makerzz Trends · Saturday, 7 November 2026
Creators Are Turning Tech Absurdity Into Series Gold
FAA floppy disks, Cybertruck's end, and a $1.1T IPO — here's how smart creators are mining this week's tech news for formats that actually perform
Three stories dominated tech feeds this week — the FAA still running floppy disks, Tesla winding down Cybertruck, and Anthropic eyeing a $1.1T IPO. Creators who move fast on absurd-but-true tech facts are cleaning up right now. Below is what the formats look like, the structures behind them, and exactly how to make one today.
What creators are doing
TikTok260 HN points"Absurd-but-true tech fact" hook reels — creators open with a single sentence that sounds fake, then spend 45–60 seconds proving it's real with screen-recorded evidence or B-roll. The FAA floppy disk story is the perfect seed: 'The system keeping your plane in the sky still uses floppy disks — and that's legal until 2028.' Creators who run this format weekly are building a recognisable 'wait, what?' series identity.
Why it works: The hook creates instant cognitive dissonance — viewers stay to resolve the tension, and the 'I have to send this to someone' impulse drives shares more than likes.
Copy this
Open with: 'This sounds made up but it's real and it affects you' — then drop the floppy disk fact cold, no preamble.
Make this today
Make a 60-Second 'Absurd-But-True Tech Fact' Reel Today
- 1
Pick your fact and find your proof5 min
Use the FAA floppy disk story (Reuters via Hacker News) or the Cybertruck wind-down. Screenshot the Reuters headline and the NBC News article. These are your on-screen evidence cards. You need at least two sources visible on screen to make the 'this is real' frame land.
- 2
Write your hook line out loud5 min
Say this into your phone's voice memo: 'The system keeping your plane in the sky still runs on floppy disks — and the government just admitted it won't fix that until 2028.' Time it. It should land in under 8 seconds. If it doesn't, cut words, not facts.
- 3
Record your 45-second body in one take15 min
Three beats: (1) confirm the fact with your screen-captured evidence, (2) give one number that makes it weirder ('there are roughly 300 air traffic control facilities still using this technology'), (3) land on a human implication ('every time you fly, a floppy disk is involved'). Use your phone camera, natural light, no script visible.
- 4
Edit and add evidence overlays15 min
Drop the headline screenshots as overlays at the moment you cite them. Use makerzz to apply your house style, write the caption, and add captions to the spoken audio. Keep the total runtime between 47 and 65 seconds — this is the sweet spot for completion rate on TikTok and Reels.
- 5
Platform signals worth knowing this week
Two platform-level shifts are worth factoring into your posting decisions today. First, the Hacker News comment volume on the Anthropic IPO story (459 comments on 205 points) suggests the ratio of opinion to information is unusually high — meaning LinkedIn and X posts that take a clear stance will outperform neutral summaries. Second, the clustering of agent-skills repos in GitHub trending (cloudflare, mattpocock, google/skills all trending simultaneously) suggests developer audiences are in an active 'show me what you built' mode rather than a 'explain the concept' mode — if you post for a developer audience, lead with outputs, not explanations.
- Anthropic IPO: take a stance, don't summarise — opinion posts will outperform neutral ones this week
- Developer content: lead with a working output or screenshot before any explanation
- FAA floppy disk story has a 2028 deadline — it will resurface every time there's an aviation incident, so content you make today has a long shelf life
What new tools let you make now
Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash (291 HN points, 216 comments) is the most creator-relevant model release this week. The 'Flash' tier means lower latency and lower cost for multimodal tasks — our read is that this makes real-time caption generation and on-the-fly script drafting from raw video more practical for solo creators who were previously priced out of multimodal API calls. The Hightouch LLM-judge post (287 HN points) demonstrates a pattern — using a smaller model to route to a larger one only when needed — that faceless video creators can apply directly: use a fast model to draft scripts, route only the final polish pass to a more capable model. This cuts generation cost by their reported 4x without sacrificing output quality.
- Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash: use it for real-time caption drafts and script generation from raw audio — lower cost than previous multimodal tiers
- LLM-judge routing pattern: draft with a fast model, polish with a capable one — the Hightouch post reports 4x cost reduction at equivalent accuracy
- PostMyPace (Product Hunt): auto-schedules posts around your activity data — worth testing if you post fitness or productivity content and want timing to feel authentic
Scripts to post today
TikTokThe FAA Floppy Disk Reel
“The system keeping your plane in the sky still runs on floppy disks — and the government just admitted it won't fix that until 2028.”
I know that sounds made up. It's not. The US Federal Aviation Administration just confirmed to Reuters that air traffic control systems are still using floppy disk technology — and they've set a 2028 deadline to phase it out. That means for the next two years, every time you board a flight, part of the infrastructure managing your route is running on storage technology from the 1980s. To be fair, these are hardened, dedicated systems — not consumer hardware. But the fact that it took until 2026 to even announce a retirement date says something about how slowly critical infrastructure actually changes. Next time someone tells you technology moves too fast — show them this.
Why it works: The hook creates immediate disbelief, the body resolves it with a credible source, and the closing line gives viewers a ready-made reason to share it with someone else — turning passive viewers into distributors.
YouTubeProfiles trending right now
XSteal this: Release something useful before you explain it — Cloudflare's repo description is one sentence and a working example. No preamble, no vision statement.
Steal this: The bio line 'straight from my [actual workflow]' is a credibility frame any creator can adapt — it signals that what you're sharing is what you actually use, not what you're paid to promote.
Steal this: Framing a technical tool as solving a specific pain ('deterministic query generation') rather than describing its architecture is why this repo description converts browsers into stars — lead with the problem you solve.
What to do today
- Record a 60-second FAA floppy disk reel today using the hook and script above — publish to TikTok and Reels simultaneously and set a comment-to-DM trigger for anyone who comments 'source' or 'real'.
- Draft a 300-word LinkedIn post on AI accelerating AI research using the three 'which means…' structure from the creatorMoves section — publish before end of day while the Hacker News thread is still active.
- Open the cloudflare/security-audit-skill repo, run it on one of your own projects, and post a five-tweet thread about what it found — the 'I tested it' frame is the highest-trust format for developer audiences right now.
- Outline a three-part YouTube series using the 'tech that died slower than you think' format — Cybertruck is episode one, FAA floppy disks is episode two, find your episode three from this week's pack.
- Update your content calendar to revisit the FAA floppy disk story every time there's a major aviation incident between now and 2028 — set a Google Alert for 'FAA floppy disk' so you're first when it resurfaces.
Sources (12)
- Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production — Hacker News
- US FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control by 2028 — Hacker News
- Anthropic IPO buyers see valuation as low as $1.1T — Hacker News
- AI is dramatically accelerating AI research — Hacker News
- Deus Ex — Hacker News
- A Jev that can ask Opus for help gives Opus accuracy at 4x lower cost — Hacker News
- Introducing Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash — Hacker News
- cloudflare/security-audit-skill — GitHub trending
- mattpocock/skills — GitHub trending
- google/skills
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