hey @cfbolz I heard that writing this kind of code is the secret to getting the most out of PyPy, is that true?

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html

GCC 15 Is Bringing Some Nice Usability Improvements For Developers

In addition to the upcoming GCC 15 stable compiler release bringing a COBOL language front-end, much better Rust support, revamped AVX10 support, and other shiny new language features and hardware supports, there are also some more fundamental usability improvements for developers...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-15-Usability-Improvements

China-based purveyors of SMS phishing kits are enjoying remarkable success converting phished payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google. Until recently, the so-called “Smishing Triad” mainly impersonated toll road operators and shipping companies. But experts say these groups are now directly targeting customers of international financial institutions, while dramatically expanding their cybercrime infrastructure and support staff.

The pace of innovation coming from these phishing groups is something to behold, as are their success rates. And thousands of US financial institutions are sitting ducks.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/china-based-sms-phishing-triad-pivots-to-banks/

It''s my fediversary -- eight years since I set up this account! I've had multiple accounts since then, and these days am mostly at @jdp23@neuromatch.social, but this was my home base for quite a while and I still enjoy it here whenever I check in. Thanks to the original admins for setting it up and inviting me, to @woozle for doing such a great job running it over the years, all the folks here for keeping the local feed interesting, and the Glitch developers for years of producing software that's so much better for communities than vanilla Mastodon!

Like so many othes I was drawn here thanks to @sarahjeong's Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It? and it's interesting to look at what has and hasn't changed since then -- Lessons (so far) from Mastodon for independent social networks, originally written in May 2017, remains very relevant. Still, despite all the ups and downs I remain optimstic about the potential of decentralized social networks (although realistic about the challenges). If not now, when? has some of my current thoughts. Looking forward to another 8 years!

At least there's some good news!

https://sf.streetsblog.org/2025/04/08/city-of-san-mateo-says-no-more-freeway-widening

Has anyone else noticed that when time travelers grab you by your shoulders and ask what year it is, and you tell them, they don't reply, "Then I'm not too late," anymore?

That's rather concerning.

PSA for users of Windows 2000: don't forget to update your regional options for two digit year parsing! We're fast approaching the default of 2029.

#Windows2000 #retrocomputing

Today's real 'fake news' incident (which added $2.4 trillion in market value and erased it nearly as quickly) hopefully will be dissected in every journalism class and newsroom. https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/07/media/fake-news-x-post-caused-market-whiplash/index.html

i'm sorry they did WHAT

Framework has stopped selling versions of its base laptop model in the US because of tariffs. Says that if it kept selling them in the US it would lose money. Framework is the only company that makes reliably upgradeable, repairable laptops

https://www.404media.co/framework-stops-selling-some-of-its-laptops-in-the-u-s-due-to-tariffs/

While working on my GCC translation validator, smtgcc, I've encountered several cases where GIMPLE IR semantics are ambiguous or inconsistent with GCC optimizations.

I'll discuss these on the GCC mailing list and link each corresponding thread here. 🧵

One of the interesting commercial differences between RISC-V and Arm is that Arm makes deals that let you ship ISA features first if you contribute a lot to the spec. They've done this with several companies in the past, where companies contribute a lot of design work to the ISA (and, often, patents to the associated patent pool) and, in exchange, they get to ship things that implement it a year or so before anyone else. This has two big advantages:

• Arm gets the feature in the ISA and everyone can implement it.
• The company that goes first has first-mover advantage but can promise their customers a second source if it's actually a useful feature (which makes adoption easier).

RISC-V has no analogue of this. Companies that ship useful extensions either:

• Do a load of work in public. It can take a year or so to get a spec ratified and other people can easily start working on it long before then and get access to it early.
• Ship the extension as a vendor-specific extension and then work to get it ratified. During ratification, even if nothing changes in the semantics, the encodings of the instructions will move from the vendor space to the standard space and so the thing that you've shipped will not be binary compatible with the standard version.

I'm curious where those different incentives will take the two ecosystems.

Users of w3m and lynx browsers will be asked to identify and fix a bug in the mm subsystem before they are allowed to access git kernel.org.

git.kernel.org and lore.kernel.org now require proof of work. Big thanks to Anubis developers for filling this important need.

Another email sent to the Linux Plumbers mailing list:

"Hi there,

This is Jacob Bryant and I came across the helpful information you shared on the lpc.events website and was wondering if you were open to adding new resources to your page.

Unfortunately, plumbers are at a higher risk of being diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare cancer caused from exposure to asbestos that takes 20-50 years to develop. It’s extremely important that those who have and are working in plumbing are aware of this type of cancer. That's why we made a guide that covers everything you need to know about mesothelioma as a plumber."

I've been saying this for years: ebikes should have USB-C PD ports for charging!

Finally a manufacturer has actually done it. In this case using 140W power delivery, which is way higher power than any ebike charger I've ever used. And USB-C PD now supports up to 240W, which is more than enough for ebikes.

I hope this becomes the norm:

https://www.theverge.com/news/639681/usb-c-charging-e-bike-ampler-nova-specs-price

I'm sad to say that we're following the lead of many others and putting in proof-of-work proxies into place to protect ourselves against "AI" crawler bots. Yes, I hate this as much as you, but all other options are currently worse (such as locking us into specific vendors).

We'll be rolling it out on lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.org in the next week or so.

@joshbressers @sjvn @TheNewStack I'm using our role as CNA to work within and push against silliness in the program, in part to work against said "need". Together with other open source CNAs (to avoid naming names).

Not saying this will succeed of course...

@joshbressers @sjvn @TheNewStack I'm with @badger Linux is a CNA to help fix the CVE process, and so far we have already achieved some change, more to hopefully come.

And the CRA is going to cause other software projects to come to terms with their reporting process, so becoming a CNA is a good step forward in the whole thing.

And besides, what open source project doesn't want to actually control what other people are saying about your project? Just this week we "took back" a CVE issued by a rogue CNA against Linux when they shouldn't have done so. If we weren't a CNA we would never have been able to do so at all.