fidzu : geek

Archive.org now has a page with "the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum's Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek's readtape tool." A Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast has created a page with the contents of the tape ready for bootstrapping, "including a tar file of the filesystem," and instructions on dumping an RK05 disk image from tape to disk (and what to do next). Research professor Rob Ricci at the University of Utah's school of computing posted pictures and video of the tape-reading process, along with several updates. ("So far some of our folks think they have found Hunt The Wumpus and the C code for a Snobol interpreter.") University researcher Mike Hibler noted the code predates the famous comment "You are not expected to understand this" - and found part of the C compiler with a copyright of 1972. The version of Unix recovered seems to have some (but not all) of the commands that later appeared in Unix v5, according to discussion on social media. "UNIX wasn't versioned as we know it today," explains University of Utah PhD student Thalia Archibald, who researched early Unix history (including the tape) and also worked on its upload. "In the early days, when you wanted to cut a tape, you'd ask Ken if it was a good day - whether the system was relatively bug-free - and copy off the research machine... I've been saying It's probably V5 minus a tiny bit, which turned out to be quite true."

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21 Dec 2025 2:02am GMT

One developer tells MIT Technology Review that AI tools weaken the coding instincts he used to have. And beyond that, "It's just not fun sitting there with my work being done for me." But is AI making coders faster? "After speaking to more than 30 developers, technology executives, analysts, and researchers, MIT Technology Review found that the picture is not as straightforward as it might seem..." For some developers on the front lines, initial enthusiasm is waning as they bump up against the technology's limitations. And as a growing body of research suggests that the claimed productivity gains may be illusory, some are questioning whether the emperor is wearing any clothes.... Data from the developer analytics firm GitClear shows that most engineers are producing roughly 10% more durable code - code that isn't deleted or rewritten within weeks - since 2022, likely thanks to AI. But that gain has come with sharp declines in several measures of code quality. Stack Overflow's survey also found trust and positive sentiment toward AI tools falling significantly for the first time. And most provocatively, a July study by the nonprofit research organization Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR) showed that while experienced developers believed AI made them 20% faster, objective tests showed they were actually 19% slower... Developers interviewed by MIT Technology Review generally agree on where AI tools excel: producing "boilerplate code" (reusable chunks of code repeated in multiple places with little modification), writing tests, fixing bugs, and explaining unfamiliar code to new developers. Several noted that AI helps overcome the "blank page problem" by offering an imperfect first stab to get a developer's creative juices flowing. It can also let nontechnical colleagues quickly prototype software features, easing the load on already overworked engineers. These tasks can be tedious, and developers are typically glad to hand them off. But they represent only a small part of an experienced engineer's workload. For the more complex problems where engineers really earn their bread, many developers told MIT Technology Review, the tools face significant hurdles... The models also just get things wrong. Like all LLMs, coding models are prone to "hallucinating" - it's an issue built into how they work. But because the code they output looks so polished, errors can be difficult to detect, says James Liu, director of software engineering at the advertising technology company Mediaocean. Put all these flaws together, and using these tools can feel a lot like pulling a lever on a one-armed bandit. "Some projects you get a 20x improvement in terms of speed or efficiency," says Liu. "On other things, it just falls flat on its face, and you spend all this time trying to coax it into granting you the wish that you wanted and it's just not going to..." There are also more specific security concerns, she says. Researchers have discovered a worrying class of hallucinations where models reference nonexistent software packages in their code. Attackers can exploit this by creating packages with those names that harbor vulnerabilities, which the model or developer may then unwittingly incorporate into software. Other key points from the article: LLMs can only hold limited amounts of information in context windows, so "they struggle to parse large code bases and are prone to forgetting what they're doing on longer tasks." "While an LLM-generated response to a problem may work in isolation, software is made up of hundreds of interconnected modules. If these aren't built with consideration for other parts of the software, it can quickly lead to a tangled, inconsistent code base that's hard for humans to parse and, more important, to maintain." "Accumulating technical debt is inevitable in most projects, but AI tools make it much easier for time-pressured engineers to cut corners, says GitClear's Harding. And GitClear's data suggests this is happening at scale..." "As models improve, the code they produce is becoming increasingly verbose and complex, says Tariq Shaukat, CEO of Sonar, which makes tools for checking code quality. This is driving down the number of obvious bugs and security vulnerabilities, he says, but at the cost of increasing the number of 'code smells' - harder-to-pinpoint flaws that lead to maintenance problems and technical debt." Yet the article cites a recent Stanford University study that found employment among software developers aged 22 to 25 dropped nearly 20% between 2022 and 2025, "coinciding with the rise of AI-powered coding tools." The story is part of MIT Technology Review's new Hype Correction series of articles about AI.

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20 Dec 2025 11:38pm GMT

"Yet another distro is making the move to the KDE Plasma desktop," writes Linux magazine. "Parrot OS, a security-focused Linux distribution, is migrating from MATE to KDE Plasma, starting with version 7.0, now available in beta." Based on Debian 13, Parrot OS's goal is a shift toward "modernization, focusing on clearing technical debt and future-proofing the system." One big under-the-hood change is that the/tmpdirectory is now automatically mounted astmpfs(in RAM), as opposed to the physical drive. By making this change, Parrot OS enjoys improved performance and reduces wear on SSDs. This shift also means that all data in/tmpis lost during a reboot. ParrotOS senior systems engineer Dario Camonita explains the change in a blog post, calling it "not only aesthetic, but also in terms of usability and greater consistency with our future goals..." "While MATE will continue to be supported by us as long as upstream development continues, We have noticed and observed the continuous improvements made by the KDE team..." And elsewhere Linux Magazine notes two other distros are embracing the desktop Enlightenment: For years, Bodhi Linux was one of the very few distributions that used anything based on Enlightenment. That period of loneliness is officially over, withMX Mokshaand AV Linux 25. MX Moksha doesn't replace the original MX Linux. Instead, it will serve as an "official spin" of the distribution... The Enlightenment desktop (and subsequently Moksha) was developed with systemd in mind, so MX Moksha uses systemd. If you're not a fan of systemd, MX Moksha is not for you. MX Moksha is lighter than MX Linux, so it will perform better on older machines. It also uses the Liquorix kernel for lower latency. AV Linux has been released with the Xfce and LXDE desktops at different times and has only recently opted to make the switch to Enlightenment.

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20 Dec 2025 9:34pm GMT

The new regulation arrives on New Year's Day.

20 Dec 2025 12:15pm GMT

Google says the lawsuit is its last resort.

19 Dec 2025 10:21pm GMT

Ants with lots of workers tend to put less energy into making them armored.

19 Dec 2025 10:05pm GMT

If Excel rules the world, Word rules the legal profession. Jordan Bryan published a great article explaining why this is the case, and why this is unlikely to change any time soon, no matter how many people from the technology world think they can change this reality. Microsoft Word can never be replaced. OpenAI could build superintelligence surpassing human cognition in every conceivable dimension, rendering all human labor obsolete, and Microsoft Word will survive. Future contracts defining the land rights to distant galaxies will undoubtedly be drafted in Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is immortal. ↫ Jordan Bryan at The Redline by Version Story Bryan cites two main reasons underpinning Microsoft Word's immortality in the legal profession. First, lawyers need the various formatting options Word provides, and alternatives often suggested by outsiders, like Markdown, don't come close to offering even 5% of the various formatting features lawyers and other writers of legal documents require. By the time you add all those features back to Markdown, you've recreated Word, but infinitely worse and more obtuse. Also, and this is entirely my personal opinion, Markdown sucks. Second, and this one you've surely heard before: Word's .docx format is effectively a network protocol. Everyone in the legal profession uses it, can read it, work with it, mark it up, apply corrections, and so on - from judges to lawyers to clients. If you try to work with, say, Google Docs, instead, you create a ton of friction in every interaction you have with other people in the legal profession. I vividly remember this from my 15 years as a translator - every single document you ever worked with was a Microsoft Office document. Sure, the translation agency standing between the end client and the translator might have abstracted the document into a computer-aided translation tool like Trados, but you're still working with .docx, and the translated document sent to the client is still .docx, and needs to look identical to the source, just in a different language. In the technology world, there's a lot of people who come barging into some other profession or field, claiming to know everything, and suggest to "just do x", without any deference to how said profession or field actually operates. "Just use Markdown and git" even if the people involved have no clue what a markup language even is let alone what git is; "just use LibreOffice" even if the people involved will skewer you for altering the formatting of a document even ever so slightly; we all know examples of this. An industry tends to work a certain way not because they're stupid or haven't seen the light - it tends to work that way because there's a thousand little reasons you're not aware of that make that way the best way.

18 Dec 2025 11:28pm GMT

In 1979, VisiCalc was released for the Apple II, and to this day, many consider it the very first spreadsheet program. Considering just how important spreadsheets have become since then - Excel rules the world - the first spreadsheet program is definitely an interesting topic to dive into. It turns out that while VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program for home computers, it's not actually the first spreadsheet program, period. That honour goes to LANPAR, created ten years before VisiCalc. Ten years before VisiCalc, two engineers at Bell Canada came up with a pretty neat idea. At the time, organizational budgets were created using a program that ran on a mainframe system. If a manager wanted to make a change to the budget model, that might take programmers months to create an updated version. Rene Pardo and Remy Landau discussed the problem and asked "what if the managers could make their own budget forms as they would normally write them?" And with that, a new idea was created: the spreadsheet program. The new spreadsheet was called LANPAR, for "LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random" (but really it was a mash-up of their last names: LANdau and PARdo). ↫ Jim Hall at Technically We Write While there wasn't a graphical user interface on the screen with a grid and icons and everything else we associate with a spreadsheet today, it was still very much a spreadsheet. Individual cells were delinianated with semicolons, you could write down formulas to manipulate these cells, and the program could do forward referencing. The idea was to make it so easy to use, managers at Dell Canada could make budgeting changes overnight, instead of having programmers take weeks or months to do so. I'm not particularly well-versed in Excel and spreadsheets in general, but I can definitely imagine advanced users no longer really seeing the grids and numbers as individual entities, instead visualising everything much more closely to what LANPAR did. Like Neo when he finally peers through the Matrix.

18 Dec 2025 10:01pm GMT

Jamie Zawinski, one of the founders of Netscape and later Mozilla, has dug up the original versions of the iconic Mozilla dinosaur logos, and posted them online in all their glory. While he strongly believes Mozilla owned these logos outright, and that they were released as open source in 1998 or 1999, he can't technically prove that. It has come to my attention that the artwork for the original mozilla.org "dinosaur" logo is not widely available online. So, here it is. As I explained in some detail in my 2016 article "They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo", I commissioned this artwork from Shepard Fairey to use as the branding of the newly-founded mozilla.org and our open source release of the Netscape source code, which eventually became Firefox. This happened in March 1998. ↫ Jamie Zawinski The original Mozilla dinosaur logos are works of pure art. They sure don't make logos like this anymore.

18 Dec 2025 9:37pm GMT

The following packages may require manual intervention due to the upgrade from 9.0 to 10.0:

• aspnet-runtime
• aspnet-targeting-pack
• dotnet-runtime
• dotnet-sdk
• dotnet-source-built-artifacts
• dotnet-targeting-pack

pacman may display the following error failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) for the affected packages. If you are affected by this and require the 9.0 packages, the following commands will update e.g. aspnet-runtime to aspnet-runtime-9.0: pacman -Syu aspnet-runtime-9.0 pacman -Rs aspnet-runtime

11 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people's beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a [widespread outage][Azure outage] that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.

24 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

After Gandi was bought up and started taking extortion level prices for their domains I've been looking for an excuse to migrate registrar. Last week I decided to bite the bullet and move to Porkbun as I have another domain renewal coming up. However after setting up an account and paying for the transfer for 4 domains, I realized their DNS services are provided by Cloudflare! I personally do not use Cloudflare, and stay far away from all of their products for various reasons.

18 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT