Monthly Archives: March 2025

DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next

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Google has gotten its first taste of remedies that Donald Trump’s Department of Justice plans to pursue to break up the tech giant’s monopoly in search. In the first filing since Trump allies took over the department, government lawyers backed off a key proposal submitted by the Biden DOJ. The government won’t ask the court to force Google to sell off its AI investments, and the way it intends to handle Android is changing. However, the most serious penalty is intact—Google’s popular Chrome browser is still on the chopping block.

“Google’s illegal conduct has created an economic goliath, one that wreaks havoc over the marketplace to ensure that—no matter what occurs—Google always wins,” the DOJ filing says. To that end, the government maintains that Chrome must go if the playing field is to be made level again.

The DOJ is asking the court to force Google to promptly and fully divest itself of Chrome, along with any data or other assets required for its continued operation. It is essentially aiming to take the Chrome user base—consisting of some 3.4 billion people—away from Google and hand it to a competitor. The government will vet any potential buyers to ensure the sale does not pose a national security threat. During the term of the judgment, Google would not be allowed to release any new browsers. However, it may continue to contribute to the open source Chromium project.

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NVIDIA’s New Hotfix GPU Driver Fixes Black Screen Crashes And An Overclocking Issue

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NVIDIA's New Hotfix GPU Driver Fixes Black Screen Crashes And An Overclocking Issue
NVIDIA’s team of driver engineers continue to try and eradicate reported black screen issues on its GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards, and perhaps earlier generation models too. We’ve seen these efforts play out in the past several driver releases, including both regular ‘Game Ready’ releases and also out-of-band hotfixes. Pertaining to

My Favorite Amazon Deal of the Day: The Apple Watch Series 10

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We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

Ever since Apple released the latest Apple Watch Series 10 earlier in September, it has been steadily dropping in price; it’s currently sitting at $299 (originally $399) after a $100 drop, the lowest price yet, according to price-tracking tools. This price is for the 42mm case, 130 to 180mm size bands, in black, denim, and rose-gold case colors. The bigger 46mm case is down to $329 (originally $429), also the lowest price yet after a $100 discount.

Memory Storage Capacity: 64 GB, Connectivity Technology: GPS, Screen Size: 42 Millimeters
Apple Watch Series 10 [GPS 42mm case]

Apple Watch Series 10 (GPS, 42mm, Black, S/M 130-180mm, Sports Band)


$299.00
at Amazon

Amazon Prime
$399.00
Save $100.00

Memory Storage Capacity: 64 GB, Connectivity Technology: GPS, Screen Size: 46 Millimeters
Apple Watch Series 10 [GPS 46mm case]

Apple Watch Series 10 [GPS 46mm] with Jet Black Aluminium Case with Black Sport Band - M/L. Fitness Tracker, ECG App, Always-On Retina Display, Water Resistant


$329.00
at Amazon

Amazon Prime
$429.00
Save $100.00

The Apple Watch Series 10 is the best Apple Watch for most people and a great replacement if you’re still wearing the more budget SE, according to Lifehacker associate tech editor Michelle Ehrhardt’s review. There are also some key upgrades from the Apple Watch 9, although they’re less noticeable than previous Apple watch upgrades. If you’re curious to know how it compares to other flagship smartwatches, you can check out our head-to-head comparison post here.

Some of the first things you’ll notice on the Series 10 are a thinner case and a bigger OLED screen (either 1.6 inches or 1.8 inches, depending on which size you get). Unlike the Series 9, which could only take calls on the speaker, the Series 10 has audio playback, meaning you can listen to podcasts or Spotify on its speakers. The sleep features were also improved, with a notification that gets triggered by sleep apnea symptoms. There are also new depth and water temperature sensors that automatically turn on when you go underwater, a feature that used to be unique to the more premium Apple Watch Ultra series.

The battery will last you anywhere between 18 and 36 hours, depending on your use. You still get the same fitness features, heart rate monitor, and sleep tracker from previous models—but still no blood oxygen sensor.

Python tail-call speedup based on LLVM regression

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The Python project’s recent switch to a tail-calling interpreter may not provide as large a speed advantage as initially thought. A blog post from Nelson Elhage gives the details. In short, switching to a tail-call-based interpreter accidentally works around an unfixed regression in LLVM 19. On other compilers, the performance benefit (while still present) is more moderate.

When the tail-call interpreter was announced, I was surprised and impressed by the performance improvements, but also confused: I’m not an expert, but I’m passingly-familiar with modern CPU hardware, compilers, and interpreter design, and I couldn’t explain why this change would be so effective. I became curious – and perhaps slightly obsessed – and the reports in this post are the result of a few weeks of off-and-on compiling and benchmarking and disassembly of dozens of different Python binaries, in an attempt to understand what I was seeing.

How the AI Talent Race Is Reshaping the Tech Job Market

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Nearly one in four U.S. tech jobs posted in 2025 require AI skills, according to data from the University of Maryland’s AI job tracker, as companies across sectors adapt to the technology.

Companies across healthcare, retail and utilities are increasingly seeking candidates who can integrate AI into existing roles rather than creating entirely new positions, with these skills commanding premium pay and greater job security.

The information sector leads with 36% of IT jobs in January seeking AI expertise, followed by finance and professional services firms. AI-related listings account for 1.3% of all job postings nationwide. New AI job postings surged 68% since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022 through end-2024, while tech postings overall fell 27% during the same period.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[$] Capability analysis for the kernel

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One of the advantages of the Rust type system is its ability to encapsulate
requirements about the state of the program in the type system;
often, this state includes which locks must be held to be able to carry out
specific operations. C lacks the ability to express these
requirements, but there would be obvious benefits if that kind of feature
could be grafted onto the language. The Clang compiler has made some
strides in that direction with its thread-safety
analysis feature; two developers have been independently working to
take advantage of that work for the kernel.

Google Will Enable Android Phones With Ability To Run Debian Linux Soon

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Google Will Enable Android Phones With Ability To Run Debian Linux Soon
Hidden away among the hullabaloo of Google’s March Pixel feature drop lies a feature many enthusiasts and developers have asked for years—the Linux Terminal app. This Debian-based Linux environment is now available for Pixel phones with the latest stable update. This means users can load a portable desktop distro on their smartphones—can you

NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, 5060 And 5050 Mainstream GPU Specs Leak

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NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, 5060 And 5050 Mainstream GPU Specs Leak
The overall GPU market for gamers is in a bit of a sorry state at the moment, with demand far outpacing supply (unless you’re shopping prebuilts) and high partner pricing (let along greedy scalpers) plaguing product launches. We’re not here to beat that dead horse, though—everyone knows the situation by now. Ignoring all that, there are more

AMD EPYC 9845 Makes For A Persuasive Upgrade With Performance & Energy Efficiency

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With the new AMD EPYC 9005 processors there are SKUs up to 500 Watt with the likes of the EPYC 9965 flagship at 192 cores for Turin Dense cores or 128 Turin classic cores with the EPYC 9755. But for those looking at upgrading from an existing EPYC 9004 series server and bound by the motherboard BIOS support and/or cooling/power capacity, 400 Watts is a sweet spot. Many of the existing platforms designed for EPYC 9004 Bergamo/Genoa(X) and now extended for EPYC 9005 Turin are limited to a 400 Watt TDP. With the prior AMD EPYC 9655 testing I have already shown off the great Zen 5 uplift when maintaining the same core counts as Zen 4, but even sticking to 400 Watts at the top-end is room for more. The EPYC 9845 is AMD’s top-end SKU for 400 Watts or less that allows for 160 dense cores (320 threads) per socket compared to the 128 core EPYC 9754 Bergamo. Effectively the same power level and 25% more — and better (Zen 5C) — cores. Plus with EPYC Turin supporting the new AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver there is greater headroom in optimizing for power efficiency if so desired. Here is a look at how the AMD EPYC 9845 delivers a great leap to performance and power efficiency for those looking at a surprisingly robust upgrade from prior generation EPYC 9004.

AI Isn’t Creating New Knowledge, Hugging Face Co-Founder Says

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An anonymous reader shares a report: AI excels at following instructions — but it’s not pushing the boundaries of knowledge, says Thomas Wolf. The chief science officer and cofounder of Hugging Face, an open-source AI company backed by Amazon and Nvidia, analyzed the limits of large language models. He wrote that the field produces “overly compliant helpers” rather than revolutionaries. Right now, AI isn’t creating new knowledge, Wolf wrote. Instead, it’s just filling in the blanks between existing facts — what he called “manifold filling.”

Wolf argues that for AI to drive real scientific breakthroughs, it needs to do more than retrieve and synthesize information. AI should question its own training data, take counterintuitive approaches, generate new ideas from minimal input, and ask unexpected questions that open new research paths. Wolf also weighed in on the idea of a “compressed 21st century” — a concept from an October essay by Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, “Machine of Loving Grace.” Amodei wrote that AI could accelerate scientific progress so much that discoveries expected over the next 100 years could happen in just five to 10.

“I read this essay twice. The first time I was totally amazed: AI will change everything in science in five years, I thought!” Wolf wrote on X. “Re-reading it, I realized that much of it seemed like wishful thinking at best.” Unless AI research shifts gears, Wolf warned, we won’t get a new Albert Einstein in a data center — just a future filled with “yes-men on servers.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.