fidzu : geek

"Robotic bird decoys are being deployed at Grand Teton National Park," reports Interesting Engineering, "to influence the behavior of real sage grouse and help restore a declining population.". Robotics mentor Gary Duquette describes the machines as "kind of a Frankenbird." (SFGate shows one of the robot birds charging up with a solar panel... "Recorded breeding calls are played at the scene, with clucking and cooing beginning at 5 a.m. each day.") Duquette builds the birds with a team of high school students, telling WyoFile that at school they "don't really get to experience real-world problems" where failures lurk. So while their robot birds may cost $150 in parts, the practical experience the students get "is priceless." Spikes in the electric currents burned out servo motors as the season of sagebrush serenades loomed, Duquette said. "The kids had to learn the difference between voltage and amperage...." To resolve the problem, the team wired a voltage converter in line with the Arduino controller and other elements on an electronic breadboard. "We pulled through and got it done in time," he said... A noggin fabricated by a 3D printer tops the robo-grouse. Wyoming Game and Fish staffers in Pinedale supplied grouse wings from hunter surveys, and body feathers came from fly-tying supplies at an angling store. Packaging foam from a Hello Fresh meal kit replicates white breast feathers, accented by yellow air sacs... The Independent wonders if more national parks would be visited by robot birds... During this year's breeding season, which runs through mid-May, researchers are using trail cameras to track whether real sage grouse respond to the robotic displays and return to the restored lek sites. If successful, officials say similar robotic systems could eventually be used in other national parks facing wildlife management challenges.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 Apr 2026 1:34am GMT

"Rust's rise shows signs of slowing," argues the CEO of TIOBE. Back in 2020 Rust first entered the top 20 of his "TIOBE Index," which ranks programming language popularity using search engine results. Rust "was widely expected to break into the top 10," he remembers today. But it never happened, and "That was nearly six years ago...." Since then, Rust has steadily improved its ranking, even reaching its highest position ever (#13) at the beginning of this year. However, just three months later, it has dropped back to position #16. This suggests that Rust's adoption rate may be plateauing. One possible explanation is that, despite its ability to produce highly efficient and safe code, Rust remains difficult to learn for non-expert programmers. While specialists in performance-critical domains are willing to invest in mastering the language, broader mainstream adoption appears more challenging. As a result, Rust's growth in popularity seems to be leveling off, and a top 10 position now appears more distant than before. Or, could Rust's sudden drop in the rankings just reflect flaws in TIOBE's ranking system? In January GitHub's senior director for developer advocacy argued AI was pushing developers toward typed languages, since types "catch the exact class of surprises that AI-generated code can sometimes introduce... A 2025 academic study found that a whopping 94% of LLM-generated compilation errors were type-check failures." And last month Forbes even described Rust as "the the safety harness for vibe coding.." A year ago Rust was ranked #18 on TIOBE's index - so it still rose by two positions over the last 12 months, hitting that all-time high in January. Could the rankings just be fluctuating due to anomalous variations in each month's search engine results? Since January Java has fallen to the #4 spot, overtaken by C++ (which moved up one rank to take Java's place in the #3 position). Here's TIOBE's current estimate for the 10 most popularity programming languages: Python C C++ Java C# JavaScript Visual Basic SQL R Delphi/Object Pascal TIOBE estimates that tthe next five most popular programming languages are Scratch, Perl, Fortran, PHP, and Go.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Apr 2026 11:32pm GMT

A new powerful chipset has arrived to take on x86 CPUs and Apple's M5, writes Wccftech. The blog Windows Central writes that "Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 processors are here" - and they run Windows: Microsoft has done a massive amount of work to improve compatibility and has also convinced developers to embrace Windows 11 on Arm. Users of Windows 11 on Arm PCs spend 90% of their time on Arm-based apps that run natively. Additionally, apps that do not run natively can often run through Prism emulation, which has improved dramatically since launch... [A]pp compatibility issues are overblown by many, and unfortunately those sharing false information are the same folks people rely on to make purchases... Works on Windows on Arm maintains a list of compatible apps and games for the platform. There, you'll see well-known apps like Google Chrome, the Adobe Creative Suite, and Spotify. We also have a collection of the best Windows on Arm apps to help you out. Snapdragon X PCs aren't gaming PCs, but there is a growing library of games that can run on the chips.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Apr 2026 9:52pm GMT

Record domestic oil and gas production hasn't saved US drivers from price spikes.

12 Apr 2026 11:17am GMT

Systems from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI struggle with the Premier League.

11 Apr 2026 11:15am GMT

"The work ahead is greater than the work behind us."

11 Apr 2026 3:24am GMT

My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.

11 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

It shouldn't be a surprise that companies - and for our field, technology companies specifically - working with the defense industry tends to raise eyebrows. With things like the genocide in Gaza, the threats of genocide and war crimes against Iran, the mass murder in Lebanon, it's no surprise that western companies working with the militaries and defense companies involved in these atrocities are receiving some serious backlash. With that in mind, it seems Red Hat, owned by IBM, is desperately trying to scrub a certain white paper from the internet. Titled "Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge", the 2024 white paper details how Red Hat's products and technologies can make it easier and faster to, well, kill people. Links to the white paper throw up 404s now, but it can still easily be found on the Wayback Machine and other places. It's got some disturbingly euphemistic content. The find, fix, track, target, engage, assess (F2T2EA) process requires ubiquitous access to data at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. Red Hat Device Edge embeds captured, analyzed, and federated data sets in a manner that positions the warfighter to use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to increase the accuracy of airborne targeting and mission-guidance systems. Delivering near real-time data from sensor pods directly to airmen, accelerating the sensor-to-shooter cycle. Sharing near real-time sensor fusion data with joint and multinational forces to increase awareness, survivability, and lethality. The new software enabled the Stalker to deploy updated, AI-based automated target recognition capabilities. If the target is an adversary tracked vehicle on the far side of a ridge, a UAS carrying a server running Red Hat Device Edge could transmit video and metadata directly to shooters. ↫ Red Hat white paper titled "Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge" I don't think there's something inherently wrong with working together with your nation's military or defense companies, but that all hinges on what, exactly, said military is doing and how those defense companies' products are being used. The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense (e.g. helping Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion). There's always going to be difficult grey areas, but any military or defense company supporting the genocide in Gaza or supplying weapons to kill women and children in Iran is unequivocally wrong, morally reprehensible, and downright illegal on both an international and national level. It clearly seems someone at Red Hat feels the same way, as the company has been trying really hard to memory-hole this particular white paper, and considering its word choices and the state of the world today, it's easy to see why. Of course, the internet never forgets, and I certainly don't intend to let something like this slide. We all know companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Google have no qualms about making a few bucks from a genocide or two, but it always feels a bit more traitorous to the cause when it's an open source company doing the profiting. It feels like Red Hat is trying to have its cake and eat it too, by, as an IBM subsidiary, trying to both profit from the vast sums of money sloshing around in the US military industrial complex as well as maintain its image as a scrappy open source business success story shitting bunnies and rainbows. It's a long time ago now that Red Hat felt like a genuine part of the open source community. Most of us - both outside and inside of Red Hat, I'm sure - have been well aware for a long time now that those days are well behind us, and I guess Red Hat doesn't like seeing its kill cycle this compressed.

10 Apr 2026 8:04pm GMT

If you want to run FreeBSD on a laptop, you're often yanked back to the Linux world of 20 years ago, with many components and parts not working and other issues such as sleep and wake problems. FreeBSD has been hard at work improving the experience of using FreeBSD on laptops, and now this has resulted in a list of laptops which work effortlessly with the venerable operating system. There's only about 10 laptops on the list so far, but they do span a range of affordability and age, with some of them surely being quite decent bargains on eBay or whatever other used stuff marketplace you use. If you want to use FreeBSD on a laptop, but don't want to face any surprises or do any difficult setup, get one of the laptops on this list - a list which will surely expand over time.

10 Apr 2026 2:41pm GMT

It may sound unbelievable to some, but not everyone has a datacenter beast with 128GB of VRAM shoved in their desktop PCs. Around the world people tell the tale of a particularly fierce group of Linux gamers: Those who dare attempt to play games with only 8 gigabytes of VRAM, or even less. Truly, it takes exceedingly strong resilience and determination to face the stutters and slowdowns bound to occur when the system starts running low on free VRAM. Carnage erupts inside the kernel driver as every application fights for as much GPU memory as it can hold on to. Any game caught up in this battle for resources will surely not leave unscathed. That is, until now. Because I fixed it. ↫ Natalie Vock The solution is to use cgroups to control the kernel's memory eviction policies, so that applications that should get priority when it comes to VRAM allocation - like games - don't get their memory evicted from VRAM to system RAM. Basically, evict everything else from VRAM before touching the protected application. This way, something like a game will have much more consistent access to more VRAM, thereby reducing needless memory evictions that harm performance. It's a clever solution that makes use of a ton of existing Linux tools, meaning it's also much easier to upstream, implement, and support. Excellent work.

10 Apr 2026 1:26pm GMT

I have discovered and shared ~800 open source Rust CLI projects over the past 3 years.

03 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

All I wanted was to learn how to play guitar, but ended up building a DIY kit for it.

28 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT