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: 29 September - 5 October, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine, sigh
• The Israel-Hamas war never ended, two years later, peace talks continue
• EA Sports is bought in some sort of record deal
• Federal government closes for a while
• More AI and datacenters everywhere with billion$ tossed about

Monday 29 September 2025

State-by-state we are banning the use of software to "treat mental health issues." Now if we could just define what mental health is...

Meanwhile in China, the "Ministry of State Security, the civilian spy agency often called the M.S.S., in particular, has emerged as the driving force behind China's most sophisticated cyber operations."

And speaking of spying, this Russian ship trolls around fishing for undersea data cables.

Meanwhile at CalTech, physicists have built the world's largest quantum computer.

More AI slop, "5,000 Podcasts. 3,000 Episodes a Week. $1 Cost Per Episode" And within a couple of years, content created by hand will be the exception. Well, I plan to continue being exceptional.

Will computing become a tradable commodity? I thought it already was. And whatever happened to those networks of unused home computers doing all that computing? That is still with us and is called public resource computing or public cloud computing.

This high school student is teaching senior citizens about AI and how not to be scammed.

The ne'er-do-wells have yet another scheme about nudify-ing photos.

This person earns money writing and selling 10-page books. Title: How to [Get Result] Without [Painful Problem] THE END

Here is a goal: To publish 75 major books in my 75th year. Not my goal, but Mr. Smith's. He will probably come close if he doesn't make all 75.

Great title: Books Don't Spoil. But Covers and Sales Copy Need Refreshing At Times

AI and creativity. Don't worry folks.

It appears that many folks enjoy the story more when they know the ending.

Using the weather to aid the story. Tolkien was excellent at that.

The desire to be published. Publish yourself. Not good enough? Be published but not by a publisher you want? And the struggles continue. Everything published? But when is Hollywood going to make it a movie? The struggles continue. Relax a bit. If you have "finished the novel," you are in the 1% of the 1%.

How do writers write? It varies greatly, but writers write.

I like this technique: write, analyze what you wrote to create an outline. Examine the outline. Does it make sense? Rearrange as desired.

Tuesday 30 September 2025

Jensen Huang is on a world tour selling Nvidia to every country he can find.

Real news that isn't news: electricity costs more if you live near a big consumer. This seems to be a moment of enlightenment to otherwise adults.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the Taliban (remember those guys?) has turned off the telecom everything and imposed a complete communications blackout. This means to Internet access for anyone unless you have a short-wave radio and can hide.

Oops, FEMA has a computer security problem and, well, things are as bad as you could imagine.

WOW! I'll just quote the headline, "Gaming giant Electronic Arts bought in unprecedented $55bn deal"

YouTube settles it court case with Donald Trump. Almost all of big tech had to pay Mr. Trump hundred$ of million$ for suspending his accounts in the past. Something about censorship and "misinformation," which at the time meant disagreeing with the main stream media.

Rumors that OpenAI is to have a TikTok look-a-like with only AI-generated content. Hmmm.

More software-that-writes-software from Anthropic.

I am not sure if any independent person verified this, but quite a claim from Anthropic on their software-writing software. This 30 hours of programming takes me back to grad school where I saw a fellow student sit in a chair in front of a terminal pounding out code for that long to finish a project. Yes, people can do these things.

Microsoft announces an Agent Mode in Copilot for Word and Excel and PowerPoint. This could be quite interesting. Learn and use it or be left in the dust.

Marissa Mayer sells her old company to her new company. Can you do that? This all has to do with financing that I don't understand. It also has to do with trying to make AI useful and profitable.

Meanwhile at our FAA, changes in drone rules are coming and here come the drones to a neighborhood near you.

Quoting the headline, "Everything You Need to Know About USB Ports and Speeds"

More information on workslop and its mostly unintended consequences. If you work without thinking, well, no surprises will follow. It doesn't matter what tool you use. Absence of thought is just plain stupid.

Wednesday 1 October 2025

And it is October and our Federal government doesn't have a budget and we shut down or something.

Meanwhile in China, they had the world's tallest bridge. Now they have a new world's tallest bridge. They are still consumed with that kind of thing.

If you give me permission, I'll make a deepfake video of you. What could possibly go wrong?

Gotta love the folks at NASA. They can't put a person in orbit, but once someone puts people on the moon, NASA has a design for a WiFi network up there. Gosh.

Quoting, "Trust in Ivy League institutions stands at just 15%." They did it to themselves.

Cancer among the younger Americans. Why?

Meanwhile in America, live sports betting takes over the sports betting industry. Shows the wealth in America. Despite all the doom and doom in the news, this is a rich place full of rich people.

And speaking of live sports betting, Amazon and FanDuel are agreeing to work together to do something with the bets in "real time." Gosh, do I get a payoff the instance a ref calls a foul? What is all this about?

Worries about Nvidia in the Chinese market. If your goal is to be the richest company in the world, I suppose you have many things to worry you. If your goal is to be really successful and you are Nvidia, life is fine.

Research shows... the change brought about by all the "AI" is happening a little faster than the change from the "personal computer" and the change from the Internet. This has not been an instant disrupting earthquake that is shattering the foundations of the foundations. Some people are adapting quickly and moving fast. The great majority are thumbing through their phones at their desks hoping their bosses don't notice that they aren't working.

OpenAI and Sora 2. Just think of the fun we will have. And then we will encounter what some folks think is "fun."

Meta buys its own chip-making company so they can supply themselves instead of buying everything from Nvidia.

Some Russian has snuck inside Apple and is obtaining product samples before they are announced.

Amazon shows much better audio speakers. What happened to the Bose home stereo giant speakers and 100-watt-per-channel amplifiers?

And more Amazon products and systems. I like the Pet Finder application of a network of Ring doorbell cameras. Thinking about this, such a system would be a good safety feature for the elderly who go on walks and fall or become lost.

Here is a new Door Dash delivery vehicle contraption. It'll go 20 mph on the bike path.

Thursday 2 October 2025

Meanwhile in China, there is a "rush" (a subjective term meaning, "you are going faster than I like") to put AI into the lives of children. Those not doing the rushing are frightened. Nothing new here, just more human stuff.

Allen Control Systems: another company I've never head of. They are trying to make quick gun turrets that can shoot down little quick drones.

The Washington Post has been running this story on In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) via robotic surgery. For some, it is a blessing they never thought possible.

AWS is pushing hard into the police technology market. A problem is that state and local law enforcement don't have money. All the money is flowing down from our Dept of Justice and other funding departments. AI surveillance welcome to America.

Meanwhile in China, they are trying the H-1B visa route of bringing in foreign devil talent. They are meeting the same resistance as the American government has for decades. Hire us; not them.

Also in China, they are limiting the use of telecommunications equipment from Europe as they don't trust it. Sound familiar again? Success sure brings headaches.

It appears that Elon Musk is not worth over $500Billion. That puts him far ahead of Larry Ellison at $350Billion. How much money is that? Does anyone really know?

America On-Line may be sold again. Good old AOL seems to be making a comeback.

Apple may be coming to its senses as it moves towards smart glasses and away from wearing big goggle contraptions on your head.

Microsoft has a new subscription plan. $20 a month brings more Copilot AI and 6TB of storage. The storage costs pennies. It is all about the AI processing load.

Qualcomm adopts the latest Arm architecture for its PCs and phones.

Amazon creates its own line of "store brand" groceries for online and in-person shopping.

Google shows Gemini for Home. New AI stuff to replace the old stuff that wasn't called AI, but was quite useful.

Using the latest Ray-Ban smart glasses. You are wearing a camera on your face. Do other folks like that? This is a great product for those who have difficult seeing.

Got thousands of dollars to spend on home exercise equipment that you'll only use for a month? Peloton is your guy.

AI in business: so far, nothing new here. If you are lost and chasing your tail around in circles, AI won't help you. If you work smart and hard already, AI will boost you.

Blue Origin wins the NASA contract to take a rover vehicle to the moon. People to the moon? Forget about it. This is, after all, NASA.

Nonprofit organizations, politics, money, and politics. Many of these nonprofits brought the troubles on themselves by being too loose with their charters and what they actually did. The result is bad for them but also bad for all the legitimate nonprofit organizations. Hint: if you are a church, preach religion and not politics.

Underwater drones from China are losing their locations, wandering about, and being caught by fishermen in the Philippines.

Friday 3 October 2025

No Internet viewing today.

Saturday 4 October 2025

Walmart ships 90million pallets of good each year. They will now attach a sensor to each one to track them.

Meta changed the publishing rules for its researchers at its AI lab (FAIR). Folks didn't like it. Well, leave if you don't like it.

Here's a new term: neocloud provider. I guess that's the opposite of ancient cloud provider or something. Anyways, Microsoft is throwing ten$ of Billion$ (with a B) at it.

IBM, still quite alive and producing, releases new open-source LLMs that are more efficient than most.

LinkedIn sues a company that had thousands of fake accounts and used them to scrape all its real accounts. Ah, the troubles that come with success.

There was an app out there for reporting the location of ICE agents. Called "RedDot" which is a term for the laser pointer mounted on a firearm and all that. Google and Apple remove the app from their stores. The main point is that many American citizens have no trust in their fellow citizens who work in the government. This is bad for everyone.

Meanwhile inside Meta, staff push to use other development tools than the ones that are officially used in the company.

Meanwhile in California, a new law allows independent contractors to form a union. There seems to be a contradiction in the terms "independent" and "union," but I am not a lawyer and don't understand the legal use of the English language.

A couple of Amazon delivery drones bump into a crane in the Phoenix area. Who put that crane there? Why didn't they update our maps?

Quoting the headline, "The smart glasses race is really on now" To which I add, "It's about time." Good grief, this should have been started decades ago.

Go to one place for all knowledge: that one place was the Internet with all its searching and finding and learning. Now that one place is an AI chattering bot thing. Odd how the one place was good and now it's bad. And then there is the library with all those different books, but kept in one place.

Sunday 5 October 2025

Boom! Number 1 with a bullet. OpenAI's Sora shoots to the top of the Apple App Store rankings.

Meanwhile in India, government officials are trying to have people use local software instead of that from Microsoft and Google.

Meanwhile in Gaza, two years into this fighting initiated by a Hamas "raid" (let's drive across the street and kill and grab people), peace talks continue amid fighting. There are "hostages" that have been held prisoners in basements for two years. Two years. Try to imagine that.

Also in India where they still have a caste system, it is of little surprise that bias based on the caste system is rampant in the majority of LLM chattering bots.

There are several stories here. The obvious one is international strife over undersea data cables. The less obvious but more important one is that we now live in a world where over 70% of undersea cables are owned by big American tech companies. This used to be controlled by nation states. Once again, the nation state bows to the company.

In another side story that overshadows the visa story is that 20% of computer programmers in America are not American citizens.

LLM-assisted writing (a new term for me) is creeping into press releases and is about of quarter of them.

In a comeback move reflecting the renewed interest in chemical analog photography, Kodak releases two new lines of film.

Meanwhile in the autism industry, yes, it is an industry, now research tends to show that there are many different conditions with different causes and different treatments and, gosh, we can make more money in this industry.

Are we living through the death of reading books? Side note, does this mean that reading the Holy Bible is something that church leaders need to understand and react.

Just to show that stupidity rises high, the Hour of Code has been replaced with the Hour of AI.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, panic on a college campus. Someone is actually wearing smart glasses that have a video camera in the frame. I guess the smart glasses thing is still far ahead of its time. People walking about in public places are supposed to be treated as if they are in private places or something like that.

Meanwhile in Austin, AI teachers teach kids who then score in the top 0.1% of all American kids. Of course they do. This is a pilot project with all the characteristics of a pilot project. Of course it doesn't "scale," i.e., it has special circumstances that don't exist everywhere else. Good grief. I hope no one falls for this scam, but history proves me wrong.

And at Microsoft, they too want to build their own processors instead of buying them from someone else.