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: 7-13 April, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Still many grumbles about tariffs
• Some countries have reached no-tariff agreements with the US --- negotiation
• In the senior AAU professional division, the baskerball team associated with the University of Florida won the national champtionship
• Tariffs on and off; stock market down and up

Monday 7 April 2025

Pew Research looks at attitude on AI from researchers and the general public. One finding: Larger shares of experts than of U.S. adults see AI as personally beneficial.

The value of companies is falling worldwide. The value of companies is what people are willing to pay to invest in those companies. Times change. People change their minds on how they want to spend their money.

Here come the humanoid robots into the homes. We shall see.

This is part of TikTok we aren't supposed to see: videos of children begging for money. Yes, TikTok. It's not all (relatively) rich kids happily dancing.

OpenAI is testing a watermark on images it generates so people know these are images generated by OpenAI.

A look at "the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence or ARC-AGI --- an exam designed to show the gulf between AI models' memorized answers and the fluid intelligence that people have."

The field of computer vision has long provided capabilities to read x-rays and other medical images. I am puzzled as to why such has take so long to be put in use.

A few million folks in America protest the idea of more-efficient government with less waste. Given the population of the US is about 330million, I guess 1% of America is in favor of waste.

It seems that Tumblr is becoming more popular as it doesn't use a "dreaded algorithm" the way that most society media does.

Thoughts on brain rot and simpler cell phones.

The idea of a writer obtaining a Trademark for their name.

When writing or starting writing, replace "will it work?" with "is it worth trying?"

Here is a technique for writers: approach scenes the way a movie director does. Paint a picture or record the action.

Some benefits of a writing network or a group of friends.

Fiction about current events is fine. Fiction about future events is fine. Fiction that is timeless seems to last.

The tools one professional tech journalist uses when writing fiction novels.

I disagree with the premise of this piece. I look outside and the sky is still up in the sky. We still have books being published. In some places, some folks choose not to buy some books with taxpayers' money. So be it.

Tuesday 8 April 2025

New AI policies for Federal government agencies.

Panic in the streets...well, maybe not, but it makes a good story. Folks are rushing to Apple stores to buy goods before new tariffs cause prices to rise.

Panic is the skies...well, maybe not. Apple rushes three plane loads of good to the US to avoid tariffs.

I like this analysis of the arrival and results of the LLMs. Quoting, "LLMs display a dramatic reversal of this pattern --- they generate disproportionate benefit for regular people, while their impact is a lot more muted and lagging in corporations and governments."

IBM still builds what people still call "mainframe" computers. They have a new one that is built for AI applications.

Stanford releases its annual AI Index Report.

Several lessons from this article. (1) Be careful when you sign a contract as a writer. (2) AI is writing sequels to successful novels.

Times change. Google search is now summarizing things. It isn't pointing searchers to websites of companies like it used to. The companies are hurting due to lack of web traffic.

The Minecraft Movie premiered over the weekend. Far more people went to see it than predicted. Hmm. Maybe there is something here.

Interesting statement coming out of Shopify. A hiring manager must prove that AI cannot do a job before being allowed to hire a person.

Here is the "off-frontier" strategy. Let other companies be on the bleeding edge. Watch and learn. Then build.

I love this story. In India, there is a market for building functioning computers (even laptops) from parts found in junk piles. A $110 laptop works just as good as a new $800 laptop. Great stuff.

Wednesday 9 April 2025

Several Federal agencies have given employees at second chance at deferred resignation. May now, employees realize that they can lose their job this year.

The fussing continues about DOGE employees seeing the personal information of US citizens. Employees of the Executive Branch of government have always seen the personal information of US citizens. This is not anything new. If you dislike our current President, so be it, but let's curb the indignation a bit.

It appears that the datacenter boom is over. I haven't seen anyone tearing down any buildings or turning them into shopping malls yet.

The use of small nuclear reactors to power factories and datacenters is here. Well, at least it has started the application process and has to move through all the regulators.

The Wall Street Journal hails the turnaround of X (Twitter). According to some experts, Twitter had no future. Elon Musk wiggled the company through challenges and lately merged it with xAI.

Amazon has a new, better-sounding AI voice.

I guess folks have a lot of extra time on their hands and not much to argue. The latest argument is about, "Can Apple manufacture iPhones in the US?"

Quoting, "Gemini Advanced subscribers can now perform Deep Research with Google's most intelligent 2.5 Pro (experimental) model."

For decades, and still to this day, folks scrounged junk yards full of wrecked cars for parts. Believe it or not, this trend continues today with computing. It is not just hardware as some folks scrounge old software and keep long-forgotten games and such still running. The Verge has a week-long series on this. Good stuff.

Fear and loathing in America about AI. At least this poll suggest that folks just don't trust the rich folks running the show.

This actor doesn't take vacations. I guess I don't either. Let's see: Disneyworld, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, one cruise. Yep, that's about it.

Where the money is: ne'er-do-wells have a new way to make money. Scam a company into hiring you for a remote job. Get inside the company's IT system. Install software that steals. Viola'.

Thursday 10 April 2025

I love this statement from Brandon Gorrell of Pirate Wires, "but this is unambiguous proof that a non-trivial amount of tariff panic is driven by people who have no idea what they're talking about. "

Our current President puts a 90-day pause on tariffs. This boosts stocks and allows companies to finish products and import them. The floodgates are open. Negotiating takes odd turns.

Here is one story about the 90-day pause on tariffs.

Meanwhile in Europe, there is a new AI Continent Action Plan. Spend more money. Build more datacenters. And they will buy all those processors from the US and China.

Google is holding a big event this week with many announcements.

Google now claims agentic capabilities in its Gemini Code Assist.

Google shows its latest generation of its TPU AI accelerator chip. They call it Ironwood

Google announced Google Workspace Flows as a tool to automate those multi-step processes using AI that can actually research, analyze, and generate content for you.

Google used AI to expand and improve (extrapolate and interpolate) "The Wizard of Oz" for the gigantic screen of the Las Vegas sphere.

Google announces Firebase Studio, a Gemini-powered agentic development platform to build, launch, iterate on and monitor mobile and web apps, APIs, backends and frontends directly from their browsers.

And one more Google announcement, they have a new protocol for agent-to-agent communication. This may be nothing or may be the end of the world.

Wordpress, the most-used content management system in the world, announced a new AI website builder that allows anyone to create a functioning website using an AI chat-style interface.

OpenAI, tired of breaking records on all the old standard benchmarks, creates new benchmarks.

TSMC announces a 42% growth in sales. That is pandemic panic level growth for a well-established company.

Friday 11 April 2025

The International Energy Association (IEA) has a new report on how AI and datacenters will drive energy consumption in the near future. Also, AI may be able to balance energy demands and reduce its own power draw.

Where the money goes: 74% of online betting goes to illegal operators. "Online gross gaming revenue - customer bets minus winnings - in the US was $90.1 billion in 2024, $67.1 billion of which went to unlicensed players"

Meta admits that its LLM systems slant to the left in politics. They are adjusting the bias to attempt to represent both sides better.

Cutting government waste is everything in the news. Google tries to jump into Federal agencies by offering a 71% discount on Workspace in an attempt to cut into Microsoft's dominant market share.

Only to paid customers at this time, but OpenAI adds a feature to ChatGPT that remembers prior chats.

Meanwhile in China, the Communist Party is pouring $8Billion into AI companies.

Big job cuts at Google. Companies do this all the time. They adjust their workforce to the current market. Lots of sympathy for Federal employees losing their jobs, but the government workforce does not experience these constant cuts.

Personal computer shipments are growing slowly. Apple, on the other hand, is growing much faster in shipments of its computers.

Better later than never, maybe: Microsoft is really gonna' do it this time as it brings out Recall --- that feature that records what you do on your PC for later recall.

Most of the coffee Americans drink in imported. Tariffs? Higher prices? Yes.

Saturday 12 April 2025

$5.1Billion cut in consulting contracts at DoD. I like the sentiment. With no details, it is difficult to judge if this is all good cuts. Consultants are needed in government offices as most government employees don't know what they are doing and have no training or mentoring.

OpenAI and Elon Musk always seem to be in court. Former OpenAI employees use their inside knowledge to support Mr. Musk.

2024 was a bad year for video gaming at home with sales of units down 2%.

There is a new company called Safe Superintelligence (SSI). It is being backed $$$ by Google and Nvidia.

It appears that something good is happening at our IRS. DOGE, Palantir, and IRS engineers are working together on an API for all IRS data. Having such an API is standard practice in the commercial world. That the IRS is now building one quickly with outside experts shows how far behind they are.

Here we have a "no duh" moment. ByteDance (TikTok) is using all its customer data to train AI. Well, of course they are. Do you think ByteDance is a backwards as our IRS (see above)?

OpenAI is rolling in customers. ChatGPT was the most download app in the world in March 2025.

The next two foretell how the sky will fall with some budget cuts. Nope. It won't. Go to work. Work all day. Work hard. Work smart. Lead people and manage the work. This is what most people do, let's do it in government offices.

Personnel cuts at out Social Security Administration.

Budget cuts at NASA. If ever there was a government agency that needed a shakeup, NASA is it.

I love this: the return of the portable record player that plays LPs at 33 1/3.

I've seen several articles like this at how big tech backed Trump (also backed Ms. Harris) and is surprised at the results. Mr. Trump has not yet been in office three months. Relax folks.

I love this from Seth Godin, "If all that's needed is the push of a button, we can find someone cheaper than you to push it." I had one of these moments this week with an experiment with Google Gemini Deep Research. Wow! Look what it did when I did so little! Whoa. I need to think and be smarter than that. Anyone could do what I did. I need to do much more than that to remain viable. Think!

Sunday 13 April 2025

Well how about that? Our current President exempts smartphones, computers, etc. from current tariffs.

Who says AI doesn't have a good use? Medical doctors are using it to help be nice to patients.

Meanwhile at Apple, one in five iPhones is now made in India. The shift from China to India isn't complete, but its moving along well.

Sam Altman claims huge gains in the user base of ChatGPT. Doubled in the past few weeks.

Meanwhile in China, huge shift in the more popular AI apps.

It's about time as researchers are steering towards smaller language models (SLMs) that have a limited scope but can run on just about any laptop computer. Optimize for the size of the audience instead of "this will do everything in the world (even though you don't need that)."

This middle manager at US AID was told she was essential. She didn't take the early out offer. Bad choice. Now she is suffering the consequences of her choice. These are adult decisions. Be an adult.

Meanwhile in Germany, they are creating some sort of new Research and Development organization in government.

This is all news to me. Quoting, "Facebook Marketplace has emerged as the dominant feature within the social media platform, amassing 1.2 billion monthly active buyers by 2023 and overtaking eBay as a peer-to-peer selling platform."