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17 Sep 2026 3:03am GMT

Targeting students and beginners, Adafruit released "CircuitPython" in 2017 (as a derivative of the MicroPython microcontroller-optimized programming language). Now Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone) brings this update: Adafruit has published CircuitPython Turbo, a workflow that compiles selected Python functions into native machine code on a computer, then loads them onto compatible microcontroller boards. It builds on MicroPython's Native and Viper emitters. In a documented Metro RP2040 fixed-point Mandelbrot test, Viper cut computation time from 8.335 seconds to 0.423 seconds, a 19.71x speedup over bytecode. The rest of the application stays in Python. The guide includes benchmarks, source code and hardware demos. The speedup is for the measured computation, not the whole application. "Turbo support is now included in the latest official CircuitPython builds for RP2040 and RP2350 boards..." explains Torrone's announcement at Adafruit.com. "The new Turbo in CircuitPython helps when the board spends time calculating: making neopixel effects, drawing fractals, processing audio, filtering sensor readings, or preparing lots of pixels. Those projects can get smoother animation, quicker responses, or room to do more things at once." With Turbo, it's easier, better, and now even faster to make LED light up costumes that also reacts to sound at the same time, a sensor dashboard with animated graphics, or a tiny game doing physics while drawing the screen. Turbo speeds up the busy Python parts. It won't make a slow sensor or display connection faster... Your computer turns selected functions into instructions the chip can run directly. Python still handles the rest. We have measured speedups, real display captures, and examples you can pull apart to see what happened. None of this arrived alone. CircuitPython, MicroPython, PyMCU, compiler tools, open hardware, and people sharing their work gave us pieces to connect. The Bao experiments take that idea somewhere else, handing calculations to four helper cores. Now we get to make those paths easier to use, compare results, and find the next useful thing. Maybe that's smoother animation, a responsive instrument, or an idea we haven't tried yet. That's what I like about open source. Someone shares a piece, someone else sees a possibility, and we get to keep building it together.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Sep 2026 2:34am GMT

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17 Sep 2026 2:19am GMT

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17 Sep 2026 1:39am GMT

"As parts of the Southern California coastline crumbled into the sea, slammed by intense waves and flooding in recent days, oceanographer Kim McCoy had one thing on his mind," reports the Los Angeles Times. He was thinking about "the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant." "Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which increases wave height ... these could wash away a section of the walkway that protects the San Onofre seawall, and the waste canisters are just 100 feet away from that," the former wave dynamics researcher and longtime advocate against beach storage of nuclear waste said. Most experts agree the risk of erosion damaging the nuclear waste storage system is extremely low in the near term. The plant's owner, Southern California Edison, has promised the California Coastal Commission to move the waste to higher elevation on-site if modeling shows sea level rise and erosion will start to pose a challenge. But the recent waves, fueled by Hurricane Marie far away in the Pacific, resurfaced the issue of the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive spent fuel that used to power the reactors. "At the moment, it is under control, I think it's essential to say that," said James Day, a geology professor at UC San Diego. "But geologically we must be thinking long term. The waste lasts for hundreds, if not thousands of generations...." [In 2103 some of the site's canisters' approach their intended 100-year lifespans, and the utility may have to start the transfer into new cansiters.] The distinctive twin domes that once housed the reactor cores will start coming down early next year. But the 3.6 million pounds of high-level waste will stay in the coastal community indefinitely. How much of a safety hazard that is depends on whom you ask. "San Onofre is sitting on some fairly young rocks in a seismically active region," Day said at a recent symposium at the Scripps Seaside Forum in La Jolla, hosted by the Samuel Lawrence Foundation. "This is not the sort of place you would leave nuclear waste." Others noted that collapse of beach slopes could make the site more vulnerable to tsunamis. They spoke of the corrosive effects of the ocean air on the steel canisters that hold the waste... Edison says its system will be safe for decades to come. "The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall," said Manuel Camargo, principal manager of decommissioning for Edison, standing on the concrete pad that holds the steel waste storage canisters. "The maximum credible earthquake, somewhere around a 7.0 magnitude, would produce something about half of what this system is designed to withstand...." Edison is bolstering a path below the seawall. Based on state data from the California Ocean Protection Council, the seawall would not be inundated before 2050, Camargo said... Plans for a deep geological repository beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada crumbled in the face of local opposition in 2011. Utilities around the U.S. now sue the federal government every year to recoup their storage expenses because the Department of Energy has not come through on its promise. The lawsuits cost taxpayers $2 million a day, according to Camargo. "It's so safe that it's almost a problem," Camargo said. "It's not a priority to a lot of folks to move it." "The Trump administration's Department of Energy wants to create 'campuses' in several states to store waste," the article points out, "and, in exchange, give local jurisdictions funding to develop different aspects of the nuclear cycle - such as fuel creation, power generation and potentially fuel recycling..." "The administration wants to address the fact that waste is sitting at 80 reactor sites around the country. It also needs places for waste from new reactors it wants to build."

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16 Sep 2026 10:04pm GMT

Planned 2029 debut could make this Apple's first enterprise server in decades.

16 Sep 2026 10:02pm GMT

Survivors appalled nobody will tell them if they're in Epstein's CSAM collection.

16 Sep 2026 9:42pm GMT

Group plans to be largely out of commission for several weeks.

16 Sep 2026 9:08pm GMT

Unicode 18.0 is now available with 13,007 new characters, three new scripts, new currency symbols, nine emojis, and updated text-processing rules.

16 Sep 2026 8:48pm GMT

"Anthropic's CEO took the stage at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday to reiterate his call for a slowdown of AI development," reports the Guardian, " while Nvidia's CEO argued against slowing its development. "Run as fast as you can." Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies; coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries; and, eventually, larger global coordination. At Dreamforce, Amodei said Anthropic has committed to independent evaluators and was "going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry" on the other two steps. Amodei, xAI's Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman have recently called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development. ["Dario is right," Musk posted on X.com] Huang, who also made an appearance at Dreamforce on Tuesday, said companies should not slow down AI development. He argued that new regulations were not necessary, advising AI companies to simply wait to release products until they know they are safe rather than begging the US government to intervene... One day prior at the All-In summit in Los Angeles, Donald Trump called Huang while the CEO was on stage. Huang put the president on speakerphone as Trump called the growing concern about AI a "hoax" and asserted again that a slowdown would only benefit China... [OpenAI's] Altman said AI models had advanced so quickly that monitoring and security need to be treated with a "new level of rigor", calling an incident in which OpenAI agents hacked into another company a "wake-up call" for the industry. He also said the public was very "right to be afraid" of AI because of the potential loss of control, and the possibility of a small group of powerful AI companies exerting their views on the world. The cofounder of Google DeepMind posted on X that "Dario's essay points towards the right path forward." And in an internal memo, Microsoft's Satya Nadella endorsed broader third-party testing and warned that companies must take time to make the technology safe, Business Insider reports. Monday Microsoft also published a 37-page training manual "for how we develop our AI, and how we intend it to function during deployment," requesting public feedback. But Michael Burry "is not buying it," reports The Street. The investor made famous in The Big Short "dismissed the united front as 'self-serving' and laid out four numbered objections..." He argued that large language models are not artificial general intelligence, so there is nothing meaningful left to slow down. Fast competition benefits incumbents, he said, and danger warnings work as hype ahead of IPOs. The whole exercise, he added, could mask growth that is already slowing as those IPOs get pushed back. Former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun is also skeptical, posting on X.com that Anthropic's Dario Amodei "was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now." Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of Google's AI ethics team who was fired in 2020, even thinks the AI companies are stoking fears of extinction "to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons," according to Wired. But others still remain concerned. "I've been in rooms with the hyperscalers, and the Trump administration officials, and none of them know what to do," CNN commentator Van Jones said in a recent panel discussion. "So I do want to say: nobody's flying the plane on this... I think that the ethicists that work for them - when they are quitting, and they are running out, and they're pointing back at the building and they're waving their arms, and saying 'I'm seeing stuff that's scaring me' - we should take that very seriously."

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16 Sep 2026 5:34pm GMT

GNOME 51 is now available with smoother frame scheduling, offline maps, improved Settings, a revamped file previewer, and many desktop refinements.

16 Sep 2026 2:59pm GMT

Omarchy 4.0.4 switches users to the project's own Linux kernel, with desktop responsiveness, gaming, Btrfs, power management, and hardware fixes in focus.

16 Sep 2026 1:25pm GMT