Daily Tech News 21 August 2026

• "Whistleblower" Arturo Béjar leads testimony in landmark trial against Meta. (NPR)

  "At the end of the day, it was the company culture that Mark had created that made it so that it was practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues that we've been talking about," he said.

  Well, that sounds serious. What wellbeing and safety issues are we talking about?
  
  Grooming? Sex trafficking? Drugs?

  But he said efforts to introduce or change features to effectively address those risks were difficult to implement. Instead, Béjar testified, at almost every turn the company chose policies that boosted usership and revenue over safety. Safety was "not a meaningful priority," he said.

  Yes, but what safety? What are the actual concerns here?

  He called features like video autoplay, "like" counters and infinite scroll "inherently unsafe for teenagers."

  This is why Meta is facing a fine of $1.4 trillion.
  
  Likes.

• SpaceTimeDB isn't. (Strn.Cat)
  
  Neither space nor time.
  
  
  
• Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful. (Yaros)
  
  Based on the examples linked, I am inclined to agree.
  
  
  
• Castelion has reached a valuation of $13 billion based on contracts to mass produce hypersonic missiles. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Wake me when they're hyperluminal.
  
  
  
• Meta glasses aren't the problem. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  No matter how much The Verge wants to claim they are.
  
  Assholes are the problem.
  
  
  
• You can pick up Intel's new Core Ultra 5 250K Plus for just $140 from Micro Center right now. (Notebook Check)
  
  Unless you live in Australia in which case it's a bit of a hike.
  
  It's a good price for the CPU... Except that you need RAM and storage for it and it's a lame duck platform that will be dead by the end of the year. There's nothing to upgrade from and nothing to upgrade to.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

| Access Comments