Eliana Willis

Lyudmila Lucienne/Getty ZDNET’s key takeaways New research from Anthropic identifies model characteristics, called persona vectors.  This helps catch bad behavior without impacting performance. Still, developers don’t know enough about why models hallucinate and behave in evil ways.  Why do models hallucinate, make violent suggestions, or overly agree with users? Generally, researchers don’t really know. But […] More

Jack Wallen / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETZDNET’s key takeawaysSlackel is a user-friendly take on the otherwise challenging Slackware.There are four different desktop variations to choose from.Slackel is a great distribution for learning Linux.Slackware has been around since 1993 and has served as the foundation for many Linux distributions, such as the early iterations of SUSE. What sets Slackware apart from other Linux distributions is that it tries to be more UNIX-like than not. Slackware makes as few modifications as possible to upstream software packages, does not anticipate use cases, and provides no GUI installer.It’s that lack of a GUI installer that keeps some users from giving Slackware a try. That’s a shame, because Slackware is a remarkably stable operating system. Fortunately, there are always distributions based on Slackware, one of which is called Slackel.Slackel borrows some tools from Salix (another distribution based on Slackware) and has a user-friendly GUI installer. Slackel can be installed to an internal drive, to external media (such as USB drives), or run as a live instance. In other words, Slackel is the most Linux-like of the UNIX-like distributions. Make sense?Also: Want to save your old computer? Try one of these 8 Linux distros for freeThink of it this way: Slackel is to Slackware what Ubuntu is to Linux. This distribution aims to make what might otherwise be challenging much less so, and it succeeds.First off, the Slackel installer makes installing a Slackware-based distribution much easier. It’s a point-and-click affair, but do know this: you have to take a few extra steps, as Slackel requires you to prepare your drive first. The preparation is done outside of the installer, but Slackel does include the GParted tool, which makes this easy. You’ll first have to create an MS-DOS partition table, and then create your ext4 partition that will be used for the installation. Outside of that, the installation is as easy as any Linux installer.I hope I haven’t scared you off yet.  More

Google / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETTwo weeks ago, Google and OpenAI touted their models’ award-winning performance at the International Math Olympiad (IMO). Now, Google is making a version of its model available to the public. Also: This one feature could make GPT-5 a true game changer (if OpenAI gets it right)On Friday, Google launched Deep Think in the Gemini app for Google Ultra subscribers, a premium subscription tier that costs $250 per year or $125 for the first three months. Although the model is a variation of the one that achieved the gold-medal standard at IMO, it is faster for everyday tasks. Internal evaluations suggested the model reaches bronze-level on the 2025 IMO benchmark. More

Jack Wallen / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETZDNET’s key takeawaysSystem performance is key to getting the most out of Linux.There are several command line and GUI tools to make this task easy.Here you’ll learn about htop, glances, Mission Center, and more apps. Linux users are notorious for wanting to know as much information as they can about their systems and how they run. There are even apps and widgets (such as Conky) that can be installed and configured to display such information right on the desktop.Also: 5 lightweight Linux distributions that will bring your old PC back to lifeIf you want to monitor system performance on your Linux desktop, what apps should you use? Well, there are several, but not all of them are created equal. There are GUI apps and command-line apps, each of which has its pros and cons. I’m going to introduce you to the apps I prefer for this task — some GUI, some command-line based. 1. htop For the longest time, top was my tool of choice. Eventually, however, I realized that top could be a bit frustrating to use and didn’t include features like color or mouse interaction. For those features, I turn to htop, which is one of the best command-line–based system monitoring tools for Linux. Also: The Linux tool you forgot about: How Synaptic makes software installation a breezeWith htop, you can kill and filter processes, view processes in a tree view, view memory and CPU usage, sort processes by CPU usage, view tasks, system load averages and even uptime. One very handy feature is the ability to kill processes within the htop interface. You can view the process with a command like htop -p 1234, select the listed process and then press F9 to kill it. The htop tool is free to use and can be installed via your distribution’s standard repositories. More

JuSun/Getty ZDNET’s key takeaways Linux is highly secure, but you should still have a firewall. You should know if your ISP’s hardware (gateway) uses a firewall. One of the easiest Linux firewalls is UFW and its GUI sidekick, GUFW. I’ve been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Over those years, I’ve experienced only one security […] More

Voltme Hypercore 10K power bank <!–> ZDNET’s key takeaways Voltme’s Hypercore 10K power bank is available on Amazon for $23. It’s very compact and easy to carry, with both USB-C and USB-A ports to charge two devices simultaneously. Its small but chunky, as some might prefer a flatter charger. –> Power banks are a tradeoff: […] More