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: 5-11 October, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx

Monday 5 October 2026

Technology has jumped a few steps up the ladder. Here is the story of one person who has ridden the jumps.

Here is a thought about the great pyramids in Egypt: they were built so that they record information about the earth and mathematics. Measure this and that and you have information that is useful elsewhere.

The ne'er-do-wells find yet another way to do what they do.

Token for the chattering bots are the new money. In China, the black market flourishes.

Some folks at Anthropic are meeting with some folks called religious leaders. Some folks like this trend. Others scoff. I would need to see the details and meet the nice folks involved.

Meanwhile at Anthropic, the company matches charitable gifts with stock giveaways. Nice for charities but not nice for future shareholders.

Quoting the headline from Wired: Muse Creates Detailed Profiles of All Your Friends and Family

Here's a paraphrase: In an X reply, Elon Musk says that SpaceX will rename its AI unit SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI (super intelligence).

Quoting: Car thefts in San Francisco are down almost 59% for the first eight months of 2026. License-plate reading systems reduce car thefts. We've decided that such systems are bad. Who is we? Why did we decide that?

Some of us try to keep AM radios in vehicles. Forget the entertainment value. These things are basic emergency communications. They work.

This writer loves doing ALL THE WORK himself. No employees. No loss of control. No sleep... oh wait, I tossed in that last one.

A classic review of a classic book: The Psychology of Computer Programming. I had the good fortune of knowing Jerry Weinberg.

Write 670 words of fiction each day (type 30 words a minute, that is about 25 minutes of writing). That isn't much as it is little more than a page a day. At that pace, however, a writer writes four novels a year. WHAT???!!!??? Yes. Those are 60,000-word novels.

If you put your hands to the keyboard, or even dictate your stories, you will find that you can write much faster than you can publish your own work.

How C.S. Lewis spent every day as a writer.

One person's reflection on 20 years of blogging. We are at that point in computing history where the blog is 20 years old plus or minus a few. My blogs will hit that mark in a couple of years.

Are we living in the death of reading?

Seth Godin calls this a handoff doc. I have worked jobs that used these under different names. Could a chattering bot do this for me?

Tuesday 6 October 2026

The governors of South Korea plan to toss a few million$ and build a frontier AI model. Note, people know how to do these things. The roadblock is renting enough computers to do it.

Imitation is flattery until it isn't.

Here come the lawyers and the insurance companies. AI makers beware.

Hardware continues to be the new software. Big tech is trying to buy a magnetic head old company.

I pause to shake my head about some of these stories. Etched is a new company that makes AI processors, I think. I have never heard of them. They are now valued at $50Billion, probably more today than yesterday. $50Billion (yes, with a B) is a big pile of money. The folks in the photo all look like they are still in high school. What is the source of all this money?

Ghost, let's build a PC that runs AI locally. The folks in the photo do look like they are still in high school.

This analysis claims that Anthropic's subscriptions offer 5x value over OpenAI's. That is not 5%; it is 5x. Hmm.

Quoting: Reflection AI, the startup billing itself as America's answer to open-source Chinese AI, is releasing its first model, called Beam.

Meta and Microsoft build their own AI tools. Their employees like to use Claude instead. The corporate managers are putting an end to that.

We don't agree with ourselves about whether or not our Dept of Defense (War) is still using Anthropic systems.

I didn't know we had a Billionaires Index. It seems we do. Anyways, the gains this year are all in the tech industry as the other B folks lost a little money.

Hackers stole records belonging to roughly 8 million Danish citizens and residents from Denmark's Central Person Register. These government systems are supposed to be safe, secure, private, and all that. DON'T CONNECT IT TO THE INTERNET! I suppose that is difficult to understand.

Wednesday 7 October 2026

Thursday 8 October 2026

Friday 9 October 2026

Saturday 10 October 2026

Sunday 11 October 2026