Vince Guaraldi’s First Televised Peformance Of ‘Linus And Lucy’

This is a video of jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi’s first televised performance of the classic ‘Linus And Lucy’ he composed for Peanuts (I also work for peanuts). This was way back in 1964, a year before A Charlie Brown Christmas, and long before I was around. At least in this plane of existence. I was already cruising lots of other planes by that time though. The things I’ve seen! Mostly erotica.

OpenAI Calls In the Consultants For Its Enterprise Push

OpenAI has formed a multi-year “Frontier Alliance” with four consulting heavyweights to accelerate enterprise adoption of its no-code AI agent platform, OpenAI Frontier. TechCrunch reports: The alliance includes multi-year partnerships between OpenAI and four major consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini, to sell its enterprise products. OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team will work with the consulting giants to help them implement OpenAI’s enterprise-focused technologies like OpenAI Frontier into customers’ tech stacks.

The company launched OpenAI Frontier in early February. The no-code open software allows users to build, deploy, and manage AI agents both built on OpenAI’s AI models and beyond. OpenAI argues in its latest announcement that consultants are the right avenue to get enterprises on board.

“AI alone does not drive transformation. It must be linked to strategy, built into redesigned processes, and adopted at scale with aligned incentives and culture to deliver sustained outcomes,” BCG CEO Christoph Schweizer said in OpenAI’s blog post. “Our expanded partnership combines OpenAI’s Frontier platform with BCG’s deep industry, functional, and tech expertise and BCG X’s build-and-scale capabilities to drive measurable impact with safeguards from day one.”


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Panasonic Will No Longer Make Its Own TVs

Panasonic is handing over the manufacturing, marketing, and sales of its TVs to Shenzhen-based Skyworth, effectively exiting in-house TV production. Ars Technica reports: Skyworth is a Shenzhen-headquartered TV brand. The company claims to be “a top three global provider of the Android TV platform.” In July, research firm Omdia reported that Skyworth was one of the top-five TV brands by sales revenue in Q1 2025; however, Skyworth hasn’t been able to maintain that position regularly. Panasonic made its announcement at a “launch event,” FlatpanelsHD reported today. During the event, a Panasonic representative reportedly said: “Under the agreement the new partner will lead sales, marketing, and logistics across the region, while Panasonic provide expertise and quality assurance to uphold its renowned audiovisual standards with full joint development on top-end OLED models.”

Panasonic also said that it will provide support “for all Panasonic TVs sold up to March 2026 and all those available from April.” Skyworth-made Panasonic TVs will be sold in the US and Europe. In the latter geography, the companies are aiming for double-digit market share. […] The news means there’s virtually no TV production happening in Japan anymore, as other Japanese companies, like Sharp, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Pioneer, have already exited TV production. Earlier this year, Sony announced that it was ceding control of its TV hardware business to TCL.


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Pentagon buyer: We’re happy with our launch industry, but payloads are lagging

DALLAS—The Space Force officer tasked with overseeing more than $24 billion in research and development spending says the Pentagon is more interested in supporting startups building new space sensors and payloads than adding yet another rocket company to its portfolio.

The statement, made at a space finance conference in Dallas last week, was one of several points Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy wanted to get across to a room full of investors and commercial space executives.

The other points on Purdy’s agenda were that the Space Force is more interested in high-volume production than spending money to develop the latest technologies, and that the military has, at least for now, lost one of its most important tools for supporting and diversifying the space industrial base.

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ASML Unveils EUV Light Source Advance That Could Yield 50% More Chips By 2030

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Researchers at ASML Holding say they have found a way to boost the power of the light source in a key chip making machine to turn out up to 50% more chips by decade’s end, to help retain the Dutch company’s edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals. ASML is the world’s only maker of commercial extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, a critical tool for chipmakers such as TSMC, Intel and others in producing advanced computing chips. “It’s not a parlor trick or something like this, where we demonstrate for a very short time that it can work,” Michael Purvis, ASML’s lead technologist for its EUV source light, said in an interview. “It’s a system that can produce 1,000 watts under all the same requirements that you could see at a customer,” he added, speaking at the company’s California facilities near San Diego. […]

With the technological advance revealed on Monday, which is being reported here for the first time, ASML aims to outdistance any would-be rivals by improving the most technologically challenging aspect of the machines. This is the quest to generate EUV light with the right power and properties to turn out chips at high volume. The company’s researchers have found a way to boost the power of the EUV light source to 1,000 watts from 600 watts now. The chief advantage is that greater power translates into the ability to make more chips every hour, helping to lower the cost of each. Chips are printed similar to a photograph, where the EUV light is shone on a silicon wafer coated with special chemicals called a photoresist. With a more powerful EUV light source, chip factories need shorter exposure times. “We’d like to make sure that our customers can keep on using EUV at a much lower cost,” Teun van Gogh, executive vice president for the NXE line of EUV machines at ASML, told Reuters. Van Gogh said customers should be able to process about 330 silicon wafers an hour on each machine by the end of the decade, up from 220 now. Depending on the size of a chip, each wafer can hold anywhere from scores to thousands of the devices.

ASML got the power boost by doubling down on an approach that already places its machines among the most complex inventions of humans. To produce light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, ASML’s machine shoots a stream of molten droplets of tin through a chamber, where a massive carbon dioxide laser heats them into plasma. This is a superheated state of matter in which the tin droplets become hotter than the sun and emit EUV light, to be collected by precision optic equipment supplied by Germany’s Carl Zeiss AG and fed into the machine to print chips. The key advancements in Monday’s disclosure involved doubling the number of tin drops to about 100,000 every second, and shaping them into plasma using two smaller laser bursts, as opposed to today’s machines that use a single shaping burst. […] ASML believes the techniques it used to hit 1,000 watts will unlock continued advances in the future, Purvis said, adding, “We see a reasonably clear path toward 1,500 watts, and no fundamental reason why we couldn’t get to 2,000 watts.”


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Data center builders thought farmers would willingly sell land, learn otherwise

It seems that tech giants eyeing rural zones for data center development have underestimated how attached American farmers have grown to their lands in the decades they’ve been nurturing them.

Across the country, several farmers have firmly rejected eye-popping offers—sometimes in the tens of millions. These offers dwarf the value of their properties, but farmers have refused to put a price on the lands that they love most.

In a report on Monday, The Guardian highlighted a handful of cases nationwide where farmers’ refusals have frustrated plans to build data centers in areas long deemed rural.

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Beaver Biting Down A Tree To Build A Dam

This is a clip from BBC Studios of a beaver in Yellowstone National Park felling a cottonwood tree and building a dam with it. Apparently beavers can take down a tree like this in a few hours, and a single beaver can fell several hundred trees a year. It’s amazing there are any trees left, and Mr. Beaver better not come anywhere near my tree fort. It’s the one with the ‘NO GURLZ ALOUD’ sign. *shrug* I was a dumb kid. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a dumb kid LARPing as an average adult, but I’m at least smart enough now not to exclude women from any gathering they’re willing to be a part of.

Panasonic, the former plasma king, will no longer make its own TVs

Panasonic, once revered for its plasma TVs, is giving up on making its own TV sets. Today, it announced that Chinese company Skyworth will take over manufacturing, marketing, and selling Panasonic-branded TVs.

Skyworth is a Shenzhen-headquartered TV brand. The company claims to be “a top three global provider of the Android TV platform.” In July, research firm Omdia reported that Skyworth was one of the top-five TV brands by sales revenue in Q1 2025; however, Skyworth hasn’t been able to maintain that position regularly.

Panasonic made its announcement at a “launch event,” FlatpanelsHD reported today. During the event, a Panasonic representative reportedly said:

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IBM Shares Crater 13% After Anthropic Says Claude Code Can Tackle COBOL Modernization

IBM shares plunged nearly 13% on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post arguing that its Claude Code tool could automate much of the complex analysis work involved in modernizing COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States and runs on the kind of mainframe systems IBM has sold for generations.

Anthropic said the shrinking pool of developers who understand COBOL had long made modernization cost-prohibitive, and that AI could now flip that equation by mapping dependencies and documenting workflows across thousands of lines of legacy code. The sell-off deepened a rough 2026 for IBM, whose shares are now down more than 22% year to date.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Modern AMD Graphics Driver Surpasses Six Million Lines Of Code In Linux 7.0

It was less than four years ago that the modern AMDGPU/AMDKFD open-source driver stack was at four million lines of C code and header files. Now with the Linux 7.0 kernel it has surpassed six million lines. Or put another way, by the same calculations Linux 7.0-rc1 is at 39.2 million with the modern AMD kernel graphics driver now making up 15% of the kernel’s entire codebase as the single largest driver…

This Solar-Powered Garmin Watch Is $200 Off Right Now

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

Garmin is known for its GPS smartwatches designed for rugged outdoor adventures and camping trips. The Garmin Instinct 2X Solar Tactical Watch is one of the brand’s best solar-charged options—an right now, it’s 40% off on Amazon, dropping its price from $499.99 to $299.99.

Compared to its predecessor, the Garmin Instinct Solar 2X produces up to 50% more energy from the sun thanks to the Power Glass lens, which is particularly helpful in GPS mode, which can drain the battery quickly. It’s also 0.8 mm thinner, has a built-in LED flashlight, a compass, and an altimeter. It also has a number of health- and fitness-tracking features, including Pulse Ox, heart rate monitoring, and sleep monitoring stats that are meant to help you train and recover more efficiently. The watch also contains integrated sports apps.

TrackBack is another helpful feature that lets you use location readings to keep track of where you last left your car or where you started your hike, for example. That said, this device doesn’t have a touchscreen; users are limited to a button-based interface, and app support on the Garmin Connect IQ app is somewhat limited. The display is also somewhat bare-bones compared to more vibrant AMOLED options like the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra (that said, there are some benefits to an MIP screen over AMOLED.)

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Anthropic accuses three Chinese AI labs of abusing Claude to improve their own models

Anthropic is issuing a call to action against AI “distillation attacks,” after accusing three AI companies of misusing its Claude chatbot. On its website, Anthropic claimed that DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax have been conducting “industrial-scale campaigns…to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models.”

Distillation in the AI world refers to when less capable models lean on the responses of more powerful ones to train themselves. While distillation isn’t a bad thing across the board, Anthropic said that these types of attacks can be used in a more nefarious way. According to Anthropic, these three Chinese AI firms were responsible for more than “16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts.” From Anthropic’s perspective, these competing companies were using Claude as a shortcut to develop more advanced AI models, which could also lead to circumventing certain safeguards.

Anthropic said in its post that it was able to link each of these distilling attack campaigns to the specific companies with “high confidence” thanks to IP address correlation, metadata requests and infrastructure indicators, along with corroborating with others in the AI industry who have noticed similar behaviors.

Early last year, OpenAI made similar claims of rival firms distilling its models and banned suspected accounts in response. As for Anthropic, the company behind Claude said it would upgrade its system to make distillation attacks harder to do and easier to identify. While Anthropic is pointing fingers at these other firms, it’s also facing a lawsuit from music publishers who accused the AI company of using illegal copies of songs to train its Claude chatbot.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/anthropic-accuses-three-chinese-ai-labs-of-abusing-claude-to-improve-their-own-models-205210613.html?src=rss

The PC VR Demos In Steam Next Fest February 2026

The first of Steam’s triannual showcases of upcoming games is now live and features dozens of PC VR demos.

This is the first chance for many players to try popular upcoming titles for the first time like Beyond Frames’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City.

Some of the participating games released demos prior to the start of Next Fest, like Echoes of Mora, Alliance Tales: Battle For The Frontier, Birdseed VR, and How To God.

Please note that this list was provided two weeks ago by Valve and is subject to change. Developers can (and previously have) drop out of Next Fest if their demo is not ready or release a demo on short notice.

For now, here are the games we’re aware of:

• Birdseed VR

• Alliance Tales: Battle For The Frontier

• Wingsuit: Romsdalen

• King Crab

• How To God

• Axiomatik

• Proton VR

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City

• Project Louisiana – The BOUNDS VR Demo

• Detective VR

• Echoes of Mora

• Artemis VR

• Scared By Squares

• Just One Man

• Confined: Leaving OKB-134

• Combat Pilot: Carrier Qualification

• La Royale: Below Deck

• That’s My Tofu

• Tammuz: Blood and Sand

• Annulus

• Get Out

• The Amusement

• Orbital Overdrive

• Marrow Marrow

• Diorama Maker

• Gun X

• Subliminal

• Dream Corps

• Quantum Eye

• Isle of Food

• Full Steam Undead

• Ironforged

• Versus One

• DJ Lusty Beats

• The Gallery: VR Secrets

• Plug Priority

• Space Control

• Road To Yvhalon

• Enigmo

Steam Next Fest runs until 10am Pacific Standard Time on March 2nd.