Agreguesi i feed

OpenAI is reportedly considering sharp price cuts for paid access to its AI models as competition with Anthropic intensifies and both companies race for users ahead of potential IPOs. "The company is weighing significant cuts to what it charges for tokens, the unit of measurement artificial-intelligence firms use to bill for their products," the Wall Street Journal said, adding that it was "in anticipation of similar cuts the company expects at Anthropic." CNBC reports: The ChatGPT producer, which did not immediately respond to CNBC's requests for comment, currently charges consumers in tiered subscriptions of $8, $20 and $100 and above each month for access to its flagship GPT-5.5 models. Anthropic conversely charges users $17 each month with an annual subscription to Claude Pro, and $100 and above monthly for a subscription to Claude Max. OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO on Monday, just a week after Anthropic made its own filing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Opendoor is shutting down its India operations less than two years after opening offices there. Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a post from Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian: "I shared this note earlier today with the entire team at Opendoor. Today we began to say goodbye to our colleagues in India as we wind down our India operations. Our customers are in America, and that's where our operational work belongs." TechCrunch reports: In announcing the decision on Wednesday, CEO Kaz Nejatian cited a push to bring operational work back to the U.S., where Opendoor's customers are, and a shift toward smaller AI-native teams. The company did not respond to requests for comment on how many employees were affected or how much of the decision was driven by AI efficiency. But the announcement quickly gained traction across Silicon Valley, where founders, investors, and outsourcing experts see it as an early example of how AI is reshaping the economics that made India a global hub for back-office operations. [...] Some investors viewed the decision as a sign of what AI could mean for India's vast outsourcing workforce. "As manual work gets replaced by AI, a lot of jobs will be lost in India," wrote Sheel Mohnot, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures. Others viewed Opendoor as evidence of a larger shift in how companies are organized. Keshav Lohia, a venture capitalist at Emergent Ventures, described the decision as a "watershed moment" for AI-driven operations, arguing that advances in AI are beginning to challenge the cost-arbitrage model that made India a popular offshoring destination. Phil Fersht, chief executive of HFS Research, an advisory firm that tracks the global outsourcing and business services industry, told TechCrunch that the development should not be viewed simply as jobs moving from India to the U.S. The more important shift, he said, is that AI is reducing the amount of operational labor companies require in the first place, allowing firms to run leaner organizations regardless of location. "This is not an isolated restructuring," Fersht said. "It is part of a much broader pattern we are starting to see as companies redesign operations around AI, automation, and much leaner workflows." Fersht argued that the winners would be companies that combine AI, software and human expertise to deliver outcomes without continually adding headcount, a model he described as "Services-as-Software." While Opendoor may be one of the first high-profile examples, he said it is unlikely to be the last. Some investors are already extrapolating beyond individual companies. Varun Rekhi, a venture capitalist at Speedinvest, argued that if AI reduces demand for labor-intensive services, it could eventually pressure one of India's most important export industries, which is built around supplying talent and expertise to global corporations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty told staff that Xbox's current economics "cannot continue," citing more than $20 billion in spending over five years, declining revenue outside Activision Blizzard King, console supply constraints tied to RAMaggedon, and an overextended studio portfolio. The memo stops short of announcing layoffs, but a Bloomberg report says substantial Xbox cuts are expected after Microsoft's fiscal year ends on June 30. Engadget reports: The takeaways are pretty grim. For starters, the simple math of Xbox's revenue isn't adding up to success. "Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time," the execs state. "Going forward, this cannot continue." They also acknowledge the impact of RAMaggedon: "We are currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy, and we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix." (Helix, in this case, is Project Helix, the codename for Xbox's new console.) Then there's the kicker, a renewed admission that Xbox still can't support the many studios it acquired in the late 2010s in an effort to grow its first-party game ambitions. "We have found ourselves over extended as we executed on changing strategies in a landscape of more readily available content," the pair said, noting elsewhere that with so many good games, not to mention the plethora of other forms of entertainment available, "Going forward, our competition is attention."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: China was likely behind an online influence operation to sway U.S. perceptions of artificial intelligence technology and reshape the debate in Washington around the infrastructure needed to support it, according to research from OpenAI published Wednesday. OpenAI said it caught the influence campaign because China-backed operatives were using ChatGPT to create content for the social media campaign. [...] OpenAI's researchers identified two clusters of ChatGPT users "likely originating from China" who used the AI chatbot to generate social media content "in support of apparent covert influence operations" promoting certain narratives about AI. This includes claims that data center build-outs are raising electricity costs for the average American family and that President Donald Trump has weaponized tariffs to keep the U.S. ahead in the global tech race. These accounts have since been banned, the report said. One cluster of users asked ChatGPT to generate images and comments pushing these narratives. These comments were then posted on social media by "batches of accounts" posing as Americans, [said Ben Nimmo, principal investigator of intelligence and investigations at OpenAI]. Another cluster identified by researchers used AI to generate social media content criticizing the Trump administration's tariffs as an attempt to "dominate technological competition." Prompts used for this campaign were submitted in Simplified Chinese and asked that AI-generated content not include Chinese President Xi Jinping and focus solely on Trump -- a possible tell that China was behind the operation, according to the report. Nimmo said that the influence campaign amplified existing public backlash in the U.S. against the creation of new AI data centers, which has resulted in dozens of proposed moratoriums at the local, state and national level. "Neither campaign appears to have gained much authentic engagement," Nimmo said. "They're important for what they reveal about the intentions of influence operators from China, and the narratives they're testing and seeking to amplify, but not for the impact."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:next-20260611 (linux-next) Released:2026-06-11

Longtime Slashdot reader MattSparkes shares a report from NewScientist, captioned: "For years we've had unconfirmed reports, rumors, hints... now we know." From the report: Fully autonomous drones with no human oversight have killed soldiers on the battlefield for the first time. This is according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defense industry, marking a watershed moment in warfare. The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled "Terminator" drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. Russian soldiers were killed. "We tried it," says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. "It's a test. We never implemented it [more widely]." The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage "Terminator mode," in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets. "We just launch it and we know everything will be dead -- everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead," says Kokhanovskyy. "There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing... Everything it sees will be killed." With no way to tell what the automated drones had seen or targeted, human-piloted drones were sent into the area after the test to manually check results. Victims included "a couple of soldiers, one truck," says Kokhanovskyy. While there is no recording of the automated drones attacking these targets, it was concluded that the drones had killed them. Kokhanovskyy says that he was not at the test personally but that it was carried out by an unnamed military unit near the cities of Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar as part of a Ukrainian counteroffensive push. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence did not respond to questions about the test or the current legal position on the use of fully autonomous weapons.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The GNOME Foundation has selected the first recipients who will receive funding through its new Fellowship program, and is delighted to announce that Peter Eisenmann and Sophie Herold will begin work as our first Fellows in July.

Sophie and Peter are both long-running GNOME contributors, with many significant contributions as members of the GNOME community. Sophie is known as developer of apps, libraries, and websites, including Loupe, Pika Backup, Glycin, and welcome.gnome.org. Peter is a long-standing Nautilus maintainer (officially known as the Files app), as well as an experienced contributor to platform libraries, including GTK and GLib.

Both Fellows will spend time working to enhance the long-term sustainability and health of the GNOME project. Sophie will be working to establish a new RFC process for GNOME, which will enhance our project-level governance. She will also be working on more maintainable and secure libraries through Rust adoption. Peter will work to modernize many aspects of the Files app, including thumbnailing, user directory localization, and the use of modern GNOME platform conventions.

Congratulations to Peter and Sophie – we’re genuinely excited to see what you’ll achieve as our first Fellows, and proud to be supporting your work.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who submitted applications to the first round of the Fellowship. We received some genuinely excellent proposals, and would strongly encourage unsuccessful applicants to apply again in future rounds.

Peter and Sophie’s work is made possible by the generosity of GNOME’s supporters. If you’d like to help fund future rounds and support contributors like them, please consider donating.

fjo3 shares a report from The Guardian: Tests reveal that when people are ambling about, they have a natural tendency to turn to the left and walk in an anticlockwise direction. "If you simply ask someone to start walking, whether they are wandering around a museum, a supermarket, or even an empty room, it is surprisingly likely that they will drift counterclockwise," said Dr Inaki Echeverria Huarte at University of Navarra in Spain. As with many critical discoveries in science, the revelation owes a debt to serendipity. During the pandemic, the researchers ran experiments to see how many people could share a space while keeping a safe distance. On reviewing the video, they noticed that crowds overwhelmingly walked in an anticlockwise direction. The surprise set in motion an entire research project. The scientists conducted a series of experiments in which individual pedestrians or small crowds roamed around enclosed spaces. Time and again, the researchers observed the tendency to walk in an anticlockwise direction. Suspecting that cultural norms might play a role, the team joined forces with Dr Claudio Feliciani at the University of Tokyo. He found the same results in Japan. The finding held when the researchers accounted for people being right-handed, right-footed and right-eye dominant, and was seen in both male and female walkers. The only difference they spotted was a more pronounced bias in children. "Each of us carries a small personal bias to turn slightly to one side, and when many people share a space, those tiny biases add up into a net counterclockwise rotation," said Echeverria Huarte. Researchers think the tendency may be tied to biomechanics: people are not perfectly symmetrical, and the way the brain processes sensory information and coordinates muscles may gently tip walkers toward one side. Right-side dominance may also play a role, especially in running, where anticlockwise movement puts more internal force on the right side of the body and may feel more natural to right-leg-dominant athletes. "We have tested several ideas and the bias stubbornly keeps showing up, so the exact mechanism is still an open question," said Echeverria Huarte. The findings have been published in Nature Communications.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Solar generated more U.S. electricity than coal for the first month on record in May 2026, according to new analysis from global energy think tank Ember. Solar supplied 12.8% of U.S. electricity during the month, while coal dropped to 12.2%. That's a dramatic shift in the U.S. power mix. Just five years ago, coal generated 19.7% of U.S. electricity in May, while solar accounted for only 5.4%. U.S. solar generation hit a record 45.5 terawatt-hours (TWh) in May 2026, up 17% from May 2025 and higher than the previous record set last July. Ember says another record could be broken again this summer. Solar output usually peaks in June or July, but its share of the electricity mix is often highest in spring, when strong sunshine lines up with milder temperatures before summer cooling demand ramps up. May was also the first time solar became the third-largest individual source of electricity in the U.S., behind only natural gas and nuclear. (If solar is included with all other renewables, then they're the second-largest source of electricity as an overall category of electricity.) Meanwhile, coal keeps sliding (and will continue to slide). Coal generation hit an all-time monthly low of 39.3 TWh in April 2026. Output rose slightly in May to 43.4 TWh, but it was still 11% lower than May 2025 levels. Even with that small rebound, coal couldn't keep pace with solar's rapid growth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A researcher using the name Nightmare Eclipse has released a new Microsoft Defender zero-day exploit called "RoguePlanet," which reportedly works on fully patched Windows 10 and 11 systems and can spawn a command prompt with SYSTEM privileges through a Defender race condition. The release came just hours after Microsoft fixed two previously disclosed flaws during its latest monthly Patch Tuesday drop -- its largest Patch Tuesday release ever. BleepingComputer reports: The researcher shared a proof-of-concept exploit on Tuesday afternoon in a self-hosted Git repository after saying that GitHub and GitLab repositories hosting their exploits had previously been removed by Microsoft. "The exploit is a race condition, so it's a hit or miss. I have managed to get a 100% success rate on some machines while it struggled to work on others," Nightmare Eclipse wrote in the repository. [...] Cybersecurity firm ThreatLocker told BleepingComputer that they successfully reproduced the flaw in their testing and confirmed the exploit worked against fully patched Windows 11 systems with KB5094126 installed, and shared a video demonstrating it. "Our initial analysis confirms that the RoguePlanet exploit is viable and performs as described. Organizations using application allowlisting can prevent the exploit from executing, providing an effective layer of protection against this attack," Danny Jenkins, CEO of ThreatLocker, told BleepingComputer. According to Nightmare Eclipse, RoguePlanet was originally developed as a remote code execution vulnerability that exploited Microsoft Defender's handling of files hosted on remote SMB shares. "In initial development, it was confirmed that this vulnerability was a remote code execution," the researcher explained in a blog post. "It required an attacker to coerce a victim to open a .vhd(x) in a remote SMB server, succesful exploitation resulted in defender overwriting its own files and obviously the end outcome was an RCE." The researcher says another attack scenario could lead to remote code execution simply by coercing a victim into opening an SMB share if symlink evaluation settings were enabled. However, the researcher claims Microsoft silently hardened Defender in mid-May by patching "mpengine!SysIO*" API, which blocked junction attacks. "Rewriting RoguePlanet to make it functional again drained my soul and I couldn't complete the other scenarios and for now it remains unclear if RoguePlanet is limited to LPE or there is some sort of way to turn it into an RCE," the researcher wrote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visa is integrating its payment network with ChatGPT so AI agents can shop and complete purchases on users' behalf. "It means AI agents can not only recommend products but complete the purchase on the user's behalf, at potentially any merchant that accepts Visa," reports the Associated Press. "The payment network's previous attempts at this technological leap were confined to a single retailer or a small set of enrolled merchants." From the report: OpenAI will provide the technology to allow agents to interact, make decisions and initiate purchases through ChatGPT. Visa, the world's largest payment network outside of China, will provide the payment authorization and fraud monitoring needed to do this at scale. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless," said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa. Speaking at a company event Wednesday in San Francisco Wednesday, Forestell gave an example of a customer telling ChatGPT they're looking for a pair of wireless headphones under $150. The chatbot would find a pair for sale under those parameters and buy it on behalf of the customer. Visa and OpenAI did not disclose the financial terms of the collaboration and did not give details on the fees merchants or customers would have to pay. [...] Visa says the feature will have guardrails like spending limits, required approval steps and approved merchants for shopping in order to protect consumers and minimize fraud.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve is discontinuing physical Steam Gift Cards and says it will stop restocking them as retailers sell through remaining inventory. In a blog post, the company blamed persistent gift card scams as the reason, though Steam Digital Gift Cards will remain available and existing physical cards can still be redeemed. PC Guide reports: Valve says it has "responded to gift card scams over the years" -- but this doesn't stop scammers from adapting. The Steam creator has actively worked with retailers and law enforcement, among other precautions, to counteract scams, but says the issue can never be fully resolved. Steam Digital Gift Cards will continue to operate as normal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last year, Meta radically overhauled the rules around what content it would allow on its platforms. The company claimed that its own efforts policing speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed. "We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions," Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, wrote in a blog post at the time. Over a year later, new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the immediate impact of these changes. The researchers analyzed about 8 million Facebook comments and found that abusive and racist comments targeting both Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of abusive comments documented by the researchers saw even sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period. The report cites specific examples of gendered and racist abuse directed at lawmakers like US representatives Jasmine Crockette of Texas and Byron Daniels of Florida. These comments were not taken down by Meta. The CCDH researchers also found that threats against President Trump more than doubled in the six months after Meta overhauled its rules. Many of the comments, which included direct threats to his life, could have been classified as felony offenses, the researchers say. [...] Comments that violated Meta's policies around violent threats quadrupled, from 1,800 in the six months before the changes to 7,600 in the six months after. Hate speech comments also quadrupled, from 6,900 to 30,000. Comments that broke Meta's rules on bullying and harassment doubled, from 15,700 to 39,900.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BYD plans to install 3,000 ultra-fast "Flash Chargers" across Europe by the end of 2027, with the first stations already appearing in Germany and the UK. The Verge reports: At an estimated cost of 580,000 euros (about $670,000) per charger according to the Financial Times, that would mean a total spend of roughly $2 billion to install the network. The 1,500kW charging stations are significantly more powerful than Tesla's 500kW V4 Superchargers, though Tesla already has 20,000 chargers installed in Europe. BYD, which has been steadily overtaking Tesla in global sales, says its chargers shouldn't add undue strain to the energy grid, as they'll charge cars from batteries which can be topped up overnight. Any car with a standard CCS charge port can use the Flash Chargers, though only BYD cars equipped with the company's new Blade Battery can hit the top speeds. Right now there's only one of those in Europe, the 115,000 euros ($133,000) Denza Z9 GT -- it charges to 70 percent in five minutes on the new chargers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Asahi Linux team is warning Apple Silicon users not to upgrade to the macOS 27 beta because Apple's changes to the boot picker and Startup Disk app make Asahi partitions invisible, preventing Linux from booting. The Register reports: The team added: "If you insist on trying out macOS 27 as soon as possible, please ensure you install a secondary copy of macOS 26 first, or install macOS 27 itself on a secondary volume." They've also updated the installer to prevent installs from running on macOS 27 for now. For anyone who ignored all of the above, "we will not support users who have installed the macOS 27 beta without ensuring at least one stable version of macOS is installed." Considering macOS 27 is in beta, the issue may be accidental rather than an attempt by Apple to block Linux on its hardware. The Asahi team said it has filed bug report. The good news for anyone who pulled the trigger on installing the macOS 27 beta is that although the partition might not be visible, it hasn't gone anywhere. The Asahi team wrote: "If you have already upgraded to the beta and noticed that your Asahi partition has disappeared, do not stress. Your Asahi partition is still there, and you have not lost any data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Munich regional court has ruled (PDF) that Google can be held directly liable for false claims in AI Overviews. The case involved AI Overviews falsely linking two publishers to scams and shady business practices, with the court rejecting Google's argument that users could simply check the sources themselves. The Decoder reports: Google's AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results "in its own words and according to its own structure," the ruling says. In the case at hand, for example, it opened with confident claims like "Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices," then built its own structure with a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users. The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements." Google built the AI, Google offered it to users, so Google owns what it produces, "because it alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates." The court also examined existing rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which gave traditional search engines and autocomplete limited liability. The BGH had argued that search engine operators were only liable as indirect infringers because they merely made third-party content findable. A proactive duty to check results would threaten how search engines work. The Munich court found that this reasoning doesn't apply to AI overviews. A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate "independent, new, and substantive statements" by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. And only Google can check those statements, the court said, "at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them." The court also noted that the AI overview is "by no means absolutely necessary" for using the internet. Traditional search results already help users sort through information, the AI overview is just an extra feature. At the hearing, Google argued that users could check the linked sources themselves to verify if the AI summary was correct. It also said that these users knew "that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted." The court rejected this.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seattle has enacted a one-year moratorium on new datacenters, making it the largest U.S. city to do so as the backlash against AI infrastructure grows across the country. The city council voted unanimously in favor of the ban. The Guardian reports: Lawmakers have framed the pause as an opportunity to draft regulations specifically targeting the electricity-hungry datacenters being built nationwide to serve the AI sector, and to protect local residents from environmental risks and rising electricity bills. According to Seattle mayor Katie Wilson, the moratorium will also let city officials determine whether datacenters are a "good use of urban land," and potentially impose new stipulations on their approval, such as requiring developers to invest in local transit and housing initiatives in exchange for construction permits. "There are times when public pressure forces elected officials to do something they don't want to do, but in other cases, public pressure just supports and helps to spur on elected officials to do things that they already want to do," said Wilson. "I think this was one of those latter cases." [...] An amendment to the moratorium that passed unanimously last week allows existing datacenters in Seattle to apply for expansions requiring up to 20 megawatts of additional power during the year-long pause. Activists are concerned that the provision may lead to a spike in datacenters' demand for power while the moratorium is in place, and may undermine the premise of the pause. Lawmakers justified the amendment as a way to differentiate between the datacenters that already exist in Seattle and serve a civic purpose, like those powering health facilities and emergency-call systems, from large-scale centers designed to serve the AI sector.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Terry Godier wrote a beautiful essay "The Boring Internet". The internet isn't dying, he argues, just the commercial veneer glued on top of it is. Underneath all the engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, there's still an older, slower, more federated web. One built on protocols nobody owns. RSS feeds still work (thank you, Aaron), people can set up websites and blogs.

Lets start a webring in 2026

Don't worry, I haven't pushed too many pixels and gone a little cuckoo. But it's a fun exercise to remind what the web once was. We'll silently skip over the fact that I actually started using gopher first, but even web surfing didn't begin on a search engine back in the day. It was web rings, later followed by index sites.

Start

Not long ago I posted about designing app icons for 3rd party GNOME app developers. The post generated quite some buzz and some old and new faces started showing up to help with the backlog. So obviously I'd like to take you on a webring tour of all the designers responsible for making the GNOME app ecosystem a little less awkward to browse on Flathub.

Let me introduce you to Brage. He's been around for a couple of years now, helping to tame the flames of the reddit community, helping with the GNOME Circle project to improve the quality of GNOME apps in the wild, creating illustrations for initial states in apps, authoring some noteworthy apps himself. So thank you, Brage, welcome to the 90s!

Next Up: Brage Fuglseth

Gom is a very old object mapper I wrote to bridge GObject to SQLite. It made a lot of assumptions about the world based on when it was prototyped.

The past couple years had me using it again for the documentation search in Manuals. Typically, I would have just built Manuals to parse all the XML files on disk and hold them in memory. That’s how both Devhelp and Builder always did things. Once we started supporting Flatpak SDKs that was no longer realistic. You could have numerous SDKs all with copies of the overlapping data and it just became easier to have a query model.

One of the more performance critical limitations was the locking model. When gom-1.0 was written, it was not common for distributions to compile SQLite with locking support. So you just created a single thread and did your work over there.

Bolting fulltext search and many other missing features onto the old ABI just wasn’t realistic. Especially when I’ve wanted to make the thing properly async for years. One of my other projects, Libdex is just right over there and perfect for this sort of problem.

The landscape changed and so do our horizons.

A new informed ABI

In the years after Gom was prototyped, I worked at a commercial database company and learned a great deal about implementing the internals of both that database and more traditional RDBMS. That left a certain cringe on my mouth whenever looking at my code predating it. Knowing how things get done inside the database allows for building better APIs to interact with it.

This time everything is async. Queries are modeled like you do with a compiler. Lowered into the back-end specific implementation. There can be an entity map and real transactions which allows you to read back the same instance despite which query inflated it.

The Center

Your early stage objects are the GomRepository, GomDriver, and GomRegistry.

The registry describes the entities that can exist within the repository. This is handy because it allows us to pre-compile information into a model that is both immutable and fast at runtime. Compare that to methods like g_object_class_list_properties() which is a performance bottleneck of its own.

The driver is very obvious. It is our abstraction layer for the database engines. Currently we have support for SQLite and PostgreSQL.

The repository is the center of the center. It is how you query, insert, update, delete, transact, and more. It is likely your application instance owns one of these unless of course you use Gom as your file format in which case you’ll have one per “document”.

Two Access Models

This new version of Gom can support either the entity mapping you’re used to or; optionally, raw access to relations/projections via the GomCursor.

As the cursor moves through the resulting rows you will have access to all the projections requested in the query. Though it holds enough information to allow you to gom_cursor_materialize() the row into an GomEntity subclass.

If you want a snapshot of that cursor row without materializing, you can use GomRecord which can also conveniently be used in GListModel for integration into GTK applications.

Most of the time, you’ll use materialization. And even then it is likely to happen through automated collections rather than with a cursor directly. More on that later.

Sessions

As I mentioned, there was no concept of transactions previously.

In this iteration we have GomSession. It is your standard identity-map layer with transaction-scoping. If you perform multiple queries for the same record, the session will ensure you get the same instance back. hat is essential when you do local mutations on an instance and what to see that reflected in followup queries.

Additionally, it makes it nice to have multiple views of an object with an editor or listview and needing them to stay in sync.

Relationship Modeling

Support for relationships was adhoc previously. We had some functions named in ways that made you think you could, but I assure you, they were not well tested.

This time around you can model your GomEntity with 1:1, 1:M, M:M, inverse, self-referencing, all while handling proper delete rules. Combing this with the session support mentioned previously is crucial.

So now you should be able to show related models easily in GtkListView while keeping the paginated-and-lazy model beneath it transactional.

Migrations

In the previous version migrations were dynamic, but largely controlled by Gom itself. Very inflexible.

This time around we have things broken down into Migrator and Migration.

You can use built-in implementations like the EntityMigrator or implement your own. CustomMigrator makes that easy. Especially since you can inject your own migrations at just the right point.

Internally, libgom-2 can snapshot your GomRegistry at specific versions based on the provided metadata. Then it performs a diff between two versions of the registry to determine what migration work must be done.

You can just as easily use a SqlMigration with custom SQL scripts. This stuff is all highly composable now to get exactly what you need.

Live List Models

I’ve written many ways to get live SQLite results into GTK over the past two decades. I think one of the first was a GtkTreeModel implementation for GTK 2 which could do it. With that in mind, it was still rather annoying when making Manuals so I set off to make that convenient.

We have GomRecordListModel, GomEntityListModel, GomRelatedListModel, GomQueryModel all of which have practical uses based on application needs.

But in short, most of those are lazy and support transaction-backed stable identities for entities. Very useful when you have a list of items and an editor loaded in another frame, both of which must reflect the same data.

Expression Trees

This time around I implemented proper expression trees. They model the query, relations, and projections in a manner that allows the driver to lower into a query much more accurately.

You can model things like function-calls cleanly all of which required writing manual SQL before. If you did anything outside of what gom could generate previously, it became madness to maintain.

Vectors

This version of libgom embeds the vec1 extension for SQLite. That means we can store vectors in your records and query them. GomVector makes that easier to manage as a property within your application entity.

I can think of a few things this will be useful for, maybe you can too.

Profiling

This version of libgom has profiling support with another project of mine, Sysprof. The whole library emits profiler marks about what is going on so that it is easy for you to figure out why something might be slow in your application.

Since we’ve already done the integration of Sysprof into GLib/GObject, GTK, Pango, Libdex, and GNOME Shell/Mutter you can very quickly get an idea with details of what is going on in your application. Click record, select the problem area, zoom, and it is often pretty clear. You can have flamegraphs, callgraphs, and timing marks all in one place.

Local First with Sync Coordination

One of my personal motivations for this is around building a native sync protocol for applications I’m building. I wrote numerous SQLite-based sync protocols for the now defuct catch.com before they were acquired by apple. That means I know multiple wrong ways to do it.

This time around, I want to put it right in the data-mapper at the point where you have the most insight. So libgom has the right abstractions in place to build that. The GomSyncCoordinator manages the process and GomSyncTransport is the abstraction-point for service integration.

You work with GomDelta at this layer. The application can provide you with a GomMergePolicy to help make decisions which allow for contextually doing the right thing.

This part is still very new. I’m still building the other side of it but landing the shape early allows me to mock and test things comprehensively before committing to the ABI.

My goal is building a practical, robust, and correct implementation for personal local first features.

A small personal note: as I wrote in my recent update from France, I am no longer employed by Red Hat. Work like this is currently self-funded, out of pocket, while my family and I settle into a new chapter. If you find it useful, a note of encouragement or a contribution means a lot right now. It helps make it possible to keep improving the free software infrastructure many of us rely on.

Version:next-20260609 (linux-next) Released:2026-06-09