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: 19-25 January, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The rise in memory prices is real
• The rich gather in Davos
• Talk talk talk about the US, Denmark, and Greenland
• TikTok deal finally finished to keep operating in the US
• Another death in Minneapolis

Monday 19 January 2026

Trouble among Chinese cell phone makers as iPhone sales rise 28% and the Chinese-made phones drop a little in sales.

All that talk about memory prices rising has come to fruition.

The most important company in the world, TSMC, is investing outside of Taiwan. Now the mainland CCP can invade with less risk. Not good.

OpenAI reports that building datacenters builds money. Hmm. Good news to some people and bad news to those who don't want a datacenter in their county.

Yet another new term: a Claude bender. I guess that is like watching two year's of episodes of The Curse of Oak Island in one day. Programmers spent the holidays hobby programming (vibe coding) with Claude.

Sigh, if you are not a US citizen and you put anti-US stuff online, don't be surprise if you are put on a list prohibiting you from entering the US. In American government, the Executive Branch controls foreign policy, and that includes things like allowing non-citizens to enter the country. Hence, anti-current-president stuff will lead to, "You can't visit here." Wait for a different President.

According to estimates, and it seems that estimating this isn't easy, there are 500million firearms in the US owned by private citizens. Being a citizen entitles such. That is why the folks living in China under the rule of the Communist Party of China are "subjects" and not "citizens."

Removing the smartphone from your life. Does anyone still say smartphone? How about cell phone or just phone?

Quoting: Russia is pushing to build 1,000 of its localized Iranian Shahed drones every day

Want to know how the really rich live? Want to know what is hot in private jets? Go to Davos this week.

Quoting: the job-finding rate for young college-educated workers has declined to be roughly in line with the rate for young high-school-educated workers. And what degrees do these college folks have?

Tuesday 20 January 2026

At one time, only the US and the Soviets had "the bomb." Others raced to get it. Now only the US and China have "the models," and others are racing to get them, too,

Turn a swarm of AI agents loose and have them try to develop a web browser.

Maybe all these new datacenters are needed to meet demand. Google claims by jumps in users of its Gemini AI.

Meanwhile in China, they have the lowest birth rate since the Communist took power in 1949. The population has dropped the most since Chairman Mao caused millions to starve to death.

Someone has a firm grasp on the obvious. They call it monoculture because they need to have a word with lots of syllables.

Misguided intentions and unintended consequences: that's Congress for ya.

I give these guys credit for patience.

Wednesday 21 January 2026

Meanwhile in China, the rulers officially ban the export of drones and parts to both Russia and Ukraine. Quietly, they export all the drones and parts used in Russia and Ukraine.

Ukraine has saved all the video data from its use of drones. They declare they will share the data with allies to help train AI models. Let's see what happens.

Meanwhile in America, colleges are using AI to score the essay question answers on admissions forms. Well, why not? They are desperate for students (demographics) so they are accepting everyone. Good. Give everyone a chance and see if they make it. Do not give everyone a degree.

Studying the electricity use of chatbots and AI coding agents. I do not recall anyone study the electricity use of a Google search way may in the day, i.e., circa 2015.

OpenAI pledges to cover all additional costs for electricity at its datacenters so that the folks living nearby don't have higher utility bills.

I guess I don't understand the details of this store. DOGE employees are Federal employees. Federal employees routinely have acces to Social Security data. Some people claim that the SSA employees are "vetted" (whatever that means). The nice folks who work at the local SSA offices nationwide are vetted and DOGE employees were not vetted? Hard to believe.

Meanwhile in America, we set yet another record for streaming entertainment on Christmas day. Perhaps one day soon we will start calling those things in our houses televisors, which is what they are. Televisors are part of the overall television system. But then, who cares?

Wired talks about the Chinese century. A one-party country can do much. Of course there are bad side effects.

Quoting: AI will displace so many jobs that it will eliminate the need for mass immigration. Well, maybe, but I doubt it.

Survey say, while spending on AI is rampant, good use of it at work is only 50/50.

Here we go again, a new study investigating whether radiation from cellphones may affect human health.

We now have global water bankruptcy.

Thursday 22 January 2026

Here in northern Virginia, we are expecting snow and ice on Sunday along with temperatures that ensure nothing melts. Weather forecast neural networks predict such things fairly well.

The amount of research papers written by America-China cooperations is small and climbing slowly.

Companies have cut the amount of hiring of folks right out of college. AI? Just regular business cycles? No one seems to know.

And how effective is AI at work? Not much.

The business of selling AI services is not doing as well as hoped.

Blue Origin announces yet another satellite communications network.

Rumors of Apple developing a little pin the has camera, microphone speakers, and of course AI.

The head of Nvidia, says AI is bring benefits. A lot of conflict of interest here as his company profits from AI.

Our current President claims a deal has been made concerning Greenland and the arctic region.

It appears there is a strong link between these weight-loss drugs and airline profits. Americans weight less. Airline passengers weigh less. Airliners use less fuel. Profit$.

These drugs mean that the recipient eats less. Grocery sales are down as are sales at McDonalds et al.

Friday 23 January 2026

Anthropic's Claude, and in particular Claude Code, keeps growing and grow its user base.

There is something in this story about the "eat your own dog food" concept. Anthropic's Claude tools are so good that Anthropic doesn't know how to give a take-home test to applicants.

Speaking of testing and AI, Google's Gemini now offers SAT questions for practice.

Intel claims that its cannot meet the demand for its servers that are used in AI datacenters.

More job cuts, about 15,000, coming to Amazon.

Where the money goes: into the pockets of our elected representatives.

Yet another deal is reached to have TikTok operate in America with American ownership. I thought this was settled long ago.

Saturday 24 January 2026

Leidos, a big government contractor, partners with OpenAI to bring AI services to the Federal government, which is funded by us taxpayers. This could be a really good thing for taxpayers or it could just be another boondoggle.

More information about how TikTok will continue to operate in the US.

I guess this solves someone's problem: Google's Gemini creates memes for me.

I hope no one spent much money on this research: get kids to use your product in schools and they will continue to use them later.

From Seth Godin: You probably won't come up with a better mousetrap. But you might find the empathy and focus to find a small group of people with a more specific problem and solve it for them in a way that earns you trust, traction and word of mouth.

Quoting: Enterprise (rent a car) is the latest company caught in the crosshairs of anti-ICE protests. Get mad and punish the innocent bystanders. That is much easier than thinking.

This is known as MASINT: when stuff falls from orbit and hits the earth, it creates a sonic boom during reentry. Earthquake monitors detect this pressure wave, i.e., sound. This works better than traditional radar at locating the thing.

Smartwatches and heart beats. A close friend of mine saved his life a few years ago when his little watch showed him his heart rate had dropped too low. These things work.

For brain health --- Active sitting good: playing cards or reading. Passive sitting bad: watching TV.

Beware of ChatGPT's data consent option. It deletes everything. Sometimes you want to keep everything.

Quoting: new university graduates are bearing the brunt of a labor market that increasingly favors experienced candidates over fresh talent. I, an experienced candidate, have not seen this.

Jeffrey Snover created and maintained the PowerShell at Microsoft for many years. I guess the alternatives were worse, but that is hard to imagine. Programming scripts in PowerShell is akin to the old IBM Job Control Language. If you can stand it, you can do things, but the cost to the psyche is high.

Sunday 25 January 2026

Want a dot ai domain name? It seems over a million organizations do. Anyways, pay a fee to the governors of British Overseas Territory of Anguilla.

AI slop creeping into arXive papers? Hey, the folks who write those papers are smart and ahead of the game. AI helps to write, so they use it. There are a lot of tools they use that most folks don't use.

Building all these datacenters brings in a lot of business for a lot of companies.

Speaking of money and datacenters, SanDisk is rolling in it right now.

Meanwhile in Europe, regulators gotta regulate.

Here is a story about something called Clawdbot. AI that runs locally on a Mac. This is a bit confusing to me, but we are moving in the right direction. Everything local. Nothing shared with anyone else.

Another killing in Minneapolis. Are people trying to be killed? Don't agitate people who are armed. Please be smart and careful.

Meanwhile in American, the V8 engine returns. Big steel.

Big warnings about safety on NASA's planned flight around the moon and back.

IT workers, who have worked remotely for years, are being pulled back into the building. Sigh. The results are predictable and are being predicted.