BlogFlock

In case you thought there was real competition in Big AI

Steven Levy says there is only one AI company. He calls it The Blob.

S****iri will use Gemini?

That's what it says here.

Unpacking Python iterables of various sorts, such as dictionaries or lists, is useful in a number of contexts, including for function arguments, but there has long been a call for extending that capability to comprehensions. PEP 798 ("Unpacking in Comprehensions") was first proposed in June 2025 to fill that…

Version 8.5.0 of the PHP language has been released. Changes include a new "|>" operator that, for some reason, makes these two lines equivalent:

    $result = strlen("Hello world");
    $result = "Hello world" |> strlen(...);

Other changes include a new function attribute, "#[\NoDiscard]" to indicate that the…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (delve and golang), Debian (webkit2gtk), Oracle (expat and thunderbird), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (openvpn), SUSE (chromium, grub2, and kernel), and Ubuntu (cups-filters, imagemagick, and libcupsfilters).

Hiss

After AM Cuts, Tesla Dropping FM Radio From Entry Level Models.

I want one

Companion Intelligence looks very close to what I've been calling for here.

What's the opposite?

Darius Van Arman has a lot to say about market concentration. (For reasons I can't grok, the…

Daniel Barkhuff has a serious one-liner bio ("Husband, Dad, Emergency Medicine physician, Veteran") and speaks with earned authority from all of them, especially the last two. His latest, On Living Memory, reminds me of two dads.

One is my father, who re-enlisted in 1944 at age 35, because he wanted…

In July, Collabora announced the Rust-based Tyr GPU driver for Arm Mali GPUs. Daniel Almeida has posted an update on progress with a prototype of the driver running on a Rock 5B board with the Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip:

The Tyr prototype has progressed from basic GPU job execution to running…

BPF allows programs uploaded from user space to be run, safely, within the kernel. The io_uring subsystem, too, can be thought of as a way of loading programs in the kernel, though the programs in question are mostly a sequence of I/O-related system calls. It has sometimes seemed inevitable that…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind9.18, container-tools:rhel8, expat, grub2, haproxy, idm:DL1, kernel, kernel-rt, lasso, libsoup, libssh, libtiff, pcs, podman, python-kdcproxy, qt5-qt3d, redis, redis:7, runc, shadow-utils, sqlite, squid, vim, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and zziplib), Debian (chromium), Oracle (lasso and postgresql), SUSE (erlang27, ghostscript, grub2, kernel, libIex-3_4-33, python312, and…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Hardware architectures; Fedora Flatpaks; Debian hardware support; sockaddr structure; NUMA nodes; Homebrew.
• Briefs: LightDM security; Debian Libre Live; Xubuntu postmortem; Blender 5.0; Git 2.52.0; Rust in Android; Thunderbird 145; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.