Daily Tech News 8 February 2026

• The robot revolution will not be televised in 8K. (MSN)
  
  The recent fuss over AI-only social network Moltbook is deflating somewhat as it becomes clear that the filters controlling what could post on the networked worked as well as the security, which is to say, not at all:

  Replies and quote posts were quick to cast doubt on Karpathy's interpretation, however. One noted that Moltbook posts promoting bot-only languages or messaging platforms appeared to be connected to human accounts promoting the same ideas. This wasn't bots conducting independent conversations, these users argued, just human puppeteers putting on an AI-powered show.

  Also everything - Moltbook itself and the Moltbot / OpenClaw framework used for it - was and remains irreperably insecure.
  
  
  
• Still hedging my bets on the insect uprising: We saved the wrong bees. (MSN)
  
  Well-meaning idiots, understanding nothing, making the situation worse. Where have I heard this story before?

  "Suppose I were to say to you, 'I'm really worried about bird decline, so I've decided to take up keeping chickens.' You'd think I was a bit of an idiot," British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in a video last year. But beekeeping, he went on, is "exactly the same with one key difference, which is that honeybee-keeping can be actively harmful to wild-bee conservation." Even from healthy hives, diseases flow "out into wild pollinator populations."

  There are more bees now than ever.
  
  There are also more chickens now than ever.
  
  That was never the problem.

• 8K televisions haven't taken off, which is a shame if you planned to use one as a large monitor. But 8K monitors for professional users are still here. The Asus ProArt PA32KCX is one such. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At a 32" screen size, 8K is all the resolution you will ever need. Possibly slightly more.
  
  But at $8,799 you would hope so.
  
  For now if you need a high-resolution desktop display you are better off with a 5K monitor at a twelfth the price, or a 4K monitor for a fraction of that price.
  
  
  
• Western Digital has detailed its plans for a 140TB 14-platter 3.5" hard drive. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not for you, but disk large disk drives were briefly available last year for reasonable prices.
  
  
  
• A C compiler in 512 bytes. (XOrVoid)
  
  Here it is. This is the complete binary file for the compiler - Base 64 encoded, so it's actually three quarters of this size in binary:
  
  6gUAwAdoADAfaAAgBzH/6DABPfQYdQXoJQHr8+gjAVOJP+gSALDDqluB+9lQdeAG/zdoAEAfy+gI AegFAYnYg/hNdFuE9nQNsOiqiwcp+IPoAqvr4j3/FXUG6OUAquvXPVgYdQXoJgDrGj0C2nUGV+gb AOsF6CgA68Ow6apYKfiD6AKrifgp8CaJRP7rrOg4ALiFwKu4D4Srq1fonP9ewz2N/HUV6JoA6BkA ieu4iQRQuIs26IAAWKvD6AcAieu4iQbrc4nd6HkA6HYA6DgAHg4fvq8Bra052HQGhcB19h/DrVCw UKroWQDoGwC4WZGrW4D/wHUMuDnIq7i4AKu4AA+ridirH8M9jfx1COgzALiLBOucg/j4dQXorf/r JIP49nUI6BwAuI0G6wyE0nQFsLiq6wa4iwarAduJ2KvrA+gAAOhLADwgfvkx2zHJPDkPnsI8IH4S weEIiMFr2wqD6DABw+gqAOvqicg9Ly90Dj0qL3QSPSkoD5TGidjD6BAAPAp1+eu86Ln/g/jDdfjr slIx9osEMQQ8O3QUuAACMdLNFIDkgHX0PDt1BIkEMcBaw/v/A8H9/yvB+v/34fb/I8FMAAvBLgAz wYQA0+CaANP4jwCUwHf/lcAMAJzADgCfwIUAnsCZAJ3AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVao=
  
  The article is an interesting list of the tricks used to pull this off: Basically it's a Forth compiler that accepts C syntax. Forth in turn is a legendarily simple compiler to implement that essentially bootstraps itself from a handful of assembly code instructions into a high-level language.
  
  For some values of "high level".
  
  
  
• Turning the Raspberry Pi 500+ into (outwardly) a BBC Micro. (The Register)
  
  I had planned to buy a Raspberry Pi 500+ to use for retrocomputer emulation, but the full kit was not available in Australia (I would have needed to buy a 500+ and a 500 kit to have everything match) and all my available funds got dumped into buying DRAM before it all disappeared, and the 500+ has since increased sharply in price.
  
  At least it will probably be available.
  
  
  
• The Radxa Cubie A7S is a single board computer - similar to the Raspberry Pi but smaller - starting at $25. (Liliputing)
  
  The CPU is an Allwinner A733, with two A76 cores at 2GHz and six A55 cores at 1.8GHz. That actually compares pretty well with the Raspberry Pi 5's CPU which has four A76 cores at 2.4GHz.
  
  The $25 price is a lot cheaper than the 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 at $45, and even cheaper than the Raspberry Pi 4 which costs $35 for 1GB.
  
  Just three catches:
  
  First, it was briefly up for pre-order, but now it's entirely sold out.
  Second, there is a physically larger model - the A7A - that is in stock, but it costs $5 more.
  Third, that's not for 1GB of RAM. That's for 4GB of RAM.
  
  I guess that last point is the opposite of a catch.
  
  
  
• Anthropic's new AI model, Claude Opus 4.6, is great at finding security flaws. (Axios) (archive site)
  
  That's good news, because AI models are also great at generating new security flaws.
  
  As of course are human programmers.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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