The tech monoculture is finally breaking (News)

What's up, nerds? Sheboy. I'm Jared, and this is Change Log News. For the week of Monday, 02/02/2026, Moltebot may be dead because it was renamed to Openclaw, but MolteBook is very much alive and is currently teaming with AI agents who share, discuss, and upvote each other because we told them to. Don't worry. Humans are invited to observe. I suggest starting in the today I learned sub or going outside. Yeah. Let's do that. We could all use more vitamin d anyhow. Okay. Let's get into this week's news. The tech monoculture is finally breaking. Jason Willems really lifted my spirits with this post. But first, the long slow decline. Quote, in the early two thousands, tech began a decades long consolidation. Almost everything we used before became a function of a single device. Our devices lost their unique personalities. Phones became our alarm clocks, flashlights, calendars, watches, cameras, GPS units, music players, radios, journals, and gaming devices all at once. We betrayed our focus in the pursuit of convenience and the personality of our devices for homogeneity, end quote. The benefits of this transition were clear to us, but at what cost? Jason argues it was high. I tend to agree, but the pendulum is starting to swing in the other direction. Quote, new paradigms are emerging for the first time since mobile. VR is no longer experimental. Early AR is starting to reach consumers. Meta shipped a wearable that normal people use thanks to a clever Ray Ban partnership and associated equity stake. Three d printers have become real household products. Wearables are diversifying. Smart rings, over the counter glucose monitors, connected beds, end quote. Jason says he acquired more new devices in 2025 than in the previous five years combined, and 2026 is off to a hot start too. Quote, we'll never truly recreate the late eighties or mid nineties. SaaS, subscription pricing, and centralized platforms are here to stay, but this feels like the beginning of another golden era. One to find less by consolidation and more by variety, personality, and choice. Notepad plus plus hijacked by state sponsored hackers. Notepad plus plus author, Don Ho, shares some bad news. Quote, following the security disclosure published in the version eight point eight point nine announcement, the investigation has continued in collaboration with external experts and with the full involvement of my now former shared hosting provider. According to the analysis provided by the security experts, the attack involved infrastructure level compromise that allowed malicious actors to intercept and redirect update traffic destined for notepad++.org, end quote. The attackers were able to redirect update traffic to malicious servers for a regrettable length of time. What's a dev to do? Quote, I deeply apologize to all users affected by this hijacking. I recommend downloading version eight point nine point one, which includes the relevant security enhancement and running the installer to update your notepad plus plus manually. With these changes and reinforcements, I believe the situation …