Hello and welcome back to the Sizzle for the year! It sucks to have to start like this but please, please, please everyone stay safe in the heat over the next few days. 

Mentioned in today's edition: Jensen Huang, Signal, NVIDIA, Google, Lenovo, BYD, Bose, BlackBerry, Tailwind CSS, n8n. Plus, deals on Samsung microSDs, Logitech Webcams and eufy robovacs.

The News

CES is more AI and robots, but real fun is where it gets weird

2026 kicks off with a preview of the year's gadgets and gizmos at CES, which wrapped up today in Las Vegas. The flavour of the year seems to be everyone continuing to go hard on AI in everything (WIRED) and robots (Verge) but nothing that seems to be the killer physical implementation of either yet.

If you want an overview, here's a wrap of the best tech (The Verge), the weirdest products (TechCrunch) and, for the sickos, a blow-by-blow live-blog (The Verge) of the nearly week long event. Otherwise, here's some other things you might be interested in:

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Google's AI mode is coming to Gmail next

After first bringing AI to search, Google is doing the same to your Gmail inbox next (Ars Technica). Last night, the company announced "AI Inbox" which is a personalised text summary that uses your emails to come up with suggested to-dos and sorts your emails into topics (Google). This feature, first rolling out to testers, is in addition to the existing inbox view.

The Sizzle: This is big. Save for AI notification summaries and junk filtering, most people's email inboxes are one of the few online surfaces untouched by algorithms. When Google rolls this out widely — and it will — it's going to fundamentally change how we think about email. Essentially, you're going to have to write every email to convince an AI to show it to your intended recipient. It's like bringing SEO to emails.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Is Tailwind the victim of AI search or is it really the same old open source problem?

Relatedly, Google will now sponsor the popular website coding framework, Tailwind CSS, after the company said it had to fire most of its engineers because AI search killed its traffic (SEO Roundtable). The story started with some drama after creator Adam Wathan refused to introduce LLM-friendly documentation. He said they were already short staffed and he didn't want to do anything to further reduce visits to the company's website, where they promote their commercial products (GitHub). Wathan said traffic to its website is down 40% and its revenue down 80% despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. 

The Sizzle: Obviously, AI search is the new thing here — but I think it's a secondary issue. This is actually a symptom of the age-old problem of funding open source projects even when they’re popular and useful. The fact that Tailwind needs to get people to visit their website to buy some secondary service in order to actually fund the really successful thing doesn't really make sense.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of the world:

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

This website will help you go to gigs (and maybe help you help others, too)

Some of my goals for 2026 are "go to more things", "rely on big tech less" and "build little websites for friends, family and fun". Sydney Music is the combination of all three: it's a non-profit that's bringing back the online gig guide to let people know about where things are. What's cool about it is that Sydney Music lets anyone use its custom website code and design so they can set up their own local site.

And they have! Last year, it was used to set up websites in Vietnam. How cool is that? Anyway, support Sydney Music, go to a gig and/or, if you're outside of Sydney and feeling frisky, set up your local guide.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.