Microsoft has built software (of course it is "AI") that diagnoses ill patients. It performs better than human doctors. We had such software in the 1980s, but medical companies rejected it because, although it performed better at a lower cost than humans, it wasn't 100%. The recent Microsoft system is 80% while humans are 20% correct. We shall see what happens this time.

Cursor (Anysphere) increases the capabilities of its self-coding software systems. And we currently have a glut of computer science college graduates.

Our Dept of Justice claims to have busted a North Korean operation in which they trick companies into hiring them for remote jobs via laptop farms and such. It is all about the money $$$.

Here is a source of more information on the North Korean scheme of tricking American companies into sending money to the Kim Dynasty.

Our Dept of Treasury keeps getting hacked. Lackadaisical employees are the reason as basic protects are not in use. This is not about money or staffing. It is about basic work ethic.

Quoting, "Apple is considering using artificial intelligence technology from Anthropic PBC or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri, potentially sidelining its own in-house models."

Amazon claims to have a million machines that do what people used to do (they call them robots, but they don't look like robots).

And in Washington D.C., our elected representatives have now removed all inkling of banning states from regulating AI. Tech companies will now have to deal with it. This is seen as a major blow to big tech, but it is a major blow to little tech or the new startups. Google et al. has a building full of lawyers who can work 50 states. New companies cannot do that. Big tech wins. Start a new company? Good luck.

And in Europe, where they really know how to regulate and punish successful American companies, DMA rules and Google complains.

Yes, telephone customer service is bad. It is designed to be bad so customers just give up. It's about the money $$$.

Meanwhile in China, physical cash disappears. It's all online and online is controlled by the controllers and rulers. Hint. Hint.

HP is building a system that collects information on home computers (and little business computers, too). When you want to buy a used computer, you can see its history. This is supposed to help consumers. There are other uses for the data as well.

I like this note from Slashdot. Space travel is difficult. Yes, NASA has flopped. No, no one else has an easy way to space. Companies can be smarter, work harder, and succeed, but it is still difficult.

The user base for Microsoft Windows PCs is shrinking. Use the phone. Use a Mac. Use (gosh) Linux. Use a tablet (Android).

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Wednesday 2 July 2025

Well, it now pays to do research in AI. Salaries have doubled in the past two years.

Anthropic's business is booming. At this rate they will haul in $4Billion (with a B) in revenue this year.

Meanwhile at X, Community Notes (longer pieces that are reviewed by groups of people before appearing) will be drafted by AI.

That company named Nothing has a new phone and continues to grow its following and customer ba$e.

How do you teach computer science with software writes software? Changing times and new strategies. One problem is that times are changing too fast for an annual summer conference to ponder ... oops something new just happened.

Google stops showing cooking recipes in search results. We have to click through to the website instead.

Meanwhile out there in the whole wide world, folks are using Chinese AI models more and more.

Oracle used to be a database company. It is becoming an owner of datacenters instead.

Go to the movie theater and watch a half hour of ads before the show.

Quoting, "Laptop Mag is shutting down after nearly 35 years of providing consumers with in-depth information about laptops and other technology."

Grammarly pushes into more AI with an email app company purchase.

I like Seth Godin's essay on AI and human work. Create. Thrive. Times change. Memory to handwriting to printing press to ...

Meanwhile in Ukraine, if you aren't there testing your next-generation drones, you lost.

This person tested microSD memory cards. I mean he REALLY TESTED them. Here are his results.

We'll need a log scale to track energy use at datacenters. Google's double in four years. At this rate, well, buy lots of candles.

Meanwhile with real hardware in China, someone flies a hypersonic aircraft claiming 12 times the speed of sound.

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Thursday 3 July 2025

Meanwhile locally in Washington D.C., now the FBI will move out of the crumbling (literally) Hoover Building into the Ronald Reagan Building. At least that is today's newest plan. The plan has changed many times in the last 20 years. No one listens to my plan: lease office space ringing the DC Beltway. Let employees go to the building nearest their home and work over the network.

AI creates a new paying job for humans at college campuses: the rewriter. The student has AI write the essay. The human rewriter fixes it so that it looks like a human wrote it.

Analysis of language in academic papers shows which parts of papers and which entire papers were generated by AI software. At least some folks believe this. Writers can write in different syles and change styles at will.

Now we move to something useful: these TranscribeGlasses do just that, transcribe conversations and put subtitles on the lens for the wearer to see. They will soon translate languages in real time.

A look into the world of sites that profit from "nudifying" images of women.

Send a bot to those boring ZoomerTeams meetings to take notes for you. Which means the meeting should not have occurred. A memo would have accomplished the same for everyone. THINK!

Meanwhile at Meta, they are working on proactive AI software that will engage users based on past activity. This is similar to what Cluely is doing. Observe and suggest the next statement, question, observation, action, etc.

Here we go with something that is useful to some of us. Train AI models on particular types of people. Gain insight into those types of people.

I recently wrote a paper on that topic.

As noted yesterday, Oracle is becoming a datacenter company. Here we note how OpenAI is becoming one of their primary customers.

Meanwhile in Memphis, xAI obtains approval to use gas-fired electric plants for the power its datacenter needs.

Where are the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials? The ICEBlock app lets users tell each other. This is a very popular app right now. This is similar to those apps that let folks tell one another where the police are hiding with their radar guns (Answer: everywhere in Herndon, Virginia...home of the four-lane divided highway with 25 MPH speed limit...but I digress).

The legislation about to pass our US Congress has bigger tax credites for Intel et al. for investing in America.

Microsoft to layoff about 9,000 persons or 4% of its global workforce.

Meanwhile in pop culture news, Sean "Diddy" Combs was convicted of some things and not convicted of others.

Quoting, "young people in the United States are significantly cutting back on spending on video games compared to this time last year."

Meanwhile at home watching TV, Amazon will close Freevee in August.

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Friday 4 July 2025

Just a two-hour drive from my house, Buc-ee's opens in Virginia.

And this is the 4th of July. Happy Birthday, America. We have lots of problems and lots of squabbling, but lots of folks are scrambling to get here. And, with a small few exceptions, folks aren't running away from here.

Meta keeps chasing AI talent with mountains of cash.

Forget about the North Koreans hacking your company. The hacktivists like this "cyber-criminal" group are the ones to fear. They have the brains and the emotional and physical energy (they are all young with nothing else to do) needed.

Private markets are the new public markets. And it sort of becomes semi-official with tokenization of companies.

Meanwhile in Europe, new AI regulations are coming. European companies plead for delays so they can compete with America and China. Good luck with all that.

Say it out loud folks, "AI will wipe out white-collar jobs." The jobs are prone to be mechanical. Do the same thing over and over. And yes, those CEOs making the decisions will be wrong most of the time.

Here is a counter-argument. AI means smart companies will hire more programmers in the face of software writing software.

Afraid of AI? The Atari 2600 Video Chess game continues to clobber ChatGPT, Copilot et al.

CoreWeave, who always works closely with Nvidia, is the first to put Nvidia's latest AI processors in its datacenters. Sign up and rent your$.

Good grief. I thought Fortune Magazine had editors. This is silly. Just plain silly outlook on electric power.

More silliness about electric power.

And the recent budget bill will stop paying rich Americans to buy luxury electric vehicles. Rich people don't need an incentive to buy luxury vehicles. Middle-class and poor Americans don't need to be funding rich people's automotive purchases. That is what was happening. It stops.

Meanwhile in Norway, folks are buying electric vehicles with over 90% market share in the past month.

Oh woe is us. America will collapse without the bureaucrats at the National Science Foundation. Just be more efficient and productive.

Hurrah! We stop spending taxpayers' money on junk science.

Smart folks write research papers. Smart folks know how to fool AI systems. Output predictable and predicted.

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Saturday 5 July 2025

And now out in Silicon Valley, we are aiming for SUPERINTELLIGENCE. Wowee! Folks, today's AI cannot beat the Atari 2600 at chess. The Atari 2600 almost 50 years old and uses a lower-cost version of the 6502 eight-bit processor. Super what?

Wailing and gnashing of teeth about our current President. For decades, Congress, i.e., the Legislative Branch of our Federal government, has worded laws vaguely and allowed agencies of the Executive Branch of our Federal government to work out all the details. Those agencies work for the President. Therefore, members of Congress, not to be bothered with hard work, gave all power to the President. Now folks are seeing what that means, and don't like it. Well, duh! This was all predictable and predicted. Get to work Congress!

Deep thoughts on the leadership of Tim Cook at Apple. Things have worked pretty well.

Meanwhile in Europe, regulators gotta regulate as that's what they do. New AI regulations in Europe will pretty much give the AI race to America and China.

And fewer advanced processors will go to Malaysia and Thailand and they have become paths around blocks of shipments to China.

Sam Altman comments on politics and members of the Democratic Party. "I'd rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires." In other words, create ways for people to thrive instead of bashing people who made their way. Be positive. Create an environment where things work. Good luck with all that.

Meanwhile in the UK, quoting, "Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has written to the UK's national institute for artificial intelligence (AI) to tell its bosses to refocus on defence and security."

A look at the tax provisions of this week's big bill passed by Congress and signed by our current President.

Horrible news: a flood hits a river in Texas on the 4th of July killing several dozen people at a weekend camp. If you camp by a river, always have someone on watch.

Meanwhile in Pakistan, Microsoft closes its operations after 25 years there.

Toss in a few irrelevant facts, and those super-intelligence AI models become...well, not so intelligent at all. A failure in basic systems engineering.

The profession of the programmer in the age of AI: " But if you work as a code monkey, getting detailed tickets and just shipping them, you've done this to yourself. You won't be needed pretty soon." If your job is mechanical, you are a mechanic. This is an old story. Newer machines come and replace you.

It has take a long time, but Windows 11 now is on more machines that Windows 10.

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Sunday 6 July 2025

Sometimes it is low-paid people behind the curtain pushing the buttons to make it look like artificial intelligence.

Building wind farms off the shore of Formosa (Taiwan).

Want to scare people and trick them into telling you the secrets? Tell them you are from the Department of Government Efficiency. We're from the government and we're here to help.

Finding and removing landmines in Ukraine.

Meanwhile in India, the governors are pushing AI technology growth.

Meanwhile off the coast of Columbia, their navy captures an autonomous semi-submersible vessel. The narcotics runners are moving into new technology. Load a "smart" vessel with drugs, tell it where to go, and the vessel finds its way. Technology applied by the bad guys.

The value of Nvidia is about to hit $4Trillion (with a Tr). So is the value of Microsoft. There are many billion-dollar stock holders in both companies. And folks thought Howard Hughes was rich.

Got $162,000? Get this Mercedes off road electric vehicle. Of course it is for rich people, but those folks need to have fun, too. And I guess those folks can still afford this vehicle without the tax credit that was removed this past week.

Elon Musk, like a tech man Ross Perot a generation ago, forms a third political party called the America Party. This voting block will help someone we really don't like be elected the next President.

AI coding agents have no secret sauce. So says this expert who is using and analyzing them.

Tesla attempts an off-grid supercharger facility. The concept is simple: out in no where, you have a field of solar panels that charge big batteries. Tesla owners pull up, plug in, and relax while their car charges. No generators etc. to power the oasis. Well, it would be grand in the zombie apocalypse.

And new tests coming next year for micro-nuclear power plants. Hoping something comes of this. It is past due.

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