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: 11-17 August, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Trump and Putin meet in Alaska
• And nothing comes of the meeting
• Nvidia and AMD to pay US 15% of their sales to China
• Meta in chaos (so say some)
• GPT-5 released poorly, everyone yawns

Monday 11 August 2025

Looking at Techmeme this morning, the first seven stories are AI related. This is dominating business, culture, and all that stuff.

AI is creating billionaire$ faster than anything else ever. Inflation, a billionair$ is not was it used to be, is part of it, but folks with money are just gaga over anything AI and are ready to invest in something that will put them in a movie in ten years.

In sort of a reverse tariff deal, Nvidia and AMD will pay US government 15% tax on items sent to China. This is odd. Is this a bribe?

GPT-5 was released, and people yawned.

Along that same trend, AI hasn't taken over the world. We've hit the flat area at the top of the S curve.

Microsoft releases a Copilot 3D service to build 3D models for 2D images.

The pendulum swings back again. Too many people majored in Computer Science. They can't find jobs. So CS enrollment will drop, jobs will be unfilled, enrollment will swing back (too far), here we are again. It is a good field. It is a good major that brings Chemistry, Physics, Calculus, and thinking logic. Those things are worth learning. I think they still require those subjects?

I'll just quote this headline, "Return to office means return to office romance"

Meanwhile in Mojave, California, a big solar and battery project turns on and delivers power to homes.

More reports of these chattering bots being delusional. I think the folks who think software can be delusional are the same.

Build a spacecraft the size and weight of a paperclip. Propel it into space with a laser. All that travels at the speed of light. And there you are.

Using the VITAL method to iterate the writing. Variable, Information, Tripwire, Analyze, Learn.

A case of lemons into lemonade. Using poorly printed books as marketing.

Neurodigergence and writing. I guess I don't know much about this. There are tools that help.

Writing and dealing with rejection. For some reason, when I started attempting to publish in magazines I wasn't bothered by rejection notices.

Notes on researching family history and writing about it.

Some writing tips from Stephen King as interpreted by another writer. Try it. If it works, use it. If not, move on.

Tuesday 12 August 2025

Meanwhile in Australia, real news that isn't new: a judge rules against successful American companies. Payments to be levied.

While in China, the party tells companies to use less-advanced processors from Nvidia. Strange one there.

And our current President meets with the CEO of Intel. Times have changed.

It takes more than a little humility to make deals with the rich and famous.

Nvidia releases new graphics cards for small-form-factor workstations.

Nvidia (sure is in the news a lot lately) releases new software development kits for robotics work.

Rumors that GM is working on driverless cars for personal use, not just robo taxis.

Amazon now has a hundred satellites up there going around in circles trying to compete with StarLink.

Ford shows plans for electric vehicles that, get this one, they can sell and not lose $5Billion a year. They hope to make a profit one day. Amazing. This is just mind numbing.

What does Palantir do? Opinions, even inside the company, differ widely. Here it is: customers like our Federal government have lots of day (LOTS of data). There ought to be something useful there. Enter Palantir. They figure it out. Simple.

Back to important stuff: Taylor Swift announces a new album.

The Woz, Steve Wozniak, is now 75. That generation of computing is about to pass away.

Minerals from humman excrement are quite useful. It's about time some gets around to this.

Research shows that the marketers of LLMs are still used car salesmen in hipper clothing. Nothing to see here.

Wednesday 13 August 2025

Big tech had pledged to spend big money on affordable housing in Silicon Valley. Well...you know.

Larry Ellison, Mr. Oracle and the world's second-richest person, is spending a lot on charity. The charity is his own research institute. There are worse things to do with money.

Circle, peer-to-peer Internet payments, reports a really big financial quarter.

Meta claims 400million active monthly users for its Threads.

Reports of Microsoft poaching AI talent from Meta. When will one of these companies try to poach old engineers from my current employer?

OpenAI adds more connectors for ChatGPT. It would be nice if I could simply point one of these chattering bots at my files so they could answer questions and help me remember what I have written over the years.

Study indicates "deskilling" from using AI tools, i.e., users lose their skills and often appear lost if the AI tool is removed.

More studies of these chattering bots show sycophantic and narcissism and such. Perhaps too many folks are spending too much time studying these things.

Someone in our government (no longer) secretly put location trackers in shipments of computer equipment to learn if such was going to China.

Meanwhile in the UK, save water by deleting files. I guess there is some connection here with cloud storage and something or other.

An example of "learning from the worst:" Ukraine studied how drug cartels smuggle things so help them smuggle drones into Russia for their strikes on airfields. Learning is learning. Some disagree with me on this.

Thursday 14 August 2025

Microsoft adds some sort of lightweight "Companion" apps to Windows 11 Task Bar. Hmmm. We shall see.

Mozilla put some AI stuff into the latest Firefox browser. People hate it.

Meanwhile at MIT, they have a new technology for imaging objects that are buried. Oak Island, here we come.

Back from the dark side: the in-person, face-to-face job interview.

It appears that cats get Alzheimer's disease like people. Enough jokes. This opens a new area of research into the illness.

Researchers at Cornell have created a new light that when used to photograph (image) something somehow puts a watermark in the image. Well, I guess this solves a major cultural problem. Perhaps there is something better to do with all those brains.

Foxconn reports a good financial quarter.

Meanwhile in the UK, a study shows how users of LLMs are easily swayed. And I have to wonder why some government security agency is studying this. I guess they waste taxpayers' money over there just as much as we do here.

An in depth review of using GPT-5. While information, the reviewer admits that these things change daily, so what you read in the report may not be valid by this afternoon.

Lenovo reports a good financial quarter.

Meanwhile in Oklahoma, here comes Google with $9Billion (with a B).

This is government waste on technology. Our Navy and Air Force had separate projects to update HR systems. 12 years into them...YES 12 YEARS...and they are cancelling them to see what real software companies can do in 90 days or some amount of time that real software companies can do things. Unbelievable waste.

Rumors about Apple's push back into AI. The centerpiece is some type of tabletop robot.

The big bill thing that recently became law brought back tax deductions on R&D. Now companies are hiring again. Good one.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, necessity continues inventing things. Cottage industries are repairing things that used to be shipped back for replacement. I have to hand it to the Ukrainians. They are pretty industrious and smart. They have not been living in a backwards-governed place like Russia.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet. I can't figure out why as this is a basic update to capabilities that wouldn't be hard to do. Google's Gemini will remember past conversations and such.

Friday 15 August 2025

Stronger rumors of a $599 laptop computer from Apple. It would use a processor built for the iPad. Well, that should work just fine.

Quoting, "I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it"

Musings about all this AI stuff and its affect on work and jobs. It is not musing if your boss fires you (most likely by mistake).

Quoting, "Mexico, Malaysia, and India are ramping up their semiconductor manufacturing capabilities."

We have reacted poorly to social media platforms (it is ALWAYS our reaction). Scientists modelled changes and none of them worked. We just need to react differently. Again, it is up to us.

Foxconn, those guys who made all the iPhones etc., now makes more money making things for AI datacenters than from Apple.

Coming real soon now, Google has a Flight Deals feature that allows finding flights by typing in English, not filling out forms.

Our National Science Foundation chips in million$ along with Nvidia and Allen Institute for AI on some project for open models in Ai that will help us all. We shall see. Contrary to the article, the NSF doesn't "contribute funds." It spends taxpayers' money.

Of course electric bills go up when you have a great big datacenter. This seems to be news to some adults.

Mr. Trump is President. Americans are buying fewer firearms. Some folks should be happy about that. Firearms purchasing is an indicator of perceived safety and good times.

We've reached a point in technology where we can put computers in eye glasses that don't look like cartoon goggles.

Software that can read through the mountains of Federal regulations and find those who lifetime has legally expired. This is a good thing. Many folks are squeezing themselves to abide by regulations that no longer exist.

Fewest Americans drink alcohol. Down to an 86-year low. I find that good news.

Lenovo has major growth in PC sales. It is the leader in PC AI (whatever those are) sales.

Google releases a smaller language model it claims can run on local PCs.

Content piracy is alive and well. It almost vanished, but everyone's "+" service simply cost too much money. Hence, find a way around.

Saturday 16 August 2025

Meanwhile at Meta, all the smart people are leaving. So say all the people who aren't leaving. Seems like if you are not leaving, you are not smart, and your comments are not valid. Perhaps there some logical fallacy at play here.

Per above, the same situation is occurring in the Federal government with cries that people essential to the running of government programs are leaving. Hmm, then the only people left are not crucial to the running of government programs. Hmm, the people who are left should be fired since they aren't crucial. Again, perhaps a logical fallacy at play here.

Meanwhile, back at Meta, they seem to be rearranging the chairs again.

Meanwhile in China, the world humanoid games begin. Again, this is odd to me as one of China's great resources is its large number of humans. Why promote artificial humans?

Researchers continue to test commercial LLMs. We didn't used to call this "research." It was called "product testing" or something like that.

Where the money is going, to ChatGPT on iPhones and Android devices.

Self promotion and Wikipedia. Some people have a lot of time on their hands. And some people can manipulate the world's default encyclopedia with working on articles once a week for 15 years.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, AI engineers are hot. No, not just wanted by big tech, the matchmakers et al. are flooded with requests by (mostly) women wanting to meet these (mostly) guys.

Meanwhile in China, a company is selling a solid state drive that is smaller than a penny. So what? I must be missing something here are this is old technology.

Yet another story shows that people are not "clicking through" to websites when they read Google's latest search results. Google claims the opposite. So we wrestle on.

Meanwhile in Croatia, they extend the digital nomad visa to three years. Please, live here, spend money, and don't take jobs from locals.

Sunday 17 August 2025

I like this long piece from Tim O'Reilly on the need for a shared LLM workspace. It shouldn't be hard to make. Come on folks, get with it.

There is much on the Internet about the passing of Margaret Boden at age 88. She is credited with the philosopher of AI or something. I am quite familiar with AI, but never heard her name until this week.

Another cry that big tech is too big and has too much money. I have heard that one many times before.

The datacenter boom is coming to the UK. For better or worse.

Forbes profiles Ion Stoica of UC Berkeley. College professor twice-over billionaire. He still teaches undergrad classes...or so they say.

And we have the AI apocalypse super preppers. Well, there are worse things to do with your time.

The latest TIOBE Programming Community Index. Python, the Pascal of the 21st century, still reigns at #1. Perl jumps into the top ten. The C family is still at the top.

Research shows that all that cybersecurity training that companies and governments do is a waste of time. People still fall for the simplest tricks of the ne'er-do-wells. Gosh. And I went through several hours of it last week.

Bribes work...at least that is what this article claims. That may be true. Still, other factors can explain what has happened like, "get those regulators out of the way."

Gosh, someone found some chipped rocks and concluded that humans existed another half-million years earlier. Keep it up and we will find that humans are older than the planet. I give these researchers some credit for working hard. I just have to shake my head when I hear their conclusions.

And with that, we end another week of Internet viewing.