano, pico, xedit, or emacs. It is only 48 kilobytes, making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system. ↫ NetBSD Foundation on Fedi Most guides and how-to article for operating systems like NetBSD assume the use of vi, and while I don't want to ignite a flamewar, vi isn't exactly the most approachable or friendly piece of software out there. My occassional text editing in the command line is all done through nano, but now I'm definitely curious to give atto a go. While other tech news websites are plastered with articles about a PC maker adding a touch screen to one of their laptops, we're talking about a new CLI text editor in NetBSD's base system. Priorities, folks.

29 Oct 2026 12:38am GMT

Windows 11 25H2, starting with build 26200.9550, now comes with something called CLAT. As organizations move toward IPv6-only and IPv6-mostly networks, some applications still depend on IPv4-only applications or services. Windows CLAT helps those applications continue to work when a network does not provide native IPv4 connectivity. CLAT is the client-side component of 464XLAT. It statelessly translates IPv4 traffic from the Windows client into IPv6 for transport across the network to a provider-side translator (PLAT), which provides stateful NAT64 translation to IPv4. ↫ Jim Alumbaugh at Microsoft's Networking Blog Yet another important component of the long, neverending transition to IPv6. Like endlessly cutting a cucumber in half, you'll never quite run out of cucumber to cut.

29 Oct 2026 12:28am GMT

Do you want a hobby operating system with a desktop for a microcontroller-based computer? Sylphide OS is a new project aiming to build just that. For the last few weeks, I've worked on a new pet project: an operating system for computers based on microcontrollers. There aren't many yet, but I expect them to be more and more common. Why MCU computers ? You get a relatively very simple platform, booting straight to your code (or almost), and you can understand the whole architecture. Exactly as it was with home computers long ago. And not at all what you get with modern computers. Even booting involves lot of very different systems, black magic, and even blog/proprietary software. ↫ Thomas Capricelli It's very early in development, but by building it atop FreeRTOS, Capricelli had a head-start. It's got a basic desktop, one that might need some changes to avoid the lawyers. The code's open source, of course.

29 Oct 2026 12:09am GMT

This Vulcan launch will be first to use a full complement of 6 solid rocket boosters.

28 Oct 2026 10:51pm GMT

Europe's Pan-Arctic Cable will bypass US to link Canada, Japan, and South Korea.

28 Oct 2026 10:35pm GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT