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I used Gemini (the Google AI) twice at work today, asking about Google Workspace configuration and Google Cloud CLI usage (because we use those a lot). You’d think that it’d be well-suited for those topics. It answered very confidently, yet completely wrong. Just wrong. Made-up CLI arguments, whatever. It took me a while to notice, though, because it’s so convincing and, well, you implicitly and subconsciously trust the results of the Google AI when asking about Google topics, don’t you?

Will it get better over time? Maybe. But what I really want is this:

  • Good, well-structured, easy-to-read, proper documentation. Google isn’t doing too bad in this regard, actually, it’s just that they have so much stuff that it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. Hence 

  • 
 I want a good search function. Just give me a good fuzzy search for your docs. That’s it.

I just don’t have the time or energy to constantly second-guess this stuff. Give me something reliable. Something that is designed to do the right thing, not toy around with probabilities. “AI for everything” is just the wrong approach.

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In-reply-to » Lol, YouTube supports increasing the playback speed, but when you want to go to 4x, they want you to pay extra:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Have we reached peak enshittification yet?

YouTube is completely broken for me for a week or more. The player doesn’t even load anymore. Trying to limit the search results to real videos doesn’t do shit, etc. It’s useless. But downloading the videos with yt-dlp still works like a dream.

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I should work on my client again and add some new features. Like adding a new feed directly in the client and not having to go to the config first. And showing a preview of a feed before actually adding it. Also, a search would be something to add. And finally combining my User-Agent analyzer with my subscription list to spot new feeds automatically.

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In-reply-to » Just a small update, on my birthday (on the 5th), I accidentally deleted the main page, of my website, so I'm using that as an opportunity, to try something new, at https://thecanine.smol.pub or gemini://thecanine.smol.pub - depending on your preferred protocol.

@bender@twtxt.net to work through both https and gemini, the site is not written in HTML, but in Gemtext, automatically converted to HTML, when needed. Gemtext is nicely explained for example here: https://garden.bouncepaw.com/hypha/gemtext . In short, it is so limited, no line can be more than one thing, so no links in a list are possible, othar than doing it through something like this primitive workaround.

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In-reply-to » @bender Thanks for this illustration, it completely “misunderstood” everything I wrote and confidently spat out garbage. 👌

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

Skill Erosion vs. Skill Evolution

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

tl;dr

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

Never again

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

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In-reply-to » For the innocent bystanders (because I know that I won’t change @bender’s opinion):

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

1. The User Perspective (Untrustworthiness)

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

  • AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  • The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
2. The Moral/Political Perspective (Skill Erosion)

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

  • Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  • Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

  • Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

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In-reply-to » sorry i haven't been working on bbycll or even hanging around twtxt much at all as of late -- gf was over for a few weeks, i turned twenty years old, and have been doing extremely unnecessary things to my website

@zvava@twtxt.net Late happy birthday! :-)

Cool, your website indeed mostly works even in w3m and ELinks. Sending notifications in the about page is out of question, since it requires JS. Apart from that, this is very good, keep it up!

Not sure how I can get the deskop look and feel working in Firefox, but since I’m a tiling window manager user, I prefer linear webpages anyway. :-)

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sorry i haven’t been working on bbycll or even hanging around twtxt much at all as of late – gf was over for a few weeks, i turned twenty years old, and have been doing extremely unnecessary things to my website

work in progress

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In-reply-to » And maybe I should go back to using GUI designers. Haven’t used those since the Visual Basic days. đŸ€” It wasn’t pretty, but you got results very quickly and efficiently.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

The one for Delphi was quite good.

It was! I didn’t use Delphi for long, though. Dunno why, I always gravitated towards Visual Basic back then. 😅

These days I don’t deal with GUI programming anymore.

I also avoid it when possible, because 
 it’s exhausting, because 
 the tools that I have/know are “subpar”. Doing anything regarding GUIs always feels like a chore. That wasn’t the case in the VB days.

Well, I made this in ~2009 with Java/Swing and it was pretty nice to work with, custom widgets and all:

https://movq.de/v/de26d5edb3/s.png

I wouldn’t dare doing this with GTK.

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Holly! I thing I might have figured out a way to twt like a true caveman đŸ€Ł
The sad thing tho is this caveman will have to cheat a bit in order to replay properly

(P.S: I hope the multi-lines trick works, if not then F..rog it!)

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In-reply-to » The hail we had yesterday đŸ€Ż Media Media

@prologic@twtxt.net Ouch, I don’t want to get hit by these projectiles! :-O Is that black tube on the bottom the remains of a chair leg?

I reckon one could collect these hail stones and put them in the drinks to work around the lost air conditioning. At least if one doesn’t mind icy drinks. (I can’t stand that, because I immediately get hickup when drinking something cold.)

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In-reply-to » A mate just sent me Microsoft's magnificent master piece diagram regarding the end of life of Windows 10: https://support.microsoft.com/de-de/windows/windows-10-support-wurde-am-14-oktober-2025-eingestellt-2ca8b313-1946-43d3-b55c-2b95b107f281

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They’re seriously telling us at work: “Can it be AI’d? Do it, don’t waste time!” Shit like that is the result. (What’s this weird gray triangle in the bottom right corner?)

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In-reply-to » You just gotta love products with articial weights in them, because they would “feel cheap” otherwise.

Just FTR, in case this wasn’t obvious, the “right to repair” (if there ever is one) needs to be more than just “you’re legally allowed to repair stuff”.

I just fixed this thing by replacing two capacitors. Great, but this was an absolute shitshow and it took several days. So many obstacles, everything’s tiny, connectors glued together, 
 It worked in the end, but I was so close to giving up.

Being legally allowed to do something is basically worthless if it’s not feasible to actually do it.

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In-reply-to » Der ganze Vorgang ist archetypisch fĂŒr die seit Jahrzehnten völlig ohne Not stattfindende politische Selbstverzwergung Europas.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de My impression also is that good sysadmins are missing. No wonder if they all get laid off because they’re “not doing anything” and developers can just operate their shit themselves. Or so the bosses and plenty devs think. Sadly, that’s the general view.

Hell no, devops is bullshit in my opinion. Most developers (including myself) are rather bad at administrating. A good sysadmin offers other skills. Great admins appear to just sit around, but they’re much more proactively working than programmers who also operate the same stuff. The latter have a waaay more reactive work model in comparison. When things have already gone south. The sysadmin, on the other hand, would have noticed and thus prevented the vast majority very early on when it was far from becoming a problem in the future.

At least that’s my personal experience in all those years in different projects and what my mates tell me from their companies. Sure, skills can be learned, but it’s just not happening (enough). And obviously, there are people out there who excel in both disciplines, but they are rare. Most fall in one of the categories. Not to forget, plenty are just bad at everything. :-)

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Advent of Code will be different this year:

https://old.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1ocwh04/changes_to_advent_of_code_starting_this_december/

There will only be 12 puzzles, i.e. only December 1 to December 12. This might make it more interesting for some people, because it’s (probably) less work and a lower chance of people getting burned out. đŸ€”

Personally, I’ll probably stretch it out over 24 days. Giving myself more time to solve each puzzle and I really want this event to last the entire month. 😅

Maybe this makes it more interesting for some people around here as well?

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Maya salt-making compound found preserved underwater in Belize
In a recent study by Dr. Heather McKillop and Dr. E. Cory Sills, a complete Late Classic Maya residential compound discovered preserved in mangrove peat below the sea floor of the Punta Ycacos Lagoon was analyzed. The work is published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica. ⌘ Read more

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Sniffer dogs tested in real-world scenarios reveal need for wider access to explosives
Dogs aren’t just our best friends, they’re also key allies in the fight against terrorism. Thousands of teams of explosive detection dogs and their handlers work 24/7 at airports, transit systems, cargo facilities, and public events around the globe to keep us safe. But canine detection is an art as well as a science: success depends not only on the skill of both dog and human, but also on their bond, and may vary 
 ⌘ Read more

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A rare variety of wheat with three ovaries—gene discovery could triple production
University of Maryland researchers discovered the gene that makes a rare form of wheat grow three ovaries per flower instead of one. Since each ovary can potentially develop into a grain of wheat, the gene could help farmers grow much more wheat per acre. Their work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ⌘ Read more

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100% Transparency and Five Pillars
How to Do Hardened Images (and Container Security) Right Container security is understandably a hot topic these days, with more and more workloads running atop this mainstay of the cloud native landscape. While I might be biased because I work at Docker, it is safe to say that containers are the dominant form factor for
 ⌘ Read more

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Chemists reveal new insights into protein linked to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Using advanced techniques in biophysical chemistry, a team led by Meredith Jackrel, an associate professor of chemistry, has achieved unprecedented views of a protein that may play a pivotal role in some cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and the related disorder frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Their work could open doors to new approaches for treatment and prevention. ⌘ Read more

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It’s Sunday, and tomorrow I don’t have to work, as I have two weeks of vacation. The first time since May. My only breaks from work were when I hurt my hand and wasn’t able to type for a week, and two free days last week, but those also weren’t really relaxing for me. So I am very much looking forward to the next two weeks! I really feel the exhaustion from the last few months with work sometimes being stressful, the start of my fiancĂ©e’s teacher training, and some other topics. But this year again showed me that bi 
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It happened.

“Can you help me debug this program? I vibe coded it and I have no idea what’s going on. I had no choice – learning this new language and frameworks would have taken ages, and I have severe time constraints.”

Did I say “no”? Of course not, I’m a “nice guy”. So I’m at fault as well, because I endorsed this whole thing. The other guy is also guilty, because he didn’t communicate clearly to his boss what can be done and how much time it takes. And the boss and his bosses are guilty a lot, because they’re all pushing for “AI”.

The end result is garbage software.

This particular project is still relatively small, so it might be okay at the moment. But normalizing this will yield nothing but garbage. And actually, especially if this small project works out fine, this contributes to the shittiness because management will interpret this as “hey, AI works”, so they will keep asking for it in future projects.

How utterly frustrating. This is not what I want to do every day from now on.

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[$] Gccrs after libcore
Despite its increasing popularity, the Rust programming language is still
supported by a single compiler, the LLVM-based rustc. At the 2025 GNU Tools\‹Cauldron, Pierre-Emmanuel Patry said that a lot of people are waiting
for a GCC-based Rust compiler before jumping into the language. Patry, who
is working on just that compiler (known as “gccrs”), provided an update on
the status of that project and what is coming next. ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » @lyse Great job!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org In my case it was a silver necklace, a hummingbird with a wing connected with the cold welding I mentioned using thin brass wires.

It made it in a goldsmithing class (I went to a private craftmanship high-school) so no phones allowed (no photos of it) and no “take home” of the works.

Here’s a rough sketch of it drawn by memory, the dots in the wing is where it connects to the body.

Image

The technique is basically the same as i described, but the scale is much smaller, the whole piece was about 5-6 cm on the largest side.

The rivet was made by drilling a hole through the parts, than with a short and thicker drill you widen the hole on the surface to let the rivet settle flatter on the piece, then with a rubber hammer you hit it to flatten the head until it’s snug on the hole, lock them together by doing the same on the other side.

Note that widening the hole with a thicker drill head won’t make a difference with bigger holes, mine had holes of about 1-2 mm of diameter maximum.

Here’s a sketch of what is going on for clarity.

Image

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[$] Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
The
Rust for Linux project has been good for Rust, Tyler Mandry, one of the
co-leads of Rust’s language-design team, said. He
gave a talk at
Kangrejos 2025 covering upcoming Rust language features and thanking
the Rust for Linux developers for helping drive them forward. Afterward, Benno Lossin and Xiangfei Ding
went into more detail about their work on the three most important language
features for kernel development: 
 ⌘ Read more

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Hundreds of Victorian sex crime cases being re-examined by police
Police are alerting hundreds of accused sexual offenders that their cases may be compromised by the work of a digital forensics officer based in Bendigo. ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » DCF77, our time signal radio station, is a great public service. I really love that. It’s just a signal that anybody can pick up, no subscription, no tracking, no nothing. Much like GPS/GNSS. 💚

@movq@www.uninformativ.de how do you set your clock to use a specific time signal radio station? I have one wall clock in my office, it works great, but no way to set that.

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Boosting work engagement through a simple smartphone diary
Work engagement is a positive and persistent state of mind related to one’s work. It is characterized by high energy and mental resilience (vigor), enthusiasm and involvement (dedication), and complete concentration in the task at hand (absorption). Engaged workers are not merely more productive; they are more likely to be proactive, creative, and less susceptible to burnout. Most importantly, work engagement has been consistently 
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My open letter, to the European Commission digital markets act team:

Hello,

I am joining other developers, concerned about Googles new plan, to approve every app and effectively destroy most of the competing 3rd party stores this way. The biggest one of these alternative stores, most known for their focus on user and developer privacy, already states, this would make it impossible for them to operate: https://f-droid.org/cs/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
Even communities like the XDA forum, where new developers are often introduced to the world of Android development, would likely be strongly impacted, as making, publishing and installing Android apps is made less accessible.

I am not just writing on their behalf, I run a small website myself (https://thecanine.ueuo.com/), that both provides legal modifications, for some android apps - for example adding an amoled dark theme, to the most popular XMPP chat client for Android, or increasing one of Androids keyboard apps height. This all comes after Googles previous changes to the Android operating system, that prevent users from installing old apps (old to Google, can mean only a couple of months, without an update - https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk and the target version gets increased every year). I rely on apps developed by a single developer, even for things like making the pixel art presented on my website and sideloading as a way to make these apps work, before developers can catch up to Google’s new requirements - if Google is allowed to slowly kill these options, us digital artists will soon lose the tools we need to create digital art.

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‘With power comes responsibility’ - the footballer who cycles to work
Former Arsenal defender Hector Bellerin talks about his attempts to live a more sustainable life as he wins the BBC Green Sports Award. ⌘ Read more

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Novel insurance model may help cover those most at risk from extreme weather
Australians have some of the highest insurance losses in the world. As natural disasters put the insurance industry in a squeeze, is it time for a rethink of how insurance works? ⌘ Read more

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[$] 6.18 merge window, part 1
At the time of writing, there have been 9,099 commits in the 6.18 merge window,
8,475 non-merges and 624 merges. The
changes so far include core-kernel, graphics, and networking work, among others.
There are no big surprises, but several items that were discussed at this year’s
LFSMM+BPF Summit have now been merged. ⌘ Read more

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[$] Next steps for BPF support in the GNU toolchain
Support for BPF in the kernel has been tied to the LLVM toolchain since the
advent of extended BPF. There has been a growing effort to add BPF support
to the GNU toolchain as well, though. At the 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron, the
developers involved got together with representatives of the kernel
community to talk about the state of that work and what needs to happen
next. ⌘ Read more

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Breaking: Trio of scientists win Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on immune system
Scientists Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi have won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance”, the award-giving body announces. ⌘ Read more

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Trump is reviving large sales of coal from public lands. Will anyone want it?
MATTHEW BROWN and MEAD GRUVER,  Reporters  -  Associated Press

_Stephan: The Trump Republican coup is not only putting Democrat controlled cities under military occupation, and dismantling the country’s efforts to convert to renewable energy, it is literally working to take the country back to the early 20th century when coal was a main source of power. This is why I predi 
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Rooney questions work ethic of ‘lost’ Salah
Wayne Rooney, Kelly Somers, Kae Kurd and John Gibbons from The Anfield Wrap discuss Liverpool’s loss of form, and why their talisman Mohamed Salah looks “lost”. ⌘ Read more

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iPad Mini 8 on the Way: Expected Features and Release Timeline
A new iPad mini is “absolutely” on the way, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. So what should we expect from the successor to the iPad mini 7 that Apple released a year ago?

Image

Processor and Performance

Apple is working on a next-generation version of the iPad mini (codename J510/J511) that features the A19 Pro chip, according to in 
 ⌘ Read more

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Buyers could save hundreds in new house buying shakeup
Housing Secretary Steve Reed claims the changes would “fix the broken system” and put more money “back into working people’s pockets”. ⌘ Read more

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cargo-subspace: Make rust-analyzer work better with very large cargo workspaces
Let me preface all of this by saying that rust-analyzer is an amazing project, and I am eternally grateful for the many people who contribute to it! It makes developing rust code a breeze, and it has surely significantly contributed to Rust’s widespread adoption.

If you’ve ever worked with a very large cargo workspace (think hundreds of crates), you know that rust-analyzer eagerly builds compile time dependencies (e.g. proc macros) and index 
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Repetitive negative thinking mediates relationship between self-esteem and burnout in students, study finds
When people are highly stressed for prolonged periods of time, they can sometimes experience a state known as burnout, characterized by pronounced emotional, mental and physical exhaustion. The stressors leading to burnout could be personal, such as family conflicts or the end of a relationship, as well as academic or professional, such as studying a lot for exams or working long 
 ⌘ Read more

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