@bender I also went back to my duty today and fixed a problem I created right before vanishing into the holidays. Of course, I discovered more problems while fixing the one thing. Luckily, another public holiday tomorrow. :-)

During my time off, I was a very lazy rat. I planned on doing some woodworking again, but instead I started watching Itchy Boot’s Africa season: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMvfS5mbsiI&list=PL8M9dV_BySaXNvQ_V1q4UU-DirPQlX0ZP

‘The College Backlash is a Mirage’
Public opinion surveys paint a picture of Americans souring dramatically on higher education, as Pew found that the share of adults calling college “very important” dropped from 70% in 2013 to just 35% today, and NBC polling shows that 63% now believe a degree is “not worth the cost,” up from 40% over the same period. Yet enrollment data tells a different story.

Four-year institutions awarded 2 million bac … ⌘ Read more

Influencers and OnlyFans Models Dominate US ‘Extraordinary’ Artist Visas
The O-1B visa, a work permit reserved for individuals deemed to possess “extraordinary ability” in the arts, has become the pathway of choice for social media influencers and OnlyFans models seeking to build careers in the United States. Immigration attorneys told the Financial Times that influencers now make up more than half their … ⌘ Read more

@prologic Yup, it’s been a while since I played that. 😅 Hardly rememberd it, to be honest. And apparently I did everything wrong, because that monster just came along and trashed my city, no way to stop it. 🤪

Samsung’s CES Concepts Disguise AI Speakers as Turntables and Cassette Players
Samsung is bringing a pair of retro-styled speaker concepts to CES 2026 that combine old-school aesthetics with OLED screens and AI-powered music recommendations, and the company is positioning them as alternatives to conventional Bluetooth speakers that typically depend on a paired smartphone or tablet for con … ⌘ Read more

People of Dubious Character Are More Likely To Enter Public Service
A new working paper from researchers at the University of Hong Kong has found that Chinese graduate students who plagiarized more heavily in their master’s theses were significantly more likely to pursue careers in the civil service and to climb the ranks faster once inside.

John Liu and co-authors analyzed 6 million dissertations from CNKI, a … ⌘ Read more

@bender I am so prepared and ready for retirement. 🤣 (Not gonna happen for a while, though. If ever.)

@prologic so, you were not giving time off during the end of year? The company you work for didn’t give a break?

@movq hear hear! If anything, holiday breaks help to validate the fact that we are prepared for retirement. At least, I am!

Stack Overflow Went From 200,000 Monthly Questions To Nearly Zero
Stack Overflow’s monthly question volume has collapsed about 300 – levels not seen since the site launched in 2009, according to data from the Stack Overflow Data Explorer that tracks the platform’s activity over its sixteen-year history.

Questions peaked around 2014 at roughly 200,000 per month, then began a gradual decline that acceler … ⌘ Read more

Samsung Co-CEO Says Soaring Memory Chip Prices Will ‘Inevitably’ Impact Smartphone Costs
Samsung’s co-CEO TM Roh has warned that product price increases are “inevitable” as an unprecedented global memory chip shortage squeezes margins across the company’s consumer electronics lineup – from smartphones to televisions and home appliances.

The South Korean giant, one of the top two larges … ⌘ Read more

As US Communities Start Fighting Back, Many Datacenters are Blocked
America’s tech companies and data center developers “are increasingly losing fights in communities where people don’t want to live next to them, or even near them,” reports the Associated Press:

Communities across the United States are reading about — and learning from — each other’s battles against data center proposals that are fast multi … ⌘ Read more

2025 Ends With Release of J. R. R. Tolkein’s Unpublished Story
2025’S final months finally saw the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Bovadium Fragments, writes the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Anyone who has read Tolkien’s letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien’s fury — specifically, ire over mankind’s obsession with … ⌘ Read more

Spent most of the long weekend working on a few coding projects… specifically, I pushed some updates for TwtKpr to my test instance before spending some time working on the build process and demo page for my new twtxt-parsing library… which lead me to make some changes to my existing fluent-dom-esm library.

So, nothing actually got finished, but the incremental updates continue…

Workstation Owner Sadly Marks the End-of-Life for HP-UX
Wednesday marked the end of support for the last and final version of HP-UX, writes OSNews.

They call it “the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux.”

I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last … ⌘ Read more

@prologic SimCity 2000 in DOSBox 😅

39 Million Californians Can Now Legally Demand Data Brokers Delete Their Personal Data
While California’s residents have had the right to demand companies stop collecting/selling their data since 2020, doing so used to require a laborious opting out with each individual company,” reports TechCrunch.
But now Californians can make “a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers … ⌘ Read more

North Dakota Law Included Fake Critical Minerals Using Lawyers’ Last Names
North Dakota passed a law last May to promote development of rare earth minerals in the state. But the law’s language apparently also includes two fake mineral names, according to the Bismarck Tribune, “that appear to be inspired by coal company lawyers who worked on the bill.”

The inclusion of fictional substances is being cal … ⌘ Read more

Are Hybrid Cars Helping America Transition to Electric Vehicles?
America’s electric car subsidies expired at the end of September, notes Bloomberg. Yet in those last three months, “while fully electric cars and trucks made up 10% of all auto sales in the US… another 15% of transactions were for hybrid vehicles.”

The EV market is slowing in the U.S., but analysts expect hybrid sales to continue accelerati … ⌘ Read more

Fleischer Studios Criticized for Claiming Betty Boop is Not Public Domain
Here it is — Betty Boop’s first appearance, which became public domain on Thursday. It’s a 60-second song halfway through a longer cartoon about a restaurant titled Dizzy Dishes. (The first scene makes it clear this is a restaurant of anthropomorphized animals — which explains why the as-yet-unnamed character has floppy dog ears…)
… ⌘ Read more

‘Fish Mouth’ Filter Removes 99% of Microplastics From Laundry Waste
“The ancient evolution of fish mouths could help solve a modern source of plastic pollution,” writes ScienceAlert.
“Inspired by these natural filtration systems, scientists in Germany have invented a way to remove 99 percent of plastic particles from water. It’s based on how some fish filter-feed to eat microscopic prey.”

The research team ha … ⌘ Read more

(#115838695176362385) Did you miss today’s event on #PublicDomain ? Or you didn’t, but want more? Don’t miss Natick FOSS’s upcoming event, on the 8th of January, where #PublicDomainDay will be celebrated!

2:45PM NY time
7:45PM GMT

https://natickfoss.org/archive.html#UpcomingMeeting

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A Drug-Resistant ‘Superbug’ Fungus Infected 7,000 Americans in 2025
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Independent:

Candida auris, a type of invasive yeast that can cause deadly infections in people with weakened immune systems, has infected at least 7,000 people [in 2025] across 27 U.S. states, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fungus, which can spr … ⌘ Read more

I just wanted to chill a bit, then this fucker came along and burned everything to the ground.

https://movq.de/v/993e81f9d7/sc2000.webp

Microsoft’s Risky Bet That Windows Can Become The Platform for AI Agents
“Microsoft is hoping that Windows can once again serve as the platform where it all takes off,” reports GeekWire:

A new framework called Agent Launchers, introduced in December as a preview in the latest Windows Insider build, lets developers register agents directly with the operating system. They can describe an agent through wh … ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai Not using OpenBSD or httpd? Yeah. It’s been working quite well since ~2017, so, meh, too lazy to switch now. But nothing is set in stone, of course.

@bender I have another two days of vacation, then it’s back to the grindstone for me as well. 😢

Can’t we have vacation all year round? 🤣

@prologic Computers are great, eh? Soooo many problems to choose from! What do you want to solve today? 😅

And now the event loop is not a simple loop around curses’ getch() anymore but it can wait for events on any file descriptor. Here’s a simple test program that waits for connections on a TCP socket, accepts it, reads a line, sends back a line:

https://movq.de/v/93fa46a030/vid-1767547942.mp4

And the scrollbar indicators are working now.

I’ll probably implement timer callbacks using timerfd (even though that’s Linux-only). 🤔

Trump Organization’s $499 Smartphone Delayed Again, Now Until the End of January
Last June the Trump organization announced sales of a $499 “T1” smartphone with a gold-colored case. But though they originally were scheduled for release in August, this week a customer service representative for the wireless carrier told CBS News the device will be pushed back again, now until the end of January, “ … ⌘ Read more

@movq I think they are Windows users, going by the lack of attention to detail, and the fact they love DFS. Ha!

Archboot Adds COSMIC Desktop as a New Install and Rescue Option
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Linux news site Linuxiac:

Archboot, a guided, user-friendly, menu-driven installer for Arch Linux that automates much of the traditional manual installation process (while still allowing advanced users to intervene when needed), has added the COSMIC desktop environment as a new selectable option. The … ⌘ Read more

Ending three luxurious do-what-I-please weeks; tomorrow is back to work. What do you all do during your break (and this assumes you had one, even if short)? I mostly did nothing, which in itself was truly something! So much, I long to do it all over again. A man can dream, right? Haha!

Furiosa’s Energy-Efficient ‘NPU’ AI Chips Start Mass Production This Month, Challenging Nvidia
The Wall Street Journal profiles “the startup that is now one of a handful of chip makers nipping at the heels of Nvidia.”

Furiosa’s AI chip is dubbed “RNGD” — short for renegade — and slated to start mass production this month. Valued at nearly $700 million based on its most recent fun … ⌘ Read more

(#115837229150102801) #Beyond40 have a #PublicDomainDay online event today!

“Discuss public domain and Creative Commons resources. Help plan #DocumentFreedomDay. Find out about public domain source code.”

From 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm (EST)
From 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm (GMT)

https://gath.io/XDKJ66FYl2ABCs2B1FktE

Trying to build a native heap allocator that grows and isn’t statically wired into the binary’s image is fuck’n hard™ as 🤣

The US Effort to Break China’s Rare-Earth Monopoly
The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility:

There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup … ⌘ Read more

This morning another AI-Crawler DDOS on my site. I hate this shit so much. Hundreds of different user agents every "user" open exactly one page, every user on Linux. I mean, maybe my archive pages got really famous and it‘s finally the year of Linux on Desktop. But I doubt at least the first part.I know, I repeat myself but it makes me really angry every time.

Looks like someone loves Depth First Search.

https://movq.de/v/eece1bf16f/dfs.jpg

Reddit Surges in Popularity to Overtake TikTok in the UK - Thanks to Google’s Algorithm?
Reddit “has overtaken TikTok as Britain’s fourth most-visited social media service,” reports the Guardian:

The platform has undergone huge growth over the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches. Three in five Brits online now encounter the site, up from … ⌘ Read more

New Tesla Video Shows Tesla Semi Electric Truck Charging at 1.2 MW
An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek:

Tesla has released a new video showing a Tesla Semi truck charging at a massive 1.2 megawatts (MW), finally giving us a clear look at the charging speeds that will enable long-haul electric trucking…>

Tesla claimed the Semi would be able to charge 70% of its range in 30 minutes. For … ⌘ Read more

What Happened When Alaska’s Court System Tried Answering Questions with an AI Chatbot?
An AI chatbot to answer probate questions from Alaska residents “was supposed to be a three-month project,” said Aubrie Souza, a consultant with the National Center for State Courts told NBC News. “We are now at well over a year and three months, but that’s all because of the due diligence that was req … ⌘ Read more

Google’s $250M Deal with California to Fund Newsrooms May Be Stalled
Remember how California’s government negotiated a 2024 deal where Google contributed millions to California’s local newsrooms to offset advertisers moving to the search engine?

“A year after it was cemented — and billed as a model that could succeed where entire countries and continents had fallen short — the agreement is tangled in budget … ⌘ Read more

Has Microsoft Discontinued Offline Activation of Windows?
An anonymous reader shared
this report from Neowin:

Offline Windows activation has been possible to do using the phone. However, it looks like Microsoft has quietly killed off that method as users online have found that they are no longer able to activate the OS using it… [As documented by Windows user Ben Kleinberg on his YouTube channel], Now when trying … ⌘ Read more

The US Invaded Venezuela and Captured Nicolás Maduro - But ChatGPT and Perplexity Disagree
Why did the U.S. invade Venezuela and capture its leader Nicolás Maduro? “If you asked ChatGPT about it this morning, it told you that youâ™re making it up,” Wired reported Saturday:

WIRED asked leading chatbots ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the same question a little before 9 am ET. In all case … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Lowering Orbits of 4,400 Starlink Satellites for Safety’s Sake
“Starlink is beginning a significant reconfiguration of its satellite constellation focused on increasing space safety,” announced Michael Nicolls, Starlink’s vice president of engineering:

“We are lowering all Starlink satellites orbiting at ~550 km to ~480 km (~4400 satellites) over the course of 2026. The shell lowering is being tig … ⌘ Read more

More widget system progress:

https://movq.de/v/87e2bce376/vid-1767467193.mp4

I like the oldschool shadow effect. 😅 Not sure if I’ll keep it, but it’s neat.

The menu bar is still fake.

Had to spend quite a bit of time optimizing the rendering today. This can get really slow really quickly.

Unicode is Pain.

I might be able to start porting my first program (currently uses urwid) soon. 🤔

(#115832590893904213) Ano novo e volta o meme do “ano do desktop Linux”, e finalmente perco a paciência.

Porque é que se fala do Linux no desktop como se fosse a segunda vinda de Cristo quando finalmente acontecer? O Linux domina nos segmentos mobile, e olha que bem que estamos, né?

É que concentrar o ativismo no sistema operativo é um erro com vistas curtas, e é inconsequente defender apenas “o Linux” sem uma postura tecnopolítica sobre software livre

Ay che camino https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FhpKtxbuxE

What a sad day for South America and the world. We live in an era devoid of international solidarity.