Epic Games says it plans to support its new Linux launcher on as many distributions as possible, specifically naming Fedora, SteamOS, CachyOS and Omarchy. GamingOnLinux's Liam Squires-Hand reports: Speaking to Jake Jones, Communications Director at Epic Games, they said: "Hey Liam! The new Epic Games Launcher is still in Preview and we plan to support as many Linux distributions as possible, including Fedora, SteamOS, Cachy, Omarchy, and more. We're testing and evaluating packaging formats for distribution, and we'll restore AppImage this month."

With that in mind, until things settle down, you might see different packaging types appear or disappear until they decide firmly how they plan to support different distributions each with their own different packaging formats. Or, perhaps they might see the Flatpak light and just put it up officially on Flathub. Would make it even easier for SteamOS then too with Flathub, since it would just be a quick pop to Desktop Mode to install it directly in the Discover app.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

France has accused Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of being behind last month's cyberattacks on fridges and freezers across the country. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the attack was "unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression," adding those who were responsible would be hit with sanctions "at the European level." The BBC reports: The cyber-attack last month saw fridges and freezers in hundreds of supermarkets across France heated up, which spoilt fresh and frozen food estimated to be worth millions of euros. Then last week, dozens of supermarkets across several other European countries were also impacted by a cyber-attack that targeted fridges and freezers. It is not known if the instances are linked.

Barrot said the attack on France's supermarkets "marks the first large-scale cyber-attack aimed at sabotage on our national territory, and it constitutes a major attack on the nation's interests and the security of the French people." He said the government had summoned the Iranian ambassador to Paris to "lodge a very strong protest against this extremely grave act." France will take "any other necessary and proportionate measures" to respond to the incident and "deter anyone who might seek to repeat it," Barrot added.

Separately on Monday, the Paris prosecutor said an investigation had been opened into the head of an offensive cyber unit associated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as well as his two deputies. Laure Beccuau named the unit as Shahid Kaveh, which she said had an affiliation with the electronic and cyber centre of the IRGC. Shahid Kaveh is the name given to a cluster of hackers thought to be directly employed by the Iranian regime. [...] The French government has not said how it reached the conclusion that Iran was responsible, and attribution of cyber attacks is extremely hard as hackers are able to hide their locations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic has released Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 with "improvements in areas like coding, reasoning, and vision," while cutting Fable's input price and claiming 30% faster responses. TechCrunch reports: It's Anthropic's first model release since the arrival of a third-party report from the assessment group METR, which suggested the lab might be approaching recursive self-improvement (RSI) -- or the ability for AI models to carry on model training independently. The METR report found internal models were speeding up Anthropic's AI progress by roughly 2x, although many uncertainties remain. Still, Anthropic's release notes significant ongoing challenges in accurately testing model capabilities. "Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 each voice suspicion that they are being evaluated more often than any of our recent models, which challenges our ability to assess how they will act in real-world settings. As these settings expand and capabilities increase with future models, we expect this challenge to grow."

Anthropic maintains that the new version of Mythos does not have the ability to act covertly against its user, a verdict that's detailed further in Mythos 5.2's system card. "Claude Mythos 5.2 shows stronger covert capabilities than prior Claude models on several of our evaluations, particularly when its reasoning is hidden from the monitor," the system card reads. "That said, we believe that low levels of absolute performance on our new covert evaluations support claims that rely on detection of harmful actions in high-stakes situations." Fable 5.2 has been available to select parties in pre-release for some time, and Anthropic says the model has already "solved two open problems in theoretical physics, formalized Fermat's Last Theorem, and supported numerous other research projects."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PARIJS (ANP/AFP) - Emmanuel Macron vindt dat de inzet van AI een halt moet worden toegeroepen op het moment dat het een bedreiging vormt voor kinderen. Dat zei de Franse president in een interview met de krant Les Échos.

"Als er een risico is voor kinderen bij bepaalde AI-toepassingen, dan moet het worden verboden", aldus Macron, die daarbij vooral wees op risico's voor de mentale gezondheid van kinderen. De president maakt zich om die reden ook al langere tijd sterk voor een socialmediaverbod voor kinderen.

Dinsdag zal een expertcommissie Macron een reeks aanbevelingen voorleggen over beschermende maatregelen. Macron sorteert vast voor op strengere Europese regelgeving, waarin AI-modellen "eerst worden beoordeeld voordat kinderen ze kunnen gebruiken".

Maandag sprak Macron in een videoconferentie met "een vijftigtal actoren", onder wie regeringsleiders en topmensen uit de AI-sector als Sam Altman (OpenAI) en Dario Amodei (Anthropic). Volgens Macron werden zij het onder meer eens over de noodzaak van onafhankelijke beoordelaars.

Son Lux’s newest music video is an atmospheric mini-epic. Last month, the video premiered at MASS MoCA—the piece is a joint commission by the museum and Pioneer Works and made in collaboration with Alex Cook—as an immersive, 17-minute installation titled “Out Into Us (Slow Down),” complementing the release of the band’s ninth studio album.

“In the last decade, social media has created a reality in which music is often eclipsed by visuals, served up in an endless buffet of bite-sized and contextless flavors,” says a statement. For this multimedia work, the artists leaned instead toward deeply felt human experiences, like how long it can take to do or understand something. Portraying a multigenerational family seated around a table and passing the time in one another’s company, the video transports us back at least a century as scenes of a giant dust cloud evoke the Dust Bowl.

Cook conjures tension, atmosphere, and moments of disrupted reality in a slippage of past and present. The Dust Bowl itself was inherently linked to an intense period when homesteaders, dreaming of prosperous lives for themselves, plowed vast swaths of prairie for their farms. In the process, they uprooted native grasses that held the topsoil in place. Then, exacerbated by drought, millions of acres of topsoil eroded completely from the Great Plains’ persistent and powerful winds, sending farms and habitats into ruin.

Taking surprisingly meta turns, the the sound and visuals provoke curiosity, togetherness, hope, and grief. The family passes delicious dishes around the table and works on a puzzle depicting an idealized landscape in the tradition of the Hudson River School—a far cry from their depicted reality, yet a type of historical propaganda that helped entice homesteaders to the plains. These bucolic tableaux and their romantic ideals could even be said to have functioned something like social media does today, as a way to spread information. Instead, Cook and Son Lux confront us—watch to the end—with quite another definition of a screen.

“Sound can create a sanctuary—a space in which we can remember what it feels like to be present in our bodies and lost in our thoughts,” says the band’s guitarist, Rafiq Bhatia. “When you decrease the playback speed of a piece of music, you can really linger in its hidden corners and shadows: passing tensions and moments of release become whole rooms you can step into and stay for a while.”

See more on Cook’s Vimeo.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Son Lux’s Music Video for ‘Out Into Us’ Is an Atmospheric Foray Between Past and Present appeared first on Colossal.

The 81-year-old’s postapocalyptic novel The End of Everything takes home the £50,000 award

• Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan on M John Harrison’s win: A visionary writer gets the recognition he deserves

Eighty-one-year-old M John Harrison has won the Booker prize for The End of Everything, a postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast, becoming the oldest winner in the award’s history.

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that while plenty of previous winners had dabbled in science fiction, Harrison’s was “the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world”. She called it “a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page”.

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison (Profile, £16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide June 1977

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

2D images that appear in the cross-section of a long cylinder are common across a bunch of craft domains: Glass, Hard Candy, Polymer Clay, Cookies, and Pottery.

I recently took a class on how to pull cane in lampwork glass and I am not terribly good at, but it is very cool. And it is also something you can do in a lot of other media! A few of the best, most elaborate examples of people working in this method: Loren Stump - Glass Elena Herburg - Glass Kim Snowden - polymer clay -- especially her repro of The Kiss. Sticky Australia - hard candy Nicole MacDougall - cookies Cary Rapaport - pottery

Fat Burns ☮ has added a photo to the pool:

Many thanks for your visits, faves and comments. Cheers.

Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater - love the emu bush flowers.
Scientific Name: Acanthagenys rufogularis
Description: The medium-sized Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater has a grey crown scalloped brown, a mottled grey-brown back, a white cheek with spiny bristles to below the ear, and an orange-brown throat and chest. The underparts are white, streaked brown, the wings are grey, with white-edged feathers, and the long tail is dark grey-brown with white tips. The pale blue-grey eye is surrounded by bare pinkish skin and the pink bill has a black tip. Young birds are browner and have yellow cheek spines. Spiny-cheeked Honeyeaters are sociable and aggressive, and are often seen or heard in large flocks, foraging high in trees.
Similar species: The Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater looks like a small wattlebird, but has a distinctive orange chest and throat, white cheek spines and a bicoloured (pink and black) bill.
Distribution: The Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater is found across mainland Australia, especially in the arid interior, reaching the coast from Esperance, Western Australia to Melbourne, Victoria. It is also found on Kangaroo Island. It is absent from the east coast, and is not found in the northern tropics from the Kimberley region, Western Australia to Cape York, Queensland.
Habitat: The Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater is found in dry woodlands, mallee and acacia scrub, especially with a porcupine grass understorey. Also found in coastal scrubs, woodlands along rivers and, occasionally, mangroves. May be found in orchards.
Seasonal movements: Sedentary in the south of its range, partially migratory in the north.
Feeding: The Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater feeds mainly on nectar and fruit, but may also eat insects, reptiles and baby birds. It forages in the dense foliage and outer branches of trees, but may sometimes feed on the ground or take insects in the air. Around Barcaldine, they love the emu bush flowers, and come in droves when it is flowering, as do other honeyeaters.
Breeding: The Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater builds a deep, suspended, cup-shaped nest of plant fibres and grasses bound with spider webs and lined with soft materials, which is placed from 1 m to 13 m from the ground. The female incubates the eggs alone, but both sexes feed and care for the young.
Calls: Gargling or bubbling notes and whistles; also, single loud 'tock'. Can mimic other species.
Minimum Size: 23cm
Maximum Size: 26cm
Average size: 24cm
Average weight: 52g
Breeding season: June to January; can breed year round.
Clutch Size: 2 to 3
Incubation: 14 days
Nestling Period: 15 days
(Source: www.birdsinbackyards.net)

© Chris Burns 2026
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This image may not be copied, reproduced, distributed, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying and recording without my written consent.

Watch the Sun’s atmosphere pulse and flow in extreme UV. Images are from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and “conformed, repaired, graded, blended, rescaled & retimed” by Seán Doran, whose video work is always incredible.

It would be great to see this in IMAX or some other large screen format, like in the observatory on the ship in Sunshine.

Tags: Sean Doran