The rambling ponderings of Eric "Gub" Snyder. I'm incurably curious. I ponder things like AI, the environment, sustainability, stranded assets, environmental stewardship, waste, waste reduction, thriving simply, living simply, genealogy, history, calendars, personal productivity...
After an extended period of pain and suffering, he decided to end his life with M.A.I.D. He passed away surrounded by family at 11:15 AM today, Wednesday, April 29, 2026.
My wife, Helen, invented the word "Waynesday" when reflecting on the date. From this day forward, we will remember Wayne and celebrate Waynesday every April 29th in future.
AI is in a “busy but transitional” phase this week: powerful new models are landing, regulators are accelerating, and investors are watching whether the 2025 AI boom can sustain its momentum into 2026.
1429 – Joan of Arc enters the besieged city of Orléans, a turning point in the Hundred Years’ War and in French national identity.
Citigroup has raised its estimate for the global AI market to more than 4 trillion dollars by 2030, including about 1.9 trillion from enterprise AI, up from a previous forecast a little over 3 trillion.
OpenAI has released GPT‑5.5, its “smartest and most intuitive” model so far, aimed at more agentic, tool‑using workflows and now rolling out broadly in ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers. Anthropic’s new frontier model Claude Mythos remains gated in a limited “Preview” program due to its exceptional ability to discover and chain together software vulnerabilities, raising major cybersecurity and governance questions. On the open and local‑deployment side, Google’s Gemma 4 family, new Qwen 3.6 variants, Kimi K2.6, and other recent releases are pushing capable multimodal and reasoning models into open‑source and on‑device settings.
Policy makers are racing to catch up: the proposed U.S. AI Foundation Model Transparency Act would force large‑model developers to disclose training and evaluation details, while Colorado’s AI Act and evolving EU AI Act timelines tighten rules on “high‑risk” AI, and the UN’s Global Dialogue on AI Governance is gathering inputs from governments and stakeholders by the end of April. At the same time, foundational AI funding has effectively doubled compared with all of 2025, led by OpenAI’s historic 122‑billion‑dollar raise, cementing a capital‑intensive “compute super‑cycle.”
4977 BC – According to Johannes Kepler’s calculations, the universe was created on this date (one of many historical attempts to date creation).
1521 – Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan is killed in the Philippines during a skirmish on Mactan, but his expedition will complete the first circumnavigation of the globe.
