Disney named its first-ever CTO on Friday, Karandeep Anand. Anand started his career at Microsoft, moved over to Meta and became a VP, bounced into Brex as chief product officer, and then took the helm of Character.AI—a company Disney once accused of stealing its IP.

Character.AI lets users make their own characters and then interact with them as chatbots. Several other staffers from the company are reportedly coming along with Anand for the Disney ride, suggesting the House of Mouse is ready to start dominating not only entertainment but new technologies.

While you wait for Anand and co. to work their magic, we found something in our archives that lets you interact with Disney characters without getting a cease-and-desist letter.

You don’t need to go full metaverse to recognize that 2D can get boring sometimes. Several tools popped up this week to make things 3D and a bit more fun. Here are three: 

• flat.social takes your remote team back to the office—without anyone having to actually go back into the office. If you want to talk to someone, bring your photo over to them and start chatting—if you don’t like what they’re saying, just walk away. You also don’t need to do actual work—you can race scooters, surf, or just hang out on some beanbag chairs. 
• cubicles.lol is like if The Sims met Ralph Breaks the Internet. Your website becomes a cubicle people can wander into—and you can walk into theirs to see what they’re working on. Did we mention there’s also a blimp?
• Try The Apartment uses the video you take while walking through an apartment to create a 3D rendering you can drag your furniture into. Suddenly, you can visualize what it will look like living there.

by Mona Truong, Murror

“From September 2026, you can't submit an update without saying whether your app has social media capabilities. Say yes, and Apple applies a minimum 13+ rating and drops you into a Time Allowance parents can cap. The definition is broader than having a feed, and your secondary category is load-bearing too.

“If you've shipped an update in the last few days, you've already met this question. If you haven't, you will on your next one, and I'd rather you met it here than at 11 pm with a release branch open.”

Here’s how to handle it.

Humans need a good excuse to be social. Otherwise we’ll just go back to bedrotting and eating ramen. We’ve seen some fun new social networking tools pop up recently. Excuse given. Here they are, as told by their makers:

Die With Me is “an AIM buddy list for your AI usage”

“Remember checking your buddy list to see who was around? Now you can see who’s locked in with Claude Code or Codex, who’s touching grass, and whose AI has clocked out. I wanted to bring a little of that old internet feeling into building with AI—seeing your friends around and having an excuse to say hi.” - Weiwei

Nepotism Network maps out your friends’ friends

“A month ago we launched@Construct Computer here and it finished #1 Product of the Day. That wasn't luck, and it definitely wasn't cold DMs. Before launch day we mapped who we needed: hunters, makers with big audiences, founders whose one repost moves a launch. Then we found the people we already knew who knew them.

Every intro came from a friend of a friend, every ask was specific and easy to say yes to. People who had never heard of us showed up because someone they trusted asked them to. It worked, but it took us weeks of scrolling through follower lists, spreadsheets and guessing who knows whom. So we built the tool we wished we'd had.” - Ankush Singh

moop is “a text-only social network for lists”

“We built moop because social media has become visual, loud, and a honeypot for brainrotting. Meanwhile, the internet’s best culture still lives and dies through lists. Best movies. Worst first-date spots. Books that changed your brain. Restaurants you’d gatekeep. Things you’d die defending.” - Joseph Fattal