glitch – Topical Fruit

Mark Zuckerberg’s big AI moment turned into a tech fail for the ages, after not one, but two onstage demos of Meta’s new smart glasses completely flopped in front of a live audience.

At Meta’s annual Connect conference, Zuck tried to show off the company’s newest pair of AI-powered Ray-Bans and a neural wristband that’s supposed to make digital life more hands-free. Instead, what people saw was a masterclass in awkward silences, failed commands, and some truly brutal buffering.

To kick things off, Zuckerberg joined food influencer Jack Mancuso live on video, and asked Meta’s fancy new glasses to help him make a Korean-inspired steak sauce. Simple enough, right? Not for Meta’s AI. It glitched almost immediately, ignoring basic questions and repeating incorrect steps like a robot stuck in a feedback loop. Mancuso had to ask what to do three times before the AI gave the same wrong answer twice.

The segment was quietly cut short as the team blamed “bad Wi-Fi” and tried to laugh it off. But the worst was yet to come.

In the very next segment, Zuckerberg attempted to make a video call using the new glasses and wristband. What followed was four failed call attempts, a bunch of awkward hand waving, and a visibly frustrated Zuck mumbling things like, “We’ll debug that later,” while the audience sat in secondhand embarrassment.

Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth eventually bailed him out by appearing on stage, cracking a joke about the Wi-Fi. But by then, the damage was done. Even Zuckerberg admitted, “You practice these things like 100 times, and then you never know what’s going to happen.”

The $799 Ray-Ban smart glasses are part of Zuckerberg’s effort to put Meta back on the AI leaderboard, especially after a string of high-profile stumbles.

He even took direct control of Meta’s AI division this year, reportedly offering new hires massive salaries in the hopes of catching up to rivals like OpenAI and Google.

But Wednesday’s fiasco felt like a metaphor: no matter how much money or ambition is thrown at it, the tech still isn’t quite ready for prime time. And when your futuristic glasses can’t even make a steak sauce or dial a phone call onstage, it’s hard not to wonder if we’re just being sold another pair of overhyped goggles.

In the meantime, the internet had a field day. The gifs, memes, and “bad Wi-Fi” jokes practically wrote themselves.

No, your iPhone’s calendar isn’t broken… it’s just showing one of the weirdest quirks in modern history: the Great Calendar Glitch of 1582.

Here’s the deal. Scroll back to October 1582… notice anything different? The dates jump straight from October 4 to October 15, skipping 10 days. If you’re asking yourself why, it’s because you’re actually seeing the Gregorian calendar reform in action.

So, what happened?

Before 1582, most of Europe used the Julian calendar, which had been introduced by Julius Caesar way back in 45 BCE. Problem was, it miscalculated the solar year by about 11 minutes. That tiny error added up over centuries, slowly shifting the calendar out of sync with the seasons. Religious holidays like Easter were drifting farther and farther away from the spring equinox.

To fix it, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar, which corrected the error by tweaking the leap year rules and, yes, deleting 10 days (which became 11 in some places due to accumulated differences). So when the change took effect in parts of Europe, the calendar literally jumped overnight from October 4 to October 15 in 1582. Those in-between days? They just… never happened.

Not everyone switched right away

Catholic countries like Italy, Spain, and Portugal made the switch immediately. Protestant and Orthodox countries, however, took their sweet time. England and its colonies didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752 — by then, they had to drop 11 days instead of 10. Russia didn’t switch until 1918.

Alaska lost 11 days in 1867?

Alaska was owned by Russia until 1867. And they were still on the Julian calendar when they sold the land to the U.S. So, Alaska had to skip ahead 11 days overnight, and then they also had to repeat the same day again when the International Date Line was redrawn from the eastern border of Alaska to the western border. (Although it’s cold and dark there, so maybe they didn’t mind.)

A lot of people were not happy about it

In some places, people thought they were being robbed of days of their lives.

So yeah, your phone’s calendar is giving you a peek into one of the most quietly chaotic timekeeping changes in history. And if you were planning a birthday party for October 10, 1582… bad news. That day literally didn’t exist.

@thetopicalfruit
Why are 10 days missing?!?Comment below (wrong answers only) #calendar #mystery #fyp #whoa #October1582 #thetopicalfruit
♬ Ghosted by an Angel – Melo Nada

Tag: glitch

Mark Zuckerberg’s Big AI Reveal? More Like a Glitchfest