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
Experiments hint that quantum mechanisms are vital to the machinery of life. Now researchers are exploring if these effects help to explain the success of an array of puzzling health treatments
Feedback goes down a "moon warfare" rabbit hole and discovers that some forward-thinkers are making plans to counteract as-yet-hypothetical pirates in space
Jennie Durant's Bitter Honey is a great exposé of the true cost of industrially farming US honeybees, finds Thomas Lewton. But the book's grim figures of bee death alone may not prompt deep change – how about seeing them as fellow creatures?
Storing carbon dioxide in rocks while producing hydrogen from them - and perhaps even geothermal power too - could be a double win on the climate front, and several groups are trying to make it happen
Storing carbon dioxide in rocks while producing hydrogen from them - and perhaps even geothermal power too - could be a double win on the climate front, and several groups are trying to make it happen
I picked up a small book by L.S. Goozdich, Fire in the Tall Grass. Published by Veritas Entertainment, this is the first adventure with Noah Redford, set after World War I. Since the book is small, I think this one is most likely a novelette.
When Richard Dawkins’s first blockbuster book was published half a century ago, few genes had ever been sequenced or studied in detail. Yet the book’s gene-centred view of evolution still has much to teach us in today’s genetic age
Fifty years ago, a draft of Richard Dawkins’s first book landed on book editor Michael Rodgers’s desk – and life was never the same
Last year, The New Yorker revealed the late Sacks's "guilt" about his “falsification” in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, but is this story about more than just the facts?
While people disagree on the quality of Lin Carter’s writing, most people agree he was a fine editor and tireless supporter of the fantasy field. Volumes edited by Carter brought quite a few new authors to my attention, as well as feeding me a steady diet of works by writers I already loved.
Five different groups of predatory dinosaurs independently evolved disproportionately small arms, and it seems they did so because their heads became so large and powerful
I redesigned my blog! I decided to put some more personality into it this time, after over a decade of the minimalist style. This short post is just an excuse to show up in your feed reader so you can go look at it.
Caffeine's negative effects on me are never clearer than when I'm under the influence of caffeine.
(I rewrote that sentence 13 times to get it ‘right’. It still doesn't feel right, but perfect is the enemy of good.)
This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM. A custom emulator-independent launcher is provided, and all OSes and emulators are pre-installed and pre-configured.
We can inter Google Search to the Google Graveyard. At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.
The following is a hands-on introduction to Futhark through a collection of commented programs, listed in roughly increasing order of complexity. You can load the programs into the interpreter to experiment with them.
Thundarr the Barbarian (21 episodes; 1980-81) Created by Steve Gerber (Howard the Duck; The Defenders). The look of the main characters was designed by Alex Toth. After he was unavailable to continue working on the series, Jack “King” Kirby was brought in, at the recommendation of Gerber and Mark Evanier (who would later write a biography of Kirby).
The world’s best BSD (I’m kidding, I love them all equally) has released version 7.9, now available through your update tools and on mirrors the world over. OpenBSD 7.9 brings a ton of changes, fixes, and improvements, such as delayed hibernation support on amd64.
A decade ago, we discovered an exceptionally exciting exoplanet that could be the best candidate for hosting alien life. Now we’re about to find out if it really is
A solar farm in a tidal bay has generated more electricity and profits than a nearby coastal solar farm, but challenges could arise as floating solar moves further offshore
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
If wind-assisted cargo ships chose routes based entirely on where the winds are better, their fuel use could be cut in half or even completely eliminated
Colossal Biosciences, the company that says it resurrected the dire wolf, now says it has developed artificial eggshells so it can replicate the huge eggs of the moa. Independent experts say this isn't nearly enough to bring back these giant birds
An exotic new molecule is shaped like a butterfly, complete with "wings" made from electrons. The discovery could provide a gateway to completely new parts of the quantum realm
Robots are becoming more a part of our lives every year, and worries about a robot army rising up have long plagued the technology. But columnist Annalee Newitz talks to nanobot researchers and finds out the real robot army could be a welcome solution to medical or environmental problems
In central Laos, the landscape is littered with enormous stone jars, some 3 metres high, and we may be closer to understanding how and when they were used
To celebrate my 21 years and 20000 posts as OSNews’ managing editor, it’s time for a massive fundraiser: €1 for every story I’ve posted over the past 21 years, for a long-term total goal of €20000.
Big news from the Haiku forums: the Haiku ARM port is running on M1 Macs now. This is bare metal, no VM. m1n1+u-boot deal with the Apple-specific parts of booting, so we can boot UEFI images from USB like any PC.
Despite the pomp and ceremony, the summit made little progress in advancing American national interests—at least for now
Maui in Hawaii experienced some of the worst wildfires in US history in 2023. Amid concerns of a PTSD epidemic, floatation tanks are being deployed to the island to help restore people's mental health
Scientists recently gathered for a conference called Love, Actually and in Theory, but didn't settle on a definition of the topic at hand
Work, illness, divorce: life is riddled with stressors out of your control. But research is revealing new ways to cope with these challenges and find hope instead of despair
I’ve seen some wild projects in my day, but this one is definitely up there as one of the more ambitious. Stock Microsoft Windows CE 2.11 running on a real Nintendo 64. A custom HAL drops the unmodified nk.lib kernel onto VR4300, brings up the CE 2.11 GWES desktop and shell, mounts the EverDrive-64 X7’s SD card under \SDCard, treats the N64 controller as a mouse, plays sound through the N64 AI hardware via the standard CE wave stack, and runs third-party CE 2.11 EXEs straight off the SD card.
There is one specific way in which the non-corporate open source projects typically document how their infrastructure work: not at all, and Flathub is no different. The full picture likely lives only in my brain, and while it could be sorted out by anyone (especially in this LLM age, yay or nay), why should it only be me thinking at night about all the single points of failure? Like any system that evolved naturally, it’s all over the place.
Microsoft is finally rolling out one of the most requested set of features to Windows 11: a movable and resizable taskbar. Windows 11 did away with the ability to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, as well as a various other taskbar customization options, that had been there since the very first iteration of the taskbar in Windows 95.
Why have so many people become fixated on protein? Donald Layman is one of the people behind the research showing the benefits of getting more protein in your diet, but he thinks things have gone too far and wants to set the record straight
The fifth volume in the chronological reprinting of Semi Dual stories from Steeger Books came out last year. I am holding off on the three Semi Dual serials that were reprinted from later in the series.
A little-known strain of Ebola virus is behind an ongoing health emergency, prompting researchers to call for the acceleration of vaccine candidates against such infections
We think of our body clock ticking over on a 24-hour cycle, but evidence is growing that it has seasonal rhythms, which could affect our response to vaccines
It’s mid-May, and I’ve been in something of a hardboiled mood lately. So with Summer looming, here’s a Black (Gat) in the Hand. More Pulp is coming, like a gumshoe with a gasper and a rod. I am fortunate to be part of a star-studded roster of writers who provide intros to Pulp reprints from Steeger Books.
The floating ice shelf of world’s widest glacier – Thwaites glacier in Antarctica – is detaching, with worrying implications for global sea-level rise
Inside some very special black holes, there may be a boundary called a Cauchy horizon. Columnist Leah Crane explores the place beyond which physics breaks and anything is possible
There are few authors whose works bring me greater joy than Roger Zelazny. Zelazny was a master of craft and style who could present in a terse style that seamlessly evolves into evocative prose without any awkwardness or jarring transitions.
From Dark Horse Comics and DC comes Superman Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle, written by Chuck Dixon with interior art by Carlos Meglia. Cover art on the original issue covers was by Humberto Ramos. This is a 3-issue comic arc that riffs off the original Tarzan story by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Almost exactly 21 years ago, in June 2005, at a mere 20 years old, I took over the managing editor role at OSNews from Eugenia. I had already published a few articles in the years prior, and had given Eugenia enough confidence to suggest me as her replacement.
In Ladakh, Himalayan wolves are increasingly breeding with feral dogs, giving rise to a new animal known as khipshang that could injure humans and outcompete other carnivores
Google recently launched something called Health Coach, an “AI” thing that’s part of the company’s new Fitbit products. Let’s check in with how that’s going. Put simply, Google’s paid replacement for Fitbit Premium immediately began hallucinating, even admitting to having made up the data before asking if, you know, maybe I’m the one who actually forgot to input a run.
One of the top pieces of customer feedback in the graphics driver area is clear: “Windows Update downgrades my drivers.” Today, we are announcing a policy change to how display drivers are published through Windows Update — allowing 2-Part HWID + Computer Hardware ID (CHID) targeting for new devices.
Every day I read some sort of wrongheaded extrapolation about the future of AI — that today’s models are somehow indicative of AGI creating a “permanent underclass” of people that stops people from building software companies, or really doing any kind of job on the computer:
Adding olivine to the ocean could remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and a pilot project in New York state found no signs of adverse effects on seafloor organisms
A record-breaking new version of Starship, due to launch within days, could form the basis of NASA's ambitious Artemis programme that aims to put humans back on the moon as soon as 2028
Global warming already threatens to destabilise the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, and new research shows that regional clean-air policies could reduce its strength further
It's been a week of chaos, but there is now a pathway to change. And with change, there's hope.
It's been a week of chaos, but there is now a pathway to change. And with change, there's hope.
If Paul W. Fairman’s name is known, it is likely as an editor or the ghostwriter who wrote several of the juvenile novels published under Lester del Rey’s name when the latter author suffered from writers block.
CAR T-cell therapy has been hugely successful in treating certain types of tumours, and stiffening up cancer cells beforehand could make it even more effective
People who imagine their self to reside in their head or their heart have different approaches to life. Columnist David Robson explores the benefits of learning to shift where you sense your self, and how this practice could improve your relationships and decision-making
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:
- Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs
- The environmental impact of LLMs
- Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output
- Moral judgements about people who use LLMs
We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.
– Add an LLM policy for rust-lang/rust, GitHub
The performance of blake3 multithreaded is very impressive:
hmac-sha256 1.00 GB 0.327s <-- with hw accelerated sha256
blake2b-256 1.00 GB 0.952s <-- pure sw, used in borg 1.x
blake3 1.00 GB 0.442s <-- pure sw, single-threaded
blake3-mt 1.00 GB 0.078s <-- pure sw, with MT.
#blake3 🚀 🚀 🚀
The EU’s Digital Markets Act has been in effect for a mere two years, but despite all the obstructionism, malicious compliance, and steady stream of lies from US tech companies and Apple in particular, it seems this rather basic consumer protection legislation is already bearing fruit.
I started intentionally looking for science fiction to read in elementary school. Our city library had one big room full of fiction for young readers, from preschool through high school, so I found books that were meant for readers older than I was — but I enjoyed reading them, even if I didn’t understand everything that happened to their protagonists.
Looks like rust platform support (blake3-py is implemented in rust) is good now for most platforms.
Couldn't solve the rust-related issues on Haiku OS yet though.
Interest in classic user interface design is spiking, and today we’ve got another great example, highlighted yesterday by Micheal MJD. Classic 7 combined Windows 10 LTSC with a whole slew of themes and deep modifications to deliver Windows 10, but made to look, feel, and even act like Windows 7.
The creaky noise known as vocal fry that people generally associate with young women – and some find irritating – is actually more common in men
Partially burnt trees still standing after a wildfire are typically felled and burned, but a US start-up claims burying them instead will trap the carbon underground for centuries
What use is a quantum computer? Perhaps both more and less than you think, according to quantum computing expert Shayan Majidy
Seismic surveys and sediment cores suggest that dozens of deep pockmarks on the sea floor were created when Arctic methane stores were disrupted by climate change after the last glacial maximum – and scientists warn it could happen again
Muscle stem cells, which are crucial for building new muscle, don’t work as well as we get older, but giving them an artificial boost could rejuvenate them
A couple years before I got my first GPS watch, this was how I tracked my workouts:
This was a ‘10k’ (ish) run. Based on my understanding of what someone had told me was the course of a local 10k race.
To be honest, it worked just fine. I'm not sure adding GPS and other sensors for a multitude of advanced metrics has made me any fitter than I would've been if I'd just continued running with my old iPod Nano in hand. But it does make my workout log look a little better, so there's that.
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.
The Iron Tower Trilogy: The Dark Tide, Shadows of Doom, and The Darkest Day (Signet, August 1985, September 1985, and October 1985). Covers by Alan Lee I recently posted some of my thoughts about High Fantasy.
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.
A Neanderthal tooth shows clear signs of human intervention to treat bacterial decay, showing that the earliest dentistry began at least 59,000 years ago
Winner of an environmental photography award, this shot of a sea turtle seen under ultraviolet light shows how forensic evidence is being used to help catch poachers and animal traffickers
A study of soils around the Arctic and boreal forests has found that some wildfires are releasing carbon stored over millennia, meaning higher CO2 emissions than assumed
Rowan Hooper met ecologist Suzanne Simard under an oak tree in Kew Gardens, London, to talk about her new book, criticism of her work, and getting a call from James Cameron's people
The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
