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: 6-12 October, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Hamas conflict continues
• And we have yet another peace deal signed, maybe, just maybe...
• OpenAI now claims 800million weekly active users
• Yet Mr. Trump does not receive the Nobel Peace Prize
• The trade war with China heats up

Monday 6 October 2025

Grievous vexation about Federal funding to colleges. The colleges brought this on themselves. Lean too far in one direction and one day someone in the other direction controls the money and WHOOOOOOSH goes the money.

Ahhh... where can we find low-cost foreign talent now?

OpenAI wants to build more datacenters and lots of places are welcoming. This is like the great search for the Amazon headquarters. Arlington, Virginia was chosen for that, but much of it never materialized.

And all these data centers gobble up all the parts. The numbers are so big as to be staggering.

SiPearl, a CPU developer funded by the EU and that must be nice if you compete with privately funded companies, claims to have Europe's first processor that competes with everyone else's.

Meanwhile in North Korea, the military cyber units to do one thing: steal money.

Audacity 4 is release with a new logo that is pretty bad.

FieldAI Robotics is building AI capabilities into robots the adult way: start simple, learn a few things, build a simple machine, learn a few things, add a little, learn a few things, etc. As simple and successful as this is, most robotics companies instead try for the giant leap.

Meanwhile south of Memphis in a grove of tupelo trees, the global artificial intelligence war rages.

Cory Doctorow discusses Amazon, its lousy business strategy, and why The internet is getting worse, fast.

The Russians have a bunch of junk in low-earth orbit. They won't remove it and no one else seems to have the willpower and money to do so.

Okay, here we go, "How To Write A Bestselling Book" Simple: figure out what book will sell a million copies. Write that book.

Forget the prior link. This one is pretty good about connecting sentences.

Joanna Penn shares here lessons learned in 14 years as a writing business.

This has good tips on writing dialogue.

Tuesday 7 October 2025

In a round-a-bout purchase of media companies, Ms. Bari Weiss, who founded a Substack outlet, is now the Editor-in-chief of CBS News.

Is this opium war number three? In the UK, law enforcement people find that 40,000 smartphones were being stolen and shipped to China.

Lots of OpenAI news as they hold their annual Dev Day.

Is OpenAI trying to buy every CPU in the world? And no one can figure how they can afford to do that.

Coming: apps inside ChatGPT. Sigh. And catch a glimpse of the CEO of a company that has 800million weekly active users. Jeans and tennis shoes.

Google starts a bug bounty program for its AI systems. Money if you find a problem in one of its systems.

Anthropic lands Deloitte as a client for 470,000 employees worldwide.

When did we stop counting processors and started counting gigawatts?

Bill Gates sort of says something that makes sense: stop with the lawyers and start with the real problem solvers.

I guess this solves someone's problem, but you can buy a two TeraByte storage device that attaches to the iPhone. Two TeraBytes? Are we storing every movie ever made or something?

Our former President gave money to companies that captured CO2. Our current President won't do that. This is mind boggling both ways. Surely there are some adults standing around willing to become elected representatives. Huh?

Hooray for this one! George Clooney is raising his kids on an isolated farm instead of in LaLaLand. Good.

Vibe coding, or "hobby programming" as I call it, will create more or fewer jobs or something.

Meanwhile in Europe, they have 100-year-old laws protecting employees. And companies cannot innovate and compete with American and Chinese companies.

This is bad news for everyone as Americans are turning to payday advance situations to buy groceries.

And I close with this note from the UK where university Physics departments are closing due to lack of students and funds.

Wednesday 8 October 2025

No Internet viewing today.

Thursday 9 October 2025

It seems I have read this news before in my lifetime, but here we are a again with a peace agreement in the Middle East.

Are companies obligated to sell your products? Some folks think that is protected speech.

When OpenAI's Sora generates a video out of thin AIr, it puts a watermark on it so folks know. Well, let's erase that watermark so folks don't know.

Library books returned from other countries are subject to tariffs. Huh?

The day has come, China stops exporting rare earth materials. Is the west now prepared to live without them?

I'm quoting this. This is real. They have solved all the problems in California and now have time to do this, "Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a law banning excessively loud advertisements on streaming platforms "

IBM and Anthropic sign a deal to put Anthropic's AI systems into IBM's development systems.

The folks running Dell predict good times ahead as the demand for computing hardware increases.

The AI industry is in debt up to its eyeballs. Yikes.

Never failing to be years behind in everything, our Congress releases a report about how western companies built China's tech industry and helped the Communist Party of China.

Three men from Google are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Google started in a garage by some grad students. Nobel Prizes in Physics. Well, you never know how things will turn out.

Oracle hauls in the money renting computers.

Domino's Pizza has a new logo, jingle, and all that stuff. I wish they made better pizza, but my grandkids like it.

A few companies are using the new AI to do big things better. 95% are just fiddling around.

I don't like this, not at all. In America this group has doubled in size, the disconnected youth - young Americans who are not in school, not working, and not looking for work.

Russia and Ukraine are fighting one another with parts from all over the world.

Meanwhile here in Virginia, you can't do anything without running into a datacenter. It is the entire economy, and Amazon is the biggest of the bigs.

Friday 10 October 2025

Good news for mice as "Scientists have developed a unique nanoparticle vaccine that prevented the development of multiple forms of cancer in mice"

The Epstein files on Github. These LLM systems are good at doing an OCR task on images of text. Those folks who want to make it difficult to read files often turn them into pictures. No longer effective.

Pew Research on what kids are watching these days. Mostly just TV.

Meanwhile in China where censorship and state control are alive and well, they are fighting to ban "excessively pessimistic sentiment and defeat-est ideas."

This is a new one on me: diamonds are the best heat conductors we have. A bit expensive, but synthetic diamonds aren't expensive. Hence, better cooling for datacenter processors.

I'll just quote the headline, "Amazon Pharmacy introduces kiosks that can quickly dispense medications at the doctor's office." And why haven't we been doing this for decades?

The European Commission finally releases its AI strategies.

With nothing useful to do with their time, the governors of New York City sue a bunch of tech companies for addicting youth to social media or some such thing.

Meanwhile in America, we have teen romance ... with AI.

...while in China, kids are playing with AI toys.

Now this is more like it, a Tiny Recursion Model that is tiny compared to the current Large Language Models and performs just as well. Let's run these on local data on local machines and accomplish some real work with privacy.

Anthropic is running a "keep thinking anti-slop" ad campaign. Maybe they will do something worthwhile in all this.

TSMC reports another very good financial quarter.

Where the money is: Healthcare. As if Microsoft doesn't have enough money already, but they are working with Harvard Medical School.

Our Dept of Commerce approves the sale of a few billion$ worth of processor from Nvidia to the UAE.

Now this is important (not). Netflix puts its video games on smart TVs.

Here is a deeper review of Meta Ray-Ban $799 smart glasses. They aren't there yet, but moving in the right direction.

Intel opened its new factory in Arizona. They hope this is a big step in the company's recovery. They also announced new products and capabilities.

Here is a report on the $32Billion factory.

Here is a report on their new Panther Lake series of processors.

Quoting: The Browser Company says AI browser Dia is now open to everyone on macOS without an invite Let the games begin!

Microsoft continues to add capabilities to Copilot on Windows 11. These capabilities can save time on basic office tasks so that people have more time to have more time. Seriously, those who are charging ahead and trying to do things will benefit.

Saturday 11 October 2025

I hope this works: an underwater autonomous glide vehicle is launched to go around the world.

The governors of China, i.e., the Communist Party of China, stopped shipping rare earth minerals. Mr. Trump declares a 100% tariff on Chinese goods. It is on and it is probably not good.

More fussing in China over imports of Nvidia systems.

Meanwhile in the UK, regulators gotta' regulate and someone declares something about Google.

Yes, it is video games, but the numbers and $$$ have grown to be significant.

Speaking of big number$, $48million fine over a BitCoin deal.

If your YouTube account was terminated, YouTube now gives a second chance.

Adobe puts more AI into its products.

Meanwhile in Germany, the governors move $3Billion from subsidies to chip makers to repairing roads and bridges.

This is a great headline, "Hollywood has no idea what to do about AI" New tools. When films became digital, editing changed dramatically and Hollywood adjusted. Then there were the avatars... then the were the... Time moves on. Those who vote on the Academy Awards are still human and usually vote for the older things.

Researchers show how easy it is to have one of these super-smart chattering bots to spout gibberish. Has anyone researched how easy it is to have a person spout gibberish. Come to Washington D.C. for test cases.

You have a PC in the kitchen that works just fine. After enough years, your software (Windows 10 in this case) won't upgrade any longer and won't work with all your other new gadgets. There has been a big boost in Windows 11 computer sales. My kitchen computer is about to join that group.

Micro Center partners with iFixit. Learn how to fix it and then go to Micro Center to buy the parts.

Qualcomm buys Arduino and competes with Raspberry Pi.

Sunday 12 October 2025

Regulators gotta regulate. Oh the risks of business people doing business without regulators telling them how to do business.

Amkor, an 57-year-old company that is new to me, is building a $7Billion chip-making plant near its home in Arizona.

Here is real reaction to artificial intelligence: 20,000 jobs cut in India.

Believe it or not, Microsoft doesn't have enough datacenters. Huh?

TEXT

Somehow Google measures how much people actually use its AI systems and claims the use is growing with new records set every month.

Apple to acqui-hire a new computer vision company called Prompt AI.

Samsung loses big, $445.5million, in a US court copyright lawsuit.

And in court in Austria, Microsoft loses. Note the similarity? A company loses in court in a foreign country.

Chainalysis reports $75Billion (with a B) in illicit crypto currency activities. Always listen when Chanalysis reports.

There is much in this story. One thing is that folks are trying to find a way to do the community college learning experience all online. If it grants access to learning to more people, good.

Meanwhile in Europe, American tech companies follow new EU regulations. Then the regulators see the results of their regulation and want everyone to reconsider. Think it all the way through.

Lamenting the current state of affairs under our current President. This neglects to mention that Americans prefer this state of affairs to the previous state of affairs.

Duh! Let's see if we can figure this out... You learn on screen and test off screen and the off screen test scores go down. Duh! Come on folks. You can't be this dense.

Let's see, we had these climate change goals (that someone just made up). Then we decided to use AI and lots of datacenters. Then... I forgot what came first.

It appears that I am not the only person trying to pull bits from 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. I have yet to find anyone who can help me.