fidzu : geek

A man accused of stealing hard drives containing unreleased Beyonce music, tour plans, and other materials from a rental car in Atlanta has pleaded guilty and accepted a five-year sentence, including two years in custody. Slashdot Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: Kelvin Evans was by the Atlanta police department in September in connection to a July 2025 car robbery where two suitcases containing Beyonce music and tour plans were stolen from a rental car. [...] According to a July police report, Beyonce choreographer Christopher Grant and dancer Diandre Blue called 911 to report a theft from their rental vehicle, a 2024 Jeep Wagoneer, before Beyonce's Cowboy Carter tour dates in Atlanta. An October indictment stated that Evans entered the car on July 8 "with the intent to commit theft." The stolen hard drives contained "watermarked music, some unreleased music, footage plans for the show and past and future set list," according to a police report. Clothing, designer sunglasses, laptops and AirPods headphones were also stolen, Grant and Blue said. Local law enforcement searched for the location of one of the stolen laptops and the AirPods to try and locate the property. One police officer wrote in the report: "I conducted a suspicious stop in the area, due to the information that was relayed to me. There were several cars in the area also that the AirPods were pinging to in that area also. After further investigation, a silver [redacted], which had traveled into zone 5 was moving at the same time as the tracking on the AirPods." Evans was arrested several weeks after Grant and Blue filed a report, and was publicly named as the suspect in September. He was released on a $20,000 bond a month later. At the time of his arrest, Atlanta police said that the stolen property had not been recovered. It is unclear whether it has since been found. Bruce66423 commented: "Just for stealing a couple of suitcases from a car. Funny how the elite punish those who inconvenience them. Can you imagine an ordinary victim see their offender get that sort of sentence?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 May 2026 11:00pm GMT

BrianFagioli writes: SOLAI has launched the Solode Neo, a $399 Linux-based mini PC designed for always-on AI agents, browser automation, and persistent developer workflows. The compact system ships with an Intel N150 processor, 12GB LPDDR5 memory, 128GB SSD storage, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a Linux-based operating system called Solode AI OS. The company says the device supports frameworks and tools including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, and Hermes, while emphasizing local control, automation, and privacy-focused workflows running directly from a home network. While SOLAI markets the Solode Neo as an "AI computer," the hardware itself appears aimed more at lightweight automation and cloud-assisted agent tasks than heavy local inference. The low-power Intel N150 should be sufficient for browser automation, scheduling, monitoring, containers, and smaller AI workloads, but the system is unlikely to compete with higher-end local AI hardware designed for running larger models offline. Even so, the idea of a dedicated low-power Linux appliance for persistent AI and automation tasks may appeal to homelab users and self-hosting enthusiasts looking for a simpler alternative to building their own always-on workflow box from scratch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 May 2026 10:00pm GMT

The final flight and complex legacy of a pioneering solar-powered aircraft.

13 May 2026 9:48pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to. "We're being told to use [AI] agents for broad changes across our codebase. There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure -- especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same," a UX designer at a midsized tech company told me. 404 Media granted all the developers we talked to for this story anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements or because they fear retribution from their employers. "We're building a rat's nest of tech debt that will be impossible to untangle when these models become prohibitively expensive (any minute now...)." "I had some issues where I forgot how to implement a Laravel API and it scared the shit out of me. I went to university for this, I've been a software engineer for many years now and it feels like I am back before I ever wrote a single line of code," the software developer at a small web design firm told 404 Media. "It's making me dumber for sure," the fintech software developer added. "It's like when we got cellphones and stopped remembering phone numbers, but it's grown to me mentally outsourcing 'thinking' in general. I feel my critical thinking and ability to sit and reason about a problem or a design has degraded because the all-knowing-dalai-llama is just a question away from giving me his take. And supposedly I tell myself ill just use it for inspiration but it ends up being my only thought. It gives you the illusion of productivity and expertise but at the end of the day you are more divorced from the output you submit than before." A software engineer at the FAANG said: "When I was using it for code generation, I found myself having a lot of trouble building and maintaining a mental model of the code I was working with. Another aspect is that I joined late last year and [the company's] codebase is massive. As a new hire, part of my job is to learn how to navigate the codebase and use the established conventions, but I think the AI push really hampered my ability to do that."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 May 2026 9:00pm GMT

The months, they don't stop coming, so here's another progress report for Haiku, our beloved successor to BeOS, the best operating system ever made. This past month the team's added basic support for SMP on ARM64 (enough to use it in QEMU), the MIME sniffer's internals have been overhauled for some serious performance gains, and a long list of smaller, but no less important or impactful, changes. Beta 6 still seems to be a ways off due to a number of unfixed bugs and an upcoming WebPositive release, but my usual spiel applies: you don't need to wait for a beta to test Haiku. It's stable enough as it is, and a nightly release will do you just fine, including updating to newer nightlies and application releases. This past month also saw which projects Haiku's GSoC people will be working on. Two projects will focus on improving Haiku's Bluetooth stack, including adding HFP profile support and support for HID devices, as well as general Bluetooth improvements across the board. The third and final project will focus on improving and expanding Haiku's Devices application to turn it into a real management utility along the lines of those available on many other modern operating systems.

13 May 2026 8:55pm GMT

Approval is no surprise after FCC chair pressured EchoStar to sell licenses.

13 May 2026 8:44pm GMT

Distinct form of tooth protein in Homo erectus shows up in Denisovans-and us.

13 May 2026 8:27pm GMT

The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments' use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC. ↫ Kai Nicol-Schwarz at CNBC The fact that this has only just become a possible reality now, and not decades ago, is beyond me, but better late than never, I suppose. The Americans voted en masse (not voting is a vote for the winner!) for Trump twice, and there's no indication they won't vote for such an anti-Europe basket case again. Their opinions and attitudes towards Europeans are clear: they dislike us deeply, and after the last few years, there's no going back. Violating trust is easy; restoring it takes decades. Relying on the Americans for our digital infrastructure is, therefore, a monumentally stupid and self-defeating idea. Of course, many members states are addicted to the cloud services from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, so there's going to be many individual member states who simply won't reduce their dependency on the Americans of their own volition. My own country of origin, The Netherlands, only recently signed off on the sale of its government ID services company and associated personal data to an American company, despite the vast majority of the Dutch House of Representatives telling them not to. As such, it makes sense for the EU to step in and simply making it illegal to hand over sensitive data to the Americans. Of course, we've got a long way to go, and I'm sure many of any possible proposed restrictions will be watered down considerably by pressure form major member states. Addiction is a harsh disease.

13 May 2026 7:52pm GMT

A few weeks ago, we talked about a project within KDE to revive two of their classic themes, Oxygen and Air, and polish them up to make them usable on the current versions of KDE. The developers and designers working on this project say they've been utterly surprised by just how popular this news has proven to be, and Filip Fila published a blog post with some thoughts on this unexpected popularity. Why are people yearning so strongly for user interfaces from the past? That's the real story underneath the retro-yearning. It isn't a simply story of people wanting their childhood from the 2000s back. It's that a lot of 'the new' we've been offering doesn't satisfy. It doesn't have personality. It doesn't feel warm. It doesn't feel like it was made with the idea of being anything more than a clean product that gets the job done. The escapism towards the past is a symptom. A symptom of unmet needs, not mere sentimentality. ↫ Filip Fila Fila uses modern architecture as an example, and I think it's an apt one. While monumental modern architecture can easily be beautiful and striking, it's the mundane buildings all around us that just don't seem to elicit any positive emotions, no sense of belonging or safety. As Fila also notes, the decades-long swing to minimalism in both architecture and UI design isn't merely because of a preference among designers, but also because minimalism is a hell of a lot cheaper to produce. A building with very little ornamentation and basic, straight lines is much easier, and thus cheaper, to design, construct, and maintain. The same applies to graphical user interface design. There are some signs that the pendulum is starting to swing back towards more instead of less, in all aspects of design. More and more people are loudly demanding buildings to adopt more classical elements, and as we can all attest to here on OSNews, the longing for aspects of UI design from the '90s and early 2000s to make a return is strong. And not just among us deep in the weeds, either; I've lost count of the number of times I've seen normal people utterly confounded by modern UI design. Anyway, bring back beveled edges.

12 May 2026 8:42pm 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