fidzu : geek

There's cursed computing, and then there's cursed computing. It turns out that you can render GNOME's windows with the compositor from Windows 7, dwm.exe. Yes. tl;dr of how this clusterfuck works: this is effectively just x11 forwarding an x server from windows to linux. the fun part is a) making gnome run with an already existing window manager (namely dwm.exe lol), b) making gnome run over x11 forwarding (it is Not a fan, last time it tried running gnome on windows this is what broke it and made it quit trying), and c) actually ripping out parts of the gnome compositor again to make dwm instead of gnome render window decorations to achieve ✨️aero gnome✨️ ↫ ⬡-49016 at Mastodon This is already one of the most cursed things I've ever seen, but then things got so much worse. How about Windows 7's dwm.exe, but composited by GNOME? I need an adult.

18 Jan 2026 12:04pm GMT

Virtualisation is a lot older than you might think, with (one of?) the first implementation(s) being IBM's VM/CMS, the line of operating systems that would grow to include things like System/370, System/390, all the way up until IBM/Z, which is still being developed and sold today; only recently IBM released the IBM z17 and z/OS 3.2, after all. The VM series of operating systems is designed exclusively for mainframes, and works by giving every user their own dedicated virtual machine running on top of the Control Program, the hypervisor. Inside this virtual machine the user can run a wide variety of operating systems, from the simple, single-user classics like IBM's Conversational Monitor System, to more complex systems like Linux or AIX. Early versions of VM were released as open source and are now in the public domain, and enthusiasts have continued to build upon it and expand it, with the latest incarnations being the VM/370 Community Edition releases. They contain the Control Program and Conversational Monitor System, augmented by various fixes, improvements, and other additions. You can run VM in an emulator like Hercules, and continue on from there - but what, exactly, can you do with it? That's where Fun things to do with your VM/370 machine comes in. This article will give you an introduction to the system, and a number of first and later steps you can take while exploring this probably alien environment. If you've always dreamt of using an early IBM mainframe, this is probably the easiest way to do so, because buying one is a really, really bad idea.

18 Jan 2026 10:47am GMT

This week Google "unveiled a set of tools for retailers that helps them roll out AI agents," reports the Wall Street Journal, The new retail AI agents, which help shoppers find their desired items, provide customer support and let people order food at restaurants, are part of what Alphabet-owned Google calls Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. Major retailers, including home improvement giant Lowe's, the grocer Kroger and pizza chain Papa Johns say they are already using Google's tools to help prepare for the incoming wave of AI-assisted shopping and ordering... Kicking off the race among tech giants to get ahead of this shift, OpenAI released its Instant Checkout feature last fall, which lets users buy stuff directly through its chatbot ChatGPT. In January, Microsoft announced a similar checkout feature for its Copilot chatbot. Soon after OpenAI's release last year, Walmart said it would partner with OpenAI to let shoppers buy its products within ChatGPT. But that's just the beginning, reports the New York Times, with hundreds of start-ups also vying for the attention of retailers: There are A.I. start-ups that offer in-store cameras that can detect a customer's age or gender, robots that manage shelves on their own and headsets that give store workers access to product information in real time... The scramble to exploit artificial intelligence is happening across the retail spectrum, from the highest echelons of luxury goods to the most pragmatic of convenience stores. 7-Eleven said it was using conversational A.I. to hire staff at its convenience stores through an agent named Rita (Recruiting Individuals Through Automation). Executives said that they no longer had to worry about whether applicants would show up to interviews and that the system had reduced hiring time, which had taken two weeks, to less than three days. The article notes that at the National Retail Federation conference, other companies showing their AI advancements included Applebee's, IHOP, the Vitamin Shoppe, Urban Outfitters, Rag & Bone, Kendra Scott, Michael Kors and Philip Morris.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Jan 2026 8:54am GMT

=[ "More than half of all cryptocurrencies ever launched are now defunct," reports CoinDesk, citing a new analysis by cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinGecko. And most of those failures occurred in 2025: The study looked at token listings on GeckoTerminal between mid-2021 and the end of 2025. Of the nearly 20.2 million tokens that entered the market during that period, 53.2% are no longer actively traded. A staggering 11.6 million of those failures happened in 2025 alone - accounting for 86.3% of all token deaths over the past five years. One key driver behind the surge in dead tokens was the rise of low-effort memecoins and experimental projects launched via crypto launchpads like pump.fun, CoinGecko analyst Shaun Paul Lee said. These platforms lowered the barrier to entry for token creation, leading to a wave of speculative assets with little or no development backing. Many of these tokens never made it past a handful of trades before disappearing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Jan 2026 5:59am GMT

At the AI safety site Foom, science journalist Mordechai Rorvig explores a paper presented at November's Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference: [R]esearchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Georgia Tech revisited earlier findings that showed that language models, the engines of commercial AI chatbots, show strong signal correlations with the human language network, the region of the brain responsible for processing language... The results lend clarity to the surprising picture that has been emerging from the last decade of neuroscience research: That AI programs can show strong resemblances to large-scale brain regions - performing similar functions, and doing so using highly similar signal patterns. Such resemblances have been exploited by neuroscientists to make much better models of cortical regions. Perhaps more importantly, the links between AI and cortex provide an interpretation of commercial AI technology as being profoundly brain-like, validating both its capabilities as well as the risks it might pose for society as the first synthetic braintech. "It is something we, as a community, need to think about a lot more," said Badr AlKhamissi, doctoral student in computer science at EPFL and first author of the preprint, in an interview with Foom. "These models are getting better and better every day. And their similarity to the brain [or brain regions] is also getting better - probably. We're not 100% sure about it...." There are many known limitations with seeing AI programs as models of brain regions, even those that have high signal correlations. For example, such models lack any direct implementations of biochemical signalling, which is known to be important for the functioning of nervous systems. However, if such comparisons are valid, then they would suggest, somewhat dramatically, that we are increasingly surrounded by a synthetic braintech. A technology not just as capable as the human brain, in some ways, but actually made up of similar components. Thanks to Slashdot reader Gazelle Bay for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Jan 2026 2:34am GMT

ChaosBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. It exists because upstream cannot, and should not, accept broken drivers, half-working hardware, vendor trash, or speculative hacks. We can. ↫ ChaosBSD GitHub page This is an excellent approach to testing drivers that simply aren't even remotely ready to be included in FreeBSD-proper. It should be obvious that this is not, in any way, meant to be used as a production operating system, as it will contain things that are broken and incomplete on purpose. The name's also pretty great.

17 Jan 2026 10:18pm GMT

Supernatural has had its staff cut and won't receive any more content updates.

17 Jan 2026 12:00pm GMT

"I've got one job, and it's the safe return of Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy."

17 Jan 2026 4:45am GMT

Reseller says Rackspace plans to charge it 706 percent more.

16 Jan 2026 11:15pm 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

In 2024 the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) started funding work on the ALPM project, which provides a Rust-based framework for Arch Linux Package Management. Refer to the project's FAQ and mission statement to learn more about the relation to the tooling currently in use on Arch Linux. The funding has now concluded, but over the time of 15 months allowed us to create various tools and integrations that we will highlight in the following sections. We have worked on six milestones with focus on various aspects of the package management ecosystem, ranging from formalizing, parsing and writing of …

10 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

Did you know you can have newlines in pathnames? The design is very human and this absolutely doesn't have any unforeseen consequences! Also a friendly reminder that you can store anything on a nameserver if you try hard enough.

Originally posted by me on donotsta.re (2025-12-23)

09 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT