fidzu : geek

MapQuest creates a new layer (that can be toggled on and off), Gizmodo reports: After promising not to comply with the Trump administration's "Lake America" gimmick, the platform announced a new "Surveillance Layer" that displays the locations of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), including those from Flock Safety. Per MapQuest, its new tool will identify the locations of known outdoor surveillance cameras and plate readers from Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and others. While the company didn't specify how it sources its data, it appears to be similar to the data amassed by DeFlock, which maintains a user-submitted map of ALPR camera locations. MapQuest may be sourcing the information from DeFlock and the OpenStreetMap project. Engadget notes that MapQuest also recently added "useful, long-overdue features like Android Auto support and public transit directions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Oct 2026 9:00pm GMT

"Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin said Friday it plans to make extensive upgrades to its Florida launch facilities," reports CNBC, "with the goal of supporting multiple flights per week by the end of the decade." "The company will add two more launch and landing pads for New Glenn, its heavy-lift, partially reusable rocket." A $330 million expansion to its Rocket Park campus in Cape Canaveral, expected to be complete in the summer of 2027, will enable it to produce up to 150 upper stages of its New Glenn rocket annually, Blue Origin said in a blog post. "These investments are centered on one goal: building the capacity to support more missions, more reliably, and more efficiently," Ian Richardson, Blue Origin's senior vice president of operations, wrote in the post. "As we look ahead, this infrastructure is designed to support multiple flights per week by the end of the decade...." Blue Origin said it's building a new customer integration facility with the U.S. Space Force at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station that will enable it to "prepare multiple missions at once" when it's up and running. Blue Origin has invested more than $3 billion in its infrastructure and facilities in Florida, which now spans more than 20 sites across the state's Brevard and Orange counties, with more than 5,000 employees, [Ian Richardson, Blue Origin's senior vice president of operations, wrote in the blog post]. The article notes it's part of "a flurry of investment" as SpaceX stops offering commercial rides on its Falcon 9, "with $92.5 billion invested in the commercial space sector in the first three quarters of 2026, according to a report this week by venture capital firm Space Capital." And it happens as Blue Origin, SpaceX and other rocket providers "are seeing increasing demand from companies and governments trying to deploy satellites into orbit." "Launching at a high cadence requires a connected system," says Blue Origin's blog post, "one that manufactures vehicles at scale, prepares customer payloads efficiently, supports reliable launch operations, and quickly returns reusable boosters to service. We are building that system here in Florida," and "laying the foundation for a future where access to space is more frequent, more reliable, and more affordable, for the benefit of Earth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Oct 2026 8:00pm GMT

Linux maintainers "have ruled that people no longer have to declare their LLM usage," reports XDA Developers, "as Torvalds himself calls a ban on AI 'utterly stupid.'" The first part of this story comes via a message sent to the Linux mailing list. It announces one of the major changes decided during the Maintainers Summit on October 8, 2026, in Prague, Czechia, where submissions to the kernel no longer need to use the "Assisted-by" tag... meaning that people can submit AI-generated code without needing to declare it as such. In some correspondence regarding concern about this new disclosure removal, the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, made his thoughts known... [Torvalds] compares an AI ban to getting rid of text editors, as doing so would prove that someone could write a good commit message without making any mistakes. He then rounds off his argument by asking, "Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be?" and stating that he simply expects the people working on the Linux kernel to "understand what they are doing." Here's the last line of Torvalds' post. "Quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools." In a related story, Torvalds says he's used AI to help him understand patches that were hard to follow. And this week Torvalds even posted an LLM-assisted patch, reports Tom's Hardware: The development branch purports to fix an old issue with massive cache contention when many CPUs are reading the same file - a scenario potentially encountered when using shared libraries, databases, and web servers. Several developers had already made attempts over the years at fixing the issue, all with varied results, none quite ideal as an all-encompassing solution... He's now posted his solution in a development branch, and claims that he's seen a 23x performance improvement in a dedicated synthetic benchmark, though he notes that actual real-world impact will be far less significant, as "no real load" will witness those figures. Torvalds used Anthropic's Claude Code, reports The New Stack, and "said the assistant wrote the implementation, tests, and initial documentation, and reviewed the code under his direction. He ran the benchmarks himself, despite having previously criticized developers for claiming AI writes 99% of their code." Tuesday Torvalds submitted a 10-patch series. "Reviewers have since identified a race condition and raised concerns about memory reclamation," adds The New Stack. "Torvalds has handed further development to Kiryl Shutsemau, a Linux kernel developer who previously worked on the same bottleneck."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Oct 2026 7:00pm GMT

Research suggests listening more while talking less. Killing aimless meetings can help, too.

17 Oct 2026 11:15am GMT

The single-player is just OK, but according to the players, that doesn't matter.

17 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

It's been two years since my initial post about making GNOME OS an end-user general purpose OS. Today, we're excited to announce that we've hit a major milestone! TL;DR: We're launching a new edition called "GNOME OS Preview", which is built from the latest stable GNOME release. This means that GNOME OS is no longer just a nightly OS for GNOME developers and testers! ↫ Aaron Ardiri A number of changes and improvements have made the move from nightly status to preview status possible. They've made GNOME OS handle environments with limited amounts of RAM much better - not a luxury, these days - including the ability to dynamically increase the swap space if needed. In addition, the work to make it much easier to install and test daily Flatpak builds of applications is now part of GNOME OS, as is the effort to make command-line utilities manageable in the same way as Flatpaks. As the blog post notes, there's still a ton of work left to do before GNOME OS is ready for everyone. They're going to bet heavily on systemd-homed to enable, among other things, per-user disk encryption, and there's a new installer coming, as well. They also want to ship GNOME's preinstalled applications as Flatpaks, integrate delta updates, and much more. It all looks incredibly appealing, even if I am not the target user for something like GNOME OS.

16 Oct 2026 11:54pm GMT

The actions could have resulted in criminal charges had humans been behind the keyboard.

16 Oct 2026 8:59pm GMT

This repository contains approximately 1 GB of historical Palm OS development material, collected over many years of working with the platform. The archive includes a mixture of publicly distributed development resources, personal development material, technical references, and historical artifacts. ↫ Aaron Ardiri An incredible resource for anyone wishing to dive into Palm OS programming and development in this day and age.

16 Oct 2026 8:47pm GMT

OpenVMS isn't exactly the easiest platform to get into, with even the first major hurdle - licensing! - being a bit of a complex issue. To address this and other issues people new to OpenVMS might run into, VSI, the company currently developing OpenVMS, launched its new VSI How-to Portal. For now, it covers things like licensing, installing and updating OpenVMS for x86, TCP/IP configuration, and setting up SSH. The company plans to expand the portal with more articles based on customer and user feedback, so hopefully more information will appear soon. Most of us are probably not particularly not particularly experienced with OpenVMS, so having a portal like this can really help get you started.

15 Oct 2026 11:55pm 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