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: 20-26 October, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Hamas peace deal seems to be holding (one week in a row)
• Telepresence robots are stocking shelves in Japan via the Philippines
• Much angst in Washington as construction of a ballroom begins

Monday 20 October 2025

AWS has a big East Coast outage this morning.

How the Communist Party of China gained control of rare earth minerals. One thing people ignore is that they have no safety measures in their mining operations.

The governors of China cry foul claiming our NSA has been hacking its National Time Service Center.

Folks seem to like the iPhone 17 as it is already outselling the model 16 by large numbers.

Alibaba Cloud claims to have a better way to manager GPUs in datacenters. Some thought towards efficiency goes a long way.

Quoting, "Apple has officially warned MacBook users not to use webcam covers" People are actually buying clips to put on the camera and then closing the lid. Really? Use a Post-It.

Meanwhile in America, there were anti-Trump protest in the guise of "no kings." Organizers have a high claim of 7million participants, which would mean about 2% of Americans. I don't want a king, either. Politics and the English language.

Anduril and the "China 27" strategy.

Fussing about programmers having "the power" over their bosses and keeping the bosses straight. Create a union is the solution so that all the programmers can walk off the job if the bosses want to mangle the product.

A surprise to me: a writer recommends AI systems that write essays.

I like and agree with this phrase from George Will, "Soon journalism stopped being about informing people to make them citizens, and began to be about making them agitated." What killed journalism? When journalists stopped journal-ing.

Brevity and story telling.

Tuesday 21 October 2025

This is what we should be doing with all this technology. Here is a retinal implant that helps people with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) to see.

OpenAI is buying so much infrastructure that it has become "too big to fail." If there is a problem, all of Silicon Valley will have a big problem.

Robots are stocking shelves in Japan. They, however, are not autonomous. They are being remotely controlled by workers in the Philippines. So, you don't have to be present to do manual labor.

The story of the telepresence robots above is probably the most significant of the week. Now a barber can be a machine operated by a low-paid person somewhere else on the planet. Same for a bartender and ... well, it becomes a long list of jobs.

Walking the statues on Easter Island. Well, you tipped them back and forth with a little forward motion.

Meanwhile in an Amazon warehouse near you, the company thinks it can replace 500,000 jobs with machinery, a.k.a., robots.

Several things to note about his piece: (1) no, we aren't getting stupid-er and (2) students are doing passable assignments without understanding anything. Well, for #2, it seems the teachers are assigning the wrong things.

Here is a big "no duh" moment. Exposing infants to things means they grow up not being allergic to things.

So much for international trade. A government knocked Nvidia out of the market in China. That government was ours.

I'll just quote the headline, "Foreign Hackers Breached a US Nuclear Weapons Plant Via SharePoint Flaws"

Breaking all records and embarrassing NASA to no end, SpaceX has put 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. They will have about 150 launches this year. NASA, a government agency supported by our taxes, is, well, uh, they are doing something.

Speaking of government and non-government competence... hacktivists have broken into "secure" government systems and are harassing government employees.

Federal, state, and local law enforcement have had access to Flock cameras and such for years.

Per research by Cisco, only 13% of organizations are using AI effectively and they are clobbering their competition.

Wednesday 22 October 2025

From a Pirate Wires newsletter comes, "What we call the gig economy is, in practice, a debt-and-fear economy - one that goes unchallenged in hyper-progressive places like NYC precisely because liberals have redefined compassion as ignoring the law." There is an illegal economy serving us. The biggest criminals are the brokers who sneak in the workers and rob them daily. Who benefits? Us rich folks. This is bad for all of us.

And now we have a browser from OpenAI. It's called Atlas.

And the AI boom brings a boom in gas-fired power plants.

Smart goggles, or whatever we call these things, from Samsung.

Netflix reports a good financial quarter.

Anthropic is in talks with Alphabet for another one of these bazillion-dollar deals for datacenters and such.

And here we have Meta signing a finance deal with Blue Owl Capital to help fund the datacenter in Louisiana. Earlier reports were it was a $10Billion datacenter. This story indicates it is a $27Billion datacenter.

The MacBook Pro upgrades to the M5 processor. This review calls it "modest." That disagrees with Apple's claims of major increases in processing power.

And here is a review of the iPad Pro with the M5 processor.

Texas Instruments reports a pretty good financial quarter.

The current head of NASA seems serious about meeting timelines and putting Americans on the moon.

Those who need apply for a $100,000 H-1B visa drops in number. Further guidance means those already here, like under a student visa, can be a free H-1B visa.

Quoting, "the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is projected to hit a once-in-a-generation milestone: 1 trillion web pages archived." Hooray. I use the archive in one form or another quite often.

Automobiles depreciate fast. It's been that way forever. It seems that the electric vehicles depreciate even faster.

Thursday 23 October 2025

Meanwhile in China, the Communist Party has a big meetings and creates a five-year plan that leads to self sufficiency in the tech world. They will largely stick to the plan. It may, however, be outdated in five months.

Quoting the headline, "OpenAI, Oracle, and Vantage Data Centers plan to build a data center in Wisconsin called Lighthouse, costing $15B+"

Meanwhile in America, we still run COBOL that was written for mainframes in the 1970s in our financial sector. Someone estimates tens of billion$ lost due to that.

Meanwhile out in Silicon Valley, those AI experts who are paid a bazillion dollars are working 100 hours a week or some such thing. Paying taxes with all that money.

Quoting, Elon Musk says Tesla's AI5 chip will be made by Samsung in Texas and TSMC in Arizona

Amazon is testing and developing augmented reality glasses for its drivers. A practical use to help scan packages and real-world tasks.

Reddit sues a few companies for scraping its data without a contract.

Google's Gemini is coming to GM vehicles next year.

Exceeding the limit of sanity, Meta cuts 600 jobs from its AI units.

Meanwhile in China, the robovans are everywhere.

And we have the "microdrama." I guess folks like a little bit of a show every day.

Google explains how it is porting 30,000 apps to Arm.

OpenBSD 7.8 has been released, 

Friday 24 October 2025

Showing that smart people continue to do stupid things, Microsoft introduces a character with expressions to go with Copilot.

This is a little better from Microsoft as they enable groups to collaborate on documents and use Copilot at the same time.

The early reviews of OpenAI's browser are generally negative.

Apple has a factory in Houston that is shipping products a year ahead of schedule.

Anthropic and Google announce a big cloud partnership. There are so many of these things happening so often it is difficult to remember which was which.

Our US Energy Secretary Chris Wright urges cutting the time to connect a datacenter to the power grid. Let's git er done and build things.

Want to upskill in AI (what does upskill mean? I know, I know). This former Nvidia engineer says to build something, anything, but build something end-to-end.

And now we have analog bags. Just a regular bag that contains analog activities like knitting and Sudoku puzzle books and such. When you go to Starbucks, you do analog things instead of scrolling on your phone.

Save for an asteroid, we would still have dinosaurs as they were thriving when the killer rock hit the planet. Well, this is a good story. It's all made up by well-meaning and educated folks, but still a story.

Saturday 25 October 2025

Love Oreo cookies. The makers has invested in AI to cut the costs of marketing. If they would just revert to the earlier recipes.

These chattering bots chattering with lonely elderly people. Sigh. Just someone to say, "Good morning."

The art of the deal: it appears that a few of Mr. Trump's friends and associates arranged a few conversations that averted the National Guard on the streets of San Francisco. Hmm, what an idea. Let's talk a few minutes about these things. Hmm, what an idea.

High finance, ten$ of Billion$, and datacenters in Texas and Wisconsin.

This is a significant move in a region of the world not known for computing. I'll quote, "HP is set to build millions of devices in Saudi Arabia with the majority earmarked for export into the wider Middle East and North Africa region, in a move that is a significant win for the kingdom's plan to boost manufacturing and exports."

There is lots of fussing over our current President building a ballroom at the White House. Much of the fussing is from Washington insiders with little coming from the vast majority of America. Lost in all this... not a penny of taxpayer money as it is funded by donations. There is money in America and folks will donate it when asked. Forcing donations, a.k.a., taxes, is another matter.

For example, an unnamed friend of the President donated $130million to pay members of the armed services.

The US job market is in a Great Freeze. Low firing, low hiring, and no progression in your job.

Microsoft attempts to update Outlook with some AI and such. How about making the search work?

More fear and loathing in and around WordPress, which happens to be the most-used content and knowledge management system in the world.

Fights over the neutrality of Wikipedia. While facts are facts, opinions are rampant. Look for the adjectives and adverbs.

Jobs? Not at Intel as the managers have cut 35,000 jobs in two years.

Microsoft Teams has always "known" where a person is based on WiFi connections. Now the software will display to everyone if you are in the office or somewhere else.

Those of us from Louisiana have new cousins: they have found mosquitoes in Iceland.

Sunday 26 October 2025

Resources are pouring into building datacenters in America. Finally, someone asks if that is a good use of all these resources. The answer is probably, "No."

Meanwhile in Kyrgyzstan, the governors create a national cryptocurrency.

The Washington Post finally discusses the Wikipedia bias story.

Text to music. It works if that is what you want. With writing essays, the benefit is not the writing but saving typing. With text-to-music, the benefit is not writing new music but doing all the recording. Writing some new music is trivial.

Chiding law enforcement to catch criminals. Folks, if your favorite candidate wasn't elected, that doesn't make catching criminals a bad thing. It is still catching criminals. If you believe certain crimes shouldn't be crimes, there are elections and legislatures to address such. If law enforcement officials abuse their positions, they should be punished. I believe these statements to be true and not controversial. Let us remember that the Boston Marathon murderers were caught by facial recognition and surveillance cameras.

And speaking of abuse of position and stupidity among law enforcement, read on.

Lamenting the loss of jobs for teenagers and others with little to no skills. Just because they have robots in Japan, a place where there population is falling at a frightening rate, doesn't mean we will have all those robots in America.

996 comes to American startups. If you have the energy and drive and dream, you can work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week.

Further proof that really smart people can be really stupid. Good grief. Look at the training data. And that brings up the basic problem in supervised learning. You have to look at the training data.

And here is a "no duh" that escapes people trying to put big data and AI to work in business: data comes in many forms; it can be inconsistent; perhaps it adheres to different standards; it may be inaccurate or biased; it could be highly sensitive information, or old and therefore irrelevant. Sigh. Slack solved many of these problems, but people didn't use it consistently. Hence, garbage in, garbage out still holds true. If we could just get all our persons to stop putting garbage into the system, the system would be perfect. Alas, the human condition. And the solution is leadership by persons.