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: 3-9 August, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Mexico is now #2 server supplier to US, only behind Taiwan
• New voluntary AI testing goes into effect (it is secret)
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx

Monday 3 August 2026

No Internet viewing this morning. Below is a longer-than-normal list of things I have seen about writing.

In order to avoid, "AI wrote this, you didn't" writers are inserting grammar and punctuation errors into pieces. Well, I don't know, , perhaps I can do that two.

More on the standard manuscript format. People still use this. And they have good reasons.

What is your writing process, i.e., how do you go about writing a book or large piece? There are many methods. What is the goal? What do you want to do?

Quoting: How can inspiring writers get published? Write a good book.

I like this piece titled: How I Sold 1,000 Copies of My Self-Published Memoir in Five Months It has good, practical marketing ideas that aren't expensive and returned on the little money invested.

• 1. I talked to readers while I was writing.
• 2. I spent money strategically.
• 3. I talked to everyone about the book.
• 4. I learned not to pigeonhole my book.
• 5. I didn't travel (much).

Dean Wesley Smith: I have in the 20 years since indie publishing started made far, far more money than I made in the 20 plus years in traditional publishing.

Another excellent quote from Smith: Writer's Just Don't Understand Copyright

Quoting the headline: The Evolution of Academic Idioms, How Writing a Paper Has Shifted from Print to Digital Services

Tuesday 4 August 2026

Quoting the headline: Apple Is Reinventing Itself as the World's Biggest Subscription Provider

Meanwhile in Montana, they are experimenting with a new model of medicine and experiments.

Larry Ellison, billionaire, bets it all on AI. You know, these guys whose wealth is on paper, can lost it all. And there is no refund for capital losses.

Speaking of having it all on paper and betting and losing ... see this guy.

Once again, someone admits there is more to engineering software systems than writing code. Still, none of those job recruiters have called me to apologize. What gives?

I am unfamiliar with Mr. Hank Green and his work. He announces that using LLM is not healthy for him or good for the world. Perhaps.

It is quite unfortunate, but we have many ne'er-do-wells working as law enforcement officers. We have all made poor decisions regarding the hiring, retention, and training of such persons. It is all our responsibility to do better.

More reports of ne'er-do-wells in law enforcement.

A frequent refrain: we are building bright, shiny, new, big places to house computers while we aren't housing people in a decent manner and manor. There is some merit to the refrain. Also, plenty of ignorance.

Meanwhile in Japan, someone discovers that they are dependent on China for drones in industry.

Meanwhile at the New York Times, someone discovers that tourists in China are tracked closely by the party. Gosh. Well, it takes the Times a while to grasp the obvious.

Meanwhile in America, some states are taxing datacenters. The result will be higher costs for all Americans at just about everything since just about everything is connected to a computer or one sort or another.

Surprise: Mexico is now the second-largest computer server supplier to the U.S.A. only behind Taiwan.

Meanwhile in China, the Communist Party realizes that if OpenAI and Anthropic can accidentally hack into companies, what can they do to China if they really want to hack.

This is wrong and harkens back to the actions of the prior presidency. Our government is warning people about what they say on the Internet. Wrong.

Quoting the headline: Amazon becomes the fifth company to reach a $3T market cap, joining Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple The definition of success has changed.

Palantir reports a booming financial quarter.

Quoting the headline: The White House says it has met its deadline to establish a voluntary framework for evaluating advanced AI models No one outside the White House seems to know what this means.

Perhaps some explanation will come from today's meeting at the White House.

Meanwhile in Europe where regulators gotta' regulate, a new EU regulation provides the ability to extract more money from successful American companies.

Wednesday 5 August 2026

SpaceX is buying 130,000 acres near Pecan Island, Louisiana. Build a space port on the Gulf Coast. Amazing stuff.

We've gone from no silver bullets to no magic wands. AI is being applied to medicine. Actually, heave numerical methods and enough compute power to run a million experiments in a short time. Still, no guarantees.

Quoting: The most important skill in prompting is expertise in the domain you're prompting for. Well, it is good that someone gets it.

And now we have AI Tokenomics. Will anyone make any money from all those tokens being processed?

Meanwhile in Silicon Valley (the idea, not the place), the question has changed from Are Chinese open models any good? to Should we be using the Chinese open models? If you use them, when do you become dependent? And most learned people in the field understand how the Chinese built their models.

Running software, endlessly, that creates software. So you manage the computing and the endlessly running software. Tools change. What we do to accomplish the same thing changes. Nothing new here. Let's stop acting surprised.

Mathematicians on how the latest tools are affecting their work.

The content battles at Reddit continue.

Starlink is booming with subscriptions doubling in the past year. They are running good ads on television. Stay connected. Stay tuned.

More news from SpaceX $$$ as AI revenue is up 247%. Good grief. How much is that?

And more huge growth numbers from SpaceX.

Pinterest reports a good financial quarter. But a rise of 19% seems so small compared to these colossal numbers from other places.

AMD reports a big financial quarter up 50%.

More cyberattacks against water and sewage facilities in the US. Don't connect these things to the Internet!

The ne'er-do-wells find more ways to hurt others. Fake bad things. They used to call this framing someone. I don't know if anyone knows that slang any longer. Again, the best way to fight this is the build a reputation so that people know you would never do these things.

The current President's underlings have a new AI framework for voluntary testing. The only people who know the details are those closely involved. It isn't TOP SECRET, but it might as well be.

Who made money in the gold rush? The guy who sold pants (Levi Strauss). Who is making money in the AI boom? The guys who build big diesel-powered machines - Caterpillar. Look at the edge. See the real money makers.

Schools are buying MacBook Neos instead of Chromebooks and low-priced Windows machines. No wonder the rest of us have to wait weeks to get a Neo.

The result of many return-to-the-office mandates is that people realize the folks running the company are a bunch of unethical liars and cheats. Not a good result.

Meanwhile in North America, the Linux desktop hits 10% of the market.

Turn on a fan, and the blades disappear into motion blur. Cause a drone to spin, and it disappears the same way.

Thursday 6 August 2026

Friday 7 August 2026

Saturday 8 August 2026

Sunday 9 August 2026