Ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window opening, several early pull requests were already sent out this week in advance of Linux 6.15 expected for release later today. Among those early feature pulls was Btrfs maintainer David Sterba sending out updates to this advanced copy-on-write file-system...

Avec le Computex, la semaine fut plutôt légère en articles, tests et dossiers. Il y a néanmoins de la lecture, voici un point pour les retardataires ! Nul doute que les jours à venir seront plus chargés, ici comme ailleurs. Alors on profite du calme avant l'overdose. […]

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Besides pressure on Apple to make iPhones in the U.S., CEO Tim Cook "is facing off against two U.S. judges, European and worldwide regulators, state and federal lawmakers, and even a creator of the iPhone," writes the Wall Street Journal, "to say nothing of the cast of rivals outrunning Apple in artificial intelligence." Each is a threat to Apple's hefty profit margins, long the company's trademark and the reason investors drove its valuation above $3 trillion before any other company. Shareholders are still Cook's most important constituency. The stock's 25% fall from its peak shows their concern about whether he — or anyone — can navigate the choppy 2025 waters. What can be said for Apple is that the company is patient, and that has often paid off in the past. They also note OpenAI's purchase of Jony Ive's company, with Sam Altman saying internally they hope to make 100 million AI "companion" devices: It is hard to gauge the potential for a brand-new computing device from a company that has never made one. Yet the fact that it is coming from the man who led design of the iPhone and other hit Apple products means it can't be dismissed. Apple sees the threat coming: "You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now, as crazy as that sounds," an Apple executive, Eddy Cue, testified in a court case this month... The company might not need to be first in AI. It didn't make the first music player, smartphone or tablet. It waited, and then conquered each market with the best. A question is whether a strategy that has been successful in devices will work for AI. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

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The Dell Latitude 7455 (X1E-80-100) is the latest laptop powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC seeing patches for enabling Linux support...

With Linux 6.15 there are many exciting new features for this kernel version expected to debut as stable later today. Following the Linux 6.15 stable release, the Linux 6.16 merge window will then open. Here is an early look at a portion of the changes anticipated to be submitted and more than likely merged for this next kernel version...

Ahead of the Linux 6.15 kernel stable release expected later today, more input driver updates have been merged for this new kernel version that include introducing compatibility with some newer gaming controllers...

Alors que la fête battait son plein à Taipei, le monde du matériel était en ébullition. Or, pas facile pour les rédactions d’assurer des tests en quantité tout en étant présent sur site pour couvrir l’évènement ! Fort heureusement, la RTX 5060 était là pour essaimer ça et là ses performances — et so...

Marque récente, Ocypus a déjà un catalogue bien rempli, et les choses devraient s'accélérer dans les mois à venir. Après avoir proposé des produits avec un affichage discret sous forme de points, la marque passe à l'écran et ne fait pas les choses à moitié avec trois produits originaux. Le premier et le second mettent en avant un style réussi, ou du moins qui change : le Sigma L PRO mise sur du carré avec un effet flottant, tandis que le Sigma L va vers le circulaire tout en intégrant un écran rectangulaire, mais avec un arceau en aluminium très sympathique sur le haut. […]

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Alors que la descente aux enfers de Scythe est désormais terminée en Europe, la marque japonaise affichait un petit stand sur le Computex... Avec des nouveautés. Nous ne nous y attendions pas, et quel plaisir de revoir des séries emblématiques revenir, à l'image du Big Shuriken en quatrième version ou encore d'un Mugen 6 aux couleurs TUF Gaming. La disponibilité chez nous n'étant pas vraiment à l'ordre du jour, voici juste quelques photos. De toute façon, aucune fiche technique n'était présente. […]

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Il y a quelques années, SilverStone a dû faire un virage à 180° et stopper quelques productions emblématiques. Et onéreuses, bien trop même. Mais pour ce Computex, la marque a décidé de nous faire plaisir avec des modèles qui rappellent de suite d'anciennes séries, dont la célèbre Temjin. Un retour dans le passé qui fait plaisir, même si on vise ici plus le serveur ou la station de travail que le PC pour un particulier. Mais quand on aime, on ne compte pas, y compris pour un HTPC ! N'écrivons plus, mettons juste des photos. […]

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Chez ID-COOLING, deux nouveautés attiraient le regarde avec des choix originaux. D'un côté, un ventilateur fin, et de l'autre un radiateur trop large. Commençons par ce second, avec un concept finalement très simple malgré une question tout aussi simple et évidente : pourquoi faire un radiateur assez large pour un ventilateur de 120 mm et, justement, rester sur du 120 ? Pour garder une compatibilité 360 mm sur la longueur dans les boitiers, tout en passant de 12 à 15 passages pour le liquide. Des jupes sont ainsi disposées à gauche et à droite des ventilateurs pour compléter le design, qui reste assez moyen ; il faut le dire. Mais si ça rentre dans tous les boitiers et que les performances grimpent un peu, pourquoi pas ? […]

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Chaque année, le stand de Noctua est l'occasion de voir des prototypes et des révisions de prototypes déjà vu l'année passée, ou même les années précédentes. Mais pour cette dernière édition du Computex, les choses étaient différentes... Noctua veut tenir un peu mieux sans roadmap tout en avançant à son rythme sur plusieurs projets, dont des collaborations. Et la première est simple, puisqu'il s'agit d'une souris Pulsar Feinman F01 qui intègre un ventilateur afin de refroidir la main du joueur. L'idée est loin d'être innovante, mais la souris Pulsar à la base est réputée et le petit ventilateur de 40 mm de Noctua n'alourdit pas trop l'ensemble et se montre silencieux si on se base sur le modèle retail. Attendue pour la fin de l'année, la souris devrait représenter un nouveau palier dans le haut de gamme de Pulsar : coque en alliage de magnésium, ventilateur, capteur XS-1 à 32000 dpi, station de charge et fréquence d'interrogation de 8000 Hz... Plus couleur marron ! […]

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Un boitier de 750 x 288 x 563 mm ? Ca se passe chez Geometric Future avec le prochain Model 9, un boitier énorme et surtout très... Organique dans son style ? Avec ses rondeurs, le boitier ne passe pas inaperçu et l'effet serait le même sur une version plus petite ; c'est original et réussi, mais ça ne semble pas le meilleur boitier pour une intégration facile des composants. Car si l'agencement est simple, malgré la présence d'une chambre à part dans le haut pour le watercooling, ce qui permet d'avoir trois niveaux pour installer des ventilateurs, les panneaux semblent massifs et plutôt lourds. A voir donc, si on a les moyens, le boitier étant attendu pour une somme rondelette. Il faudra ensuite mettre des composants imposants (et chers ?) pour le remplir, et pourquoi pas charger les quatorze emplacements pour des ventilateurs. […]

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"In the 1970s, the USSR used nuclear devices to try to send water from Siberia's rivers flowing south, instead of its natural route north..." remembers the BBC. [T]he Soviet Union simultaneously fired three nuclear devices buried 127m (417ft) underground. The yield of each device was 15 kilotonnes (about the same as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945). The experiment, codenamed "Taiga", was part of a two-decade long Soviet programme of carrying out peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs). In this case, the blasts were supposed to help excavate a massive canal to connect the basin of the Pechora River with that of the Kama, a tributary of the Volga. Such a link would have allowed Soviet scientists to siphon off some of the water destined for the Pechora, and send it southward through the Volga. It would have diverted a significant flow of water destined for the Arctic Ocean to go instead to the hot, heavily populated regions of Central Asia and southern Russia. This was just one of a planned series of gargantuan "river reversals" that were designed to alter the direction of Russia's great Eurasian waterways... Years later, Leonid Volkov, a scientist involved in preparing the Taiga explosions, recalled the moment of detonation. "The final countdown began: ...3, 2, 1, 0... then fountains of soil and water shot upward," he wrote. "It was an impressive sight." Despite Soviet efforts to minimise the fallout by using a low-fission explosive, which produce fewer atomic fragments, the blasts were detected as far away as the United States and Sweden, whose governments lodged formal complaints, accusing Moscow of violating the Limited Test Ban Treaty... Ultimately, the nuclear explosions that created Nuclear Lake, one of the few physical traces left of river reversal, were deemed a failure because the crater was not big enough. Although similar PNE canal excavation tests were planned, they were never carried out. In 2024, the leader of a scientific expedition to the lake announced radiation levels were normal. "Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, which not only consumed a huge amount of money, but pushed environmental concerns up the political agenda," the article notes. "Four months after the Number Four Reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev cancelled the river reversal project." And a Russian blogger who travelled to Nuclear Lake in the summer of 2024 told the BBC that nearly 50 years later, there were some places where the radiation was still significantly elevated.

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Quand on monte un watercooling custom, on aime bien montrer la tuyauterie. Mais avec un AIO, ce n'est pas vraiment le cas et DeepCool avance donc un nouveau boitier dont le but est simple : cacher une grosse partie du refroidissement, mais aussi séparer le radiateur du reste des composants pour améliorer le refroidissement. Ainsi, il dispose d'un compartiment dédié dans le haut, avec un espace dessous par rapport au reste de la structure. Le passage des tuyaux se fait facilement depuis l'arrière et l'accès aux composants reste simple et rapide. Pourquoi pas ? Surtout que DeepCool a de nouveaux AIO en préparation avec des coudes qui partent directement vers le haut de la carte mère pour une organisation encore plus rapide et propre. […]

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"Duolingo had been riding high," reports Fast Company, until CEO Luis von Ahn "announced on LinkedIn that the company is phasing out human contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that 'headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.'" But then "facing heavy backlash online after unveiling its new AI-first policy", Duolingo's social media presence went dark last weekend. Duolingo even temporarily took down all its posts on TikTok (6.7 million followers) and Instagram (4.1 million followers) "after both accounts were flooded with negative feedback." Duolingo previously faced criticism for quietly laying off 10% of its contractor base and introducing some AI features in late 2023, but it barely went beyond a semi-viral post on Reddit. Now that Duolingo is cutting out all its human contractors whose work can technically be done by AI, and relying on more AI-generated language lessons, the response is far more pronounced. Although earlier TikTok videos are not currently visible, a Fast Company article from May 12 captured a flavor of the reaction: The top comments on virtually every recent post have nothing to do with the video or the company — and everything to do with the company's embrace of AI. For example, a Duolingo TikTok video jumping on board the "Mama, may I have a cookie" trend saw replies like "Mama, may I have real people running the company" (with 69,000 likes) and "How about NO ai, keep your employees...." And then... After days of silence, on Tuesday the company posted a bizarre video message on TikTok and Instagram, the meaning of which is hard to decipher... Duolingo's first video drop in days has the degraded, stuttering feel of a Max Headroom video made by the hackers at Anonymous. In it, a supposed member of the company's social team appears in a three-eyed Duo mask and black hoodie to complain about the corporate overlords ruining the empire the heroic social media crew built. "But this is something Duolingo can't cute-post its way out of," Fast Company wrote on Tuesday, complaining the company "has not yet meaningfully addressed the policies that inspired the backlash against it... " So the next video (Thursday) featured Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn himself, being confronted by that same hoodie-wearing social media rebel, who says "I'm making the man who caused this mess accountable for his behavior. I'm demanding answers from the CEO..." [Though the video carefully sidesteps the issue of replacing contractors with AI or how "headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work."] Rebel: First question. So are there going to be any humans left at this company? CEO: Our employees are what make Duolingo so amazing. Our app is so great because our employees made it... So we're going to continue having employees, and not only that, we're actually going to be hiring more employees. Rebel: How do we know that these aren't just empty promises? As long as you're in charge, we could still be shuffled out once the media fire dies down. And we all know that in terms of automation, CEOs should be the first to go. CEO: AI is a fundamental shift. It's going to change how we all do work — including me. And honestly, I don't really know what's going to happen. But I want us, as a company, to have our workforce prepared by really knowing how to use AI so that we can be more efficient with it. Rebel: Learning a foreign language is literally about human connection. How is that even possible with AI-first? CEO: Yes, language is about human connection, and it's about people. And this is the thing about AI. AI will allow us to reach more people, and to teach more people. I mean for example, it took us about 10 years to develop the first 100 courses on Duolingo, and now in under a year, with the help of AI and of course with humans reviewing all the work, we were able to release another 100 courses in less than a year. Rebel: So do you regret posting this memo on LinkedIn. CEO: Honestly, I think I messed up sending that email. What we're trying to do is empower our own employees to be able to achieve more and be able to have way more content to teach better and reach more people all with the help of AI. Returning to where it all started, Duolingo's CEO posted again on LinkedIn Thursday with "more context" for his vision. It still emphasizes the company's employees while sidestepping contractors replaced by AI. But it puts a positive spin on how "headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work." I've always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that's why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission. To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are in fact continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it, and use it responsibly, the better off we will be in the long run. My goal is for Duos to feel empowered and prepared to use this technology. No one is expected to navigate this shift alone. We're developing workshops and advisory councils, and carving out dedicated experimentation time to help all our teams learn and adapt. People work at Duolingo because they want to solve big problems to improve education, and the people who work here are what make Duolingo successful. Our mission isn't changing, but the tools we use to build new things will change. I remain committed to leading Duolingo in a way that is consistent with our mission to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. "The backlash to Duolingo is the latest evidence that 'AI-first' tends to be a concept with much more appeal to investors and managers than most regular people," notes Fortune: And it's not hard to see why. Generative AI is often trained on reams of content that may have been illegally accessed; much of its output is bizarre or incorrect; and some leaders in the field are opposed to regulations on the technology. But outside particular niches in entry-level white-collar work, AI's productivity gains have yet to materialize.

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Doom: The Dark Ages just launched on May 15. But it's already received "difficulty" balance changes "that have made the demons of Hell even more dangerous than ever," writes Windows Central: According to DOOM's official website Slayer's Club, these balance adjustments are focused on making the game harder, as players have been leaving feedback saying it felt too easy even on Nightmare Mode. As a result, enemies now hit harder, health and armor item pick-ups drop less often, and certain enemies punish you more severely for mistiming the parry mechanic. It reached three million players in just five days, which was seven times faster than 2020's Doom: Eternal," reports Wccftech (though according to analytics firm Ampere Analysis (via The Game Business), more than two million of those three million launch players were playing on Xbox, while only 500K were playing on PS5.") "id Software proves it can still reinvent the wheel," according to one reviewer, "shaking up numerous aspects of gameplay, exchanging elaborate platforming for brutal on-the-ground action, as well as the ability to soar on a dragon's back or stomp around in a giant mech." And the New York Times says the game "effectively reinvents the hellish shooter with a revamped movement system and deepened lore" in the medieval goth-themed game... Double jumping and dashing are ditched and replaced with an emphasis on raw power and slow, strategic melee combat. Doom Slayer's arsenal features a brand-new tool, the powerful Shield Saw, which Id Software made a point to showcase across its "Stand and Fight" trailers and advertisements. Used for absorbing damage at the expense of speed, the saw also allows players to bash enemies from afar and close the gap on chasms too wide to jump across. While previous titles allowed players to quickly worm their way through bullet hell, The Dark Ages expects you to meet foes head on. "If you were an F-22 fighter jet in Doom Eternal, this time around we wanted you to feel like an Abrams tank," Hugo Martin, the game's creative director, has told journalists. And Doom Slayer's beefy durability and unstoppable nature does make the gameplay a refreshing experience. The badassery is somehow ratcheted to new heights with the inclusion of a fully controllable mech, which has only a handful of attacks at its disposal, and actual dragons. Flight in a Doom game is entirely surprising and fluid, and the dragons feel relatively easy to maneuver through tight spots. They can also engage in combat more deliberately with the use of dodges and mounted cannons... One of my favorite additions is the skullcrusher pulverizer. Equal parts heinous nutcracker and demonic woodchipper, the gun lodges skulls into a grinder and sends shards of bones flying at enemies. The animation is both goofy and satisfying. Another special Times article notes that Doom's fans "resurrect the original game over and over again on progressively stranger pieces of hardware: a Mazda Miata, a NordicTrack treadmill, a French pharmacy sign." But what many hard-core tech hobbyists want to know is whether you can play it on a pregnancy test. The answer: positively yes. And for the first time, even New York Times readers can play Doom within The Times's site [after creating a free account]... None of this happened by accident, of course. Ports were not incidental to Doom's development. They were a core consideration. "Doom was developed in a really unique way that lent a high degree of portability to its code base," said John Romero, who programmed the game with John Carmack. (In our interview, he then reminisced about operating systems for the next 14 minutes.) Id had developed Wolfenstein 3D, the Nazi-killing predecessor to Doom, on PCs. To build Doom, Carmack and Romero used NeXT, the hardware and software company founded by Steve Jobs after his ouster from Apple in 1985. NeXT computers were powerful, selling for about $25,000 apiece in today's dollars. And any game designed on that system would require porting to the more humdrum PCs encountered by consumers at computer labs or office jobs. This turned out to be advantageous because Carmack had a special aptitude for ports. All of Id's founders met as colleagues at Softdisk, which had hired Carmack because of his ability to spin off multiple versions of a single game. The group decided to strike out on its own after Carmack created a near-perfect replica of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 — Nintendo's best-selling platformer — on a PC. It was a wonder of software engineering that compensated for limited processing power with clever workarounds. "This is the thing that everyone has," Romero said of PCs. "The fact that we could figure out how to make it become a game console was world changing...." Romero founded a series of game studios after leaving Id in 1996 and is working on a new first-person shooter, the genre he and Carmack practically invented. He has no illusions about how it may stack up. "I absolutely accept that Doom is the best game I'll ever make that has that kind of a reach," he said. "At some point you make the best thing." Thirty years on, people are still making it. And in related news, PC Gamer reports... As part of a new "FPS Fridays" series on Twitch, legendary shooter designer John Romero streamed New Blood's 2018 hit, Dusk, one of the first and most influential indie "boomer shooters" in the genre's recent revitalization. The short of it? Romero seems to have had a blast.

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With Ubuntu 25.10 planning to ship the Rust-based Coreutils "uutils" by default, it's a big year ahead for this alternative to GNU Coreutils. In furthering along the project's goals, today marks the Rust Coreutils v0.1 release...

It's like "a USB-C port for AI applications..." according to the official documentation for MCP — "a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools." And now Microsoft has "revealed plans to make MCP a native component of Windows," reports DevClass.com, "despite concerns over the security of the fast-expanding MCP ecosystem." In the context of Windows, it is easy to see the value of a standardised means of automating both built-in and third-party applications. A single prompt might, for example, fire off a workflow which queries data, uses it to create an Excel spreadsheet complete with a suitable chart, and then emails it to selected colleagues. Microsoft is preparing the ground for this by previewing new Windows features. — First, there will be a local MCP registry which enables discovery of installed MCP servers. — Second, built-in MCP servers will expose system functions including the file system, windowing, and the Windows Subsystem for Linux. — Third, a new type of API called App Actions enables third-party applications to expose actions appropriate to each application, which will also be available as MCP servers so that these actions can be performed by AI agents. According to Microsoft, "developers will be able to consume actions developed by other relevant apps," enabling app-to-app automation as well as use by AI agents. MCP servers are a powerful concept but vulnerable to misuse. Microsoft corporate VP David Weston noted seven vectors of attack, including cross-prompt injection where malicious content overrides agent instructions, authentication gaps because "MCP's current standards for authentication are immature and inconsistently adopted," credential leakage, tool poisoning from "unvetted MCP servers," lack of containment, limited security review in MCP servers, supply chain risks from rogue MCP servers, and command injection from improperly validated inputs. According to Weston, "security is our top priority as we expand MCP capabilities." Security controls planned by Microsoft (according to the article): A proxy to mediate all MCP client-server interactions. This will enable centralized enforcement of policies and consent, as well as auditing and a hook for security software to monitor actions. A baseline security level for MCP servers to be allowed into the Windows MCP registry. This will include code-signing, security testing of exposed interfaces, and declaration of what privileges are required. Runtime isolation through what Weston called "isolation and granular permissions." MCP was introduced by Anthropic just 6 months ago, the article notes, but Microsoft has now joined the official MCP steering committee, "and is collaborating with Anthropic and others on an updated authorization specification as well as a future public registry service for MCP servers."

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Long-time Slashdot reader SchroedingersCat shares this article from Deadline: Prime Video will not be renewing The Wheel of Time for a fourth season according to Deadline article. The decision, which comes more than a month after the Season 3 finale was released April 17, followed lengthy deliberations. As often is the case in the current economic environment, the reasons were financial as the series is liked creatively by the streamer's executives... The Season 3 overall performance was not strong enough compared to the show's cost for Prime Video to commit to another season and the streamer could not make it work after examining different scenarios and following discussions with lead studio Sony TV, sources said. With the cancellation possibility — and the show's passionate fanbase — in mind, the Season 3 finale was designed to offer some closure. Still, the news would be a gut punch for fans who have been praising the latest season as the series' best yet creatively... Prime Video and Sony TV will continue to back the Emmy campaign for The Wheel of Time's third season.

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