You mean for the Linux kernel specifically? Linux distributions?

For software in general — not Linux-specific — updates fix bugs (some of which might be security-related). Adds features.

That may be too general to be useful, but the question doesn’t have much by way of specifics.

I feel like maybe more context would make for better answers. Like, if what you’re asking is “I have a limited network connection, and I’d like to reduce or eliminate downloading of updates” or “I have a system that I don’t want to reboot; do I need to apply updates”, that might affect the answer.

EDIT: Okay, you updated your post, and it sounds like it’s the Ubuntu distribution and the new release frequency that’s an issue.

Well, if you want fewer updates and are otherwise fine with Ubuntu, you could try using Ubuntu LTS.

https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

LTS releases

LTS are released every two years and receive 5 years of standard security maintenance.

LTS releases are the go-to choice for users who value stability and extended support. These versions are security maintained for 5 years with CVE patches for packages in the Main repository. They are recommended for production environments, enterprises, and long-term projects.

You’ll still get security updates, but you won’t see new releases on a six-month basis.

It can be nice to have a relatively-new kernel, as it means support for the latest hardware (like, say you have a desktop with a new video card), but if you have some system that’s working and you don’t especially want it to change, a lower frequency might be preferable for you.

I use Debian myself, and Debian stable tends to have less-frequent new releases. You’ll normally get a new stable release every two years, with inter-release updates generally just being bugfixes, and new stuff going in every two years.

https://www.debian.org/releases/

Debian announces its new stable release on a regular basis. The Debian release life cycle encompasses five years: the first three years of full support followed by two years of Long Term Support (LTS).

EDIT2: If you already have Ubuntu on your system and only want LTS updates, it looks like this is how one selects notification of new LTS releases or all releases.

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/upgrading-ubuntu-desktop#5-optional-upgrading-to-interim-releases

Navigate to the ‘Updates’ tab and change the menu option titled ‘Notify me of a new Ubuntu version’ to For any new version.

EDIT3: I’d wait until an LTS release to switch to LTS, if you aren’t currently using LTS, so that you aren’t on a system that isn’t getting updates. Looking at that Ubuntu release page, it looks like 26.04 is an LTS release. The Ubuntu versioning scheme refers to the year and month (26.04 being the fourth month of 2026). It’s the third month of 2026 right now, so the next release will be LTS, so switching over to LTS notifications now is probably a good time. You’ll get a release update notification next month. You do that update, and then will be on LTS and won’t receive another notification again for the next two years.

OpenAI exec highlights the rising importance of AI compute in tech job compensation.

In other news, Roblox executive thinks that having companies pay employees partly in Robux would be a great idea.

Ah, thanks.

Note that:

• You probably want to flag this post NSFW, so that people who don’t want NSFW content can filter it out. Currently it is not so flagged.

• There used to be a community on lemmynsfw.com, !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com, dedicated specifically to NSFW questions. Unfortunately, I understand that lemmynsfw.com went down in the last couple weeks, and apparently the admin was expected to be away from some time (“months”), and so people have been setting up replacement NSFW instances; I’m not sure that there’s a similar community up yet.

  checks lemmynsfw.com

  Ah. Looks like they managed to get it back up.

EDIT: Looks like it’s been up for over a week, going off https://lestat.org/

Relevant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)

Glancing at that still in the thumbnail, it also looks like she doesn’t have a driveway.

I don’t know if that’d be the situation that the woman has, but I’ve been in old neighborhoods in the US with housing built before about WW2 or so, and they don’t have off-street parking, as they predate the automobile becoming very common.

If companies are going to place increasing reliance on review due to having lower-quality submissions, then they should probably evaluate employees weighting review quality (say, oh, rate of bugs subsequently discovered in reviewed commits or something like that).

I never really got into the Assassin’s Creed series, but I did enjoy Saboteur, which I understand is somewhat similar, albeit getting a little long in the tooth these days. I don’t think that there are going to be any new games in that series, though. Users might consider taking a glance at it.

On another note…the live service elements going in also highlights one major concern I have with games purchased on platforms like Steam or on console download services or whatever. Publishers can push updates. So, normally you sell a game once, and there’s no future revenue from it. But…if you go out of business or just want to sell the rights, you can sell it to someone else, who now has the ability to push updates to the software to the computers of people who own the game, and can include, say, ads, data-harvesting, live-service stuff, microtransactions, or whatever else might generate money.

Traditionally, that’s not how games worked. A player buys a game on physical media, he can always use that game. It won’t be worse in the future.

I’ve seen a variety of people running stats dashboards of various sorts. Some spring up, others go down. A couple:

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats

https://lestat.org/ doesn’t have all instances, but can be a useful dashboard for major instances.

EDIT: Lemmyverse.net walks the Threadiverse to update its index and gathers various interesting types of information:

https://lemmyverse.net/inspect

https://lemmyverse.net/inspect/version-chart

They also let you download their data, if you want to do your own analysis.

EDIT2: https://fedidb.com/

If you can use Termux, you can use the command-line lftp, which supports SFTP; I use this on Linux, so I’m familiar with it.

$ pkg install lftp
$ lftp sftp://foo.com

I also use rsync in Termux after being exasperated over the lack of a reasonable F-Droid graphical client for that.

I wound up using some non-open-source graphical SCP or SFTP client out of the Google Play Store using Aurora Store’s anonymous login at one point, which worked but wasn’t what I wanted to use.

But it’s not even overwhelming politics (though I can understand people being tired of politics, as a separate concern). I’m pretty sure that @LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net or @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com or a few other users I’ve run into could probably carry on a constructive discussion about left-wing politics. I occasionally see, on !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works, good-faith, well-meaning left-wing users who are actually trying to go talk about left-wing issues on lemmygrad.ml or lemmy.ml and are off trying to have a serious conversation. Usually auth-left-versus-non-auth-left, but that’s just what gets submitted to MeanwhileOnGrad, and I imagine that there is probably other conversation elsewhere. It’s just that the “capitalism bad” comments that I’m talking about aren’t from those users and don’t fall into that category. They’re just the largest source of low-effort comment stuff that I see.

Relative to Reddit, probably the number of users. More users means more posts, more comments, more expertise on various areas, and more niche communities that become viable.

Somewhere down the list:

• Extremely determined negativity. There are a lot of…I don’t know how to describe it. People who actively try to take the absolute, most utterly-pessimistic read on anything possible, to the point of having to make crazy assumptions to keep some kind of negative perspective on the thing. I don’t know if it’s people suffering from depression — which I understand can produce that effect — or doomerism or what, but it’s exasperating. I haven’t run into that sort of phenomenon, certainly not to anything like that degree, on other social media environments that I’ve used.

• The low-effort “capitalism bad” venting comments. I’m not really into far-left views, but that’s not what irks me. I’ve seen people on here who you can at least talk to about left-wing positions. Like, some random user who is interested in, I don’t know, adopting universal basic income and wants to talk about different proposals. But about 99% of the comments I see that contain the word “capitalism” don’t amount to that. They’re just venting. They aren’t constructive. They don’t reference any material. They aren’t proposing any improvement or ideas or anything. All they want to do is to vent. I mean, it’s like someone wanting to complain about their ex or how their sports team lost or something like that. And not only that, but a substantial percentage of those comments are complaining about something that has little to do with capitalism. Instead, it’s virtually anything to do with the political or economic world that they don’t like relative to some sort of idealized paradigm that they hold. You could use that “everything I don’t like is woke” meme about the right, swap “woke” and “capitalism”, and I swear, it’d apply to a lot of the comments. And I get that, yeah, one purpose of talking to people is to vent, and so you’d expect that occasionally when people talk to each other, sometimes they’re gonna vent. That’s human nature. But holy cow, as low-effort venting goes, the “capitalism bad” comments show up as a high proportion here.

  Occasionally I do talk about things, write larger comments about communal ownership. Like…okay, I know that on at least a couple of occasions, I’ve talked about the fact you’ve had communal ownership work at small scale, like families, say, or that there have been smaller organizations that have practiced communal ownership of property, and that maybe it’d be interesting to try working up in scale from smaller organizations to try and identify where any issues might crop up. And I have never had anyone actually respond with discussion when I do write something like that. No engagement. Like, it’s not as if people have some raging unmet desire to talk about any of that. They just want to complain.

  I don’t even see people who are writing “capitalism bad” comments engage in discussion with each other. Like, this isn’t Marx and a bunch of activists in a London cafe throwing around ideas with each other. It’s just one-off complaints, leaf comments in the thread.

Neural net computation has predictable access patterns, so instead of using the thing as a random access memory with latency incurred by waiting for the bit you want to get around to you, I expect that you can load the memory appropriately such that you always have the appropriate bit showing up at the time you need it. I’d guess that it probably needs something like the ability to buffer a small amount of data to get and keep multiple fiber coils in synch due to thermal expansion.

The Hacker’s Jargon File has an anecdote about doing something akin to that with drum memory, “The Story of Mel”.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

I’m assuming that the point is the bandwidth.

goes looking for HBM bandwidth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory

It says that HBM 4, which came out one year ago, can do 2 TiB/s.

A little bit, but normally Token Ring didn’t just keep data running around in a circle on and on — Token Ring works more like a roundabout, where you enter at a given computer on the ring and then exit at another device. Without looking, I suspect that, like Internet Protocol packets, Token Ring probably had a TTL (time-to-live) field in its frames to keep a mis-addressed packet from forever running around in circles.

Also, I’m assuming that an implementation of Carmack’s idea would have only one…I don’t know the right term, might be “repeater”. You need to have some device to receive the data and then retransmit them to keep the signal strong and from spreading out. You wouldn’t want to have a ton of those, because otherwise it’d add cost. On Token Ring, you’d have a bunch of transceivers, to have a bunch of “exits”, since the whole point is to move data from one device to another.

Creating workable consumer-grade alternatives

I think that this is intended not to replace DIMMs in PCs, but to replace HBM for AI use. If you’re doing neural net computation, you have very predictable access patterns, so you can store your edge weights such that the desired data is showing up at just the right time.

Note that this is from last month, though I haven’t seen it submitted.

Note that the article is from the beginning of February.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hanaGames.LifeOfBlackTigerFREE&hl=en-US

1M+ downloads on Android

Huh.

I imagine this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Dodgeball

The game is a variation of dodgeball, in which players from each team attempt to hit players from the other team with a ball in order to eliminate them from the round without leaving their half of the court.