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: 1-7 September, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• It is illegal for tech companies to charge our government $1 per year
• Federal judge rules in Google antitrust case, Google's value rises
• The Swiss government releases open-source AI models
• Law enforcement arrests 500 at Hyundai plant in Georgia
• Big tech attends a White House Dinner
• We return the name Dept of War, sort of

Monday 1 September 2025

Meanwhile in the UK, they have age-verification laws for websites. Sites that follow the law and check age have fewer visitors. Sites ignoring the law have more visitors. Vote with you clicks ... or something like that.

Gen Z (or whatever we call it) and Gen AI collide in college. Almost 20% of students look at the classes and textbooks and compare them to ChatGPT and ask, "What are all those classes about anyways?" College is fun. Lots of guys and gals, free time, and no supervision. Class?

Meanwhile in China, there is a plan to create a brain-computer-interface industry in the next five years.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, more evidence of China supplying weapons to the Russians. This comes as a surprise to some otherwise adult people.

Thoughts of Norway and the mandatory three-week summer vacation. Work 49 weeks straight and take off three. And don't forget the climate in Norway where the sun shines 18 hours a day in summer and the rest of the year is winter.

Here is a no duh moment: young kids are given prescription medication to soon.

83-year-old Brian Kernighan comments on programming in Rust (everything was slow and inefficient) and how all these smartphones are based on Unix (I find it intriguing...And I also find it kind of irritating that underneath there is a system that I could do things with - but I can't get at it!) There is so much compute power everywhere with the great majority of it being wasted. And some of us just hate waste.

I'll just quote the headline: Humans Are Being Hired to Make AI Slop Look Less Sloppy

OpenAI admits that its employees monitor users' chats and call the police when they see something that is sufficiently threatening.

Meanwhile in China, it is build, build, and build some more. The US is mired in regulations that we created to stifle ourselves.

Something to explore: MathGPT dot ai.

This is a new one on me: expanding my vocabulary by pronouncing new words aloud.

A few notes on copyright. This is dull to most, but really folks, learn about copyrights.

Write constantly. Most of it will "be bad." Some, however, will be good. One famous writer, cannot remember which but I think it was Ray Bradbury, encouraged writing a short story every week as "you can't write 52 bad short stories in a row."

Looking for ideas for writing stories? Try to be a child and stare at things children find fascinating.

Good thoughts on how to take memories from life and blend them into fiction.

Write what you know. How about writing and using a place you know as the setting.

Tuesday 2 September 2025

Aha! It's about time. Someone challenges the contracts that big tech has for AI systems for $1 per agency for the first year (pricing after that to be determined). Those $1 contracts violate Federal law in many ways. One simple one is the unbalanced bid or pricing something so low as to win business and clobber competitors. You cannot win a contract by bidding a ridiculously low price. More fun to come. Stay tuned.

OpenAI looks like they are to build a really big datacenter in India.

G42 is a UAE-based money company that is eyeing real estate in the US.

Global chip foundry industry gets big gains with TSMC still dominating the market.

Meanwhile in America, school is back in session, and AI has poured into everything. Teachers and other adults attempt to adjust.

Meanwhile in China, the robots are moving into the factories in large numbers. The Chinese factory owners need cheaper labor (they don't have that in China? Guess not.).

Our current President meets with tech CEOs and is always negotiating. Microsoft cuts prices by $6Billion to our Federal agencies.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, they home country is using AI to pilot swarms of drones as they attack Russians. Yet another advance in warfare. Where, however, are the results? They Russians are still where they were a couple of years ago.

And back in Ukraine, they have found that Russians tanks are full of parts made in NATO countries. Again, if the Russians are in such bad shape, why can't the Ukrainians defeat them.We began this war marveling at Ukrainian resilience and Russian incompetence. Now we are ... well, surprised that neither side can win.

85% of American college student admit to using AI in their coursework. I am amazed that this percentage are actually given work to do in courses.

Meanwhile in America, we have population declining??? maybe??? Birth still outnumber deaths. Non-citizens leaving the country outnumber those arriving. Legal and illegal. It is all up in the air.

Wednesday 3 September 2025

The big news of the week is that a Federal Judge rules in the antitrust case against Google. The debate is on as to who "won." Google stock value, however, goes up.

Here is one analysis. I'll just quote the crazy headline, "Google, Apple, and Mozilla Win in the Antitrust Case Google Lost"

By the way, Google's Chrome browser has over 70% of the market. Well, no one is telling everyone else that they can't make a better product.

Nvidia buys into the AI programming market. The goal is to become IBM or what IBM was. AWS did the same, so have others. Have hardware and software so that you are the computing systems company.

All is not wonderful in the AI world. Companies with their LLMs and chattering bot companions are being sued. Expectations are higher than current capabilities.

The names of the companies and technologies and corners of markets are not familiar. This is, however, big money.

China now becomes the big player in the world of robot vacuum cleaners. Caution: these things map your house and office space.

Plaud makes a little gadget that you pin to your shirt. I records all audio. Then comes the AI transcription, summarization, and all that. They have sold a million units in two years. The definition of success has changed. That is a big number.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: Amazon will no longer allow family members with different addresses to share the free shipping on one account.

WordPress introduces a new AI tool. I have used WordPress for years, but I do not understand what this tool does.

The No-Tax-On-Tips may extend to more novel professions, like influencers, online streamers and other digital content creators.

This is a long piece about software engineering jobs. Too much emphasis on AI and such. How about telling us about jobs for programmers in the real world?

Got some money and an itch for video gaming on a laptop. Acer updates its machine with an 18-inch 4K screen.

And Acer has a new laptop with 16-inch screen that weights less than a MacBook Air with 13-inch screen.

Meanwhile in China, a big military display celebrating how China defeated Japan in WWII or what is also known as the second Sino-Japanese war. Of course current politicians rewrite history. What's new? This is an actually a field of study in how current events allow and encourage the changing of history. Dusty history books on library shelves contain other accounts of history.

Thursday 4 September 2025

Meanwhile in India, they are investing tens of billion$ in chip manufacturing.

Better late than never, some American colleges are creating Chief AI Officer jobs to teach everyone else what to do. Use the money left after cancelling some other administrative jobs.

One day people will shake their heads in disbelief. Anyways, Microsoft is the leader far and away for buying carbon offset credits in a what has become almost a $10billion per year industry.

Big tech CEOs coming to a White House dinner tonight on AI and all things they do at White House dinners.

Meanwhile in Switzerland, the government releases an open-source AI model.

Lambda Labs prepares to go public. I've followed this group for a few years. They used to make their money selling high-end workstations that were loaded with AI tools. Now they make more money in the cloud by renting Nvidia processors. If I had the $10K, I would have bought one of their workstations. I should have done that five years ago.

OpenAI now lets non-paying users have access to its Projects service.

HPE reports a good financial quarter. Well, maybe they have turned around their fortunes.

Garmin to release a new watch with GPS and communications and more. $1,200. That's what such gadgets cost these days.

Even more innovation from Ukraine's army. When, however, will we see some results. All this innovation with nothing to show for it.

Someone figures that we have fewer job openings that job seekers in America.

The standard college entry test industry is on hard times. SAT and ACT both lost million$ in the great pan(dem)ic. Recovery has not come.

AI slop is now teaching everyone history on YouTube. The trouble is, the history being shown is incorrect.

Friday 5 September 2025

Samsung shows new phone and tablets.

Big advances in smart lightbulbs. I guess this solves a problem from someone.

Meanwhile in North Korea, they are listing jobs to steal crypto money. The jobs sound real and innocent.

New $98million Army contract for software to identify incoming drones.

Atlassian (the Jira company) to buy The Browser Company for $610million.

Meanwhile in Europe where regulators gotta' regulate, Microsoft will unbundle Teams from its other products.

Regulations on self-driving cars are silly. If the computer drives the car, you don't need windshield wipers. You also don't need a transparent windshield.

Nvidia sells its processors to cloud computing companies and then rents them back. Huh? I am pretty sure that taxes has something to do with this silliness.

Broadcom reports a big financial quarter.

Fear and loathing at Wikipedia. When Wikipedia was a novelty and not THE SOURCE of knowledge, no one really cared about what it said.

Big Tech comes out of the White House dinner pledging big dollars for AI education.

Intel, in lots of financial trouble, is still spending heavily on R&D.

Is this food good for you? Opinions and language vary. Still.

Everyone is buying more and more graphical processing units. Some folks even use them for computer graphics (imagine that!). Nvidia ships 94% of them. Where are the anti-trust investigators?

Some computing history and the original Microsoft 6502 BASIC language interpreter. Eat your heart out, Python.

A study shows that India is far behind in the AI economy and shows little ability to catch up.

Saturday 6 September 2025

There seems to be a big huff about people who have dashboard cams in their vehicles. Of course they are taking photos and videos of people without their knowledge. And of course, since these things are connected to the Internet, others hack into the files and see the contents.

Meanwhile in Germany, they turn on Europe's most super super duper computer.

Spending money to make money, they hope, OpenAI is certainly spending lots of money.

These aren't tariffs, but European regulators fine American companies billion$. Well, call it this or that, it is still money spent to operate somewhere.

Winding around in Congress is a proposed law to ensure Nvidia sells its processors to American customers first, then to foreign customers.

Eight US tech companies are worth a whole lotta' money. That is a gross understatement. Is it a good idea to have so much capital in so few companies? This is all legal and, in many ways, mind boggling.

This is bizarre. Quoting, "Anthropic has reached an agreement to pay at least a staggering $1.5 billion, plus interest, to authors to settle its class-action lawsuit. "

Our Dept of Defense goes back to its original name, Dept of War. Well, it sort of does.

This is a big story everywhere today: a Hyundai factory in Georgia was "raided" by law enforcement with almost 500 persons arrested. In a twist, the majority of those arrested are from South Korea.

Meanwhile in Canada, they had a plan to make all automakers make only electric cars and... reality got in the way of a good theory.

Someone finds fresh water under the ocean floor. Not a startling discovery, and the cost to have wells there is simply not practical.

Meanwhile in the UK, government employees tried Microsoft Copilot and ... nothing happened. Well, probably not the most innovate and creative group of people.

A classic loss leader program in colleges...quoting, "Microsoft is giving away Microsoft 365 Personal subscriptions to all US college students. "

Sunday 7 September 2025

The Verge visits NatCon or the National Conservatism Conference. Seems the NatCon folks don't like big tech and don't like AI and such.

Apple is now selling $9Billion (with a B) of its products in India.

In praise of the OpenAI model called GPT-5 Thinking.

Again from OpenAI, quoting the title, "Why language models hallucinate"

Here is the link to OpenAI's research paper.

I guess we needed some official confirmation with numbers and such, but the obvious seems more obvious in that employers are declaring "Return to the Office" not so much because that works. Instead, it is a tactic to cause employees to resign so the company doesn't have to lay them off.

I continue to be puzzled and confused by the war in Ukraine. Here we see that Ukraine wants to sell some of its newly developed weapons to other countries instead of using them against the invading Russians. My puzzlement and confusion deepen. What is going on over there? Was this war started as some sort of profit campaign by some people?

Microsoft sends Copilot capabilities to Federal Agencies at no cost FOR THE FIRST YEAR. This will be challenged in court as it probably isn't legal. Now, if Microsoft said, "Copilot is a new feature to our office suite and we don't charge money for it just like we don't charge for spell checking. And you get this forever and anyone out there who buys a similar product also gets this an a free new capability..." Well, that is okay, but that is not the situation.