fidzu : geek

Since I have no qualms about kicking a proprietary software product while it's down, let's now switch to NTDEV's thoughts on the state of Windows 11. Unfortunately, the issue that plagued Windows since the dawn of time has only aggravated recently. Windows 11 is a mixture of old and new technologies that are glued together, with decades of legacy code that simply refuses to die (because if it did a lot of corporate costumers would complain, and whether we like it or not they are paying big cash for support to Microsoft). Also, it tries to have a "modern" UI that unfortunately not only is inconsistent, but also it's too heavy for its own good, being just a lipstick on a bloated old pig. Last, but certainly not least, it is full of AI features that most people didn't ask for, some are even actively feared (see Recall) and are also quite lacking in polish and usefulness. Until Microsoft stops treating Windows as an "AI innovation platform" of sorts and starts treating it as the stable, reliable tool it was always meant to be, the user experience will continue to feel like a battle between the person sitting at the desk and the company that built the desk. ↫ NETDEV When even some of the most knowledgeable and respected Windows/Windows NT developers and experts are this down on the current state of Windows, you know things are way worse than we even know from just following the news and our own experiences. Back in 2024, I stated that I firmly believe we will see Windows - or at least, huge, crucial chunks of it - shift to an open source development model, as it's the only way for Windows to move forward without crumbling into itself. It would also be a massive cost-cutting and personnel-culling step for Microsoft, something that seems to become ever more relevant now that the company bet massively on "AI", without any of it paying off. They're going to need to do some serious cost-cutting once the "AI" bubble bursts, and Windows will definitely be the first on the chopping block. As a side note, the step to release Windows as open source won't be nearly as difficult or problematic as people think. In fact, Microsoft has provided access to the source code behind Windows and various other products for decades, and countless governments and organisations have access to said source code. On top of that, the source code to Windows XP and Server 2003 is out there, hosted on GitHub, and various other leaks have occurred as well over the years. While I'm sure a large clean-up effort would still be required, and while it surely will be a big engineering effort, if there were any truly shocking things in the code Microsoft wouldn't want the world to see we'd already know by now. I'm getting the strong feeling Microsoft is trying to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of Windows before it ends up on the chopping block. Windows will definitely not be axed, but cost-cutting is inevitable.

28 Jan 2026 8:51pm GMT

The housing shortages plaguing Western cities today stem partly from the abandonment of a 19th century urban governance model that enabled cities like Berlin, New York and Chicago to expand rapidly while keeping real house prices flat and homes increasingly affordable. A new analysis by Works in Progress argues that Victorian-era urban management wasn't laissez-faire but rather a system carefully designed to align private profit with public benefit. Infrastructure monopolies -- whether privately franchised, operated as concessions or municipally owned -- funded themselves entirely through user fees rather than public subsidies, and were structured so that building more capacity was the path to greater returns. Landowners enjoyed a fundamental right to build when profitable, and height limits applied uniformly across entire cities rather than varying by neighborhood, meaning dense development remained legal everywhere. The system began collapsing after 1914, however. Inflation proved fatal to self-funding transport because governments found it politically impossible to raise controlled prices year after year. By the 1960s, trams had vanished from Britain, France and the U.S. Meanwhile, differential zoning gradually banned densification in established neighborhoods, and rent controls decimated private homebuilding in many countries. In Britain, average house prices fell from twelve times earnings in 1850 to four times by 1914. They have since climbed back to nine times earnings. The article argues roughly 80% of postwar price increases trace directly to restrictions on building.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Jan 2026 8:44pm GMT

I've been terribly sick for a few days so we've got some catching up to. Let's first take a look at how Windows is doing. People often say Linux is "too much work." And I agree. They're completely justified to complain. There's the documentation page diving, the forums, the reddit threads. And, most importantly, you have to basically rewire your brain and stop expecting it to behave like Windows used to. But I looked at the list above and realized: Windows is now also too much work. And the difference with Windows is that you're going to do all that work while actively fighting your computer only for it to be undone when the next surprise update comes and ruins everything. You might be thinking "just disable updates, man" or "just install LTSC", or "just run some random debloat script off of GitHub". Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I'd rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and respects me as a user. ↫ Bogdan-Mihai Mosteanu You know how in most theme parks they have various different rides for all kinds of people? There's the wild and crazy over-the-top deathcoasters for the ultimate thrill seekers, the more gentle wooden coasters for those who like a thrill, but not over-the-top. There's the swinging ship-type things for thrill-seeking accountants who seek their thrills predictably. There's a game of Russian roulette played in the backlot. For the kids, there's the classic spinning tea cups. And then there's the public transport service dressed up as an old-timey steam train that just brings you to your destination without any issue, silently doing its thing, the unsung backbone of park logistics. Commercial operating systems like Windows and macOS are the games of Russian roulette, predictably unexpectedly shooting you in the face every sixth time you pull the trigger. That's not my vibe. I want my operating system to be that steam train, and desktop Linux is the only thing that fits that bill - and it's very clear more and more people are discovering that too.

28 Jan 2026 8:13pm GMT

For decades, researchers have noted that cancer and Alzheimer's disease are rarely found in the same person, fuelling speculation that one condition might offer some degree of protection from the other. Nature: Now, a study in mice provides a possible molecular solution to the medical mystery: a protein produced by cancer cells seems to infiltrate the brain, where it helps to break apart clumps of misfolded proteins that are often associated with Alzheimer's disease. The study, which was 15 years in the making, was published on 22 January in Cell and could help researchers to design drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease. "They have a piece of the puzzle," says Donald Weaver, a neurologist and chemist at the Krembil Research Institute at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the study. "It's not the full picture by any stretch of the imagination. But it's an interesting piece." [...] A 2020 meta-analysis of data from more than 9.6 million people found that cancer diagnosis was associated with an 11% decreased incidence of Alzheimer's disease. It has been a difficult relationship to unpick: researchers must control for a variety of external factors. For example, people might die of cancer before they are old enough to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, and some cancer treatments can cause cognitive difficulties, which could obscure an Alzheimer's diagnosis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Jan 2026 8:02pm GMT

When asked directly whether people actually like Experian, Alex Lintner, the credit bureau's CEO of Software and Technology, offered an unusual defense in an interview: "First of all, we're not Palantir, so we don't do reputation scores." Speaking on The Verge's podcast, Lintner conceded that consumers who have poor credit scores through "life's circumstances" sometimes direct their frustration at Experian, though he argued the company enables vital access to credit for 247 million Americans. The 10-year company veteran said Experian has built its own large language model and about 200 AI agents for internal use, but consumer data remains entirely walled off from public AI systems. On security, Lintner said Experian hasn't experienced a data breach in a decade -- the last occurred two weeks into his tenure. When competitor Equifax suffered its massive breach, Equifax actually paid Experian to help protect affected consumers' identities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

28 Jan 2026 7:22pm GMT

Anti-vaccine Kennedy may be "enacting a self-fulfilling prophecy," expert says.

27 Jan 2026 11:28pm GMT

TikTok's tech issues abound as censorship fears drive users to delete app.

27 Jan 2026 11:17pm GMT

Abusing Microsoft's reputation may make scam harder to spot.

27 Jan 2026 10:34pm GMT

9front, by far the best operating system in the whole world, pushed out a new release, titled "GEFS SERVICE PACK 1". Even with only a few changes, this is still, as always, a more monumental, important, and groundbreaking release than any other operating system release in history. Everything changes, today, because exec() now supports shell-scripts as interpreter in #!, improved sam scrolling, TLS by default in ircrc, and more. You're already running 9front, of course, but if you're one of the few holdouts still using something else, download GEFS SERVICE PACK 1 and install it.

25 Jan 2026 11:09am 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

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