nerd

17 May 2026

Slashdot

Amazon Stops Supporting Pre-2013 Kindles Today. Some Owners Turn to Jailbreaking

Today Amazon ends support for first- and second-generation versions of Kindles and Kindle Fire tablets, along with the Kindle Touch, the 9.7-inch Kindle DX, and other devices released in 2012 or earlier. Owners can continue reading ebooks that they've already downloaded, and they can also still sideload books using a USB cable (from, for example, Project Gutenberg). And PCMag points out that "There are plenty of e-stores where you can buy DRM-free novels legally, such as ebook.com and Smashwords. If you want to try this process for free, public-domain repositories such as the one at Standard Ebooks are a great place to start." (eBook files can be converted for the Kindle with the open source tool Calibre.) New ebooks can no longer be purchased directly from Amazon. But most of Amazon's affected devices "have not received firmware updates for over a decade," notes the blog OMG Ubuntu, "and most lost on-device access the Kindle Store." Some Kindle owners are taking things even further: You can unlock the firmware of older devices to add extra functionality (custom screensavers, epub support) or run entirely different software. On the hardware hacks side, some choose to turn old Kindles into photo frames or online dashboards. TechCrunch offers some caveats about jailbreaking: This process allows users to install custom fonts, new screensavers, alternative reading apps, and even third-party tools that expand the Kindle's functionality... [I]t's important to note that jailbreaking a Kindle might violate Amazon's terms of service. In many jurisdictions, jailbreaking isn't considered a criminal offense for personal use, but it may become a crime if it involves copyright infringement, illegal software distribution, or the sale of modified devices. Many Kindle owners who opt to jailbreak view it as a method to gain control over a device they purchased that is still functional, rather than being forced to buy a new device. However, jailbreaking is technical and carries risks, including the possibility of rendering the device unusable if something goes wrong. It also isn't possible on every Kindle model or firmware version, so before proceeding, Kindle owners should first spend some time researching if their device is compatible. Alternately, PCMag notes, "If you're feeling particularly virtuous, you can donate your old Kindle to a local library or send it back to Amazon free of charge via its electronic recycling program."

Hacker News

Bear spray is exploding in the trash near Yellowstone National Park

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17 May 2026 2:24am GMT

Slashdot

Some Datacenters Divert Power from Homes. Will It Drive Homeowners to Solar and Batteries?

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: A Nevada utility just told 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents that it's redirecting 75% of their electricity supply to data centers, and they have less than a year to find a new power source. It's one of the starkest examples yet of the AI boom's impact on everyday Americans... NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers being built by Google, Apple, and Microsoft around the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center east of Reno, according to Fortune... Data centers drove half of all US electricity demand growth last year.... That dynamic - small residential customers losing out to massive industrial electricity buyers - is exactly what's driving the broader shift to distributed solar and storage. When the grid becomes unreliable or unaffordable because of data center demand, the homeowners who have solar panels and a battery in the garage are the ones with options. "The shift is measurable," they argue: Third-party ownership models (leases and power purchase agreements), which still qualify for the [U.S.] commercial investment tax credit through 2027, are projected to grow 25% in 2026 and capture up to 69% of residential installations, up from roughly 45% in 2025. Homeowners aren't waiting for incentives to come back - they're finding new ways to get solar on their roofs... [A] battery that can store cheap solar energy and deploy it during peak hours is increasingly essential. California utility customers alone are adding roughly 8,000 new home batteries per month - about 100 MW of new storage capacity. Municipal programs are accelerating the trend. Ann Arbor, Michigan, recently became the first US city to directly deploy solar and battery systems on 150 homes through its city-owned utility. Vermont's Green Mountain Power is offering home batteries at little to no upfront cost. These programs signal that utilities themselves recognize the value of distributed energy.

Hacker News

Hosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller

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17 May 2026 1:25am GMT

Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning [pdf]

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17 May 2026 1:19am GMT

16 May 2026

Slashdot

An Entire Wikipedia That's 100% AI Hallucinations

"Every link leads to an entry that does not exist yet," explains the GitHub page for a Wikipedia-like site called Halupedia. "Until you click it, at which point an LLM pretends it has always existed and writes it for you, in the deadpan register of a 19th-century scholarly press..." Every article is invented on demand. The footnotes are also lies... The hardest problem with an infinite, on-demand encyclopedia is internal contradiction... When the LLM writes an article, it is required to add a context="..." attribute on every <a> it inserts, summarising the future article it is linking to (e.g. context="19th-century clerk who formalized footnote drift, Pellbrick's mentor")... When that target article is later requested for the first time, the worker loads the accumulated hints and injects them into the system prompt as "PRIOR REFERENCES - these are CANON". The LLM is instructed that the encyclopedia is hallucinated and absurd, but it must not contradict itself. Fast Company reports that Halupedia was created by software developer BartÅomiej Strama, who confessed in a Reddit comment that the site came about after a drunk night with a friend. In the week since launch, he says Halupedia has amassed more than 150,000 users." Beyond indulging in silly alternate histories, what's the point of using Halupedia? Strama hinted at one larger purpose in a reply to a donor on his Buy Me a Coffee page: "Your contribution towards polluting LLM training data will surely benefit society!" he wrote. The site is licensed as free software under the GPL-3.0 license. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.