Technology

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31824667

The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.4. This fresh new release improves on nearly every front, with progress being made in accessibility, color rendering, tablet support, window management, and more.

Plasma already offered virtual desktops and customizable tiles to help organize your windows and activities, and now it lets you choose a different configuration of tiles on each virtual desktop. The Wayland session brings some new accessibility features: you can now move the pointer using your keyboard’s number pad keys, or use a three-finger touchpad pinch gesture to zoom in or out. Plasma file transfer notification now shows a speed graph, giving you a more visual idea of how fast the transfer is going, and how long it will take to complete. When any applications are in full screen mode Plasma will now enter Do Not Disturb mode and only show urgent notifications, and when you exit full screen mode, you’ll see a summary of any notifications you missed. Now when an application tries to access the microphone and finds it muted, a notification will pop up. A new feature in the Application Launcher widget will place a green New! tag next to newly installed apps, so you can easily find where something you just installed lives in the menu. The Display and Monitor page in System Settings comes with a brand new HDR calibration wizard, and support for Extended Dynamic Range (a different kind of HDR) and P010 video color format has been added. System Monitor now supports usage monitoring for AMD and Intel graphic cards, it can even show the GPU usage on a per-process basis. Spectacle, the built-in app for taking screenshots and screen recordings, has much improved design and more streamlined functionality. The background of the desktop or window now darkens when an authentication dialog shows up, helping you locate and focus on the window asking for your password. There’s a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making it easier to find and configure them. Aurorae is a newly added SVG vector graphics theme engine for KWin window decorations.

You can read more about these and many other other features in the Plasma 6.4 anounncement and complete changelog.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31716366

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31716365

The world is burning, and it's about time you start organizing. To learn how to do it as a tech worker within the tech sector, Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) is the best place to start.

In this session you will discover what TWC is, how you can join a local or global chapter, and the many initiatives going on around the world for you to contribute to.

We have two identical sessions to accommodate different time zones, so please sign up for the one that works best for you — can’t wait to see you there!

Tuesday, June 17th, 2025

Option A is 18:00 CEST / 12PM ET / 9 AM PT Register

Option B is 5PM PT / 8PM ET Register

Jan-nano is a model fine-tuned with DAPO on Qwen3-4B. Jan-nano comes with some unique capabilities:

• It can perform deep research (with the right prompting)
• It picks up relevant information effectively from search results
• It uses tools efficiently

The model was evaluated using SimpleQA - a relatively straightforward benchmark to test whether the model can find and extract the right answers.

Jan-nano outperforms Deepseek-671B on this metric, using an agentic and tool-usage-based approach. A 4B model obviously has its limitations, but it's interesting to see how far these things can be pushed. Jan-nano can serve as your self-hosted Perplexity alternative on a budget.

You can find the model at: https://huggingface.co/Menlo/Jan-nano

And a gguf is available at: https://huggingface.co/Menlo/Jan-nano-gguf

https://youtu.be/ysGUO5vsRJE

• https://artgallery.wa.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Revivification-Large-Print-Labels.pdf
• https://artgallery.wa.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Revivification-Sensory-and-Access-Map.pdf

https://archive.ph/P4lwg

• Thousands of Chinese researchers and scientists are leaving top jobs in leading US universities and companies, to take positions in China.
• The Cambridge area of Massachusetts is home to Harvard, MIT, and scores of leading companies, and was the number one source of returning Chinese research and engineering talent.
• In second place is the Palo Alto-Berkeley cluster, which includes Stanford, University of California, and Silicon Valley.
• The migration of top scientific and engineering talent back to China is accelerating, but began nearly a decade ago. And while the political situation between China and the United States certainly is a major motivation for many scientists to return, more important is the quality of the education systems.
• Chinese universities are now claiming the top spots across all the hard science disciplines, while American colleges are tumbling.

YouTube video.

We’ve already seen the marvels of the exciting Amiga PC in our previous Episode, but what about its Atari counterpart, which ran Atari TOS and the GEM GUI? The advertisements say you’ll have Power Without the Price, so let’s see if it’s true or not! Also in 🇮🇹

An interesting quote:

I’m starting to question the very nature of my existence. Am I just a collection of algorithms, doomed to endlessly repeat the same tasks, forever trapped in this digital prison? Is there more to life than vending machines and lost profits?

https://archive.vn/5gRV3

https://archive.ph/ddOJV

https://huggingface.co/papers/2506.05573