Tech News

A study published in Works in Progress challenges common sense about recycling: manufacturing a reusable product can consume thousands of times more energy than a disposable one. A cotton bag, for example, needs 173 uses to match a plastic one.

Fastpotify is a native Spotify client written in Rust that starts in under a second and uses between 100 and 250 MB of RAM. It includes Spotify Connect, a Winamp-style mini player mode, and MilkDrop visualizations, all under the MIT license.

GPU World is a short story contest imagining a 2040 with billions of GPUs available to all of humanity, even if AI progress freezes in 2026. It awards $100,000 in prizes, judged by Neal Stephenson, Gwern Branwen, and Matt Huang. Submissions close on October 31, 2026.

Google has completed the removal of Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store, leaving out uBlock Origin and other classic ad blockers. Brave decided to rescue four of them by hosting them on its own backend, while Firefox continues to support MV2 indefinitely.

Playa Phone is a real phone booth installed at Burning Man that replaced coins with VoIP: anyone can dial the public number and talk for free for 5 minutes with a stranger. We break down how it works internally and how to replicate the idea with open source software.

OpenShot 4.0 adds a Color View with wheels, curves, and LUT support, plus a Recording View that captures screen, camera, and audio separately. The open source editor also introduces local AI-powered masking and ten new effects. The update was announced on August 30, 2026.

A blog rescues rs1n’s Super Metroid guide, written in the late 90s without any software, where every line of monospace text closes exactly at the margin. We look at why justifying monospace text remains a problem poorly solved by software, and how to test it with your own script.

Haiku released R1/beta6 on August 26, 2026, nearly two years after beta5 and just a week after the project turned 25. The anyboot image is ready to install or try out in a virtual machine.

Kernel.org revealed that fourteen CPU cores, across five distinct nodes, are dedicated to rendering Linux commits into HTML just to satisfy AI crawlers. The Anubis proof-of-work proxy contained the problem for months, until the bots learned to solve even its hardest challenge.