All of the headline changes go in during a two-week window at the start of the cycle, having been developed previously. Several people write articles during that window about what got merged, so the list is already known when the release actually comes out two months later. (That two-month period is used for testing in more unusual situations and checking for incompatibilities among the set of changes that got merged for the cycle.)

So this article is really reporting that two compact weeks of merge decisions in early October are now officially considered tested and ready, and they wrote the article and people checked it over a while ago now.

The part that's harder to track is ongoing development work, which happens continuously without a set schedule, but it happens in separate trees and only goes into the official tree when it's complete, has been reviewed, and has gone through various testing in systems managed by kernel developers. All of the work described here was done before 6.17 was released, and developed during several releases before that, but it didn't need to affect Linus's tree until he decided it would land in 6.18.

They generally use a primary and standby system, just because it's a lot harder to avoid consistency problems with multiple primaries. This means that you need to direct traffic to the current primary, and redirect it to a standby when necessary, which is fine except that the system you're switching away from and the configuration interface for your DNS provider are both in us-east-1, because everything normally is. That's why they're looking for the ability to make a different region primary specifically during in AWS outage.

There's a typo in the headline. It's supposed to read "Microsoft Forms Superintelligence Team Under AI Chef Suleyman 'To Serve Humanity'".

I use the magsafe on my laptop. I almost always use the laptop in the same place and only charge it there, so it's not getting mixed into my collection and picked back out, and the magsafe is somewhat easier to fumble into place than USB-C. If I was using it long enough somewhere different to need to charge it, I'd grab a USB-C (probably already nearby), rather than collecting the magsafe from where it's set up.

They could include things like special lines at immigration, rather than just visa requirements. Arriving in Amsterdam with an EU passport is much less of a hassle than arriving with a US passport, but they both count the same on this report. Then there's the question of whether you need a permit to stay indefinitely, or just the passport.

The person who made the report is a professional penetration tester. His usual method is to look for anything that could be wrong and then test whether it actually is. What he found is that the AI tools came up with potential issues he hadn't thought of, and they weren't all wrong, so it's a valuable tool to him because he normally runs out of ideas rather than running out of time to test them. He complained about the UI making it hard to go through large lists of reported issues exhaustively, and he only used the suggested fixes to get a better idea of what the issue was supposed to be. So it's clear that the tool's output wouldn't be directly useful to a maintainer, but it does serve a purpose.

I got a third-party cable for my phone that my phone recognizes as being able to charge it faster than the cable that came with the phone could. They should probably warn you that they don't have a cable or charger, in case you're getting a phone because you lost everything and don't have that stuff, but the first-party stuff isn't better these days.

I think it's even more interesting, in that one or two humans have to decide whether to question a call, and they have to identify calls that were wrong, not just ones they want to overturn, and they don't have a great angle to figure out what the algorithm would do. I think it's going to be fun to see batters try to do the ump's job, while standing to the side and considering swinging at the pitch.

I think the real issue is warm parts of China selling to cold parts of India without including the features that aren't needed near the factory. We know lots about battery chemistry, but rural farmers have had more immediately relevant things to know about up to now and don't have a good source of information on this new thing the government is pushing, so they skip things that sound like luxuries and end up with something inappropriate for their purpose.