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: 16-22 February, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• And more AI news
• US Supreme Court overrules much of the President's Tariff policies

Monday 16 February 2026

The creator of OpenClaw (I lose track of the dozen names used the first week), moves to OpenAI.

Coming out of China, a big video-generation system. Make your own movies for fun. Buy a $5,000 computer and you have a movie studio. Yes, this is a bit pricey, but you don't have 40 people.

Quoting: Bias toward action is defaulting to the smallest responsible step that produces real feedback, while pre-committing to guardrails so that being wrong is survivable and quickly correctable. End quote. Do something. Anything. Do something safely and reverse-able.

Claude Code broke everything. Have a new playbook. Here is one rule: No coding before 10am. Hands off keyboards. First hour or two every morning is for talking, aligning, and drafting prompts together. Once the team is aligned on what to build and how to set agents up, then you can code and let agents start working. We are in the CHAOS stage of change. We don't know where we are going. Let's be smart.

Claims that productivity in the US grew at a rate double that of the prior ten years. Let's see, who is president in the US?

This piece asks good questions about these claims of productivity gains.

People are not "attached" to chatbots. They prefer the way one system performs over the way its replacements perform. Good grief folks, let's not take this so goofy.

Meanwhile in Iran, the governors use all sorts of technology to track those who protest. Technology in the hands of ne'er-do-wells leads to predictable results. Can those who seek change outsmart them?

Sam Altman claims 100million weekly active users of ChatGPT in India.

Professor David J. Farber dies at 91. His research and teaching helped form computer networks and eventually the interconnected network or Internet.

It appears that the Apple computers with M-series processors just don't quite work with Linux.

Vim 9.2 is released.

Tuesday 17 February 2026

Three-day weekend in the US shows up as today is a second Monday with slow news online.

It appears that the current group of AI systems are improving at performing basic math.

Even with all this expansion and investment, the suppliers cannot meet the demand.

This was supposed to be kept secret, but our Dept of War has leading companies competing for a drone swarm capability.

Other news at our Dept of War, it appears that Anthropic will be kicked out of everything.

Meanwhile in Ireland, the governors have created a basic income program for artists. They call three years "permanent" and other such attacks on the English language, but hey, it's their money.

Meanwhile in New Dehli, the air is pretty bad.

Dealing with inflation, sales of refurbished laptop computers are up up and up in Europe. I would guess we same the same in the US.

Wednesday 18 February 2026

Coming real soon now from Apple, an integrated video podcast experience to Apple Podcasts.

Some deep thoughts on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). This could be a huge blessing to those whose brains work but their bodies don't. Still a long way to go.

Have a chattering bot write software and don't read it. Are you kidding? I guess I lack the courage.

Do we hate what AI is doing to the job market? I don't think anyone knows what AI is doing to the job market, so I can't love or hate it.

Quoting: When people talk about all the jobs AI will soon automate away pay close attention. It's always somebody else's job.

For reference, see the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

Quoting: When people talk about all the jobs AI will soon automate away pay close attention. It's always somebody else's job.

Meanwhile in China where companies are not encumbered by regulation, those companies are making inroads into brain interfaces for computing.

Microsoft invests in India.

Nvidia invests in India.

Meanwhile in India, they are building one of Asia's largest AI superclusters. I am not sure what a supercluster is, but it sounds like a whole lotta computing power.

The means of production still exists.

Meanwhile at Nvidia, the money keeps flowing in as the products keep flowing out.

Meanwhile in Miami, the governors there want to become a Silicon Valley and attract tech brains. Good move.

Raspberry Pi has an unbelievable day at the stock market. People want to buy their $50 computers to run AI Agents.

Thursday 19 February 2026

The first Tesla Cyber Cab comes off the assembly line. No steering wheel and no pedals. Sit and ride. We shall see.

Strong rumors about Apple and new wearable devices powered by some for of Siri AI.

Meanwhile in India, they held a big AI conference with 250,000 people attending. Big.

Apple pushes the podcast world from audio to video.

Meanwhile in Europe, a study of 12,000 companies shows only a 4% increase in productivity. If that is all the are gaining, they are managing poorly or hiding something.

Meanwhile in the US, OPM head tries to boost morale at the US Tech Force with billionaire guest speakers. Yet another effort to move the unmovable Federal bureaucracy.

Radio Free Europe moves to the Internet. Not officially, but this is the same thing.

DoorDash report a big financial quarter.

More generative AI from Google: make music and cover art.

Google shows some newer, lower-priced smartphones.

Our current President is backing AI $$$. Folks in the heartland are not so enthusiastic about it. A lack of communicating what is and isn't happening.

Quoting the headline: At India's AI Summit, Alphabet announces the America-India Connect Initiative, which will build new fiber optic lines between India, the US, and other countries.

And I'll quote this headline as well: Microsoft is bringing a built-in network speed test to Windows 11

Medical tests show that 99% of US adults have shoulder problems. The great majority of US adults disagree with the medical tests. Uh, well, perhaps the tests are wrong.

Meanwhile in Ohio, newspaper editors turn human reporters into doing something only they can do: gather information. The tedium of writing from the information is handed to the computer.

A little history about the creation of Linux.

The public houses or pubs in Britain are disappearing.

Theory says this can't happen. Reality disagrees. Testing signals that run through a banana, yes, you attach one wire to one end of a banana and the other wire to the other end of the banana and the banana conducts the signal, sound just as good as high-quality copper. Uh, let's reconsider a few things.

Friday 20 February 2026

On a different schedule today with less Internet viewing.

Strong rumors that Meta will jump into the smartwatch market this year.

Microsoft is working on writing data onto pieces of glass. No power to maintain the data storage and quick to read and, well it is supposed to be readable 10,000 years from now.

A lot of mumbo jumbo, but I think GitHub has better ways to automate actions.

Quoting: We still need good design decisions and engineers who say no to most product ideas, maintain conceptual integrity, and know when something is done.

Here's a good phrase: the Software Industrial Revolution. Give 10x or 100x programming productivity leaps, software will be flooded in mass just like the industrial revolution produced mass amounts of clothing and such.

The concept that, "intelligence is transitioning from a scarce resource to a commodity." Again, have an idea, implement it in software in 1/1000th the time. Boom. And the number of people who can do that will soon be in the tens or hundreds of millions. This happened with the word processor, the website, and now this.

Quoting: Power now lies in owning the workflow and the industry-specific data that AI needs to be useful. A big victory for procedural knowledge. And I don't have to know Python. "All I need" is the procedure in my mind and the ability to write English. Power goes to those who can write.

A couple of quotes from this one. First: AI allows any company to scale and ship features quickly. Second: The new test requires a company to prove it has a defensible moat -- such as proprietary data, a unique brand, or a complex hard problem -- that prevents it from being easily copied or commoditized by the very AI tools that fueled its initial rise.

Saturday 21 February 2026

Perhaps going a bit too fast, AWS has a couple of outages caused by AI running things. Some dispute this, saying human error is to blame.

Stealing trade secrets is still a lucrative business. Being caught and sent to prison is one of the risks.

We'll generate our own electricity. Ah, but the pollution! How do you think the state-regulated power companies generate electricity? Same way. Hypocrisy rules in the media and government.

Money continues to flow towards OpenAI. This is investment money, not revenue from customers. A side note: if it does've have a "billion" attached to it and isn't greater than 10, who cares?

Our DHS signs a blanket purchase agreement with Palantir. This makes it easier for agencies in DHS to quickly hire Palantir. It actually saves the taxpayers piles of money.

When did it become the role of the media (journalists) to spread rumors?

ByteDance, a Chinese company, is hiring AI talent in the US.

The Internet Freedom program is cut out of our Dept of State's budget. Nice sentiment, but not necessary for foreign policy. If you think the program has merit, fund it privately. There are plenty of folks in America with a worth over $100million.

Quoting the headline: The US launches the Tech Corps, a program under the Peace Corps to send volunteers abroad to promote American AI, as the US competes with China for AI dominance. Again, a nice but not necessary part of foreign policy. If it is so good, fund it privately.

Of course you can use Ring doorbell cameras to find lost dogs and persons far more valuable than dogs. Of course some ne'er-do-well can find something evil to do with this, hence the name ne'er-do-well. How do we have the good without the bad? Hire good and smart people. It's simple, yet few seem to understand this.

The story of Claude Code and how hobby programming advanced to, well, advanced hobby programming. I still wouldn't install the software in an x-ray machine without close examination and thorough testing.

Looking at smaller-claws that run locally. The hardware cost$, but under $1,000. And that means there are a few thousand tinkerers in America alone.

India joins Pax Silica.

Considering the Claude C Compiler (CCC for those C programmers who get the joke). This is pretty impressive, but not an ultimate demonstration of capability. Pretty good, not great.

Meanwhile in India, OpenAI claims that 80% of ChatGPT users are 30 and under.

Sunday 22 February 2026

At least one person has a firm grasp of the obvious.

Pain is coming to US office jobs. AI Agents et al. will disrupt things. The typewriter went away, folks. That was a big deal. Here comes something else.

A couple of quotes here. First: Revenge of the English majors: The age of AI is driving new respect for humanities skills. Second: Universities are rethinking how they teach liberal arts in the AI age. The world changed late in 2022. Colleges are a bit slow. Governments are really slow.

$75,000 gets your 2-year-old into a preschool in New York City.

DNA tech convicts a murdered 44 years later. I trust the tech is reliable.

The Hour of Code changes to the Hour of AI.

Pinterest used to be fun. Now its just another battlefield of angry people.

Write it down: March 6th. NASA to send four people to circle the moon and return.

Basic problem solving with AI and Agents. Note, this is something you learn in a Computer Science or Engineering major in college. Yes, if you want to do this well, go to college. And stay awake in the English composition class as writing is important.