Linux fréttir

Probe indicates it was all over for Bayesian in just 9 minutes

An interim report by the UK's Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) has indicated that extreme wind was to blame for the sinking of the yacht Bayesian, claiming the lives of UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch, his daughter, and five others.…

MEWSIC to Brit crews' ears will see off anti-ship missiles, among other things

Britain's Royal Navy is to get updated electromagnetic warfare (EW) capabilities including launchable decoys to help defend its vessels against threats such as modern anti-ship missiles.…

Nvidia-backed CoreWeave plans to spend up to $23 billion this year on AI infrastructure and data center capacity, as it aims to meet the booming demand from clients. Reuters reports: The heavy spending plan weighed on its shares, which fell 5% after surging as much as 11% on better-than-expected revenue in its first results as a public company after debuting on the Nasdaq in March. The company's projected capital expenditure of between $3 billion and $3.5 billion for the second quarter was way above its revenue expectation of $1.06 billion to $1.1 billion. "While the revenue from Microsoft is likely secure for the next three years, CoreWeave represents overflow capacity for Microsoft, which may not need that capacity in the future," D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said. The company's revenue backlog was $25.9 billion as of March 31, with its five-year deal with OpenAI adding $11.2 billion to the pile up. As part of the deal signed in March, CoreWeave will provide AI infrastructure to OpenAI, while the ChatGPT maker will get a stake. CoreWeave expects annual revenue of $4.9 billion to $5.1 billion, above analysts' expectation of $4.61 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. It reported revenue of $981.6 million for the first quarter, beating the estimate of $852.9 million.

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Linux types mobilize website to help people avoid creating more e-waste

The "End of 10" website is a cooperative effort to let people know that they have other options besides buying a new computer.…

U.S. President Donald Trump said he has told Apple CEO Tim Cook to stop expanding manufacturing operations in India despite New Delhi offering a "no-tariff deal" to the United States, a move that could impede India's aspirations to become a global technology manufacturing hub. "I had a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday," Trump said during his state visit to Qatar, referring to the Apple chief executive. "He is building all over India. I don't want you building in India. India can take care of itself." Apple has significantly increased its Indian manufacturing footprint, assembling $22 billion worth of iPhones in India during the 12 months through March. Apple said earlier this month a majority of its devices shipped into the U.S. in the June quarter will originate in India and Vietnam.

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Fork focuses on stability and inclusion as it preps for more ambitious changes

Interview Version 8.1 of Valkey was recently released, marking a year since the creation of the Redis fork. Valkey's co-maintainer, Madelyn Olson, is looking ahead to version 9 as the project settles down.…

AlphaEvolve may optimize your code in ways you hadn’t thought possible. Or not. Not is possible, too

Google's AI shop DeepMind has unveiled AlphaEvolve, its "evolutionary coding agent" powered by large language models to discover and optimize algorithms.…

Montana has passed a bill allowing licensed clinics to offer experimental medical treatments that haven't been approved by the FDA, provided the drugs have passed phase I safety trials. MIT Technology Review reports: The bill, which was passed by the state legislature on April 29 and is expected to be signed by Governor Greg Gianforte, essentially expands on existing Right to Try legislation in the state. But while that law was originally designed to allow terminally ill people to access experimental drugs, the new bill was drafted and lobbied for by people interested in extending human lifespans -- a group of longevity enthusiasts that includes scientists, libertarians, and influencers. These longevity enthusiasts are hoping Montana will serve as a test bed for opening up access to experimental drugs. [...] Supporters of the bill say it gives individuals the freedom to make choices about their own bodies. At the same event, bioethicist Jessica Flanigan of the University of Richmond said she was "optimistic" about the measure, because "it's great any time anybody is trying to give people back their medical autonomy." Ultimately, they hope that the new law will enable people to try unproven drugs that might help them live longer, make it easier for Americans to try experimental treatments without having to travel abroad, and potentially turn Montana into a medical tourism hub. But ethicists and legal scholars aren't as optimistic. "I hate it," bioethicist Alison Bateman-House of New York University says of the bill. She and others are worried about the ethics of promoting and selling unproven treatments -- and the risks of harm should something go wrong. [...] At any rate, the clinics are coming to Montana, says [Dylan Livingston, founder and CEO of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives]. "We have half a dozen that are interested, and maybe two or three that are definitively going to set up shop out there." He won't name names, but he says some of the interested clinicians already have clinics in the US, while others are abroad." Mac Davis -- founder and CEO of Minicircle, the company that developed the controversial "anti-aging" gene therapy -- told MIT Technology Review he was "looking into it." "I think this can be an opportunity for America and Montana to really kind of corner the market when it comes to medical tourism," says Livingston. "There is no other place in the world with this sort of regulatory environment."

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Would you believe it, this RaaS cartel says Russia is off limits

DragonForce, a new-ish ransomware-as-a-service operation, has given organizations another cyber threat to worry about — unless they’re in Russia, which is off limits to the would-be extortionists.…

Fintech startup Klarna is now recruiting humans after its AI customer service agents underperformed. The buy-now-pay-later company, which eliminated its marketing contracts in 2023 and customer service team in 2024, now plans an "Uber-type setup" with remote gig workers. This marks a stark reversal from CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's 2024 claim that "AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do." Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg: "From a brand perspective, I just think it's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want." He added that "cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor" leading to "lower quality."

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IT department keeps the infrastructure. Then this new persona takes over and handles the AI stuff

Some organizations have started hiring for a new tech job: The Machine Learning Administrator – aka the “ML admin”.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's DeepMind research division claims its newest AI agent marks a significant step toward using the technology to tackle big problems in math and science. The system, known as AlphaEvolve, is based on the company's Gemini large language models (LLMs), with the addition of an "evolutionary" approach that evaluates and improves algorithms across a range of use cases. AlphaEvolve is essentially an AI coding agent, but it goes deeper than a standard Gemini chatbot. When you talk to Gemini, there is always a risk of hallucination, where the AI makes up details due to the non-deterministic nature of the underlying technology. AlphaEvolve uses an interesting approach to increase its accuracy when handling complex algorithmic problems. According to DeepMind, this AI uses an automatic evaluation system. When a researcher interacts with AlphaEvolve, they input a problem along with possible solutions and avenues to explore. The model generates multiple possible solutions, using the efficient Gemini Flash and the more detail-oriented Gemini Pro, and then each solution is analyzed by the evaluator. An evolutionary framework allows AlphaEvolve to focus on the best solution and improve upon it. Many of the company's past AI systems, for example, the protein-folding AlphaFold, were trained extensively on a single domain of knowledge. AlphaEvolve, however, is more dynamic. DeepMind says AlphaEvolve is a general-purpose AI that can aid research in any programming or algorithmic problem. And Google has already started to deploy it across its sprawling business with positive results. DeepMind's AlphaEvolve AI has optimized Google's Borg cluster scheduler, reducing global computing resource usage by 0.7% -- a significant cost saving at Google's scale. It also outperformed specialized AI like AlphaTensor by discovering a more efficient algorithm for multiplying complex-valued matrices. Additionally, AlphaEvolve proposed hardware-level optimizations for Google's next-gen Tensor chips. The AI remains too complex for public release but that may change in the future as it gets integrated into smaller research tools.

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Partly because America does AI wrong and it can get more done with less

Chinese web giant Tencent says it has enough high-end GPUs to train new AI models for years, in part because it’s found more efficient ways to do so.…

Microsoft quietly announced earlier this week that it plans to shut down a long-standing tool supplying search engine startups and other software developers with a raw feed of Bing search results. From a report: The Bing Search APIs, or application programming interfaces, were once vital to many niche Google alternatives, but fell out of favor more recently as Microsoft hiked fees for the service and restricted its use. The shutoff, which is scheduled to begin on August 11, still came as a surprise to several developers who spoke with WIRED. Customers learned of it on Monday via an email from Microsoft and a post on its website. They were directed to consider using "Grounding with Bing Search as part of Azure AI Agents," a Microsoft service that allows chatbots like ChatGPT to augment AI-generated responses with "real-time public web data." Some developers view the AI-centric alternative as an insufficient replacement. Larger customers like DuckDuckGo told Wired they won't be affected.

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Google has warned that the hacker group known as "Scattered Spider," which recently disrupted UK retailer Marks & Spencer, is now targeting U.S. retailers with aggressive and sophisticated cyberattacks. "U.S. retailers should take note. These actors are aggressive, creative, and particularly effective at circumventing mature security programs," John Hultquist, an analyst at Google's cybersecurity arm, said in an email sent on Wednesday. The Guardian reports: Scattered Spider is widely reported to have been behind the particularly disruptive hack at M&S, one of the best-known names in British business, whose online operations have been frozen since 25 April. It has a history of focusing on a single sector at a time and is likely to target retail for a while longer, Hultquist said. Just a day before Google's warning, M&S announced that some customer data had been accessed, but this did not include usable payment or card details, or any account passwords. The Guardian understands the details taken are names, addresses and order histories. M&S said personal information had been accessed because of the "sophisticated nature of the incident." "Today, we are writing to customers informing them that due to the sophisticated nature of the incident, some of their personal customer data has been taken," the company said. Hackers from the Scattered Spider ecosystem have been behind a slew of disruptive break-ins on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2023, hackers tied to the group made headlines for hacking the casino operators MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment. Law enforcement has struggled to get a handle on the Scattered Spider hacking groups, in part because of their amorphousness, the hackers' youth, and a lack of cooperation from cybercrime victims.

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Netflix said its cheaper, ad-supporter tier now has 94 million monthly active users -- an increase of more than 20 million since its last public tally in November. CNBC reports: The company and its peers have been increasingly leaning on advertising to boost the profitability of their streaming products. Netflix first introduced the ad-supported plan in November 2022. Netflix's ad-supported plan costs $7.99 per month, a steep discount from its least-expensive ad-free plan, at $17.99 per month. Netflix also said its cheapest tier reaches more 18- to 34-year-olds than any U.S. broadcast or cable network. "When you compare us to our competitors, attention starts higher and ends much higher," Netflix president of advertising Amy Reinhard said in a statement. "Even more impressive, members pay as much attention to mid-roll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves."

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Bit barn operator to wedge 8,192 liquid-cooled MI325Xs into AI training cluster

Interview After some teething pains, TensorWave CEO Darrick Horton is confident that AMD's Instinct accelerators are ready to take on large-scale AI training.…

Apple's smartphone shipments in China plunged nearly 50% year-over-year in March 2025, as domestic brands like Huawei and Vivo surged ahead -- now controlling 92% of the market. MacRumors reports: The steep decline saw shipments fall to just 1.89 million units, down from 3.75 million during the same period last year. That shrinks Apple's share of the Chinese market to approximately 8%, while domestic brands now control 92% of smartphone shipments. For the entire first quarter, non-Chinese brand shipments declined over 25%, while total smartphone shipments in China actually increased by 3.3%. Apple's struggles come as domestic competitors have gained ground. Counterpoint Research reports Huawei now leads with a 19.4% share, followed by Vivo (17%), Xiaomi (16.6%), and Oppo (14.6%). Apple has slipped to fifth place with 14.1%. Several factors are driving Apple's declining fortunes. The company faces competition from rejuvenated local brands like Huawei, which has rebounded with proprietary chips and its HarmonyOS Next software. Chinese government policies appear to be playing a role too. Under government subsidies, consumers of electronics get a 15% refund of products that are priced under 6,000 yuan ($820). Apple's standard iPhone 16 starts at 5,999 yuan.

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More than $100M in costs could be cut by gutting duplicative IT alone, making DOGE itself look a bit redundant

Comment Cost-trimming in the US federal government is all the rage right now – and a new report finds more than $100 million in savings available to the Feds by doing nothing but eliminating redundant and unnecessary IT investments. …

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Would you believe Microsoft has announced a new Linux distribution service for its Azure cloud service? You should. For many years, the most popular operating system on Azure has not been Windows Server, it's been Linux. Last time I checked, in 2024, Azure Linux Platforms Group Program Manager Jack Aboutboul told me that 60% of Azure Marketplace offerings and more than 60% of virtual machine cores use Linux. Those figures mean it's sensible for Microsoft to make it easier than ever for Linux distributors to release first-class Linux distros on Azure. The tech giant is taking this step, said Andrew Randall, principal manager for the Azure Core Linux product management team, by making "Azure Image Testing for Linux (AITL) available 'as a service' to distro publishers." ATIL is built on Microsoft's Linux Integration Services Automation project (LISA). Microsoft's Linux Systems Group originally developed this initiative to validate Linux OS images. LISA is a Linux quality validation system with two parts: a test framework to drive test execution and a set of test suites to verify Linux distribution quality. LISA is now open-sourced under the MIT License. The system enables continuous testing of Linux images, covering a wide range of scenarios from kernel updates to complex cloud-native workloads. [...] Specifically, the ATIL service is designed to streamline the deployment, testing, and management of Linux images on Azure. The service builds on the company's internal expertise and open-source tools to provide: - Curated, Azure-optimized, security-hardened Linux images - Automated quality assurance and compliance testing for Linux distributions - Seamless integration with Azure's cloud-native services and Kubernetes environments Krum Kashan, Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program manager, said in a statement: "While numerous testing tools are available for validating Linux kernels, guest OS images, and user space packages across various cloud platforms, finding a comprehensive testing framework that addresses the entire platform stack remains a significant challenge. A robust framework is essential, one that seamlessly integrates with Azure's environment while providing coverage for major testing tools, such as LTP and kselftest, and covers critical areas like networking, storage, and specialized workloads, including Confidential VMs, HPC, and GPU scenarios. This unified testing framework is invaluable for developers, Linux distribution providers, and customers who build custom kernels and images."

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