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: 8-14 September, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• American high school seniors continue to perform poorly in reading and math
• Apple has a big event and shows a thinner iPhone
• Charlie Kirk assassinated in Utah
• Everyone is reacting to the reactions of the murder
• And the mainstream media can't decide which way is up

Monday 8 September 2025

Larry Ellison quietly moves into Oxford (UK, not Mississippi). He spent a billion $$$ quietly, which isn't easy to do.

Coming soon to a theater near you, Critterz. An animated movie made with OpenAI's tools.

Speaking of movies, the classic The Wizard of Oz has been edited and augmented with physical stuff and pulling in million$ a day at the sphere in Las Vegas.

The $7,500 consumer tax credit for purchasing a new EV is set to expire at the end of the month. No more free ride to buy an EV. GM cuts production.

Meanwhile in Russia, mine more coal.

And in Ukraine, drones versus drones and all that. Everyone is innovating and no one is winning.

What's next in Ukraine, bake sales?

Tech companies have cut the number of employees 21-25 years old in half. They have to know how to use AI and new things to get a job.

NASA runs yet another mission-to-Mars simulation by locking four people into a small place for a year.

Good old fashioned lying and stealing in trade deals from China.

Google searches are providing answers instead of pointers to websites. This seems apparent and news sites want detailed numbers to prove they are now irrelevant.

More on writing a novel.

More on the novel: add a subplot or three.

You "publish" to Amazon dot com. Now comes writing about your book there to generate sales.

The infodump in the book. Before I get into the story, let me tell you a few (dozen) things. Wrong. Weace them in gently over many pages.

The critical response process: Describe what you observe, celebrate what's working, and ask neutral questions that guide writers to their own discoveries about any elements that could use further development. 

This guy, Dean Wesley Smith, writes and writes and writes and makes money. Pulp speed.

Writing for industries that need extra credibility.

Tuesday 9 September 2025

Quoting the headline, "Google admits the open web is in rapid decline"

Meanwhile in America, our high school seniors read and perform math at the lowest level in decades. We closed schools for two years during the great PAN(dem)IC. That was a horrible mistake.

Companies use AI to write job descriptions. Applicants use AI to write resumes. Companies use AI to read the resumes. No one is hiring anyone. When I was unemployed, I would talk to recruiters on the phone and tell them, "I live five minutes from your office. I can come by anytime to chat." No, no, no. No one wanted to see anyone face to face.

Techmeme is 20 years old this week. I look it at 365 days a year. "Every morning nearly 100,000 geeks world wide, including some of the richest tech barons in the universe, fire up one of the most dated-looking websites online to find out what's going on in their world. "

Meanwhile in Pakistan, the governors are using tech from the Communist Party of China to surveil its subjects.

Meanwhile in Nepal, the governors turned off access to social media. During the ensuing riots, a couple dozen persons were killed. And folks think we fight about such in America.

Our Army awards about $250million in contracts with several companies to build smart combat goggles. I used the term "smart" with great apprehension.

YouTube was the exclusive "broadcaster" for Friday night's NFL game. They drew 17million viewers.

Our Dept of State will cut its spending on trying to stop disinformation from other countries. Taxpayers' dollars should be spent elsewhere. And how about just cutting the spending altogether?

DJI, a company controlled by the Communist Party of China, is the #1 seller of drones in America. Their import is being banned. Of course this will disrupt operations of many for a short term until Americans build these things themselves. Short term and long term are subjective terms.

Microsoft partners with Nebius Group NV for about $20Billion (with a B) of AI cloud computing power.

This is new to me: The Great Lock In. No excuses, just grind. Something about do good habits without fail until the new year at which time people go nuts or something and regain all the weight they lost or something.

Quoting the headline, "Nvidia is the world's most valuable company. Why does CEO Jensen Huang barely make the list of the 10 wealthiest people?" Simple, like Tim Cook at Apple, he doesn't own much of the company. The estimate is that he own 4% of Nvidia.

I find this to be a fascinating example of a run-away feedback loop or some such thing. Sam Altman says people are starting to talk like AI. AI learned to talk from reading what people say on the Internet. So people on the Internet taught AI which taught people who then write on the Internet where AI reads what people write which then... Oh well.

Wednesday 10 September 2025

Apple had a big event yesterday in which they showed a new thin thin thin iPhone for $999 (people don't blink at thousand-dollar phones these days). Here is one summary of the event. They are doing some interesting things with the ear bud pod things in healthcare.

Arm shows some new CPU and GPU designs. Of course there is more AI processing in everything.

We have a Man vs Machine hackathon. Hey, no surprise that a team with better tools won.

The business of surveillance is good and who is better at it than the Communist Party of China?

As usual, the new smartphones (iPhones this week) are more about the cameras than anything else.

Apple shows the new A19 processor in its new iPhones.

Black Forest Labs specializes in imagery and analysis tools. Meta signs a $140million contract to use that technology.

Microsoft to use some of Anthropic's AI models alongside those from OpenAI.

And Microsoft announces new return-to-the-office mandates for its Redmond headquarters.

Nvidia shows yet another new processor.

No surprise as Nvidia lobbies Congress to allow more chip sales to China. The age-old embargo debate: do you block sales so that China develops its own capabilities (which it will) or do you sell to China and keep them dependent on you?

Of course US tech companies sold the goods to the Communist Party of China so the Party could watch and detain those it didn't like.

Now I know why people will be shaking their phones.

Thursday 11 September 2025

Charlie Kirk is assassinated on a college campus in Utah.

Meanwhile in the skies above Poland, NATO F-35s shoot down Russian drones.

International trade and imports and, "Oh wait a minute. You mean this affects me?"

ICE buys new facial recognition tech to find people who assault officers.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, the fertility rate is plummeting everywhere, except in the semiconductor hub of Hinschu.

The electric vehicle industry is cutting staff faster than smoke.

I like the title to this piece.

"But summaries like this hide critical details --- the very details that can make or break your next strategic move.

For a moment, Larry Ellison is or was the world's richest man. Dusty old Oracle somehow became an AI money machine.

More humanoid robots from China. It is difficult to utter the words, "China is running short of people."

Microsoft updates Visual Studio for the first time in five years.

YouTube now has multi-lingual audio.

Someone went to the trouble to count the millions of videos used without permission to train AI.

OpenAI buys $300Billion (with a B) in computing power from Oracle. So that's how Ellison became rich.

If you pay for Reddit Pro, you get free tools for publishers. Something is amiss with the English language.

Strong rumors that Amazon is trying to build augmented reality smart glasses.

An industry consortium comes out in support for Really Simple Licensing (RSL), an open content licensing standard that enables publishers to outline how bots should pay to scrape their sites for AI training data.

If you have "AI skills" (not sure how to prove that), you will be paid 20% to 50% more. Not sure how that works.

Friday 12 September 2025

Meanwhile in Nepal, 100,000 people "gather" online to try to pick a new leader as the government collapses. You read stuff like this and you no longer wonder why people want to come to America. We have lots of problems, lots of problems, but...

Meanwhile is Switzerland, threats of collecting user IDs threatens the great neutrality state.

The title of this piece pretty much says it. These humanoid robots fascinate and frighten us as they "look like us." Still, their batteries run dead quickly.

Big American tech and data centers are coming to the UK. And then the electric bills will follow. They have North Sea oil.

Meanwhile in Albania, someone appoints an AI bot to be a government official and stop corruption or something like that.

There is fair use and there is stealing your property and your customers. Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue an AI company.

OpenAI spends about 45% of its income on research and development. Other big tech spends about 10% or 20%.

Uber comes under scrutiny for not accommodating Americans with physical disabilities as required by law.

There comes a time when you recognize stupidity as stupidity and let it go. "I'm sorry you feel that way," is a pretty good response.

Asus updates its high-performance (and high $$$) laptop.

Meanwhile in Britain, traffic deaths per just about everything are the lowest in the world.

And now we have Darwin awards for stupid AI systems.

Our Census Bureau reports that AI use at larger companies is declining. I have not idea how our Census Bureau would know this. They shouldn't be spending any taxpayer money on such.

Rumors that Amazon wants to make augmented reality glasses for its delivery truck drivers.

Saturday 13 September 2025

First-world problems: Gosh, how can I choose between two thousand-dollar phones?

More first-world problems: is a murder "graphic content" or "glorified violence?" Gosh, we need to debate that with great vigor. Huh?

More first-world nonsense: The Washington Post glorifies a family for calling the police when they find a murderer. Of course that is what a person should do. There is no question here.

There are times in life when things are better left unsaid and unwritten. This comes from a person (me) who has goofed too many times. Commentary on everything is not necessary.

Ah to be young and have a dream, "AI Startup Founders Tout a Winning Formula --- No Booze, No Sleep, No Fun" They say the goal isn't to make big money, but to do SOMEthing.

More on the idea that Techmeme is 20 years old and still going and still boring and still quite effective.

If you work at Opendoor, get ready to not be working at Opendoor as the boss says 85% of the employees need to go.

Please stop hyperventilating and live a normal life. Please.

Americans become richer and have more debt both at the same time. I think this is yet another first-world problem.

For the first time since the great recession (that was about 1930 for you recent high school grads), US colleges will have a declining market for many years to come. Birth rates and other demographics are undeniable and sometimes hurt.

Sales of electric vehicles in America jump up. The Federal subsidies are about to end, so buyers race to beat the deadline.

Sunday 14 September 2025

Meanwhile in China, cheap and abundant electric power is powering their AI race. This is age-old economics and something that America has forgotten in the age of Al Gore and, "Let's turn off the lights."

Thoughts on remembering things long term or just renting the knowledge for the moment.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz introduces the AI Sandbox Act. The idea is an AI company applies for a pass to experiment with AI in a a fenced sandbox. The company abides by Federal laws outside the sandbox, but can do just about anything inside the sandbox.

Sovreign nations face the classic buy or build decision regarding AI for local use.

News flash (not): batteries in electric vehicles lose 40% of their power when cold. The California coast, home of the EV, has mild temperatures year round. The rest of the world doesn't.

Google releases yet another LLM that it claim break some record for something. Hey, someone release a practical model that I can run on my laptop computer that doesn't have a special processor and doesn't cost $3,000.

It seems that Australia hosts some of the leading researchers in quantum computing.

Meanwhile in Malaysia, there is a fuss about water and power and how China uses the place to run around US technology embargos.

The ne'er-do-wells find a way to extort money using the reviews on Google Maps.

Voting with their wallets, or some cliche like that, the AI companies are racing ahead and ignoring all the AI doom-sayers.

I am all for this effort at Thinking Machines Lab: making the LLM stuff much less probabilistic.

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Dell. This is a standard Dell monitor that won't bring grief from your boss/spouse/budget.

Meanwhile in the UAE, "an Emirati AI lab called the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) released K2 Think on Tuesday, a model that researchers say rivals OpenAI's ChatGPT and China's DeepSeek" Also, the model is 1/20th the size of those others.

The return-to-the-office movement has about 60% of Americans working in the office full time. I'm in that number, but I have a ten-minute commute..

New full-time job: fixing the poor-quality code produced by these chattering bots.