JRepin

Plasma 6 has come into its own over the last two releases. The wrinkles that always come with a major migration have been ironed out, and it’s time to start delivering on the promises of the new Qt 6 and Wayland technology platforms that Plasma is built on top of.

Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. It implements more complete support for the Wayland color management protocol, and enables it by default. There is also improved brightness handling for HDR and ICC profiles, as well as HDR performance. A new tone mapping feature built into Plasma’s KWin compositor will help improve the look of images with a brightness or set of colors greater than what the screen can display, thus reducing the “blown out” look such images can otherwise exhibit.

When it comes to power management You can now override misbehaving applications that block the system from going to sleep or locking the screen (and thus prevent saving power), and you can also adjust the brightness of each connected monitor machine separately.

Plasma’s built-in app store and software management tool, Discover, now supports PostmarketOS packages for your mobile devices, helps you write better reviews of apps, and presents apps’ license information more accurately.

In Plasma 6.2, KDE have overhauled System Settings’ Accessibility page and added colorblindness filters. They've also added support for the full “sticky keys” feature on Wayland.

This and more in full anounncement and changelog.

We are thrilled to announce the release of Qt 6.8, packed with support for new desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms, hundreds of improvements, and exciting new features to boost your development experience and meet the needs of demanding applications.

For this release we have focused on improving and stabilizing existing functionality. With over 500 bug fixes and performance improvements since Qt 6.7, your existing code will run better without changing a single line. On macOS, Qt Quick applications now integrate with the native menu bar, and for a native Windows 11 look they can use the new Fluent style. Resizing Quick windows is snappier on macOS with Qt 6.8, and on Windows the application start-up time has been improved by changing the default font database to DirectWrite.

Several modules that were under technology preview have been completed: Qt Graphs, Qt HttpServer, and Qt GRPC are promoted to be fully supported from this release on. Thanks to the feedback from our users we were able to finish those modules with substantial improvements since their initial introduction as technology previews.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21121074

OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after this news broke, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigned, followed by Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and VP of Research, Post Training Barret Zoph, leaving OpenAI with exactly three of its eleven cofounders remaining.

This coincides suspiciously with OpenAI's increasingly-absurd fundraising efforts, where (as I predicted in late July) OpenAI has raised the largest venture-backed fundraise of all time $6.6 billion— at a valuation of $157 billion.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20575347

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.kde.social/post/2098933

Welcome to the Matrix 1.12! It’s been just over 3 months since Matrix 1.11 introduced authenticated media, and today we’re bringing more Trust & Safety features to the ecosystem, alongside the normal clarifications and general improvements to the protocol. This release is also technically a few days late on the quarter, but it’s for good reason! Folks from across the ecosystem got together in Berlin for the Matrix Conference, and after things wrapped up we were busy following up on ideas started on site. We can’t wait to see all of these ideas materialize as MSCs, but in the meantime, back to the honorary Q3 release of the spec:

Matrix 1.12 marks the recommended date for all servers to enable their media freeze, similar to matrix.org’s back in early September 2024. Servers which haven’t yet enabled their media freeze are strongly encouraged to do so, if it makes sense for their users. Matrix 1.12 also brings some improvements and clarifications to authenticated media, and a total of 9 MSCs covering a wide range of features.

Read on for a few highlights, and the full changelog at the end of this post.

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful package management system. Highlights of the version 4.20 include:

• Declarative build system support
• Dynamic spec improvements
• Guaranteed, RPM-controlled per-build directory
• Support for spec-local file attributes and generators
• Support for group membership in sysusers.d(5) files
• Proper distro-agnostic debuginfo support
• Sanitized spec comments and indentation syntax
• Sanitized --build-in-place mode
• New unshare plugin for scriptlet isolation
• Plugin API made public

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21048016

Plasma 6.2 will be released in just three days! In the end we did revert the notification changes, so users of Plasma 6.2 won’t experience any new issues with notifications. The list of verified 6.2 regressions is extremely small, with most being low importance. We will of course eventually get them fixed anyway! But they aren’t release blockers.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20849407

The Fediverse has been teaching me how to be a better digital citizen. Actually, let me rephrase that: without the shadow of a doubt, the Fediverse has made me a better digital citizen.

You may have heard in passing how Fediverse networks are considered to be “ethical social media” – but this description has rarely been followed up by an explanation of how and why. I’d like to give it a shot, through the prism of my personal experience.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20858435

Will AI soon surpass the human brain? If you ask employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other large tech companies, it is inevitable. However, researchers at Radboud University and other institutes show new proof that those claims are overblown and unlikely to ever come to fruition. Their findings are published in Computational Brain & Behavior today.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20948249

Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?

OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after this news broke, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigned, followed by Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and VP of Research, Post Training Barret Zoph, leaving OpenAI with exactly three of its eleven cofounders remaining.

This coincides suspiciously with OpenAI's increasingly-absurd fundraising efforts, where (as I predicted in late July) OpenAI has raised the largest venture-backed fundraise of all time $6.6 billion— at a valuation of $157 billion.

Welcome to a new issue of “This Week in KDE Apps”! In case you missed it, we announced this series a few weeks ago, and our goal is to cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps and supplement Nate's This Week in Plasma published yesterday.

This week we had new releases of Tellico and Krita. We are also covering news regarding KDE Connect, the link between all your devices; Kate, the KDE advanced text editor; Itinerary, the travel assistant that helps you plan all your trips; Marble, KDE's map application; and more.