2026-04-14 13:00:18
The 24 Hours of Le Mans races is an extremely prestigious endurance motorsport event which attracts the best cars and drivers from around the world. It’s one of the longest-running races too, taking place once a year since 1923 (with a few obvious understandable gaps). But, like most motorsports, it’s financially out of reach for most people. One of the more popular attempts to bring racing to the masses has been the 24 Hours of Lemons races, which have price limits on vehicles to keep the barrier to entry low, and an EV truck recently entered one of these races with some interesting results.
The group behind this vehicle is called Team Arcblast, who retrofitted an old Datsun pickup truck to the extreme to enter this race. The modestly sized electric motor is installed in between the cab and the bed for easy access to the driveshaft, with the engine bay repurposed for all of the cooling and radiators needed for endurance racing like this. They’ve also equipped the truck with plenty of efficiency-increasing spoilers and other aerodynamic parts, and rebuilt the cab with not only the required roll cage and other safety equipment, but a modified driving position with steering and other components from various Miatas.
The most impressive part of this build, however, is the battery. The team invented a method of swapping out batteries quickly to avoid having to fast charge the car in the pit area. The system lets a battery slide in to the middle of the truck above the motor and quickly connect to the electrical system allowing for very quick pit stops and the ability to charge other batteries while the race goes on. All of these modifications together allowed the team to break the EV record for a Lemons race.
For a Lemons race, though, even this truck stretches the original spirit that these races were started, however impressive the build. We published a primer to these types of races a while back which includes much more affordable internal combustion options.
Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip!
2026-04-14 10:00:17
Long ago, in the aftermath of the UNIX wars, three kernels emerged from the rubble: BSD, Linux, and Hurd. BSD, being UNIX, was held back by legal wrangling in the aftermath of the wars, and that allowed Linux to pull ahead to a pole position it still enjoys to this day. BSD has its following, of course, but Hurd? GNU Hurd seemed destined to languish… until April 1st, 2026, when the Gentoo Linux distribution was ported to the Free Software Foundation’s kernel.
It turns out, they weren’t actually joking. The joke part was that they were moving fully to the Hurd kernel, away from Linux– you can absolutely still run Gentoo with the Linux kernel, and make no mistake, that’s still the default and best-supported option. Options are good, though, and the Gentoo team has decided that it’s time to add some options to the kernel space, and give the Hurd some time in the sun.
Unlike the Linux kernel, which follows closely the monolithic UNIX framework– and the BSD-Unix kernel, which is Unix–GNU Hurd is a microkernel architecture, based originally on the Mach kernel. In that, it’s rather like MacOS. Unlike MacOS, given its roots in the Free Software Foundation, GNU Hurd is 100% free and open source. There are advantages to a microkernel architecture– it keeps drivers out of kernel space so a dodgy WiFi adapter can’t crash your system, for example– but the big disadvantage is, of course, drivers. Both Linux and BSD drivers can be ported, but that takes work and many of them have not been.
Still, now that Microsoft has become a major contributor to the Linux kernel, we could see a lot of the old-school Linux users who talk about “win-doze” and still spell Microsoft with a dollar sign being tempted to join the Hurd. If that appeals to you and you’re not into Gentoo, Debian has quietly let you install with the Hurd kernel for years now. It’s either that or embrace BSD and escape the chaos vortex.
The big three aren’t the only POSIX kernels out there, of course– there’s even one written entirely in Rust, for the die hard rustaceans amongst you.
2026-04-14 07:00:09
All the cool new 3D printers have tool-changing heads. Instead of multiplexing filament through one hot end, you simply park one hot end and pick up another. Or pick up a different tool, depending on what you need. There are many advantages to a system like that, but one disadvantage: cost. [Ultimate Tool Changer] has been working on a design for what he calls a simple, cheap changer, and it appears to be working well, as you can see in the video below.
This is one of those things that seems easy until you try to do it. He talks about a lot of the failures and dead ends along the way.
We worry that the tolerances are tight enough that wear over time might affect some of the key components, but how long that might take or if it will happen at all, we can’t say. Regardless, the system does appear to work, and we have no doubt you could keep it aligned or periodically replace parts to work around any wear issues.
One of the problems we have nowadays is that our main printers are plug-and-play boxes that are difficult to modify significantly. But if you have a homebrew printer or something made to expand like a Voron or old-school commercial printer, it seems like this would be something you could adapt.
We’ve seen homebrew tool changers, of course. Many times, actually.
2026-04-14 04:00:27
It seems like everybody takes their turn doing an ESP32-based weather display, and why not? They’re cheap, they’re easy, and you need to start somewhere. With the Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) and modules like it, you don’t even need to touch hardware! [likeablob] had the CYD, and he’s showing weather on it, but the Cydintosh is a full Macintosh Plus Emulator running on the ESP32.
The weather app is his own creation, written with the Retro68k cross-compiler, but it looks like something out of the 80s even if it’s getting its data over WiFi. The WiFi connection is, of course, thanks to the whole thing running on an ESP32-S3. Mac Plus emulation comes from [evansm7]’s Micro Mac emulator, the same one that lives inside the RP2040-based PicoMac that we covered some time ago. Obviously [likeablob] has added his own code to get the Macintosh emulator talking to the ESP32’s wireless hardware, with a native application to control the wifi connection in System 3.3. As far as the Macintosh is concerned, commands are passed to the ESP32 via memory address 0xF00000, and data can be read back from it as well. It’s a straightforward approach to allow intercommunication between the emulator and the real world.
The touchpad on the CYD serves as a mouse for the Macintosh, which might not be the most ergonomic given the Macintosh System interface was never meant for touchscreens, but evidently it’s good enough for [likeablob]. He’s built it into a lovely 3D printed case, whose STLs are available on the GitHub repository along with all the code, including the Home Assistant integration.
2026-04-14 01:00:18
Cognitive processes are not something that we generally pay much attention to until something goes wrong, but they cover the entire scope of us ingesting sensory information, the processing and recalling thereof, as well as any resulting decisions made based on such internal deliberation.
Within that context there has also long been a struggle between those who feel that it’s fine for humans to rely on available technologies to make tasks like information recall and calculations easier, and those who insist that a human should be perfectly capable of doing such tasks without any assistance. Plato argued that reading and writing hurt our ability to memorize, and for the longest time it was deemed inappropriate for students to even consider taking one of those newfangled digital calculators into an exam, while now we have many arguing that using an ‘AI’ is the equivalent of using a calculator.
At the root of this conundrum lies the distinction between that which enhances and that which hampers human cognition. When does one merely offload tasks to a device or object, and when does one harm one’s own cognition?
Cognitive offloading is the practice of shifting cognitive tasks to external aids, and it is thought to make learning complex tasks easier. In contrast to rote memorization of facts like dates of events and formulas, if we consider books to be an external memory storage device, then we can offload such precise memorization to their pages and only require from students that they are capable of efficiently finding information, as well as the judging of these on their merits.
An often misquoted anecdote here pertains to Albert Einstein, who was was once asked why he couldn’t cite the speed of sound from memory. To this he responded with a curt:
[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. …The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.
With this statement Einstein makes a clear case for the benefits of cognitive offloading in the sense that rote memorization does not enhance one’s cognition. Similarly, the ability to solve complicated equations and sums without so much as the use of pen and paper is fairly irrelevant when a slide rule and a digital calculator can offload all that work. As a benefit these devices tend to be more precise, faster and very accessible.
It is still important to have an intuitive feeling for whether a calculation is in the expected range, and one should never assume that what is written in a book is the absolute truth. That in a nutshell is the key difference between cognitive offloading and cognitive surrender. If you have entered a series of values into your calculator, the result seems off and you re-type them to be sure, that’s cognitive offloading.
If, however, you accept the outcome of such a calculation, or a text as written without a second thought, that constitutes surrendering an essential part of your cognitive processes to an external source. If we thus replace ‘calculator’ in this context with ‘LLM chatbot’ or an ‘AI summary’, the same caveat applies. Perhaps more so as at least a calculator is fully deterministic and can be proven to be mathematically correct.
So if that’s the case, and modern-day ‘AI’ isn’t really what it’s often cracked up to be, why would a presumably intelligent human being end up accepting their outputs like the literal gospel?
A recent study (DOI link) by Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave of the University of Pennsylvania investigated the prevalence of cognitive surrender in the context of LLM chatbots, looking for instances where users are seen to blindly accept the generated answers.
In this study, Shaw et al. had three groups of volunteers take a standardized test, during which one group had to rely purely on their own wits, the second group could use an LLM chatbot which gave correct answers, while a third group also had access to this chatbot, but for them it gave wrong answers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the test subjects used the chatbot quite a lot when available, with predictable results. In the ‘tri-system theory of cognition’ that Shaw et al. propose in the paper, the external cognitive system (‘System 3’) is that of the chatbot, whose output is clearly being accepted verbatim by a significant part of the test subjects. If said chatbot output is correct, this is great, but when it’s not, the test results massively suffer.
Where this is worrisome outside of such a self-contained tests is that people are exposed to endless amounts of faulty LLM-generated text, such as for example in the form of ‘AI summaries’ that search engines love to put front and center these days. Back in 2024, for example, Avram Piltch over at Tom’s Hardware compiled a amusing collection of such faulty outputs, some of which are easier to spot than others.
Ranging from the health effects of eating nose pickings to the speed difference between USB 3.2 Gen 1 and USB 3.0, to classics like adding Elmer’s glue to pizza sauce, it’s generally possible to find where on the internet a ridiculous claim was scraped from for the LLM’s dataset, while other types of faulty output are simply due to an LLM not possessing any intelligence or essentials like grasping what a context is.
Meanwhile other types of output are clearly confabulations, a fact which ought to be obvious to any intelligent human being, and yet it seems that so much of it passes whatever sniff test occurs within the cognitive capabilities of the average person.
In the generally accepted model of cognitive decision making we see two internal systems: the first is the fast, intuitive and emotion-driven system. The second is the deliberate and analytical system, which tends to take a backseat to the first system in general, but could be said to be checking the homework of the first.
Although psychology is hardly an exact science, in the scientific fields of systems neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience we can find evidence for how decisions are made in the primate brain – including those of humans – with various cortices involved in the decision-making process. Fascinating here is the activity observed in the parietal cortex where a decision is not only formed, but also apparently assigned a degree of confidence.
Lesions in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) have been linked to impaired decision making and the arisal of impulse control issues, as the ACC appears to be instrumental in error detection. Issues in the ACC are thus more likely to result in faulty or flawed decisions and judgements passing by uncorrected. Incidentally, the ACC was found to be heavily affected by environmental tetraethyl lead contamination, underlying the theory that leaded gasoline was responsible for a surge in crime until this additive was discontinued.
Knowing this, we can thus say with a fairly high degree of confidence that the concept of human cognition is very much determined by the physical wiring in the pinkish-white goo that constitutes our brains. A good demonstration of this is the effect of ethanol on the brain, as well as the intense cravings that accompany addictions.
Abnormal activity in the ACC has for example been associated with alcohol addiction, with an implant suggested to adjust said neural activity as detailed in a 2020 Neurotherapeutics study by Sook Ling Leong et al. In this study the eight treatment-resistant alcoholics had electrodes inserted into part of their ACC to provide direct stimulation, leading to a self-reported 60% drop in cravings.
As ethanol can freely pass through the blood-brain barrier, it is free to start binding with GABA receptors and induce the release of dopamine along with a range of other neurological effects that initially induce a feeling of relaxation and well-being, but also suppresses activity in various cortices, including the ACC. Effectively ethanol thus reduces one’s cognitive prowess and with it the ability to recognize flawed decisions.
From this we can thus deduce that activity in the ACC is not only essential for decision-making, but it also illustrates how the pinkish goop in our skulls is a fascinating biochemistry and neurochemistry experiment in which the addition or subtraction of certain substances and poking it with electrodes can induce a wide variety of cognitive outcomes.
Experiments aside, we started our lives off with the baseline that we were born with (‘nature’) and the various neuroplastic alterations made as we grew up (‘nurture’), which along the way led to various cognitive outcomes that we may or may not regret as adults. This leaves us free to learn from our mistakes and do better in as far as neuroplasticity allows.
It’s often said that the most valuable skill in life that adults tend to lose as we mature out of innocent childhood is the incessant ability to ask ‘Why?’. By questioning everything and wanting to know everything, we not only display curiosity, but also nurture the cognitive skills of our brain. If instead our environment pushes back against this, it can harm the development of such cognitive skills, even if the pushback doesn’t rise to the level of childhood trauma.
As a certified ‘nerdy kid’ back in the day who went through all the motions of being bullied, shoved into proverbial lockers and other types of physical abuse at school for having the nerve to like books, science and other ‘nerdy’ things that involved being curious, it’s hard not to feel the social pressure to simply comply and not question things. As an adult such social pressure only gets worse, with skills like critical thinking generally discouraged.
Of course, said critical thinking is exactly what we need when confronted with new technologies and the temptation to simply surrender that cognitive burden instead of asking questions. Yet when cognitive surrendering can have real consequences that may affect not just your own life but also those of others, it’s pretty much a basic survival skill to weapon yourself against it.
In a world where things like politics, idols, religion, and advertising exist, the rise of this purported ‘AI’ in the form of LLM-based chatbots with their often very convincingly human-like and authoritative outputs seem to have hit the same weaknesses that unscrupulous religious leaders and scammers exploit, with sometimes tragic consequences.
Although it’s clear that believing some factual misinformation generated by a chatbot is a far cry from deciding to take fatal actions based on a dialog with said chatbot, it also highlights the importance of retaining your critical thinking skills. Although we often like to think otherwise, people aren’t fully rational beings whose cognitive processes belong completely to themselves.
Answering the question of when we harm our own cognition, it would seem that while we can generally trust a calculator, an LLM-based chatbot is not nearly as reliable or benign. Caution and awareness of the risk of cognitive surrendering are thus well-warranted.
2026-04-13 23:30:00
Moon missions are hot again for the first bit since the space race. While the previous period had us land on the big lunar rock, the missions of tomorrow have us living on it. The initial problem of landing in one piece has been solved, but there are many more puzzles to solve. One major issue of living in the vacuum of space is the lack of breathable air, because, ya know, it’s space.
This brings us to today, where [Blue Origin] has announced a prototype method of turning Moon dust into the valuable gas we call oxygen. [Blue Origin] hasn’t posted much about the actual process behind this feat, terming the system “Air Pioneer”. What we do know is that it requires melting the regolith and then passing current through to release the O2 molecules from their rocky prison.
While some publications on this matter have been calling this a first in its entirety, this isn’t entirely true. NASA has worked on this technology for the past couple of years, called “Gaseous Lunar Oxygen from Regolith Electrolysis”, or (GaLORE). What [Blue Origin] has done, however, is complete the task under a for-profit motive. Perhaps this can introduce the drive needed to accelerate the development of the tech? (If anyone knows any more detail about the Blue Origins system, please let us know.)
Private space is certainly an exciting and quickly moving space in nearly all regards. It’s important to see how far we have come from the initial moon missions. If you want to check out some of the wackier lessons from that era, be sure to read up on the fight for moon cockroaches!
