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: 9-15 February, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Seattle wins the Super Bowl
• More and more AI news on everything
• Vampire AI, Cognitive Debt, and other fatigue

Monday 9 February 2026

Seattle wins the Super Bowl.

And the big AI companies have big ads during the game. Of course, five years from now, we may laugh at half of these if those companies are gone.

Meanwhile in China, the Communist Party hauls in money on AI exports.

The Communist Party of China bets big on humanoid robots. Like in Japan, they are facing a crisis of elderly people with no one to care for them.

The week that was: ClawedBot to Moltbot to Moltbook to Open Claw or something like that. Gosh, if AI is in the title, we want to know about it. Well, some folks want to know about it. I've been doing AI for over 40 years. Some of this is humorous while most of it is just boring.

AI invades the romance novel industry. If it involves writing or simply predicting the next word, AI is invading it. Not sure how an invasion occurs, but the headline reads well.

Read this essay: AI fatigue. New tools means we can do more in the same time. Therefore, we are expected to do more in the same time. That is tiring as the To Do List for the day is longer than it used to be. Nothing new here.

Predictable and predicted: billionaires move from California to Nevada.

Our CIA stops publishing The World Factbook. That book was a nice public service, but folks, public service publications is not in the essential mission of the CIA.

This is a good public service: when you hit an old and dead link, this jumps you to the Internet Archive.

Here come 140 TeraByte disk drives. And the disk drive was dead, so said all the industry experts.

Tuesday 10 February 2026

Strong rumors about a slew of new products from Apple coming real soon now.

Study shows that these chattering bots don't give good medical advice. Try something else, folks.

Meanwhile in Iran, decades of sitting on the subjects by the rulers, and there is a semi-revolution in progress. Tech industry? Are you kidding?

Meanwhile at Wikipedia, the volunteers are struggling to keep AI-generated text out of the encyclopedia.

Silicon Valley companies are moving forward to the past and outsourcing jobs.

If your gonna build a thousand more datacenters, you gotta raise ca$h.

Want the government to endorse and use your products? Just throw money.

From the inside, if you want government agencies to increase their use of AI, tell them they will receive more money if the CLAIM to be using AI.

From the Harvard Business Review, AI tools at work intensify work, not reduce it.

Claude Code is changing the world. Well, maybe.

Save the bees. The best of intentions and the worse of the outcomes.

You know those driverless taxis? Well, it seems that they do have drivers who are in the Philippines and monitoring and steering and all that.

Were the experts wrong about exercise for 50 years? Probably. That is usually the case. All these experts who advocate studying history rarely note that the experts have been wrong more than right.

The NFL starts an open source crowd sourced innovation hub thing to reduce concussions.

Wednesday 11 February 2026

Meanwhile in China, with their New Year celebration approaching, the AI companies are giving away services.

There were many AI ads during the Super Bowl. Basic nostalgic product ads, however, garnered all the attention.

Datacenters in orbit? Bad idea. Considering ten years of operations, okay good. No cost of power (solar panels) and no cost of cooling. The engine, however, is a processor that is replaced in 18 months on earth. Too much churn to consider the long term benefits.

Mr. Zuckerburg plans to buy a house in Miami. Yet another billionaire moving out of California. I guess maybe that billionaire tax might be counter productive? Predictable and predicted.

Better tools to help engineers design integrated circuits faster.

Meanwhile in Singapore, they discover the Communist Party of China has been breaking into their telecommunications.

Meanwhile on Facebook, we can now replace our old still photo with an animation. Really folks? We are using all this engineering talent and processing power for stuff like this? How about applying those resources to real problems? Huh?

Side note on this piece, Boston Dynamics is over 30 years old.

OpenAI updates its Deep Research tool.

Cloudflare reports a big financial quarter.

Amazon receives approval to launch another 4,500 satellites. Their launch capacity, however, is not even close to this number. Aspirations are checked by reality.

Big tech is finding ways around the $100K feel for H-1B visas.

The folks at Raspberry Pi have modified their model 4 unit to accept different memory chips in light of supply chain problems.

Thursday 12 February 2026

Read this essay! The AI Vampire and who gains the value of productivity from better tools. We are in a period of rapid change or chaos. We have yet to figure out where we are and where we are going.

OpenAI is going to an IPO. Or is it? Executives at OpenAI were surprised by reports.

Google has an open speech dataset for 21 African languages. Good.

Lenovo reports a good financial quarter with big PC sales. Some speculate that people are buying PCs right now before the prices rise due to resource shortages caused by those datacenters.

The datacenter is now our universal scapegoat. Even surpassing Donald Trump in some circles.

Microsoft is trying to have all its own models and not depend on OpenAI. Note: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon---these are real companies with real resources. They can do things like catch up to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Our Customs and Border Patrol buy into facial recognition technology. Before we cry evil and such, let us not forget that this tech solved the Boston Marathon bombing murders.

AppLovin, advertising technology, reports a big, big financial quarter.

And we debate if social media is addictive. Good grief. Have we nothing better to do with our resources?

BOOM! 7million Meta AI glasses were sold in 2025. Wow.

More on OpenAI selling ChatGPT to the US government for daily use in Federal offices (Dept of War or Defense). There are a few people inside government who know how to use these new tools. Most, however, are waiting for official training $$$.

Meanwhile at OpenAI, company security is trying to catch employees who leak information.

Elon Musk wants a factory on the moon. Well, that would be nice, but how about the supply chain?

Friday 13 February 2026

Rumors that Meta will add facial recognition to its smart glasses next year.

The US and Taiwan boost their trade. Good for preventing an invasion of Taiwan.

A victory for privacy and a loss for law enforcement. Privacy is not a concern if law enforcement hires and retains good people. And that is the tough part.

Meanwhile in Russia, the reign of censorship continues.

Doing the opposite of everyone else, IBM plans to boost entry-level positions.

Perhaps this AI stuff does something productive. Spotify reports that its best programmers no longer write code.

Waymo releases a new generation of robotaxis.

Google pushes forward in Deep Think for research, not just writing college freshman essays.

A more powerful portable computer, the HP ZBook Ultra G1a. At least it has a power-sounding name.

Got $7,999? Get this robot that will fold some of your laundry and take up half the room doing nothing the rest of the day.

The consulting industry moves to AI agents.

Better tools? Do more work! We are in the chaos phase of change. Not sure where we are going with these better tools, but we can do more in less time. So, what do we do with the saved time?

Meanwhile in the US, our population may decline this year. ICE is doing it? Nope, that would require deporting millions of people and that is far beyond anyone's capacity. Instead, declining birth rates are the answer as always. And that is a boring answer. And that answer is something no one wants to address.

Most of us didn't notice this, but there has been a major shift in how our economy works. The biggest companies are big because of money, not because of the number of employees.

Quoting: If you think your daily doses of espresso or Earl Grey sharpen your mind, you just might be right, new science suggests. Well, my mother drank lots of coffee and suffered from dementia.

Coming real soon now is the Linux 7.0 kernel.

Read this if you want to drown in computer slang. Oh, someone claims to have put AI to work on writing a compiler for the C programming language. I think someone solved that problem 40 years ago.

Quoting the headline: AI Gold Rush is Resurrecting China's Infamous 72-hour Work Week - in US

Let's quote another headline: The Are You Sure? Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind

Saturday 14 February 2026

The power of the Super Bowl ad.

Tariffs work (sometimes in some cases) as TSMC is to build four more factories in the US.

Fear and loathing at xAI.

Write this one down: a country of geniuses in the datacenter. Pause and consider.

The Executive Branch of our Federal government is one great big thing. It is not a collection of individual governments. If the Executive Branch knows about crime, it knows about crime and should prosecute those committing crimes. When did someone create the idea that some parts of the Executive Branch can hide criminals from other parts?

Given all the photos there are online with geographic locations, there is software that locates photos. Law enforcement is using this software to take criminals off the streets. As long as we hire and retain good people, this is fine. Hiring bullies is a bad idea.

Oops, lost those files. Oops, don't know how that tape recording was erased. Oops, is it malace or incompetence?

With cameras on every front door, we can find lost pets and people and do much good. See above comment about hiring and retaining good people.

Sunday 15 February 2026

Vampire AI was not an academic term. Cognitive Debt is. Same thing. There is a cost in shifting focus from one thing to another thing. The tasks are difficult enough to require focus. It is easy to constantly shift from one simple thing to another simple thing. Difficult things are different. They are difficult.

Yet, some jobs might become more fun with these new AI tools.

It's mid-February and Western Digital has already sold its entire year's worth of hard disk drives. The consumer, PCs and laptops and such, account for only 5% of that. We have returned to the era of the mainframe computer and computing center. We just call it a datacenter now.

Indian officials see a Global AI Commons.

Anthropic, Claude Code, is working to change the programming classes at colleges in the US.

The pendulum continues to swing to and fro. Now it is swinging away from Computer Science as a college major. You learn much more than programming in a Computer Science program.

There was a time when American companies proceeded to do business with the governors of China without caution. Now, American companies are being cautious to do business with the governors of America.

Speaking of China, the governors invested $150billion in chipmaking factories, but still only produce 2% of the world's output.

An analysis of how the dirty money is moved. And there is plenty of dirty money moving around the world.

Jikipedia: a wikimedia instance containing all the Epstein files or something like that.

Viagra and Cialis may be wonder drugs that improve the health of many parts of the body.