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: 5-11 January, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The world resumes spinning on its axis
• In Minneapolis, an ICE agent shoots and kills a woman driving a car
• There are growing protests in Iran, this may amount to something

Monday 5 January 2026

Turning the big trucks into self-driving vehicles.

Foxconn reports a good financial quarter.

Samsung updates its televisions to adjust the volume continuously so that the booms don't deafen you and you can still hear the whispers. Of course it is labeled as AI.

Some common sense in the discussion of using AI stuff. Help you do your job better. Not, produces slop.

This might be useful: tell the refrigerator door to open instead of trying to pull it open with your big toe while both hands are holding all that stuff.

Starlink is providing free service to Venezuela during the time of transition.

Quoting the headline: US immigration lawyers, talent managers, and creators say influencers and OnlyFans models now dominate O-1B visas, which are reserved for exceptional artists

I suppose this solves some problem for some people. The little "robot" follows your dog around the house during the day so you can see what the dog is doing.

Quoting: Every Writer I Know Thinks They Don't Write Enough

How to be a better reader. Yes, there are techniques for this.

And a few more techniques for reading. I would use a separate piece of paper instead of writing inside the back cover.

Tips on keeping a journal. This article emphasizes digital apps. They can be fine as long as you can easily export all content to something else as technology changes.

Do they have editors at CNBC? I read of "unsealed documents" containing information. The word "unsealed" is redundant and unnecessary. Of course the sealed documents were unsealed. How else could anyone read the contents? Stupid.

Tuesday 6 January 2026

CES is on and there are many announcement from everyone.

Aha, someone gets it: the human tendency to invent stuff for us to do. See, e.g., the US Federal government.

AMD has a new series of processors for AI on PCs. They call it the Ryzen AI 400 series.

Everyone wants to buy memory chips for all these datacenters. Samsung has the chips. Hence, here come$ the money.

This piece explains how Apple has gone in the wrong direction on its user interface for the more recent MacOS. It is not just complaining. There is a point to all this.

Nvidia pushes into the autonomous vehicle market with new systems and a partnership with Mercedes-Benz.

Boston Dynamics works closer with Google to bring better performance to its robots.

More information on the robots.

Lego puts processors and such into a few bricks. Here comes the magic.

Qualcomm shows a new generation of Snapdragon processors to go in Windows PCs. The marketplace for who powers PCs is becoming crowded. That is good.

And Qualcomm moves further into robotics.

Well, I didn't see this one coming but, here comes Google Nano Banana image fun to the TV in the living room.

Alienware is trying to build less-expensive and thinner laptops for gaming.

HP tries something a little different by putting a PC into a keyboard.

Dell brings back the XPS name to the line of premium laptop computers. Remember New Coke? Same story.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting quits and claims the moral high ground. Claiming such is easy, much easier than admitting to bad management of resources.

Maybe people are still going to college. There is great confusing on the sticker price of college versus the actual cost paid. Such confusion was created by government regulators in cohort with college administrators. Just tell me the price meets with, "Well, you don't understand how this works." That is a subtle way of saying, "We got you and your money."

Wednesday 7 January 2026

No Internet viewing today.

Thursday 8 January 2026

Intel tries to stay in gaming by improving its integrated GPU. Last year's processor worked well and worked in the marketplace.

American Airlines promises to bring free hi(gher)-speed WiFi to flight with a new agreement with AT&T. Could you just make the seats bigger and serve ice cream?

Meta pumps more capabilities into the Ray-Ban glasses. I like their strategy: build a little, learn a little, build a little more.

Let's put some legs and wheels on those little vacuum cleaners that look like disks. And it seems that everyone has a type of robot at CES.

Asus improves its two-display laptop computer by shrinking the gap between the displays.

Jensen Huang says the word and the value of Sandisk jumps 23%.

California billionaire tax? Jensen Huang says he isn't concerned and will stay in the Golden State.

Larry Page, however, moved out. The details of the proposal show that it is an ex post facto law meaning that if you lived here in the past when there was no tax, you have to pay that tax for back when it didn't exist. Confusing? Of course it is. It is a money grab.

And speaking of changing the rules mid-stream (we used to think that was unethical, but hey, why not?) some "officials" want the power to turn off datacenter power when they want.

More sexualized images. Is "sexualized" a real word?

And now we have ChatGPT Health. Import your health records and --- what? Import what? Well, why not?

Samsung makes memory chips. Everyone is buying memory chips. Samsung has a growing pile of money.

Arm pushes into robotics and "Physical AI."

The administration of our current President is cutting research funds to US universities. This could hurt bad in ten years. The policies and politics of many research universities brought these cuts. Who is the bad guy? There are many of them here.

Who knew that a simple pointing device could be so complicated?

Have we already seen the death of the AI PC? Dell thinks so. Just pack in the processors and forget the AI sticker on the box.

Craigslist is still here and still real. It is not dominated by AI stuff.

Friday 9 January 2026

In Minneapolis, an ICE agent shoots and kills a woman driving a car. She was wrong to do what she did. The ICE agent was wrong as well. Folks, when someone has a gun. Do whatever you can to no agitate them. It is not worth dying.

Humanoid robots are surging, but only about 13,000 units were sold last year. That is a nit in today's economy.

More on robotics at CES. It's just a stunt.

I ran into these guys at Lambda about five years ago. At the time they sold workstations packed with GPUs and loaded with software. Now they are trying to go into cloud computing. I liked the old products better.

It appears that X is about to build its third datacenter in the Memphis area. This one will be across the border in Mississippi.

iOS26 isn't being installed by iPhone users. They are just fine using what they have.

Meanwhile in Iran, a couple of things that may be related: (1) people are protesting against the governors in over 100 cities and (2) Internet connectivity is down.

Microsoft updates Copilot so we can now buy stuff using it.

Google moves some of its AI writing aids to all users.

Microsoft makes it easier to insert hyperlinks. I guess pressing ctrl-k was too hard? Oh well, some people will like this.

Now we have a micro-drama industry. Disney tries to move into it. I guess that means there is money in it.

Volkswagen brings back actual real buttons to its cars. What a concept.

Microsoft keeps renaming its Office suite (Word, Excel, etc.) or maybe it doesn't. New Coke, Old Coke? I guess this all shows the dominance of Microsoft in the office. They can make all these mistakes, yet they are still dominant in the office.

Meanwhile in the UK, folks are encouraged to stop using tech products from the US.

Saturday 10 January 2026

Everyone carries a video camera in their pocket. The Minneapolis ICE shooting reveals one result. That event was awful. It appears, to me, that the wife of the woman who was killed had what we used to call "a smart mouth." Well, someone is now dead in part due to a smart mouth poking someone. Folks, when we are in a crowd of people with guns, behave. Remember the Boston Massacre? Quiet the smart mouth in the crowd. Live for another day. Please, live for another day.

Hunting, finding, and mapping the datacenters in America.

Where the money is hidden: British overseas territories.

Why buy a book when these chattering bots will chatter and give 90% of the book to you?

Want to help OpenAI make money? You get nothing for your efforts. Quoting OpenAI: We've hired folks across occupations to help collect real-world tasks modeled off those you've done in your full-time jobs, so we can measure how well AI models perform on those tasks,

The headline: The FCC approves SpaceX's request to deploy an additional 7,500 Gen2 Starlink satellites, bringing the total to 15,000 satellites worldwide The reality: Hey, why didn't you ask the rest of us about this? And how about asking all the other people on this planet if we mind having all that space junk up there.

OpenAI wants to protect kids from chatbots. OpenAI makes the world's most-used chatbot. Is there something I'm missing here?

It appears that Amazon is to build a great big brick-and-mortar store in Indiana.

Meta buys into nuclear power.

Meanwhile in (Communist) China, the Party hacks into Congressional email systems in America. Shame on Congress for being lackadaisical in security. Shame on the Communists as well.

Why have the prices of televisions fallen so low? It has to do with "mother glass sheets."

Blinded by the light? We all are. The standard for bright headlights is 40 years old. The technology used in headlights is much newer. Once again, the speed of government is, well, not to swift.

A couple of days ago I wrote something about Microsoft dominates the PC world that it can make all kinds of mistakes and still dominate the PC world. It seems that OneDrive is part of all that mess of mistakes.

Sunday 11 January 2026

There are fears that the boom in datacenters is driving the US economy. The numbers, however, don't show that. Still, if there is a bust, the datacenters will be blamed.

Markdown: it is a simple way to put formatting commands into an ASCII file. That is probably why its use grew quietly to its almost-dominant position today. MS Word and those WYSIWYG word processors? They have their place.

A company called Wonder owns Grubhub, but its real business is finding ways to prepare meals much cheaper, i.e., with machines instead of people.

One person's experience with Linux instead of MS Windows. Yes, it works. And you can run all the Microsoft office applications in a browser if that is what you need. Or you can use Markdown or TeX (see above).

It seems that knowledgeable people switching to Linux is somewhat of a trend.

These guys are worth $300Billion. How much money is that? If anyone needs any suggestions on what to do with 1% of that, I have a few.

Researchers found tasks listed on job sites. They put AI to work on them. Well, AI didn't do well as it completed about 2% (not 22% but only 2%) of the tasks.