I want to write something true and a little sentimental this month because December makes me feel that way and also because I have genuinely good in-laws and the world does not celebrate that enough. There is a whole industry of in-law complaint content out there and I have always felt slightly left out of it because my experience has been the opposite.

I need to talk about Celebrity Beyond. I have been on cruises before and I have enjoyed them in the pleasant, generic way that cruises are designed to be enjoyed. Celebrity Beyond is not that. Celebrity Beyond is what happens when a cruise line decides to actually think carefully about design, food, service, and atmosphere, and then executes on all of it at a level that makes you rethink what a vacation is supposed to feel like.

Science News ran a profile this month on Bhavin Shastri, a physicist and engineer at Queen's University in Canada, and I have been thinking about it ever since. Shastri is building photonic computers, computers that use light instead of electricity to process information.

Back in June I wrote about the Gallup data showing AI use at work had nearly doubled in two years. I wanted to revisit that conversation because the numbers have continued to move and the governance situation has not improved at the pace it should have. As of mid-2025, about 40% of US employees report using AI at least a few times per year, with frequent use concentrated in technology, finance, and professional services.

I have a birthday this month. I am not going to tell you which one specifically because that information is on a need-to-know basis and most people do not need to know. What I will tell you is that I am squarely in what the culture politely calls middle life and what I personally call the era of extremely informed decision-making.

Google quietly dropped something interesting this week inside NotebookLM: Video Overviews. If you have not been using NotebookLM, the short version is that it is a research tool that lets you feed it your own documents, notes, and sources and then ask questions, generate summaries, and create Audio Overviews, which are essentially AI-generated podcast-style discussions about your material.

Gallup dropped a report this month that made me put down my coffee and stare at the wall for a moment. The share of US employees who use AI at least a few times per year has gone from 21% to 40% in just two years. Weekly use has nearly doubled. Daily use has doubled in just the past year.

I want to talk about the UK's Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS) situation because it is a perfect real-world illustration of what happens when you let legacy technology run past its end of life and do not have a migration plan that actually reaches everyone in time. The RTS is a system introduced in the 1980s that uses a radio signal to tell older electricity meters when to switch between peak and off-peak rates.

There is a specific kind of pride that I do not think anyone warned me about when my kid was small. It is not the pride of the little moments, though those are wonderful. It is the pride that arrives when you watch someone you raised become a whole, capable, thriving adult human being who is out here doing things and achieving goals and handling life in ways that genuinely impress you.

I came across a CNBC piece on Preferred Networks this week and I want to talk about it because it is the kind of story that puts the AI conversation in a different frame than we usually get. While most of the debate in US tech circles revolves around generative AI, chatbots, and whether AI will steal everyone's job, Preferred Networks has been quietly building AI that solves things that are physically real.

I have been on cruises before. I have sat by pools and eaten too much and watched the ocean go by in a very pleasant, low-key kind of way. Comic Con the Cruise Vol. 1 was absolutely nothing like that. It was a full sensory experience of fandoms, sequins, people in elaborate costumes at 9am, panel rooms packed with enthusiastic humans, and me, a grown adult IT professional, completely losing her composure multiple times in the best possible way.

I want to tell you about something that made me put down my coffee and actually read the whole article. Scottish researchers at the University of Edinburgh have built an AI tool that analyzes photographs taken during routine eye exams and detects early signs of dementia before any symptoms appear. Not a specialized brain scan. Not an expensive hospital procedure. A photograph.