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: 18-24 August, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Presidents and others meet and meet to find a treaty in Ukraine
• Ukraine continues to innovate in war, but none of that leads to battlefield gains
• Google has a hardware event
• Big fire in Roseland, Louisiana

Monday 18 August 2025

The US and EU are fussing over tariffs and trade.

Meanwhile, a peace deal in Europe might happen. Ukraine won't like the deal, but it will have peace. Ukraine, even given weapons and ammunition and hundreds of billion$, cannot push out the Russians. If Ukraine would get it in gear, the war would have ended in their favor a couple of years ago.

As usual, the boss tells the workers to do things the boss doesn't do.

Meanwhile, the ne'er-do-wells grab new techniques and technology quickly. They are the ultimate experimenters.

Palantir had something going as former employees have started several hundred companies.

I'll quote this, "Judy Faulkner, who just turned 82, has spent the past 46 years running Epic Systems, turning it into one of the largest private technology companies in the U.S."

Here is a $199 simple video camera.

It is from the same company that makes a simple still camera.

The sale of electric vehicles is up 7% in the US this year. That isn't a big number, but it is an increase.

As a writer, how do you stay productive while travelling. Well, uh, you write. Sitting on a plane? Grab notebook and pencil. Spiral notebook and Bic pen (combined cost about a dollar) will suffice.

You have to market what you write. If you want to earn money, that is.

And we are back to being Neurodivergent and attempting to write. Perhaps I am that N word and don't know it.

Quoting the headline, "How to Turn Real Family Stories Into Compelling Historical Fiction" I like this piece.

Thoughts on the long nature of the novel. It's more than a story.

I'll quote this line as I like it, "no one can lift you out of the pit. You have to climb the ladder yourself."

Johanna Rothman on resilience and learning resilience. The pandemic, i.e., our reactive (the great panic), hurt young persons as they didn't develop much resilience.

Tuesday 19 August 2025

Apple moves even more manufacturing from China to India. As shown over the last 20 years, China isn't a reliable business partner. They have a health crisis every ten years.

OpenAI now has a special ChatGPT and price plan for India, the world's most populated country.

SoftBank tosses $2Billion (with a B) into Intel.

Nvidia releases a little smaller AI model. They call it Nemotron-Nano-9B-V2. They really have to work on their product names.

MIT reports that 95% of all Gen AI projects at companies fail. Back in the 1980s and 1990s we were hearing such failure rates in software projects and called it the Software Crisis. I have yet to hear this called the AI Crisis, but why not. The reason? Silliness practiced by adults who should know better.

Arm, seeking to boost its AI chips, hires an expert from Amazon.

Google claims that users have made 100million videos using its Flow system since May.

The American taxpayer is putting $10.9Billion into Intel via that CHIPS Act thing. Our current President is considering ways to turn that into part ownership. Interesting idea.

New study shows 87% of game developers are using AI agents.

Grammarly introduces new AI-based tools that, they claim, will help students learn and develop, not just do their work for them.

Meanwhile in the UK, the regulators drop the demand on Apple for backdoors into its products. Negotiation.

Yet another new war-making machine in Ukraine. They are innovating much there. Okay, then why can't they push the poor battered Russian army out of their country. Something doesn't make sense.

Here we have a digital clutter coach. That's a new profession on me... When my father was killed by a truck driver in 1990, being able to sit at his home computer and walk through things made life much easier. There is something to this. Get a piece of paper, write all accounts and login information. Put that in an envelope and put it in the kitchen drawer. It will help during a terrible time.

Complaints about recent changes at LinkedIn. It remains the place to go to find a job (for me at least).

New numbers show 5% of Americans have lived through cancer. There is no cure, but treatments that seem to work.

Wednesday 20 August 2025

It's not the language, it's the compiler. Syntax of the different languages vary enough to be quite annoying. Okay, get past that. FORTRAN works well because the compilers work well.

The US and China appear to be in a race back to the moon with people. The US is taking a long-range approach. China is taking a "let's there now" approach. The US will be embarrassed.

And our current acting director of NASA tells the bureaucrats to stop measuring the temperature of the great plains and get exploration in gear. What happened to the folks at NASA? Horrible. Good for a study in how not to do government.

Good times ahead for embattled Intel? It's stock price is up 28%.

Meanwhile in Shackelford, County, Texas, population 3,000 with 3 people per square mile, here comes a $25Billion (with a B) datacenter.

I'll quote the headline, "Meta rolls out AI-powered translations to creators globally, starting with English and Spanish" A good start. Where are the other hundred languages?

In the up and down world of AI at Meta, it appears to be down this morning.

And yet more juggling at Meta's AI labs.

Rolling out slowly to some Excel users, Microsoft adds more Copilot AI. Type something like a chat prompt into a cell and there you have it.

I'll quote, "Bill Gates is funding a $1mn competition to spur the use of artificial intelligence to find innovative treatments for Alzheimer's disease" Perhaps some good will come of this.

Survey says, Americans (71%) fear that AI will kill many jobs and cause widespread unemployment.

Meanwhile in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft employees rally against contracts with Israel. Does Microsoft sell any of its products in Cuba, China, North Korea, and the list goes on?

Seth Godin on what is available in this worldwide AI, compute, communications system we have. "Corporations and governments used to need to hire 1,000 people to even come close to having the leverage that any individual reading this has right now."

Meanwhile in Russia, preschoolers are taught to love the Motherland. Patriotism can be a good thing and a bad thing.

Thursday 21 August 2025

More talk and evidence about how people took the Agile method and ran it into the ground. Too bad.

I like this article on the movement of relatively wealthy people. The US is winning. China is losing.

It appears the Databricks is now worth $100billion (with a B).

Google holds a big hardware event. Here is one summary.

Loathing and angst in international trade, embargoes, and all the variations.

It seems that Meta was hiring everyone for AI just a few days ago. Now they are hiring no one.

Yet another new company, this one called Halo, promises always-on super-smart glasses. Augmented reality that literally augments what you are seeing and hearing. You can appear to be much smarter.

Microsoft and the NFL extend their contract for sideline tablets. The new ones will have some sort of Copilot AI. Not sure what that will do for anyone.

Inside Google's hardware lab where they stress test everything.

Research shows that Americans are using this new AI to do the same things that Siri and Alexa did ten years ago. "What's the weather? Play music. Tell me when it's 8 o'clock."

Amazon announces a major change in its Fire tablets for next year. They will use Android for the first time, not Fire OS. I hope they continue to have a $50 to $80 low-end tablet...the best value in computing.

Microsoft and Asus team to build handheld Xbox machines.

The birthrate in America has been dropping. Reality hits this year with a small number of 18-year-olds. Colleges have no customers. Businesses have no employees. Old people (me) have no health care.

More and more countries are hitting the low birth rates. Over population? I remember that warning in the 1960s. Over correction or something like that.

Friday 22 August 2025

Abbreviated Internet viewing this morning.

I have an iPad that is several years old. My wife uses it ten minutes everyday to schedule an exercise class. Big improvements in the hardware and software since then.

Demographics and such. India's population is still young on average. China's is now old. Put together a few more statistics, and India is in a good position. China, and much of the rest of the "developed world," is in a bad position.

Oops. Arctic Sea ice isn't melting as fast as it was. It isn't melting as fast as the experts predicted. Nevertheless, there will not be any further review of the panic of climate change. The panic is set in stone.

It seems that most commercial airplanes have "window" seats that are not next to windows. This brings lawsuits from paying customers who want to see out a window, not stare at a wall.

There are all sorts of air filtering gadgets that are supposed to keep folks from becoming sick. The great majority were never tested to see if they kept folks from becoming sick.

It appears that our current President is to use CHIPS Act money to lessen dependence on China for minerals. Its the spice that runs the universe.

H20. No, it's not a way to write the chemical formula for water. It is the name of a processing chip from Nvidia that is now the most critical political industrial fight in the world.

Meta moves $10Billion of its cloud infrastructure over to Google Cloud. That's a lot of money.

Our current President creates the National Design Studio to improve the appearance of website and real life places. Note, the President's wife made a career out of fashion design.

Saturday 23 August 2025

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's next satellites will focus on weather and forego all this climate measuring. The climate measures would be unusable as you have to compare measurements from the same measuring devices. Basic stuff.

Think some of your chatbot prompts are long? How about 100 pages long?

Meanwhile in Denmark, want people to read more books, cut all the taxes on books.

You can't put an EV charger in your garage if the garage is full of junk.

Meanwhile on LinkedIn, mediocre fluff easily displaces deep thought and discourse.

Meanwhile at the Wikimedia Foundation, angst and anger over the use of AI to edit Wikipedia articles.

404 Media is now two years old. So far, they have held to their principles and keep striving for high-quality news reporting.

TSMC reports its first profit from its Arizona facilities.

It seems official: we the taxpayers are buying an $8.9Billion stake in Intel. Why? Huh?

Strong rumors that next month Meta will introduce new smart glasses with a display at $800.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: a former Apple employee is being sued for taking trade secrets to another company.

Meanwhile in Mississipi, BlueSky blocks its service there as it cannot comply with the age verification laws.

Meanwhile "back home" in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana...an explosion and fire at Smitty's Supply which makes lubricants (petrochemical) in Roseland up Highway 51. No injuries or deaths. Thank God.

This is something parents of Virginia Tech students have done for decades. Buy a house, rent the bedrooms, and sell it later for a profit. College housing at a profit.

The dog days of summer? How about 15 years of dog days in Europe as the economy of the continent is failing slowly and surely.

Google claims big reductions in the electrical power needed for an AI query. This is to Google's and all the rest's benefit as lower power costs mean more profits.

College professor claims that all the rare minerals the US needs are already here and are being discarded at gold and zinc mines.

Sunday 24 August 2025

I note that professional football of America College Division began playing games yesterday.

I regret to note that the petrochemical fire in Roseland, Louisiana is dumping chemicals into the Tangipahoa River which is the central river in Tangipahoa Parish.

Texas Instruments, yes the are still with us, opens a new factory as part of a $60Billion US investment.

It may be too late to save Intel. That industry depends on being able to make better semiconductors. Intel fell behind in that technology. They just couldn't figure out how to manufacture at tighter tolerances like TSMC et al. could.

Automation: replace expensive people with inexpensive machines. This isn't new. AI is just software running a machine. Replace content moderators with a machine to save money. Nothing new. Sometimes the machines break or don't have the quality output of expert humans. Nothing new here.

A Wired reporter did some vibe coding at Notion. They actually "shipped" some of the code he used code to produce.

Software recreates a woman's voice so that she can now "speak" with it instead of a generic robot voice.

I'll just quote the headline from Forbes, "TikTok Booms In Europe Despite Threat Of U.S. Ban"

We now have AI slop money as a gig job or side hustle. Can we have more silly jargon? Good grief.

How do you make some side money if you are an entertainment company? Show old movies. People still love them and still love the big screen.

Nvidia releases tools that make translating from one European language to another much easier. The tools are "free" in that no price is charged to use them. That is good as it helps people start working. The work of actually translation, of course, carries a cost in manpower and computing.

I like this. It is a good way to turn a phrase and encourage people to go in a direction. "AI should be built for people not as people"

Singapore, government, and tech talent.

Meanwhile in Mongolia, a local company has built LLMs for Mongolians. They don't rely of Google, OpenAI, et al. for things. Good.