Before saying goodbye to CES 2026, I roamed around without a destination in mind to soak up the scene with my camera. After a week of operating at breakneck pace for long hours, it felt meditative to just capture a tiny glimpse of tech on display — including some human (and very non-human) moments.

There were a couple Steam Machine mockups at Jsaux’s CES booth, but they were just shells showing off the company’s cheesy looking stickers. The front display concept wasn’t there.

Anil Dash wrote a really fun, really deep history of Markdown, the text markup language John Gruber created that has subsequently become totally ubiquitous online. Dash also argues that the idea behind Markdown, and the forces that made it huge, hold important lessons that the current tech industry — and AI companies in particular — could really stand to learn from.

Former Polygon staffers Maddy Myers and Zoë Hannah are launching a new publication called Mothership, “which aims to analyze games specifically through the lens of gender and identity.”

A Waymo made the unfortunate decision to drive on light rail tracks in Phoenix with a passenger inside while a train was approaching. The passenger made the right call to abandon the robotaxis, even if it meant getting out in the middle of traffic. Valley Metro, which oversees light rail service, says there were no significant delays as a result of the incident. This comes a few weeks after a blackout caused a massive Waymo traffic jam in San Francisco.

GDU Technology’s Li Lei says she’s not sure whether it might truly hurt her company. “It’s really hard to tell because they’re changing drone policy all the time,” she tells me at CES. Also, GDU mostly sells in China. But it just recently expanded in the US, and now its just-announced flagship P300 won’t come here.

While shows produced with generative AI can still be submitted for Emmy consideration, the Television Academy has updated its rules to reserve the right to inquire about whether the technology was used in a production.

The charge is related to the automaker’s plans to reduce some of its EV production in the face of cooling demand and a less hospitable regulatory environment. It comes a week after Ford said it would take a similar financial hit on its EV investments, and a few months after GM took a $1.6 billion writedown on EVs. When will the EV bloodletting end?

The next flagship model from Chinese startup DeepSeek “makes breakthroughs handling extremely long coding prompts,” according to The Information, and DeepSeek’s internal benchmarks put it ahead of Anthropic and OpenAI’s models in coding.

Stellantis is discontinuing its plug-in hybrid lineup for Jeep and Chrysler, as the automaker pivots away from electrification to gas guzzlers and extended-range electric vehicles. It’s kind of a surprising move, given the sales momentum around hybrids these days in the face of slowing demand for EVs. But when you recall that Jeep’s 4xe lineup has been plagued by recalls, including one recently for a high-voltage battery defect that poses a risk for fire, than it starts to make a little more sense.

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said in a press conference that “a single crew member on board the [ISS] experienced a medical situation and is now stable,” but NASA is playing it safe and bringing Crew-11 home early.

15 years ago, j5create made a cable that magically let you drag and drop between PCs and Macs. Now, it’s got a $70 USB-C astronaut dongle that wirelessly links Windows PCs with iPads here at CES. You can send files, mirror displays, and beam your mouse and keyboard. I can’t vouch for latency yet — Wi-Fi reliability at CES is kind of crap.