Daily Tech News 30 July 2026

Top Story

• The United States government just banned Roombas. (The Verge)
  
  Well, it didn't, and wouldn't have at all if it hadn't previously blocked the acquisition of US company iRobot by US company Amazon leaving the market to Chinese competitors. And they're only being blocked over well-founded fears of being used for surveillance just like every other thing in our lives these days with more functional purpose than a Chia Pet.
  
  If you like your Roomba you can keep your Roomba, and existing models of Roomba can continue to be imported, but new models of Roomba - and of any other imported robot - will need to be certified.

Tech News

• While would the US government consider robots to be a security ris-
  
  

  U.S. company Satyress is developing threehalves, a centaur-style robot designed for dangerous environments such as wildfires, rubble searches, toxic areas and confined spaces. The system combines a humanoid upper body with a quadruped mobility platform. #USA #Robotics #UGV #AI pic.twitter.com/ViPprQ1lrZ

  — Drone Wars (@Drone_Wars_) July 28, 2026

  
  
  Got it. Drone strikes it is.
  
  
  
• Huawei's new MateBook Pro S weighs just 798 grams, which is vanishingly light for a 14" model. (Notebook Check)
  
  Only problem is that it runs an in-house Kirin XE90 Arm CPU, which has decent multi-threaded performance thanks to its 10 dual-thread cores, but pretty lousy single-threaded performance. Expect performance like a 2017-era laptop in that regard.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, I just realised that the new Minisforum NAB9S has a 13900HK CPU rather than a 13900HX. So while it is a current model that takes DDR4 SODIMMs (of which I have an abundance) and is a fair bit faster than my existing hardware that uses that memory, it is also a fair bit slower than the full HX model.
  
  It's also relatively inexpensive because it's available as a barebones model, and has a 2.5" bay for a SATA SSD if I should happen to find where mine have gone.
  
  
  
• How to run Gemma 26B on an 8GB Apple Silicon system. (GitHub)
  
  Gemma 26B requires 52GB of VRAM to run as it ships with 16-bit values. The process squimshes it down to 4-bit quantisation and then caches the core (using about 2GB of RAM in total) and streams the rest from SSD.
  
  Which is great because while you can certainly run Gemma 26B-A4B (4-bit quantised) on a 16GB graphics card without hacks, this sort of trick would allow you to run some 200B parameter models on the same hardware - the scale where AI models stop being stupid and useless.
  
  
  
• And if you have an Acemagic F9A, 1.6T parameters. (WCCFTech)
  
  You'd want a fast SSD for that, though, because that would be a lot of data to fling about.