GoKawiil
Tech News
The United States government has, for the first time, publicly acknowledged that it has deployed weapons systems in space. Officials confirmed the existence of these orbital assets after years of speculation and denial, marking a shift in how openly Washington discusses its military space capabilities.
San Mateo County's Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 to advance an ordinance requiring businesses to obtain permits before deploying autonomous, battery-powered robots in workplaces. Companies must submit an Economic Impact Assessment and Workforce Mitigation Plan, choosing to redeploy displaced workers at equal pay, offer 60 days' notice with severance, or pay into a new county fund for retraining. The rule, believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S., still needs final adoption before taking effect 30 days later.
The US International Trade Commission has launched a Section 337 investigation into Apple, Samsung, and Google following a complaint from BoomCloud 360, a California audio tech firm. BoomCloud 360 alleges the three companies' spatial audio features infringe three of its patents covering gain adjustment, speaker asymmetry compensation, and crosstalk correction.
While many tech firms cite AI code-generation as reason to cut entry-level hiring, one company says it is increasing its junior engineer headcount instead. The company argues that AI tools handle routine coding tasks but cannot substitute for the on-the-job learning that turns junior developers into engineers with real judgment and intuition.
The U.S. Navy has awarded a $3.8 million contract to America's largest shipbuilder, marking the company's first publicly known foray into naval laser weapon development. The deal comes as the Navy accelerates efforts to move directed-energy weapons from experimental prototypes into systems that can actually be fielded on ships.
The jemalloc project shipped version 5.4.0, a maintenance-focused update spanning more than 160 commits aimed at reducing technical debt through refactoring, bug fixes, expanded test coverage, and portability fixes. Key additions include an EXTENT_ALLOC_FLAG_PINNED flag letting custom allocation hooks mark non-reclaimable mappings like HugeTLB pages for preferential reuse, plus new mallctl interfaces to report pinned-memory and mutex statistics. The update also replaces the old fixed tcache refill/flush policy with a dynamic system that adapts to observed demand, removing seven legacy tuning controls in the process.
A technical deep dive explains why translating x86 software to run on ARM chips runs into a persistent obstacle: x86's strict Total Store Ordering (TSO) memory model clashes with ARM's much more relaxed memory consistency rules. The piece walks through why this mismatch affects essentially every emulated multi-threaded application and outlines the various workarounds engineers use, noting some cases where no clean fix exists.
An independent developer has released PlxNative, a free open-source Plex client built specifically for LG TVs running webOS, aimed at fixing the sluggish menus that plague older sets. Rather than running inside a browser like the official app, it renders its interface natively using Rust and OpenGL while still handing off video playback to the TV's built-in hardware decoder. It can be installed through the Homebrew Channel or sideloaded using LG's Developer Mode and webOS Dev Manager.
Waymo has started manually driving and mapping all regions of Singapore around the clock, gathering data it needs to seek approval from the Land Transport Authority for autonomous operations by 2027. Initial runs will use human specialists behind the wheel, with the company promising public notice before shifting to autonomous-specialist and eventually fully driverless operations. Data collected will be handled under Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act and Waymo's own privacy policy.
Microsoft released update KB5002655 to address a silent copy-and-paste failure introduced by the September security patch KB5002914, but the fix only applies to MSI-based installations of Excel 2016. Users of Excel Online, 2024, 2021, 2019, and Click-to-Run editions of 2016 remain affected, with Microsoft citing a code regression as the cause and recommending the Paste Special workaround in the meantime.
A developer built Qbix, a PHP webserver that forks thousands of lightweight worker processes from a single parent process using pcntl_fork(), relying on the Linux kernel's copy-on-write memory sharing. Unlike FrankenPHP, RoadRunner or PHP-FPM, which are limited by worker count due to memory duplication, Qbix lets each worker share the framework's loaded classes and only pay memory costs for pages it actually modifies during a request.
Researchers have long noted that about 1,000 Ancient Greek words—including labyrinthos, elaia, and names like Odysseus, Athens, and Corinth—cannot be traced to Proto-Indo-European or any known neighboring tongue. A newsletter from linguist Danny Hieber revisits this puzzle, arguing these terms likely survive from a lost 'Pre-Greek' substrate language spoken in the region before Greek speakers arrived.