Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Nov. 30, 2025.
After 10 years, clean energy startup Modern Hydrogen has laid off most of its employees due to funding changes and is undergoing a “broader restructuring effort.” … Read More
The Washington-based company backed by Bill Gates and NVIDIA could be the first to deploy a utility-scale, next-generation reactor in America. … Read More
The announcement confirms reporting by GeekWire last week that revealed Amazon was building out a new rapid-delivery hub at a former Amazon Fresh Pickup site in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. … Read More
Does everyone in Seattle hate AI? That’s one of the surprising topics to arise this week in response to a spicy blog post penned by a former Microsoft engineer. … Read More
Yoodli is on a roll. The Seattle startup, which sells AI-powered software to help people practice real-world conversations such as sales calls and feedback sessions, announced a $40 million Series B round on Tuesday to fuel growth. … Read More
Microsoft’s shareholder meeting Friday morning highlighted a sharp divide: executives promoting a “planet-scale” AI future while investors voiced concerns about censorship, bias, privacy, and geopolitical entanglements. … Read More
There are some features that are easy to immediately dismiss as gimmicks. Then, over time, they start to make sense. Apple’s "Personas" are one such feature, one Samsung and Google seriously need to imitate.
Today, downloading a free Unix-like system for a PC or a single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi is routine. In the late '80s and early '90s, as computer hardware improved, these systems brought Unix power down from minicomputers and workstations to the personal level before the arrival of Linux.
Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat. Most of my friends and relatives know that I'm a self-confessed geek and will often buy me tech gifts that they're sure I'll love. Sometimes, however, they would have been better off saving their money. If you're looking to buy something for a tech lover, please don't get them these gifts.
If you’ve ever had to reinstall everything on your Mac, or even on a second machine, you’ll know what a struggle it is. Even keeping track of what’s installed can be a pain if, like me, you’re constantly trying out new software.
Melissa McCarthy served up some of her classic physical comedy in a new Saturday Night Livesketch about what happens when a sales associate is just really, really nice to you on a particularly bad day.
Playing a severely touch-starved and jealous suburban woman, McCarthy doesn't quite know how to respond to cast member Jeremy Culhane's kindly grocery store employee, who has just handed her some soft and tasty Raclette. McCarthy, the owner of a pack of ill-behaved dogs, gives Culhane a family heirloom, pats him with soft caresses, and violates several other HR policies, all in the name of a little bite of cheese. I get it.
The spirit of Christmas has taken over 30 Rock, and this week's Saturday Night Live host, Melissa McCarthy, joined in with a sketch about spreading joy through acts of kindness.
Well, kind of.
Following her young neighbor's heartwarming decision to shovel her snowy path, McCarthy — the elderly, seemingly innocuous grandma next door — decided to return the favor, with a series of gifts that escalate in terrifying, hilarious ways.
A bully (Marcello Hernandez) hog-tied on the front lawn, two women and a pimp on the doorstep, a gun in a nicely-wrapped box — it's like some kind of messed-up Grinch fable. Grandma might be a psychopathic killer, but her misguided attempts are still spreading holiday cheer.
FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE arrived this week, notes this report from The Register, which calls it the latest release "of the Unix world's leading alternative to Linux."
As well as numerous bug fixes and upgrades to many of its components, the major changes in this version are reductions in the number of platforms the OS supports, and in how it's built and how its component software is packaged.
FreeBSD 15 has significantly reduced support for 32-bit platforms. Compared to FreeBSD 14 in 2023, there are no longer builds for x86-32, POWER, or ARM-v6. As the release notes put it:
"The venerable 32-bit hardware platforms i386, armv6, and 32-bit powerpc have been retired. 32-bit application support lives on via the 32-bit compatibility mode in their respective 64-bit platforms. The armv7 platform remains as the last supported 32-bit platform. We thank them for their service."
Now FreeBSD supports five CPU architectures — two Tier-1 platforms, x86-64 and AArch64, and three Tier-2 platforms, armv7 and up, powerpc64le, and riscv64.
Arguably, it's time. AMD's first 64-bit chips started shipping 22 years ago. Intel launched the original x86 chip, the 8086 in 1978. These days, 64-bit is nearly as old as the entire Intel 80x86 platform was when the 64-bit versions first appeared. In comparison, a few months ago, Debian
13 also dropped its x86-32 edition — six years after Canonical launched its first x86-64-only distro, Ubuntu 19.10.
Another significant change is that this is the first version built under the new pkgbase system, although it's still experimental and optional for now. If you opt for a pkgbase installation, then the core OS itself is installed from multiple separate software packages,
meaning that the whole system can be updated using the package
manager. Over in the Linux world, this is the norm, but Linux is a
very different beast... The plan is that by FreeBSD 16, scheduled
for December 2027, the restructure will be complete, the old
distribution sets will be removed, and the current freebsd-update
command and its associated infrastructure can be turned off.
Another significant change is reproducible
builds, a milestone the project reached
in late October. This change is part of a multi-project
initiative toward ensuring deterministic compilation: to be able
to demonstrate that a certain set of source files and compilation
directives is guaranteed to produce identical binaries, as a
countermeasure against compromised code. A handy side-effect is that
building the whole OS, including installation media images, no longer
needs root access.
There are of course other new features. Lots of drivers and
subsystems have been updated, and this release has better power
management, including suspend and resume. There's improved wireless
networking, with support for more Wi-Fi chipsets and faster wireless
standards, plus updated graphics drivers... The release announcement calls out the inclusion of OpenZFS
2.4.0-rc4, OpenSSL
3.5.4, and OpenSSH
10.0 p2, and notes the inclusion of some new quantum-resistant
encryption systems...
In general, we found FreeBSD 15 easier and less complicated to
work with than either of the previous major releases.
It should be easier on servers too. The new OCI container support
in FreeBSD 14.2, which we wrote
about a year ago, is more mature now. FreeBSD has its own version
of Podman, and you
can run
Linux containers on FreeBSD. This means you can use Docker
commands and tools, which are familiar to many more developers
than FreeBSD's native Jail system.
"FreeBSD has its own place in servers and the public cloud, but
it's getting easier to run it as a desktop OS as well," the article concludes. "It can run all
the main Linux desktops, including GNOME on Wayland."
"There's no
systemd here, and never will be — and no Flatpak or Snap either,
for that matter.
CNET's experts have tested a dozen new air purifiers with comprehensive new lab tests to evaluate them for particle filtering, noise and energy efficiency. Here are our five new winners.
While OpenAI continues to insist that there are currently no ads — or tests for advertising — live in ChatGPT, the company’s chief research officer also acknowledged that the company “fell short” with recent promotional messages.
There are plenty of well-known models among the 8-bit machines of the 1980s, and most readers could rattle them off without a thought. They were merely the stars among a plethora of others, and even for a seasoned follower of the retrocomputing world, there are fresh models from foreign markets that continue to surprise and delight. [Dave Collins] is treating us to an in-depth look at the VTech VZ-200, a budget machine that did particularly well in Asian markets. On the way, we learn a lot about a very cleverly designed machine.
The meat of the design centres not around the Z80 microprocessor or the 6847 video chip, but the three 74LS chips handling both address decoding and timing for video RAM access. That they managed this with only three devices is the exceptionally clever part. While there are some compromises similar to other minimalist machines in what memory ranges can be addressed, they are not sufficient to derail the experience.
Perhaps the most ingenuity comes in using not just the logic functions of the chips, but their timings. The designers of this circuit really knew the devices and used them to their full potential. Here in 2025, this is something novice designers using FPGAs have to learn; back then, it was learned the hard way on the breadboard.
We answer questions about replacing long HDMI runs with wireless extender options, diagnosing YouTube TV lag on a TCL set, and whether plasma TVs still make sense today.
Streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music give you access to hundreds of millions of songs, but they're quite restrictive in how you can use them. They may not include some of the music you want to listen to, and you may not be able to play those streaming services through some of your speakers. Music Assistant allows you to play music from a wide range of sources on almost any speaker in your home.
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