fidzu : geek

Jensen Huang has stepped down as CEO of Nvidia after 33 years leading the company, with CFO Colette Kress taking over as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent replacement. "The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company's operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption," said board chair Harvey Jones in a release announcing the news. The abrupt departure follows revelations about Huang's affairs, including one with a woman U.S. intelligence reportedly believes was a Chinese spy. CNBC reports: Huang, 63, apologized on Sunday for being "unfaithful to my wife," though he provided no details about the affair with businesswoman Alice Huang, who has worked for a Chinese company and Nvidia customer called Megaspeed. Late Wednesday, The New York Times reported that the Nvidia CEO also had a separate affair, this one with Kimberly Powell, vice president of health care at the chipmaker. Later that afternoon The Times and other outlets reported that Nvidia's board met to discuss the company's future. Jensen Huang denied allegations that he had compromised national security or Nvidia secrets after reports of the Alice Huang affair. The news sparked concerns that Nvidia knew companies based in Singapore and Malaysia had been evading U.S. export controls in accessing its technology. The board said on Tuesday that it had hired Wachtell Lipton to investigate the intelligence allegations.

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12 Nov 2026 4:00pm GMT

Tim Peters, one of Python's earliest and most influential contributors, died on July 15 at age 74. Known as Python's second real user, Peters created the Zen of Python and Timsort sorting algorithm while contributing to numerous core components. He also served as a Python Software Foundation director from 2001 to 2014. Adafruit remembers Peters in a blog post: He's best known for the Zen of Python, PEP 20, still printed by typing import this. In 2002, he gave Python Timsort, the sorting algorithm he designed for lists, later adopted by Java and Android. He also polished the cyclic garbage collector and the pymalloc allocator, worked on the dict implementation, the float object, the math module and Karatsuba multiplication in longobject, and wrote the first version of doctest, plus difflib, pickletools and tabnanny. He was a director of the Python Software Foundation from 2001 to 2014. Before Python, he wrote compilers at Cray Research and speech-to-text software at Dragon Systems. The thread is full of recollections from core developers about his patient, detailed answers on the mailing lists, signed with his trademark . Python creator Guido van Rossum also paid tribute to Peters in a post on discuss.python.org, writing: "It's hard to overestimate Tim's influence on Python. He's probably best known for writing the Zen of Python (PEP 20), but to me he was a mentor and language co-designer long before that..." Further discussions can be found on Hacker News and Reddit.

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12 Nov 2026 11:00am GMT

There are many problems in this world - some big, some small, some so minute nobody ought to put them to paper at all. The problem I'm going to highlight here is even smaller than that. This literally - the actual literally - does not matter and absolutely nobody should care about it, let alone put any work into changing it or addressing it some other way. I want to talk about the iconography GNOME's Disks utility uses to symbolise "mount" and "unmount". No, I'm not descending into madness. GNOME's Disks utility uses the "play" symbol on the mount button, and the "stop" symbol on the unmount button. Inexplicably, considering the state of the world in general and the rapidly deteriorating quality of software specifically, this bothers me. Out in the real world, built on decades of consistent use, these symbols have gained clearly defined meanings, and mounting and unmounting disks definitely isn't one of them. In fact, the meaning of these symbols isn't mere convention; they're defined in a variety of international standards for symbols for use in software and on equipment, such as ISO/IEC 18035 (which you need to buy to read; my copy fell of a truck): ISO/IEC 18035:2002 defines a consistent set of icons and related functions that are represented by multimedia applications on a computer screen and that users interact with to control such applications. It describes controls applying to such functions as: Play, Pause, Stop, Rewind, Scan forward, Scan backward, Replay backward, Loop, Go to beginning, Go to previous, Go to next, Go to end, Set volume and Mute. ↫ ISO/IEC 18035:2003 They're also part of ISO 7000/IEC 60417, a much larger, more encompassing standard that also contains things like the various symbols used on laundry machines, tumble dryers, in cars, and so on. The symbols themselves are much older than the standards, of course, with many of them dating back to the 1960s and possibly even 1950s. The point remains, though: the play and stop symbols have clearly defined meanings, and I don't think they are at all a good fit for mount and unmount. The function of the "play" symbol according to ISO/IEC 18035: To enable the user to start the presentation of dynamic media, except where the task requires automatic playing of that media. ↫ ISO/IEC 18035:2003 And of the "stop" symbol: To enable the user to stop the presentation of dynamic media. ↫ ISO/IEC 18035:2003 Neither of these descriptions match what mounting and unmounting mean or do. Mounting a drive or partition doesn't present any media at all; it merely makes the drive or partition in question accessible. Unmounting also doesn't eject anything; it merely makes the drive or partition inaccessible. I would argue that play and pause act upon contents of a drive or volume, and not upon the drive or volume itself. As it stands right now, you "play" a drive" to "play" a video stored on said drive. Madness. I already know what you're thinking, and yes, I agree that the Disks utility is a tool aimed at more advanced use cases and users, and most normal, average users will never even know it exists, let alone open it at all. Very few people get to see these symbols, and those that do already know full well what mounting and unmounting mean, reducing the importance of said symbols considerably. But now it's time for the big surprise, the twist in the story that turns this entire thing on its head. Files, GNOME's file manager, uses an entirely different symbol for unmounting! Instead of the "stop" symbol, Files uses the "eject" symbol. You may think this is a more accurate visual representation of what unmounting means, but I strongly disagree. Let's turn to ISO/IEC 18035:2003 once again: To enable the user to eject the current physical media from the appropriate drive. ↫ ISO/IEC 18035:2003 Unmounting doesn't eject anything! If you unmount a USB stick, the stick doesn't get fired out of the USB port. If you unmount a volume, it doesn't get removed from the SSD. Hell, if you unmount a CD-ROM, it doesn't even eject it! Ejecting a CD-ROM - opening the drive's tray or spitting the CD-ROM out of a slot-loader - is an entirely different act! Are we really "ejecting" a CD-ROM twice? Are we "mounting" a CD-ROM when we merely close the tray? No! Madness! The real underlying problem here is, of course, that mounting and unmounting are deeply weird and confusing concepts, bordering on the esoteric, that simply do not have physical equivalents to fall back on. Using symbols and iconography designed in the 1960s explicitly for playing music or stopping a video or ejecting a cassette tape are not a good fit for something as difficult to explain to most people as mounting and unmounting. It's like putting an eject symbol on a car's door handle or a play symbol on a soap dispenser. Should GNOME developers waste any time or resources to address this? No, of course not, that would be stupid. Nobody should care about this but me. I should suffer in silence, every time I need to mount or unmount something, forced to look for an eject or stop symbol in whatever user interface I happen to be using. Every time, I should die a little inside. Please, don't be like me and waste precious resources thinking about this. I'm not descending into madness. I just want mount and unmount symbols that make sense. I'm not descending into madness.

12 Nov 2026 10:13am GMT

"ScienceAlert is reporting that researchers may have finally determined why, for many years, power grids around the world have been pulsing every 60 seconds," writes longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. The likely culprit? Uninterruptible power supplies running routine battery checks. From the report: Every minute, some uninterruptible power supplies perform routine battery checks, creating small but measurable surges in electricity demand. And it's like clockwork. "Even benign control routines can become systemically relevant when many devices act coherently," writes a team led by physicist Dirk Witthaut of the University of Cologne, Germany, in a paper published in Nature Energy. "Unintended synchronization can generate recurrent and potentially amplified oscillatory behavior in large-scale cyber-physical energy systems." To figure it out, Witthaut and his colleagues analyzed high-resolution electricity measurements from buildings at the Forschungszentrum Julich research campus in Germany. [... they found that] the 60-second pattern appeared in four buildings, all of which contained uninterruptible power supplies. None of the buildings they measured without these systems showed the same pattern. Following the electrical signals more closely, the researchers detected tiny bursts of current from the batteries at precisely one-minute intervals. They were able to trace the resulting fluctuations through one building's electrical system, all the way to the connection with the public high-voltage grid. The manufacturer subsequently confirmed the culprit's identity -- routine battery self-tests, conducted automatically by the systems' management software. But why would equipment in different buildings, let alone different countries, be doing this at the same time? The answer appears to lie in the clocks. Digital devices can synchronize their internal clocks using external time signals, meaning that independently operating systems can end up performing their scheduled tasks together. Individually, these small checks are insignificant. But when enough devices act in synchrony, their combined electricity demand can produce a measurable effect across an entire power grid.

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12 Nov 2026 7:00am GMT

We're almost halfway through November, but we hadn't seen Haiku's monthly activity report for October yet. It's here now, and there's quite a few good things in here, like support for two and three-finger tap gestures on touchpads for right and middle-click, a new driver that adds Universal Flash Storage support, and even some build fixes for Haiku's SPARC port as well as some fixes on the RISC-V side. Of course, that's just a selection, as there's the usual long list of smaller changes, bugfixes, and improvements as well.

11 Nov 2026 3:22pm GMT

Today, we're excited to announce the release of .NET 11! This year's release makes building modern applications faster, more productive, and has improvements across C# 15, ASP.NET Core, .NET MAUI, and Windows development. With hundreds of runtime optimizations, more responsive SDK tooling, and less overhead in everyday commands, you can spend less time waiting and more time creating. Build richer web and cross-platform applications, take advantage of new C# language features, and explore AI-powered development with improved tools and agentic capabilities. ↫ .NET Team I'm not going to pretend to care about .NET, but I know many of you have to care on a professional level, because .NET is remarkably popular in places where the spotlights don't often shine.

11 Nov 2026 3:13pm GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT