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It would be easy to dismiss Kshama Sawant as a far-left radical with pie-in-the-sky dreams, if not for the fact that she was elected three consecutive times to Seattle’s City Council, narrowly survived a recall campaign, and won victories while in office, such as establishing a $15 an hour minimum wage in 2014 and fighting for a historic tax on large corporations such as Amazon. Now Sawant—who was born in India, immigrated to the United States in 1996, and describes herself as a Marxist and a revolutionary socialist—has tossed her hat in the ring to run for the U.S. Congress seat currently held by fourteen-term incumbent Adam Smith in Washington State’s ninth Congressional district.

Q: Now you’re running for Congress in Washington’s ninth district, against incumbent Democrat Adam Smith. On news broadcasts, he comes across as, and is treated like, one of the more liberal Democrats in Congress. Why are you challenging him?

Sawant: Adam Smith voted to send tens of billions of dollars for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. He voted repeatedly to ban any U.S. funding for United Nations food assistance in Gaza. He did that while there was mass starvation in Gaza. He voted for the Iraq War in 2002. He voted to create ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] by voting for George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Act, and for Bush’s PATRIOT Act, which unleashed a new wave of mass surveillance and attacks on peaceful protest.

In 1997, Smith voted for Bill Clinton’s so-called Balanced Budget Act, which savagely cut Medicare and Medicaid by about $120 billion. In 1999, Smith voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which deregulated banking and helped create the 2008 recession—he then voted to bail out Wall Street, instead of millions of ravaged working families. In 2022, Smith voted to break the railroad workers’ strike. For nearly thirty years, Adam Smith has been a dogged, unshakeable, loyal advocate for big business and the war-mongering interests of U.S. imperialism. In my view, Smith has blood on his hands—he should be on trial for war crimes, and thrown out of office.

How did the very primitive cell-like entities that preceded the first cells (protocells) develop the ability to survive in unpredictable and changing environments?

Researchers developed a new computer model called Araudia to start addressing this question.

In the model, protocells live and evolve in a simulated flow reactor, an artificial environment where nutrients are continually supplied and washed away. The protocells consume nutrients, grow, divide, and occasionally mutate.

Importantly, they can live in a cross-feeding ecology, meaning that they can interact metabolically by exchanging chemical byproducts, which leads to complex interdependencies. The model spans three levels of analysis: metabolism (how cells process resources), ecology (how they interact with each other), and evolution (how populations change over longer timescales).

Fedora-based Ultramarine Linux distribution has been updated to version 43, a release built on top of Fedora Linux 43 and shipping with updated components and a few surprise features.

Highlights of Ultramarine 43 include a new theme called Orchis for the Xfce edition, the latest KDE Plasma 6.5 and GNOME 49 desktop environments for the KDE Plasma and GNOME editions, Pinebook Pro support, updated Raspberry Pi 4 images, and support for the CachyOS kernel as a tweak in umcli.

LXD, a modern system container and virtual machine manager developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has just released LXD 6.6, marking the sixth feature launch in the 6.x series.

One of the headline additions is support for instance placement groups, giving administrators more control over how virtual machines and containers are distributed across cluster members. Kubernetes users receive a new LXD Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver, streamlining volume provisioning and integrating more cleanly with Kubernetes storage workflows.

Intel software engineers continue to be hard at work on LLM-Scaler as their solution for running vLLM on Intel GPUs in a Docker containerized environment. A new beta release of LLM-Scaler built around vLLM was released overnight with support for running more large language models.

Since the "LLM-Scaler 1.0" debut of the project back in August there have been frequent updates for expanding LLM coverage on Intel GPUs and exposing more features for harnessing the AI compute power on Intel graphics hardware. The versioning scheme though remains a mess with today's test version being "llm-scaler-vllm beta release 0.10.2-b6" even with "1.0" previously being announced.

Reus 2 from Abbey Games recently had a big upgrade, and now it's Steam Deck Verified / SteamOS Compatible with full support from the developer.

What is it? It's all about shaping worlds as one of 6 powerful giants each with their own unique abilities. Your choices will determine the fate of the planet and its inhabitants. And as you progress, you'll unlock more new skills for your giants too. Humanity does its own thing though, and may even turn against you.

For those continuing to make use of the X.Org Server, a new point release is now available in the 21.1 series. While most often X.Org Server stable releases these days are driven by shipping new security fixes, the X.Org Server 21.1.21 release is to fix several regressions introduced for various functional issues.

Red Hat engineer Olivier Fourdan released X.Org Server 21.1.21 this morning and it simply consists of various code reverts in order to address some reported problems with the X.Org Server usage, particularly when using NVIDIA graphics.

Chaosmonger Studio continue working on Voivod: The Nuclear Warrior a retro-styled heavy metal platformer in partnership with the band Voivod.

Following on from the successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, they say it has now moved onto "full production" with the new trailer showcasing the game's evolving world: a desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape where mechanical ruins meet cosmic horror, brought to life through hand-crafted pixel art and an original soundtrack shaped by Voivod's unmistakable sound.

Only a month after the previous 42 release, Ultramarine Linux 43 is now out, powered by kernel 6.17 and based on Fedora 43. Developed by Fyra Labs, the distro bets on the Btrfs filesystem under the hood, and it is now beginning with the retirement of Ultramarine’s long-standing “Flagship” designation.

With that said, the Budgie edition, which previously held that role, is no longer the recommended default. The project notes that its original rationale for choosing Budgie was that Fedora did not offer it at the time.

But now Ultramarine is formally recommending the Plasma Edition going forward. According to devs, this change doesn’t remove Budgie from the lineup; it simply becomes “Budgie Edition,” still fully supported and updated with the latest fixes as the desktop approaches its 10.10 release.