Tricky punctuation marks. If you are writing fiction, don't bother. I was looking at Jane Austen's "Emma." Punctuation was all wrong per 2025 standards. If you write for government and business. Follow a standard. Look and learn. It isn't that hard.

Should You Write What You Know or Aim to Experiment? YES. WRITE.

You deserve a writing retreat. I have written on this topic much in the past. I'm on a writing retreat this morning. It is in the same place I sit at this time of day everyday. It is all in the mind. Ah, retreats!

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Tuesday 8 July 2025

Quoting, "The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest U.S. teachers' union, said on Tuesday that it would start an A.I. training hub for educators with $23 million in funding from three leading chatbot makers: Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic." I'm all for education, but let's not be silly. Big tech wants a larger workforce from which to draw at lower salaries.

The purveyors or data are buying one another and merging. The number of suppliers shrinks in the age of AI.

OpenAI tightens its corporate security in the face of threats (cyber and physical).

Anubis is software that blocks AI companies from scraping a website---no cost to the user. It has been downloaded 200,000 times.

After months of folderol (yes, that's a real word), the US is supplying more weapons and such to Ukraine.

No surprise here as the Democratic party is happy to see Elon Musk (Ross Perot) form a political party that will syphon votes from the Republicans.

China was once famous for building an airliner everyone called the 706 (a Boeing 707 copy). Now China has a real maker of aircraft.

Folks are tying to blame the Texas flood disaster on DOGE cuts. Get a grip folks.

Well, this is different, "Americans live in separate economic realities: Those with a job are likely to stay employed, but those without one are likely to stay unemployed. "

Coming later this year (maybe) is Copilot Plus to desktop PCs as Intel's latest desktop CPU has the required neural processing unit.

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Wednesday 9 July 2025

Replit, an AI company that specializes in natural language, on Tuesday announced a strategic partnership deal with Microsoft.

Yahoo is evolving into a platform for creators and writers as it offers a good royalties split...50/50.

Meanwhile in Germany, researchers develop a computer vision system they call all-topographic that performs better and cuts electric power use.

Disney puts A+E Media (owner of several cable networks) up for sale.

Meta puts $3.5Billion (with a B) into EssilorLuxottica, which makes eye glasses for the world. Pushing into the suppliers of what may be the future of augmented reality glasses.

OpenAI is not to be outdone in the AI talent wars as it hires four top AI minds from several other companies.

Meanwhile in China, someone maneuvers to buy a mountain of processors from Nvidia to build a datacenter out west in Xinjiang where the Communist Party of China can do whatever they want without anyone noticing.

Are you talking to whom you think you are talking to? Our Secretary of State has an AI imposter running around out there (can AI run around?).

xAI's Grok was spouting the run stuff before it was caught and corrected. Can you chastise an AI thing?

Meanwhile at the New York Times, they can't seem to get a story straight.

Want to make a hundred million dollars? The UK Police want someone to digitize their library of VHS tapes. Legacy Box? Someone is calling you.

Meanwhile in the space above China, a couple of satellites link up showing the technology of orbital refueling.

Rich folks pour money into the idea of bringing back extinct species.

Yet another deep study concludes with the obvious. I hope they didn't spend much taxpayers' money on this, but they probably did. And people are bemoaning cuts to such "scientific" research.

Intel cuts 500 jobs in Oregon. Not a pretty sight.

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Thursday 10 July 2025

Everyone wants to invest Billion$ in Anthropic. Something afoot here.

Reports of fear and loathing inside Meta.

Reports from Microsoft that using AI in their call centers increased customer happiness and cut $500Million in expense.

YouTube attempts to define AI slop and not pay royalties to it.

Microsoft commits $4Billion (with a B) to child and adult education in AI.

Rent a car and pay for damages to it. Companies are using AI-enabled, high-resolution scanners to find the tiniest blemishes.

Samsung held a big event to introduce new phones etc. Here is one summary.

xAI updates Grok to Grok 4.

TSMC, the most important company in the world, reports a big financial quarter.

Got new datacenters? Need power. The law of supply and demand, or something like that, means higher utility bills.

This is a BIG DEAL. Quoting, "A novel approach from the Allen Institute for AI enables data to be removed from an artificial intelligence model even after it has already been used for training."

Actors and video game makers agree on royalties and rights---at least for now.

Nvidia makes special China versions of its processors.

a16z (Andreesen Horowitz) is leaving Delaware for Nevada. Taxes and competition for business.

Autonomous surveillance towers mean business for Anduril. Everyone else has to catch up.

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Friday 11 July 2025

Our current President likes to be positive. Somehow, that is now a bad thing.

And law enforcement is using government databases to find criminals. Somehow, that is now a bad thing.

Quoting, "countries want tech giants to store their citizens' data locally instead of overseas, to reclaim digital sovereignty." Quoting an old commercial, "That's now how this works. That not how any of this works." Oh well.

Stealing ore from lithium mines in Zimbabwe. Electric vehicles have made it profitable to get lithium anyway you can.

Linkage? Microsoft laysoff 9,000 people and claims AI saved $500million.

Google adds image-to-video capability to Veo.

Emergency alert systems: sometimes the technology fails (fires break the cellphone system) and sometimes people turn off their cellphones and ignore those silly sounds. The boy cried wolf too often. I've lived through hurricanes. I went to college twice during hurricanes. You don't pay attention to them after a while. That is part of the human condition. Texas was a tragedy...so horrible you can't talk about it. It was a one-in-a-million. And that's the trouble with it.

Those who test AI models say that the new Grok 4 is now the best...this week or this morning or something.

Indeed and Glassdoor, two employment companies owned by the same company, cut 1,300 jobs.

Rumors of new Apple hardware coming in 2026. That is a long time from now...at least six months.

AWS will have a marketplace where folks can sell their AI agents. We aren't sure what an AI agent is, but we can soon buy them all in one place.

Paraphrasing, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is threatening Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta with a deceptive business practices claim because their AI chatbots don't like our current President.

Folks are using ChatGPT and other chattering bots for medical advice. Sometimes it is pretty good...sometimes.

Recent study shows...programmers who use AI as an aid often work slower and produce less.

Federal law enforcement agencies are telling local law enforcement agencies to basically arrest more people.

Nvidia becomes the first company to hit the $4Trillion (with a Tr) market value.

I like this piece on engineering leadership. We have too little leadership (not management, leadership) in the engineering profession.

Oh, yes, that! Michael Dell reminds us that Meta paying a few smart folks a huge amount of money may hurt the feelings, morale, and productivity of the rest of the employees. No duh!

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Saturday 12 July 2025

M5 processor coming to an iPad later this year. That is before it comes to a MacBook laptop.

If you can afford to have children, you don't have children. Why? Because you don't want to. Fertility rates have dropped worldwide with everyone who can afford children.

In a show of government doing poorly at just about everything, Texas, Virginia, the Smithsonian and toss in a few other folks as well are all in a fight over who can have a space shuttle in a museum.

Fully autonomous surgery, think of a robot looking at you and performing surgery on you without any humans present, comes closer. This could be literally a life saver on battlefields and in remote locations where human doctors are not present.

Scan your trash and send you a citation $$$ for not recycling properly. It is here now.

Meanwhile in Germany, a court finds that Meta owes individuals $$$ for doing something that violates German regulations. Regulators gotta' regulate.

Meanwhile in China, they are where three quarters of the world's solar and wind projects are. A great leap forward (to quote Mao) or a great big waste of money that will create a great big pile of hazardous waste?

Ya' gotta' watch out for apps that reveal your location on a map.

And back in Europe, new regulations from the same old regulators. This time more regulations on AI and those folks who make $$$ from AI.

It was good for a few years. Amazon's Prime Day sales have outlived their splendor. Sales are down 41%.

This is a long piece on Meta's leap to superintelligence (whatever that is). There are hundreds of million$ in compensation for AI stars and tens of billion$ in purchases of companies. Big money everywhere.

There is a big resemblance of today's AI boom and Nvidia to the Internet boom of the 1990s and Cisco. Will Nvidia fall to earth?

Google becomes a very close partner with Windsurf...an AI coding assistant company.

Meanwhile in Australia, if you run a search engine, you must check the age of your users.

Medium, the writing platform, claims to be making a profit.

Meanwhile in France, regulators investigate X because they can. There is some charge or other.

Realsense was Intel's robotics camera division for 14 years. Now it is a separate company.

Seth Godin on chatbots, "We're not building intelligence. We're building culture machines. Tools that can compress and reconstruct the patterns of human expression."

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Sunday 13 July 2025

George Will reminds us that it was not a virus, but the reaction to the virus that...well, it messed us up a bit and killed a few people as well. It is not the event, it is the reaction.

Our Dept of State lays off 1,300 people. Cries follow that western civilization will collapse. How about urging the remaining to get with it, get efficient, and be productive? And when was the last time someone said, "That State Department! Now they do a great job!" Of course this hurts people. Of course many people laid off deserved to stay and many who stayed should have been laid off. State, like many agencies, have too many employees doing too little work. It is a great shame.

Enterprises, i.e., business, is using agents (whatever they are) more than predicted. Also, business wants practical results.

Hugging Face now has a $299 robot open source for developers to experiment.

Anthropic makes moves into education.

Microsoft updates its smaller language model with Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning (what a name).

Research shows...if you have mental illness, you shouldn't ask one of these chattering bots for help.

Meanwhile in Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon is a leader in AI. There are many old empty buildings. Datacenters? Will it work?

Angst about Mozilla and Firefox.

Someone may have found Emilia Earhart's last spot. Once again.

Renewable energy from solar power. It is made by burning coal.

Bitcoin's synthetic value hits an all-time high.

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