The stu­dents at America’s elite uni­ver­si­ties are sup­posed to be the smartest, most promis­ing young peo­ple in the coun­try. And yet, shock­ing per­cent­ages of them are claim­ing aca­d­e­mic ac­com­mo­da­tions de­signed for stu­dents with learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties.

In an ar­ti­cle pub­lished this week in The Atlantic, ed­u­ca­tion re­porter Rose Horowitch lays out some shock­ing num­bers. At Brown and Harvard, 20 per­cent of un­der­grad­u­ate stu­dents are dis­abled. At Amherst College, that’s 34 per­cent. At Stanford University, it’s a galling 38 per­cent. Most of these stu­dents are claim­ing men­tal health con­di­tions and learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties, like anx­i­ety, de­pres­sion, and ADHD.

Obviously, some­thing is off here. The idea that some of the most elite, se­lec­tive uni­ver­si­ties in America—schools that re­quire 99th per­centile SATs and ster­ling es­says—would be ed­u­cat­ing large num­bers of gen­uinely learn­ing dis­abled stu­dents is clearly bo­gus. A stu­dent with real cog­ni­tive strug­gles is much more likely to end up in com­mu­nity col­lege, or not in higher ed­u­ca­tion at all, right?

The pro­fes­sors Horowitz in­ter­viewed largely back up this the­ory. “You hear ‘students with dis­abil­i­ties’ and it’s not kids in wheel­chairs,” one pro­fes­sor told Horowitch. “It’s just not. It’s rich kids get­ting ex­tra time on tests.” Talented stu­dents get to col­lege, start strug­gling, and run for a di­ag­no­sis to avoid bad grades. Ironically, the very schools that cog­ni­tively chal­lenged stu­dents are most likely to at­tend—com­mu­nity col­leges—have far lower rates of dis­abled stu­dents, with only three to four per­cent of such stu­dents get­ting ac­com­mo­da­tions.

To be fair, some of the stu­dents re­ceiv­ing these ac­com­mo­da­tions do need them. But the cur­rent lan­guage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) al­lows stu­dents to get ex­pan­sive ac­com­mo­da­tions with lit­tle more than a doc­tor’s note.

While some stu­dents are no doubt seek­ing these ac­com­mo­da­tions as semi-con­scious cheaters, I think most gen­uinely iden­tify with the men­tal health con­di­tion they’re us­ing to get ex­tra time on tests. Over the past few years, there’s been a ris­ing push to see men­tal health and neu­rode­vel­op­men­tal con­di­tions as not just a med­ical fact, but an iden­tity marker. Will Lindstrom, the di­rec­tor of the Regents’ Center for Learning Disorders at the University of Georgia, told Horowitch that he sees a grow­ing num­ber of stu­dents with this per­spec­tive. “It’s al­most like it’s part of their iden­tity,” Lindstrom told her. “By the time we see them, they’re con­vinced they have a neu­rode­vel­op­men­tal dis­or­der.”

What’s dri­ving this trend? Well, the way con­di­tions like ADHD, autism, and anx­i­ety get talked about on­line—the place where most young peo­ple first learn about these con­di­tions—is prob­a­bly a con­tribut­ing fac­tor. Online cre­ators tend to paint a very broad pic­ture of the con­di­tions they de­scribe. A quick scroll of TikTok re­veals cre­ators la­bel­ing every­thing from al­ways wear­ing head­phones, to be­ing bad at man­ag­ing your time, to doo­dling in class as a sign that some­one may have a di­ag­nos­able con­di­tion. According to these videos, who is­n’t dis­abled?

The re­sult is a deeply dis­torted view of “normal.” If ever strug­gling to fo­cus or ex­pe­ri­enc­ing bore­dom is a sign you have ADHD, the im­pli­ca­tion is that a “normal,” nondis­abled per­son has es­sen­tially no prob­lems. A “neurotypical” per­son, the think­ing goes, can churn out a 15-page pa­per with no hint of pro­cras­ti­na­tion, main­tain per­fect fo­cus dur­ing a bor­ing lec­ture, and never ex­pe­ri­ence so­cial anx­i­ety or awk­ward­ness. This view is buf­feted by the cur­rent way many of these con­di­tions are di­ag­nosed. As Horowitch points out, when the lat­est is­sue of the DSM, the man­ual psy­chi­a­trists use to di­ag­nose pa­tients, was re­leased in 2013, it sig­nif­i­cantly low­ered the bar for an ADHD di­ag­no­sis. When the de­f­i­n­i­tion of these con­di­tions is set so lib­er­ally, it’s easy to imag­ine a highly in­tel­li­gent Stanford stu­dent be­com­ing con­vinced that any sign of aca­d­e­mic strug­gle proves they’re learn­ing dis­abled, and any prob­lems mak­ing friends are a sign they have autism.

Risk-aversion, too, seems like a com­pelling fac­tor dri­ving bright stu­dents to claim learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties. Our na­tion’s most promis­ing stu­dents are also its least as­sured. So afraid of fail­ure—of bad grades, of a poorly-re­ceived es­say—they take any sign of strug­gle as a di­ag­nos­able con­di­tion. A few decades ago, a stu­dent who en­tered col­lege and found the ma­te­r­ial harder to mas­ter and their time less eas­ily man­aged than in high school would have been seen as rel­a­tively nor­mal. Now, every time she picks up her phone, a bar­rage of in­flu­encers is clam­or­ing to tell her this is a sign she has ADHD. Discomfort and dif­fi­culty are no longer per­ceived as typ­i­cal parts of grow­ing up.

In this con­text, it’s easy to read the rise of aca­d­e­mic ac­com­mo­da­tions among the na­tion’s most in­tel­li­gent stu­dents as yet an­other man­i­fes­ta­tion of the risk-aver­sion en­demic in the striv­ing chil­dren of the up­per mid­dle class. For most of the elite-col­lege stu­dents who re­ceive them, aca­d­e­mic ac­com­mo­da­tions are a pro­tec­tion against fail­ure and self-doubt. Unnecessary ac­com­mo­da­tions are a two-front form of cheat­ing—they give you an un­just leg-up on your fel­low stu­dents, but they also al­low you to cheat your­self out of gen­uine in­tel­lec­tual growth. If you mask learn­ing de­fi­cien­cies with ex­tra time on texts, soothe so­cial anx­i­ety by for­go­ing pre­sen­ta­tions, and ne­glect time man­age­ment skills with dead­line ex­ten­sions, you might forge a path to bet­ter grades. But you’ll also find your­self less ca­pa­ble of tack­ling the chal­lenges of adult life.

: Parenting and lead­er­ship is sim­i­lar. Teach a man to fish, etc.

I spent a cou­ple of years man­ag­ing a team, and I en­tered that role — like many — with­out know­ing any­thing about how to do it. I tried to fig­ure out how to be a good man­ager, and do­ing so I ended up read­ing a lot about ser­vant lead­er­ship. It never quite sat right with me, though. Servant lead­er­ship seems to me a lot like curl­ing par­ent­ing: the leader/​par­ent an­tic­i­pate prob­lems and sweep the way for their di­rect re­ports/​chil­dren.

To be clear, this prob­a­bly feels very good (initially, any­way) for the di­rect re­ports/​chil­dren. But the ser­vant leader/​curl­ing par­ent quickly be­comes an over­worked sin­gle point of fail­ure, and once they leave there is no­body else who knows how to han­dle the ob­sta­cles the leader moved out of the way for every­one. In the worst cases, they leave be­hind a group of peo­ple who have been com­pletely iso­lated from the rest of the or­gan­i­sa­tion, and has no idea what their pur­pose is and how to fit in with the rest of the world.

I would like to in­vent my own buzz­word: trans­par­ent lead­er­ship. In my book, a good leader

ex­plains val­ues and prin­ci­ples em­braced by the or­gan­i­sa­tion to aid them in

mak­ing aligned de­ci­sions on their own,

cre­ates di­rect links be­tween sup­ply and de­mand (instead of de­lib­er­ately mak­ing

them­selves a mid­dle man),

al­lows their di­rect re­ports ca­reer growth by grad­u­ally tak­ing over lead­er­ship

re­spon­si­bil­i­ties,

The mid­dle man­ager that does­n’t per­form any use­ful work is a fun stereo­type, but I also think it’s a good tar­get to aim for. The dif­fer­ence lies in what to do once one has ren­dered one­self re­dun­dant. A com­mon re­sponse is to in­vent new work, ask for sta­tus re­ports, and add bu­reau­cracy.

A bet­ter re­sponse is to go back to work­ing on tech­ni­cal prob­lems. This keeps the man­ager’s skills fresh and gets them more re­spect from their re­ports. The man­ager should turn into a high-pow­ered spare worker, rather than a pa­per-shuf­fler.

Microsoft has low­ered sales growth tar­gets for its AI agent prod­ucts af­ter many sales­peo­ple missed their quo­tas in the fis­cal year end­ing in June, ac­cord­ing to a re­port Wednesday from The Information. The ad­just­ment is re­port­edly un­usual for Microsoft, and it comes af­ter the com­pany missed a num­ber of am­bi­tious sales goals for its AI of­fer­ings.

AI agents are spe­cial­ized im­ple­men­ta­tions of AI lan­guage mod­els de­signed to per­form mul­ti­step tasks au­tonomously rather than sim­ply re­spond­ing to sin­gle prompts. So-called “agentic” fea­tures have been cen­tral to Microsoft’s 2025 sales pitch: At its Build con­fer­ence in May, the com­pany de­clared that it has en­tered “the era of AI agents.”

The com­pany has promised cus­tomers that agents could au­to­mate com­plex tasks, such as gen­er­at­ing dash­boards from sales data or writ­ing cus­tomer re­ports. At its Ignite con­fer­ence in November, Microsoft an­nounced new fea­tures like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, along with tools for build­ing and de­ploy­ing agents through Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio. But as the year draws to a close, that promise has proven harder to de­liver than the com­pany ex­pected.

According to The Information, one US Azure sales unit set quo­tas for sales­peo­ple to in­crease cus­tomer spend­ing on a prod­uct called Foundry, which helps cus­tomers de­velop AI ap­pli­ca­tions, by 50 per­cent. Less than a fifth of sales­peo­ple in that unit met their Foundry sales growth tar­gets. In July, Microsoft low­ered those tar­gets to roughly 25 per­cent growth for the cur­rent fis­cal year. In an­other US Azure unit, most sales­peo­ple failed to meet an ear­lier quota to dou­ble Foundry sales, and Microsoft cut their quo­tas to 50 per­cent for the cur­rent fis­cal year.

When you pur­chase through links in our ar­ti­cles, we may earn a small com­mis­sion. This does­n’t af­fect our ed­i­to­r­ial in­de­pen­dence.

RAM is so ex­pen­sive, Samsung won’t even sell it to Samsung

Due to ris­ing prices from the “AI” bub­ble, Samsung Semiconductor re­port­edly re­fused a RAM or­der for new Galaxy phones from Samsung Electronics.

The price of eggs has noth­ing on the price of com­puter mem­ory right now. Thanks to a sup­ply crunch from the “AI” bub­ble, RAM chips are the new gold, with prices on con­sumer PC mem­ory kits bal­loon­ing out of con­trol. In an ob­ject les­son in the ridicu­lous­ness of an eco­nomic bub­ble, Samsung won’t even sell its mem­ory to… Samsung.

Here’s the sit­u­a­tion. Samsung makes every­thing from re­frig­er­a­tors to su­per­mas­sive oil tankers. Getting all that stuff made re­quires an or­ga­ni­za­tion that’s lit­er­ally dozens of af­fil­i­ated com­pa­nies and sub­sidiaries, which don’t nec­es­sar­ily work as closely or har­mo­niously as you might as­sume. For this story, we’re talk­ing about Samsung Electronics, which makes Galaxy phones, tablets, lap­tops, watches, etc., and Samsung Semiconductor Global, which man­u­fac­tures mem­ory and other chips and sup­plies the global mar­ket. That global mar­ket in­cludes both Samsung sub­sidiaries and their com­peti­tors—lap­tops from Samsung, Dell, and Lenovo sit­ting on a Best Buy store shelf might all have Samsung-manufactured mem­ory sit­ting in their RAM slots.

Samsung sub­sidiaries are, nat­u­rally, go­ing to look to Samsung Semiconductor first when they need parts. Such was re­port­edly the case for Samsung Electronics, in search of mem­ory sup­plies for its newest smart­phones as the com­pany ramps up pro­duc­tion for 2026 flag­ship de­signs. But with so much RAM hard­ware go­ing into new “AI” data cen­ters—and those com­pa­nies will­ing to pay top dol­lar for their hard­ware—mem­ory man­u­fac­tur­ers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are pri­or­i­tiz­ing data cen­ter sup­pli­ers to max­i­mize prof­its.

The end re­sult, ac­cord­ing to a re­port from SE Daily spot­ted by SamMobile, is that Samsung Semiconductor re­jected the orig­i­nal or­der for smart­phone DRAM chips from Samsung Electronics’ Mobile Experience di­vi­sion. The smart­phone man­u­fac­tur­ing arm of the com­pany had hoped to nail down pric­ing and sup­ply for an­other year. But re­ports say that due to “chipflation,” the phone-mak­ing di­vi­sion must rene­go­ti­ate quar­terly, with a long-term sup­ply deal re­jected by its cor­po­rate sib­ling. A short-term deal, with higher prices, was re­port­edly ham­mered out.

Assuming that this in­for­ma­tion is ac­cu­rate—and to be clear, we can’t in­de­pen­dently con­firm it—con­sumers will see prices rise for Samsung phones and other mo­bile hard­ware. But that’s hardly a sur­prise. Finished elec­tron­ics prob­a­bly won’t see the same me­te­oric rise in prices as con­sumer-grade RAM mod­ules, but this ris­ing tide is flood­ing all the boats. Raspberry Pi, which strives to keep its mod-friendly elec­tron­ics as cheap as pos­si­ble, has re­cently had to bring prices up and called out mem­ory costs as the cul­prit. Lenovo, the world’s largest PC man­u­fac­turer, is stock­pil­ing mem­ory sup­plies as a bul­wark against the mar­ket.

But if you’re hop­ing to see prices lower in 2026, don’t hold your breath. According to a fore­cast from mem­ory sup­plier TeamGroup, com­po­nent prices have tripled re­cently, caus­ing fin­ished mod­ules to jump in prices as quickly as 100 per­cent in a month. Absent some kind of dis­as­trous mar­ket col­lapse, prices are ex­pected to con­tinue ris­ing into next year, and sup­ply could re­main con­strained well into 2027 or later.

Michael is a 10-year vet­eran of tech­nol­ogy jour­nal­ism, cov­er­ing every­thing from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he’s the res­i­dent key­board nut, al­ways us­ing a new one for a re­view and build­ing a new me­chan­i­cal board or ex­pand­ing his desk­top “battlestation” in his off hours. Michael’s pre­vi­ous by­lines in­clude Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he’s cov­ered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he’s al­ways look­ing for­ward to his next kayak­ing trip.

AMD’s FSR Redstone tech to get wider roll­out in December

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, se­lects her favourite sto­ries in this weekly newslet­ter.

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, se­lects her favourite sto­ries in this weekly newslet­ter.

Anthropic has tapped law firm Wilson Sonsini to be­gin work on one of the largest ini­tial pub­lic of­fer­ings ever, which could come as soon as 2026, as the ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence start-up races OpenAI to the pub­lic mar­ket.

The maker of the Claude chat­bot, which is in talks for a pri­vate fund­ing round that would value it at more than $300bn, chose the US west coast law firm in re­cent days, ac­cord­ing to two peo­ple with knowl­edge of the de­ci­sion.

The start-up, led by chief ex­ec­u­tive Dario Amodei, had also dis­cussed a po­ten­tial IPO with big in­vest­ment banks, ac­cord­ing to mul­ti­ple peo­ple with knowl­edge of those talks. The peo­ple char­ac­terised the dis­cus­sions as pre­lim­i­nary and in­for­mal, sug­gest­ing that the com­pany was not close to pick­ing its IPO un­der­writ­ers.

Nonetheless, these moves rep­re­sent a sig­nif­i­cant step up in Anthropic’s prepa­ra­tions for an IPO that would test the ap­petite of pub­lic mar­kets to back the mas­sive, loss­mak­ing re­search labs at the heart of the AI boom.

Wilson Sonsini has ad­vised Anthropic since 2022, in­clud­ing on com­mer­cial as­pects of multi­bil­lion-dol­lar in­vest­ments from Amazon, and has worked on high-pro­file tech IPOs such as Google, LinkedIn and Lyft.

Its in­vestors are en­thu­si­as­tic about an IPO, ar­gu­ing that Anthropic can seize the ini­tia­tive from its larger ri­val OpenAI by list­ing first.

Anthropic could be pre­pared to list in 2026, ac­cord­ing to one per­son with knowl­edge of its plans. Another per­son close to the com­pany cau­tioned that an IPO so soon was un­likely.

“It’s fairly stan­dard prac­tice for com­pa­nies op­er­at­ing at our scale and rev­enue level to ef­fec­tively op­er­ate as if they are pub­licly traded com­pa­nies,” said an Anthropic spokesper­son. “We haven’t made any de­ci­sions about when or even whether to go pub­lic, and don’t have any news to share at this time.”

OpenAI was also un­der­tak­ing pre­lim­i­nary work to ready it­self for a pub­lic of­fer­ing, ac­cord­ing to peo­ple with knowl­edge of its plans, though they cau­tioned it was too soon to set even an ap­prox­i­mate date for a list­ing.

But both com­pa­nies may also be ham­pered by the fact that their rapid growth and the as­tro­nom­i­cal costs of train­ing AI mod­els make their fi­nan­cial per­for­mance dif­fi­cult to fore­cast.

The pair will also be at­tempt­ing IPOs at val­u­a­tions that are un­prece­dented for US tech start-ups. OpenAI was val­ued at $500bn in October. Anthropic re­ceived a $15bn com­mit­ment from Microsoft and Nvidia last month, which will form part of a fund­ing round ex­pected to value the group be­tween $300bn and $350bn.

Anthropic had been work­ing through an in­ter­nal check­list of changes re­quired to go pub­lic, ac­cord­ing to one per­son fa­mil­iar with the process.

The San Francisco-headquartered start-up hired Krishna Rao, who worked at Airbnb for six years and was in­stru­men­tal in that com­pa­ny’s IPO, as chief fi­nan­cial of­fi­cer last year.

Wilson Sonsini did not re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment.

Memory price in­fla­tion comes for us all, and if you’re not af­fected yet, just wait.

I was build­ing a new PC last month us­ing some parts I had bought ear­lier this year. The 64 Gigabyte T-Create DDR5 mem­ory kit I used cost $209 then. Today? The same kit costs $650!

Just in the past week, we found out Raspberry Pi’s in­creas­ing their sin­gle board com­puter prices. Micron’s killing the Crucial brand of RAM and stor­age de­vices com­pletely, mean­ing there’s gonna be one fewer con­sumer mem­ory man­u­fac­turer. Samsung can’t even buy RAM from them­selves to build their own Smartphones, and small ven­dors like Libre Computer and Mono are see­ing RAM prices dou­ble, triple, or even worse, and they’re not even buy­ing the lat­est RAM tech!

I think PC builders might be the first crowd to get im­pacted across the board—just look at these in­sane graphs from PC Parts Picker, show­ing RAM prices go­ing from like $30 to $120 for DDR4, or like $150 to five hun­dred dol­lars for 64 gigs of DDR5.

But the im­pacts are only just start­ing to hit other mar­kets.

Libre Computer men­tioned on Twitter a sin­gle 4 gi­ga­byte mod­ule of LPDDR4 mem­ory costs $35. That’s more ex­pen­sive than every other com­po­nent on one of their sin­gle board com­put­ers com­bined! You can’t sur­vive sell­ing prod­ucts at a loss, so once the cur­rent pro­duc­tion batches are sold through, ei­ther prices will be in­creased, or cer­tain prod­uct lines will go out of stock.

The smaller the com­pany, the worse the price hit will be. Even Raspberry Pi, who I’m sure has a lit­tle more mar­gin built in, al­ready raised SBC prices (and in­tro­duced a 1 GB Pi 5—maybe a good ex­cuse for de­vel­op­ers to drop Javascript frame­works and pro­gram for lower mem­ory re­quire­ments again?).

Cameras, gam­ing con­soles, tablets, al­most any­thing that has mem­ory will get hit sooner or later.

I can’t be­lieve I’m say­ing this, but com­pared to the cur­rent mar­ket, Apple’s in­sane mem­ory up­grade pric­ing is… ac­tu­ally in line with the rest of the in­dus­try.

The rea­son for all this, of course, is AI dat­a­cen­ter build­outs. I have no clue if there’s any price fix­ing go­ing on like there was a few decades ago—that’s some­thing con­spir­acy the­o­rists can de­bate—but the prob­lem is there’s only a few com­pa­nies pro­duc­ing all the world’s mem­ory sup­plies.

And those com­pa­nies all re­al­ized they can make bil­lions more dol­lars mak­ing RAM just for AI dat­a­cen­ter prod­ucts, and ne­glect the rest of the mar­ket.

So they’re shut­ting down their con­sumer mem­ory lines, and de­vot­ing all pro­duc­tion to AI.

Even com­pa­nies like GPU board man­u­fac­tur­ers are get­ting shafted; Nvidia’s not giv­ing mem­ory to them along with their chips like they used to, ba­si­cally telling them “good luck, you’re on your own for VRAM now!”

Which is es­pe­cially rich, be­cause Nvidia’s prof­it­ing ob­scenely off of all this stuff.

That’s all bad enough, but some peo­ple see a sil­ver lin­ing. I’ve seen some peo­ple say “well, once the AI bub­ble bursts, at least we’ll have a ton of cheap hard­ware flood­ing the mar­ket!”

And yes, in past decades, that might be one out­come.

But the prob­lem here is the RAM they’re mak­ing, a ton of it is ei­ther in­te­grated into spe­cial­ized GPUs that won’t run on nor­mal com­put­ers, or be­ing fit­ted into spe­cial types of mem­ory mod­ules that don’t work on con­sumer PCs, ei­ther. (See: HBM).

That, and the GPUs and servers be­ing de­ployed now don’t even run on nor­mal power and cool­ing, they’re part of mas­sive sys­tems that would take a ton of ef­fort to get run­ning in even the most well-equipped home­labs. It’s not like the clas­sic Dell R720 that just needs some air and a wall out­let to run.

That is to say, we might be hit­ting a weird era where the PC build­ing hobby is gut­ted, SBCs get pro­hib­i­tively ex­pen­sive, and any­one who did­n’t stock­pile parts ear­lier this year is, pretty much, in a lurch.

Even Lenovo ad­mits to stock­pil­ing RAM, mak­ing this like the toi­let pa­per sit­u­a­tion back in 2020, ex­cept for mas­sive cor­po­ra­tions. Not enough sup­ply, so com­pa­nies who can af­ford to get some will buy it all up, hop­ing to stave off the short­ages that will prob­a­bly last longer, partly be­cause of that stock­pil­ing.

I don’t think it’s com­pletely out­landish to think some com­pa­nies will start scav­eng­ing mem­ory chips (ala dos­dude1) off other sys­tems for stock, es­pe­cially if RAM prices keep go­ing up.

It’s ei­ther that, or just stop mak­ing prod­ucts. There are some echoes to the global chip short­ages that hit in 2021-2022, and that re­ally shook up the mar­ket for smaller com­pa­nies.

I hate to see it hap­pen­ing again, but some­how, here we are a few years later, ex­cept this time, the AI bub­ble is to blame.

Sorry for not hav­ing a pos­i­tive note to end this on, but I guess… maybe it’s a good time to dig into that pile of old pro­jects you never fin­ished in­stead of buy­ing some­thing new this year.

How long will this last? That’s any­body’s guess. But I’ve al­ready put off some pro­jects I was gonna do for 2026, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

These re­lease notes cover the new fea­tures, as well as some back­wards in­com­pat­i­ble changes you should be aware of when up­grad­ing from Django 5.2 or ear­lier. We’ve

be­gun the dep­re­ca­tion process for some fea­tures.

See the How to up­grade Django to a newer ver­sion guide if you’re up­dat­ing an ex­ist­ing pro­ject.

The Django 5.2.x se­ries is the last to sup­port Python 3.10 and 3.11.

Django 6.0 sup­ports Python 3.12, 3.13, and 3.14. We highly rec­om­mend, and only of­fi­cially sup­port, the lat­est re­lease of each se­ries.

Following the re­lease of Django 6.0, we sug­gest that third-party app au­thors drop sup­port for all ver­sions of Django prior to 5.2. At that time, you should be able to run your pack­age’s tests us­ing python -Wd so that dep­re­ca­tion warn­ings ap­pear. After mak­ing the dep­re­ca­tion warn­ing fixes, your app should be com­pat­i­ble with Django 6.0.

These re­lease notes cover the new fea­tures, as well as some back­wards in­com­pat­i­ble changes you should be aware of when up­grad­ing from Django 5.2 or ear­lier. We’ve

be­gun the dep­re­ca­tion process for some fea­tures.

See the How to up­grade Django to a newer ver­sion guide if you’re up­dat­ing an ex­ist­ing pro­ject.

The Django 5.2.x se­ries is the last to sup­port Python 3.10 and 3.11.

Django 6.0 sup­ports Python 3.12, 3.13, and 3.14. We highly rec­om­mend, and only of­fi­cially sup­port, the lat­est re­lease of each se­ries.

Following the re­lease of Django 6.0, we sug­gest that third-party app au­thors drop sup­port for all ver­sions of Django prior to 5.2. At that time, you should be able to run your pack­age’s tests us­ing python -Wd so that dep­re­ca­tion warn­ings ap­pear. After mak­ing the dep­re­ca­tion warn­ing fixes, your app should be com­pat­i­ble with Django 6.0.

Built-in sup­port for the Content Security Policy (CSP)

stan­dard is now avail­able, mak­ing it eas­ier to pro­tect web ap­pli­ca­tions against con­tent in­jec­tion at­tacks such as cross-site script­ing (XSS). CSP al­lows de­clar­ing trusted sources of con­tent by giv­ing browsers strict rules about which scripts, styles, im­ages, or other re­sources can be loaded.

CSP poli­cies can now be en­forced or mon­i­tored di­rectly us­ing built-in tools: head­ers are added via the

ContentSecurityPolicyMiddleware, nonces are sup­ported through the csp() con­text proces­sor, and poli­cies are con­fig­ured us­ing the SECURE_CSP and

SECURE_CSP_REPORT_ONLY set­tings.

These set­tings ac­cept Python dic­tio­nar­ies and sup­port Django-provided con­stants for clar­ity and safety. For ex­am­ple:

from django.utils.csp im­port CSP

SECURE_CSP = {

“default-src”: [CSP. SELF],

“script-src”: [CSP.SELF, CSP.NONCE],

“img-src”: [CSP.SELF, “https:“],

The re­sult­ing Content-Security-Policy header would be set to:

de­fault-src ‘self’; script-src ‘self’ ‘nonce-SECRET’; img-src ‘self’ https:

To get started, fol­low the CSP how-to guide. For in-depth guid­ance, see the CSP se­cu­rity overview and the

ref­er­ence docs, which in­clude de­tails about dec­o­ra­tors to over­ride or dis­able poli­cies on a per-view ba­sis.

Django now in­cludes a built-in Tasks frame­work for run­ning code out­side the HTTP re­quest–re­sponse cy­cle. This en­ables of­fload­ing work, such as send­ing emails or pro­cess­ing data, to back­ground work­ers.

The frame­work pro­vides task de­f­i­n­i­tion, val­i­da­tion, queu­ing, and re­sult han­dling. Django guar­an­tees con­sis­tent be­hav­ior for cre­at­ing and man­ag­ing tasks, while the re­spon­si­bil­ity for run­ning them con­tin­ues to be­long to ex­ter­nal worker processes.

Tasks are de­fined us­ing the task() dec­o­ra­tor:

from django.core.mail im­port send_­mail

from django.tasks im­port task

@task

def email_users(emails, sub­ject, mes­sage):

re­turn send_­mail(sub­ject, mes­sage, None, emails)

Once de­fined, tasks can be en­queued through a con­fig­ured back­end:

email_users.en­queue(

emails=[“user@ex­am­ple.com”],

sub­ject=“You have a mes­sage”,

mes­sage=“Hello there!”,

Backends are con­fig­ured via the TASKS set­ting. The two

built-in back­ends in­cluded in this re­lease are pri­mar­ily in­tended for de­vel­op­ment and test­ing.

Django han­dles task cre­ation and queu­ing, but does not pro­vide a worker mech­a­nism to run tasks. Execution must be man­aged by ex­ter­nal in­fra­struc­ture, such as a sep­a­rate process or ser­vice.

See Django’s Tasks frame­work for an overview and the Tasks ref­er­ence for API de­tails.

Email han­dling in Django now uses Python’s mod­ern email API, in­tro­duced in Python 3.6. This API, cen­tered around the

email.mes­sage. EmailMessage class, of­fers a cleaner and Unicode-friendly in­ter­face for com­pos­ing and send­ing emails. It re­places use of Python’s older legacy (Compat32) API, which re­lied on lower-level MIME classes (from email.mime) and re­quired more man­ual han­dling of mes­sage struc­ture and en­cod­ing.

Notably, the re­turn type of the EmailMessage.message() method is now an in­stance of Python’s

email.mes­sage.EmailMes­sage. This sup­ports the same API as the pre­vi­ous SafeMIMEText and SafeMIMEMultipart re­turn types, but is not an in­stance of those now-dep­re­cated classes.

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HomeHybridBMW2021 > PHEV BMW iB­MUCP 21F37E Post-Crash Recovery — When EU en­gi­neer­ing be­comes a syn­onym for “unrepairable” + “generating waste”.

2021 > PHEV BMW iB­MUCP 21F37E Post-Crash Recovery — When EU en­gi­neer­ing be­comes a syn­onym for “unrepairable” + “generating waste”.

2021 > PHEV BMW iB­MUCP PHEV Post-Crash Recovery — When EU en­gi­neer­ing be­comes a syn­onym for “unrepairable” + “generating waste”.

If you own a BMW PHEV — or if you’re an in­sur­ance com­pany — every pot­hole, every curb im­pact, small or large in­ci­deng and even any rab­bit jump­ing out of a bush rep­re­sents a po­ten­tial €5,000 cost, just for a sin­gle blown fuse in­side the high-volt­age bat­tery sys­tem.

This “safety fuse” is de­signed to shut the sys­tem down the mo­ment any crash event is de­tected. Sounds safe — but ex­tremely ex­pen­sive. Theoraticaly in­sur­ance for BMW PHEV should be 3x higher than ICE or EV

Unfortunately, that’s not the only is­sue.

BMW has over-en­gi­neered the di­ag­nos­tic pro­ce­dure to such a level that even their own tech­ni­cians of­ten do not know the cor­rect re­place­ment process. And it gets worse: the orig­i­nal iB­MUCP mod­ule, which in­te­grates the py­ro­fuse, con­tac­tors, BMS and in­ter­nal cop­per-bonded cir­cuitry, is fully welded shut. There are no screws, no ser­vice open­ings, and it is not de­signed to be opened, even though the py­ro­fuse and con­tac­tors are tech­ni­cally re­place­able com­po­nents. Additionally, the pro­ce­dure re­quires flash­ing the en­tire ve­hi­cle both be­fore and af­ter the re­place­ment, which adds sev­eral hours to the process and in­creases risk of bricked com­po­nents which can in­crease the re­cov­ery cost by fac­tor 10x.

But that is still not the only prob­lem.

Even af­ter we man­aged to open the unit and ac­cess every­thing in­side, we dis­cov­ered that the Infineon TC375 MCU is fully locked. Both the D-Flash sec­tors and crash-flag ar­eas are un­read­able via DAP or via se­r­ial ac­cess.

Meaning: even if you re­place the py­ro­fuse, you still can­not clear the crash flag, be­cause the TC375 is cryp­to­graph­i­cally locked.

This leaves only one method:

➡️ Replace the en­tire iB­MUCP mod­ule with a brand-new one. (1100€ + tax for faulty fuse)

And the reg­is­tra­tion of the new com­po­nent is eas­ily one of the worst pro­ce­dures we have ever seen. You need an ICOM, IMIB, and AOS sub­scrip­tion — to­talling over €25,000 in tools — just to re­place a fuse. (even we man­aged to ac­ti­vate this one with IMIB, it will be nec­es­sary in some sit­u­a­tion)

Yes, you read that cor­rectly, 25,000€

Lot of ve­hi­cles de­signed and pro­duced in Europe — ICE, PHEV, and EV — have ef­fec­tively be­come a misslead­ing ECO ex­er­cise. Vehicles mar­keted as “CO₂-friendly” end up pro­duc­ing mas­sive CO₂ foot­prints through forced ser­vices, throw-away com­po­nents, high fail­ure rates and un­nec­es­sary parts man­u­fac­tur­ing cy­cles, over­com­pli­cated ser­vice pro­ce­dures, far larger than what the pub­lic is told. If we are de­stroy­ing our ICE au­to­mo­tive in­dus­try based on EURO norms, who is cal­cu­lat­ing real ECO foot­print of re­place­ment part manuc­fac­tur­ing, un­ec­es­sary ser­vic­ing and real waste cost?

We saw this years ago on diesel and petrol cars:

DPF fail­ures, EGR valves, high-pres­sure pumps, tim­ing belts run­ning in oil, low qual­ity au­to­matic trans­mis­sions, and lu­bri­ca­tion sys­tem de­fects. Everyone cal­cu­lates the CO₂ foot­print of a mov­ing ve­hi­cle — no­body cal­cu­lates the CO₂ foot­print of a ve­hi­cle that is con­stantly bro­ken and cre­at­ing waste.

ISTA’s of­fi­cial iB­MUCP re­place­ment pro­ce­dure is so risky that if you miss one sin­gle step — poorly ex­plained within ISTA — the sys­tem trig­gers ANTITHEFT LOCK.

This causes the bal­anc­ing con­troller to wipe and lock mod­ules.

Meaning: even in an au­tho­rised ser­vice cen­tre, sys­tem can ac­ci­den­tally delete the con­fig­u­ra­tion and end up need­ing not only a new iB­MUCP, but also all new bat­tery mod­ules.

Yes — re­plac­ing a fuse can ac­ci­den­tally trig­ger the re­place­ment of all healthy HV mod­ules, cost­ing €6,000+ VAT per mod­ule, plus a mas­sive un­known CO₂ foot­print.

This has al­ready hap­pened to sev­eral work­shops in the re­gion.

The next prob­lem: BMW re­fuses to pro­vide train­ing ac­cess for ISTA us­age. We sub­mit­ted two of­fi­cial cer­ti­fi­ca­tion re­quests — both were re­jected by the cen­tral of­fice in Austria, which is bor­der­line dis­crim­i­na­tory.

One more next prob­lem: Battery erasal can hap­pen in OEM and can hap­pen in our or any other 3rd party work­shop, but if pro­ce­dure was started in work­shop 1, it cant be con­tin­ued in work­shop 2. If bat­tery dam­age hap­pens in our work­shop dur­ing fuse change, and than bat­tery swap needed, we or even OEM work­shop do not cover costs of com­pletely new bat­tery pack. Which in­creases heav­ily own­er­ship costs.

All of this rep­re­sents un­nec­es­sary com­plex­ity with no mean­ing­ful pur­pose.

While Tesla’s py­ro­fuse costs €11 and the BMS re­set is around 50€, al­low­ing the car to be safely re­stored, BMW’s ap­proach bor­ders on il­log­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing, with no ben­e­fit to safety, no ben­e­fit to anti-theft pro­tec­tion — the only out­come is the gen­er­a­tion of bill­able labour hours and mas­sive amounts of need­less elec­tronic/​lithium waste.

Beyond that, we are ac­tively work­ing on break­ing the JTAG/DAP pro­tec­tion to gain di­rect ac­cess to the D-Flash data and de­crypt its con­tents to­gether with our col­leagues from Hungary. The goal is to sim­plify the en­tire bat­tery-re­cov­ery pro­ce­dure, re­duce costs, and ac­tu­ally de­liver the CO₂ re­duc­tion that the EU keeps misslead­ing— since the man­u­fac­tur­ers clearly won’t.

21F35B high volt­age bat­tery unit,

volt­age and elec­tric cur­rent sen­sor, cur­rent: Counter for the reuse of cell mod­ules ex­ceeded (safety func­tion)

OEM Service cost: 4000€+tax (aprox — if you have bmw quote, send)

OEM iB­MUCP : 1100€+tax

Labor hours: 24h — 50h

EVC: 2500€+tax (full ser­vice)

**It is cheaper to change LG Battery on Tesla, than chang­ing fuse on BMW PHEV, and prob­a­bly even less CO2 foot­pring

If you want to book your ser­vice with EV CLINIC:

Zagreb 1: www.evclinic.hr

Berlin: www.evclinic.de

Slovenija: www.evclinic.si

Serbia: www.evclinic.rs

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This is the code I cur­rently use to drive my vol­u­met­ric dis­plays.

It sup­ports two closely re­lated de­vices which are con­fig­ured in the src/​dri­ver/​gad­gets di­rec­tory:

* Rotovox is a 400mm Orb fea­tur­ing two 128x64 pan­els arranged ver­ti­cally side by side.

* Vortex is a 300mm Orb fea­tur­ing two 128x64 pan­els arranged hor­i­zon­tally, back to back.

Rotovox has a higher ver­ti­cal res­o­lu­tion and bet­ter hor­i­zon­tal den­sity; Vortex is brighter and has a higher re­fresh rate.

The 3D print­able parts for Vortex are avail­able here.

This code was orig­i­nally writ­ten for a sin­gle dis­play, and the de­vice spe­cific code was later some­what ab­stracted out to sup­port a sec­ond sim­i­lar gad­get. There are as­sump­tions about the hard­ware that are pretty well baked in:

* It con­sists of two HUB75 LED pan­els spin­ning around a ver­ti­cal axis.

* The pan­els use ei­ther ABCDE ad­dress­ing or ABC shift reg­is­ter ad­dress­ing.

* It uses a sin­gle GPIO (a pho­to­di­ode or sim­i­lar) to sync to ro­ta­tion - high for 180°, low for 180°.

The GPIO map­pings and panel lay­out are de­fined in src/​dri­ver/​gad­gets/​gad­get_. GPIO is via mem­ory mapped ac­cess - if you’re us­ing a dif­fer­ent model of Pi you’ll need to change BCM_BASE in the GPIO code. I haven’t tested this, and you should prob­a­bly as­sume it does­n’t work.

Input is via a blue­tooth gamepad - I’ve been us­ing an Xbox con­troller, and the in­put sys­tem is based on the de­fault map­ping for that.

Audio out is also via blue­tooth. I haven’t had suc­cess with the higher qual­ity codecs, but the head­set pro­to­col works.

There are two parts to this code - the dri­ver, which cre­ates a voxel buffer in shared mem­ory and scans its con­tents out in sync with ro­ta­tion, and the client code which gen­er­ates con­tent and writes it into the voxel buffer. Both dri­ver and client code are de­signed to run on the same de­vice, a Raspberry Pi em­bed­ded in the hard­ware and spin­ning at sev­eral hun­dred RPM. There is a demo in­cluded in the Python di­rec­tory which streams point clouds from a PC over wifi to the de­vice, but fun­da­men­tally it’s de­signed as a self con­tained gad­get, like an al­ter­nate time­line Vectrex. A blue­tooth gamepad is used to con­trol the demos.

On the Raspberry Pi, clone the repos­i­tory:

Configure the pro­ject for your hard­ware:

First, the dri­ver has to be run­ning:

When in­voked from the com­mand line it pe­ri­od­i­cally out­puts pro­fil­ing in­for­ma­tion (frame rate, ro­ta­tion rate), and ac­cepts key­board in­put for var­i­ous di­ag­nos­tics:

While that’s run­ning, try one of the toys:

The viewer takes a list of .obj and .png files as ar­gu­ments. You can scale, ro­tate and so on us­ing the gamepad, and it also ac­cepts key­board in­put when run re­motely from the com­mand line.

If you don’t have a phys­i­cal vol­u­met­ric dis­play, there’s a sim­u­la­tor, vir­tex, which you can run in place of vor­tex. It ex­poses the same voxel buffer in shared mem­ory, but ren­ders the con­tents us­ing OpenGL in an X11 win­dow.

Run with­out com­mand line ar­gu­ments it cre­ates a dis­play com­pat­i­ble with the cur­rently con­fig­ured gad­get, but there are some op­tions to let you ex­per­i­ment with dif­fer­ent geome­tries:

An ide­alised de­vice with lin­ear scan­ning and 3 bits per chan­nel can be in­voked like this:

The sim­u­la­tor is fill rate in­ten­sive; if you’re run­ning it on a Raspberry Pi you’ll prob­a­bly want to re­duce the slice count.

If you want it to start up au­to­mat­i­cally on boot, you can in­stall vor­tex as a ser­vice, and set mul­ti­vox to run on startup.

First in­stall every­thing to its de­fault lo­ca­tion ~/Multivox:

This will build the ex­e­cutable files and copy them into the des­ti­na­tion di­rec­tory, as well as cre­at­ing .mct files in ~/Multivox/carts for the built in toys.

and fill in the fol­low­ing in­for­ma­tion:

Then start it up:

The dri­ver as­signs it­self to core 3 - you can add isol­c­pus=3 to the end of /boot/cmdline.txt to en­sure it’s the only thing run­ning on that core.

You’ll also want the launcher to start up on boot:

If every­thing goes smoothly, when you turn on the de­vice it will boot up into Multivox. This is a fan­tasy con­sole which acts as a launcher for all the games and demos you run on the hard­ware. The bun­dled toys are au­to­mat­i­cally in­stalled in the ~/Multivox/carts/ di­rec­tory as .mct files, and ex­ter­nal apps can be launched by adding a .mct file con­tain­ing its com­mand, path and ar­gu­ments.

Each .mct file ap­pears as a car­tridge in the Multivox front end. They should each have a la­bel on the side; at the mo­ment all you can do to dis­tin­guish be­tween them is change their colour in the .mct.

When you exit an app back to the launcher, it saves a snap­shot of the voxel vol­ume, and this gives a pre­view of what you’ll see when you launch a cart. This means there are two com­pet­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the same in­for­ma­tion, and any fu­ture work on the front end will prob­a­bly start with over­haul­ing the en­tire ap­proach.

Some ba­sic UI for con­trols such as chang­ing bit depth, re­boot­ing and so on would also be a boon.