fidzu : computers

Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini set 16 instances of Claude Opus 4.6 loose on a shared codebase over two weeks to build a C compiler from scratch, and the AI agents produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V architectures. The project ran through nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and cost about $20,000 in API fees. Each instance operated inside its own Docker container, independently claiming tasks via lock files and pushing completed code to a shared Git repository. No orchestration agent directed traffic. The compiler achieved a 99% pass rate on the GCC torture test suite and can compile major open source projects including PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, FFmpeg and Doom. But it lacks a 16-bit x86 backend and calls out to GCC for that step, its assembler and linker remain buggy, and it produces less efficient code than GCC running with all optimizations disabled. Carlini also invested significant effort building test harnesses and feedback systems to keep the agents productive, and the model hit a practical ceiling at around 100,000 lines as bug fixes and new features frequently broke existing functionality.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

09 Feb 2026 8:00pm GMT

The romance genre -- long the publishing industry's earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases -- has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, produced more than 200 AI-assisted romance novels last year and self-published them on Amazon, where they collectively sold around 50,000 copies. She found Anthropic's Claude delivered the most elegant prose but was terrible at sexy banter; other programs like Grok and NovelAI wrote graphic scenes that felt rushed and mechanical. Chatbots struggled broadly to build the slow-burn sexual tension romance readers crave, she said. A BookBub survey of more than 1,200 authors found roughly a third were using generative AI for plotting, outlining, or writing, and the majority did not disclose this to readers. Romance accounts for more than 20% of all adult fiction print sales, according to Circana BookScan, and the genre's reliance on familiar tropes and narrative formulas makes it especially susceptible to AI disruption.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

09 Feb 2026 7:01pm GMT

Can we pander to MAHA, re-litigate COVID, and improve science at the same time?

09 Feb 2026 6:32pm GMT

Autodesk has sued Google in San Francisco federal court, alleging the search giant infringed its "Flow" trademark by launching competing AI-powered software for movie, TV and video game production in May 2025. Autodesk says it has used the Flow name since September 2022 and that Google assured it would not commercialize a product under the same name -- then filed a trademark application in Tonga, where filings are not publicly accessible, before seeking U.S. protection.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

09 Feb 2026 6:01pm GMT

Bonus: Mandalorian and Grogu 30-second spot shows duo being pulled through the snow by Tauntauns.

09 Feb 2026 5:41pm GMT

Analogue dials, aluminum switches, and plenty of buttons for the Ferrari Luce.

09 Feb 2026 3:44pm GMT

It's time for an OSNews fundrasier! This time, it's unplanned due to a financial emergency after our car unexpectedly had to be scrapped (you can find more details below). If you want to support one of the few independent technology news websites left, this is your chance. OSNews is entirely supported by you, our readers, so go to our Ko-Fi and donate to our emergency fundraiser today! Why support OSNews? In short, we are truly independent. After turning off our ads, our Patreons and donors are our sole source of income, and since I know many of you prefer the occasional individual donation over recurring Patreon ones, I run a fundraiser a few times a year to rally the troops, so to speak. This particular fundraiser wasn't planned, however, given the circumstances described below, several readers have urged me to run a fundraiser now. We're incredibly grateful for even having the opportunity to do something like this, and as always, I'd like to stress that OSNews will never be paywalled, and that access to our website will never be predicated on your financial support. You can ignore all of this and continue on reading the site as usual. What's going on? Sadly, and unexpectedly, we've had to scrap our car. Our 2007 Hyundai Santa Fe did not survive this Arctic Winter, as the two decades in the biting cold has taken a toll on a long list of components and parts - it would no longer start. After consulting an expert, we determined that repairs would've been too expensive to make financial sense for such an old vehicle. Sometimes, you have to take the loss lest you throw money down a pit. An unreliable car in an Arctic climate is a really bad idea, since getting stranded on a back road somewhere when it's -30°C (or colder) with two toddlers is not going to be a fun time. On top of that, my wife uses our car to commute to work, and while using the bus is going to be fine for a little while, her job in home care for the very elderly and recovering alcoholics is incredibly stressful and intensive. Dealing with bus schedules and wait times at such low temperatures is not exactly compatible with her job. Since she's just recovering from a doctor-mandated rest period - very common in her line of work - her income has taken a hit. Taking professional care of people with severe dementia or other old-age related conditions is a thankless and underpaid job, and it's no surprise those working in this profession often require mandated rest (and thus a temporary pay cut). And so, urged on by readers on Mastodon, I'm doing an OSNews fundraiser to help us pay for the "new" car. Of course, we're looking for a used car, not a new one, and based on our needs we've set a budget of around €10,000. This should allow us to buy something like a used Mazda 6 or Volvo V60 from around 2014-2015, or something similar in size and age, with a reasonable petrol engine (an EV is well out of our price range). We consider this the sweet spot for safety features, size, age, longevity, and reliability. We've got some savings, but most of the purchase price will have to come in the form of a car loan. We've already made some changes to our monthly expenses to cover for part of the monthly repayments, including a lucky break where our daycare expenses will be going down considerably next month. Based on this, I've set the fundraising goal at €5000. If we manage to hit that - and the last few times we hit our goals quite fast - it won't cover the entire purchase price, but it will cut down on the amount we need to loan considerably. I'm feeling a little apprehensive about all of this, since this isn't really an OSNews-related expense I can easily get some content out of. However, I'm entirely open to suggestions about how I could get some OSNews content out of this - perhaps buying and installing one of those Android headunits with a large display? They make them tailored for almost every vehicle at low prices on AliExpress, and the installation process and user experience might be something interesting to write about, as it's potentially a great way to add some modern features to an older car. Feel free to make any suggestions. I'm also open to other crazy ideas. If you happen to work at an automaker, and need some testing done in an Arctic environment - including ice roads - I'm open to ideas. A few random notes Since about half of our audience hails from the United States, I figured I'd make a few notes about car pricing in Europe, and in Arctic Sweden in particular. Cars are definitely more expensive here in Europe, doubly so in the sparsely populated area where we live (low supply leads to higher prices). Buying a brand new car is entirely out of the question due to pricing, and leasing is also far too expensive (well over €500/month for even a basic, small car). Used electric cars are still well out of our budget as well, and since we don't have our own driveway, we wouldn't be able to charge at home anyway. Opting to forego a car entirely is sadly not an option either. With two small children, the Arctic climate, the remoteness, my wife's stressful job and commute, and long distances to basic amenities, we can't "go Dutch" and live off public transport and bicycles, no matter how much we'd want to. We have considered it, but it's just not a realistic long-term solution. Had we lived in The Netherlands or in a big city, going carless would've possibly been a more realistic option. We intended to drive the Santa Fe until it fell apart, but we did not expect this to happen so soon. Feel free

09 Feb 2026 2:46pm GMT

About a year ago I mentioned that I had rediscovered the Dillo Web Browser. Unlike some of my other hobbies, endeavours, and interests, my appreciation for Dillo has not wavered. I only have a moment to gush today, so I'll cut right to it. Dillo has been plugging along nicely (see the Git forge.) and adding little features. Features that even I, a guy with a blog, can put to use. Here are a few of my favourites. ↫ Bobby Hiltz If you're looking for a more minimalist, less distracting browser experience that gives you a ton of interesting UNIXy control, you should really consider giving Dillo a try.

09 Feb 2026 2:24pm GMT

KDE's Nate Graham has published a status update about KDE Linux, the KDE project's new immutable Linux distribution, intended to be the "KDE OS" showcasing the best of the KDE community. While the project is approaching the beta stage, it's currently still in alpha, but from what I gather from friends who are using it, the alpha label might actually be like how Haiku is supposedly still alpha: intended more to scare people away for now than ana ctual descriptor of the state of the software. Recently, KDE Linux enabled delta updates, possibly dramatically reducing the size of updates. Before delta updates were enabled, a system update would come in at 7GB, while with delta updates enabled, it's gone down to 1-2GB. In addition, plasma-setup and plasma-login-manager have been added to KDE Linux, which are, respectively, a first-run setup assistant and KDE's new login manager. This new login manager was forked from SDDM, and specifically targets Wayland, and comes with much deeper Plasma integration than SDDM. Note that SDDM will remain available for platforms that don't use Wayland. KDE Linux has also massively improved its hardware support, and the list is long; from scanners to fancy multi-button mice, from Android devices to professional audio devices, and much more. Performance has been improved as well, the boot manager menu will no longer be shown at every boot but only when needed, the wireless regulatory domain is now properly set and managed, and much, much more. I'm keeping an eye on KDE Linux as a possible replacement for my Fedora KDE installations if Fedora ever loses the plot, even if it's an immutable distribution relying on Flatpak. I'm a KDE user, and I want the latest and greatest the KDE community has to offer without going through an distributor.

09 Feb 2026 2:14pm 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