Items I happen to view each day. Science, Technology, Management, Culture, and Writing

    This is my day book for this week. It is a log of things I see on the Internet.

This week: 26 October - 1 November, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Anthropic files some IPO papers, reveals $80B losses
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx

Monday 26 October 2026

The marketplace adjusts: OpenAI and Anthropic cut their prices.

Meanwhile in Phoenix, TSMC engineers have taught American workers how to make semiconductors.

Long live the king of rock and roll: those who own the rights to Elvis' songs sue Anthropic.

Marissa Mayer makes the newspapers again. This time she has an AI startup that is trying to make AI work for the rest of us the rest of the time. I think it will work. Forget about hacking into the Kremlin or some such thing. Get the kids to here and there, fix the car, return library books, decide what to cook for dinner, etc. Help people keep things straight.

Amazon has a gadget that "listens," i.e., it has a microphone. It does speech-to-text and summarizes.

Reddit's opensource group bans AI contributions.

In the fickle world of politics, AI tech leaders are now supposed to stand in the back row of the photos.

Meanwhile on Wikipedia, folks are having their profile pages deleted because they are not notable enough to deserve one. And, the editors are finding mistakes that are 20 years old and trying to correct them. Ah, the problems we have these days.

It appears that companies overestimated what they would need, bought too many resources, and are tying to figure out what to do. Nothing new here.

Few will read this. I believe that to be a shame. Companies are companies, not people. Let's stop treating companies and machines like they were people. Some managers at a company are doing this and that. Machines don't have feelings. Software doesn't have feelings. AI is software. Never prompt AI with, "Would you please give me such and such?" The prompt is, "Analyze this and that and show results in 100-word summary."

Fiction writers are supposed to be creatives, not disciplined organizers. Well, there are times to be organizing in a disciplined manner. My profession and personality always pushes me to think years ahead and keep organized. That pays dividends at time, not always, but sometimes.

Quoting from someone who as big succe$$ as a writer: The only way writers make any money is understanding copyright and trademark and branding

A few new ways to read books. Well, the writer says these things are new.

More discussion on how to prepare for writing a novel.

Quoting the headline: To Read a Little or To Read Lot? Are You Kidding? Read a LOT!

News on the Anthropic copyright settlement. As usual, you had to spend money years ago to be eligible for money today. The little guy is bypassed, again.

Tuesday 27 October 2026

Anthropic files papers to go public. Those filings show they have lost $80billion (with a B) during ONLY the first half of 2026. I guess folks are predicting that one day they will be profitable??? I don't understand big finance.

This report indicates they are already making the turn.

Quoting the headline: Anthropic's S-1 shows a governance structure that suits a fun quirky little mission-driven worker cooperative An S-1 is the papers filed before going public. It seems the grad students may be running a company some value at a Trillion $$$.

Meta and Nvidia sign more deals and toss around a few billion$. Both are long-established companies. They are making deals like they both started last weekend.

More big finance related to Anthropic as ten$ of billion$ in loan$ and such fly around.

Where the money is: datacenters. And someone has to haul the goods from a factory to the datacenter. Truckers might as well be hauling gold bars, except they don't have the protection they would have if they were hauling gold bars.

The AI-aided researchers at OpenAI claim breakthroughs in theoretical STEM fields.

Apple continues to advance the capabilities of its Siri system.

Microsoft offers to buyout about 60,000 employees. They have about 222,000 total.

Want a small iPad? Why not buy a big iPhone. I guess the price of the iPad is much lower.

Google's DeepMind predicted the path of the recent hurricane much better than other systems. This is credited to AI. I guess so, but its a basic application of backpropagation neural networks. I wrote little articles about this application 30+ years ago.

This is a deep read worth the time: Ben Thompson on the new economics of creating software applications. We can now build an app in half an hour. Okay, three people use the app only for this weekend's family reunion, then the app goes away. The cost of creating apps has steadily fallen since ... since the first programmers in the 1940s. So, in one respect, nothing new here. In another respect, this trend has fallen off a cliff. There are a million times more people who can create an app than there were a week ago.

Another deep-thought piece comparing the history of capitalism to the history of AI.

Quoting the headline: The NBA's response to gambling scandals is to add more gambling partnerships Of course. It is all about the money.

It appears that the folks doing enterprise IT are spending more and more of their resources on installing system upgrades. No new thought. Just polishing the old stuff again and again..

Meanwhile at UC Berkeley, there is no need in grading homework. Students use AI to do all the homework. Cries of, "but you aren't learning," fall on deaf ears. The professors have yet to adjust.

Wednesday 28 October 2026

Thursday 29 October 2026

Friday 30 October 2026

Saturday 31 October 2026

Sunday 1 November 2026