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: 14-20 July, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• CDAO awards contracts to big AI for our DoD
• Intel cuts 5,000 jobs in the US
• The GENIUS Act becomes law
• Doctors admit Mr. Trump is old

Monday 14 July 2025

Some folks spend their lives studying the seating charts at events where the President appears. I guess there is something to this.

Recent study shows that lonely kids are spending hours talking that these chattering bots.

Jensen Huang wants the US government to allow his Nvidia to sell everything to China. "They won't use our chips in their military as they cannot trust us," is his claim. Maybe. Maybe not. That claim never stopped the Communist Party (the original one in Moscow).

Fresh air at airports. I vote for it.

It appears that the latest movie about Superman is a big hit. Maybe something like this will revive the theater industry after the great pan(dem)ic.

It appears that generating power from the movement of the tides is working off the coast of Scotland.

Drone warfare in Ukraine seems to be the trench warfare of the 21st century. The front is frozen with no one making any advances.

We have a carbon offset project to balance what we do at work. It seems these things are silly and foolish and fraudulent.

Here is Tiobe's list of the top ten programming languages in use. Ada pulls into the top ten as a surprise to many. I used Ada 1983-1986.

"This is why the gravity of a single word matters." I agree.

I'll wait till tomorrow to do this. Sometimes that is a good idea. Often it is just wrong.

Fillers. Stuff to take up space on the page. Stuff that the writer types to start. Delete, delete, delete. Often at a later time, but delete.

Let's have a few more writing tips. These are pretty good.

You cannot have too many writing tips. Here are 15 more. Good to review and do.

Tips on creative nonfiction. Quoting a quote, "Creative nonfiction (also known as literary or narrative nonfiction) is a genre of writing truth which uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives."

This is fascinating to some of us (please give us a hug). There is a difference in dashes, hyphens, en dash, and em dash.

Tuesday 15 July 2025

Sex sells and continues to do so with the nudify websites raking in the money.

Mr. Zuckerburg talks about the really big datacenters Meta is building. Called "clusters" with the biggest one coming to Richland Parish Louisiana.

Meanwhile in the nation's capital, fair-sized AI contracts to Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, et al.

More on that story.

Google starts sharing notebooks from big publishers on NotebookLM. The platform is becoming a platform for various types of news.

Imitation is flattery, but imitation is being banned on YouTube and Facebook.

Nvidia receives permission to sell high-end processors to China...again.

Where the money goes...AI as usual.

Meanwhile in Russia, the birthrate has been so low for so long that they just don't have enough people. This is one of the reasons for trying to sieze Ukraine. Mr. Putin needs more Russians.

230 years of recording the weather by hand. Great stuff! One note at a time, one day at a time, one day you wake up and there are 230 years worth of handwritten notes.

There is a glut of scientific research papers. Simply too many for anyone to read or note or see if they make any sense at all. Follow the science? Which one?

Of course there are a relatively few folks ruining the Internet for the rest of us. Just ignore them. I was talking to someone last week when I said, "They have ads on Facebook?" I know they do, but somehow I don't see them as I read news from friends and relatives in others states.

Start a business to compete with businesses that have lousy service. Don't complain, compete. There, that's a pretty good slogan or something.

Wednesday 16 July 2025

The use of generative AI to help build video games is growing steadily.

Meanwhile in China, the Communist Party of China is treating AI as a national industry in competition with the capitalists of the world.

Nvidia's new permission to sell to China is linked to shipments of rare minerals. It's all connected.

AMD is also starting to ship previously banned processors to China.

Publicly traded companies list AI investments as risky and not they may never receive any return on investments. Current AI practices just aren't making a dent in the bottom line.

OpenAI prepares ChatGPT to create most Microsoft 365 files (PowerPoint, Excel, etc.).

Former OpenAI engineer tells all.

It appears that Microsoft has been using engineerings in China to work on US Dept of Defense contracts and systems.

Nextdoor is trying to revive its app by connecting with more local news sources.

The Israel-Hamas Gaza war had unprecedented AI use in generating propoganda etc.

Google signs a $3Billion (with a B) deal with Brookfield of Pennsylvania for hydroelectric power. Sort of puts into a new perspective the $200Million contract with the Dept of Defense. While $200million is pretty good, we have to remember that Google does real business deals.

AI tools for developers are moving to the command line interface. "at a point where terminal-based tools can reliably handle much of a developer's non-coding work - a value proposition that's hard to ignore."

Whether they know it or not, Huggin Face is hosting 5,000 nudify models.

Quoting, "to the blind and low-vision community, the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and their AI features have been an absolute life-altering game-changer."

Microsoft updates its Copilot Vision system for reading what is on a screen and connecting the dots.

Amazon dot com is not 30 years old this week.

Oh woe is us continues for new college grads seeking their first real jobs.

Hack a real train and trigger the brakes. Oh well, you connect your train to the Internet and there you have it. Stupid.

And another cyber leak: this one in Britain where the identities of several thousand Afghan refugees were shown.

Thursday 17 July 2025

Meanwhile in China, a hit video game is called Revenge on Gold Diggers. It is popular with men, hated by women, and all that predictable stuff.

Big agriculture is adopting AI. Here is hoping that the intelligence system can greatly reduce the chemicals dumped into the food supply.

TSMC is building manufacturing facilities in Arizona as fast as it can.

And TSMC reports yet another big good financial quarter.

AI is not coming to Hollywood---it is there. Lots of folks worried about their jobs. I don't think the carpenters, plumbers, et al. are worried.

Delta Airlines is pushing hard to individual prices for tickets. Each customer has a price they are willing to pay, and the system seeks to find that highest price.

Microsoft's Copilot is here and it works, but people are using it.

Intel is cutting 5,000 jobs.

Yet another AI-based tool to help software development teams.

Google continues to put more of its Gemini AI-based capabilities into its plain old search at google dot com.

Meanwhile off the coast of China, they are putting data centers in the ocean to cool them. Sigh. This is a problem with obvious solutions, and I guess money is the reason why obvious solutions are not being used.

I suppose this solves some problem for some folks: Microsoft and Mercedes team so that the in-car camera on a Mercedes shows you in a Teams meeting. You cannot see anyone else (bowing to safety regulations).

Quoting, "Linux now holds 5.03% of the desktop operating system market share in the United United States of America. "

Again quoting, " Perplexity has partnered with Indian telecoms giant Bharti Airtel to provide its premium Pro service to 360 million customers for free for an entire year, representing the largest distribution deal of its kind globally."

Friday 18 July 2025

With sadness I note that the lodge on the north rim of the Grand Canyon burned in a forest fire. We visited the place years ago and stayed a night in one of the wooden cabins (not very nice). This is not the first time the lodge has burned in over a hundred years. Hoping something will be rebuilt and hoping that cabins will be much better. Come one Bill Gates et al. spend some of your money here.

It seems that many persons appointed by Mr. Trump were invested in the crypto currency industry.

Meanwhile at out Dept of State, a digital whatever department is eliminated in a reorganization. State cut 1/3 of its workforce. The heads are reorganizing the place for new times.

Speaking of changing with the times and tide, Sam Altman takes OpenAI to the Trump White House and has been quite successful with the moves.

The rich get richer: once again we have big tech buying small new tech and growing richer. Microsoft used to do this as anyone who had a really neat app for Windows was bought so MS could put the app in a Windows distribution.

Rumors about how Jensen Huang convinced our current President to let Nvidia sell processors to China. Let's be the best in the world. Otherwise, China will makes its own processors (steal our IP).

AMD updates its Threadripper series of processors. The top end has 96 cores and 192 threads and can be yours for $11,000+. Big numbers all around.

Quoting, "OpenAI is going all in on the most-hyped trend in AI right now: AI agents, or tools that go a step beyond chatbots to complete complex, multi-step tasks on a user's behalf. "

Here is more on the ChatGPT Agent. Folks, the idea that a software system can input data, branch in its code, and then do something based on the data is NOTHING NEW.>

Netflix reports a good financial quarter.

Round about censorship or something: here comes an Executive Order: if you have a Federal contract, your chattering bot better not spout this "woke" stuff. Oh, we didn't tell you that when we awarded you a $200million contract this week?

Quoting, "A coalition of funders, including the Gates Foundation and Ballmer Group, will spend $1 billion over 15 years to help develop artificial intelligence tools for public defenders, parole officers, social workers and others who help Americans in precarious situations. " Good! Now how about funding the rebuilding of the Grand Canyon's North Rim Lodge?

More angst over a Federal law enforcement agency having access to Federal government databases to catch criminals. When did catching criminals become a bad thing? I'm not naive. This is all politics, but still folks, the police are catching and jailing criminals. It isn't nice when the criminal lives next door and is a nice guy. Who says my nice neighbor is a "criminal?"

I like Seth Godin's piece on how AI helps finish tasks faster. Then what? "If tech helps you finish your task faster, the time saved is yours. Take the rest of the day off... If you finish some tasks with time to spare, put that productivity to work doing something else that serves the customer. If you don't, we might not get another chance, because someone else will."

Someone with some money is replacing one entertainer with another entertainer. Do-gooders want to know if this is about free speech and rights. Huh?

Meanwhile in Britain, universities are suffering ca$h problems.

Hacktivists in Ukraine cyber bomb a Russian drone maker and wipe all the disks clean...even lock the doors. Warfare has changed. It's not those in uniform? Or when the Russians learn where the hacktivists live, are those folks now legitimate wartime targets? War cimes? Times change. And it you "win" the war and can walk the streets unopposed with guns in your hands. You can do whatever it is you want as payback. Something Mao said about political power and the muzzle of a gun.

Mozilla will ship WebGPU support in Firefox 141 next week.

Saturday 19 July 2025

An open data training set for AI is a bit too open as it contains photos passports etc. of real people.

Apple signed Brad Pitt and made a movie about care racing. Of course it's a hit and making big money. Steve McQueen of this century.

This is an odd story about how you must show how you use AI to be promoted in a part of Amazon. Really odd.

More rumors about how Mr. Zuckerburg is buying AI talent for several hundred million dollars. The pity is that these folks aren't curing cancer, cleaning the oceans, or even rebuilding a national park lodge. They are making it easier to find a girlfriend or make a funny cat video. Really?

The folks who make Android claim that phones running on Android have warned of over 1,000 earthquakes.

The GENIUS Act becomes law. I guess I don't understand all I know about this.

AI moves from a tab in the browser to a browser. Gain more information about a user to help the user more and gain more information about the user that can be sold.

More details on Google hiring Windsurf team. The deal is odd in that Google didn't buy the company but bought key people...well, sort of. Anyways, someone is making a lot more money and Google hopes to take a leap forward in agentic coding (whatever that is).

SpaceX's Starlink keeps pushing the satellite Internet business and promise a third generation of birds. The numbers are astounding: "Over the past twelve months, SpaceX has flown over 100 missions dedicated to Starlink, placing more than 2,300 new satellites into the sky"

I guess if this were easy everyone would be doing it. But can you really use AI to start and run a business and haul in cash with almost no effort?

More AI slop keeps slopping its way in.

Facial recognition and law enforcement: we don't want this until a crime happens near us and then we want it...real bad.

Sunday 20 July 2025

Doctors admit that Mr. Trump is an old man with ailments common to old men. This is a news flash in light of what happened with our previous President.

Real news that isn't news: European regulators find a way to extract money from successful American companies.

Meanwhile in China, a story of hacktivists who became government employees and now work for the Communist Party.

A look at the Dor Brothers. They make videos with AI. No actors, scriptwriters, camera operators, et al. And they are succeeding.

YouTube is now the most-watched network or whatever we will call it on the living room television or whatever we will call that thing. Writer always correctly called it the televisor.

Angst on college campuses as the old folks try to figure out how to push the younger folks into learning in the age of AI. Ask harder questions. Good grief. This isn't rocket science.

Bio-degradable caskets. That's what pine boxes were. How did folks forget that?

In-N-Out Burger moves its headquarters from California to Tennessee. It is too difficult in California as regulators gotta' regulate.

OpenAI won a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad. That's pretty impressive, but...

Intel abruptly stops supporting its Clear Linux distribution.

The billionaire planners of a new city announce a really really big manufacturing plant. They have a point in that if you build a factory or something somewhere like Richland Parish, Louisiana, you won't have the best Stanford and MIT grads racing to move there and work there.

The Commodore 64 returns. This is big news for some folks. Kind of cute for others.

And a big story this week. A couple were video recorder hugging at a concert. Yes, the were married to other people. The man was the CEO of a company. The woman the head of HR. Gosh. They are supposedly smart people, but, well, you know... And yes they resigned from their jobs. No word of the reaction from their spouses.