2026-01-19 06:54:54
This video from Brendon Bigley resonated with me. A PC is really the ideal gaming platform in 2026, and it's only getting better. I have a PS5 that I got back in 2021, but the only game I played on it in 2025 was Death Stranding 2. Everything else was played on my PC or Switch.
I'm not saying a PC is the right choice for everyone, but once you get comfortable with PC gaming (which is easier than ever, for what it's worth), it's hard to get too excited about the consoles anymore. Nintendo continues to play the long game by doing their own thing.
2026-01-19 01:43:16
Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom in a joint statement:
We will continue to stand united and coordinated in our response. We are committed to upholding our sovereignty.
I remember when this is how the world would respond to Russia and China's actions, not the United States'.
2026-01-18 09:58:00
Shawn McCreesh: Trump Announces 10 Percent Tariff on European Countries in Standoff Over Greenland
President Trump announced in a social media post on Saturday morning his latest strategy to get control of Greenland: He is slapping new tariffs on a bloc of European nations until they come to the negotiating table to sell Greenland.
Put another way, Trump has enacted yet another tax hike on Americans because he wants to take over sovereign nations who do not want to be invaded.
Always remember that tariffs are just another way to say taxes. He’s raising your taxes and thinks cost of living concerns are a distraction.
2026-01-17 06:46:38
OpenAI: Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT
Today we’re bringing Go to the U.S. and everywhere ChatGPT is available, giving people expanded access to messaging, image creation, file uploads and memory for $8 USD/month. In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay. Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads.
I'm sure in a few days we'll see a Stratechery post praising this move to high heaven, and I don't doubt it will start to earn real money for the company.
However, dear reader, I've been on this train before. Following Google Search for the past 20 years has been:
Sure, ads will help offset the costs of the most used piece of software to be released in the past decade, and giving people an $8 option is good for giving more access to people who can't afford the $20 price tag. That said, I will be shocked if ads don't become a revenue knob that OpenAI can crank up and up and up until users are as annoyed with them as they are with Google.
2026-01-16 10:00:00
Joint statement from Google and Apple
Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.
My only question is whether this will be more like the Maps or Search deals. Is this a forever thing where Apple is never incentivized to build their own, or is it a temporary thing while Apple figures out their own solution to replace this? My money's on the former, but time will tell.
2026-01-16 09:00:54
Jez Corden: Jeff Bezos once said the quiet part out loud
Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
Corden links to an interview with Bezos where he talks about going to an old brewery and finding it fascinating that the brewery used to do its own power generation since there wasn't a a power grid yet. Here's more of his direct quote from the interview:
I went to a brewery in Luxembourg many years ago now. In fact, this trip was one of the little tiny catalysts for the founding of AWS. And the brewery was 300 years old. This company making beer for 300 years. A lot of the oldest companies in the world are breweries, by the way. I don't know why this is. And they were very proud of their history and they had a museum.
And in that museum, was an electric power generator, 100 years old. Because when they wanted to improve the efficiency of their brewery with electricity, there was no power grid, so they had to build their own power station. So they made their own electricity. And at that time, that's what everybody did. If a hotel wanted electricity, they had their own electric generator.
And I looked at this, and I thought, this is what computation is like today, everybody has their own data center. And that's not gonna last. It makes no sense. You're gonna buy compute off the grid. That's AWS.
Put another way in a trending post on mastodon.social:
Jeff Bezos is saying the quiet part out loud. They want to kill local computing.
You will own nothing and be happy. You will rent your computing power from the cloud. You pay a subscription for the privilege of using a computer.
So, I almost published a completely different version of this post. I was all set to go, scheduled to publish, but at the last second, I thought I should probably watch a bit more of the interview myself, just to get the full context of what Bezos actually said. After all, the original article claimed he was "saying the quiet part out loud" and the Mastodon post said he wanted "to kill local computing". I figured I should probably double-check, just in case.
Honestly, my takeaway from the interview is completely different.
The core of Bezos's argument, as I understood it, was creating a parallel between electricity distribution and data center distribution, specifically in the context of AWS and why he thought that worked for data centers. At no point did he mention personal computers, and he certainly didn't express any desire to move all customer data to his cloud. The explicit text of his words was that AWS solved the problem of every business needing its own physical server farm. AWS offered a different solution, one that has been quite successful and convenient on the whole.
I suspect the counter argument is that, "well, he implied he wanted to kill local computing!" Maybe that's what he meant, but to me, that's like hearing someone say they like dogs and replying, "oh, so you hate cats?" It feels like an unwarranted extrapolation of the point to get him to have said what you want to be angry about.
Anyway, I encourage you to watch the interview yourself and see what you think. The portion we're discussing starts around the 51-minute mark.