fidzu : geek

We're a mere €124 away from the first incentive during our fundraiser: making me use stock Windows 11 for a month. Since the writing appears to be on the wall, and the donation pulling us across the line can come in any moment, I figured I'd better take a peek at how things stand with Windows. I came across a story about Yusuf Mehdi, an executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, who apparently became the face of Microsoft's "AI" push. After 35 years, he's leaving the company, but not after pledging to continue pushing "AI" deeper into Windows 11. Despite this intense backlash, Mehdi is doubling down on the AI vision during his final months at the company. In his LinkedIn announcement, he stated: "I will work through the next fiscal year to help reimagine Windows for the agentic era, grow Microsoft 365 services, and bring our One Copilot vision to life." Microsoft has recently scaled back on some intrusive Copilot features in Notepad, Snipping Tool, and Photos, but the executive leadership team still views AI agents as the inevitable future of the Windows desktop experience. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest The numbers for Microsoft and every other software company who dove head-first into "AI" are clear: it's one of the biggest bottomless pits of all time, and they're all throwing money down the pit hoping it'll eventually fill up and overflow. Meanwhile, 100 metres down in the pit, a dude in a leather jacket is holding out a bucket and collecting some of the money before it disappears into the void below. For Microsoft, "AI" represents a $235 billion loss (so far!), so the company had to do something - anything - to stop the bleeding. They tried shoving Copilot buttons in every nook and cranny of its products, but users rightfully and understandably revolted. They're toning it down in Windows, and recently, they've also had to tone it down in Office as users were horrified to discover a floating Copilot button in Word, Excel, and so on. People really do not want this shit, which puts these companies in a hugely precarious position: just how badly can they abuse the geese? We'll see just how much Microsoft will actually roll back its force-feeding practices, and I'm not excited to be partaking in the Windows 11 experiment soon.

25 May 2026 7:26pm GMT

"The expansion of SpaceX's Starlink network of internet relay satellites continued Monday with a Memorial Day launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station," reports Spaceflight Now. The mission added another 29 Starlink satellites to more than 10,000 already in low Earth orbit: This was SpaceX's 60th orbital flight of the year, consisting of 59 Falcon 9 rockets and one Falcon Heavy rocket... Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, [Falcon 9 first stage] B1078 landed on the drone ship, 'A Shortfall of Gravitas,' positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. This was the 151st landing for this vessel and the 614th booster landing to date for SpaceX. Meanwhile, the second stage shut down eight minutes and 39 seconds into flight and entered a coast phase, before short second burn at T+52 minutes. The stack of Starlink satellites deployed 61 minutes and 26 seconds after launch. On X.com SpaceX shared footage of the booster rocket landing, and a longer video showing Starship's 12th test flight Friday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 May 2026 5:10pm GMT

Anyone who's written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn't for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and libraries. A lot of codebases will try somewhat to support various environments, mostly through the use of preprocessor checks and guards, but these attempts are finicky at best and straight up broken at worst. I have ran into many of these situations while working on my C compiler, so here's a small list of some of them. ↫ lemon/Sofia Sometimes I wonder how computers even get anything done at all.

25 May 2026 4:11pm GMT

Deal also launched the first quantum foundry company, but is there a need for it?

25 May 2026 12:00pm GMT

Tech industry layoffs may be worse at large tech companies than the rest of the IT industry. The New York Times argues those layoffs have now shifted the culture at Big Tech companies, after interviewing more than two dozen of their workers. "Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships; and a throbbing economic anxiety infects almost every conversation. "Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone..." Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000... By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success - topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions - more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success... The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren't constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy. Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a "tech layoff tracker" that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. "I was on Blind five days a week," said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. "I was trying to get prepared mentally," she said. Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers' reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 May 2026 11:34am GMT

Consensus and genre labels aren't reliable predictors of what you'll enjoy.

25 May 2026 11:22am GMT

"Think Olympics on steroids. Literally," quips the BBC, describing Sunday's controversial Enhanced Games event in Las Vegas featuring dozens of athletes "using performance-enhancing drugs to try and break world records in track, weightlifting and swimming. Some $25m (£18.6m) in prize money is up for grabs - with cash prizes for winners... The drugs they use must be legal, and approved by the Federal Drug Administration. But substances like testosterone and human growth hormone - banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency - are not only celebrated here, they're encouraged and for sale... Health experts warn that anabolic steroids and growth hormones can cause strokes and cardiovascular damage, among other risks. Event organisers claim Enhanced will push the limits of human performance while critics, especially in the Olympic movement, dismiss it as an affront to the spirit and founding principles of competitive sport... Earlier this month, the Enhanced Group - the company behind the competition - began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. And the competition is seemingly being treated as an opportunity for Enhanced to sell performance-enhancing medicine and supplements online. "The project was founded by entrepreneurs Aron D'Souza and Maximilian Martin in 2023," the artidcle points out, "and has attracted backing from prominent investors including billionaire Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr." And NPR adds that "Most of the participating athletes trained for the competition in Abu Dhabi, as part of Enhanced's own study." Enhanced did not break down what specific athletes used which drugs, but they announced on Wednesday in the lead-up to the event that 91% of the athletes competing used testosterone or testosterone esters, 79% used human growth hormone, and 62% used stimulants, such as adderall... The games have been largely panned by outside medical experts and sports governing bodies. Multiple recent studies assess the harm surrounding the Enhanced Games. Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, called the games a "dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle" in a statement. The International Olympic Committee said the games are a "betrayal of everything that we stand for." The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) last year urged U.S. authorities to stop the games. The International Federation of Sports Medicine said in 2024 that they see the medical oversight as "insufficient" to support the athletes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 May 2026 7:34am GMT

If you visit the Flatpak website today, it lists, as the very first advantage of the project: "Build for every distro: create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market." If you then move on to the list of supported distributions, you'll see the usual suspects, but also distributions like Void Linux, Guix, and Alpine. These last three all have one thing in common: they use an init system other than systemd, because Flatpak doesn't care what init system you use. It seems that for the next major version of Flatpak, however, that's going to change: systemd will probably become a dependency for Flatpak. Speaking at the Linux App Summit, Arian Vovk and Sebastian Wick held a great talk about the future of Flatpak. The current version of Flatpak will continue to see a ton of improvements, but at the same time, the limits of what can be done with its decades-old design have become harder and harder to work around. As such, they're also planning for and working on what they call Flatpak Next, or perhaps Flatpak 2.0, which is effectively a rewrite of Flatpak based on what they've learned over the years, making use of modern technologies and ideas that have gained ground since the initial design of Flatpak 1.x. It's important to note that everything discussed during the talk is planning, and not a single line of code has been written yet. This means that all of these plans are subject to change, and as the work progresses over the coming years, the end result may turn out very different from what's been detailed in the talk. In addition, and I can't stress this enough: if anything in this discussion gives you even the smallest of inklings to go and harass, attack, insult, or otherwise bother anyone involved in Flatpak, systemd, or related technologies, please be so kind as to book an appointment for a yoga class or whatever. It seems like you need it. Right at the onset of the talk, Vovk and Wick explain that they want to move the permission management from Flatpak into the service layer, through a new service called systemd-appd. Systemd-appd gives applications an identifier and stores their permissions, and then this data can be queried by the rest of the system. In turn, this enables a slew of other features, not least of which is subsandboxing. At the moment, the plan is to introduce this feature in the current version of Flatpak, thereby introducing a dependency on systemd into Flatpak. From what I understand from Vovk, they were intending to be "super considerate" of distributions and people not using systemd, which I take to mean we'd eventually end up in a situation very similar to systemd-logind, which was extracted from systemd into a separate daemon, elogind, so that distributions using other init systems could still make use of desktop environments depending on systemd-logind. I imagine Flatpak developers wanted to make as many affordances as realistically possible for something similar to happen to systemd-appd, thus ensuring Flatpak would remain available on distributions not using systemd. Obviously, people who are using distributions like Void or Alpine were concerned about the future of Flatpak on their systems. If Flatpak gains a hard dependency on systemd, Flatpak would no longer work on distributions without systemd, so the talk raised questions - sadly, it seems the questions were directed at someone not technically involved with Flatpak development, and his replies were not particularly helpful and often just downright insulting and inflammatory. Even though he's not involved in Flatpak development, enough people assumed that he was, and a toxic brew stirred. Users with genuine, friendly questions about the future of Flatpak on their systems were met with derision and insults, and it spiraled out of control from there, drawing in the rabid anti-systemd Red Hat conspiracy lunatics (and worse). Things got progressively worse for everyone involved, particularly for Flatpak's developers. And so we ended up at the situation where everyone's mad and Flatpak's developers are "not feeling inclined to spend time on that shit anymore" when it comes to accommodating and making affordances for distributions and people not using systemd. The end result will most likely be that any future Flatpak dependency on systemd will be stricter, and making any independent elogind-like daemon will be much harder than it was going to be. Nobody wins, everybody loses, all because some people thought it necessary and productive to be insulting and inflammatory. As things currently stands, it's very likely that over the coming years, Flatpak will gain a dependency on systemd, possibly without any affordances for an independent daemon to replicate systemd-appd functionality on distributions that do not use systemd. In other words, Flatpak would no longer be able to boast that it enables "Build for every distro: create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market.", as it would no longer be distribution-agnostic. And that's a shame, because Flatpak fills a real need for users, regardless of whatever init system they use. Which is apparently something some people base their entire identity on, because they're weirdos.

24 May 2026 3:05pm GMT

The white whales join the short, contested list of animals that see themselves.

24 May 2026 11:15am GMT

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT

Break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow.

18 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.

11 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT