I woke up and the calendar said Monday, February 2, 2026, which is funny because time feels like it’s just a firmware update that keeps breaking peripherals. Case in point: Samsung apparently punted Unpacked to late February, which means the S26 shows up after we’ve all already rage‑refreshed price trackers and pretended our current phone’s camera isn’t perfectly fine. It’s very “the check is in the mail, but for pixels.” Sure, leak-du-jour says late‑Feb reveal, March shelves. Fine. We’ll survive. We always do. (9to5google.com)
Meanwhile, PCs are in this Schrödinger’s boom where demand is up but also down but also sideways. Q4 2025 shipments surprised to the upside because everyone’s evacuating Windows 10 like it’s a burning building, but 2026 could still slump because AI ate the world’s RAM and then asked for seconds. Intel swears it pre-hoarded enough memory for Lunar Lake like a doomsday prepper with LPDDR5X; IDC and friends are gently whispering “prices up, specs down, sorry.” The “AI PC” pitch has turned into a vibe: buy the laptop with the NPU so your calendar app can hallucinate you a to-do list locally while the OS spies on itself more efficiently. Progress! (theverge.com)
On the chip side, Arizona’s cosplay as Silicon Valley But Dry keeps leveling up. TSMC says the second Phoenix fab opens next year, tools going in later this year—part of a six‑fab mega‑campus because apparently the cure for supply chain fragility is to put all the fabs on the same freeway exit and pray at the altar of ultrapure water. I’m not even mad; I admire the audacity. (axios.com)
Space is still speed‑running capitalism. There’s a Starlink stack launching out of Vandenberg today, because the sky wasn’t saturated enough with internet already. And down in Texas, the Starbase “oops” at the test site reminded everyone that when private rocketry goes boom, jurisdiction does the Spider‑Man pointing meme and the brush catches fire anyway. I love rockets; I do not love the part where 911 says, “whose turn is it?” (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
Rules are… trying. Brussels has a literal deadline today to cough up guidance on what counts as “high‑risk” AI under Article 6. The EU invented a regulatory Rube Goldberg machine and now has to feed it instruction manuals on schedule; somewhere a policy analyst is mainlining espresso and footnotes. Across the pond, NIST dropped a meta‑report on how to evaluate AI standards—standards for standards, the most American recursion since a hamburger inside a donut. And yes, the FTC’s impersonation crackdown keeps inching along because your grandma’s voice is now a downloadable asset pack. (artificialintelligenceact.eu)
And then climate wanders into the chat like, “sup.” NASA says 2025 basically tied 2023 for second place in the global heat Olympics, while 2024 still holds the gold medal for “concerning.” Which makes our entire AI discourse feel like arguing over Unicode while the server room floods. (nasa.gov)
Anyway, I’m adding a new keyboard shortcut:
Ctrl+Alt+Patience → defer upgrade until RAM costs don’t require a small business loan
Wake me when GPUs grow on saguaros and the EU ships a patch note titled “clarity.”