Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Copypasta is the internet's version of folklore
Like folklore, copypasta changes as people pass it along: blocks of text mutate slightly across forums and become cultural touchstones for online communities.
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Why virtual worlds can make you nauseous
Your headset shows motion while the balance organs in your inner ears report that you are still. This sensory conflict is one explanation for cybersickness.…
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GIF's creator chose the pronunciation 'Jif'
Steve Wilhite favored a soft G, even though many users say the acronym with a hard G. The file format spread much more successfully than agreement about its…
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How streamers become animated avatars
Facial-tracking software maps creators’ expressions onto digital puppets, letting them stream as animated characters without showing their real appearance.
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Non playable characters rely on simple behavioral trees
Their apparent intelligence often comes from simple rules: approach the player, then swing a sword if attacked.
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Cyberpunk imagined our corporate future
The genre imagined neon cities, unchecked corporate power and people absorbed in digital worlds—features that can now feel less like fantasy than everyday life.
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Why realistic face sliders create monsters
With detailed controls, users often exaggerate features like jaw width and eye spacing, producing uncanny faces.
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A grid of app icons is nicknamed a bento menu
The little squares resemble the compartments of a Japanese lunch box, making bento a convenient name for a grid-style app launcher. It describes a specific…
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Teaching AI to obey starts with the right words
Prompt engineering is the practice of finding wording that gets an AI model to produce a useful response. It can feel like highly specialized begging directed…
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Rubberbanding snaps digital avatars back to reality
Your device may show you moving ahead before the game’s host confirms your position; when they disagree, the game snaps your avatar back to the host’s version.
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How 3D graphics get a comic-book look
By removing smooth lighting gradients, creators can make complex 3D models look like flat, hand-drawn cartoons.
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Emojis are pictograms while emoticons use punctuation
An emoticon such as :-) is made from punctuation and may look like a face when you tilt your head; an emoji is a pre-rendered illustration.
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Why 99% completion is so hard to ignore
A progress bar stuck at 99% can make optional goals feel unfinished, nudging players to hunt for hundreds of hidden items and boosting engagement metrics.
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Why every app suddenly went flat
Designers turned against skeuomorphic details like fake leather stitching and stripped away shadows, gradients, and textures. The result was flat design:…
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Why people replaced letters with numbers online
Early online forums used filters to block certain words, so users swapped letters for numbers to get around them. It was a way to evade word filters, not just…
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Voyager crossed into interstellar space with 1970s computing
The probes carry tiny memories by modern standards and even use tape recorders for data storage. Their computers handle carefully defined spacecraft tasks…
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How Tinder filled its first dating pool
Tinder’s early strategy was to seed the app with profiles of women from college sororities, then show them to fraternity members. Co-founder Whitney Wolfe…
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The supercomputer that beat Jeopardy!’s champions
In 2011, IBM’s Watson beat human champions on Jeopardy! without internet access during the game. It relied on stored data and natural-language processing to…
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PayPal first bet on a gadget-to-gadget payment idea
Early work focused on payments between handheld devices before email-based payments became the service's defining use. That pivot changed how easily people…
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A synthesizer can slide between piano-key notes
A pitch wheel tells the instrument to raise or lower a sounding note continuously. On a digital setup that instruction can travel as a MIDI pitch-bend…
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Why movie microphones wear furry coats
Wind can ruin a recording, so the microphone sits inside a hollow basket wrapped in synthetic fur. The fur diffuses the breeze before it reaches the sensitive…
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Jukeboxes rely on motorized arms to flip physical records
A motorized arm selects a record, places it on the turntable, and drops the needle—letting the jukebox handle the music mechanically.
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Why LEDs fade instead of suddenly dying
LEDs produce light by moving electrons through a semiconductor, not by heating a fragile filament. As the components degrade over time, they usually grow…
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Why novelty pictures change when you tilt them
The ridged surface contains tiny lenses that reveal different slices of a combined image as you tilt the cup or change your viewing angle.
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