fidzu : computers

"Technology companies spent part of the 2010s trying to convince us that we would want an 8K display one day..." writes Ars Technica. "However, 8K never proved its necessity or practicality." LG Display is no longer making 8K LCD or OLED panels, FlatpanelsHD reported today... LG Electronics was the first and only company to sell 8K OLED TVs, starting with the 88-inch Z9 in 2019. In 2022, it lowered the price-of-entry for an 8K OLED TV by $7,000 by charging $13,000 for a 76.7-inch TV. FlatpanelsHD cited anonymous sources who said that LG Electronics would no longer restock the 2024 QNED99T, which is the last LCD 8K TV that it released. LG's 8K abandonment follows other brands distancing themselves from 8K. TCL, which released its last 8K TV in 2021, said in 2023 that it wasn't making more 8K TVs due to low demand. Sony discontinued its last 8K TVs in April and is unlikely to return to the market, as it plans to sell the majority ownership of its Bravia TVs to TCL. The tech industry tried to convince people that the 8K living room was coming soon. But since the 2010s, people have mostly adopted 4K. In September 2024, research firm Omdia reported that there were "nearly 1 billion 4K TVs currently in use." In comparison, 1.6 million 8K TVs had been sold since 2015, Paul Gray, Omdia's TV and video technology analyst, said, noting that 8K TV sales peaked in 2022. That helps explain why membership at the 8K Association, launched by stakeholders Samsung, TCL, Hisense, and panel maker AU Optronics in 2019, is dwindling. As of this writing, the group's membership page lists 16 companies, including just two TV manufacturers (Samsung and Panasonic). Membership no longer includes any major TV panel suppliers. At the end of 2022, the 8K Association had 33 members, per an archived version of the nonprofit's online membership page via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. "It wasn't hard to predict that 8K TVs wouldn't take off," the article concludes. "In addition to being too expensive for many households, there's been virtually zero native 8K content available to make investing in an 8K display worthwhile..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Feb 2026 5:34am GMT

The EU "has switched on parts of its homegrown secure satellite communications network for the first time," reports Bloomberg, calling it part of a €10.6 billion push to "wean itself off US support amid growing tensions." SpaceNews notes the new government program GOVSATCOM pools capacity from eight already on-oribit satellites from France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Luxembourg - both national and commercial. And they cite this prediction by EU Defense and Space Commissioner Andrius Kubilius. The program could expand by 2027. "All member states can now have access to sovereign satellite communications - military and government, secure and resilient, built in Europe, operated in Europe, and under European control," [Kubilius said during his opening remarks at the European Space Conference]... Beginning in 2029, GOVSATCOM is expected to integrate with the 290 satellites in the Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite constellation, known as IRIS2, and be fully operational... "The goal is connectivity and security for all of Europe - guaranteed access for all member states and full European control."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Feb 2026 3:13am GMT

"Most Go developers are now using AI-powered development tools when seeking information (e.g., learning how to use a module) or toiling (e.g., writing repetitive blocks of similar code)." That's one of the conclusions Google's Go team drew from September's big survey of 5,379 Go developers. But the survey also found that among Go developers using AI-powered tools, "their satisfaction with these tools is middling due, in part, to quality concerns." Our survey suggests bifurcated adoption - while a majority of respondents (53%) said they use such tools daily, there is also a large group (29%) who do not use these at all, or only used them a few times during the past month. We expected this to negatively correlate with age or development experience, but were unable to find strong evidence supporting this theory except for very new developers: respondents with less than one year of professional development experience (not specific to Go) did report more AI use than every other cohort, but this group only represented 2% of survey respondents. At this time, agentic use of AI-powered tools appears nascent among Go developers, with only 17% of respondents saying this is their primary way of using such tools, though a larger group (40%) are occasionally trying agentic modes of operation... We also asked about overall satisfaction with AI-powered development tools. A majority (55%) reported being satisfied, but this was heavily weighted towards the "Somewhat satisfied" category (42%) vs. the "Very satisfied" group (13%)... [D]eveloper sentiment towards them remains much softer than towards more established tooling (among Go developers, at least). What is driving this lower rate of satisfaction? In a word: quality. We asked respondents to tell us something good they've accomplished with these tools, as well as something that didn't work out well. A majority said that creating non-functional code was their primary problem with AI developer tools (53%), with 30% lamenting that even working code was of poor quality. The most frequently cited benefits, conversely, were generating unit tests, writing boilerplate code, enhanced autocompletion, refactoring, and documentation generation. These appear to be cases where code quality is perceived as less critical, tipping the balance in favor of letting AI take the first pass at a task. That said, respondents also told us the AI-generated code in these successful cases still required careful review (and often, corrections), as it can be buggy, insecure, or lack context... [One developer said reviewing AI-generated code was so mentally taxing that it "kills the productivity potential".] Of all the tasks we asked about, "Writing code" was the most bifurcated, with 66% of respondents already or hoping to soon use AI for this, while 1/4 of respondents didn't want AI involved at all. Open-ended responses suggest developers primarily use this for toilsome, repetitive code, and continue to have concerns about the quality of AI-generated code. Most respondents also said they "are not currently building AI-powered features into the Go software they work on (78%)," the surveyors report, "with 2/3 reporting that their software does not use AI functionality at all (66%)." This appears to be a decrease in production-related AI usage year-over-year; in 2024, 59% of respondents were not involved in AI feature work, while 39% indicated some level of involvement. That marks a shift of 14 points away from building AI-powered systems among survey respondents, and may reflect some natural pullback from the early hype around AI-powered applications: it's plausible that lots of folks tried to see what they could do with this technology during its initial rollout, with some proportion deciding against further exploration (at least at this time). Among respondents who are building AI- or LLM-powered functionality, the most common use case was to create summaries of existing content (45%). Overall, however, there was little difference between most uses, with between 28% - 33% of respondents adding AI functionality to support classification, generation, solution identification, chatbots, and software development.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Feb 2026 1:13am GMT

The research agency has 27 institute and center directors. Will those roles become politicized?

01 Feb 2026 12:15pm GMT

Plant chemicals made more potent by insect pests are detoxified by the fungus.

01 Feb 2026 12:00pm GMT

I previously covered x64 OpenVMS release on VMware. This was insanely cool achievement for the operating system. While it had no practical ramification there was one small annoyance. The OS console was on a serial port. In VMware it meant another VM connected via named pipe. Now OpenVMS x64 supports (limited?) local console on OPA0. ↫ Virtually Fun I think this has been available for a while now - since 2024 - but we hadn't covered it yet. That same 2024 post also indicates CDE and DECWindows work now, a side effect of a C/C++ compiler bugfix. Sadly, VSI has made it clear that desktop support is not at all on their list of things to spend time on, so don't expect graphics support to improve meaningfully other than by accident like in this case.

01 Feb 2026 9:10am GMT

But NixOS isn't the only declarative distro out there. In fact GNU forked Nix fairly early and made their own spin called Guix, whose big innovation is that, instead of using the unwieldy Nix-language, it uses Scheme. Specifically Guile Scheme, GNU's sanctioned configuration language. I've been following Guix for a bit, but it never felt quite ready to me with stuff like KDE being only barely supported and a lot of hardware not working out of the box. However, now that (after three years) Guix announced its 1.5.0 release with a lot of stuff stabilized and KDE finally a first-party citizen, I figured now is the best time to give it a fresh shot. This post captures my experiences from installation to the first 3-4 days. ↫ Nemin's blog If you're interested in Guix, but aren't quite sure if you want to take the plunge, this article does a great job of showing you the ropes, listing what issues you might run into, some pitfalls to avoid, and so on.

01 Feb 2026 8:54am GMT

A lip-syncing robot, Leonardo's DNA, and new evidence that humans, not glaciers, moved stones to Stonehenge

31 Jan 2026 11:13pm GMT

It's no secret that Windows 11 isn't exactly well-liked by even most of its users, and I'm fairly sure that perception has permeated into the general public as well. It seems Microsoft is finally getting the message, and they're clearly spooked: the company has told The Verge that they have heard the complaints, and intend to start fixing many of the issues people are having. The feedback we're receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people. This year, you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows. ↫ Pavan Davuluri, head of Windows, to The Verge This entire statement is utterly meaningless. I have zero faith in words; only actions will do. Microsoft has made many promises over the years, and they have a history of simply not following through on them. Up until this year is over and there have been material improvements in Windows 11 that we can measure, see, and point to, nothing has changed between the day before the statement and the day after. Anyone taking this at face value and reporting it as such is an idiot. This means that at the end of this year, Windows 11 should be faster, more stable, experience far fewer breaking updates, have fewer - nay - zero ads, a far more consistent user interface, proper local account support, and more. If these things haven't become reality once the countdown runs out and on 31 December, Microsoft lied to our faces once more. Until then, don't use Windows.

30 Jan 2026 10:37pm 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