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: December 29, 2025 - January 4, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• By some arbitrary calendar, we roll into the year 2026
• As we are between Christmas and the New Year, news is slow
• We enter the year of 2026
• India's economy grows past Japan's (will soon surpass Germany)
• America extracts the president of Venezuela

Monday 29 December 2025

The world remains on vacation this week.

Schools and school children in Ukraine. This has been an odd war with those not in the fighting not affected by the fighting. In some respects.

Google adds a lecture mode to NotebookLM.

Fraud and scams are rampant on LinkedIn job listings.

I'm not sure how to find these numbers, but a study shows that slop AI videos had 63Billion (with a B) views in 2025. That is a large number.

From the New York Times: How tech worker activism has grown more cautious as companies crack down and once-privileged workers realize they don't have much leverage. I focused on the once-privileged phrase. Times change.

Meanwhile in the datacenters, if you can't connect to the power grid, generate your own power.

Meanwhile in Vietnam, they manufacture goods. 98% of those are exported. The locals do not enjoy the fruit of their labor.

Tuesday 30 December 2025

Everyone is competing in AI. Microsoft has the Office Suite that people use. If AI would ever really work there, Microsoft would have a huge advantage.

The business of making semiconductors is bigger than ever and continues to grow in leaps. Bust? Bubble bursting? What?

New uses for laboratory-made diamonds. Insert some imperfections, and they are good for quantum computing among other things. I am hoping this is not another fad that never worked like the nanotubes.

Fussing inside the Democratic Party about datacenters and AI. Nothing new.

The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, which has 257,900 members, will end its online exams. It is simply too easy to cheat now. Those watching the online exams cannot catch the cheating.

In a job you like or not? A simple test as to whether you would be successful in your dream job ... is whether you would be willing to learn on your own time.

Here is some AI optimism about jobs related to creating and maintaining the AI systems.

Wednesday 31 December 2025

And one of the big winners in all these new datacenters is Caterpillar. They make all those big, yellow diesel generators that puff puff and puff to make electricity.

And of course Nvidia continues to roll in the money in the AI frenzy. Folks in China are to buy 2million of this one model of processor next year. That is a large number.

More billion$ pouring into Nvidia.

Speaking of datacenters, AI, and large number$...the value of a share of Sandisk went up 580% in 2025. Yes, that is 580%. You've got to be kidding, but no, it went up 580%.

And these number$ from OpenAI are just as unbelievable.

This essay looks back ten years in AI and tries to predict the next ten.

Thursday 1 January 2026

By some arbitrary calendar, today is the first day of the year 2026.

A researcher, I guess that means a person with too much time on their hands, finds several hundred apps on Apple's store that use AI to be a companion. I guess I don't know what a companion is. I'll have study this one, or just let it go by.

Vernon, California---a little square inside Los Angeles---is now becoming a datacenter place. Undersea data cables from Japan enter the US in this area.

The law of supply and demand holds true. All these datacenters use semiconductors. So do phones, PCs, tablets, and microwave ovens. The prices of all these things will rise.

One review of the large language model approach to AI in 2025. Yes, they perform better for what they are with their inherent limitations.

Build a datacenter and wait for the local power company to bring electricity? NOPE. Bring your own generators. This is the obvious answer for someone who (1) attended high school in college in an oil producing state (put generators in the swamp next to the oil rig) and (2) worked at the last place on earth as an engineer.

Someone has a firm grap on the obvious. Don't believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see.

Another way the ne'er-do-wells thrive: Scammers are generating images of broken merchandise in order to apply for refunds.

One of the problems with AI, so say some, is that they can do what we used to call entry-level jobs. No one can learn a craft.

This is a milestone in time. The economy of India is now larger than that of Japan and is about to surpass the economy of Germany. Demographics. India produces babies. Many other countries don't any longer. Read it and weep.

"Creative bankruptcy" is a fancier term for AI slop.

What to do about housing areas that flood often? Buy them, demolish them, and let them be grasslands as "grass lots ... absorb rainwater far better than concrete and asphalt."

Friday 2 January 2026

Something in social media that I actually use: Meta's Reels. I love the little videos about babies and dogs.

Follow this circle... Nikkei Asia goes to a community college in Arizona to learn how teenagers and older folks are learning enough to land jobs in semiconductor manufacturing. Companies need Americans as visa restrictions take hold. Imagine that! Hiring Americans.

More innovation in warfare in Ukraine. Okay, so when do we see results?

This is not good: startup companies want new employees to concentrate for endless hours. They slap a nicotine patch on them and guess what? Yes, they concentrate better and longer. Chemicals do that to the human body. Oh, by the way, there are harmful side effects.

New year and new items enter the Public Domain. Items from 1925 and 1930 are now free. Good grief, that is too long to be protected.

Government efficiency? Competency? I have to quote this: Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn't even work as a national ID. But that's what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers unreliable, even though getting one requires providing proof of citizenship or lawful status in the country.

And IPv6 is 30 years old and still hasn't eclipsed IPv4.

Saturday 3 January 2026

Elon Musk has Tesla attempting a grand leap with humanoid robots.

Here is a 100-page article on co-packaged optics. Lasers inside of semiconductors to speed data connections.

Quoting, "London is set to become the first city where both US and Chinese robotaxis operate" The battle of the robots on the streets of London. Let's see where we are in a year.

I type these words at 06:26, it is still dark outside. Details are sparse. It appears that America's forces have swooped into Venezuela and extracted that country's President.

Predictions are rolling in for this month's Consumer Electronics Show.

Ahead of CES, LG shows new laptops with 17-inch screens, GPUs, and new case materials that make the machines lightweight but retaining strength.

Of some interest is this open letter comparing Silicon Valley with the Communist Party of China. It is quite a stretch as we have yet to see evidence that Silicon Valley makes people disappear or has built concentration camps housing several million people.

Yann LeCun, a well-respected name in AI research, admits that Meta "fudged" the numbers a bit to show how well Llama models performed. His name used to be well-respected.

This study won't see much press: researchers gathered information from millions of persons across the globe and have a conclusion contrary to the popular agenda: economic inequality does not lead to mental health issues or people being just plain sad.

Meanwhile in the state of New York, smartphones are banned in schools. Some folks, otherwise called adults, discover that many students cannot tell time by looking at those round things on the walls that have numbers and two levers spinning, a.k.a., clocks.

Speaking of teenagers, someone (re)discovers that if you tell teens that reading is a virtue, they run away from it. If, however, you tell teens that reading dangerous ideas is dangerous, they run to it. No duh.

Music Television quits playing music.

Sunday 4 January 2026

Better concentration through chemistry. Earlier this week was a story of nicotine patches for better concentration. Good grief. Smart people doing stupid things.

More news about the "capture" of the president of Venezuela. Side effects? For one, if you think your are a tough guy, beware. US Armed Forces can walk into your bedroom in the middle of the night...anywhere in the world. Message to all the tough guys in the world: Mr. Trump is perhaps crazy. Mr. Trump commands the best armed forces and intelligence sources in the world. That is a bad combination for the tough guys.

Lots of speculation about what happens next. The legacy media is lamenting that everyone else out there (not professional journalists like them) is speculating as well.

Meanwhile in the UK, Reddit passes TikTok for visits by the Internet masses.

Stronger rumors that Apple will soon release a laptop that uses a processor built for iPhones and costs about $600 (not $1,000). The performance will be like an M1 processor, which is what is in the MacBook Air I use daily to view the Internet and write pithy comments and blogs. It suffices. (See, I can use words like "suffices" on this machine. It works.)

The world MS Excel champion (yes, there is one of those) gives basic tips to the rest of us. The basic tip is that if I am doing an operation over and over, there is probably a way to automate that. Google it and learn and improve.

Research shows that AI is not replacing people on the job. Actually, those jobs that the experts said would go away are increasing more than other jobs. It appears there is nuance to many tasks, and that today's AI systems cannot work in that nuance. Entry-level jobs? AI is not killing them. Incompetence by business managers is the cause of that problem. Such incompetence has always been the cause. See, for example, the need for DOGE in government.

And perhaps tomorrow the world will resume spinning on its axis.