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: 24-30 November, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• US government launches Genesis Mission technology program
• AWS to invest $50Billion in high-performance compute for government customers
• Thanksgiving Day in America
• I am closing out this week on Saturday night instead of Sunday morning

Monday 24 November 2025

Let's role play ICE raids to ... well, to do something. Not sure about all this.

DOGE was short lived. It's influence was large. A few people showed what could be done. Many agencies actually changed. Let's see if the change was just a blip or has some lasting influence.

X now has a feature called About This Account in which users can find out a few things about other users. Things like folks who claim to live in Gaza but really live in Canada and are just making up stuff. Hmm. Seems like all is not what it seems.

I like this piece. Quite controversial to some. The Second Amendment of the US Constitution is for all American citizens. Even those of us who are on the margins. I think that makes all of us.

The job market is currently broken. Sigh.

It appears that the core features of Windows 11 often break.

Some advances in tiny robots that will flow through the human body to precisely deliver medicine.

Meanwhile at MIT, where trust and integrity and the advancement of knowledge and all that are ... well, they used to be prevalent. Uh, er, maybe not any longer?

Meanwhile on Mars, perhaps that fabled underground lake of water didn't exist after all. Put a pause on the Starbucks on Mars that makes coffee with local water. Call me when we are doing that.

Some thoughts on the idea of micro-tension.

Dean Wesley Smith changes his challenge. He has about 800 short stories on the shelf and putting them into collections is a lot of work in itself. I know as I once put 1,500 blog posts into three collections.

And Smith is delving more into the types of things that Jerry Pournelle did at Chaos Manor. Doing foolish things so you don't have to.

This is a good piece on financial risk and freelancing. Being a freelancer incurs much financial risk. Understand that and work with it.

Here are practical tips on reducing some of that risk. You have to be making money to save any money. If you aren't making any money, you should not be freelancing. That is easier said than lived by many, but it is true. One famous writer had a full-time job and wrote in the evenings. Writing brought income. He decided that he would write full time only if his writing equaled his full-time job two years in a row.

Actions a successful writer does. Number one is write. Number two is write. So on. See Mr. Smith and his challenges above.

Looking to magazines for writing income. This is much more difficult than even just in the 1990s. There just aren't nearly as magazines that pay as there were.

Tuesday 25 November 2025

Law enforcement used Flock cameras to watch the people at "No Kings" protests. This is portrayed as evil police state. Imagine, however, that a nut drove by a protest and shot a bunch of protestors. The use of the Flock cameras would enable quickly catching and prosecuting the shooter. Oh, so perhaps the Flock cameras were there to protect protestors. Hmm.

Need more computer power? Google will increases its power by 1,000x in the next five years. That is not 1,000%. It is 1,0000 times what the power is today.

This piece is quite optimistic about the potential for AI in Europe.

Our President recently hosted rulers from Saudi Arabia. Now all the Gulf States are buying American AI processors instead of dealing with China. Hmm. Perhaps someone knew what they were doing?

A related story on Gulf States businesses in Silicon Valley.

Everybody wants some AI. Nations learned from their PC and Windows mistake where they all bought American without even trying to do their own. For AI, everyone is trying to do their own.

Meanwhile in China, once the world's factory, declining population and other mishaps are causing them to push automation with robotics and AI.

Is it censorship or "combatting coordinated inauthentic behavior?" I like that phrase. There is something to demanding that folks tell you who they are and not hiding their self. Then, if everyone is required to do that, much truth will not be told. In our world today, not everyone can afford to tell the whole truth. That is not new as that has existed for centuries.

More news about how Meta is financing its datacenter in Louisiana. The cost seems to have settled at $27Billion. Originally, it was a mere $10Billion. These are big numbers.

President Trump signed an executive order Monday creating the Genesis Mission. Heralded as the largest national science program since the Apollo moon mission of the 1960s, this is supposed to created compute resources for scientists across America in widely differing fields. Create AI, create energy, create medicine and so on. Build something.

Zoom is still in business. It became THE thing to use during COVID panic. Since then, business uses Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft releases a smaller AI model to run on local machines and do wonderful things. We shall see about this. And I hope this works. We need some smarts in all this AI stuff.

The NGA awards a big data-labeling contract to a company called Enabled Intelligence.

Amazon Web Services rents computers to government agencies. They've done that for over ten years. They announce another big push to build $50Billion in advanced computing so that government employees can look at each other in meetings while someone waits for them to decide what to do with all this compute power. What a waste.

Wednesday 26 November 2025

And we have reports that the demise of DOGE was not true.

317,000 federal employees left the government this year, while 68,000 joined. This leaves 2.1million Federal employees.

Per McKinsey, The state of AI in 2025.

Buy buy and buy some more. With all these Billion$ spent on datacenters, the prices of various forms of memory have risen. Some memory systems are now 3x the price of six months ago.

Meanwhile in Malaysia, they are slowing up a bit on datacenters.

Microsoft cancels a datacenter in Wisconsin. This happens all the time. It just isn't reported.

For the first time in 15 years, Apple will pass Samsung as the maker of the most smartphones in the world. Apple invented around 2008, it took Samsung just a couple of years to be #1.

WARNING WARNING WARNING take care is you use a Thanksgiving recipe you found on Google. It might be a phony and all that stuff.

Per MIT and Hugging Face, the downloads of Chinese open AI models passes that of American open models. Of course the concept of what is an "open AI model" changes daily. And of course, most American companies are not releasing their AI models as "open."

Let's form a lobbying group to push or stop AI regulations. Note, while $50million would pay off my house, it is 1/1,000th the money spent on a datacenter. Chump change.

Speaking of chump change, that is what the "we have our own AI GPU processor" looks like to Nvidia.

Dell reports a good financial quarter.

And more fussing about a datacenter. Bessemer, Alabama is part of Birmingham. I guess it's on the edge of the city (I drive through it several times a year, stop at Jack's restaurant). Still, everyone has an opinion while almost no one has any details.

Thursday 27 November 2025

Happy Thanksgiving Day. In America, this is Thanksgiving Day. Something about the fourth Thursday in November or something. We attribute this to folks in our history who were thankful that they had a good harvest and had stored enough crops to sustain them through the winter. Their children would not die this winter. I have never had a situation where I doubted if my children would live through the winter. Food has never been short of supply. There has always been a roof, warm and dry beds, and clothing. Food, shelter, clothing --- never been a worry. Thank you God.

And how much gold do you have?

Quoting, An MIT study finds that AI can replace 11.7% of the US labor market, or about $1.2T in wages

More on the shortage of computer hardware in memory systems.

Quoting the headline, "You can play classic Nintendo games on these custom SNES-inspired Nike sneakers" Well, why not? I suppose there are worse things to do in your spare time.

Nvidia claims to be at least a generation ahead of other AI processor makers. The stock market doesn't believe the claim.

HP to cut about 6,000 jobs in the next couple of years.

A reminder that good old undersea cables carry about 95% of the world's Internet traffic. And there are plenty of ne'er-do-wells who can cut them.

It appears that AI is rewriting the Internet. Please note, I produce this and have for 15+ years. AI does not write this, so don't blame it on AI.

Meanwhile in Mexico, the governors plan to build what they claim will be Latin America's biggest super duper computer.

Friday 28 November 2025

Researchers create a tool so that folks don't have to see posts they don't like. Hmm, seems like there is a low-tech version of that or something. Perhaps I don't understand this story.

Meanwhile in Australia, new law requires global streamers, e.g., Netflix and Disney, to spend money in Australia. If you sell here, you must also buy here.

It seems that much of this datacenter economy is built on borrowed money (and borrowed time). Not good.

Meanwhile in China, there is the threat of a bubble in humanoid robotics.

Motorola, now that is an old American brand name, is alive and doing pretty well. They made the 68000 line of microprocessors that battled the Intel 8086 line. Motorola's had technical advantages, but the market went to Intel.

Some folks seem to have a grasp on the idea that "made with AI" is just plain silly.

Even our patent office gets a grip on reality. AI is a tool, not a person that uses tools. No duh.

Quoting the headline from MIT, "What we still don't know about weight-loss drugs" I hope those drugs don't turn out to be a nightmare.

From Dell, folks are not flocking to Windows 11. I didn't realize that Win 10 was ten years old. It was one of those Windows releases that people liked. Win 7, Win XP, were among the others. Win 8...no so much.

Well, let's have a contest about creating a Thanksgiving Day meal that would be impossible in real life, but we can imagine and have AI create a photo.

A tragedy in Hong Kong with a high rise on fire.

Meanwhile in Canada, a few folks recognize that the climate change limits limited the economy and are reversing course.

Saturday 29 November 2025

More information on the Genesis Mission.

Let's look at all this unstructured information and try to make sense of it. The Holy Grail of just about everyone, even those who don't know it.

Some actual good use for all this AI stuff: cochlear implants that "learn." We used to call this adjusting to the inputs, but now we have to call it learning.

Use the Slop Evader to find older things on the Internet, not slop generated by generative AI junk.

Strong rumors that Apple will contract with Intel to manufacture the Apple-designed M-series processors.

Paulina Borsook wrote "Cyberselfish" 25 years ago. It sold almost no copies. Today, however, it is selling. In it, Silicon Valley, Ms. Borsook wrote, hated governments, rules and regulations. It believed if you were rich, you were smart.

An analysis of AI processors from three different companies. Nvidia does win.

Guess what? American still use YouTube and Facebook. This maligned society media systems are far more popular than the ones who are in the headlines.

Banning the Chinese drones from DJI. Of course they phone home to the Communist Party of China. Sigh.

Fascinating article on computer science and jobs and such. All over the place, but it has many useful comments.

The 5 why's approach at Palantir. It is an old method. Ask Why to a problem. Get the answer. Ask Why again. Repeat at least five times. The real problem usually surfaces by then. A similar approach is to ask, "And then what happens?"

Sunday 30 November 2025