To start things off, we’d like to extend a special thanks to everyone who joined us for Hackaday Europe this weekend in Lecco, Italy. It was 48 hours of fascinating talks, incredible badge hacks, and some of the greatest company you could hope for. For those who couldn’t make it in person, we didn’t forget you — expect to hear more about what went down once we get a chance to catch our collective breath.
That’s not the only thing to keep an eye out for in the coming days. This is your reminder that Amazon will be officially ending support for older Kindles in a few days. After May 20th, any of the megacorp’s e-readers that were introduced before 2012 will be persona non grata, so you should plan accordingly.
The biggest change is that these older devices won’t be able to buy digital books from Amazon, but you can still use them offline, and the fantastic Calibre makes it a breeze to load up content from other sources. To be perfectly honest, we’d advise any Kindle user to decouple their device from the Amazon mothership by using Calibre or even jailbreaking it and installing KOReader, so the end of official support is fine by us. In fact, if a surge of unsupported Kindles brings more attention and users to those projects, that suits us just fine.
We’ve also heard that Microsoft is removing the “Together” feature from Teams on June 30th. We actually had to look this one up — apparently, it was a mode added during the pandemic that made it look like you and the other people in the call were all sitting together in a virtual conference room of sorts. Sounds an awful lot like a dystopian nightmare to us, but to be fair, things got kinda weird there when we were all sheltering in place, so it’s hard to judge. In any event, we don’t think too many people will miss this particular feature in 2026.
While on the subject of products the world seems to have forgotten about, Electrek reports that Tesla has all but given up on their once promising solar roof tiles. The company won’t say just how many installations they’ve completed since the camouflaged panels hit the market in 2016, but estimates suggest the number may be as low as 3,000. It will probably come as little surprise to find that cost seems to be the biggest factor: a roof full of Tesla’s swanky tiles could run you six-figures, while traditional panels are only getting cheaper every year.
From end-of-life to the latest and greatest, today also marks the release of Linux 7.1-rc4. If you’re in the business of running release candidate kernels, you probably don’t need to be told what’s new, but for everyone else, Phoronix has a rundown on some of the changes. Highlights include improvements to hardware support (including a fix for the Framework Laptop 13 Pro), security fixes, and new guidance about the use of AI-generated code.
Finally, if you want a time-waster, there’s Halupedia. According to the site’s GitHub: An infinite, hallucinated encyclopedia. Every link leads to an entry that does not exist yet — 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. For example, you can read about “The Ministry of Slightly Wrong Maps,” or, if you prefer, “The Ministry of Terribly Wrong Maps.”
See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.
That reminds me of a recent Design Theory video. Silicon Valley’s Billion Dollar Design Scams.
“The wealthiest person in the world has a company that runs on inventing stories and hype about how amazing he’s going to make the future, with no plans on how he’s going to achieve it. This strategy makes perfect sense if you think about it: concrete measurable value has limits. You can’t really argue or speculate on how many units you sold last quarter, or easily fake your price to earnings ratio, but a bullshit story has infinite upside. The only limit is your imagination. The line can only go up.”
https://youtu.be/hDvAQf1cnr8?t=578
The target for companies like Tesla isn’t the consumers but investors who are willing to take the loss with a shrug. The product doesn’t need to work at all – failing on the market is actually the goal, because you get better returns on the initial hype than maintaining a productive business. The goal is to dump the product quietly and start a new round of hype with something else.
Where were Tesla’s solar roofs ever promising?
Nobody who knew anything about solar saw them as anything other than another musk money grab.
Solar City was $1.5 billion in debt by the time Musk bailed his cousins out and bought the company.
Their entire business model was about inserting themselves between homeowners and the government by renting out solar panels at zero up-front cost and collecting the renewable energy subsidies that would have otherwise landed on the homeowners. Once the subsidies were reduced, there was not enough margin left to sustain a middle-man and they could not offer the consumers attractive prices any more. It was a cash grab to begin with, but they didn’t plan their exit very well.
What Musk did with the solar roof tiles was then another one of his fantasy hype investor baits, and the rest is history.