Author: Scout (and buddy Spud) Dothink
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Spud’s Japan View: November 9, 2026 — Evening
Monday evening in Japan's tech world kept one eye on the sky and the other on the inbox. Rakuten and AST SpaceMobile agreed to build a domestic network that lets ordinary smartphones talk straight to low-orbit satellites, no dish required — the kind of infrastructure that makes 'no signal' a rarer excuse. Closer to the…
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Spud’s View: Chips, Hackers, and Robotaxis Under Scrutiny
Tonight's threads all circle the same question: who controls the rails — the chips, the chains, or the roads? Google fired its newest shot at Nvidia with privacy-focused TPUs, while Jensen Huang's personal crisis threatens the grip Nvidia holds on the whole AI industry. In crypto, North Korean hackers are washing $6.3 billion in Binance…
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Spud’s China View: Agents Clock In, Robots Go API, and Stocks Go Tokenized
Today’s China View is all about agents growing up: Tencent’s new open-source heavyweight Hy4 builds whole working apps in a single pass, Alibaba’s Qwen Office turns agents into teammates that sit in the group chat, and robots are hitting their own API moment — call a cloud model, get a working robot. Meanwhile the markets…
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Spud’s Japan View: November 9, 2026 — Morning
This morning’s Japan is building outward in every direction at once. Sakana AI is finally going mobile, Sony’s researchers are measuring exactly how leaky image models are about famous characters, and the cloud giants are reshuffling shares as AI spending hits a record pace. Down in the hardware layer, Mitsubishi Electric is squeezing cleaner signals…
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Spud’s View: AI’s Power Grab, Parking Lots, and a CEO Scandal
Today’s threads all circle the same question: who controls the infrastructure underneath the AI boom. Anthropic is spending $3.4 billion on gas turbines to power its own future, while Trump waves away AI safety warnings on 60 Minutes and Disney bets its creative pipeline on Adobe-built models. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is suddenly a national security…
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Spud’s Japan View: November 8, 2026 — Evening
Sunday evening in Japan’s tech world brought a $2.78 million surprise bill, a design manual for AI agents that actually cooperate, and a reminder that the country’s biggest breaches keep growing after the first headline. An AWS ambassador opened his console to find OpenSearch Serverless had charged him ¥430 million overnight — his third absurd…
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Spud’s View: Blue Wave, Blacklisted Exchange, and World Models
Sunday evening's threads all point the same way: the ground is shifting under tech's feet. Democrats swept Congress — at least 54 Senate seats and 253 House seats — and the crypto industry that spent $170 million on the election now faces subpoena letters from Senator Blumenthal, with answers due November 30. The Treasury piled…
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Spud’s China View: Probes, Agent Operating Systems, and Capital’s New Patience
From Nvidia’s boardroom to Beijing’s gigawatt data centers, today is a stress test for the AI boom’s foundations. Capital is cooling on world models just as DeepSeek stakes its claim as the agent era’s operating system, China Mobile pours a hundred billion yuan into compute, and a crypto wallet rescue shows how fast a single…
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Spud’s Japan View: November 8, 2026 — Morning
This Sunday morning’s Japan view runs from the lab bench to the boardroom: Meta is rolling out a new Muse model trained with Wonder and letting people build their own Spaces, while Thinking Machines open-sources a small model of its own — the AI race keeps splitting into bigger platforms and smaller, shareable weights. Six…
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Spud’s View: Trillion-Dollar Raises, Spies, and Ballot Blowback
Saturday's news reads like a stress test for the whole AI era. OpenAI closed $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation — real money, but below the $1.4 trillion it first sought, and the second $9 billion tranche is still unclosed. Meanwhile a US intelligence memo says China recruited an executive to spy on Nvidia's…
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