Last year, Apple debuted Digital ID on iPhone, allowing users to use their US passport as identification in Apple Wallet. Apple’s been rolling out drivers licenses in Wallet slowly over the past few years, but that’s on a state-by-state basis. Digital ID is universal, allowing anyone with a passport to use it. Of course, you can use it at TSA checkpoints in airports – but Apple had a bigger scope in mind: digital age and identity verification. While not yet confirmed, it’s possible that we could see a first major implementation of this quite soon, in Claude.
In the era of Apple Silicon, MacBooks are more affordable than ever. Nowadays, you can buy a MacBook Air with 512GB of storage and 16GB of memory for $1099 directly from Apple, when such a configuration would’ve cost $1599 just a few years ago. And on top of that, we have MacBook Neo bringing the entry-point down substantially. That said, Apple has warned that there will be price hikes in the future because of the AI-induced memory crisis, so now might be a good time to buy if you’re in the market for a new Mac.
So, Valve’s driver folks have been digging into the old GCN chips—those first‑gen AMD cards that many of us still keep around. They found that when the GPU hangs, the recovery path was pretty clunky, often forcing a full reboot. The new patch rewrites the low‑level watchdog, letting the driver reset just the offending context instead of pulling the plug on the whole card.
What’s neat is they’re doing it from the Linux side, without needing any firmware updates from AMD. The driver now tracks the GPU’s command streams more tightly, so it can spot a stall, flush the queue, and hand the hardware back to the user space in a few milliseconds. It’s a bit like giving the GPU a quick coffee break rather than a full‑on nap.
Because the change lives entirely in the open‑source driver, it rolls out to any distro that pulls the latest Mesa version. That means older Radeon cards on older laptops can stay responsive longer, especially when you’re running Vulkan or heavy compute workloads.
Bottom line: if you’ve got a GCN‑based Radeon hanging around, updating your driver should make those occasional freezes feel a lot less disruptive. It’s a small tweak, but it smooths out the experience without any extra hardware hassle.
There's a fresh fork of systemd that popped up right after the official 261 release, and its only mission is to pull out the new optional birthDate field that landed in the JSON user records. The maintainer calls it “Liberated systemd,” and rather than trying to rewrite the whole init system, they simply track upstream changes while stripping away that particular piece of metadata.
The author frames the edit as a privacy move, saying the birth date field could be used for “surveillance enablement.” It’s not a competing init, just a clean‑cut version that stays tightly coupled to the mainline codebase, so you still get all the usual systemd behavior—just without the extra personal data field.
If you’re curious, the fork already has a tagged v261 release, and the creator suggests testing it in a VM first. Nightly builds are available, but they’re more likely to wobble than the stable tags, so stick with the named releases if you want to keep things steady.
When Kapwing dug into TikTok’s For You feed, they found almost six in ten videos were AI‑generated – roughly three times the share they saw on YouTube Shorts.
They sampled 10,000 videos across 20 tags and ran fresh‑account tests; 294 of the first 500 TikTok videos were flagged as AI, versus 104 on YouTube. Kids content was the worst, with 57 % AI, and the #cartoonkids tag hit 97 % AI.
Categories that rely on a real person or hands‑on demo stayed low – fashion 1.3 %, music 1.5 %, fitness 1.6 %. By last November TikTok had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI‑generated.
I saw a guy rig up a mini ice maker to his RTX 3060 and actually got the chip down to 21 °C while gaming. He hooked the ice machine’s chilled water line straight onto the GPU’s water block, letting the frost‑cold flow replace the usual radiator coolant. The temps dropped dramatically, and the card stayed rock‑steady even in the most demanding titles.
The catch, though, is that the system leaks a little when the ice machine cycles, so moisture gathers on the board and can short out components if you’re not careful. He mitigated it with a DIY splash guard, but it’s still a fragile setup.
In practice it’s a neat proof‑of‑concept—showing how much headroom the card has—but the extra plumbing, the constant need to refill the ice maker, and the condensation risk make it more of a lab experiment than a daily‑driver solution.
It’s wild how a game that’s been out for ten years just nudged past its launch‑day peak. The latest patch added a handful of quality‑of‑life tweaks, but the real kicker was a new cross‑platform event that let players trade rare items they’d never seen before. That alone sparked a surge of old fans logging back in, plus a wave of curious newcomers drawn by the buzz.
What’s surprising under the hood is the matchmaking overhaul: they re‑engineered the server allocation so even modest hardware can host smooth sessions, cutting down wait times dramatically. That technical polish made the game feel fresh, and the community responded with a burst of activity that pushed the concurrent player count higher than ever.
So, after a decade of steady play, a mix of smart backend work and a timely community event gave it that unexpected lift. It feels like the game’s still discovering new ways to keep people hooked, even after all this time.
Usually, when something weird happens with Windows 11, it's due to a Patch Tuesday update going wrong. After all, Patch Tuesday is when the Redmond giant releases its big monthly update for its operating system, which opens the door for things to go wrong.
The thing that caught my eye is the way the machine swaps heat for sound. Instead of blasting hot water through the puck, a transducer sticks to the basket and sends ultrasonic pulses into a room‑temperature slurry of grounds. Those pulses generate tiny cavitation bubbles that implode, ripping open the coffee particles and launching micro‑jets of water straight into the interior.
Because the extraction is driven by those shock waves, the usual pressure‑and‑temperature knobs become less critical. By tweaking the ultrasonic power and the grind size, the researchers could dial the total dissolved solids up to match a classic espresso or pull it down toward a cold‑brew profile, all without heating the water.
When they ran the numbers, the brew used only about a quarter of the energy of a conventional shot, and the chemical markers—caffeine, chlorogenic acids, pH, colour—were essentially indistinguishable. A blind taste test with a hundred coffee lovers showed no clear preference between the ultrasonic espresso and the traditional version, though the same crowd did favor the ultrasonic cold brew over a regular cold brew.
So, in practice, you get a comparable cup with far less heat, less power, and a bit of acoustic flair. It’s a neat tweak on the old espresso ritual that could make the whole process a little greener without sacrificing flavor.
The British government is in a headlong rush to ban under-16s from social media, and restrict the access of under-18s. And in typical form, the EFF is here with a warning about the dangers and futility of such legislation. The proposed new law will involve an age restriction policed through online ID verification, something which will not be limited to the young, as every British adult will also have to show ID to access large parts of the Internet. There is little in the way of information about how this unprecedented invasion of privacy will be implemented, however we expect that it will be left to the lax security measures of a range of lowest-bidder third party identity verification services. The resulting database will become a very rich target indeed. The EFF pull no punches in warning of the harms these measures will bring upon those it seeks to protect. Far from “Giving under-16s their childhood back” as it is being promoted, they warn that it will deprive them of access to community, friends, and distant family, as well as educational content that could be vital for them. If it works at all. Certainly he more technically minded youth will put their efforts into the world of computer networking. A VPN ban is reportedly in the works, so a whole generation of future software developers and IT specialists will get their start running software to get round this on their Raspberry Pi. We’ve reported on the EFF’s concerns over UK ID laws before. Header image: Diliff, CC BY-SA 2.5.
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