While college applicants are often required to write a personal essay for their applications, political scientist/author/academic Yascha Mounk argues that’s “a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is much more biased against the poor than standardized tests.”

The college essay wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they’ve faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader, should be banned and banished and burned to the ground.

There are many tangible, “objective” reasons to oppose making personal statements a key part of the admissions process. Perhaps the most obvious is that they have always been the easiest part of the system to game. While rich parents can hire SAT tutors they can’t sit the standardized test in the stead of their offspring; they can, however, easily write the admissions essay for their kid or hire a “college consultant” who “works with” the applicant to “improve” that essay. Even if rich parents don’t cheat in those ways, their class position gives rich kids a huge advantage in the exercise… [W]riting a good admissions essay is to a large extent an exercise in demonstrating one’s good taste — and the ability to do so has always depended on being fluent in the unspoken norms of an elite community…

Many on the left oppose standardized tests on the grounds that they have a class bias, and that hiring a tutor can make you perform better at them. But studies on the subject consistently suggest that the class bias of personal essays is far stronger than the class bias of standardized tests…. But the thing I truly hate about the college essay is not that it is part of a system that keeps deserving kids out of top colleges while rewarding privileged kids who (to add insult to injury) get to flatter themselves that they have been selected for showcasing such superior personality in their 750-word statements composed by their college consultant or ghostwritten by ChatGPT… [W]hat I truly hate about the college essay is the way in which it shapes the lives of high school students and encourages the whole elite stratum of society — including some of its most affluent, privileged and sheltered members — to conceive of themselves in terms of the hardships they have supposedly suffered…

[I]t is the bizarre spectacle of those kids from comparatively privileged backgrounds being effectively coerced by the admissions system to self-exoticize as products of great hardship which I find to be truly unseemly… And this is why I suspect that the seemingly innocuous institution of the college essay is more deeply damaging — to the high school experience, to the self-conception of millions of Americans, and even to the country’s ability to sustain a trusted elite — than it appears… [I]t drains the souls of teenagers and encourages a deeply pernicious brand of fakery and breeds widespread mistrust in social elites.

The college essay is absurd and unfair and — ironically — unforgivably cringe. It’s time to put an end to its strange hold over American society, and liberate us all from its tyranny.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spoilers follow for The Last of Us season two, episodes one and two

HBO’s The Last of Us showed viewers in season one that it would lean heavily on the source video games for major plot points and general direction of the season while expanding on the universe, and season two has followed that to the most extreme end possible. Episode two sees Tommy and Maria lead the town of Jackson Hole against a massive wave of Infected, the likes of which we haven’t seen in the show (or video games) yet. This was a complete invention for the show, one that gives the episode Game of Thrones vibes, or calls to mind a battle like the siege of Helm’s Deep in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It’s epic in scale, with the overmatched defenders showing their skill and bravery against overwhelming odds; there is loss and pain but the good guys eventually triumph.

That mass-scale battle is paired with the most intimate and brutal violence we’ve seen in the entire series so far, as Joel’s actions finally catch up with him. His death at the hands of Abby and her crew of ex-Fireflies from Seattle is truly upsetting, even if you know it is coming — and that in the twisted world that Joel and Abby inhabit, it was a form of “justice.”

Of course, it was pretty obvious after the first five minutes of episode one that this is where Abby’s journey would take her, but it sure happened fast. You could say the same thing about when Joel dies in the video game, but ever since the HBO series was announced I’ve been wondering about just how Craig Mazin would choose to tackle the events of the second game and Joel’s death. Part of me wondered if we wouldn’t know for sure Joel was dead until near the end of the season, or if we might not find out Abby’s motivations until much later. But after two episodes, we know that Abby’s dad was the doctor Joel killed at the end of season one to save Ellie, a fact that makes her disturbing lust for vengeance more understandable to the television audience. In the game, on the other hand, players didn’t find that out until much later — a move that cast Abby in the role of “villain” that made Ellie’s own desire for revenge more relatable for the player

Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO

But what works in a game doesn’t necessarily work in a more passive adaptation. I do think there was a way for the writers to save the full reveal for Abby’s motivations for later, but I didn’t really bump on how things played out here. Similarly, I wasn’t really bothered by the introduction to Abby’s crew and her desire to find Joel that happened at the beginning of the season premiere. But I do know a number of people who played the game feel like this has robbed the show of some mystery and changed the momentum in a way that didn’t work for them, and I can appreciate that argument.

For anyone who hasn’t played the games, though, I’m sure that seeing the co-lead character killed off in the second episode of the season was a bit of a shock, no matter how much it was hinted at — particularly after Joel went out of his way to save Abby from certain death. In another world, you could imagine that blunting her need for revenge, or at least having her forgo the extended torture of a helpless Joel. But she’s clearly captivated by the opportunity in a way that even her friends are a bit horrified by. Ellie being there to find Dina unconscious and then forced to watch Abby deliver the final blow is the cherry on the disaster sundae that is this episode. It’s even harder to swallow when you consider their last interaction was Ellie’s extreme rebuff of Joel at the dance the night before.

Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO

It’s truly a wild choice for such a high-profile show, even though there was nowhere else for it to go. Pedro Pascal has been everywhere the last few years, and The Last of Us could have been his signature role. Joel’s death doesn’t fully diminish that, but obviously even if we see him in flashbacks in this season and the next, it won’t be the same as him leading an episode. To let such a marketable and popular star go must have been a tough pill for HBO to swallow, though chances are that the network knew from the beginning of negotiations that would have to happen. Regardless, it’s a move up there with the death of Sean Bean’s Ned Stark in terms of subverting audience expectations about who is going to lead the show going forward. That’ll fall to Bella Ramsey for the rest of the season.

I will say that Mazin and director Mark Mylod did a great job of balancing the many stories and cast members in this episode. Kaitlyn Dever gets her first extended amount of screen time and captures Abby’s barely-contained ferocity in a way that feels like a great tribute to the game source material, despite the fact that she is not nearly as physically ripped as Abby is in the game. Her scenes with Joel and Dina are absolutely chilling, even before she has Joel on the ropes; big credit to Pascal and Isabela Merced, again, for showing a major range of emotions as they help Abby escape from the Infected only to be betrayed.

Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO

Ramsey, meanwhile, shares a lot of time with Young Mazino’s Jesse as they go on patrol and frantically search for Joel; back in Jackson, Gabriella Luna and Rutina Wesley as Tommy and Maria keep Jackson from falling to the Infected. It’s a lot of threads to tie together, and the fact that this episode includes the biggest battle we’ve ever seen as well as Joel’s capture and death without feeling overstuffed is a testament to the writers, directors and cast.

Speaking of that Infected battle, I wasn’t fully sold on it when I saw teases in the trailers for this season, but it was a thrilling delight. I loved seeing the preparations Jackson put into place, like the oil barrels coming down from the walls and the flamethrower brigade surrounded by snipers up on the buildings. Of course, all the best-planned defenses fail once the Infected get through the wall and all hell breaks loose, and the show successfully had me questioning whether the town would make it even though the idea of it fully falling seemed like a deviation too far from the game. It definitely felt like a response to the criticisms of a relative lack of Infected action in season one, but it worked, and the juxtaposition of the disaster befalling Jackson at large as well as the smaller-scale loss of one of its most important citizens added another layer to the grief.

Infected Score: 11/10

The showrunners say season two will have more Infected than season one — let’s see if they’re sticking to their word.

Tommy taking down a Bloater with a flamethrower in front of a Mailboxes Etc. store? Barrels of oil lighting a field of Infected on fire? The extremely creepy reveal of the “live” Infected buried and laying in wait under a field of frozen ones that emerged and chased Abby right into the path of Joel? Jackson’s guard dogs coming to the rescue to keep the horde from overtaking the town? This was the most epic action we’ve seen out of the show yet, on a scale that we didn’t get in the games. It’ll be hard to top this battle.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-last-of-us-season-two-through-the-valley-recap-well-that-happened-020017596.html?src=rss

Slashdot reader yeokm1 is the Singapore-based embedded security researcher whose side projects include installing Linux on a 1993 PC and building a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS.

He’s now sharing his latest project — installing Llama 2 on DOS:

Conventional wisdom states that running LLMs locally will require computers with high performance specifications especially GPUs with lots of VRAM. But is this actually true?
Thanks to an open-source llama2.c project [original created by Andrej Karpathy], I ported it to work so vintage machines running DOS can actually inference with Llama 2 LLM models. Of course there are severe limitations but the results will surprise you.

“Everything is open sourced with the executable available here,” according to the blog post. (They even addressed an early “gotcha” with DOS filenames being limited to eight characters.)

“As expected, the more modern the system, the faster the inference speed…” it adds. “Still, I’m amazed what can still be accomplished with vintage systems.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:

Five years ago, Airbus made a bold bet: The plane maker would launch a zero-emissions, hydrogen-powered aircraft within 15 years that, if successful, would mark the biggest revolution in aviation technology since the jet engine. Now, Airbus is pulling the brakes. The company has cut the project’s budget by a quarter, reallocated staff and sent remaining engineers back to the drawing board, delaying its plans by as much as a decade…

Airbus has spent more than $1.7 billion on the project, according to people familiar with the matter, but over the past year concluded that technical challenges and a slow uptake of hydrogen in the wider economy meant the jet wouldn’t be ready by 2035… Airbus says the past five years of work and money haven’t been wasted. The company has established that hydrogen is technically feasible and delaying the project will give it more time to fine-tune the technology, executives said…

Airbus shifted focus to hydrogen-fuel cells, which use a chemical reaction to generate energy for an electric motor. It would produce only water vapor, but would require a more radical redesign of the airframe and propulsion system. The plane would carry only 100 passengers about 1,000 nautical miles. Over time, even that proved challenging because of the extra weight of the fuel cells and their limited electricity generation. Instead of a short-haul narrow-body — the workhorse of the aviation industry — at best the aircraft would be more akin to a less appealing regional turboprop.
Airbus received a multi-billion Covid-era support package from the French government that “required Airbus to spend a portion of the money on bringing green aircraft to market by the 2030s,” according to the article.
“The hydrogen project helped Airbus access additional government funding, as well as private green financing… Airbus ultimately assigned the project an annual budget of about €400 million, primarily funded through its own coffers, according to people familiar with its financing arrangements.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Honeybee colonies are under siege across much of North America…” reported the New York Times last week. [Alternate URL here.] Last winter beekeepers across America “began reporting massive beehive collapses. More than half of the roughly 2.8 million colonies collapsed, costing the industry about $600 million in economic losses…”

America’s Department of Agriculture says “sublethal exposure” to pesticides remains one of the biggest factors threatening honeybees, according to the article — but it’s one of several threats. “Parasites, loss of habitat, climate change and pesticides threaten to wipe out as much as 70% or more of the nation’s honeybee colonies this year, potentially the most devastating loss that the nation has ever seen.”

Some years are worse than others, but there has been a steady decline over time. Scientists have named the phenomenon colony collapse disorder: Bees simply disappear after they fly out to forage for pollen and nectar. Illness disables their radar, preventing them from finding their way home. The queen and her brood, if they survive, remain defenseless.

The precise causes remain unknown.
Bee colonies have become even more vulnerable because of the increase in extreme weather conditions, including droughts, heat waves, monster hurricanes, explosive wildfires and floods that have damaged or destroyed the bees and the vegetation they pollinate. If that isn’t bad enough, parasites — and other creatures researchers refer to as “biotic” threats that prey on bees — proliferate when there is damage to ecosystems.

All that means that the U.S. beekeeping industry has contracted by about 2.9% over the past five years, according to data collected by IBISWorld, a research firm. Annual loss rates have been increasing among all beekeepers over the past decade with the most significant colony collapses in commercial operations happening during the past five years.

The article notes that “compounding the troubles for the bee industry are recent federal cuts” proposed by DOGE to America’s Department of Agriculture, “where researchers were studying ways to protect the nation’s honeybees.” And while federal policies like tariffs could make farming more expensive, “Beekeepers also often depend on immigrants to manage their hives and to help produce commercial honey…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo surprised us with a little blast from the past this weekend, uploading a 34-year-old Super Nintendo commercial featuring Paul Rudd to its YouTube channel — and it’s released a sequel for the Nintendo Switch 2. Rudd appears in the Switch 2 promo wearing the same outfit he wore back in 1991, but this time he’s playing Mario Kart World with some celebrity friends over the new GameChat social feature. It’s a charming callback to the original SNES ad, which itself is deliciously ‘90s and a real treat to revisit in 2025. Commercials today just don’t hit the same.

Nintendo has steadily been drumming up the hype for the Switch 2’s arrival since the release details were announced at the beginning of April. The company recently held a livestream to share a more in-depth look at Mario Kart World, which launches on the same day as the new console, revealing some of the new courses, items and assistive features like Smart Steering. We’ve still got some time to wait before it’s all here, though. Pre-orders for the Switch 2 open on April 24, and the console will be available starting June 5.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-shares-a-vintage-snes-commercial-starring-paul-rudd-as-he-reprises-the-role-for-switch-2-171316112.html?src=rss

For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a lone black hole,” reports Science News — “one with no star orbiting it.”

It’s “the only one so far,” says Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. In 2022, Sahu and his colleagues discovered the dark object coursing through the constellation Sagittarius. A second team disputed the claim, saying the body might instead be a neutron star. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now confirm that the object’s mass is so large that it must be a black hole, Sahu’s team reports in the April 20 Astrophysical Journal…. [And that second team has revised its assessment and now agrees: the object is a black hole.]

While solitary black holes should be common, they are hard to find. The one in Sagittarius revealed itself when it passed in front of a dim background star, magnifying the star’s light and slowly shifting its position due to the black hole’s gravity. This passage occurred in July 2011, but the star’s position is still changing. “It takes a long time to do the observations,” Sahu says. “Everything is improved if you have a longer baseline and more observations.” The original discovery relied on precise Hubble measurements of star positions from 2011 to 2017. The new work incorporates Hubble observations from 2021 and 2022 as well as data from the Gaia spacecraft.

The upshot: The black hole is about seven times as massive as the sun, give or take 0.8 solar masses…. Located 5,000 light-years from Earth, this black hole is much closer than the supermassive one at the Milky Way’s center, which also lies in Sagittarius but about 27,000 light-years from us. The star-rich region around the galactic center provides an ideal hunting ground for solitary black holes passing in front of stars. Sahu hopes to find additional lone black holes by using the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2027.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There was excitement when biotech company Collosal announced genetically modified grey wolves (first hailed as a “de-extinction” of the Dire wolf species after several millennia). “But bioethicists and conservationists are expressing unease with the kind of scientific research,” writes the Chicago Tribune. [Alternate URL here.]

“Unfortunately, as clever as this science is … it’s can-do science and not should-do science,” said Lindsay Marshall, director of science in animal research at Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the U.S…. Ed Heist, a professor at Southern Illinois University and a conservation geneticist, said the news bothered him. “This is not conservation, but people conflate it,” he said. “The point is entertainment….”

Naomi Louchouarn [program director of wildlife partnerships at Humane World for Animals], has dedicated her studies and research to the relationship between humans and animals, specifically carnivores like gray wolves. “The reason our current endangered species are becoming extinct is because we don’t know how to coexist with them,” she said. “And this doesn’t solve that problem at all.” Humans can treat the symptoms of wildlife conflict with “big, flashy silver bullets” and “in this case, advanced, inefficient science,” she said, but the real solution is behavioral change. “Assuming that we could actually bring back a full population of animals,” Louchouarn said, “which is so difficult and so crazy — that’s a big if — I don’t understand the point of trying to bring back a woolly mammoth when we already can’t coexist with elephants.”

The article notes that even Colossal’s chief science officer says their technology is at best one of several tools for fighting biodiversity loss, calling it a battle which humans are ‘not close to winning’… We as a global community need to continue to invest in traditional approaches to conservation and habitat preservation, as well as in the protection of living endangered species.”
But the article adds that the Trump administration “is citing the case of the dire wolf as it moves to reduce federal protections under the Endangered Species Act of 1973.” (Wednesday U.S. interior secretary Doug Burgum has even posted on X “The concept of ‘de-extinction’ can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.”)

And the article adds that “During a livestreamed town hall with Interior Department employees on April 9, Burgum said: “If we’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back. Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal.

Ken Angielczyk, curator of mammal fossils at the Field Museum who researches extinct species that lived 200 to 300 million years ago, said it’s a misguided approach. “If that’s the basis … for changing regulations related to the endangered species list, that is very, very premature,” he said. “Because we can’t resurrect things…. If the purpose is to restore the damage to the shared ecosystem, we have that opportunity right now,” she said. “And that’s the necessity immediately….”

“This whole idea that extinction is reversible is so dangerous,” Marshall said, “because then it stops us caring.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There was excitement when biotech company Collosal announced genetically modified grey wolves (first hailed as a “de-extinction” of the Dire wolf species after several millennia). “But bioethicists and conservationists are expressing unease with the kind of scientific research,” writes the Chicago Tribune. [Alternate URL here.]

“Unfortunately, as clever as this science is … it’s can-do science and not should-do science,” said Lindsay Marshall, director of science in animal research at Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the U.S…. Ed Heist, a professor at Southern Illinois University and a conservation geneticist, said the news bothered him. “This is not conservation, but people conflate it,” he said. “The point is entertainment….”

Naomi Louchouarn [program director of wildlife partnerships at Humane World for Animals], has dedicated her studies and research to the relationship between humans and animals, specifically carnivores like gray wolves. “The reason our current endangered species are becoming extinct is because we don’t know how to coexist with them,” she said. “And this doesn’t solve that problem at all.” Humans can treat the symptoms of wildlife conflict with “big, flashy silver bullets” and “in this case, advanced, inefficient science,” she said, but the real solution is behavioral change. “Assuming that we could actually bring back a full population of animals,” Louchouarn said, “which is so difficult and so crazy — that’s a big if — I don’t understand the point of trying to bring back a woolly mammoth when we already can’t coexist with elephants.”

The article notes that even Colossal’s chief science officer says their technology is at best one of several tools for fighting biodiversity loss, calling it a battle which humans are ‘not close to winning’… We as a global community need to continue to invest in traditional approaches to conservation and habitat preservation, as well as in the protection of living endangered species.”
But the article adds that the Trump administration “is citing the case of the dire wolf as it moves to reduce federal protections under the Endangered Species Act of 1973.” (Wednesday U.S. interior secretary Doug Burgum has even posted on X “The concept of ‘de-extinction’ can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.”)

And the article adds that “During a livestreamed town hall with Interior Department employees on April 9, Burgum said: “If we’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back. Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal.

Ken Angielczyk, curator of mammal fossils at the Field Museum who researches extinct species that lived 200 to 300 million years ago, said it’s a misguided approach. “If that’s the basis … for changing regulations related to the endangered species list, that is very, very premature,” he said. “Because we can’t resurrect things…. If the purpose is to restore the damage to the shared ecosystem, we have that opportunity right now,” she said. “And that’s the necessity immediately….”

“This whole idea that extinction is reversible is so dangerous,” Marshall said, “because then it stops us caring.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Star Wars Celebration is heading back to Los Angeles for the first time since 2006 to mark the franchise’s 50th anniversary in 2027. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, then simply called Star Wars, first hit theaters in 1977 and the rest is history. The location was announced during the closing ceremony of this year’s event, which took place in Japan. Star Wars Celebration 2027 will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center from April 1 to April 4, 2027.

This year’s Star Wars Celebration brought a ton of announcements and previews into upcoming developments for the franchise. We finally got a real look at Star Wars Zero Company, a single-player turn-based tactics game expected to be released in 2026. ILM also revealed a bit more about its Meta Quest mixed-reality experience (which it’s calling a “playset”), Star Wars: Beyond Victory, and it was confirmed that Ryan Gosling will star in a film called Star Wars: Starfighter, per The Hollywood Reporter. And of course, there will be a Fortnite collaboration. With the Galactic Battle season beginning May 2, Darth Jar Jar is coming to Fortnite.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/the-next-star-wars-celebration-will-be-held-in-la-in-2027-for-the-50th-anniversary-of-the-first-film-194628408.html?src=rss

TechCrunch looks at Mechanize, an ambitious new startup “whose founder — and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch — is being skewered on X…”

Mechanize was launched on Thursday via a post on X by its founder, famed AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu. The startup’s goal, Besiroglu wrote, is “the full automation of all work” and “the full automation of the economy.”

Does that mean Mechanize is working to replace every human worker with an AI agent bot? Essentially, yes. The startup wants to provide the data, evaluations, and digital environments to make worker automation of any job possible. Besiroglu even calculated Mechanize’s total addressable market by aggregating all the wages humans are currently paid. “The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year,” he wrote.
Besiroglu did, however, clarify to TechCrunch that “our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar work” rather than manual labor jobs that would require robotics…

Besiroglu argues to the naysayers that having agents do all the work will actually enrich humans, not impoverish them, through “explosive economic growth.” He points to a paper he published on the topic. “Completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can’t even imagine today,” he told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch wonders how jobless humans will produce goods — and whether wealth will simply concentrate around whoever owns the agents.
But they do concede that Besiroglu may be right that “If each human worker has a personal crew of agents which helps them produce more work, economic abundance could follow…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Using electrochemistry, University of Oregon researchers have developed a way to make iron metal for steel production without burning fossil fuels…” the University of Oregon wrote last year. “Decarbonizing this step would do roughly as much to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as converting every gas-guzzling vehicle on the roads to electric… If scaled up, the process could help decarbonize one of the largest and most emissions-intensive industries worldwide,” replacing carbon-spewing industrial blast furnaces.

Paul Kempler, their research assistant chemistry professor, added “The reason we got excited about this chemistry, is that our reactants are two things that are very cheap: saltwater and iron oxide.” And this week he announced that “We actually have a chemical principle, a sort of guiding design rule, that will teach us how to identify low-cost iron oxides that we could use in these reactors.”

“Those reactions conveniently also produce chlorine, a commercially valuable byproduct,” writes SciTechDaily, in a new follow-up report this week:

In their latest study, the researchers focused on improving the process by identifying which types of iron oxides make the reaction more cost-effective, an essential step toward scaling the method for industrial use…. In lab tests, the difference was striking: “With the really porous particles, we can make iron really quickly on a small area,” Goldman said. “The dense particles just can’t achieve the same rate, so we’re limited in how much iron we can make per square meter of electrodes….”

To take their process beyond the lab, Kempler’s lab is working with researchers in other fields. A collaboration with civil engineers at Oregon State University is helping them better understand what’s needed for the product to work in real-world applications. And collaboration with an electrode manufacturing company is helping them address the logistical and scientific challenges of scaling up an electrochemical process. “I think what this work shows is that technology can meet the needs of an industrial society without being environmentally devastating,” Goldman said.

“We haven’t solved all the problems yet, of course, but I think it’s an example that serves as a nucleation point for a different way of thinking about what solutions look like. We can continue to have industry and technology and medicine, and we can do it in a way that’s clean — and that’s awesome!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“The time has come for me to step away,” ArcoLinux lead Erik Dubois posted last week. (“After eight years of dedication to the ArcoLinux project and the broader Linux community…”)

‘Learn, have fun, and enjoy’ was our motto for the past eight years — and I really had fun doing all this,” Dubois says in a video version of his farewell post. “And if we reflect back on this teaching and the building and promoting of Linux, it was fun. But the time has come for me to step away…”

Over its eight years ArcoLinux “accomplished several important milestones,” reports Linux magazine, “such as creating over 5,000 educational videos; the creation of ArcoInstall; the Carli education project; the Arch Linux Calamares Installer (ALCI); the ArcoPlasma, ArcoNet, ArcroPro, and Ariser variants; and much more.”
According to Dubois, they weren’t just creating a distribution but a mindset.

Dubois says that the code will remain online so others can learn from, fork, or remix the distro. He also indicated that ArcoLinux will supply users with a transition package to help them convert their existing ArcoLinux systems to Arch Linux. That package will remove ArcoLinux branding, replace pacman.conf with an Arch and Chaotic-AUR focused config file, and change the arcolinux-mirrorlist to a single source.

It’s FOSS News describes ArcoLinux as one of those “user-friendly Arch-based distros that give you a bleeding-edge experience.”
The reasoning behind this move, as shared by Erik, is his advancing age and him realizing that he doesn’t have the same level of mental focus or stamina he used to have before. He has found himself making small mistakes, the kind that can negatively affect a major undertaking like this… Come July 1, 2025, the transition period will end, marking a stop to all development, including the deactivation of the ArcoLinux social media handles. The Telegram and Discord communities will stay a bit longer but will close up eventually.
“I want to leave ArcoLinux while it’s still strong, and while I can look back with pride at everything we’ve accomplished together,” Dubois says in their post…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Discover magazine reports that a team of researchers have produced evidence that the ancient building blocks for water have been here on earth “since early in the planet’s history, according to a study published in the journal Icarus.”
Pinpointing when and where Earth’s hydrogen is an essential key to understanding how life arose on the planet. Without hydrogen, there’s no water, and without water, life can’t exist here. Ironically, researchers turned to a meteorite containing hydrogen to prove that such former bodies did not provide the H2 ingredient of water’s H2O recipe. They examined a rare type of meteorite — known as an enstatite chondrite — that was built similarly to early Earth 4.5 billion years ago and the team discovered hydrogen present in the chemical. The logic is that if this material resembling early Earth’s composition can contain hydrogen, so too could the young planet….

Since the proto-Earth was made of material similar to enstatite chondrites, by the time the immature planet had grown large enough to be struck by asteroids, it would have already stashed enough hydrogen to explain Earth’s present-day water supply.Although this study likely won’t resolve the debate over Earth’s original water source, it tilts the ta ble toward an internal, not external one. “We now think that the material that built our planet — which we can study using these rare meteorites — was far richer in hydrogen than we thought previously,” James Bryson, an Oxford professor and an author of the paper, said in a press release. “This finding supports the idea that the formation of water on Earth was a natural process, rather than a fluke of hydrated asteroids bombarding our planet after it formed.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.