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: 3-9 November, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians (remember them?) are still in Ukraine
• Democrats win the off year elections with a socialist as mayor of New York City
• Biggest job cuts in 20 years in the US
• The partial Federal government shutdown continues and breaks some sort of record

Monday 3 November 2025

It seems that rare earth minerals aren't that rare as Brazil may have them.

I find this article interesting as it discusses doing a machine learning project at home. If you are unemployed and want a job in this field, doing such a project may help. It is a lot of work, but may land a job. If nothing else, a person can learn, and that is generally a good thing.

All these datacenters can't add a zero and a one if they don't have electricity.

Big tech is hiring "forward deployed engineers." We will send you one of our engineers to show you how to use our systems.

The Palantir fellowship: skip college, come to work here. Of course this will work. It is a pilot project for a couple dozen people who are much brighter than average in a much better than average situation shooting for a much better than average goal.

Researchers show that LLMs can understand languages better than has been thought possible. Well, let's see how this works its way through.

Once again, we have a massive case of STUPID. Toss in, "I know I am right and your are wrong so you might as well admit you are wrong and make it easy on yourself." Good grief. We have all played a part in the failure of our law enforcement agencies to hire, train, and perform to the standards we want.

Thoughts on writers who have this thing called ADHD.

And two minutes later, I find this second piece on the same topic.

I love this title: The Art of Finishing. Sometimes you have to trick yourself on these things. Like, "If I don't ship this, no one in this household will be able to eat next week."

"Software isn't just a nerd in a basement writing code. ... this is the architecture of our time" --- Seth Godin

Thoughts on building relationships among characters in fiction.

This essay is about completing class assignments without cheating. Is it cheating to use a spell checker in MS Word (or anything else?)? Some folks would answer, "Yes." I understand that college professors want students to, "Do your own work." Still, building relationships with colleagues is real-world work. Using the latest tools to be productive is real-world work. Learning how to do real-world work is something you should do in college and something college professors should be teaching.

This 75-year-old writer is going to write a novel every two weeks. He is a story teller. He will tell stories. Enough said.

Everyone, read this little essay. It's about perspective and sympathy and caring.

So if you tell stories four hours a day, that is 16 novels in a year. This is simple math. But but but but... stop that and sit and tell stories.

Tuesday 4 November 2025

Today is election day in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Statewide offices up for election include Governor, Lt Governor, and Attorney General. As usual, the results are interpreted as reaction to the President. One hope is that the government shutdown will end soon thereafter. How many folks out their in the middle of America know that the Federal Government is closed?

I love this headline, "What Happened When Small-Town America Became Data Center, U.S.A."

Report from Chainalysis, beware of decentralized finance.

This is hard to believe, but Nintendo reports Q2 revenue up 90%.

And Palantir reports Q3 revenue up 63%.

Cognizant will deploy Anthropic's Claude to its 350,000 employees.

Apple releases updates to all its operating systems to 26.1.

I've never heard of Facebook Dating, but they have 21million daily active users.

Here's another good headline, "arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated Research Papers" They publish yet-to-be-published papers. Excellent source of information. But, they get spam, too.

Microsoft will spend $8Billion in the United Arab Emirates on technology. Big money partners.

New tech to commit old crimes: it seems that organized criminals (who are they? more organized than unorganized criminals) are paying hackers to help them hijack trucking shipments of goods.

I'm trying to follow the geography here, but following the $10Billion is even more difficult. Microsoft of Washington State is buying chips made in Texas by an Australian company to use somewhere else.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet (I don't understand why): Coca-Cola has created more AI-created ads for this Christmas and lots of folks dislike it.

AI-generated videos are fooling even the professional journalists (who would have thunk that?). Don't believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see.

Right on schedule: take away the $7,500 bribe to buy an electric car and people stop buying electric cars.

OpenAI signs deal to buy $38Billion in computing power from Amazon. Perhaps this is some sort of record number.

The Internet Archive lives on after losing many legal battles over its lofty goals. Look folks, authors want money for the use of their works. I understand the concept of a library online, but see previous sentence.

Wednesday 5 November 2025

As usual, Virginia flip flops and elects a governor of the other party from the prior governor.

There is money flying around the pornography industry in America.

Fear and loathing at our National Security Agency.

This is all convoluted. To run a factory you need skilled people. Hire them and train them. But if we train everyone, we have lots of potential workers so we can pay lower salaries.

I love this word: bragawatts. All these super duper datacenters are bragging rights for the various celebrity CEOs. Who cares about the world's tallest building. We want the world's biggest electric bill.

Low-wage workers in India fold towels in front of cameras so that robots will learn how to do it and replace the low-wage workers so that they become no-wage people. It's a paycheck for the short term.

And we have more news about archives of copyrighted works. Creators want to be paid. Others want to preserve for the next generations. See prior sentence.

AMD reports a big financial quarter.

Project Suncatcher: Google has an idea of putting datacenters in low-earth orbit where the sun will shine on them all the time and power will be free and so will real estate and ...

Quoting, "Amazon Web Services (AWS) will lay a new subsea cable across the ocean floor, connecting Maryland and Ireland." What is new here is they plan to bury the cable a few feet under the sea floor to protect it. That is smart.

Stronger rumors that next year Apple will have a laptop that costs less ($500 would be nice, but they are shooting for $1,000). They will "target people who primarily browse the web, work on documents or conduct light media editing, and will be sold for well under $1,000." That sounds like me, but again, $500 sounds about right. Tests show that the intended iPad processor will perform a little better than the M1 processor. I use the M1 processor now to my satisfaction.

Studies in the UK show that it is us old folks who stare at the screen all day.

IBM announces thousands of job cuts.

Finally, chip designers stack layers of processors instead of packing more transistors in a flat space. This has been rumored for 30 years.

Thursday 6 November 2025

In addition to the lower-priced laptop, strong rumors of Apple bringing their newest M5 processor to desktop computers.

More evidence that Kodak and film have returned.

Thoughts on applying some DevOps pipeline principles to AI and machine learning. It is basic systems development.

At least someone is thinking about return on investment in AI use at work.

"AI systems, and generative AI models in particular, are notoriously flawed ... AI outputs are not facts; they're predictions." It is good to see that somene has a grasp off these things. This article is about the misuse of AI in warfare. People die. Real people die based on these flawed predictions.

Fear of a few super rich partnering with government for the benefit of the few super rich.

We live in a time when a $600 phone is considered inexpensive. Gosh.

An optimistic take on the looming AI bubble. Back in the day, America-On Line burst with the dot-com bubble. AoL, however, constructed data lines and buildings that are still used for good things. The factories to produce processors and the electric power capacity produced today will serve good for a long time to come.

This is a funny one: government agencies telling private companies that they need to take more care with cuber security. Ha.

Sony unveils the Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark dataset. They claim that everyone whose image is in the dataset gave permission and that the dataset is representative and fair and all that good stuff.

The Washington Post is investigation how our Veteran's Affairs spends money. That is an easy target. Good grief, talk about waste and the need for efficiency.

Inflation at McDonald's is driving away low-income customers. They don't have a dollar menu any more. Here in Reston, Virginia a person spends close to $10 for drink, burger, and fries. And yet, McDonald's remains the lowest-price burger place. Others charge $20 for the same meal.

Here is something a little different. A ring (the kind you wear on your finger) with a microphone and Internet connection. It listens and converts speech to text.

Google claims its Deep Research tool in Gemini can now use the content in Gmail and Gdrive.

Arm reports a good financial quarter.

Meanwhile in China, if you want to build a datacenter, you have to use domestic products only. Leave it to the Communists to stifle innovation and productivity.

Only in California...the Zuckerburgs had the gall to teach their children. This qualified their home as a school. Schools are zoned in that neighborhood. And the rest goes downhill quickly. Good grief.

Friday 7 November 2025

Suicide and harmful delusions are awful. No one is in favor of such and no one causes such on purpose. Still, in California, folks sue OpenAI claiming willful harm.

Meanwhile at Oxford, they study the studies that AI companies study and find that...well, the marketers are running the show and really can't show much in the way of science when it comes to results. I can literally spit out an essay in five minutes, so what?

It appears our Congressional Budget Office has been hacked by some "foreign actor." Congress has a budget office? Do those folks know how to add and subtract numbers?

Meanwhile at Tesla, the shareholders approve a Trillion-dollar pay package for Mr. Musk. The things is so complicated that we need to have weekday names with four A's in them for the package to kick in.

Write books for Kindle? Amazon may soon have a tool that translates your writings into other languages.

Promises from our Federal government heads that none of our AI companies are too big to fail.

To date, Microsoft has backed OpenAI and used its tools. Now, Microsoft plots its own course to become independent in AI.

Meanwhile in America, companies announce the most job cuts in 20 years. Is it AI or is it correcting for hiring too many people who produce too little?

It as been 40 years, but we now have another undersea habitat so we can learn something or other. Let's see, it has been 50+ years since man walked on the moon. Still waiting on that one.

We'll go to the last place on earth to build a datacenter.

a16Z has a New Media Fellowship program. It looks like it is setup for insiders to become insiders.

Meanwhile in Europe, they don't have any self-driving cars. They seem to be getting along just fine.

What are gonna' do with America's youth? They like YouTube more than TV. And what is "TV" anyways?

Make a little money on the side by training AI systems to do more than ... well, whatever they do now.

Saturday 8 November 2025

I didn't find much in Internet viewing this morning.

Mr. Zuckerberg promises Mr. Trump that he will invest $600Billion (with a B) in the US in the next three years. That is a large number.

Our nation's capitol is host to the worst team in pro basketball. Our major league baseball team is a little better, but not much. Our NFL team is falling apart. Well, at least we have, uh, er, give me a day or two to think of something.

Google research claims an advance in continual learning.

Some thoughts on a lower-price Apple portable computer coming next year. As the story notes, the M1=powered MacBook Air, which is what I am using daily, still sells well. The strongly rumored new MacBook Air with an iPhone processor will have a little more power than this machine. I have a PhD in Engineering. This machine does everything I need from a portable machine. Bring on a $500 machine!

News from Washington D.C., no free Direct File for income tax this year. The government should not compete with private industry. Also, the government should not make income tax so complicated that an entire industry grew around it.

Sunday 9 November 2025

Rivian spins off an industrial robotics company.

The great AI buildout, that seems to be what folks are calling it, spurs big growth in laying undersea data cables. That is important. The world running on a few such data cables. That allowed the ne'er-do-wells to hold many hostage with the threat of cutting them. With more and more cables, such threats are not believable.

The AI buildout is big in Asia-Pacific as well.

American schools, having mastered the science of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, (NOT) are delving more into monitoring kids with AI. Good grief. Talk about requirements drift!

More musings on the coming lower-price Apple portable computer. Apple hasn't said anything yet, so these are all rumors.

Okay America, take in this next sentence and show some pride: Eight of the world's top 10 most valuable companies are AI-centric or AI-ish AMERICAN corporate giants --- Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Broadcom, Meta and Tesla. Come on, a little happiness goes a long way.

The scam is everywhere. It appears that Facebook knowingly ran ads for scammers and got rich doing it.

Someone demonstrates a working cargo ship powered by the wind. Well, it sort of worked.

The Firefox browser has a new fox logo.

Analysis shows that analysis of LLMs and such is pretty bad. I guess that is a meta-analysis problem.

And here we are in 2025. Someone created a children's book about the alphabet. The book has 1,000 illustrations created by AI not human illustrators. Paying for all those illustrations would have made the $30 book cost $1,000. Good for kids and parents of kids. But what about the illustrators who didn't contribute for pay? And what about the illustrators whose illustrations were used to train the AI system. They weren't paid either. You see, when we eliminate jobs for some people, other people benefit with lower prices. And we eliminate jobs for some people. Cut the grass for your elderly neighbor to help them. That is a good deed, but you have eliminated a job for a grass cutter.

And with that puzzle, I end this week.