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SUNDAY, 17 MAY 2026, 08:24

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Taxis, Ferraris and the Big Five: the rise and fall of Joe Sibanyoni

Today at 07:26 AM, via SowetanLIVE

Joe Sibanyoni, known as “Joe Ferrari,” rose from a taxi driver in 1985 to lead a multimillion-rand business empire. He is now accused of demanding R2.2m in protection fees from a prominent businessman involved in the Moloto Road construction project.

Education

My Classmate, ChatGPT

Today at 07:00 AM, via New York Times

Lessons from the first graduating A.I. class.

Education

Canvas hack: is it ever a good idea to pay a ransom, and what happens to the data?

Yesterday at 20:00 PM, via The Guardian

Businesses are advised against paying – but as the Canvas platform hack shows, many are prepared to deal to protect users’ privacy

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After a week of outages, hundreds of millions of students’ data stolen, delayed assignment due dates, and school login pages being defaced by hackers, US tech firm Instructure – which operates the...

Education

La Gradiva review – stunning coming-of-age story of young love and sexual tension

Yesterday at 13:25 PM, via The Guardian

Cannes film festival: Marine Atlan’s debut film follows a group of French high-school kids and their long-suffering teacher on a visit to Pompeii and Naples

Here is cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan’s beautiful debut film about young love, superbly acted and directed. It is a reminder of how fundamentally dishonest and pseudosophisticated it is to laugh dismissively at the...

Education

What A.I. Kant Do

Yesterday at 13:00 PM, via New York Times

Could we English majors have a future after all?

Science/Tech

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

Today at 05:34 AM, via Slashdot

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...

Science/Tech

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

Today at 03:34 AM, via Slashdot

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,...

Science/Tech

An Entire Wikipedia That’s 100% AI Hallucinations

Today at 00:34 AM, via Slashdot

“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...

Science/Tech

How I Added an LLM-Based Grammar Checking + TeX Math Import To LibreOffice

Yesterday at 23:34 PM, via Slashdot

Former Microsoft programmer Keith Curtis “wrote and self-published After the Software Wars to explain the caliber of free and open source software,” according to his entry on Wikipedia, “and why he believes Linux is technically superior to any proprietary OS.” He’s also KeithCu (long-time Slashdot reader #925,649), and has written a blog post on “How I added an LLM-based grammar checking + TeX...