fidzu : geek

A major new review by the Cochrane collaboration -- an independent network of researchers -- evaluated 73 randomized controlled trials involving about 5,000 people with depression and found that exercise matched the effectiveness of both pharmacological treatments and psychological therapies. The biological mechanisms overlap considerably with antidepressants. "Exercise can help improve neurotransmitter function, like serotonin as well as dopamine and endorphins," said Dr. Stephen Mateka, medical director of psychiatry at Inspira Health. Dr. Nicholas Fabiano of the University of Ottawa added that exercise triggers the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which he calls "Miracle-Gro for the brain." Exercise has been adopted as a first-line treatment in depression guidelines globally, though Fabiano noted it remains underutilized. The meta-analysis found that combining aerobic exercise and resistance training appeared more effective than aerobic exercise alone, and that 13 to 36 workouts led to improvements in depressive symptoms. Light to moderate exercise proved as beneficial as vigorous workouts, at least initially.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Jan 2026 4:41pm GMT

Apple has struck a multi-year partnership with Google to power a more capable version of Siri using Gemini AI models, ending months of speculation about which company would help the iPhone maker catch up in the generative AI race. In a statement, Apple said it had determined after "careful evaluation" that "Google's technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models." The deal comes after Apple delayed its planned Siri AI upgrade last March, acknowledging that the project was taking "longer than we thought." Bloomberg had reported in August that Apple was in early talks with Google about using a custom Gemini model. Apple also explored potential partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, and CEO Tim Cook has said the company plans to integrate with more AI companies over time. The upgraded Siri is expected to perform actions on users' behalf and understand personal context.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Jan 2026 4:05pm GMT

President Donald Trump revived a campaign pledge Friday night by calling for a one-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a proposal that banking groups immediately opposed despite the industry's heavy donations to his 2024 campaign and support for his second-term agenda. Trump posted on Truth Social that he hoped the cap would be in place by January 20, one year after he took office, though he did not specify whether it would come through executive action or legislation. Americans currently pay between 19.65% and 21.5% interest on credit cards on average and carry roughly $1.23 trillion in credit card debt, according to the New York Federal Reserve. Researchers found that a 10% cap would save Americans roughly $100 billion in interest annually. The American Bankers Association warned that such a cap "would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives." Further reading: How Trump's proposed cap on credit card rates could reshape consumer lending.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Jan 2026 3:22pm GMT

We all knew this was going to happen, so let's just get it over with. Microsoft is testing a new feature that integrates Copilot into the File Explorer, but it's not going to be another 'Ask Copilot' button in the right-click menu. This time, Copilot will live inside File Explorer, likely in a sidebar or Details/Preview-pane-like interface, according to new references in Windows 11 preview builds. ↫ Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest What am I even supposed to say at this point? Who wants this? Why utterly destroy what little reputation and goodwill Windows has left? Has the hype bubble become this clouded and intoxicating? Even system administrators who want to turn off Copilot in their organisations or device fleets in an official, supported way are getting punched in the face by Microsoft. The company rolled out a new Group Policy to disable Copilot, but it's such a useless mess it might as well not be there at all. This essentially means that IT admins will only be able to uninstall the Copilot app for customers where their device has both Copilot apps installed by either a clean install or by the IT team itself, as long as the Copilot app has not been opened in a month. So, even if you accidentally open the Copilot app for a second because it's there in your Windows taskbar, the Copilot app won't be uninstalled. ↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin You shouldn't be using Windows.

11 Jan 2026 10:02pm GMT

Posh, GNOME's mobile shell, published a look back on the project's 2025. The Phosh developers focus from day one was to make devices running Phosh daily drivable without having to resort to any proprietary OSes as a fallback. This year showed improvements in some important areas people rely on like cell broadcasts and emergency calls, further improving usability and starting some ground work we'll need for some upcoming features. ↫ Phosh developers In 2025, Posh gained support for cell broadcasts - like the emergency messages regarding storms, or alerts about missing persons, that sort of stuff - which is a pretty important feature in this day and age. Posh also improved its support for per-source audio volumes and one source of audio muting another, its on-screen keyboard, its compositor, and much more. Of course, the main problem for shells like Phosh is hardware support, which is handled by the underlying operating system, like PostmarketOS. These Linux mobile operating systems are fighting an uphill battle when it comes to hardware support, and while Android application support can fill some of the application shortcomings, you're going to be making pretty significant concessions by switching to mobile Linux at the moment. When even Android ROMs not sanctioned by Google are having issues with banking applications or government ID stuff, using mobile Linux will be even more of a problem. None of this is the fault of any of the people dedicating their free time to things like Phosh or PostmarketOS, of course - it's just a sad reality of a market we once again just gave up to a few megacorporations, with our governments too cowardly to stand up and fix this issue.

11 Jan 2026 9:42pm GMT

Footage of the 2024 discovery appears in NatGeo's new documentary series Pole to Pole with Will Smith

11 Jan 2026 8:35pm GMT

For the eighth year in a row, the world's oceans absorbed a record-breaking amount of heat in 2025.

11 Jan 2026 12:00pm GMT

Budgie has fallen a bit by the wayside in recent years, but it's still in development and making steady progress. The project's just released Budgie 10.10, the final release in the 10.x series which also marks the end of the transition to Wayland. Budgie 10.10 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, marking our first release to migrate Budgie from X11 to Wayland. This release series brings to a close just over a decade of Budgie 10 development; we are formally putting Budgie 10 into maintenance mode to focus our efforts on Budgie 11. ↫ Joshua Strobl Budgie is taking a very interesting approach for its move to Wayland; instead of writing every single component of their desktop environment from scratch or porting their X11 tools, the project opted to reuse and implement a ton of established, well-tested, and popular Wayland tools like swaybg, swayidle, labwc, and so on. This obviously saves on development time, but also ensures the transition to Wayland is relatively smooth. Things like the panel, applets, the Budgie Control Center, and so on, have been updated or rewritten. There's also some new features, as well as a ton of bug fixes and smaller improvements. As noted, this release marks the end of the road for the 10.x series, with development now shifting to Budgie 11. Upcoming releases of major distributions will have Budgie 10.10 in their repositories.

11 Jan 2026 11:05am 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

Half the country has enacted age-verification laws to prevent minors from viewing porn.

10 Jan 2026 12:00pm 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