Edge has a built-in image enhancement tool that, according to Microsoft, can use “super-resolution to improve clarity, sharpness, lighting, and contrast in images on the web.” Although the feature sounds exciting, recent Microsoft Edge Canary updates have provided more information on how image enhancement works. The browser now warns that it sends image links to Microsoft instead of performing on-device enhancements. The biggest problem with Edge’s “super-resolution” and other questionable services is that it is enabled by default. Therefore, unaware users automatically give the browser permission to send pictures to Microsoft for processing and enhancement. Don’t use Edge.

It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2023. This is a snapshot of Debian “sid” at the time of the stable Debian “bookworm” release (June 2023), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release. Debian GNU/Hurd is probably the easiest, most accessible way to try out Hurd.

For those of you a little confused about what a postcode is, it’s effectively the same as a US zip code; a way of distilling a postal address down to but a few characters. Hence why some rogue auto-translate function in Windows 11 is occasionally switching ‘zip’ to ‘postcode’ in the UK’s Windows menus. As a translator myself, this is easy enough to explain. Either we’re looking at a terrible machine translation that wasn’t properly vetted, or a translator/reviewer not getting enough context to properly translate this string. As translators, we often get the absolute bare minimum to work with when it comes to software – usually just the strings, and if we’re very, very, very lucky, we might get a screenshot, but that’s a rarity. It’s easy to look at this and think the translator is an idiot, but without any context, some isolated strings, often delivered in a random order, can be incredibly hard to translate in a way that makes any sense in the target context. It’s just another way the software industry gets away with bottom-of-the-barrel effort, something no other industry is allowed to do. A random package of disposable paper plates has to adhere to more standards, controls, and checks than consumer software has to do. Managers in the consumer software industry face virtually no consequences for shipping the absolute bare minimum in quality, and unlike in any other industry, shipping broken garbage that never gets fixed is the norm, rather than the exception. There’s no other product category in our lives where we would tolerate the amount of brokenness that’s common in software. And, of course, software translations are no exception. It’s an easy target for managers to outsource and automate to “save money”. This is what it leads to.

We’re bringing a new mid-tier compiler to Chrome. Maglev is a just-in-time compiler that can quickly generate performant machine code for all relevant functions within the first one-hundredth of a second. It reduces overall CPU time to compile code while also saving battery life. Our measurements show Maglev has provided a 7.5 percent improvement on Jetstream and a 5 percent improvement in Speedometer. Maglev will start rolling out in Chrome version 114, which begins release on June 5. Let’s hope making benchmarks run faster also makes actual websites load faster.

Back in March I came home for spring break and quickly found myself motivated to do something dumb with Linux but there was an issue, all of my stuff was back in my dorm. The only thing I really had was a hard modded Xbox 360, an old monitor, and an even older keyboard. I knew what I had to do. Of course.

After years of speculation, leaks, rumors, setbacks, and rumblings of amazing behind-the-scenes demos, Apple has made its plans for a mixed reality platform and headset public. Vision Pro is “the first Apple Product you look through, not at,” Apple’s Tim Cook said, a “new AR platform with a new product” that augments reality by seamlessly blending the real world with the digital world. The headset will start at $3,499 and be available early next year. That puts the device in an entirely different class than most existing VR headsets, including the $550 PSVR2 (which requires a tethered PS5 to use) and the $500 Quest 3 that was just announced for a fall release. The technology on display here is amazing, but the presentation itself, including Apple’s proposed use cases, were thoroughly dystopian. When you’re wearing it, a video feed of your eyes can be shown on the outside display when talking to someone next to you, which looks like pure nightmare fuel to me. Apple also showed a birthday party where the dad was wearing this thing while his daughter and her friends were blowing out the candles – which, as a dad… Just no. Don’t wear the creepy glowing robot face during your daughter’s birthday party. Other than that, since it has no controllers, the gaming proposition consisted of regular “2D” games projected on a screen, so you can’t play popular VR games like Beat Saber or Gorilla Tag. Since the device tries very hard to mimic a traditional user interface in VR, many of the renders shown off during the presentation consisted of floating windows. Videoconferencing consisted of floating windows with camera feeds from the participants, for instance, while the VR user’s face is rendered onto an avatar. Showing multiple application windows floating around you definitely looks very cool, but whether or not that’s actually a pleasant user experience? I don’t know. But the biggest problem with the whole presentation is that Apple has not actually showed off anything tangible. Everything shown off during the keynote was fake – prerendered special effects layered onto video, and since nobody has received any hands-on time with the actual hardware, and thus nobody outside of Apple has seen the real user interface in action, we actually have no idea how it will actually look, feel, and perform. This is the AR/VR equivalent of using prerendered cinematics to create hype for a video game, and we should know better by now. If there’s one company that can convince people to spend $3500 to strap an isolating dystopian glowing robot mask onto their faces it’s Apple, but I still have a hard time believing this is what people want.

The Mac Pro might not look different from its predecessor on the outside, but on the inside, Intel’s Xeon CPU and AMD’s Radeon Pro graphics are gone, and in their place we have a new chip called the M2 Ultra. This is the same chip in the new Mac Studio; it has a 24-core CPU and an up to 76-core GPU, and it starts with twice the memory and SSD storage of the old Mac Pro. Apple promises it will be “3x faster” than the Intel Mac Pro. Memory tops out at 192GB. These stats all match the new Mac Studio—the only thing you get from the bigger chassis is expansion capabilities and more ports. The whole point of a Mac tower is support for traditional expansion cards, and that normally means discrete GPUs. Apple demoed some expansion cards, but none of them were graphics cards. It sounds like you’ll be using the M2 Ultra’s on-board GPU. Making real graphics cards work with an ARM chip would have been a massive undertaking—for starters, no ARM drivers exist. Even for the non-GPU options, compatibility will be an interesting problem. Apple calls out digital signal processing (DSP) cards, serial digital interface (SDI) I/O cards, and additional networking and storage as PCI express card possibilities. Apple’s transition from Intel to ARM is now complete, and there’s no denying they’ve done a fantastic job. The competition is catching up, but for now, especially the Mac laptop lineup is in the best state it’s ever been in.

At Build 2023 developer conference, Microsoft finally teased the all-new modern File Explorer refresh. It’s unclear when the update is coming out, but we have accessed an early and unreleased version of the new File Explorer that mirrors what was teased at the conference. This definitely looks like a marked improvement over the aging current File Explorer, which isn’t very hard to do. It should ship somewhere later this year.

IceWM 3.4.0 might as well be called the Keybinding Update, since virtually all changes are related to them in some way. This release adds support for keybindings to literal Latin-1 characters, all UTF-8 code points in keybindings, and more.

ArcaOS 5.0.8 includes refreshed driver content, updated kernel and included software, as well as installation boot fixes since 5.0.7 was released at the end of 2021. It also rolls in a few fixes that come from our 5.1.0 development work. ArcaOS 5.0.8 can be used for new installs or to update any prior version of ArcaOS 5. If you have experienced difficulty installing previous releases of ArcaOS on your hardware, 5.0.8 may address your issue(s). This is a small point release in the run-up to the release of ArcaOS 5.1.0, which will be a much bigger update, but that is currently held back by the developers having to redesign their ISO delivery stack. The wiki has all the detailed changes since 5.0.7.

Windows 11 users who open the official Get Help support application of the operating system may be greeted with an advertisement for Microsoft’s Teams application now. The ad is not the first for Microsoft Teams in Windows 11. Back in late 2021, a Microsoft Teams advertisement was causing freezes on Windows 11 systems it was displayed on. Another day, another ad. Fun times to be a Windows user.

Apollo, the popular Reddit app for iOS, could face millions of dollars in fees as a result of Reddit’s new paid API model. According to an update posted by developer Christian Selig, Reddit could charge Apollo roughly $20 million per year if it continues operating at its current scale. Reddit announced changes to its API policy in April, which allows the platform to put limits on the number of API requests made by a third-party client like Apollo. But now, we have more details on what exactly this means: Selig says Reddit plans on charging about $12,000 per 50 million requests. Reddit looked at Twitter and thought now that’s how you run a business.

According to Canonical’s Oliver Grawert, the next long-term support release of Ubuntu will be available to download in 2 versions: a classic, deb-based version (default) and, for the first time, an immutable, snap-based build. This makes sense, and was inevitable. I wonder how long they’re going to keep the .deb-based version around; I doubt they’d pull it any time soon. Still, competition is good, and it’s been clear for a while now that immutability is the next big thing in the desktop Linux world.

As cryptocurrencies rise and fall, there’s one number that just keeps going up. Whenever somebody loses money to a crypto scam or hack, the Grift Counter on Molly White’s blog, Web3 Is Going Just Great, spins higher and higher. Recently it ticked over $12 billion. White started the blog in December 2021 out of frustration with the mainstream coverage of crypto, which she says paid too much attention to rags-to-riches tales and not enough to its dark underbelly. Her goal was to paint a fuller picture, to chronicle the thefts and failures, debunk the marketing spiel, and underline the risks in the process. A software engineer by trade, White coded Web3 Is Going Just Great over the span of a few weeks. It was only a side project, designed to “entertain me and me alone,” says White; she never imagined it would gain any traction. But within a few months, the blog had become a viral hit, earning White a reputation as an authoritative crypto pundit. Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and all the related bullshit are nothing but pyramid schemes – MLMs for tech bros. I’m glad most of us and the wider world has finally come to the same conclusion.