Hey Beeple and visitors to Beehaw: I think we need to have a discussion about !technology@beehaw.org, community culture, and moderation. First, some of the reasons that I think we need to have this conversation.
The public freakout about blue light started with a study in 2014. Half of the 12 participants read on an iPad before bed. The rest read physical books. The iPad users took longer to fall asleep, felt groggier the next day and produced less melatonin. The researchers said the culprit was the glow emitted from the iPad’s LED screen, which produces a disproportionate amount of light in the upper, bluer end of the spectrum. Under specific circumstances, blue-enriched light disrupts the daily circadian rhythm – our body’s natural pacemaker – that uses daylight to help determine when we start to feel tired. Subsequent research seemed to support the findings. Sounds simple, right? It’s not.
Iran is all over the news right now, but did you know they also made a 5G smartphone which runs Android? It is called the Daria Bond. In this video, the YouTuber “KHANISTEK” bought the Daria Bond 1 to see how a country under 40 years of sanctions builds consumer tech in 2026.
Do we want a half dozen tech giants spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers around the world to build what is essentially the same technology, spiking energy costs, creating noise and pollution, and even, according to one study, dramatically raising the temperature around the complexes due to an advanced heat island effect? So that those tech giants can make good on their promises to automate jobs en masse and remake the social contract to their liking? A great many people who live closest to said projects have decided they do not, and rather than cut deals or hedge bets, they have chosen to refuse them.
A Korean developer named Sigrid Jin—featured in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month for having consumed 25 billion Claude Code tokens—woke up at 4 a.m. to the news. He sat down, ported the core architecture to Python from scratch using an AI orchestration tool called oh-my-codex, and pushed claw-code before sunrise. The repo hit 30,000 GitHub stars faster than any repository in history.
To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let’s quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB. This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album’s worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the global average broadband internet speed back then was about 1.5 Mbps. Your browser would continue loading this monstrosity for several minutes, enough time for you to walk away and make a cup of coffee.
he open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think an official government app should be loading executable code from a random person’s GitHub account. Or tracking your GPS location in the background. Or silently stripping privacy consent dialogs from every website you visit through its built-in browser. And yet here we are.
Yekaterina Chudnovsky, online biographies say, is a mother-of-four who “enjoys spending time with her family and teaching them the importance of giving back and helping others”. They add that Ukrainian-born Chudnovsky, known as Katie, finds sanctuary in walks on the beach.
The young woman at the heart of what has been called the tech industry’s “big tobacco” moment was on YouTube at six and Instagram by nine. More than a decade later, she says, she still can’t live without the social media she became addicted to.
AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found.
The first basic income program for workers who have lost pay, jobs, or opportunities to AI began sending out its first funds this week. The program is run by the nonprofits the AI Commons Project and What We Will, who together are administering the AI Dividend, which will issue a no-strings payment of $1,000 a month for a year to a cohort of 25-50 impacted workers. The project’s organizers say they have $300,000 in initial funding, and hope to expand quickly. They plan to distribute $3 million in funds in 2026—and aim to do so by pushing the major AI companies to contribute to the effort.
Many people start their work with AI by prompting the machine to imagine it is an expert at the task they want it to perform, a technique that boffins have found may be futile.
Science fiction author Neal Stephenson, who coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has argued he and others who believed immersive environments would require head-mounted hardware got it wrong.
Has Microsoft finally reckoned with Windows 11’s many failings - or has its OS chief, Pavan Davuluri, simply offered more soothing platitudes to users fed up with bugs and unwanted AI?
A New Mexico jury on Tuesday ordered Meta to pay $375m in civil penalties after it found the company misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and enabled harm, including child sexual exploitation, against its users.
I’m old enough that digital cameras only came out about the time I was legal to drink. Photos were a way to capture vacation moments, not food styling with a conspicuous bite missing. I rarely even take photos anymore, despite having been heavily into photography in college, to the extent that I developed my own Tri-X in the newsroom darkroom and going E-6 Velvia 50 when I wanted to do landscapes in colour. I bought film in bulk and had one of those machines that spooled film into canisters, which worked out in my favour, as Ivy Seright charged the same for processing a 36-shot roll even if I’d squeezed 40 into the canister.
There was a post earlier about the NEMA 1-15 plug that was, unfortunately, just spam. However, it’s kind of an interesting topic, and better yet made me remember this delightfully old-school website: The Digital Museum of Plugs and Sockets.
The history and overview sections for plug standards in different parts of the world are genuinely interesting, and the site as a whole is impressively comprehensive and is a well constructed HTML website (I don’t know how it looks on mobile but on desktop it’s a very clean looking site)
A patent granted to Google on January 27, 2026 titled “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user” describes a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google’s machine learning model thinks they should see instead.
Feddit.fr
TheRtRevKaiser
Da Cap’n
alyaza [they/she]
sabreW4K3
ProdigalFrog
artifex
Chris Remington
MoogleMaestro
Powderhorn
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rysiek
