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"c0lo" writes:

The practice impacts consumers beyond the grocery store. Car dealerships can be dynamic pricing traps, too, the FTC said last year:

Your favorite online grocer or retail store might be secretly raising prices on you - and one state has had enough.

Maryland lawmakers approved a bill earlier this month that will ban surveillance pricing: the practice of raising individualized prices online, based on a shopper's habits and personal information. The practice can cost shoppers as much as $1,200 a year, a study from consumer watchdog Consumer Reports found last year.

The bill is likely to become law in Maryland later this month when Governor Wes Moore signs it. His signature is all but guaranteed after Moore said in an April 14 social media post that he "can't wait to sign it."

Titled, "Protection From Predatory Pricing Act," it includes a ban on grocery stores and third-party partners from using an individual's personal information and other data to set a price. If passed, it would be the first law of its kind in the country.

Surveillance pricing uses a shopper's personal information, past purchases, cart activity and, in some cases, protected data such as gender to raise prices as far as they can without losing the customer. That can lead to higher prices for the same product for different consumers.

Surveillance pricing has become widespread in the last few years, and can increase a company's profits by up to 4 percent, a 2025 Federal Trade Commission study found.

The practice impacts consumers beyond the grocery store. Car dealerships can be dynamic pricing traps, too, the commission said.

"A car could potentially be segmented as a 'first-time car buyer' by the dealership using these tools, inferring that [the] shopper might be less savvy about the options available and be promoted particular financing rates, trade-in discounts, or maintenance products," the commission wrote.

Translation: a company can use your personal info to shape how it pitches lending options, discounts and optional vehicle features.

Maryland isn't the only state taking on surveillance pricing.

New York passed a law in November 2025 requiring retailers to tell customers when they're using AI or personal information to set prices. A bill submitted to New York's state legislature in January would ban surveillance pricing altogether, but it has yet to make it past the early stages of the lawmaking process.

In January 2026, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an investigation into how businesses use surveillance pricing and whether it violates the state's consumer protection laws.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

It adds to the body of evidence that the Red Planet once contained the building blocks of life:

The search for signs of life on Mars continues to yield promising data. A first-of-its-kind wet chemistry experiment, published Tuesday in Nature, confirmed the presence of essential ingredients of life preserved in ancient Martian sandstones.

The molecules were found inside 3.5-billion-year-old sandstone. NASA's Curiosity rover collected the clay-filled rocks from an area called Glen Torridon, inside Mars' enormous Gale Crater. The rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) mobile instrument suite analyzed the data.

The experiment was unique as the first off-Earth study to use the chemical tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH). The reagent allows Curiosity to break down larger organic molecules on the Martian surface, reducing them to something the rover's instruments can read.

It revealed the presence of over 20 different organic molecules. Among the data was confirmation of naphthalene and benzothiophene, some of the largest and most complex organic compounds discovered on the Red Planet. The experiment also yielded the first detection of a possible N-heterocycles, which DNA and RNA are built upon.

“That detection is pretty profound because these structures can be chemical precursors to more complex nitrogen-bearing molecules,” the paper’s lead author, Amy Williams, wrote in NASA’s announcement. “Nitrogen heterocycles have never been found before on the Martian surface or confirmed in Martian meteorites.”

As with previous discoveries of organic material on Mars, this one is not yet the smoking gun we've been waiting for. But it adds to a growing body of evidence that, at a minimum, the foundations of life as we know it were present on an ancient version of the planet. The study also confirms that organic material can survive on Mars for billions of years, which will encourage future experiments.

The paper's authors say the data will help NASA to optimize its second (and final) TMAH experiment on Curiosity. It also opens the door to future TMAH tests on the Rosalind Franklin Mars rover and the Dragonfly mission to Saturn's moon, Titan. Both missions are scheduled for 2028 at the earliest.

Journal Reference: Williams, A.J., Eigenbrode, J.L., Millan, M. et al. Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment. Nat Commun 17, 2748 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70656-0

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The influencers claim that products such as patches, gums and pouches utilize the 'natural' product and that it has been unfairly condemned by the medical establishment:

Multiple influencers who are supporters of Robert F Kennedy Jr's Make America Healthy Again movement are pushing a new and somewhat surprising health hack to their followers – nicotine.

The influencers claim that products such as patches, gums and pouches utilize the "natural" product and that it has been unfairly condemned by the medical establishment,

Nicotine pouches entered the U.S. market in 2016, and scientists are still learning about the short and long-term effects of the products, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"There are no safe tobacco products, including nicotine pouches. This is particularly true for youth, young adults, and women who are pregnant," the CDC website states.

"Youth, young adults, and women who are pregnant should not use nicotine pouches. People who do not currently use tobacco products, including nicotine pouches, should not start."

The center notes that nicotine can harm brain development, which continues up until the age of 25, as well as increasing the risk for young people of future addiction to other drugs. Symptoms of addiction can start "quickly" even if the person has not used nicotine products previously.

"Nicotine can also increase blood pressure and heart rate, which could, over time, raise the risk of heart disease; the compound may also harden the walls of arteries in the heart, which can lead to heart attacks. Nicotine can also exacerbate existing heart conditions, according to the CDC.

This has not deterred the MAHA influencers, who argue that nicotine has been vilified in a similar way to peptides, raw milk and beef tallow – which has been promoted by Kennedy. The U.S. Health Secretary himself has been pictured carrying around a tin of nicotine pouches, and has said previously that such pouches are "probably" the safest way to consume nicotine.

[...] Medical experts are united in their condemnation of such promotions.

"If there really was a health benefit for nicotine, then the medical community would be recommending it to their patients," Doctor Adam Leventhal, director of the Institute for Addiction Science at the University of Southern California, told The New York Times.

"And what's happening is the opposite."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Gold-based substrates create major cost barriers for mass production:

The team from the Institute of Metal Research reengineered the chemical vapor deposition process by introducing a liquid gold and tungsten bilayer as the substrate.

For decades, Moore's Law predicted a doubling of computing power roughly every two years - but as transistor dimensions approach atomic scales, quantum effects and heat dissipation are making further miniaturization increasingly difficult.

2D semiconductors have emerged as a leading candidate for post-Moore chip materials, as the rising workloads from AI tools and large language models are pushing current chip architectures to their limits.

Modern transistor architectures depend on the complementary pairing of n-type and p-type materials.

The shortage of high-performance p-type options has become a major constraint for next-generation chip design, as while many n-type 2D semiconductors are well established, achieving stable p-type counterparts remains a challenge.

"The lack of high performance p-type materials has become a critical bottleneck for the development of sub-5 nanometer node 2D semiconductors," said Zhu Mengjian from the National University of Defense Technology.

The monolayer tungsten silicon nitride films combine several key advantages for advanced transistor design.

These include strong hole mobility, high on-state current density, mechanical strength, efficient heat dissipation, and chemical stability.

The method expands single-crystal domains to sub-millimeter sizes and increases production speed from approximately 0.00004 inches over five hours to about 0.0008 inches per minute.

This represents an increase of around 1,000x compared to conventional approaches.

The research represents progress in 2D semiconductor manufacturing, but the gap between growing centimeter-scale films in a lab and mass-producing defect-free wafers remains enormous.

The gold-based substrate, while effective for research, would be prohibitively expensive for high-volume production.

China's ambition to leapfrog existing semiconductor limitations is understandable, and this study is a breakthrough.

Unfortunately, the industry has seen many promising 2D materials fail to transition from academic papers to fabrication plants.

Whether this material follows the same path will depend on solving the scalability and cost challenges that have doomed previous options.

Via Interesting Engineering

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

What makes a person keep playing a video slot machine? Some of the same features that make children stay on social media apps or video games for too long:

In two landmark cases, social media companies have been found liable for endangering and harming children. Meta and Google are appealing the verdicts and disputing the idea that their products are addictive. But over the course of more than a decade, scientists have identified key features of social media and other apps meant to hold children's attention for as long as possible.

These features create a kind of superglue on the apps, says cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll at New York University, who has pioneered research in this field. "They keep us spending more time on these apps and spending more money. They drain us of our energy and ourselves." Understanding these features offers parents a rubric for evaluating how harmful an app or device may be for kids, Schüll says.

During the trial in California, the attorney bringing the case accused Meta and Google of designing their apps to behave like "digital casinos." That's an apt comparison, according to Schüll's research, because major design elements of social media have surprising roots in the gambling industry.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the casino industry gradually and purposely created what many scientists consider to be the most addictive form of gambling: video slot machines. They are something like a giant app, played on a huge video screen with an ergonomic chair attached to it.

People struggling with gambling addiction often cite video slots as their game of choice, studies have found. Some people gamble on these machines for extraordinary periods of time, Schüll found in her ethnographic fieldwork. They can play for 24 hours, even 48 hours straight. Some people even told Schüll that they wear adult diapers to the casino so they don't have to stop gambling to use the restroom.

[...] Through her research, she uncovered four key features that, when combined together, help hold people on the gambling devices. These features trigger a trancelike or dissociative state, known as a "machine zone" or "dark flow," in which people lose track of their sense of time and place.

To Schüll's surprise, around the early 2010s, the same features began to appear on phone and tablet apps, including social media, games and video-streaming platforms. "These are not normal products for kids like a pair of shoes or a toy," she says. "They create a relationship with kids."

Here are four features that create that superglue:

AnonTechie writes:

[Source]: Anthropocene Magazine

Scientists have engineered a water-soluble pyrimidone molecule that captures solar heat and releases it days or weeks later—enough to boil water on demand.

There are several technologies out there that harvest the sun's boundless energy. Solar panels soak up solar energy and convert it to electricity, while solar thermal systems use mirror-like contraptions to collect sunshine to heat water or living spaces. But there aren't any efficient ways to store solar heat for days or weeks.

Now, researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara have come up with a way to do that. They have created a new engineered molecule that traps sunlight, stores the energy in its chemical bonds, and then releases it on demand. The team reported this rechargeable solar heat battery in a paper published in the journal Science.

"Think of photochromic sunglasses," said Han Nguyen, a PhD student and the paper's lead author in a press release . "When you're inside, they're just clear lenses. You walk out into the sun, and they darken on their own. Come back inside, and the lenses become clear again. That kind of reversible change is what we're interested in. Only instead of changing color, we want to use the same idea to store energy, release it when we need it, and then reuse the material over and over."

The new material, called a pyrimidone, can store more than 1.6 megajoules per kilogram. That is almost double the energy density of a conventional lithium-ion battery, which is about 0.9 MJ/kg. Just like a lithium-ion battery can store electricity for days, the new liquid battery could store sunshine for days to provide hot water or heat when needed.

Molecular solar thermal energy storage in Dewar pyrimidone beyond 1.6 megajoules per kilogram

Original Submission

"c0lo" writes:

Governments want to move away from "platforms over which we have no control," says Dutch minister:

Governments in France, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium have started rolling out in-house messaging services for officials to exchange sensitive information, in an effort to stop staff from using popular encrypted apps and switch to local alternatives they can control. Defense alliance NATO also has its own messenger, and the European Commission plans to make the switch by the end of the year.

The move toward government-controlled messaging apps is part of Europe's search for alternatives to American technology, sparked by fears of being strategically dependent on Washington. WhatsApp is owned by U.S. tech giant Meta, while Signal is run by a U.S.-based non-profit and managed by a large community of open-source software enthusiasts.

The effort to unplug from American companies also reflects growing recognition among governments of the vulnerabilities of mainstream messaging apps for sharing sensitive information between politicians.

"Our communication currently often takes place via platforms over which we have no control," Willemijn Aerdts, the Netherlands' digital minister, told POLITICO in a statement. "In a world where technology is increasingly being used as a tool of power, that poses a risk."

Brandon De Waele, the director of Belgian Secure Communications, the Belgian federal government agency in charge of its new secure app, said: "Everyone in Europe is getting more and more awake on sovereignty ... For us it's data sovereignty."

WhatsApp and Signal have faced cybersecurity challenges in recent weeks. Last month, dozens of cybersecurity agencies warned that Russian hacking groups were targeting political and government officials on the messengers with high-level phishing attacks.

"Fnord666" writes:

The Dumbest Hack of the Year Exposed a Very Real Problem:

In the wee hours of the night last April, someone stopped at roughly 20 street intersections across Silicon Valley and launched an unprecedented cyberattack that would eventually spread to multiple states, embarrassing local officials and prompting them to question their security practices. Authorities suspect the unknown culprit took advantage of weak and publicly available default passwords to wirelessly upload custom recordings that played whenever a pedestrian pressed a crosswalk button.

Instead of the normal recordings telling people to either wait or cross the street, pedestrians heard the spoofed voices of billionaire tech CEOs. A fake Mark Zuckerberg said at one Menlo Park intersection that people would not be able to stop AI from "forcefully" being inserted "into every facet of your conscious experience." At another, he celebrated "undermining democracy." At a different intersection, an altered Elon Musk described President Donald Trump as "actually really sweet and tender and loving," while on a nearby street his faked voice whined about being "so alone."

Government emails and text messages obtained by WIRED through public records requests show how the cities of Menlo Park, Redwood City, Palo Alto, and later Seattle and Denver scrambled to respond to the crosswalk button tampering. The communications, along with interviews with security experts and former employees of the button manufacturer, highlight how governments and the company had overlooked vulnerabilities in a widespread technology.

In Redwood City, then-city manager Melissa Diaz quizzed staff about who should be blamed for the incident. "We need to understand who should be accountable for the security of these systems and what we can do to hold either staff or the external responsible party accountable," she wrote in an email to colleagues in the days after the hack.

Nick Mathiowdis, Redwood City's current communications manager, tells WIRED that staff have been addressing the issue based on "lessons learned and evolving best practices," but declines to share details to avoid encouraging further hacks.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The Smash program focuses on processing, not mining:

The United States has spent years trying to rebuild its rare earth supply chain, but mining alone hasn’t fixed the core problem. Processing remains the sticking point, and as Data Centre Dynamics reports, that’s where the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is placing a high-risk bet.

“So the challenge is processing, not mining,” said Julian McMorrow, Smash lead and program manager at DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office. “We want to develop technologies to take the industry from wasting over 99 percent of its feedstock to making use of the entire feedstock.”

Traditional mining wastes enormous amounts of material during refinement. More than two tons of ore and 13 tons of water can produce just one kilogram of copper, leaving most of the original material discarded.

Smash explores a parallel processing model that attempts to extract nearly everything from a shovel of dirt at once. That concept borrows ideas from industries such as petroleum refining, where multiple outputs are separated efficiently from a single input.

The program also reflects concerns about relying on a single major site such as the Mountain Pass mine which once dominated global rare earth output but struggled when refining costs became uncompetitive.

DARPA notes that concentrating production in one location creates vulnerability if disruptions occur. A distributed model using varied feedstocks, including mining waste and recycled materials, could cut that exposure.

Smash will run as a 48-month effort split into two phases. The first will focus on proof-of-concept experiments, while the second will move toward working prototypes suitable for industrial mining environments.

Even if the technology succeeds in laboratory settings, scaling it economically could be tricky. Achieving profitability while maintaining strict environmental and labor standards will be the real test.

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

A stubborn misconception is hampering the already hard work of quantum readiness:

With growing focus on the existential threat quantum computing poses to some of the most crucial and widely used forms of encryption, cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda wants to make one thing absolutely clear: Contrary to popular mythology that refuses to die, AES 128 is perfectly fine in a post-quantum world.

AES 128 is the most widely used variety of the Advanced Encryption Standard , a block cipher suite formally adopted by NIST in 2001. While the specification allows 192- and 256-bit key sizes, AES 128 was widely considered to be the preferred one because it meets the sweet spot between computational resources required to use it and the security it offers. With no known vulnerabilities in its 30-year history, a brute-force attack is the only known way to break it. With 2 128 or 3.4 x 10 38 possible key combinations, such an attack would take about 9 billion years using the entire Bitcoin mining resources as of 2026.

Over the past decade, something interesting happened to all that public confidence. Amateur cryptographers and mathematicians twisted a series of equations known as Grover's algorithm to declare the death of AES 128 once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) came into being. They said a CRQC would halve the effective strength to just 2 64 , a small enough supply that—if true—would allow the same Bitcoin mining resources to brute force it in less than a second (the comparison is purely for illustration purposes; a CRQC almost certainly couldn't run like clusters of Bitcoin ASICs and more importantly couldn't parallelize the workload as the amateurs assume).

On Monday Valsorda finally channelled years' worth of frustration fueled by the widely held misunderstanding into a blog post titled Quantum Computers Are Not a Threat to 128-bit Symmetric Keys .

"There's a common misconception that quantum computers will 'halve' the security of symmetric keys, requiring 256-bit keys for 128 bits of security," he wrote. "That is not an accurate interpretation of the speedup offered by quantum algorithms, it's not reflected in any compliance mandate, and risks diverting energy and attention from actually necessary post-quantum transition work."

That's the easy part of the argument. The much harder part is the math and physics that explains it. At its highest level it comes down to a fundamental difference in the way a brute-force search works on classical computers versus the way it works using Grover's algorithm. Classical computers can perform multiple searches simultaneously, a capability that allows large tasks to be broken into smaller pieces to complete the overall job faster. Grover's algorithm, by contrast, requires a long-running serial computation, where each search is done one at a time.

AnonTechie writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/23/france-keeps-breaking-the-internet-to-stop-piracy-even-though-its-not-working/

Back in 2011 and 2012, one of the central technical objections that helped kill SOPA and PIPA was about DNS blocking. Engineers, internet architects, and cybersecurity experts all lined up to explain, in painstaking detail, why blocking at the DNS layer was a terrible idea. It would break the fundamental architecture of how the internet works. It would have massive collateral damage. It would undermine security protocols designed to protect users from exactly the kind of DNS manipulation that the bill proposed. And it wouldn't even stop piracy, because anyone who actually wanted to get around DNS blocking could do so easily.

Congress, to its rare credit, actually listened to the technical experts (and widespread protests) and shelved the legislation. But the entertainment industry never gave up on the idea. They just went jurisdiction-shopping. And France, which has never met a maximalist copyright enforcement scheme it didn't love, has been more than happy to oblige.

As recently reported by TorrentFreak, a Paris Court of Appeal validated DNS blocking orders requiring Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to block access to pirate sites through their own DNS resolvers. This goes beyond traditional ISP resolvers, which France has been ordering blocked for years — this targets third-party resolvers — the ones that millions of people specifically choose to use because they offer better privacy, better security, and better reliability than their ISP's default DNS.

But, of course, in France (and to the usual crew of Hollywood lobbyists), "better privacy, security, and reliability" can only mean one thing: used for piracy.

The court rejected all five appeals, and in doing so, articulated a legal principle so sweeping that it has no natural stopping point.

"c0lo" writes:

Physicists witness pinpricks of darkness moving faster than the speed of light ‪—‬ without breaking the laws of relativity:

For the first time, researchers have detected empty voids moving faster than the speed of light — and they blazed past that cosmic speed limit without breaking the laws of relativity.

A recent study shows the voids' acceleration. Researchers used recent advances in ultrafast electron microscopy to measure voids in phonon-polariton waves zooming around inside a thin flake of boron nitride. Phonon-polaritons are quasiparticles formed from photons (quantized light) coupled with tiny vibrations, and they act like light and sound waves combined.

Waves are often visualized as a single squiggle, but in many applications, imagining them as a lake could give a better idea of what's going on. Lakes are full of waves and ripples that interfere with each other. If the waves interact when they're at their maximum height, they combine to create an even higher wave. But if they make contact when they're at their lowest points, they create deeper troughs than they would on their own.

Sometimes, waves cancel each other out, creating points where the waves' magnitude drops to zero. In a lake, this would make a temporary whirlpool (a vortex) that moves around that empty point, also called a singularity. These singularities are found throughout nature and mathematics and, since the 1970s, have been theorized to move faster than light speed in some instances, according to a recent statement from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Einstein's theory of special relativity states that the speed of light in a vacuum ‪—‬ 299,792,458 meters per second, or about 186,000 miles per second ‪—‬ is the fastest speed information, matter and energy can travel through space. So how do singularities move faster than light speed? Because singularities are empty points of nothingness, they contain no information, no matter and no energy. They are tiny voids, so they don't have to obey the cosmic speed limit.

These voids don't just exceed the speed of light ‪—‬ they blaze past it. When two singularities encounter each other, they can sometimes exponentially speed up toward each other until their velocities approach infinity just before they cancel each other out. However, the faster they go, the harder it is to observe them. The recent study, published March 25 in the journal Nature, shows researchers doing just that.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline&story=20169

The latest Linux Mint monthly newsletter looks ahead to the next version of Mint and some key changes which will be happening in the project. One of the significant changes is a longer development cycle for new Mint versions.

"Linux Mint will adopt a longer development lifecycle. The next release is planned for Christmas 2026. Linux Mint will use the same installer as LMDE (i.e. live-installer). What hasn't been decided yet is the release strategy itself: the length of the cycle, whether minor releases are frozen (like the point releases in Mint 22.x) or backported/semi-rolling (as in LMDE), and whether we will introduce alpha releases."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

MIT scientists create a detailed map of exactly what happens in the brains of C. elegans worms:

Animal behavior reflects a complex interplay between an animal's brain and its sensory surroundings. Only rarely have scientists been able to discern how actions emerge from this interaction. A new open-access study in Nature Neuroscience by researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT offers one example by revealing how circuits of neurons within C. elegans nematode worms respond to odors and generate movement as they pursue of smells they like and evade ones they don't.

"Across the animal kingdom, there are just so many remarkable behaviors," says study senior author Steven Flavell, associate professor in the Picower Institute and MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "With modern neuroscience tools, we are finally gaining the ability to map their mechanistic underpinnings."

By the end of the study, which former graduate student Talya Kramer PhD '25 led as her doctoral thesis research, the team was able to show exactly which neurons in the worm's brain did which of the jobs needed to sense where smells were coming from, plan turns toward or away from them, shift to reverse (like old-fashioned radio-controlled cars, C. elegans worms turn in reverse), execute the turns, and then go back to moving forward. Not only did the study reveal the sequence and each neuron's role in it, but it also demonstrated that worms are more skillful and intentional in these actions than perhaps they've received credit for. And finally, the study demonstrated that it's all coordinated by the neuromodulatory chemical tyramine.

[...] The surveillance enabled Kramer, Flavell, and their colleagues to observe that the worms weren't just ambling randomly until they happened to get where they'd want to be. Instead, the worms would execute turns with advantageous timing and at well-chosen angles. The worms seemed to know what they were doing as they navigated along the gradients of the odors.

"Fnord666" writes:

Schematik is a program that aims to help people vibe code for physical devices. Hopefully, it won't blow anything up:

Samuel Beek knew he had a problem when he blew every fuse in his house. The culprit was an electric door opener he had built himself, guided by instructions for wiring and piecing together a device drummed up by ChatGPT . Turns out, the chatbot wasn't so great at distinguishing between wet and dry connections, so the device he had built sent out a surge of misallocated power that zapped everything else. Oops.

Beek, based in Amsterdam , admits he is not a hardware guy. But he had that itch and now really just wanted to make something that wouldn't explode.

"That's the difference: Your fuses blow out, or you have a solid product," Beek says. "That was kind of a learning experience for me to be more careful, but also to build AI that deeply understands what it's talking about."

He switched his requests to Anthropic's Claude, then rejiggered that into an assistant program he calls Schematik and has described, over and over again, as " Cursor for Hardware."

The idea of Schematik is essentially vibe coding for physical devices. Tell the program what you want to make, and it will suggest just about everything you need to build it out in the real world and share links to where you can buy the individual wires and pieces. Then, it will serve as a guide for putting it all together. Beek plans to make money off it eventually and is working on getting investors. (It just got $4.6 million from venture capitalist firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.) But you can go use it to build something right now.

When Beek posted on X about the idea in February, it got lots of traction. Other tinkerers gave it a shot, describing what they wanted to make and then building it out. Marc Vermeeren , who leads branding at N8N, a European AI company, says he has made several devices, from an MP3 player to a Tamagotchi-style bot called Clawy that helped him manage Claude coding sessions. (Other people have created their own takes on the design, like a Clawy that looks like Paulie Walnuts from The Sopranos .)

Original Submission