Flathub, by the most popular (effectively only) repository for Flatpak applications, has changed its policies to include a strict ban on “AI” use for both application submissions as well as the application code itself.
Last week I ran the second part of my three-part “What If…We’re In An AI Bubble?” series where I have been covering the scenarios that I believe could lead to the bubble popping.
Here’s what I’ve discussed so far:
According to a mathematical model of how people weigh up different outcomes, the optimal strategy is to be ambitious, but not overly so
The work on the May release has been dominated by topics on account of the just published Sculpt OS version 26.04. Besides featuring profound driver improvements across Wifi, ACPI, I2C HID, SOF audio, and graphics, it turns the most innovative aspects of Sculpt OS into building blocks for the easy reuse in other incarnations of Genode-based systems.
In the release notes for the latest NVIDIA driver version for Windows, the “AI” company who happens to spare a few GPUs for regular users every now and then has announced that the curtain has fallen for the classic NVIDIA Control Panel.
Quantum Backrooms is a horror game in which the player explores eerie rooms. The twist is that the rooms have been generated by a quantum computer
We're increasingly prioritising our own needs over those of the wider community, which may be causing us to love our partners less intensely
Bacteria created using mirror images of natural biomolecules would pose a grave threat to life on Earth, some researchers warn, but a new study suggests they would struggle to survive in the wild
One man is motivated by self-justification, the other by public service.
One man is motivated by self-justification, the other by public service.
Roger Phillip Graham was born in Spokane, Washington on February 20, 1909 to John Alfred Graham and Abbie Susan (née McCalmont). His family moved often, spending time in Oklahoma, among other places. He returned to Spokane to attend Gonzaga College, from which he graduated in 1931 and did some graduate work at the University of Washington.
A cancer-killing virus has stopped pancreatic tumours from growing and spreading in three people in an initial safety trial, raising hopes that it may help to beat the deadly condition
Even if you’ve never bought any cryptocurrency, like columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, your money may be affected by bitcoin’s fate – which is uncertain, as quantum computing advances are threatening to make the encryption protecting it useless
Dive into the opening of The Selfish Gene's first chapter 'Why are people?', the New Scientist Book Club’s read for June to mark 50 years since the popular science classic was first published
Until recently, the Pamir mountains in central Asia have bucked the global melting trend, but in 2025, the region’s glaciers experienced a massive loss of ice due to extreme heat
When you think of Gentoo, you tend to think of it being a difficult distribution, where you compile everything yourself. There’s much more to Gentoo than that. Yes, some of it comes from building from source: the flexibility.
One of my local gaming friends told me about Marrying Mr. Darcy, and brought his copy to a recent session, where we played it. I thought it was a lot of fun and have acquired a copy. This is a game based on Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice.
After an AI from OpenAI found a trick to solve an 80-year-old conjecture from Paul Erdős, mathematicians have borrowed the same technique to solve another important problem
It’s no secret there’s a war going on inside the open source community, with people adopting “AI” on one side, and those that want nothing to do with it on the other. While the former are, by nature, using destructive tactics like mass website scraping, license washing, taking people’s creative works without permission, taking all the RAM and GPUs, and oh, destroying the planet, the latter have mostly stuck to fairly benign things like policies banning “AI” use, “AI” bot blockers, and the occasional honey pot mazes to trap “AI” crawlers.
AI start-ups with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding are hiring mathematicians and building AI systems that they hope will not only solve mathematics, but also build more intelligent AI
The cost of CAR T-cell therapy means that the highly effective cancer treatment is unavailable in many parts of the world. But a new way of making these cells could dramatically drive down the cost
borgstore 0.5.0 was just released!
borgstore is a general purpose key/value store with some nice features, supporting misc. backends (local fs, sftp, REST https, s3, rclone).
it now supports optional caching (usually via an additional posixfs caching backend).
Helen Phillips, winner of the Climate Fiction prize for her novel Hum, on if stories can make a difference, her anxieties and writing about the climate
Massive amounts of dust swirl around active nuclei at the centres of galaxies, and these discs could give rise to vast numbers of rocky planets, some even the size of stars
We’ve talked about the various age verification laws in the United States, and there’s been a development recently that a lot of people seem to think is a good thing: both the age verification laws in California and Colorado have received exemptions for open source operating systems.
But what I want to write about today are three protocols that have their own ecosystems, their own communities, and their own aesthetics. finger://, gopher://, and gemini://. Two predate the World Wide Web entirely, but one was created in 2019, the same year the first black hole photograph circled the planet.
Now that my one-month sentence of using Windows 11 has begun (you can follow along!), I’m also a bit more perceptive of news and developments regardingMicrosoft’s latest and greatest operating system version.
The Eternal City, edited by David Drake, Martin Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh (Baen Books, January 1990). Cover by John Rheaume The main reason I bought this collection was for the Howard story, “Kings of the Night.” This was back when I was striving to be a Howard completist.
From Kenya's Tree of Life to a Svalbard glacier, these stunning photos are taken from a new book by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, whose The Earth From Above was a smash hit 25 years ago
Inspired by Shannon Vallor's book The AI Mirror, this compelling piece looks at how we are being affected by our deepening interactions with tech
Embryo organoids made from stem cells are enabling scientists to recreate early pregnancy in the lab, unlocking treatments for infertility, miscarriage and pre-eclampsia
Among people of high socioeconomic status, love for nature corresponds with a bigger environmental footprint – and there's an obvious reason why
I have been posting on the fanzine bare*bones, which is devoted to “unearthing vintage, forgotten, and overlooked horror, mystery, sci-fi, western, and weird film, paperbacks, comics, pulp fiction, and video.” It is produced by Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri through Cimarron Street Books.
Three missions slated to launch this year will begin to search the lunar surface for a suitable base location
Researchers have designed a quantum version of a pendulum clock. It could shed light on timekeeping in the quantum realm
Gold is chemically inert and so doesn't tarnish, but exactly why had been a mystery
João Carrasqueira at XDA Developers has taken a look at the current state of Sailfish OS, and concludes: As an idea, I love Sailfish OS. Not only does it bring a wholly unique interface to mobile devices at a time when things seem more unified than ever, but it also has the potential to bring the full power of Linux to a smartphone you actually want to use.
Good afterevenmorn, Readers! Now that I’ve finished my play-thorugh of Far Cry 6, I have started playing a new game on my Friday night live streams. It is a survival exploration game that I am assured also has a story element (my livestreams are narrative games, largely).
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and
We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun
Critical safety equipment in many train systems is vulnerable to disruption by space weather, which could lead to fatal accidents
Residues on medical equipment reveal that physicians in China over 600 years ago used aconitine, a highly toxic plant chemical, to alleviate pain during surgical procedures
Men who do not produce sperm can’t be helped by existing fertility treatments, but a start-up is now claiming it can grow their sperm in the lab. Columnist Michael Le Page suspects this technique will have to be combined with gene editing if it is to help many men
Airstrikes on Tehran earlier this year emitted a plume containing almost 30,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide that reached Asian countries
Sometimes you come across a tune and you instantly know. It will be a combination of the melody, the instrumentation, the vocals and the lyrics. And everything else that makes music unique.
Came across Rattlesnake Milk today and it was love at first listen. Both their albums (from Bandcamp and Qobuz).
While listening I looked up their upcoming tour dates. Was mightily disappointed discovering that they're coming to Norway in the fall, but won't be playing in Oslo! Can we get someone on this asap?!
I have a Nokia N8, and it’s one of my favourite retro (?) devices I own. It was one of Nokia’s last efforts to make Symbian happen in the post-iPhone era, and while the hardware was quite nice, Symbian just wasn’t made for multitouch devices.
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.
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 rewrite of quantum mechanics that includes the force of gravity could finally achieve one of physicists’ biggest goals and reveal the ultimate fuzziness of time
I picked up the third volume in the Jimmy Wentworth series from Steeger Books. The Brothers of the Snake: The Complete Chinatown Cases of Jimmy Wentworth, Vol. 3, collects the next six stories in this series.
“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep Back in the Summer of 2020, A (Black) Gat in the Hand looked at some screen and radio productions for Raymond Chandler’s private eye, Philip Marlowe.
There is currently no good way for astronauts in space to do laundry, but researchers may have finally come up with one: a bright purple jet of microbe-killing plasma
In the age of AI, instant answers to our questions are readily available. But columnist Helen Thomson finds that continuing to encourage those delicious flashes of insight that come from your own thoughts may be beneficial both for your everyday life and your long-term brain health
Since the publication of his first novel Ghost Road Blues, Jonathan Maberry has been a mainstay in genre fiction circles. Whether its for one of his multiple series, comic book writing, or the numerous anthologies he’s edited over the years, audiences have come to know and love his work.
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.
You may think you know what “long-term support” means when picking a Linux distribution and version, but judging by the multitude of utterly wrong takes and deeply confused users I come across online, I’m starting to get the feeling that in fact, no, you don’t know what it means.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Gnutella is a file sharing protocol that many have forgotten and it has the story of a decentralized technology adopted by millions of casual users who did not care to learn what a peer-to-peer system was.
A veritable cornucopia of dodgy barbarian and barbarian-adjacent movies that I have never watched before, and will probably never watch again. Enjoy Parts One and Two here and here. A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1990) – USA I can’t help thinking that this one must have disappointed many a randy teenager when they smuggled it out of the video store, only to learn that ‘nymphoid’ doesn’t mean the same as ‘nymphomaniac,’ and were instead subjected to a good hour of aimless...
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Signed up for updates about Open Printer. Hopefully this project sees the light of day, and soon! Right ready for a printer in the house, and this looks perfect.
Via.
Revisiting two appearances on The Late Show during pivotal moments in U.S.-Russia relations.
Bruno Croci’s blog had been running on Ubuntu 16.04 for a long time, well past the Linux distribution’s expiration date. As such, it was time to upgrade, but instead of opting for something standard like another Ubuntu release, he opted for FreeBSD instead.
Despite being the closest planet to the sun, Mercury has thick deposits of ice at its poles, and now we may understand the events that formed them over just one Mercurian day
We’ve already talked about the secure boot certificates from Microsoft that are about to become invalid, but Debian EFI team member and longtime Debian contributor Steve McIntyre published a blog post with more information for users and distribution developers alike.
Tests with rodents suggest an mRNA vaccine in development offers protection against three strains of Ebola virus, including the one behind the current crisis
Last week I ran the first part of my What If…We’re In An AI Bubble? Series, where I asked questions and posed scenarios as to the consequences of the many, many questions I’ve asked over the last few years.
Executive Summary:
- The Information reports that OpenAI generated $5.7bn in revenue for the first quarter of 2026 based on discussions with sources familiar with its financials.
- With adjusted negative margins of -122%, this means that for every dollar of revenue OpenAI made, it lost an additional $1.22, or
We all feel emotions like anger and disgust from time to time, but they seem to cause stronger bodily sensations when they're politically induced
Vaccine misinformation, nurse and doctor shortages and crowded living arrangements may be behind soaring rates of diphtheria in remote Indigenous communities in Australia
Pauline Whitby was born in Hatfield, Hertfordshire on January 25, 1926 to the headmaster and headmistress of Merchant Taylors’ School in Ashwell, the village from which she would gain her pseudonym. Whitby had a younger sister named Marie.
We've fucked it up not once, not twice, but at least seven times in succession. Perhaps it's time to rethink how we do it.
We've fucked it up not once, not twice, but at least seven times in succession. Perhaps it's time to rethink how we do it.
Life on the International Space Station may feel distant, but columnist Graham Lawton finds that studying how astronauts experience accelerated ageing could help us fight similar effects on Earth related to sedentary lifestyles, disrupted circadian rhythms and social isolation
After Google killed its search engine a few days ago, one question remained: how exactly does advertising fit into all of this? Google is obviously not going to move to chatbot search without somehow adding ads to your conversation with the pachinko machine, so everybody was wondering how that was going to work, exactly.
Suppose your manager asks you next week to demonstrate that the AI coding tools your company signed up for are worth the subscription cost. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way; the sections below explain why.
The stories of “AI” bots and crawlers absolutely ravaging websites and services keep on coming, and the amount of work people have to do just to survive these “AI” bot and crawler assaults is insane.
Since X11 has moved to legacy status, it’s only a matter of time before the BSDs are going to have to make the move to being Wayland-first as well. This applies particularly to FreeBSD, which has been focusing on improving its suitability for desktop and laptops lately.
The Fish in Jonah’s Puddle (To Say Nothing of the Demon) by Byron Leavitt (Brain Waves Press, 2026.) Cover created by Miblart with interior illustration by the author. A contemporary, cosmic-horror take on portal fantasy! The Fish in Jonah’s Puddle (To Say Nothing of the Demon) is a young-adult, portal fantasy written by Byron Leavitt. It’s a contemporary, cosmic-horror take on the sub-genre that was a gateway for many of us.
Two popular web browser are overhauling their user interface, and the first to actually ship its new version is Vivaldi. Version 8.0 of this Chromium-based browser completely overhauls its UI, but retains its extensive customisation options, including the option to go back to the old look and feel if the new one doesn’t float your boat.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability:
Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of
Artificial intelligence built by OpenAI has cracked a decades-old conjecture by Paul Erdős, which mathematicians have hailed as a monumental moment for AI in mathematics
Some people experience vivid, incessant dreams that leave them feeling exhausted the next day, with researchers calling for this "epic dreaming" to be classed as a sleep disorder
Trumpets From Oblivion is a historical action/adventure series by H. Bedford-Jones that appeared in Blue Book Magazine. This thirteen-part series ran from November 1938 to November 1939 and was cover-featured four times.
Women appear cognitively normal for almost three years longer than men after their brains start to develop Alzheimer’s disease, making it harder to diagnose and preventing early treatment
I was a long-time Bitwarden user, until a year or so ago when I started migrating my passwords first to Firefox/LibreWolf, and recently from there to a KeePass database I can transfer and use with whatever password manager application is compatible with KeePass’ file format.
Printing on Linux, macOS, and even on Windows seems to be pretty much a solved problem, but what about printing on OpenBSD? Anyway, to do so I would need to set up my HP OfficeJet printer, connected wirelessly to the network, on OpenBSD.
⁂ A little progress bar to keep track of our fundraiser! ⁂ ➡️ Donate through Ko-Fi ➡️ Donate through SEPA transfer ➡️ Why a fundraiser? Note that I have to update it manually, and that it includes both Ko-Fi donations, as well as direct bank transfers.
Women experience a steady rise in body temperature from their teens to midlife, which may be useful for monitoring ageing and overall health
Women experience a steady rise in body temperature from their teens to midlife, which may be useful for monitoring ageing and overall health
