Uncategorized – Tech News

Pantone’s new Colour of the Year is giving me existential dread

Pantone has released its Colour of the Year for 2026, and the winner is… drumroll please… white. While it's not the most exciting shade on paper, the world's leading authority on colour claims the "lofty" white is much more than blank space. As a "symbol of calming influence in a society rediscovering the value of quiet reflection," Cloud Dancer supposedly represents a sense of serenity and retrospection. Built to encourage "true relaxation and focus," the shade allows the mind the freedom to wander, creating a perfect environment for innovation to grow.
https://www.creativebloq.com/design/pantones-new-colour-of-the-year-is-giving-me-existential-dread

Meta eyes big cuts to its metaverse budget in the AI era

According to Bloomberg News, Meta is considering slashing its metaverse spending by as much as 30% in 2026 — although no plans are final yet — after meetings at Zuckerberg’s Hawaii compound laid out a slimmer future for its namesake ambitions. For three years, the company tried to brute-force another new reality into existence: new name, new stock ticker, new keynote vocabulary about “presence” and “embodied internet.”
https://qz.com/meta-metaverse-cuts-mark-zuckerberg-reality-labs

The annual app recaps for 2025: all Wrapped up

Spotify may have popularized the Wrapped user recap trend, but more companies are jumping on that bandwagon every year. From rival music streaming providers like Apple, Amazon, YouTube, and Deezer, to completely unrelated services across tech, gaming, and other industries, a huge range of companies are using fun visuals, stats, and personalization features to show how you’ve been using their platforms over the last 12 months.
https://www.theverge.com/news/837280/spotify-wrapped-2025-recap-annual-best-of-data

Apple’s new Font Book icon is upsetting designers

Font Book, macOS's built-in font manager, has seen its icon hugely simplified. Gone are the various typefaces depicting the letter, 'A', replaced with a single clean sans-serif character. Many have complained that it's no longer clear what the app does. "I get the modern take, but this is disappointing, I'd rather have it say 'Aa' than just 'a'," one Redditor comments. Another adds, "hmmm yeah this is upsetting."
https://www.creativebloq.com/design/logos-icons/apples-new-font-book-icon-is-upsetting-designers

‘Slop Evader’ Lets You Surf the Web Like It’s 2022

[Slop Evader is] a new browser tool that filters your web searches to only include results from before November 30, 2022 — the day that ChatGPT was released to the public. Created by artist and researcher Tega Brain, who says she was motivated by the growing dismay over the tech industry’s unrelenting, aggressive rollout of so-called “generative AI”—despite widespread criticism and the wider public’s distaste for it.
https://www.404media.co/slop-evader-browser-extension-pre-generative-ai-search-filter/

OpenAI Can’t Fix Sora’s Copyright Infringement Problem Because It Was Built With Stolen Content

The flaw in OpenAI’s attempt to stop users from generating videos of Nintendo and popular cartoon characters exposes a fundamental problem with most generative AI tools: it is extremely difficult to completely stop users from recreating any kind of content that’s in the training data, and OpenAI can’t remove the copyrighted content from Sora 2’s training data because it couldn’t exist without it.
https://www.404media.co/openai-cant-fix-soras-copyright-infringement-problem-because-it-was-built-with-stolen-content/

New “Canva of AR” iPhone app aims to make augmented reality design easy

After Meta shut Spark at the start of the year and Adobe retired Aero this week, it seemed there was a space for a simple no-code app for creating augmented reality (AR) experiences and effects. Right on cue, along comes Trace looking to fill the gap. Described by its developers as the “Canva of AR”, the iPad and iPhone app is intended to allow people to create high-fidelity location-based AR experiences without code and without needing specialist knowledge.
https://www.creativebloq.com/3d/vr-ar/a-new-canva-of-ar-aims-to-let-anyone-design-ar-experiences