AI skeptics claim the rate of advancement is slowing, and yet we now have a chatbot that doesn't always use em dashes. Checkmate, haters.

arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/for…

Forget AGI—Sam Altman celebrates ChatGPT finally following em dash formatting rules

Ongoing struggles with AI model instruction-following show that true human-level AI still a ways off.

^{Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)}

Giant: Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he alive, or be he dead. I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

England: *taking notes* and can this method be used on French bones?

Open source maintainers of major projects (hi) are not ready to accept and talk about how the cultural insistence on permissive licensing is just straight up labor exploitation taking advantage of our addiction to popularity (also hi).

We’re doing this to ourselves too, you know.

"...detailed how the company would use AI to speed up licensing. In [Microsoft’s] conception, existing nuclear licensing documents and data about nuclear sites data would be used to train an LLM that’s then used to generate documents to speed up the process."

JESUS MOTHERFUCKING CHRIST

404media.co/power-companies-ar…

Power Companies Are Using AI To Build Nuclear Power Plants

Tech companies are betting big on nuclear energy to meet AIs massive power demands and they're using that AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

New from 404 Media: Microsoft and nuclear power company Westinghouse Nuclear want to use AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants in the United States.

"may lead [..] to catastrophic nuclear consequences" and distrust of nuclear tech

404media.co/power-companies-ar…

Power Companies Are Using AI To Build Nuclear Power Plants

Tech companies are betting big on nuclear energy to meet AIs massive power demands and they're using that AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

In the "filesystems and I/O" portion of my Operating Systems course in college today. Brought some floppy disks in to help understanding storage system history and the archaic methods for data organization: tracks, sectors, partitions, etc.

I was surprised at how much the disks were investigated and examined by the students and how much curiosity was expressed. We almost had to suppress questions to get to the course material.

I think this is instructive. I'll try and incorporate some kind of tactile thing this spring when I'm teaching.

#retrocomputing #teaching

#Facebook v posledních dnech zaplavila masivní vlna hejtů na vedení pražské radnice a hlavně na náměstka Hřiba. Že prý zavinil dopravní zácpy v Praze. Nevím, jestli je to organizovaná kampaň, nebo jestli jen někdo začal a ostatní se jako stádo přidali. Každopádně fakt dává logiku hejtit (a posílat do Slavičína) někoho, kdo ve funkci za pár týdnů končí 😁

#hate #hejt #Praha #doprava

It seems like yesterday we released Thunderbird for Android. See how fast our first mobile app is growing up.

#Thunderbird #OpenSource #Android

blog.thunderbird.net/2025/11/v…

VIDEO: An Android Retrospective

Thunderbird for Android has just turned one! Join our retrospective for what we've accomplished this year and take a peek at what's ahead!

^{Monica Ayhens-Madon (The Thunderbird Blog)}

We want everyone to benefit from digital sovereignty. 🤲

That’s why Nextcloud will invest €250 million by 2030 in open source solutions that put people back in control of their data.

Get the full story 👉 nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-c…

Nextcloud and its community take the lead in making sovereignty available for everyone - Nextcloud

Discover how Nextcloud will grow the digital sovereignty movement, investing in people, open source, and community.

^{Christoph Weissthaner (Nextcloud)}

Sensitive content Reveal/hide

Steve Ramirez, a neuroscientist who studies the creation (and manipulation) of memory, a truly sci-fi level of neuroscience, has written a book! I can only imagine this may be of interest to the type of folks who follow me:

press.princeton.edu/books/hard…

How to Change a Memory

A disarmingly personal account of the new science of memory manipulation by one of today’s leading pioneers in the field

^{press.princeton.edu}

People who have been to #FOSDEM before: do projects sell t-shirts there?

I am in need of some new geeky t-shirts, but I could wait a couple of months if there is likely to be a selection there.

I played with GUI for #Linux Desktop Migration Tool today. It is still rough around the edges, but it looks promising. Some operations such as selecting applications to reinstall can be done much more easily in GUI than in CLI.

#GTK #libadwaita #linuxdesktop

The matrix.org room dir is ready for business; the future of room lists in Element Web; opening rooms more quickly in EX Android - all this and more happened This Week in Matrix!

Grab the report and learn how to start your local Matrix S̵t̵a̵m̵m̵t̵i̵s̵c̵h̵ user group! matrix.org/blog/2025/11/14/thi…

This Week in Matrix 2025-11-14

Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications

^{HarHarLinks (matrix.org)}

Do you have 2 minutes?

Please consider nominating GrapheneOS and Accrescent (submit the form once for each) for the 2025 Proton Lifetime Fundraiser.

Direct link to form: form.typeform.com/to/XixQrG8Q

Learn more about the fundraiser: proton.me/blog/lifetime-fundra…

#grapheneOS #opensource #accrescent #android

Help us choose recipients for our 2025 Lifetime Account Charity Fundraiser!

Join Proton’s 2025 Lifetime Fundraiser and help decide which organizations receive grants supporting privacy, free speech, and human rights.

^{Irina Marcopol (Proton)}

New: Google has chosen a side in Trump's mass deportation campaign. Google is hosting a CBP facial recognition app to hunt immigrants; no indication Google will remove. At same time Google takes down apps for reporting ICE sightings

“Big tech has made their choice”

404media.co/google-has-chosen-…

Google Has Chosen a Side in Trump's Mass Deportation Effort

Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable group.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

Suggestions for SSD erasure/destruction?

The tiny local credit union had to replace their Windows 10 PCs. Their local IT provider got acquired by a regional IT company and no longer offers disk wiping/destruction.

What are the best options to wipe or destroy (if required) about 5 SSDs that would satisfy a bank auditor?

I don't know if these are self encrypting drives. If they were spinning disks, I've used DBAN in the past, but SSDs have additional logic for wear leveling and trimming, so I don't know what additional steps are needed to ensure the data is all gone.

A quick check for physical disk destruction devices seems a bit pricey at this low volume, but a handy sledge hammer might not be enough for an auditor.

In the past, a disk random write/wipe plus drilling a hole through the platters was accepable for spinning drives.

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030716.txt.pdf

Mark Epstein asks his brother Jeffrey to ask Steve Bannon if Putin still has the photos of Trump giving Bubba (Bill Clinton) a blowjob.

🇪🇺 "I am surprised and concerned that the GDPR is being reopened and weakened at its core […]"

💬 Read the full article, including comments from Max Schrems and Markéta Gregorová, who is a European Parliament negotiator on the issue 👉 brusselstimes.com/1835654/secr…

Secret EU plans to allow Big Tech to train AI with our personal data

According to leaked documents, the EU is proposing changes which take aim at every element of GDPR that could limit AI usage.

^{www.brusselstimes.com}