Vulkan 1.3.296 is out as the first spec update in nearly one month. Given the time that has passed there are more bug fixes than usual but there is also a prominent new extension: VK_EXT_device_generated_commands. It has been worked on by Valve's Linux graphics driver developers along with engineers from Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Collabora, and others. This new extension allows for the GPU device to generate a number of commands for command buffers.

A new project launching today aims to capitalize on the momentum seen within the fediverse, also known as the open social web, which describes interconnected social networking services powered by the ActivityPub protocol. Co-founded by the co-author and current editor of ActivityPub, Evan Prodromou, a new nonprofit organization called the Social Web Foundation will focus on expanding the fediverse, improving ActivityPub and the user experience, informing policymakers, and educating people about the fediverse and how they can participate.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20503641

Detailed post about FSFE's goals and main topics in 2024.

Table of contents:

• Device Neutrality: the Free Software community “shows its teeth”
• Next Generation Internet and the lack of long-term sustainable funding for Free Software
• Reaching Generation Alpha: Youth Hacking 4 Freedom and Ada & Zangemann
• Policy work: Advocating for Free Sotware
• Legal Support: giving advise to projects and individuals Our work on public awareness
• Join the movement

This is the last minor release before v7, but it's packed with interesting new features

• Separate audio and video streams for more flexibility
• Browse subtitles in the transcription widget
• Set up Youtube-dl for smoother imports
• And much more!

AMD today made public their RDNA 3.5 instruction set architecture (ISA) programming guide for these updated RDNA3 graphics found within new Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" APUs thus far.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20289663

A report from Morgan Stanley suggests the datacenter industry is on track to emit 2.5 billion tons by 2030, which is three times higher than the predictions if generative AI had not come into play.

The extra demand from GenAI will reportedly lead to a rise in emissions from 200 million tons this year to 600 million tons by 2030, thanks largely to the construction of more data centers to keep up with the demand for cloud services.

Linus has released the 6.11 kernel. ""I'm once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it's Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out."" Significant changes in this release include new io_uring operations for bind() and listen(), the nested bottom-half locking patches, the ability to write to busy executable files, support for writing block drivers in Rust, support for atomic write operations in the block layer, the dedicated bucket slab allocator, the vDSO implementation of getrandom(), and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) for more information.

Two-dimensional vector graphics has been quite prevalent in recent Qt release notes, and it is something we have plans to continue exploring in the releases to come. This blog takes a look at some of the options you have, as a Qt developer.

In Qt 6.6 we added support for a new renderer in Qt Quick Shapes, making it possible to render smooth, anti-aliased curves without enabling multisampling. The renderer was generalized to also support text rendering in Qt 6.7, and, in the same release, Qt SVG was expanded to support a bunch of new features.

And there is no end in sight yet: In Qt 6.8 we are bringing even more vector graphics goodies to the Qt APIs. In this blog, I will share some details on the different ways vector graphics can be used in Qt, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of each.

A report from Morgan Stanley suggests the datacenter industry is on track to emit 2.5 billion tons by 2030, which is three times higher than the predictions if generative AI had not come into play.

The extra demand from GenAI will reportedly lead to a rise in emissions from 200 million tons this year to 600 million tons by 2030, thanks largely to the construction of more data centers to keep up with the demand for cloud services.

The KDE community has charted its course for the coming years, focusing on three interconnected paths that converge on a single point: community. These paths aim to improve user experience, support developers, and foster community growth.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19683130

The ideologues of Silicon Valley are in model collapse.

To train an AI model, you need to give it a ton of data, and the quality of output from the model depends upon whether that data is any good. A risk AI models face, especially as AI-generated output makes up a larger share of what’s published online, is “model collapse”: the rapid degradation that results from AI models being trained on the output of AI models. Essentially, the AI is primarily talking to, and learning from, itself, and this creates a self-reinforcing cascade of bad thinking.

We’ve been watching something similar happen, in real time, with the Elon Musks, Marc Andreessens, Peter Thiels, and other chronically online Silicon Valley representatives of far-right ideology. It’s not just that they have bad values that are leading to bad politics. They also seem to be talking themselves into believing nonsense at an increasing rate. The world they seem to believe exists, and which they’re reacting and warning against, bears less and less resemblance to the actual world, and instead represents an imagined lore they’ve gotten themselves lost in.