🤳 Nothing OS 5.0 Puts Customisation First

The update brings a new visual layer with transparency and a light frosted-glass effect. Surfaces now have depth, making it clearer what sits in front. The system font is Geist, while the dot matrix becomes mostly decorative.

A new colour engine can take shades directly from your wallpaper. They flow into icons, widgets, and controls, so changing the wallpaper changes the interface. Essential Apps Builder is now a phone app that turns a text description into a custom AI widget.

Comments under the announcement are less enthusiastic. Users say a year of work brought a font, more colour settings, and transparent widgets, while Nothing still lacks its own clock and calculator.

📊@tech

📊 Alibaba previews Qwen4 architecture

Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an open multimodal model and early preview of the architecture planned for Qwen4. It has 125B parameters, but uses only 6B for each text fragment. Another 51B sit in separate memory for frequent combinations.

The design keeps the model large while reducing compute. Alibaba says training is about 9 times cheaper than Qwen3.7-Plus, while the model already performs better on coding, tool-use tasks, and long office workflows.

Long-context support reaches 262,000 tokens by default and up to 1 million tokens in extended mode. At 1 million tokens, a new retrieval mechanism can significantly speed up processing. The weights are already open on Hugging Face.

📊@tech