Sunday, 19 April
13:00 EDT
Who will rescue the rescuer? (Hampshire College) [Philip Greenspun’s Weblog]
From January: Should today’s 18-year-olds avoid liberal arts colleges because such schools are likely to disappear during their careers?
From 2023, a liberal arts college offers to rescue Floridians whose lives were ruined by Ron DeSantis:
Hampshire College announced today its commitment to offer admission to all New College of Florida students in good standing and to match their current cost of tuition. This opportunity is in response to the continuing attacks on New College of Florida intended to limit intellectual exploration, turn back progress toward inclusion, and curtail open discussion of race, injustice, and histories of oppression. By committing to impose a narrowly politicized curriculum on New College, the newly appointed trustees broke promises made to its current students to support a self-directed, rigorous education grounded in a commitment to free inquiry.
Last week:
How much was the college extracting from each customer? About $80,000 per year:
Maybe they got into financial stress because they gave their land back to the Native Americans, who they say are the rightful owners, and then had to pay rent?
The original peoples of this land have had connections with these lands for millennia and maintain and reclaim relationships to this day. They are part of a vast expanse of Algonquian relations. Over 400 years of colonization, Nipmuc, Nonotuck, and Pocumtuc Peoples were forcibly displaced. In the 17th century, the Nonotuck peoples responded to ongoing settler colonial violence by seeking safety with their kinship connections in surrounding areas. … we are on stolen land built up by the stolen labor of enslaved African peoples. Let us be mindful of the ongoing colonial violence that continues to rage across the globe in places like Sudan, Congo, and Palestine, and our complicity in that violence.
Who are the evil people perpetrating “colonial violence” in “Palestine”? Maybe we could have learned at Hampshire’s 25th Annual Eqbal Ahmad Symposium, “The boomerang Comes Back: How the U.S.-Backed War on Palestine is Expanding Authoritarianism at Home”:
Noura Erakat, human rights attorney and associate professor in the department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, as well as the cofounder of the online journal Jadaliyya, presented an analysis for our times. Amherst College Writer-in-Residence George Abraham moderated.
Here’s the professor at the UN (2025):
Today is day 585 of genocide. Every day is a day of unprecedented atrocity.
She agrees with Gavin Newsom (see “Newsom Compares Israel to ‘Apartheid State,’ Questions Military Support” (NYT)):
Since 2020, an emerging consensus among legacy human rights organizations as well as the world court, have defined Israel as an apartheid regime. Rather than boycott, divest from, and sanction apartheid Israel, the global community has attempted to normalize it.
What else can one learn at Hampshire? That our society rests on “fundamental contributions” from Africans:
That the university is a place for “theorizing queer horizons”:
That being trans is not a modern fad of some sort:
That anyone who says liberal arts kids study basketweaving is an ignorant hater. It’s actually how to make brooms:
Students can study Donald Trump, a man who likely be long-dead by the time they’re mid-career (separately, a group of people who can’t figure out whether they’re male or female throws rocks at Donald Trump’s understanding of science):
What’s the value of having “Trump vs. Science” on one’s resume? It gets a graduate into the lucrative world of taxpayer-funded nonprofits?
The post Who will rescue the rescuer? (Hampshire College) appeared first on Philip Greenspun’s Weblog.
12:00 EDT
I’m up early, I look out the window, and what do I see? Snow.
It has been warm and pleasant, except for the last few days, which have been chilly and windy. I was starting to see spiders around the yard again, but now — they’re probably huddled deep in crevices and whatever shelter they can find, waiting out this doggedly persistent winter.
They won’t have long to wait. The forecast is for 31°C on Wednesday.
Paint pens / Budget espresso / AI bird feeder [Cool Tools]
Digital colors
My book of 800 unusual images from Asia — arranged by colors — is now available as an inexpensive digital book. Because it is so graphic the digital version works best as a PDF. You can order and download the digital Colors of Asia, anywhere in the world for $3.99. — KK
Wireless wild bird watching
My mother used to tell me stories about her favorite great aunt in Mexico who had an aviary, and I’ve always dreamed of having my own but can’t imagine keeping birds caged. And then for Christmas, my husband gifted me the Birdfy AI Smart Bird Feeder, and it’s totally made that dream come true in a way I didn’t expect. My backyard has never been more active, and I’ve gotten to know all the visiting birds that the AI identifies, plus collect and download clips of their cute eating and fighting. The images are crisp and clear, and it feels like a whole hidden dimension of the world has opened up for me. Birdfy is the brand we have and I’m very happy with it, but I know there are more out there, and I’m really recommending the experience of a bird feeder camera more than this one specific product. — CD
Budget espresso machine that punches above its weight
A friend bought the under-$200 Casabrews CM5418 Espresso Machine for her boyfriend’s birthday because they were tired of paying inflated prices for Nespresso pods. I had my doubts that a machine this cheap could make decent coffee, but I have to say it’s excellent. It has a decent pump that pulls a rich shot and has a steam wand for frothing milk. Pair it with a burr grinder rather than a blade grinder — fresh, evenly ground beans make a big difference. I use a Capresso Infinity grinder. — MF
Paint pens
Sharpie makes pens that lay down a heavy layer of paint, instead of a thinner layer of ink. With these paint pens, you can make very visible marks on virtually anything. Sharpie Creative Markers work on glass, dark plastic, rusty metal, stone – surfaces that ordinary markers fail on. They come in lots of colors, and 3 different tip types. Artists like them on paper because they are very opaque yet don’t bleed through the other side. There are fancy brands of expensive paint pens made for artists, but the Sharpie versions are very affordable, about $1 per pen. — KK
A reminder to “Play”
This opinion piece on The Next Web titled “The most radical act in an age of outrage is to play” is a navigational reset for where we should put our energy. The invitation is that in a culture addicted to outrage, choosing to play—freely, creatively, and with others—is itself a radical act of resistance and repair. Which is such a good reminder. Play—along with Kindness, Truth, and Love—is a core tenet of mine. Play as a radical act is the quiet, subversive way we can reclaim our own nervous systems, our attention, and our capacity to connect. — CD
Explore Wikipedia by map
The Wikipedia app (free, iOS/Android) has a locations feature that shows Wikipedia articles on a map. It’s a fun way to discover interesting spots when you travel. I’ve been using it around Los Angeles and have found things I never knew existed. My favorite find so far: the Hollywood Freeway chickens, a colony of feral chickens that have lived under the Vineland Avenue off-ramp of the 101 since around 1970, possibly descended from a truckload of poultry that overturned. — MF
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HP Will Discontinue 'HP Anyware' Remote Desktop, Trusted Zero Clients [Slashdot]
kriston (Slashdot reader #7,886) writes: HP Anyware, the new name of the Teradici PCoIP remote desktop solution that was acquired by HP in 2021, is being discontinued. "Maintenance and support for customers and partners with multi-year terms will continue until 31 October, 2029," a href="https://anyware.hp.com/hp-anyware-end-of-life">according to HP's announcement. But HP is also announcing the planned End of Life for Anyware Trust Center and Trusted Zero Clients, with support now limited to setup and troubleshooting, no new updates or patches, and support ending in a little over six months on October 31, 2026. While for Desktop Access customers — Tera2 Zero Clients and PCoIP Management Console — "the previously announced EOL date remains December 31, 2029," sales have already ended for other customers. HP Anyware renewals are available for purchase through October 31 of 2027, but with a maximum one year term, with support ending October 31, 2028. HP says the decision "enables us to focus our resources on product categories where we can deliver the greatest customer value and drive long-term innovation."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
11:00 EDT
Disney Creates Its Own IMAX for 'Avengers: Doomsday' After Losing Screens to 'Dune: Part 3' [Slashdot]
Ahead of December's release of Avengers: Doomsday, Disney has unveiled "Infinity Vision," reports Kotaku, which they describe as "a new theater-going experience that will be certain to transform your pedestrian $15 night out into an exotic $43 one." (Though those prices appear to be estimates...) Disney's announcement calls it "a new certification for premium large format (PLF) theaters," helping ticket-buyers find "a huge screen with the sharpest, clearest color and sound," including laser projection "for superior brightness and clarity ") and "premium audio formats for fully immersive sound". Light on specifics, Disney says they will be certifying premium large format theaters for the Infinity Vision experience, highlighting laser projection and immersive audio quality. The new program will begin in the summer for a theater run of 2019's Avengers: Endgame ahead of Doomsday's holiday release. Now you might be thinking: Giant screen? Booming audio? That sounds an awful lot like IMAX. The most consumer-recognized premium movie-going screen is the coveted throne for big blockbuster events, from Avatar to One Battle After Another. Unfortunately for Doomsday, IMAX screens are already booked for the holiday season by Dune: Part Three, the anticipated return to Arrakis, where Timothée Chalamet's Muad'Dib will begin to go worm-mode. Locked out of the popular choice for doubling your ticket price, Disney appears to have made up a new one... Disney says they aim to certify 75 theaters in the United States and 300 internationally for the Infinity Vision program.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
09:00 EDT
I’ve fired one of America’s most powerful lasers—here’s what a shot day looks like [Ars Technica - All content]
If you walk across the open yard in front of the Physics, Math, and Astronomy building at the University of Texas at Austin, you’ll see a 17-story tower and a huge L-shaped building. What you won’t see is what’s underneath you. Two floors below ground, behind heavy double doors stamped with a logo that most students have never noticed, sits one of the most powerful lasers in the United States.
I was the lead laser scientist on the Texas Petawatt, or TPW as we called it, from 2020 to 2024. Texas Petawatt, which is currently closed due to funding cuts, was a government-funded research center where scientists from across the country applied for time to use specialized equipment. It was part of LaserNetUS, a Department of Energy network of high-power laser labs.
This type of laser takes a tiny pulse of light, stretches it out so it doesn’t blast optics to pieces, and amplifies it until, for a brief instant, it carries more power than the entire US electrical grid. Then it compresses the pulse back to a trillionth of a second to create a star in a vacuum chamber.
Why nearly every farmer who grows these chile peppers is a woman [NPR Topics: News]
Chile peppers are a traditional part of Indian cuisine — and a key crop for women farmers. They say it's too demanding for men. "In spite of the challenges," says one, "we've found freedom."
(Image credit: Viraj Nayar for NPR)
U.S. negotiators prepare for more peace talks as Trump repeats threats to Iran [NPR Topics: News]
After Iran again closed the Strait of Hormuz, President Trump said the U.S. is returning to Pakistan for negotiations, with the American delegation led by Vice President Vance.
(Image credit: Asghar Besharati)
Real estate investors are buying up long-term care facilities. Residents can suffer [NPR Topics: News]
Real estate investment trusts are landlords for thousands of nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and hospitals. Some select the managers and keep close watch but deny blame for bad care.
(Image credit: Taylor Glascock for KFF Health News)
08:00 EDT
Can the 'Attention Liberation Movement' Foment a Rebellion Against Screens? [Slashdot]
The Associated Press looks at the small-but-growing "rebellion" against attention-hogging devices, citing "a growing body of literature calling for people to move away from screens and pay attention to life." D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science at Princeton University and one of the authors of " Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement," making him a pillar of the growing backlash against the corporate harvesting of human attention. Along with MS NOW host Chris Hayes' bestselling " The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource," his work is part of a growing body of literature calling for people to move away from screens and pay attention to life. Burnett says the "attention liberation movement" is about throwing off the yoke of time-sucking apps. People "need to rewild their attention. Their attention is the fullness of their relationship to the world".... There are several dozen "attention activism" groups across the United States and Canada, and the movement has also cropped up in Spain, Italy, Croatia, France and England. Burnett said he expects it to spread further. Some examples cited in the article: "More than a dozen millennials gathered in a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn and placed their phones in a metal colander before two hours of reading, drawing and conversation." A few miles away "Nearly 20 people in their 30s stared at their cellphones for a few minutes. Then they set them down and looked at their bared palms for a while. Then those of their neighbors." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
07:00 EDT
One-Minute Daily AI News 4/18/2026 [AI Daily News by Bush Bush]
- Founded by Tristan Bepler PhD ’20 and former MIT professor Tim Lu PhD ’07, OpenProtein.AI offers researchers open-source models and other tools for protein engineering.[1]
- Qwen Team Open-Sources Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: A Sparse MoE Vision-Language Model with 3B Active Parameters and Agentic Coding Capabilities.[2]
- The Google app for desktop is now available for Windows users around the world.[3]
- Anthropic just launched Claude Design, an AI tool that turns prompts into prototypes and challenges Figma.[4]
This tariff-refund portal is about to be America's hottest website [NPR Topics: News]
Exactly two months after the Supreme Court struck down most of President Trump's tariffs, the U.S. government has set Monday as the day when some companies can begin requesting refunds.
(Image credit: Nickolai Hammar)
She no longer remembers it's her birthday. He got her a present anyway [NPR Topics: News]
A special day can be tinged with sorrow when your partner has dementia. But then he found the perfect gift.
Iowa went all-in on school choice. It's hurting this city's public schools [NPR Topics: News]
With school choice programs ascendant not just in Iowa but across the U.S., Cedar Rapids offers a preview of who wins and who loses when education meets the free market.
(Image credit: Cliff Jette for NPR)
05:00 EDT
04:00 EDT
Remembering Zip Drives - the Trendy Storage Technology of the 1990s [Slashdot]
Back in the 1990s, floppy disks "had a mere capacity of 1.44MB," remembers XDA Developers, "which would soon become absolutely tiny for the increasingly large pieces of software that would come about." Floppy disks also felt quite fragile, and while we got "superfloppy" formats that were physically larger and had more capacity, those were pretty unwieldy as portable storage. Enter 1994, when a company called Iomega introduced its variant of a "superfloppy", the Zip drive... [T]he initial capacity introduced in 1994 reached a whopping 100MB, which was huge number when put up against the traditional floppy disk. Zip drives also had major performance benefits, with read speeds that could average 1.4MB/s, as opposed to the comparatively sluggish 16kB/s speeds of a traditional floppy disk, as well as a seek time of around 28ms seconds, whereas a floppy disk averaged 200ms. Zip drives weren't quite as fast as desktop HDDs, but for portable storage, this was a huge step forward... [I]n 1998, Iomega introduced the Zip 250 disks, which increased the capacity to 250MB, and, already in the new millennium, we got the Zip 750, which took that further to 750MB... It was an appealing enough proposition that big computer manufacturers like Dell started including a Zip drive in some of their PCs. Even Apple included Zip drives in some of its Power Macintosh models from the mid-to-late 90s. However, things started to shift towards the end of the decade as other portable formats rose to prominence, most notably CDs and USB flash drives. Despite their initial success, it didn't take long for users to start noticing a major drawback of Zip drives: many times, they would just fail. It wasn't necessarily related to age or any particular misuse of the disks, it just happened. It was a big enough phenomenon that it became known as the "click of death", and once it happened, your drive was gone. The problem was estimated by Iomega to affect around 0.5% of Zip drives, but while that sounds like a small number, when you sell products by the thousands, it becomes fairly widespread. It was a big enough issue that, in September 1998, a class action lawsuit was filed against Iomega for the common problems. Some of the complaints in that lawsuit were eventually dismissed by the court of Delaware, but others were not, and once the public became aware of the problems with Zip drives, it was hard for the brand to make a comeback. It didn't help that this happened around the same time as formats such as CDs were becoming more popular... And eventually, USB flash drives became the most popular way to carry data around since they were smaller and offered much faster speeds... Eventually, after seeing its profits plummet by the mid-2000s, Iomega was sold to a company called EMC in 2008, and in 2013, EMC and Lenovo formed a joint venture that took over Iomega's business and removed all of the Iomega branding from its products. The article does note that "as late as 2014, some aviation companies were still using Zip drives to distribute updates for navigation databases." Are there any Slashdot readers who still remember their own Zip drive experiences? Share your memories in the comments of that once-so-trendy storage technology from the 1990s...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
03:00 EDT
The Little Probe That Could: Why Voyager 1 Matters, and Why NASA Just Switched Part of It Off [NPR Topics: News]
This week, NASA announced it had shut down one of that spacecraft's remaining science instruments — not because the mission has failed, but to keep it alive a little longer.
(Image credit: NASA)
01:00 EDT
00:00 EDT
Duolingo CEO Says They've Stopped Tracking Employees' AI Use for Performance Reviews [Slashdot]
Last May Duolingo's stock peaked at $529.05. But while the learning app passed $1 billion in revenue in 2025 and 50 million daily active users, today its stock price has dropped more than 81%, to $100.51. And there's been other changes, reports Entrepreneur: In April 2025, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn made headlines after writing a memo calling the company "AI-first." In the memo, von Ahn announced that the language-learning platform would track employees' AI use in performance reviews. Now, a year later, von Ahn is backtracking and rethinking how he measures employee performance. He told the Silicon Valley Girl podcast earlier this month that Duolingo no longer considers AI use in performance reviews. The change arose after employees started to ask, "Do you just want us to use AI for AI's sake?" von Ahn explained. "We said no, look — the most important thing in your performance is that you are doing whatever your job is as well as possible. A lot of times, AI can help you with that, but if it can't, I'm not going to force you to do that," von Ahn said on the podcast. He felt as though the company was "trying to push something that in some cases did not fit" instead of "being held accountable for the actual outcome." The CEO is, however, still sticking to other "constructive constraints" he introduced in the April 2025 memo, including stopping contractor hiring in cases where AI can assume their workload... Von Ahn also mentioned that a few months ago, Duolingo had a day dedicated to vibe coding, or prompting AI to create an app without manually writing a single line of code. Every single person at the company, from engineers to human resources professionals, had to vibe code an app. Vibe coding has made an impact at the company. One of Duolingo's latest offerings, a course teaching users how to play chess, arose when two people vibe-coded the first prototype of it, the CEO said. Neither of them knew how to play chess or program, but they managed to use AI to create the whole chess curriculum and a prototype of the app in about six months last year. Now chess is Duolingo's fastest-growing course, according to von Ahn. "At this point, we have seven million daily active users that are learning chess," the CEO said on the podcast.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Saturday, 18 April
22:00 EDT
North Korea launches ballistic missiles toward sea [NPR Topics: News]
South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff says the launches happened on Sunday morning from the North's eastern Sinpo area.
(Image credit: AP)
