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Proton Experimental updated to fix the EA app again on SteamOS / Linux  GamingOnLinux

The preprint repository arXiv will require all submissions to be written in English or accompanied by a full English translation starting February 11, a policy change that explicitly permits the use of AI translators even as research suggests large language models remain inconsistent at the task. Until now, authors only needed to submit an abstract in English. ArXiv hosts nearly 3 million preprints and receives more than 20,000 submissions monthly, though just 1% are in languages other than English. Ralph Wijers, chair of arXiv's editorial advisory council, advises authors to verify any AI-generated translations. "Our own experience is that AI translation is good but not good enough," he says. A 2025 study from ByteDance Seed and Peking University ranked 20 LLMs on translation quality between Chinese and English; GPT-5-high scored nearly 77, just below the human expert benchmark of 80, but most models including GPT-4o, Claude 4, and Deepseek-V3 scored under 60.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The US is leading a huge global surge in new gas-fired power generation that will cause a major leap in planet-heating emissions, with this record boom driven by the expansion of energy-hungry datacenters to service AI, according to a new forecast. This year is set to shatter the annual record for new gas power additions around the world, with projects in development expected to grow existing global gas capacity by nearly 50%, a report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) found. The US is at the forefront of a global push for gas that is set to escalate over the next five years, after tripling its planned gas-fired capacity in 2025. Much of this new capacity will be devoted to the vast electricity needs of AI, with a third of the 252 gigawatts of gas power in development set to be situated on site at datacenters. All of this new gas energy is set to come at a significant cost to the climate, amid ongoing warnings from scientists that fossil fuels must be rapidly phased out to avoid disastrous global heating.

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I carry Windows, Linux, and repair tools in my pocket: Here is how  How-To Geek

An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. life expectancy rose to a record high of 79 years in 2024, an increase of six months from the previous year, reflecting a sharp decline in deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. According to a report from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy improved for both men and women across races and among Hispanics, surpassing the previous peak set in 2014.

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Nvidia Launches Native GeForce NOW App on Linux  Thurrott.com

Linux users can finally stream games via GeForce NOW  Android Headlines

An overview of coordinated influence operation campaigns terminated on our platforms in Q4 2025.An overview of coordinated influence operation campaigns terminated on our platforms in Q4 2025.

Linux gets a continuity plan for the day Linus Torvalds steps aside  TechSpot

Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system's performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls "swarming." "The feedback we're receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people," Pavan Davuluri, president of Windows and devices, told The Verge. The company plans to spend the rest of 2026 focusing on pain points including system performance, reliability, and overall user experience. January has been particularly rough for Windows 11. Microsoft issued an emergency out-of-band update to fix shutdown issues on some machines, then released a second out-of-band fix a week later to address OneDrive and Dropbox crashes. Some business PCs are also failing to boot after the January update because they were left in an "improper state" after December's monthly update failed to install. Users have also grown frustrated by aggressive Edge and Bing prompts, constant OneDrive upselling nags, and Microsoft's push to require Microsoft accounts. The core members of the company's Windows Insider team recently moved to different roles. "Trust is earned over time and we are committed to building it back with the Windows community," Davuluri said.

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Offer is back, updated details, expires soon. American Express is again promoting their Rewards Checking Account with a new $250 direct deposit bonus. The bonus requirements are pretty straightforward:

• Open your first American Express Rewards Checking Account in your name by 1/31/2026,
• Receive a total of $5,000 or more of Qualifying Direct Deposit(s) within 90 days of account opening.
• After you have completed the above qualifying criteria, American Express will deposit the Welcome Bonus into your Rewards Checking Account within 8-12 weeks.

This bonus is targeted for existing consumer credit cardholders, and possibly savings accountholders:

Who is eligible to apply for an American Express® Rewards Checking account?

Applying for an American Express Rewards Checking account can be completed in minutes. We are currently accepting applications from Card Members with a U.S. Basic Consumer Card issued by American Express National Bank (AENB) with at least 5 days tenure. We may also accept applications from Additional Card Members on a U.S. Basic Consumer Card issued by AENB, Customers with an existing High Yield Savings Account and CD with at least 5 days of tenure who are not existing US Basic Card Members.

Submitted applications will be reviewed promptly with decisions that can be provided within minutes.

If you log into your personal credit card account, the application is mostly auto-filled and just takes a few clicks. There is no hard credit check.

Here are some quick highlights about the Rewards Checking account:

• No monthly fees, and no minimum balance requirements.
• 1.00% APY (as of 1/29/26)
• Earn 1 Membership Rewards® point for every $2 of eligible Debit Card purchases. You can combine these points for redemption using your other AmEx cards.
• Unlimited fee-free ATM withdrawals at over 37,000 MoneyPass® ATM locations nationwide.
• Mobile check deposit is available.
• Free paper checks are not included, but you can purchase them at additional cost.

From the full terms and conditions:

A Qualifying Direct Deposit is a single ACH transfer from an employer or the government for a paycheck, pension, government benefit (such as Social Security), or tax refund. Qualifying Direct Deposit(s) totaling at least $5,000 or more are required to qualify for this offer. The following are not Qualifying Direct Deposits: person to person transfers (P2P) such as money transfer apps, deposit account to deposit account transfers (for example, from a checking account to another checking account or from a savings account to a checking account), deposits or ACH transfers not from an employer or the government (for example, online transfers or bank transfers), internal transfers from your American Express® Savings account, deposits made via check, and Membership Rewards® points redemption for deposits.

The private equity industry is experiencing a quiet reckoning as hundreds of midsize firms find themselves trapped between investors who have lost patience and portfolios of companies they cannot sell at acceptable prices. "There is existential risk for a number [of funds] because of the fundraising environment," said Sunaina Sinha Haldea, global head of private capital advisory at Raymond James. "If existing investors don't come and support them, new investors are highly unlikely to." According to data from Preqin, the average buyout fund that closed in 2025 spent 23 months fundraising, up from 16 months in 2021, and the total number of funds raised fell to 1,191 from 2,679 over the same period. New York's Vestar Capital scrapped plans for its eighth fund in late 2024 and has not invested in a new portfolio company since 2023. The firm's assets under management dropped from $7 billion fifteen years ago to $3.3 billion in 2024. Three-year annualized returns through June 2025 for the Cambridge Associates U.S. Private Equity Index stand at 7.4%, trailing the MSCI World stock index by 11 percentage points annually. The average holding period for buyout deals has stretched to 6.3 years from 5.1 years in 2020. Blue-chip megafunds continue raising capital normally, but smaller firms face existential pressure.

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Why one Linux power user abandoned 8 years of distros for Windows 11  Windows Central

Linux gamers finally get official Nvidia GeForce Now support  XDA

Why I trust open-source software more now than I did five years ago  XDA

These gaming Linux distros are teaming up to fix bigger problems  How-To Geek

Apple has acquired Q.AI, a secretive Israeli startup whose technology can analyze facial skin micro-movements to interpret "silent speech," in a deal valued at close to $2 billion that marks the iPhone maker's second-largest acquisition ever, according to backer GV (formerly Google Ventures). The four-year-old company was founded in Tel Aviv in 2022 by Aviad Maizels, Yonatan Wexler and Avi Barliya. Patents filed by Q.AI show its technology being deployed in headphones or smart glasses to enable non-verbal communication with an AI assistant. The acquisition comes as Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses already let wearers talk to its AI, and Google and Snap are preparing to launch competing devices later this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6000 Performance With The AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D In 300+ Benchmarks Review  Phoronix

Nvidia launches its native GeForce Now App for Linux  OC3D

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chat & Ask AI, one of the most popular AI apps on the Google Play and Apple App stores that claims more than 50 million users, left hundreds of millions of those users' private messages with the app's chatbot exposed, according to an independent security researcher and emails viewed by 404 Media. The exposed chats showed users asked the app "How do I painlessly kill myself," to write suicide notes, "how to make meth," and how to hack various apps. The exposed data was discovered by an independent security researcher who goes by Harry. The issue is a misconfiguration in the app's usage of the mobile app development platform Google Firebase, which by default makes it easy for anyone to make themselves an "authenticated" user who can access the app's backend storage where in many instances user data is stored. Harry said that he had access to 300 million messages from more than 25 million users in the exposed database, and that he extracted and analyzed a sample of 60,000 users and a million messages. The database contained user files with a complete history of their chats with the AI, timestamps of those chats, the name they gave the app's chatbot, how they configured the model, and which specific model they used. Chat & Ask AI is a "wrapper" that plugs into various large language models from bigger companies users can choose from, Including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.