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: 26 January - 1 February, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• We now have a social media site for AI agents
• We had a short-lived government shutdown of sorts

Monday 26 January 2026

We had the giant winter storm yesterday. We had maybe 6 inches of snow, which isn't much. Then we had 12 hours of light sleet. As usual, everything associated with government is closed as all those folks have the day off. The rest of us are working today. Oh, and no, the roads are not clear. We just make do.

The current AI systems are doing a good job of helping people search and find ideas. Some call this research. Hence, AI is helping research and development.

Meanwhile in America, the use of AI on the job is slowly climbing. It is still at 12%.

There is a quote, "an armed society is a polite society." Robert Heinlein wrote it first in a fiction work. Others have repeated it since in real life. It has something to do with the idea that a rational person does not carry a firearm into a contentious situation unless the person is ready and willing to die. You do not confront an armed person with shouts and clenched fists and a red, furios face. That is likely to cause a deadly response. I feel for the families of those people killed in Minneapolis. I feel for those who pulled the trigger as their lives are now ruined. Come on everyone, let's think. And I mean EVERYONE.

TikTok is now American owned. And it had technical problems its first weekend.

It is called NIMBY or Not In My Back Yard. Hate the datacenter and love all the jobs of the places that build the stuff that builds the datacenter (that goes in some other neighborhood).

During the time of our prior President, Congress controlled by the President's party passed a kill switch law in which government officials could turn off anyone's automobile. In light of the past couple of weeks, perhaps that wasn't wise? Members of Congress in the other party are now discussing removing the kill switch mandate.

Study says: the risks of utilizing generative AI in children's education overshadow its benefits.

Richard Stallman has a firm grasp on the obvious and he explains it well. Per today's AI of LLM and chattering bots: So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them.

Cooling datacenters with less electric power and no water. Okay, let's do it.

Tuesday 27 January 2026

The folks at Uber finally realize that data is worth money.

Money keeps rolling in for anyone having anything to do with datacenters. Corning makes fiber optic cable$.

Quoting the headline: Micron plans to invest $24B over the next decade to build a 700,000-square-foot memory chip facility in Singapore

A profile on one group of ne'er-do-wells.

You want to scan a million books to train the current AI systems. Rip the books to pieces to speed the process.

Quoting the headline: The US Army signs a $5.6B, 10-year contract with Salesforce to speed up outdated practices; as part of the deal, military recruiters will get access to Slack. I wish this works. All of our government needs this kind of help and kick in the pants.

It appears that our current President is responsible for the actions of everyone. And if you stand next to the President, you too are responsible for the actions of everyone.

More of the same story. Everyone is responsible for everyone else's actions. The folks acting, however, are not responsible. I suppose I should understand how this works.

In the past few weeks, several billionaire$ have said they are in favor of the billionaire tax. There is nothing from preventing these guys and gals from simply giving all their money to charity and the state of California's government.

Zoom becomes an investment company. Forget that stuff about video calls and such.

Nvidia has built a weather-predicting system. And I thought they made processors for video gaming. Huh? This is an indication of how much money they have. They can venture off into far-flung areas of research.

Where is money is: deepfake videos plus sex equals what a lot of people seem to want.

It appears that Intel is back on track building processors that work well.

Wednesday 28 January 2026

I LIKE THIS! OpenAI has a thing they call Prism which is an AI-assisted LaTeX editor. Great stuff!

Job cuts at ASML.

Job cuts at Amazon.

Forward to the past or something like that as Samsung changes their phone displays so that other people can't read your screen. Remember those filters you would put on your laptop screen on the airplane?

Fascinating, the AI mirror. Apps that tell blind people about their appearance. The blind can now appear better. Is that a good thing? Perhaps.

Now we have the neolabs, which are small R&D companies doing long-term research. The surprising thing to me is that investors are happy to give them money. To me, this is a sign of the wealth of America. There is so much money and these things are good tax shelters.

Wheel and deal in the semiconductor industry.

Tim Cook talks about the situation in Minneapolis and his meetings with President Trump.

Sam Altman does the same.

I guess everyone is supposed to opine on this topic. Of course it is awful. Public employees are killing members of the public while performing public duties funded by the public. Yes, we all contribute to their salaries. We all contribute to their hiring, training, and retention. Yes, we are all involved. This is awful. This is not them against us. This is all us. This is a predictable outcome of us hating us. I recommend we stop.

When Tiny BASIC arrived, whoever thought Microsoft would consume so much water of all things?

Seagate reports a big financial quarter. No surprise.

Mozilla's leaders plan to fund an AI rebel alliance. Okay, let the games begin.

The governors of France move away from American software to software made in France. Good for them. Promote your own industries.

Clawdbot renames itself to Moltbot. We hardly knew you.

Quoting the headline: Amazon plans to close all 57 Fresh and 15 Go locations in the US, as it pivots its physical retail strategy to focus exclusively on Whole Foods. Experiment performed, useful information acquired, move on.

Thursday 29 January 2026

Major moves as Tesla converts car factories to make something else. Note the speed at which these changes occur. And now you know why Mr. Musk gave up on the Federal bureaucracy.

Meanwhile in the American construction industry, folks are adopting the current version of AI to help manage work sites. It seems to be a good tool.

License plate readers are ruled okay by a Federal judge in a case in Virginia. You are driving on a public road. You are, in this ruling, broadcasting your location to the public. Privacy is not an issue, in this ruling.

Let's toss around some huge money numbers. This is what the big tech persons do.

LinkedIn has a big financial quarter.

Samsung has a big financial quarter. The thing about Samsung is that their financial numbers were already huge. How did they gain 24% over that mountain?

Microsoft's cloud computing business grew about 40% last quarter over last year. Again, like Samsung, they made that mountain 40% taller.

Meta reports a good financial quarter.

The AI and counter-AI tools war escalates on college campuses. It's black spy vs. white spy or some such thing. Perhaps instead of spending all this energy on tools to fight tools, we just have better assignments for the students to use in learning. Hmm. That's an idea.

Meanwhile in Minneapolis, the locals don't like out-of-town-ers arriving and telling them what to do. Hmm, has that ever happened before? Does the term carpet bagger mean anything to ya? Don't like that example? There are 10,000 more to cite. If you want to protest what ICE is doing, there are many example of peaceful and effective techniques. Please, be smart and safe.

And now we have the Vitalists. Death is just wrong. We should live forever or something like that.

Windows 11 hits a billion users and does it quicker than Windows 10 did. Perhaps all that talk of buy a new computer with Win 11 or else you old Win 10 will die talk had something to do with it.

Datacenters bring gas-fired generators. There is a boom here with a 25x increase. Note, this is 25x, not 25%.

Friday 30 January 2026

Once again in America we are facing a government shutdown because our Congress refuses to do its job.

Meanwhile in China, they are playing this typical Chinese dance of officially regulating the import of Nvidia processors while actually craving these things and bringing them in through the backdoor. That way, they can save face (they still do that) and get er done at the same time.

Also in China, sales of Apple watches are booming.

Meanwhile in India, Google has run a large and successful campaign using Gemini AI and education. Here it comes rest of world.

TEX Meanwhile at the the Pentagon, folks are fussing with Anthropic over, what else, AI tools.

SanDisk reports a huge financial quarter as the folks building all these datacenters buy parts from SanDisk.

All is not great in the tech world as Microsoft's stock value fell. Once again, profits were not as large as estimated, and once again the stock holders were punished instead of punishing the estimators, i.e., the ones who goofed.

Nvidia pushes more into the Linux market.

Dow is cutting more than 10% of its workforce. Some say it is because of AI. Nope, just business and bad management.

The ne'er-do-wells are putting garbage into AI training data. Once again, we have an example of the fundamental problem in supervised learning. You have to supervise, and the dataset is to big to be supervised.

Mr. Zuckerburg says one person plus AI does the work of a team. Well, I think that shows the team was poorly managed and led.

The television system is now 100 years old.

More job cuts at Amazon.

Someone finds that our Federal workforce lost 10,000 STEM PhDs last year. Perhaps these folks will find jobs more in line with their abilities. As a former Federal STEM PhD, it is mind-numbing work, but a paycheck.

Sir Tim Berners Lee, invented the www stuff, is saddened by today's Internet. A corner of the web, he says, has been optimized for nastiness. Well, don't invent things and expect people to not act like people.

Meanwhile in Europe, folks buy electric vehicles more than gas-powered ones. That is Europe. It is a different place with different roads and such.

Real news that isn't news: the Communist Party of China hacked into the phones of the British government. It surprises me that adults don't believe what that group of folks will do.

Saturday 31 January 2026

The definition of success has changed. I have never heard of of this, but 30 million monthly active users for this health app.

Taiwan, the entire country, reports a good financial quarter with over 12% growth. Hmm. Let's try to consider what such a thing would mean for America.

OpenAI discusses its AI system that it uses internally to run all its chattering bots for the rest of us.

Meanwhile at a site called Moltbook, there are 150,000 AI agents running all the time. Perhaps something good will come of this.

More detail on Moltbook.

And more on how Clawdbot became Moltbot became Moltbook. Sigh. This is hard to follow.

This thing may change everything the way ChatGPT changed everything. Perhaps it will fade away by the 4th of July.

Okay, so you made a billion$ or so. What now? How about bringing sanity back to the California legislature before it is too late.

Anthropic considers the effects of using its AI coding tools on programmers. "Our results suggest that incorporating AI aggressively into the workplace, particularly with respect to software engineering, comes with trade-offs. " No duh.

Using computer vision to read mammagrams. This is old, old, and older news.

And now we have he Open Gaming Collective.

Sunday 1 February 2026

Meanwhile in China, let's blend the old with the new and have AI-powered accupuncture robots.

More from China is the genius class of 100,000 kids chosen for the best education.

Moltbook continues to stay in the news.

Amazon is behind schedule in sending up satellites to power a network. They cite a rocket shortage as the cause for the delays.

The ups and downs of crypto currency is that all of the big ones are down.

SpaceX wants to put satellites in orbit to collect solar energy, send it to earth, and power datacenters. The dream of this form of energy may come to fruition. Jerry Pournelle pushed for this for many years.

Meanwhile in America, if you want to fly commercially, you have to use the national ID card or pay $45. Gosh. How did we get here?

Want to protest ICE? Cancel your Facebook account. I fail to connect the two.

Quoting the headline: Microdosing For Depression Appears To Work About As Well As Drinking Coffee. Well, we gave it a try.

Got $200,000? Get a flying car. And then good luck with the regulations.

Jobs: the video game industry has lost a third of its jobs.

Jobs: Oracle to cut 30,000 jobs.

Quoting: The White House has announced that software security guidance issued during the Biden administration has been rescinded due to unproven and burdensome requirements that prioritized administrative compliance over meaningful security investments.