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
Asteroid 2026JH2 will zoom past Earth at a distance of only 90,000 kilometres next week. It has enough mass to wipe out a city, but simulations suggest there is no chance of an impact for at least the next century
Asteroid 2026JH2 has enough mass to wipe out a city and will zoom past Earth next week
After a career spent grappling with the neural underpinnings of autism, Uta Frith is unwavering in her controversial call to scrap our current view of the condition and start again
Six teeth roughly 400,000 years old have yielded some of the first ancient proteins thought to belong to Homo erectus, providing molecular clues to their relationships with other hominins
Genetically altered bacteria can synthesise gadusol, a naturally occurring compound found in zebrafish eggs that could be developed as an alternative to existing sunscreen products that can harm marine life
This time I look at a fanzine that just recently ended, The Paperback Fanatic. Produced by Justin Marriott, it focused on, of course, paperback book collecting. It’s one of several such fanzines he has put out over the years.
Government departments and other public bodies in the UK must consider requests to release information about AI-produced content, regulators have confirmed. The move follows a successful request by New Scientist for the release of a minister's ChatGPT logs
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.
The news that Google is working to move Chrome OS to the Android technology stack, and that it wants to start putting Android on laptops, is not exactly news, as the company has been talking about it for years.
Trump is weaker, and Xi is stronger, since their last summit in Beijing. But the U.S. does not have to remain in this state of weakness forever.
If you liked this piece, please 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 OpenAI&
We’ve long tried to control the weather by engineering rainfall. Now such cloud-seeding efforts are escalating, creating conflict between countries and stoking conspiracy theories. But do they work?
Carbon credits bought by companies to offset their emissions really have reduced deforestation, but not by as much as credit developers claim, according to a rigorous analysis
There's a chance for decorum and perhaps even a bit of dignity. It's fading fast.
PCOS will now be known as PMOS (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome), and for Alice Klein, who has the condition, it's been a long time coming
The concept of a field plays a key role in particle physics, but what exactly is it? From its origins in the study of magnetism to the quantum fields of today, columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein goes exploring
Good afterevenmorn, Readers! This past Saturday, I headed out with a few of my martial arts students, past and present, to watch the second installment of the recent Mortal Kombat adaptations. I’m not going to lie, the draw for me was the involvement of Karl Urban as Johnny Cage.
Gases collected from boiling mineral springs in Zambia contain the chemical signature of having come directly from the Earth’s mantle, a sign of a rupture in the tectonic plates and the possible beginning of a new continental boundary
Every single software product is dealing with the question about what to do with “AI”-generated code, but the question is particularly difficult to answer for open source operating systems like Linux distributions and the various BSDs, which often consist of a wide variety of software packages from hundreds to thousands of different developers.
Microsoft is currently testing a brand new performance-enhancing feature in Windows 11. Microsoft, too, is introducing something to Windows 11 called “low latency profile” and it this will work irrespective of the processor, be it AMD64 CPUs like Intel or AMD or ARM64 ones like from Qualcomm.
Microsoft acquired GitHub and applied their unique brand of enshittification. Amongst their achievements was the spawning of the Copilot circle of hell. Now they’re effectively DDoSing themselves with slop.
An analysis of ancient human artefacts finds that the container, a simple but critical tool, may have originated 500,000 years ago. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how slings, ostrich eggs and wooden trays helped our ancestors survive
A US start-up is putting autonomous data centres in the ocean, powered by wave energy, but experts warn that the harsh environment could make maintenance challenging
The rules governing gravity and other laws of nature seem like eternal truths, but cosmologist João Magueijo has always questioned their origins. Now, he has a bold new proposal
After the release of The Singular Papers of Solar Pons, the next collection of new stories by David Marcum, we got the next issue of the scholarly journal devoted to Solar Pons: The Pontine Dossier, Millennium Edition, Vol.
Genetic analysis of 1039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and the Norman conquest highlights the impact of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the island’s ancestry
So, last week, I talked about ten movies that you can stream for free over on Tubi. I could easily list ten or twenty more. There’s a lot of good stuff there. I’m also watching TV shows on Tubi. Of course, a multiple season show takes a lot longer to work through, than a single movie.
Big news from the Debian release team: Debian is going for reproducible package builds. Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we’ve decided it’s time to say that Debian must ship reproducible packages.
ymawky is a small, static http web server written entirely in aarch64 assembly for macos. it uses raw darwin syscalls with no libc wrappers, serves static files, supports GET, HEAD, PUT, OPTIONS, DELETE, byte ranges, directory listing, custom error pages, and tries to be as hardened as possible.
Ada is incredibly well designed. One way this shows is that it takes the big, monolithic features of other languages and breaks them down into their constituent parts, so we can choose which portions of those features we want.
Sculpt OS, the operating system based on the various components that make up Genode, has seen a new release, 26.04. A lot of the new features and changes to Genode that we’ve been talking about for a while now are part of this release, most notably the new human-inclined data syntax that replaces XML as the configuration language for Genode.
Sprite scaling. It is the coolest effect of the 2D arcade era, a must-have for games from Space Harrier to Real Bout Fatal Fury Special. Home consoles pretty much lacked it– sorry, Nintendo, but Mode 7 only scales a background, not sprites.
A veritable cornucopia of dodgy barbarian and barbarian-adjacent movies that I have never watched before, and will probably never watch again. Enjoy Part One here. Gor (1987) – USA/Italy Another nail in the Cannon coffin lid, this effort to start a franchise based on the uncomfortable series of novels by John Norman spawned one sequel, and then went belly up before things could get worse.
A deeper discussion of the arguments behind this week’s essay on Russia’s mounting political and economic pressures.
Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system
The Vanishing Tower (DAW Books, June 1977). Cover by Michael Whelan Here’s another in my series of reviews of “mostly obscure” 1970s/1980s books — the last one was of Evangeline Walton’s The Children of Llyr.
The strange historical echoes of Trump's Persian misadventures
If a key ocean current collapses it could plunge northern Europe into a big freeze. Now researchers are weighing up a drastic intervention – building a 130-kilometre-wide dam between the US and Russia
The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early,
primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought
to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the
whole thing difficult.
The ways in which Google can lock you into their ecosystem are often obvious, but sometimes, they’re incredibly sneaky and easily missed. CAPTCHA tests are annoying, but at the same time, they can help protect websites from bots.
With that context, I always found it strange that the designers of ASCII included 6 characters after uppercase Z before starting the lowercase letters. Then it hit me: we have 26 letters in the English alphabet, plus 6 additional characters before lowercase starts: 26 + 6 = 32.
Many Bourne shells go slightly beyond the POSIX sh specification to also support a ‘-l’ option that makes the shell act as a ‘login shell’. POSIX’s omission of -l isn’t only because it doesn’t really talk about login shells at all, it’s also because Unix has a special way of marking login shells that goes back very far in its history.
The US Department of Defense has released hundreds of documents and photographs related to UFOs, some of which have been declassified, in the first of many drops to come
Predictions of Putin’s demise have been wrong many times before, but something is happening in Russia now that deserves more attention.
Many flowering plants have duplicated genomes, which could have helped them evolve to deal with extreme stress in times of environmental upheaval
A drone has crashed in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, causing a fire that has spread to 12 square kilometres of land. Dry weather, strong winds and the presence of land mines are complicating efforts to bring the blaze under control
Satellite measurements show that in the early 2010s sea level rise suddenly accelerated to a rate of 4.1 millimetres per year, possibly in response to an increase in the rate of global warming
Early days yet, but let's take a punt anyway.
How important is thinking about your breath for calming yourself down? We now know that slow breathing is effective even without conscious involvement
Miles J. Breuer was born in Chicago on January 3, 1889, but the family moved to Crete, Nebraska when he was four years old so his father could attend medical school. He attended the University of Texas and went on to medical school at Rush Medical Center.
An impression made in clay around 175,000 years ago could be a kneeprint left by one of the builders of a strange stalagmite circle found deep inside Bruniquel cave in south-west France
A secret society of French mathematicians has been revolutionising the field of mathematics under a pseudonym for nearly a century. Columnist Jacob Aron finds that this mythic collective provided maths a rigorous and useful foundation, and did some real harm along the way
On the Fedora forums, there’s a long-running thread about a proposal for Fedora to build a variant of the distribution aimed specifically at “AI”. The “problem” identified in the proposal is that setting up the various parts that a developer in the “AI” space needs is currently quite difficult on Fedora, and as such, a bunch of technical steps need to be taken to make this easier.
In August 2025, we hailed the emergence of a second Chain Story project championed by Michael A. Stackpole. This is a Sword & Sorcery-focused, contagious set of connected (“chained”) stories. Each is: A standalone tale Readable in any order Free to read! Interconnected via a theme involving a Crown We round up groups every several weeks, but check the Chain Story website.
Another month, another progress report, Redox, etc. etc., you know the drill by now. This past month Redox saw improved booting on real hardware by making sure the boot process continues even if certain drivers fail or become blocked.
Time for another Sun Ray blog post! I’ve had a few people email me asking for help setting up a Sun Ray server over the last few months, and despite my attempts to help them get it going there’s been mixed results with running SRSS on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10.
