fidzu : computers

Astronomers have identified what may be the first genuinely green star, a white dwarf called WD J1330+6435 located about 326 light-years from Earth. Space.com reports: The researchers found that some dead star white dwarfs can go a little green around the gills after snacking on orbiting planets. An example of this is WD J1330+6435, a cool white dwarf located around 326 light-years away, which has been accreting rocky material from a planetary companion. This has enriched its atmosphere with calcium, lithium, and sodium, and the team's model suggests this would have led WD J1330+6435 to adopt a green hue. [...] The researchers think that no other star, living or dead, has ever been credibly reported as green. That makes WD J1330+6435 the first known genuinely green star. "The traces of sodium in the atmosphere of this white dwarf absorb the orange part of the spectrum, leaving behind a ghostly green glow," Hollands said. "Imagine standing on a planet and looking up at a green star. It feels like something out of science fiction." The researchers also discovered what may be the reddest star ever observed, the white dwarf WD J1011+2845, located just 48 light-years away. The findings have been published in the journal RAS Techniques and Instruments.

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17 Oct 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Prediction market boosters often tout the platforms as barometers of public opinion, or even "truth machines" offering a clearer picture of where things are headed than polling or other data. In 2024, for example, Kalshi beat many pollsters in forecasting the outcome of the US presidential race. But their trading activity can also tell more perplexing stories. Two global election markets on Polymarket's offshore platform, for instance, generated over $600 million in trading volume, far more than most political markets typically attract. Most of the activity took place buying and selling contracts tied to long-shot candidates who ultimately did not win. The report focuses on suspicious trading activity surrounding elections in Ethiopia and Romania, where researchers uncovered $284 million in questionable trades tied to Ethiopia's election and periods when 99.6% of trading volume in a Romanian election market was flagged as suspected "wash trading." According to Wired, "wash trading is a type of market manipulation in which accounts repeatedly buy and sell assets to create the illusion of heavy trading activity, when in reality, money is simply moving back and forth." Some accounts may also be artificially inflating their activity to qualify for potential cryptocurrency token rewards, a practice known as "activity farming." In response to the Ethiopian trading activity, Polymarket told Wired that the company "immediately flagged this activity, investigated, and blocked the accounts from trading." The company did not explain why the suspicious trades were allowed to continue for months before action was taken.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Oct 2026 3:30am GMT

It's been two years since my initial post about making GNOME OS an end-user general purpose OS. Today, we're excited to announce that we've hit a major milestone! TL;DR: We're launching a new edition called "GNOME OS Preview", which is built from the latest stable GNOME release. This means that GNOME OS is no longer just a nightly OS for GNOME developers and testers! ↫ Aaron Ardiri A number of changes and improvements have made the move from nightly status to preview status possible. They've made GNOME OS handle environments with limited amounts of RAM much better - not a luxury, these days - including the ability to dynamically increase the swap space if needed. In addition, the work to make it much easier to install and test daily Flatpak builds of applications is now part of GNOME OS, as is the effort to make command-line utilities manageable in the same way as Flatpaks. As the blog post notes, there's still a ton of work left to do before GNOME OS is ready for everyone. They're going to bet heavily on systemd-homed to enable, among other things, per-user disk encryption, and there's a new installer coming, as well. They also want to ship GNOME's preinstalled applications as Flatpaks, integrate delta updates, and much more. It all looks incredibly appealing, even if I am not the target user for something like GNOME OS.

16 Oct 2026 11:54pm GMT

The collaborative reverse-engineering site decomp.dev is shutting down, with its administrator saying AI has made game decompilation so fast and accessible that the community's human-driven model has effectively broken down. "The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which ones are done by AI," reports 404 Media. From the report: "Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time consuming task, on the scale of years for any moderately-sized game with a number of active contributors," the pseudonymous admin of decomp.dev, who goes by Encounter, wrote on the site. But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game: "They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance," Encounter wrote. "It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Oct 2026 11:00pm GMT

The actions could have resulted in criminal charges had humans been behind the keyboard.

16 Oct 2026 8:59pm GMT

This repository contains approximately 1 GB of historical Palm OS development material, collected over many years of working with the platform. The archive includes a mixture of publicly distributed development resources, personal development material, technical references, and historical artifacts. ↫ Aaron Ardiri An incredible resource for anyone wishing to dive into Palm OS programming and development in this day and age.

16 Oct 2026 8:47pm GMT

Discord user flagged AI CSAM, triggering arrest of New Jersey deputy AG.

16 Oct 2026 8:20pm GMT

There are still significant hurdles ahead, both technical and legislative.

16 Oct 2026 7:41pm GMT

OpenVMS isn't exactly the easiest platform to get into, with even the first major hurdle - licensing! - being a bit of a complex issue. To address this and other issues people new to OpenVMS might run into, VSI, the company currently developing OpenVMS, launched its new VSI How-to Portal. For now, it covers things like licensing, installing and updating OpenVMS for x86, TCP/IP configuration, and setting up SSH. The company plans to expand the portal with more articles based on customer and user feedback, so hopefully more information will appear soon. Most of us are probably not particularly not particularly experienced with OpenVMS, so having a portal like this can really help get you started.

15 Oct 2026 11:55pm 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