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: 8-14 December, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Biggest story in the world: Netflix buying WBD
• OpenAI turns ten years old
• Rivian to build its own self-driving hardware and software
• Michigan football has a horrible week

Monday 8 December 2025

Google touts its Gemini 3 Pro Vision. Its capability to read old handwritten tables and create new digital recreations is impressive.

The CEO of Google's DeepMind push for scaling or more more and more data.

Turning real money into crypto currency is becoming easier.

Etiquette camp for tech bros. I wrote an essay asking for this a few years ago. My complaint is that this is open only to the rich guys running companies.

College accomodate students with disabilities. My granddaughter has poor vision (really poor). I trust colleges will accomodate her vision. Expensive, privileged colleges, however, are really turning on the accommodations.

Those folks in their 20s are returning to older devices like cameras and radios.

Quoting: bad meetings generate even more meetings... in an attempt to repair the damage caused by previous ones...

One more time...maybe this time will work. Convert waste heat into energy as electricity.

Students are still paying for essay-writing services over no-charge generative AI. They claim the quality is still worth the price.

at its core, publishing is a business. It is if you want to make any money. Otherwise, it is a hobby and one of the better hobbies out there.

Quoting, "Every year I watch hundreds of writers just keep doing what they have been doing, make no real changes going into a new year, and then get to the end of the year wondering what went wrong. "

Quoting, "A successful writer focuses on process rather than product. Show up, be a student of the craft, love the work, and you will be successful regardless of the outcome." Agreed.

Dean Wesley Smith keeps churning out the content.

Write via dictating. This is strange for many of us, but try it. If it works, and it may, keep using it.

Guess what? People still read printed books.

Tuesday 9 December 2025

It seems that the most important news in the world is Netflix buying Warner Brothers. Everyone has an opinion. Every regulator claims a stake. Everyone everywhere is yelling something.

Meanwhile in China, some wisdom from the governors as they reject Nvidia processors in favor of growing their own industry.

The other side of this is that people are still smuggling Nvidia processors into China.

And in Australia, they prepare for the world's largest experiment with teenagers.

Reddit joins in with its experiment with teenagers.

This is a long and deep review of AI in 2025.

The browser of the web is changing. Hence, the design of the web is changing as well.

Reddit joins in with its experiment with teenagers.

The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems drew a record crowd this year.

Warning: some folks use AI to write papers and they create historical research out of thin air. See the Internatonal Committee of the Red Cross.

Apple and Google create ways to move data among their respective mobile systems.

Federalism versus Statism in the world of AI regulation.

Everyone is (attempting to) making computing devices or devices with computers in them. Uh, well, you have to buy memory chips to do that and, us, well, er, you see those datacenters?

Wednesday 10 December 2025

How fast does a computer processor depreciate? Silly question? Nope. Big money at stake here.

Firefox 146 has been released.

And now we return to Violence-as-a-Service VaaS.

Survey days, about two-thirds of the American teenager use these chatter bots.

And Australia moves forward with its experiment with the teenager.

Amazon to pour a few more tens of billion$ into India.

It appears that Nvidia has built a phone home feature into its processors so they report where they are.

A group of tech companies works on an AI method to analyze tumors.

Boom makes engines for supersonic jets. Those engines can also be used to generate electricity for datacenters.

Should everyone pay the same price for the same thing in the same location at the same time?

A government contract for Google and its Gemini for Government. They call it GenAI.

Thursday 11 December 2025

News about GenAI.mil. This story is completely misleading. Google isn't powering the site. Gemini is just the first system on the site. Others from the other big players will be there soon.

Microsoft's Excel turns 40 years old. Bring back VisiCalc!!!

Here is a No Duh moment for America's colleges:  The implication is stark: if instruction becomes abundant and cheap, colleges must sell what remains scarce -- genuine human community.

 The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine produced a 200-page report on why we should send people to Mars. Well, uh, er, so someone would actually read the 200-page report.

Quoting: Meta's newly recruited AI "superstars" have developed an us-versus-them mentality against the company's longtime executive leadership. Well, no one would have predicted that! NOT

Notes from the Allen Institute contending that artificial general intelligence will not come from the current chattering bots and such.

Quoting the headline: A look at the Model Context Protocol and how it went from a passion project made by Anthropic employees to an industry standard managed by the Linux Foundation.

There are claims that China's power grid is so good and powerful that they have a huge edge in all the AI datacenters. Note, claims from such governments are usually inflated, see, e.g., the power of the Russian army. Also note, in China, the rulers have no qualms about turning off the power to subjects' homes to power a datacenter.

Meanwhile here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Operation Bluebird seeks to create or recreate a new Twitter. Since Mr. Musk went to X.com, they argue that all the logos and names and such are up for grabs.

Meanwhile on Microsoft's Copilot, folks discuss health, career, and relationships.

I'll just quote this headline as I don't know how it comment on its lunacy: A group of US state AGs sent a letter to Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others warning their chatbots' delusional outputs could be violating state laws

Real news that isn't news: in Europe, a successful American company readies for a big fine from European regulators. The regulators are accusing the successful American company of being a successful American company that is so successful that it can pay a big fine. This is not a "tariff," but it might as well be as it is the cost of doing business in Europe.

Putting computing resources in orbit. Does air conditioning cost that much to cover the cost of space launches?

Well, here is a one-processor datacenter already running in orbit.

Now we can share live video on 911 calls.

If an Intel 8086 processor is found in a Russian-made weapon in Ukraine... Folks, you can't make it up.

Something new for protecting intellectual property: Really Simple Licensing 1.0 --- or RSL for short --- gives publishers the ability to dictate licensing and compensation rules to the web crawlers that visit their sites.

If you can't buy it from China, start a business and mine it somewhere else. That's business.

Friday 12 December 2025

Affordability seems to be the word in the news this week. Portable computers are affordable right now. Prices, however, may jump next year as all the datacenters eat all the parts.

Quoting: A man in Atlanta has been arrested and charged for allegedly deleting data from a Google Pixel phone before a member of a secretive Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unit was able to search it. I guess this is destroying evidence or something. Is it evidence if no one has been charged and no crime has been committed?

Quoting: While tech executives tout AI's potential to transform business, users are spending the majority of their time engaging in character-driven conversations, interactive fiction, and gaming scenarios. Well, there are less-productive things to do with time and tools.

Still, some companies are using AI for the good of their business. It is the same old story: Got a new tool? Great! Let's find real work for it as opposed to making it available so employees can use it for Fantasy Football.

Meanwhile in the rest of the world, Starlink is the best alternative for Internet connectivity.

Yikes! Disney and OpenAI partner. Disney invest a billlion $$$. OpenAI has access to all of Disney's characters and such.

It appears that those who owe money on student loans will have to pay money on student loans. Wait, isn't that how it's supposed to work?

Meanwhile in Ukraine, more innovation with drones and such. Yet no one can make any headway in the war.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, they open the their newest and largest AI supercomputing data center using Nvidia's Blackwell chips.

Meanwhile in Australia, instead of technology progressing, the lawyers pile up the fees as folks sue one another.

And in America, we go the Australian route with lawyers instead of technology.

OpenAI, once a not-for-profit research company, is now ten years old and its CEO is a celebrity fella.

And OpenAI releases GPT-5.2 which is, of course, so much better than 5.1 that we don't know how we got along with that 5.1 anyhows.

Broadcom reports a good financial quarter.

Time magazines names "the architects of AI" as its man of the year or whatever they call it. Okay, enough is enough. Someone uses an decades-old pattern recognition technique and AI is eating the world. I suppose it is simply too much to ask for so called journalists to understand any of this?

Rivian, maker of those stylish and expensive electric vehicles, jumps into the market of self-driving vehicles by announcing its work on a 5-nm processor and a self-driving model.

Meanwhile at Stanford, researchers built a hacking bot that hacks networks better than anything before it. I trust that these folks keep this thing locked up. It wouldn't be good for such to run wild everywhere and hack everything.

It appears that the American teenager has no trust in the American journalist. I wonder how that happened? Actually, I don't wonder.

Saturday 13 December 2025

Cisco, yes they are still here, hit a record high value in stock.

Speaking of quietly doing quite well are Seagate and Western Digital. Yes, all these new super giant datacenters use a lot of disk drives.

And still the top story in the world is Netflix trying to buy WBD.

And the other most important story in the world this past week is that the university of Michigan fired the coach of the professional football team associated with the university. He had an affair with another employee and then had that employee promoted. This is all illegal at a publicly funded place. Then after the firing, the coach went berserk and threatened to kill himself and maybe others as well. It is all a sordid episode. I hope for some good outcome for some persons.

Back in the mid-1980s (yes, I am that old) in the earlier days of the home PC, everyone made their own version of Monopoly. Then everyone discovered that the game had a copyright and all those folks making and selling games were, uh, er, breaking the law. We repeat that experience today with folks making videos of movie characters that are copyrighted and all that.

Another continuing story is Federalism versus statism in AI regulations. I suppose it is too much to hope for those in government to understand what they are doing and understand the nature of this think we loosely call "AI."

It appears that shortages in resources are delaying the completion of some datacenters. Some want to deny this. Good grief, it's basic management. You can't make apple pie until the apples arrive.

Meanwhile in India, here come a couple of new Apple factories that will bring 100,000 jobs.

I'll just copy the headline: Google researchers find the best AI model is 69% right. Well, that doesn't sound too good, does it? And another side of this is that writing a pretty good email (AI does this for us) is good enough. We neither expect nor need excellence. Or have we just settled for blah blah blah?

Well, it was a good try. Amazon had a Recaps feature to summarize the prior seasons of a show. It was recapping poorly, and users noted such.

And speaking of pretty good but not too good, the Washington Post has lots of errors in its podcasts created from its own content.

What's next? Are the Ukrainians going to sue Microsoft because the Russians use Windows and Word?

A man from China flees to the US, tells Americans Chinese secrets, is hunted by the Chinese governors, and the hunters use American technology in America to hunt a friend of America. I think I got this all straight. You can't make this stuff up.

It takes more than one generation to jump in income and economic well being. Still, the jump is quite probable.

If you want to sell your AI system to the Federal government, you must disclose its political bias. There are always strings attached to these things.

Sunday 14 December 2025

What's a crypto casino. "Crypto casinos have become online gambling havens for teens and problem gamblers" Sounds like the ne'er-do-wells have found another way to take money from others. A shame.

Meanwhile in China, it appears that the governors are pouring more money into robotics and electric vehicles than into AI.

A lesson in resource management: construction workers are building datacenters instead of working on government construction projects. Who pays the most? Simple stuff that seems to be beyond government employees.

What kids are playing: this unknown brand has a hit with a game console that senses movement.

And now we have a dinner-cooking machine of sorts. You must prepare all ingredients and load them in the morning before going to work, but come home and dinner is cooked. Of course preparing all the ingredients in 90% of the effort, so this thing really doesn't do anything that a crockpot slow cooker does. And this thing costs $1,500. Still you can make your neighbors envious for a couple of minutes.

System76, I own one of their machines, now has a new version of its own Linux distribution that has a new user interface. I guess it acts more like the latest Windows and MacOS releases.

The R programming language has a growing user base. It works. It is useful.

Some history of how Kodak built the first digital camera in 1975. They didn't capitalize on their advances.