GoKawiil
Tech News
Fomu is a tiny programmable device that plugs directly into a USB-A port, combining an FPGA chip, four touch pads, and an RGB LED in a compact plastic case. It ships with enough RAM and storage to run Python natively, while also supporting a RISC-V softcore and other softcores like LM32 and OpenRISC, all programmable through a fully open-source toolchain without accounts, NDAs, or heavy installers.
California's Assembly passed Bill 1856, amending the Digital Age Assurance Act to exclude operating systems and software meant to be freely copied, redistributed or modified from mandatory age-verification requirements. This shields most Linux distributions, though derivative projects with proprietary layers like Valve's SteamOS may still need to comply. The bill also fixes the DAAA's overly broad definition of 'user' and restricts sharing of age data to law enforcement requests.
Tailscale has launched tailcat, an open-source Go package and CLI tool that lets developers move data between two points using the company's underlying network technology—WireGuard encryption, NAT traversal, and DERP relay servers—without any of Tailscale's account system, control plane, or administrative layer. It functions like the classic netcat utility but routes traffic through Tailscale's magicsock networking stack, and can run entirely independent of Tailscale as a company if users host their own DERP relay server.
Developers are building ravynOS, a pre-alpha open-source operating system combining FreeBSD, Darwin, and Apple's open-source components. The project aims to replicate the look, feel, and app compatibility of macOS while running on general-purpose hardware without Apple's restrictions.
The founder of Monica, an open source personal CRM with over 25,000 GitHub stars, has announced that the project is being rebuilt from scratch and launched a new blog series called Building Monica to document the process. The series will cover the problems the team is trying to solve, the design decisions being made, and the missteps along the way. The founder explains that after nearly a decade of accumulated decisions, the current codebase no longer reflects how he would build the product today.
The Debian Project has decided against banning AI-generated contributions to its Linux distribution, instead requiring that all submissions meet existing standards for quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance regardless of the tools used. Contributors must review, test, and modify AI-assisted output before submission, though disclosing AI involvement remains optional rather than mandatory.
A technical walkthrough details how diffusion language models work as an alternative to the dominant autoregressive approach used by most LLMs today. Rather than generating text token-by-token in sequence, diffusion models produce an entire sequence at once and refine it over multiple steps, drawing on techniques like masking, iterative refinement, and post-training used in recent open-source models. The material stems from workshop talks and lectures given at ICLR 2026 and MLSS 2026.
A group of programmers who previously built the DK64 Randomizer have released DK64: ReKONGpiled, a project that recompiles Donkey Kong 64's original N64 machine code into C using the N64: Recompiled framework and RT64 rendering. Users must supply their own ROM, after which the game runs natively on Windows, Linux, and Mac without emulation overhead, gaining ultrawide support, uncapped framerates, and faster load times.
Tencent has released Hy4 preview, a large language model with 770 billion total parameters, 49 billion active parameters, and a context window over 1 million tokens, aimed at coding, office and research tasks. The model is open-source and also accessible via Tencent's WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy, Yuanbao and ima apps, plus API access through Tencent Cloud TokenHub and OpenRouter, with free trials offered for two weeks.
California's legislature unanimously passed Assembly Bill 1856, which carves out open-source operating systems and software distributed under permissive licenses such as GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache from the state's Digital Age Assurance Act. The bill also exempts software components not sold as standalone apps through app stores, covering package managers like apt and pacman, and excludes browser extension stores. The measure now awaits Governor Gavin Newsom's signature before the underlying law takes effect on January 1, 2027.
The Debian Project has voted to allow developers to use generative AI tools when producing contributions to the project, provided the resulting work meets Debian's existing standards. The decision clarifies that contributors remain fully responsible for reviewing, testing, and validating any AI-assisted code or documentation before submission, regardless of the tools used to create it.
AI language models fall into three broad categories based on how much of their inner workings are shared publicly: proprietary systems that keep code and weights closed, open-weight models that release trained parameters without full training data or code, and open source models that make the entire stack available for inspection and modification. The distinctions affect how much control, transparency, and customization developers and businesses get when building on top of these systems.