Roundup for Monday

• Digital sovereignty: Federal government withdraws from AI partnership with Mistral and SAP – “The [German] federal government is withdrawing from the partnership with Mistral and SAP. The decision fuels doubts about Europe’s path to digital sovereignty.”
• Home Depot and Lowe’s share a common goal for their AI assistants, but their strategies diverge
• Cabinet recognizes: Cloud Act can collide with AVG and give access to Dutch healthcare data – [Translated:] Furthermore, there is no insight into American access to Dutch patient data. The US government can secretly request our healthcare data. The government does not know if Dutch care data has ever been requested. The lack of reports is certainly not proof that such requests do not take place.”
• Not enough nerds left Twitter, it’s still relevant – “Since that blog post, Federico Viticci and John Voorhees returned to X. Other people started posting to X who had never even posted to Twitter before, like Jensen Huang and Jeffrey Katzenberg. While I still believe X is doomed in the long run — closed, rudderless, and toxic to many — the AI community has held on to a remnant of the old Twitter, and in fact that community is growing, apparently immune to the decay of a platform that has no soul.”
• Tiny5 – “Tiny5 is a family of compact 5-pixel variable fonts that capture the essence of 1980s – 90s digital minimalism. Inspired by the graphing calculators and pocket gadgets of the era, they distill letterforms to their absolute essentials – proving that even at just five pixels tall, clarity, charm, and personality can thrive together.”
• PC Market Woes Continue: Shipments Fall 20.1% in Q3 2026 as Pull-In Hangover and Supply Constraints Bite – IDC – ”Worldwide PC shipments fell 20.1% year over year in Q3 2026 to 62.7 million units, according to preliminary results from IDC Research (IDC), the second consecutive decline and a deeper one than the 3.8% drop in Q2. ”
• Anime, etc., now completely normal, even for the olds – “A new NRG survey commissioned by anime streamer Crunchyroll found that in the United States, the percentage of consumers aged 13 to 54 who watch Japanese animation at least weekly increased to 41 percent this year, up from 39 percent. The percentage of daily watchers also increased to 21 percent from 13 percent in 2025. The idea that people age out of anime was rattled by the survey, with 58 percent of viewers aged 45 to 54 indicating that their fandom had intensified.”
• AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up – “Some of our earliest gains required almost no optimization of CI itself. Moving our workloads off GitHub Actions to third-party runners with faster CPUs, higher-performance storage, and better cache infrastructure gave us faster machines to run the same pipeline on. In a like-for-like comparison of the two days either side of the switch, jobs ran 34% faster on average, with some workloads like tsc dropping 52%.”

The above are links for you, dear readers, that do not have their own post on the weblog.