Feed aggregator

Linux Kernel Bugs Can Hide for 20 Years  Bitdefender

Microsoft is discontinuing its Send to Kindle integration in Word, ending a feature that allowed Microsoft 365 subscribers to send documents directly to their Kindle e-readers and preserve complex formatting through fixed layouts. The company updated its documentation to announce that beginning February 9th, 2026, the Send to Kindle feature will no longer work across Web, Win32, and Mac platforms. Microsoft has not disclosed why it's killing the integration but recommends users switch to Amazon's official Send to Kindle app. The feature launched in 2023 and was particularly valued by Kindle Scribe owners who could annotate the transferred documents.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'There is *zero* point in talking about AI slop. That's just plain stupid': Linus Torvalds weighs in on AI debate in Linux kernel documentation  PC Gamer

I switched to Linux: Bye macOS and Windows  overkill.wtf

Abstract of a paper on NBER: We construct an international panel data set comprising three distinct yet plausible measures of government indebtedness: the debt-to-GDP, the interest-to-GDP, and the debt-to-equity ratios. Our analysis reveals that these measures yield differing conclusions about recent trends in government indebtedness. While the debt-to-GDP ratio has reached historically high levels, the other two indicators show either no clear trend or a declining pattern over recent decades. We argue for the development of stronger theoretical foundations for the measures employed in the literature, suggesting that, without such grounding, assertions about debt (un)sustainability may be premature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's oceans absorbed yet another record-breaking amount of heat in 2025, continuing an almost unbroken streak of annual records since the start of the millennium and fueling increasingly extreme weather events around the globe. More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity's carbon emissions ends up in the oceans, making ocean heat content one of the clearest indicators of the climate crisis's trajectory. The analysis, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, drew on temperature data collected across the oceans and collated by three independent research teams. The measurements cover the top 2,000 meters of ocean depth, where most heat absorption occurs. The amount of heat absorbed is equivalent to more than 200 times the total electricity used by humans worldwide. This extra thermal energy intensifies hurricanes and typhoons, produces heavier rainfall and greater flooding, and results in longer marine heatwaves that decimate ocean life. The oceans are likely at their hottest in at least 1,000 years and heating faster than at any point in the past 2,000 years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

3 Linux apps to try this weekend (January 9 - 11)  How-To Geek

Daily driving Linux for 3 years taught me these 6 habits  How-To Geek

Vitalik Buterin Says Ethereum Should Become Civilization Infrastructure Like Linux  ICOBench.com

Steam Frame and Steam Machine will be another good boost for Flatpaks and desktop Linux overall too  GamingOnLinux

Linux 6.19-rc5 To Fix Broken Nouveau Driver With Newer NVIDIA GPUs  Phoronix

Latest SteamOS Beta Now Includes NTSYNC Kernel Driver  Phoronix

Qualcomm Sends Out Linux Patches For RAS Support On RISC-V For Reporting Hardware Errors  Phoronix

How to Tar Compress Files in Linux  commandlinux.com

Why Ethereum Mirrors BitTorrent Scale and Linux Trust?  Altcoin Buzz

Linux In ML And AI Infrastructure Statistics In 2026  commandlinux.com

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: At the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), physicists successfully exceeded what is known as the Greenwald limit, a practical density boundary beyond which plasmas tend to violently destabilize, often damaging reactor components. For a long time, the Greenwald limit was accepted as a given and incorporated into fusion reactor engineering. The new work shows that precise control over how the plasma is created and interacts with the reactor walls can push it beyond this limit into what physicists call a 'density-free' regime. [...] A team led by physicists Ping Zhu of Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Ning Yan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences designed an experiment to take this theory further, based on a simple premise: that the density limit is strongly influenced by the initial plasma-wall interactions as the reactor starts up. In their experiment, the researchers wanted to see if they could deliberately steer the outcome of this interaction. They carefully controlled the pressure of the fuel gas during tokamak startup and added a burst of heating called electron cyclotron resonance heating. These changes altered how the plasma interacts with the tokamak walls through a cooler plasma boundary, which dramatically reduced the degree to which wall impurities entered the plasma. Under this regime, the researchers were able to reach densities up to about 65 percent higher than the tokamak's Greenwald limit. This doesn't mean that magnetically confined plasmas can now operate with no density limits whatsoever. However, it does show that the Greenwald limit is not a fundamental barrier and that tweaking operational processes could lead to more effective fusion reactors. The findings have been published in Science Advances.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After testing over 125,000 Linux bugs, one researcher found the average one takes over two years to be fixed  PC Gamer

Here is my 2025 Year-End portfolio update that includes all our combined 401k/403b/IRAs and taxable brokerage accounts but excludes our house and small side portfolio of self-directed investments. Following the concept of skin in the game, the following is not a recommendation, but a sharing of our actual, imperfect DIY portfolio.

“Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have in their portfolio.” – Nassim Taleb

How I Track My Portfolio
Here’s how I track my portfolio across multiple brokers and account types:

• The Empower Personal Dashboard real-time portfolio tracking tools (free) automatically logs into my different accounts, adds up my various balances, tracks my performance, and calculates my overall asset allocation daily. Formerly known as Personal Capital.
• Once a quarter, I also update my manual Google Spreadsheet (free to copy, instructions) because it helps me calculate how much I need in each asset class to rebalance back towards my target asset allocation. I also create a new sheet each quarter, so I have a personal archive of my portfolio dating back many years.

2025 Year-End Asset Allocation and YTD Performance
Here are updated performance and asset allocation charts, per the “Holdings” and “Allocation” tabs of my Empower Personal Dashboard.

The major components of my portfolio are broad index ETFs. I do mix it up a bit around the edges, but not very much. Here is a model version of my target asset allocation with sample ETF holdings for each asset class.

• 35% US Total Market (VTI)
• 5% US Small-Cap Value (AVUV)
• 20% International Total Market (VXUS)
• 5% International Small-Cap Value (AVDV)
• 5% US Real Estate (REIT) (VNQ)
• 20% US “Regular” Treasury Bonds and/or FDIC-insured deposits (VGSH)
• 10% US Treasury Inflation-Protected Bonds (SCHP)

Big picture, it is 70% businesses and 30% very safe bonds/cash:

By paying minimal costs including management fees, transaction spreads, and tax drag, I am trying to essentially guarantee myself above-average net performance over time.

I do not spend a lot of time backtesting various model portfolios. You’ll usually find that whatever model portfolio is popular at the moment just happens to hold the asset class that has been the hottest recently.

The portfolio that you can hold onto through the tough times is the best one for you. I’ve been pretty much holding this same portfolio for 20 years. Check out these ancient posts from 2004 and 2005. Every asset class will eventually have a low period, and you must have strong faith during these periods to earn those historically high returns. You have to keep owning and buying more stocks through the stock market crashes. You have to maintain and even buy more rental properties during a housing crunch, etc. A good sign is that if prices drop, you’ll want to buy more of that asset instead of less. I don’t have strong faith in the long-term results of commodities, gold, or bitcoin – so I don’t own them.

Performance details. Here’s an updated YTD Growth of $10,000 chart courtesy of Testfolio for some of the major ETFs that shows the difference in performance in the broad indexes:

Nearly everything went up in 2025. I doubt 2026 will be boring. I’ll share about more about the income aspect in a separate post.

Researchers at Stanford University have created a programmable synthetic "skin" that can independently change color and texture, "a feat previously only available within the animal kingdom," reports the Register. From the report: The technique employs electron beams to write patterns and add optical layers that create color effects. When exposed to water, the film swells to reveal texture and colors independently, depending on which side of the material is exposed, according to a paper published in the scientific journal Nature this week. In an accompanying article, University of Stuttgart's Benjamin Renz and Na Liu said the researchers' "most striking achievement was a photonic skin in which color and texture could be independently controlled, mirroring the separate regulation... in octopuses." The research team used the polymer PEDOT:PSS, which can swell in water, as the basis for their material. Its reaction to water can be controlled by irradiating it with electrons, creating textures and patterns in the film. By adding thin layers of gold, the researchers turned surface texture into tunable optical effects. A single layer could be used to scatter light, giving the shiny metal a matte, textured appearance. To control color, a polymer film was sandwiched between two layers of gold, forming an optical cavity, which selectively reflects light.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.