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: 17-23 November, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The billion$ keep flowing to datacenters and partnerships
• The Jeffrey Epstein files are still in the news
• What will happend first? Epstein files over with or Russians leave Ukraine?
• Saudis visit the White House, big tech deals follow soon thereafter

Monday 17 November 2025

Okay, so you make a toy that talks to kids. Okay...now...you install software written by someone else and you really don't know how that software works or what it will say...and then bad things happen... and you are surprised. Any adults work at your company?

Want to avoid the regulators? Build you datacenter in orbit.

The Intenet Archive, a fun place to work (?), is saving prompts and replies of these chattering bots.

Here is a no duh moment: crypto mining rigs generate heat. It is cold in the winter. Well, need I go further?

One writer's experience in the long road to publishing a technology book.

This writer has big plans and challenges. It shows what a person can do. And this guy is in his 70s. Step up to the keyboard. And if you don't like the keyboard, dictate. MS Word et al. allow dictation. Do it.

This piece asks, "Is Your Writing Good Enough to Publish?" Sure. Why not?

Quoting, "memoir is about connected events, not chronological storytelling --- and how to transform random experiences into compelling plot "

One writer's misconceptions about the memoir.

This piece is centered on the Miraculous Staircase in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I visited it years ago. From the writer, "story is held up by something invisible. Something sturdy but unseen. "

People want stories. I recall reading that same thing from Jerry Pournelle many years ago.

I like this: the myth of the right process. Sometimes you just write.

Tuesday 18 November 2025

Clash of the titans at Oxford over funding and research directions with Larry Ellison and 10billion pounds at stake.

We have a new benchmark for these chattering bots and their hallucinations, i.e., oops, we got the wrong answer.

Arm and Nvidia work together so that their processors can work together.

Buy a Ford vehicle on Amazon.

Google's DeepMind claims a newer and better weather predictor. Let's see.

Meanwhile in Europe, regulators want to decide if successful American companies should be regulated more in Europe by European regulators. Yes, this does go around in a circle and the outcome is quite predictable.

How do you recycle clothing? Bury it in the backyard, silly. It will degrade into dirt.

Researchers at US Berkeley decipher whale language. Will that soon come to Google Translate et al.?

Another great advance in science (not), we can now track individual butterflies. Huh?

Meanwhile in South America with fewer regulators and regulations, folks are buying Chinese-made electric vehicles.

Google continues to collect data from old Nest thermostats. Data is the new oil or something like that. Some folks know how to pump it and use it. Others, a.k.a., Federal government...well, still floundering.

What can AI do? How about 3,000 podcasts a week? Automating tasks. Simple stuff.

Meanwhile in Iran, the are dumping stuff into the air to make it rain. What could possible go wrong? Much.

Wednesday 19 November 2025

Study shows that researchers from China who come to America stay here. Life is good here folks. The longer they stay, they longer they will stay.

Fox News contracts with Palantir for technology help.

Boston Dynamics reports that dozens of American and Canadian law enforcement agencies use its "robot dog" in bomb squads. Send in the machine and go home safe to your family at the end of the day.

A look at Tsinghua University in Beijing. It leads in AI patents. Let us not forgot that it was created by Theodore Roosevelt in 1911 to help China educate its best.

Meanwhile in Europe where the regulators gotta regulate, TSMC is trying to build a factory in Germany as it attempts to abide by all the regulations.

In America, we have 50 different sets of AI regulations and such. This makes it difficult for national AI technology to keep pace with China. It also makes it easier for companies that find one state that has better benefits than the other 49.

Some testing of Windows 11 Copilot. Good intentions where the reach is still further than the grasp.

More information about Microsoft and how it is trying to put AI into Windows to do useful things.

Microsoft and Nvidia keep pouring billion$ into Anthropic.

Google updates its Gemini to version 3. I usually don't link to all these "we are now better" things as that would take an encyclopedia. Anyways...

More tripping and falling from the Jeffrey Epstein files. This is all bad news. Rich people and people acting like they were rich behaving badly and abusing people who were poor and needed money. It is a travesty. What is the use of keeping a running tally of how many D, R, liberal, conservative, whatever participated? Change your ways.

These travellers find a good use for the chattering bots.

I find this hard to believe, but why not? Most used passwords are still 12345 and 123456. Oh well.

Thursday 20 November 2025

Saudis visit the White House. The Washington Post screams all sorts of things. Big business deals follow the visit. The Washington Post claims that the Saudis killed one of there reporters, i.e., someone who once wrote a paragraph for them. Always ready to pounce on someone, they keep repeating the story with a more-than-slight tilt in their direction. Time will tell, maybe.

A semi-annual presentation on major technology trends. AI eats the world is the theme of this one. Aptly put.

Meanwhile in Poland, tech services drive the economy. AI may be driving out tech services jobs.

Perhaps quantum sensors will replace the GPS system. If you have a sensor on board that relies on nothing else, nothing else can be jammed, so you are always okay.

Meanwhile in China, they are adopting self-driving vehicles across many industries. This is good if you have no skilled labor and bad if you want to keep up employment.

Meanwhile in Europe where regulators gotta regulate, a few folks are now asking for more consideration in the regulated state.

Nvidia plans to rent $26Billion in cloud servers. If you can't or don't want to buy, rent instead. That is the promise of cloud computing.

Speaking of servers, shipments of them from Taiwan to the US are doubling this year. Invade Taiwan? Are you kidding? Only a fool would do that. Sorry, the world has plenty of fools.

Speaking of Taiwan, Google opens an AI infrastructure hardware engineering hub there.

Our Dept of Commerce approves Nvidia's sale of 35,000 processors to countries in the middle east.

Nvidia reports yet another unbelievable financial quarter with figures up 60% and the like. They are printing money there.

Not sure if you want to watch a video on Amazon Prime? Get a quick video recap. I guess this solves one of the world's pressing requirements?

OpenAI claims wonderful things for its new GPT-5.1-Codex-Max.

And OpenAI announces ChatGPT for Teachers. They claim student privacy and guidance and such. They are also offering it at no charge $$$ for a year or so.

Elon Musk goes to Saudi Arabia to build a braggawatt datacenter.

A handful of companies initially focused on bitcoin mining that have pivoted to AI while tech companies pursue one of the most expensive infrastructure build-outs in U.S. history.

Friday 21 November 2025

Changes in Windows plus more game on Linux pushes one person to install Linux on the machines.

More notes on how Nvidia is building stuff and making money.

Quoting the headline, "Verizon is laying off over 13,000 workers"

A side note to this article is that MS Windows is 40 years old. Yep. I used Windows 1.0 which was quite odd.

\ Drive a Chinese truck into a mine. Block all RF. Try to hack into it.

Meanwhile in the UK, the governors pledge 100 million pounds towards helping companies build AI. Pennies (or shillings or something) in this world.

Survey says...US adults use YouTube and Facebook with the others trailing behind. I guess I've never considered YouTube as society media.

Google is offering voluntary buyouts in the US and UK. Take some money and leave before we fire you.

The Allen Institute for AI, or Ai2, has some new LLMs that outperform other open models.

Some experiments with Google's Nano Banana Pro. This is amazing. These are high-quality images created by someone who types some descriptions and poof is an image. Amazing stuff.

Coming real soon now, enough of this AI-written emails. This robotics company has robots that clear the dining room table and load the dishwasher. We shall see.

The western world is safe...well, sort of as Microsoft and Qualcomm releases updates so that playing video games on Windows systems is better. Is this a good use of all these talented engineers?

Our Dept of Energy works with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle to bring lower-cost AI super duper computers to national labs. Somewhere in this scheme, the companies are paying some of the cost. That is called a loss leader.

This is a good study: for software engineers, consider pay, consider cost of living, and where do you go? I am surprised that Seattle is at the top as it has a high cost of living and some bad things going on in the city.

Skipping the Google search for other, newer tools.

Saturday 22 November 2025

No Internet viewing as I was travelling today.

Sunday 23 November 2025

Harper's magazine on all the hyperbole and marketing on humanoid robots. We are infatuated with the possibility of these machines. Grow up. Does the Roomba look anything like a human? Does it work? Emphatic NO and YES.

Meanwhile in Arizona, we are building the valley of the silicon sun or some cute real esate agent phrase.

Most of the current wave of AI systems is trained on what is on the Internet. Everyone has access to the Internet. The result is predictable and was predicted. The Russians are flooding the Internet so that AI talks like Mr. Putin. That is one famous case. There are many others not so famous, but equal in influence.

Good times at Alphabet with Google's Gemini 3 received happily. This is opposed to the yawns that greeted GPT-5.1 from OpenAI.

Meanwhile at AMD, three years ago they moved to AI processors. The value of the company tripled.

Bitmain Technologies of Beijing, China (yes, that place) is the world leader in make crypto currency mining rigs. Uh, well, the maker claims the machines don't surveil their surroundings and phone home data to you know who.

Want to read the Jeffrey Epstein emails (isn't everyone supposed to want that?)? This site reformats everything to look like an email account. Well, there are worse things to do with your time.

I'll quote the title of this piece from a major online news source: The Climate Impact of Owning a Dog See comment above. I guess there are worse things to do with your time than making up a research report on the climate impact of a pet. Good grief. What will people think of us 100 years or even 10 years from now?

Meanwhile in Chicago, the governors make their guaranteed basic income program permanent. Note: permanent is a prediction of the future, and we aren't good at predicting the future. The idea: instead of giving people money for specific things, e.g., food, rent, heat in the winter, etc. give them money with no strings attached. I like the idea if you eliminate all the programs that are tied to specific items. Save the taxpayers' money in all the administrative costs. I doubt the practical implementations meet what I desire.

This ends what is an odd week for me. I was furloughed as part of the reaction to the Federal government sort of shutdown. I was out two weeks. I came back to the office this past week. And then I am taking a week off, well sort of, and such for a holiday family gathering. The schedule has been completely different for the past seven days. Things like that are good for a person.