Wednesday, 07 October 2026
79 stories filed.
Meta Engineer's Linux Patches For Boosting AMD P-State / Steam Deck Gaming Performance
Back in July I wrote about AMD P-State driver patches boosting 1%-low frame rates for gaming by as much as 31%. That work was done by David Vernet who is a Linux kernel engineer/hacker at Mesa. This week Vernet presented on the topic at the Linux Plumbers Conference happening in Prague...
Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth
Paramount now owns Warner Bros. as last-ditch effort to stop $111B merger fails.
Support Ars and get a better reading experience in return
ArsPro gives you more ways to read while directly supporting our journalism.
Amazon kills Alexa’s ability to control Echo speakers' AUX input
Amazon hasn't made an Echo with a 3.5mm port in six years.
Neutrino physicist wins 2026 Nobel Physics Prize
Francis Halzen of University of Wisconsin-Madison led development of IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
AI is now capable of developing its own inference hardware
Article URL: https://github.com/FeSens/openTPU Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49980715 Points: 143 # Comments: 144
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Googlebook "Better Together" phone features don't work with Samsung at launch
Googlebooks require Android 17, but Samsung's Android 17 phones won't work yet.
Wikimedia Foundation comes forward as latest OpenAI agent assault victim
Millions of automated requests may have contributed to partial Wikidata outage in May
NVIDIA Vera HPC Performance Benchmarks Take On AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon
While most everyone understandably likes to talk about AI these days, one of the areas of NVIDIA's Vera CPU I have been most eager to test has been for conventional high performance computing (HPC) workloads. HPC was talked up as one of Vera's strengths thanks to its 1.2TB/s LPDDR5x memory bandwidth and custom Olympus cores. Vera is seeing deployments at HPC labs like Los Alamos.
Why is NASA bringing 7,500 contractors back to work as civil servants?
"The administrator's directive is a coherent and necessary vision for the future."
All-electric camping gets a solar upgrade: The 2027 Pebble Flow
The Pebble Flow has a 45 kWh LFP battery and can even charge an EV.
Microsoft extends the Outlook naughty step with two more file types
You didn't really want to be sending around .msix and .msixbundle files, did you?
Vulkan API Improvements Coming For The AMD Polaris GPUs With Mesa RADV
Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has done an incredible job improving older AMD GPU support under Linux with migrating GCN 1.0/1.1 era hardware to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver and an assortment of other improvements for various older Radeon GPUs. The newest work is on enhancing the RADV Vulkan driver support for old Radeon RX 400/500 "Polaris" graphics cards...
Classic Outlook clings to stale search results as Microsoft works on a fix
Moved messages linger and throw errors when clicked, leaving Windows Desktop Search as the workaround
Tapo (Rust/Python library) now speaks TP-Link's TPAP protocol
Article URL: https://mihai.dinculescu.dev/posts/tapo-speaks-tpap/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49978563 Points: 101 # Comments: 36
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Big Oil asks Supreme Court to kill climate lawsuits before trial
Oil companies say federal law should block state climate deception claims.
IBM & Red Hat Find More Than 400 New Vulnerabilities In Popular Java Code
IBM and Red Hat announced today they have identified and remediated more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across popular Java libraries...
Mistral Large 4
https://docs.mistral.ai/models/mistral-large-4-0 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49977979 Points: 1185 # Comments: 762
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
The Importance Of Intel's LPMD For Linux Gaming Performance & Power Efficiency
Intel's LPMD project as the Low Power Mode Daemon for modern Intel Core Ultra desktops and laptops is quite important for achieving peak performance and optimal power efficiency. Here are some of Intel's own findings on the importance of LPMD for Linux gaming..
Zombie instructions on carefully constructed web pages could trick GitHub Copilot CLI into sharing secrets
Run the CLI in autopilot mode and take your chances
Meta’s Muse is an adorable privacy and security dumpster fire
Article URL: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/10/06/metas-muse-is-an-adorable-privacy-and-security-dumpster-fire/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49977588 Points: 330 # Comments: 222
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic
The reports of OpenAI agents harming third-party sites keep coming.
Blender 6.0 May End Up Removing OpenGL Support
With Blender 5.0 having nice Vulkan API support that's now grown mature, Blender developers are contemplating on potentially removing OpenGL support in Blender 6.0...
Licensing costs driving 90 percent of VMware users to explore options: Survey
Users want to "reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption" while making changes.
Release of Polars 2.0
Article URL: https://pola.rs/posts/release-polars-2/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49977177 Points: 340 # Comments: 69
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Asos app delivers a data leak threat instead of fast fashion
Rogue notification claims Snowflake instance compromised, but customer info theft remains unverified
Denmark's ID register spills more people's details than the country has residents
Abuse of private firm's access exposed 8.8M records, including those of people who had died or moved abroad
World's First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months
Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/01/worlds-first-enhanced-geothermal-power-plant-completed-in-just-23-months/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49976993 Points: 129 # Comments: 50
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is vastly overestimated
Article URL: https://phys.org/news/2026-10-nature-capacity-species-lost-vastly.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49976823 Points: 251 # Comments: 118
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Atos lands £350M beat keeping Met Police applications running
Six-year deal covers management and security, with options to add cloud and digital workplace services
Meta Developing Compressed RAM "CRAM" For Linux: Better Than ZRAM & Zswap
With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM "CRAM" for Linux. This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with…
Windows Subsystem For Linux Can Now Run On Very Large Servers, Experimental Sparse VHD
Microsoft yesterday released WSL 3.0.2 as their latest WSL update since last week's WSL3 release with "WSLC" for promoting Linux containers on Windows to general availability. Some notable changes in WSL 3.0.2 include automatic virtual NUMA support and experimental support for sparse VHD storage...
Intel Compiler Engineer Shares Latest Project Gains For APX
Last week at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2026 conference in Prague there was an x86 BOF with presentations both by AMD and Intel compiler engineers. There are a few interesting nuggets out of that with both Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AI Compute Extensions (ACE) talked about as part of their ongoing enablement in the GCC compiler...
Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen
Article URL: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2026/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49976265 Points: 423 # Comments: 133
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
YSERVER 1.7 Rust X11 Server Narrows Memory Usage Difference With X.Org Server
YSERVER continues seeing a lot of activity for this vibe coded X11 server written in the Rust programming language. YSERVER has been seeing many apps and desktops working fine on this creation crafted in large part by Claude Code and continues chipping away at more X11 features. YSERVER 1.7 is out today with the latest fixes and improvements...
Legacy sign-on service comes back to bite school software provider Bromcom
Intruders retrieved email addresses from superseded tech kept running for an internal system
KPMG tells staff facing the axe: Here's £100, now zip it
Staff in AI, Cyber, SAP and Testing told the consultation is over, with notices due Friday
Gleam doesn't compile to Erlang source anymore
Article URL: https://gleam.run/news/gleam-doesnt-compile-to-erlang-source-anymore/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49975619 Points: 233 # Comments: 100
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Only the finest Swedish Bork will do for Stockholm station
No, this is not GRUB of the meatball variety
OpenAI rolls out weak sauce watermarking for AI text
Compliance, we've heard of it
Scientists find planet made on new matter recipe, and it formed after a Red Giant ate a solar system
Death of a star may not be game over for the inner solar system after all
Atlassian warns of critical file access flaw in its datacenter products
Tells users ‘action required’ – but maybe don’t make that action a Jira ticket, because it has this bug
Security researcher claims they found KVM guest-host escape flaw
Firecracker MicroVMs, which started at AWS, seem to be the problem
TrueNAS 27 RC.1 Released: Linux 6.18 LTS + OpenZFS 2.4
TrueNAS 27 RC.1 released today in working toward the next major release of this Linux-based storage/NAS operating system from iXsystems...
Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades
Article URL: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/example-dot-com-redesign-history Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49971921 Points: 308 # Comments: 210
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Schneider Electric drops $22.6B on PTC as datacenter boom rains money on infra companies
Part of a bigger play for smarter power infra
Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend
Article URL: https://dbushell.com/2026/10/03/deno-to-node/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49971719 Points: 287 # Comments: 207
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
MCP for agent-to-agent comms may be the riskiest protocol you've never heard of
Trust gaps in the new protocol spread malicious prompts from one agent to another.
AMD ROCm 10.1 Released With Many Improvements
Following the ROCm 10.0 release from late August, ROCm 10.1 is now available in continuing with the ROCm six week release cycle...
Find the flattest route between any two points in SF
Article URL: https://flattensf.com/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49971230 Points: 284 # Comments: 97
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Citrix NetScaler security snafus get even worse amid more 0-day reports
The new vuln, CVE-2026-88779, is a memory overflow bug that leads to denial of service
Dust: Pretraining Transformers Without Backpropagation
Article URL: https://qlabs.sh/research/dust Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49970871 Points: 256 # Comments: 69
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates
Article URL: https://www.vals.ai/blogs/room-temperature-magnetic-semiconductors Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49970667 Points: 464 # Comments: 311
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Cable lobby to sue Trump FCC over repeal of national TV ownership cap
Cable industry to sue, says FCC can't repeal TV ownership limit set by Congress.
Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage
Prices of public records tracking cops' use of Flock go up as backlash swells.
Cohere offers to put agents in lockdown mode with strict ACLs
Like OpenClaw but with access control
Get rid of Apple's AI bloatware and reclaim 12 GB of storage with this open source tool
Meet RemoveMacAI
Beam: Reflection's 501B open-weight model
Article URL: https://reflection.ai/blog/introducing-beam Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49969183 Points: 523 # Comments: 164
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Command-line tool quickly removes Apple Intelligence from macOS 27
The tool can free up over 12GB of storage.
Linux 7.4 To Land New BTB CTX Isolation Feature Of AMD Zen 6
The Linux 7.4 kernel is set to introduce support for a new AMD Zen 6 security feature...
Controlling the brain with light earns a physiology Nobel
The entire field of optogenetics traces back to light-seeking algae.
FBI confirms 'multiple' arrests related to ShinyHunters hack
Another few bite the dust
Windows 11 26H2 blighted by new audio issue
AC-3 decoder drama also hits Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2
Russian drones strike Ukraine’s data centers by exploiting air defense gaps
Russian attacks on Internet, phone services threaten Ukraine’s wartime economy.
F1 in Bahrain... in Malaysia: The race needed a software update to start
A software bug waylaid half the field and required a race reboot.
Auto-CPUFreq 3.2 Adds Configurable HWP Dynamic Boost, Platform Profile Reporting
The open-source Auto-CPUFreq tool for active system monitoring and power optimizations is out with a new release for continuing to enhance battery life on Linux laptops...
Mass quarantine issued in Russia after unexplained death of plague researcher
Unconfirmed reports have suggested there was a laboratory accident.
The lamps in my house
Article URL: https://arslan.io/2026/10/05/the-lamps-in-my-house/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49965152 Points: 303 # Comments: 114
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
AMD ROCm vs. Vulkan Performance For Lemonade Local AI Server With Llama.cpp
A Phoronix Premium reader recently inquired about seeing some new benchmarks of AI performance between Vulkan and AMD ROCm back-ends to see how the situation plays out today. Here are some fresh benchmarks on two separate systems with AMD Radeon graphics and using the Lemonade local AI server while exploring the difference between the ROCm and Vulkan Llama.cpp back-ends.
AI glasses face their first major government crackdown
Norway wants time to write permanent rules for glasses that can record bystanders.
Mesa Developers Looking At A Formal Governance Model
The Mesa 3D driver stack has functioned well over the years without a formal governance model and just relying on an informal consensus approach for big changes. But on some occasions this informal handling has been less than ideal so upstream Mesa developers are now looking at establishing a formal governance model...
Linux's ZRAM Reworked For Greater Memory Savings, Better Performance
With today's very high memory prices, the Linux ZRAM code for compressed block devices in RAM has seen a rework to provide greater memory savings...
Linux 7.4 To Mainline Support For The Google Tensor G5, Pixel 10 Devices
Going back to last year have been patches for booting the mainline Linux kernel on Pixel 10 devices while finally those Google Pixel 10 Device Trees and Tensor G5 SoC support is set to be mainlined for Linux 7.4...
Explaining Hall-effect, TMR, and other new types of "mechanical" switches
Ars Technica's guide to new keyboard sensing technologies.
Mold 3.0 High Speed Linker Released Following Rust Rewrite
The Mold high speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold/LD and LLVM LLD recently has been going through a rewrite from C++ to Rust as well as having high ambitions of eventually becoming the default linker on Linux systems. Today marks the release of Mold 3.0 for this Rust-based high performance linker...
Linux 7.4 Continues Preparing For Intel's Rugged Panther Lake
Back in May we spotted a Linux patch adding "Panther Lake R" as a rugged version of Panther Lake intended for "use in harsh environments". Since Linux 7.2 we have seen some bits of Panther Lake R driver support added while for the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle there is additional enablement happening for this Panther Lake derivative...
Testing 12 different Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors
Article URL: https://smarthomescene.com/reviews/best-selling-zigbee-temperature-sensors-tested/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49950653 Points: 202 # Comments: 110
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Direct retinal projection display for smart glasses using a meta-optic mirror
Article URL: https://www.tdk.com/en/news_center/press/20261002_01.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49944369 Points: 103 # Comments: 43
Discussion: Hacker News thread →
Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2018) [pdf]
Article URL: https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49944049 Points: 284 # Comments: 70
Discussion: Hacker News thread →