today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 11, 2026

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • The Cyber Show ☛ Blues go marching

    art authenticiy education life-skills communication propaganda

  • Sabine Hossenfelder ☛ Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: Biologists Give 3 Reasons Why AI Isn’t Conscious (Yet)

    One of the biggest debates in tech at the moment is the question of whether current AI models can become conscious. Whatever “conscious” means. According to a group of biologists, current AI models are far from it – but it’s not because consciousness can only appear in biological systems. They identify which key properties an artificial system would have to fulfill to become more like the human brain and hence have a chance at developing consciousness. Let’s take a look.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • TecMint ☛ 19 Quick systemd-networkd Config Hacks to Speed Up Your Linux Server

    Nothing may be broken. systemd-networkd-wait-online is simply waiting for managed interfaces to reach the required state, potentially including a spare NIC with no cable, until its 120-second timeout expires.

• Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • QML Quick Editor: my QtCreator extension has been integrated

      Great news for the community! The integration of QML Quick Editor into Qt Creator is now 100% complete. The plugin is officially available, bringing native workflow integration directly to your development environment. Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • New Releases

    • Kodi Foundation ☛ Kodi 22 "Piers" RC 1 | News | Kodi

      Announcing the first release candidate of Kodi 22 "Piers"!

      Since leaving beta, we've been focusing on fixing reported issues and polishing new features. Now, we feel like we've reached the final state we want to ship for v22. We're still tracking a few bugs, but these are mostly contained to the shiny new features introduced in v22.

      It's been over two years since the initial Kodi 21 "Omega" release, so before diving into the complete changelog, here are a few highlights from Piers.

  • Debian Family

    • Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activities in September 2026

      Here’s my monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the FOSS world.

    • James Cherti ☛ Configuring Debian to run smoothly on an older desktop computer

      Over the weekend, I pulled an old Dell tower out of storage to set up a dedicated machine for my daughter to use for homework and retro gaming. While the default Debian installation booted up cleanly, system responsiveness was poor out of the box because of heavy mechanical disk I/O, combined with software video decoding taxing the aging CPU.

      Below is a breakdown of the configuration tweaks, firmware setup, hardware acceleration, background services, and sysctl settings I applied while configuring this older desktop computer with Debian. (Most of these adjustments also apply to other Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu or Linux Mint.).