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: 19-25 May, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Mr. Biden found to have prostate cancer
• Google has a big event and announces many AI features
• Microsoft does the same

Monday 19 May 2025

To beat China, we need...electrical power. Just plain old coal-fueled electricity. Okay, don't like coal? Build nuclear power plants QUICKLY Cut enough regulation so a plant goes from, "Here is the money," to "flip that switch for the power to flow" in 12 months or less.

Once again, its not the engineers and scientists that bring trouble to tech companies. It is the lawyers and marketers.

Long overdue, but weather predictors are using AI now.

Good stuff from Apple related to helping those who don't hear and see well. The Magnifier is impressive to me as I know something about the computer vision technologies being used. Good for Apple.

Reports from real life about how AI is affecting real people in real jobs.

A report on alternative devices that parenting groups are trying to find for their kids. Then there is the part of the story about how some adults can't act like adults and simply use devices for good and not for self destruction. Come on folks. If you are an adult, act your age.

Meanwhile in the world of crypto currencies and big money, folks are hiring bodyguards everywhere as the ne'er-do-wells resort to the age old practice of kidnapping and ransom.

The brain-computer interface, researched and experimented for decades, may come to fruition this year.

Nvidia to build an AI supercomputer in Taiwan.

Predictions that AI systems will work at the level of a junior programmer in a year. I guess "junior" is subjective as I think this level is here now.

College? Go to college? Many 20-year-olds have run the numbers on the return on investment and are going to blue collar jobs and running their own businesses.

Our prior President is found to have prostate cancer.

Some companies are having the chattering bots interview job applicants. Of course it doesn't work well for anyone.

Writing bullets in PowerPoint is one thing. Writing a book is another...sort of.

Quoting, "how to go from brainstorming ideas to planning out a concrete story." Some writers are smart enough to keep it all in their head. I am not. I have to jot notes and keep those notes pages handy.

Here is how one person takes notes while travelling. I like the photo printer.

A look at AI-based copy-editing tools. Is this all wrong?

Which famous writer said this thing?

Tuesday 20 May 2025

Microsoft held a big event yesterday with many announcements.

Microsoft makes its Windows System for Linux open source.

Microsoft launches Microsoft Discovery. This is some type of agentic system that will help scientist do science.

Get the product names correct: Microsoft rebrands and improves Copilot Runtime to Windows AI Foundry.

What would a CEO speech be without protestors protesting something they feel is worthy of protest?

Quoting, "GitHub is launching an AI coding agent that can do things like fix bugs, add features, and improve documentation."

The Communist Party of China issues a typical warning for the USA to stop its wrongdoings.

Qualcomm plans to build data center processors that will work alongside Nvidia processors.

Meanwhile in New Orleans, the NOPD operates facial recognition systems three years after a law prohibited such.

Huawei releases its MS Windows replacement called HarmonyOS. They are working to make many Windows applications run on HarmonyOS.

Here come the datacenters to the Tahoe-Reno area of the desert in Nevada.

The Take It Down Act is now law. Here we go. With good intentions to prevent nonconsensual intimate images (NCII), we dive into what is "intimate" and what is merely something I don't like.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, we now have flamethrower equipped robots. Not like WWII, these launch thermobaric rounds.

This is an important message that few are hearing. AI is completely new every year. We are in the extreme upward slope of the S curve. Government studies that last a year are silly at best and just plain wasteful at worst.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet. Some study shows that some of these chattering bots outperform some humans in some debates.

Rumors that Apple's Siri will be as powerful as ChatGPT.

Wednesday 21 May 2025

Microsoft has a new tool called NLWeb that helps web developers add a chattering bot interface to a website.

The nuclear weapon of the 21st century: AI chattering bots. This "just a student" builds such a weapon that finds radical people and slowly but surely nudges an AI-powered conversation towards less radical thought. This all happens without the person's knowledge. It also happens without the knowledge of the platform hosting the conversation.

Google held a big event yesterday with plenty of announcements.

Here is one summary to Google's event.

Google increases its AI replies to emails to include far more context and suggest more than "Sound good."

Google increases the number of AI subscription plans that go up to $250/month. If you use the tools to do your job, $250/month is well worth it.

Google releases their own text-to-video AI system to compete with OpenAI et al.

Google extends its Project Mariner, an experimental AI agent that browses and uses websites.

Google adds Video Overview to NotebookLM. Produce a visual video that summarizes the inputs to NotebookLM.

Google spreads its AI Mode for Search to more users.

Google and Warby Parker partner to build smart glasses and compete with Meta and Ray-Ban.

An experiment with a prototype of the Google Warby Parker glasses.

Someone put social sensitivity into the AI that controls driverless cars. They drive safer now. What is "social sensitivity?"

Meanwhile in Europe, big tech isn't there. Decades of overregulation after two world wars have left the continent that once was the center of the world just flailing around using products from other countries.

A 19-year-old Massachusetts man has agreed to plead guilty to hacking into one of the top education tech companies in the United States and stealing tens of millions of schoolchildren's personal information for profit. This wasn't North Korea or China or Cuba. It was a teenager literally working from his grandmother's basement. This is hacktivism. This is the real threat.

AMD updates its high-end desktop processors.

I'll just quote the headline, "Nvidia chief Jensen Huang condemns US chip curbs on China as a failure"

Stolen iPhones are not supposed to work anymore. No one told the folks in China's stolen iPhone building.

AMD has new high-powered GPUs.

It seems we all tired of taking surveys.

Check the output of AI systems. Check the output of all systems. How did we forget that?

Thursday 22 May 2025

From Mr. Riley Nork at Pirate Wires...try to follow the train of events. Folks in left-leaning California don't like Mr. Trump, so they don't like Mr. Musk, so they stop buying Tesla electric vehicles, Tesla dominates the EV market, so EV sales fall in California, California cannot reach its EV sales goals, the whole thing falls apart in California. This is what happens when the guy you hate builds the cars you need. Do you hate the person enough to kill your own programs? Surely there comes a point when adults think like adults and understand that this is an imperfect world that requires imperfect compromises on some things to achieve some other things.

A deep article on the scam farms of southeast Asia. If you live in the region and answer a help wanted ad for a tech job, you could be trapped scamming for a living.

The life of the content moderators. They run social media (sort of) but no one knows who they are.

Some folks at MIT do the math on AI, computer use, and electricity consumed. Gosh, why not do something like calculate the total length of hair grown by humanity each year and the carbon addition of that. These exercises in multiplying and dividing large numbers are pretty frivolous.

Meanwhile in Russia, the government has hackers messing with any corporation worldwide that lends any aid to Ukraine. Total war. The extension of the concept into the Internet age.

OpenAI (Sam Altman) buys a company called io (Jony Ive). Can two geniuses make a little company work? I don't know. First we have to find two geniuses.

More information on the Altman-Ive partnership.

Meanwhile inside Microsoft, everyone tries to focus on "this is a for-profit business" not a political round table discussion.

More from Microsoft, new AI techniques are improving weather forecasting.

The Wall Street Journal predicts a China-dominated world. It is a question of numbers: How many people do you have? How much money do you spend? But then, there is the human and creative element and the question of immigration. China doesn't like foreign devils (their common expression) coming in and starting businesses.

Google has gathered data on its "free" users for decades. It feeds that data into its AI systems. When I ask a question, Gemini et al. know context.

News from Washington D.C., FEMA employees are in a tizzy as current actions break with precedent. Well, perhaps precedent needed to be broken. How many Americans (non-FEMA employees) think FEMA has been doing a great job and should continue on with precedent?

"A fast car isn't rare, good drivers are."---Seth Godin

Coders are told to use AI-produced code. Then laid off. Uh.

Friday 23 May 2025

Harvard loses its license to admit foreign students. Herds of lawyers are rumbling this way. I am sure this is complicated. America's oldest university has done lots of things over the decades that it shouldn't have. This is a harsh punishment. The law is the law and no one is above the law. And lots of other good sayings on both sides here. Academic freedom? Again, more good sayings.

Our Dept of Justice indicts a Russian for major hacking. No one will ever be extradited and arrested.

Lots of opposition to opposing AI regulation (opposition). Is that a triple negative?

Our House of Representatives passes its version of a law prohibiting AI regulation by any state. I guess our Federal government has the authority to tell our state governments what to do. Anyways, opposition to opposition or something.

Strong rumors that the ODNI is working to purchase commercially available information on people.

Anthropic releases Claud Opus 4. There are many stories out about this.

This Opus 4 story is about locking out uses for "immoral" behaviour. Does that include the mainstream media being locked out?

Opus 4 will blackmail engineers if they try to remove it. We are going a bit too far with this stuff.

We have a few new tell-all books about OpenAI. Folks, there is always smoke behind the curtains at these places.

All state legislatures seem to agree on one thing: it must be fun to pass deepfake laws. I suppose these folks don't have much to do with their time.

Strong rumors that Apple will have smart glasses next year. It appears that the AI headset thing is gone the way of the 3D TV.

Quoting the headline: OpenAI Commits to Giant U.A.E. Data Center in Global Expansion

Apple claims a new and better way to train humanoid robots.

Here is Apple's research paper.

The paper on arXiv.

Western civilization is saved: Nike returns to Amazon. All kidding aside, given all of this week's news, this story will affect more Americans than any other.

Congress moves to remove the $7,500 EV tax credit. That was a tax credit, not a deduction on income. Free money.

Meanwhile in Russia, they are fighting against massive aerial drone attacks. The drone has become the long-range artillery or the 21st century air command or something. I was one of the many who predicted such.

Must-see photo of a large ship that almost flattened someone's house.

Quoting, "Google cofounder Sergey Brin says now is the time for retired computer scientists to dust off their keyboards."

Where have all the pennys gone?

Where have all the semicolons gone?

Microsoft brings AI text generation to the lowly Notepad.

Perhaps something useful will come of this: infrared contact lenses that allow people to see in the dark.

Saturday 24 May 2025

Somewhere in an obscure novel is a phrase that a chatbot would write telling the user how they have written a passage.

Hollywood has quickly but quietly adopted AI in making movies.

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 sets some kind of record by working on a programming task for seven hours.

At this time, practically all smartphones sold in America are made in some other country. Mr. Trump wants a 25% tariff on all those. Make them here. Well folks, why not?

More on tariffs on all the imported smartphones.

Melania Trump narrated the audiobook of her autobiography. Well, actually software (AI) used her voice and narrated the book.

Government insiders say that cutting cyber programs will leave America at risk from China. Government insiders haven't done a good job of running effective and efficient programs. Folks, I am still waiting to here some government insiders admit their faults and admit that most of these cuts are the result of decades of mismanagement.

A new term: sovereign AI.Also a new thought about Nvdia being the preeminent arms dealer in the AI wars of the 21st century. Times change.

This will replace the helicopter. Let's hope it works.

A recent study shows that having a sharper knive reduces tears while chopping onions. I wish there was no tax dollars spent on this study, but that is only a wish. Gosh. Do we really need these studies? I suppose there are worse things to do with resources.

The College Board rolls in troubles. This is a non-profit...well, sort of.

The Java programming language is now 30 years old. Bytecode, write once, run anywhere, object-oriented and all that. I greatly dislike the language, its syntax and public static void main(String[] args) {...gosh

Our current President moves to revive the US nuclear energy industry by cutting regulations.

Quoting: Google's new AI video tool, Veo 3, is being used to create hyperrealistic videos that are now flooding the internet, terrifying viewers WOW! Times change. New tools. New expectations.

Sunday 25 May 2025

Meanwhile in Texas, banning social media for minors and such continues.

Nvidia dumbs down a few of its AI processors so they can be sold to China. It's the numbers game. There are so many researchers in China that less-powerful processors will be sufficient.

Google's Veo 3 is less than a week old. The videos that folks are producing are already storming the Internet. The speed of change is speeding up. Studies of AI are irrelevant before completion. Buy some hardware, hire a few smart people, and try to run alongside.

Elon Musk sees thousands of humanoid robots working in his factories this year. Sometimes he exaggerates to make a point.

This is a bad story sad story tragic story about repaying a student loan. There is no way around it. A person borrowed money. They have to pay back the money with interest. That is the way it is with borrowing money. Why did anyone ever think it would be different? Come on Bill Gates et al. Step in and pay the debts of these folks. No? Why not? Instead, the average tax payer will pass this debt along to their grandchildren.

Career advice: stay flexible and keep learning.

Now we have something called "tip creep" or more and more places are asking for tips. With tips not being taxed (we shall see), this will increase. And Americans don't like to leave tips for more things.

Alas the humble front yard bird feeder. A few generations of it favor birds with a certain size and shape. No evolution here, just the right type of birds showing up.

Mozilla adds many features to the address bar of Firefox. Check out these improvements. Quite good.

These chattering bots are "learning" about the people who use them. Simple trick, not amazing.

There are some tools available that show the tendencies of what people do. The software simply copies the more-often used things and mimics the user. Simple trick that scares many folks.

The senior managers at Duolingo announced that they were phasing out some jobs to AI. Folks on the Internt slapped back.