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The education-news site EdSurge published "sponsored content" from Minecraft Education this month. "Students light up when they create something meaningful," the article begins. "Self-expression fuels learning, and creativity lies at the heart of the human experience." But they also argue that "As AI rapidly reshapes software development, computer science education must move beyond syntax drills and algorithmic repetition." Students "must also learn to think systemically…"
As AI automates many of the mechanical aspects of programming, the value of CS education is shifting, from writing perfect code to shaping systems, telling stories through logic and designing ethical, human-centered solutions… [I]t’s critical to offer computer science experiences that foster invention, expression and design. This isn’t just an education issue — it’s a workforce one. Creativity now ranks among the top skills employers seek, alongside analytical thinking and AI literacy. As automation reshapes the job market, McKinsey estimates up to 375 million workers may need to change occupations by 2030. The takeaway? We need more adaptable, creative thinkers. Creative coding, where programming becomes a medium for self-expression and innovation, offers a promising solution to this disconnect. By positioning code as a creative tool, educators can tap into students’ intrinsic motivation while simultaneously building computational thinking skills. This approach helps students see themselves as creators, not just consumers, of technology. It aligns with digital literacy frameworks that emphasize critical evaluation, meaningful contribution and not just technical skills. One example of creative coding comes from a curriculum that introduces computer science through game design and storytelling in Minecraft… Developed by Urban Arts in collaboration with Minecraft Education, the program offers middle school teachers professional development, ongoing coaching and a 72-session curriculum built around game-based instruction. Designed for grades 6-8, the project-based program is beginner-friendly; no prior programming experience is required for teachers or students. It blends storytelling, collaborative design and foundational programming skills with a focus on creativity and equity…. Students use Minecraft to build interactive narratives and simulations, developing computational thinking and creative design… Early results are promising: 93 percent of surveyed teachers found the Creative Coders program engaging and effective, noting gains in problem-solving, storytelling and coding, as well as growth in critical thinking, creativity and resilience. As AI tools like GitHub Copilot become standard in development workflows, the definition of programming proficiency is evolving. Skills like prompt engineering, systems thinking and ethical oversight are rising in importance, precisely what creative coding develops… As AI continues to automate routine tasks, students must be able to guide systems, understand logic and collaborate with intelligent tools. Creative coding introduces these capabilities in ways that are accessible, culturally relevant and engaging for today’s learners. Some background from long-time Slashdot reader theodp:
The Urban Arts and Microsoft Creative Coders program touted by EdSurge in its advertorial was funded by a $4 million Education Innovation and Research grant that was awarded to Urban Arts in 2023 by the U.S. Education Department "to create an engaging, game-based, middle school CS course using Minecraft tools" for 3,450 middle schoolers (6th-8th grades)" in New York and California (Urban Arts credited Minecraft for helping craft the winning proposal)… New York City is a Minecraft Education believer — the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment recently kicked off summer with the inaugural NYC Video Game Festival, which included the annual citywide Minecraft Education Battle of the Boroughs Esports Competition in partnership with NYC Public Schools.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot

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Suchomimus has a video up on the U.S. strike on Fordow:

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says that initial battle damage assessment showed “all of our precision munitions struck where we wanted them to strike and had the desired effect, which means, especially in Fordow, which was the primary target here, we believe we achieved destruction of capabilities there.”

More:

B-2 Spirit bombers dropped a total of 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, or MOPs, on two of the Iranian nuclear facility sites struck this weekend as part of “Operation Midnight Hammer,” Air Force Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Sunday.

President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that the U.S. military had attacked three facilities involved with Iran’s nuclear program at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan.

The mission marked the first operational use of the 30,000-pound MOP, the largest B-2 bomber strike in history, and the second-longest B-2 mission ever flown, Caine said during a Pentagon news conference. In order to deceive the Iranians, a number of B-2s flew west as decoys prior to the strike, he said.

Snip.

Defense officials showed reporters a graphic during Sunday’s news conference that indicated that seven B-2 bombers took part in the strikes.

A total of 125 aircraft were involved in the mission, including fighters and aerial refuelers, Caine said. The bombers and fighters dropped about 75 precision-guided munitions on two of the sites, and a Navy submarine fired Tomahawk missiles at a third.

Possibly more later.

Update: A more detailed Suchomimus damage assessment video:

I had heard chatter about using a ventilation shaft to hit the facility, because surely the Iranians wouldn’t be so stupid as to to use a vertical shaft that leads directly to the bunker complex rather than a horizontal one. But that seems to be the case.

Plus damage details for the Natanz and Isfahan sites. At least some of the 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators seem to have targeted Natanz, with the Tomahawks hitting Isfahan.

Also, U.S. graphics suggest the B-2s were actually flown from Whitman Airbase in Missouri, rather than Diego Garcia, as previously reported. Maybe that too was deception.

Update 2 via Ed Dirscoll at Instapundit: Israel seems to think that the 60% enriched Uranium was at Natanz and Isfahan, which was hit in the strike, and now they have no way to get it to 90%.

I’m gonna say something a bit different from what that source told the New York Times. He said Fordo was damaged Severely but wasn’t destroyed. So I’ll tell you what Israel’s current assessment is.

First off all Natanz was completely wiped out. For Fordo and Isfahan, we’re… pic.twitter.com/KQ9OTlh7Oo

— Amit Segal (@AmitSegal) June 22, 2025

Update 3 via Charlie Martin at Instapundit: Ex-spy Aimen Dean doesn’t buy the “they dismantled everything” narrative:

1. Real-Time Monitoring by the IAEA:
Both Fordow and Natanz are under partial surveillance by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). While Iran has restricted access in recent years, many of the monitoring systems – especially CCTV cameras – were active in the past and still provided some insight until at least early 2023. In several cases, the IAEA retained knowledge of infrastructure layouts and could remotely detect large-scale activity, especially if dismantling or evacuation were attempted.

2. The Myth of Rapid Evacuation:
This isn’t a warehouse full of sacks of potatoes. We’re talking about highly specialized, sensitive equipment, thousands of IR-1 and advanced IR-2m and IR-6 centrifuges. For context:
•Natanz had an estimated 15,000–20,000 centrifuges at peak capacity. Even after the JCPOA, thousands remained in use or storage.
•Fordow, while smaller, housed over 1,000 advanced centrifuges, some enriching uranium up to 60% purity in recent years.

These are not items that can be boxed up and trucked out overnight. Dismantling a single cascade (a chain of 164 centrifuges) safely requires days of work, if not longer. Multiply that by hundreds of cascades, and you quickly realize this isn’t a quick getaway.

Additionally, centrifuges are connected to high-pressure uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6) lines. Improper disassembly can lead to contamination, equipment damage, or worse, leaks of radioactive gas. Such evacuations would require weeks of preparation under controlled conditions.

3. Eyes in the Sky and on the Ground:
Let’s not forget that the U.S. and Israel have had persistent, layered surveillance over these sites for years, satellites, high-altitude drones, SIGINT, HUMINT. Every inch of ground around Fordow and Natanz has been watched for telltale signs of activity. The idea that Iran stealthily evacuated multiple facilities without being detected is simply ludicrous.

4. Propaganda to Salvage Prestige:
This entire narrative is damage control, plain and simple. The regime knows its core scientific and strategic assets were hit. They can’t admit it, so they spin: “We were too smart for them. Nothing of value was lost.” But it’s hollow bravado, masking what is in reality a colossal strategic failure – yet another one – in a long line of catastrophic blunders by a leadership that has brought nothing but ruin to a once-proud civilization.

Lawrence Person’s BattleSwarm Blog

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Legend has it that physicist Ernest Rutherford once dismissed all sciences other than physics as mere "stamp collecting." (Whether he actually said it is a matter of some debate.) But we now live in the information age, and scientists have found tremendous value in amassing giant databases of information for large-scale analysis, enabling them to explore different kinds of questions.

The latest addition is the Marine Organizational Body Size (MOBS) database, an open-access resource that—as its name implies—has collected body size data for more than 85,000 marine animal species and counting, ranging from microscopic creatures like zooplankton to the largest whales. MOBS is already enabling new research on the ocean’s biodiversity and global ecosystem, according to a paper published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography. The database is now available though GitHub and currently covers 40 percent of all described marine animal species, with a goal of achieving 75 percent coverage.

"We’ve really lacked that broader persecutive for a lot of ocean life," marine ecologist Craig McClain of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette told Ars. McClain is the lead creator of MOBS. "We know about evolution and ecology for mammals and birds especially, and to a lesser extent reptiles and amphibians. We just haven’t had these big collated body size data sets for the marine groups, especially the invertebrates." The MOBS project is basically constructing a "library of [marine] life."

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Ars Technica – All content

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Centuries-old archaeological finds pertaining to the Bible are often fascinating, but how many of them are found … in North America? That’s what happened in a Canadian forest north of the Michigan border.

Not the Bee

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MakeUseOf

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The Laravel Taxonomy package manages categories, tags, and hierarchical structures in Laravel applications. Taxonomy is ideal for category management, organizing content, product attributes, and more.

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Inspired by the guidance computer used in Apollo missions, the DSKY Moonwatch packs space-age tech into a wristwatch. Styled like NASA’s iconic DSKY interface, the watch features glowing indicators, a numerical keypad, and an OLED screen that mimics spacecraft readouts. Features include stopwatch, timer, alarm, and GPS waypoint navigation.

The Awesomer

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NVIDIA releases a brand new video card and AMD follows up with a cheaper one. That’s basically been the cycle of the GPU industry for the last decade, with NVIDIA typically leading the pack and AMD rushing to keep up. But with the recent Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT, AMD finally found a winning formula with GPUs that were both cheaper than NVIDIA’s and, in many cases, more powerful. The new Radeon RX 9060 XT, which is meant to take on NVIDIA’s RTX 5060 Ti in 1080p and 1440p gaming, mostly repeats that formula. Starting at $350 with 16GB of RAM (and $300 with a paltry 8GB), it’s launching for much less than the $429 RTX 5060 Ti while delivering a similar level of performance.

Once again, the key for AMD is offering much more RAM than NVIDIA for far less money. Sure, AMD is using slower GDDR6 RAM with 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth, compared to NVIDIAs’ 448 GB/s GDDR7. But in practice, actually having a larger memory pool is more useful when you’re dealing with massive textures and 3D models in modern games. So if you’re looking for the best gaming bang for the buck under $400, the 16GB Radeon RX 9060 XT is undoubtedly a winner.

What is the Radeon RX 9060 Ti?

The least powerful member of AMD’s Radeon RX 9000 family (so far), the RX 9060 XT is basically the card you’d get if you can’t stomach spending more than $500 on a GPU. Just remember that video cards tend to jump up in cost once they actually hit stores, depending on availability and the whims of retailers. The RX 9060 XT sports 32 RDNA 4 compute units, 32 RT accelerators and 64 AI accelerators. It can reach up to 3.1GHz speeds with its boost clock and consumes up to 180W of power. In comparison, the $549 MSRP RX 9070 has 56 compute units, while the $599 RX 9070 XT has eight more.

AMD is pitching this GPU as a replacement for the RX 7600 XT, which launched at $329 last year. That card also had 16GB of VRAM, but it had a slower 288 GB/s bandwidth. While the 7600 XT was more focused on entry-level 1440p gaming, the 9060 XT’s hardware improvements make it far more capable. AMD claims it’s 46 percent faster than the 7600 XT across more than 40 games, and in my testing that figure checks out.

For this review, I tested Gigabyte’s RX 9060 XT GPU, which has three cooling fans pointed at a typical copper heatsink. There’s no fancy vapor cooling chamber or any extravagant materials on the card, but at this price range I didn’t expect much.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

What’s good about the Radeon RX 9060 Ti?

Across games and benchmarks, the 9060 XT clocked in just about where I expected: noticeably slower than the RX 9070, and either on-par or slightly slower than the NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti. In 3DMark’s Steel Nomad benchmark, the 9060 XT scored 200 more points than that NVIDIA card, and it was also 90 points ahead in Timespy Extreme. But NVIDIA had a 1,000 point lead in the Speedway benchmark and it was more than 2,000 points ahead in the Luxmark HDR 4 test.

Despite those figures, I’m still impressed that the 9060 XT can stay in the same league as NVIDIA’s RTX 5060 Ti while costing a lot less. AMD’s ray tracing performance has also improved quite a bit from its previous generations, scoring 45 percent faster in the 3DMark Port Royal benchmark. NVIDIA still has the lead in ray tracing in games though, especially with the one-two punch of DLSS 4 AI upscaling and multi-frame generation. NVIDIA’s RTX 5000-series cards can produce up to three interpolate frames for every natively rendered frame, while AMD is still stuck with generating a single extra frame with its FSR 3 and 4 (Fidelity Super Resolution 4) upscaling.

The Radeon RX 9060 XT was able to run Cyberpunk 2077 in 1440p ray tracing "overdrive" mode at a respectable 80 fps, whereas NVIDIA’s RTX 5060 Ti hit 136 fps thanks to multi-frame generation. Still, there’s plenty of wiggle room to crank out more frames: Stepping down to 1080p got me 120 fps, and I saw 90 fps while using the less demanding ray tracing "ultra" preset in 1440p. In terms of raw performance, without any upscaling fanciness, the 9060 XT hit 114 fps in 1080p and 90 fps in 1440p.

The Radeon RX 9060 XT didn’t run very hot during my testing, but that makes sense since it’s purely focused on 1080p and 1440p gaming, During 3DMark’s Steel Nomad stress test, which repeats the benchmark 20 times in succession, the card only topped out at 54 Celsius. I’m used to seeing video cards reaching upwards of 70C under load, so the 9060 XT was a nice surprise. While idling, it sits at 42 Celsius. That’s higher than cards with vapor chamber cooling, but it’s about average for cards in this price range. I didn’t hear any annoying fan noise under load either, since it barely broke a sweat.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

What’s bad about the Radeon RX 9060 XT?

There isn’t really much to complain about with the Radeon RX 9060 XT, so long as you’re not expecting too much from a sub-$400 GPU. Still, it would be nice to see support for AMD’s new FSR 4 AI upscaling spread out more quickly. When the RX 9070 XT launched, the feature was only available in a handful of games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and now it’s supported over 60 games. That’s still about half of the games that NVIDIA’s DLSS 4 supports (which so far includes over 125 titles).

On the RX 9060 XT, the FSR 4 user experience still isn’t as simple as activating DLSS on NVIDIA cards. I had to enable it manually in AMD’s Adrenaline software, then flip it on in Call of Duty: Warzone to activate it. On the bright side, I saw an average of 254 fps while playing a match in 1440p with extreme graphics settings, FSR 4 and frame generation flipped on. With frame gen enabled, but no FSR 4, performance dipped to 174fps. And if I removed both of those features, it fell to 110 fps. Clearly, FSR 4 and frame gen helps quite a bit, I just wish it were in more games. 

Should you buy the Radeon RX 9060 XT?

Assuming retailers don’t go wild by overpricing the Radeon RX 9060 XT, it’s a solid option if you’re looking for an affordable GPU that’s dedicated to 1080p and 1440p gameplay. At $350, the 9060 XT is well below the RTX 5060 Ti’s $429 retail price, and certainly much cheaper than models being sold for more than $500.

To reach a lower $300 price point, AMD also unveiled an RX 9060 Ti with 8GB of RAM. But honestly, I’d recommend avoiding that entirely unless you only play ancient games in 1080p. It’s worth spending a bit more so you can play newer games with less headaches, and it’s practically a requirement if you want to play in 1440p.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

Wrap-up

The Radeon RX 9060 XT is a reminder of a world where we didn’t have to pay more than $400 to get a capable GPU. We already know more than 80 percent of PC gamers play at 1440p or lower resolutions, according to Steam’s data. So for the vast majority of players out there — the ones who aren’t using monitors with crazy high refresh rates or 4K+ resolutions — it’s all the GPU you really need.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/amd-radeon-rx-9060-xt-16gb-review-finally-a-powerful-350-gpu-130037952.html?src=rssEngadget

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Payphones "were the only things that were built to last for decades and be out in the elements," says electrical engineer Patrick Schlott. He should know; as a hobby, he buys secondhand payphones, rewires them, then asks local businesses in rural Vermont if they’d let him install them. His goal is to offer, for free, public telephone service. (Schlott foots the bill himself.)

"It’s assumed most folks own cell phones," writes Schlott. "Well, not everyone does, sometimes they don’t work out on dirt roads, sometimes you forget your charger, and sometimes you just really need to make a phone call. We aim to provide a valuable public service to the community while teaching people about the US telephone system that has over a century of history behind it."

Schlott’s company, RandTel, currently operates three phones in his neck of Vermont: One at the North Tunbridge General Store in Tunbridge, one at the Latham Library and a third—a rotary model from the 1950s–at the town of Randolph’s information booth. He’s particularly proud of that last one, as "This installation is 100% solar-powered, provided graciously by Catamount Solar," he writes. "Many thanks to the White River Valley Chamber of Commerce for hosting!"

Here’s a look at what Schlott does:

Core77

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This Laravel Blade + Apline.js starter kit emphasizes simplicity by offering a lightweight, Blade-only kit.

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