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: February 23 - March 1, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• US and Israel strike Iran and kill supreme leader
• USA beats Canada in Olympic hockey Gold Medal Game
• We have the State of the Union address (an outdate bore)
• Our DoD and Anthropic continue to fuss
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx

Monday 23 February 2026

The USA team beat the Canadian team in Olympic hockey for the gold medal. That is surprising is this is the first gold medal in that event for USA since 1980's miracle on ice. I would have thought with the fall of the Soviet olympic machine and all that, the USA would have won a medal in this event in the last 46 years.

Quoting: What follows is a scenario, not a prediction. The Consequences of Abundant Intelligence

South Korea has become the world's computer factory. Over %100 gains reported in exports in 2025.

The Work Tok video. Good grief, quoting: They are rarely the most gripping viewing, but corporate day in the life clips, where employees film themselves going about their regular working days, are proving a fast-growing hit on TikTok and Instagram, particularly among Gen Z viewers.

It appears the Russians have mastered the crypto exchange idea. You move money around the world without real banks and nations noticing.

Here come the portable computers powered by Nvidia processors --- CPUs of a sort.

A few farmers in America are turning down the cash and keeping the land. The datacenter builders offer big money. BIG MONEY.

There is a point here. It does take many resources to raise and train a human.

Just as soon as NASA announces March 6th as the launch date to the moon, well, uh, er, there's a problem. What comes after March? Oh, April. Might as well pull out the calendar and see what months come after April.

So much for security in commercial products. All the robot vacuum cleaners have cameras, microphones, floor plans, and are easy to hack all at once.

The rumor is out that Raspberry Pi single-board computers can run AI agents and OpenClaw. Folks are believing the rumor, buying the units, and driving up the stock price.

Tuesday 23 February 2026

Ah, the Portable Document Format file. It is a challenge.

More on AI trying to read PDFs. I use both everyday, and AI struggles here.

Apple and the supply of integrated circuits from TSMC-A (Arizona).

Apple to move Mac Mini production to Houston.

Tesla battles with the regulators in California. It appears that the California regulators are acting like the European regulators: take money when you can.

Our Dept of Defense gains access to xAI's Grok. Anthropic still won't let us use Claude. All the ne'er-do-wells in the world can, but we can't.

Claude owners visit the Pentagon to discuss terms.

IBM, home of the remaining COBOL expertise, sees its stock price fall as Claude purports to analyze and modernize COBOL all by itself.

Amazon to build a $12Billion datacenter in northwest Louisiana. They join Meta in Louisiana.

Has the AI boom contributed anything to the US economy? Economist say, "No."

Microsoft improves the look and feel of OneDrive on the Mac. Does anyone still say "look and feel?"

Young adults are once again moving away from the universal device, i.e., the smartphone and back to purpose-built devices like the iPod music player and the standalone digital camera.

Ring cameras see much. Much good can come from that. Of course, if Ring hires rotten people, much bad can come of that.

There is a war in Ukraine. That seems an obvious statement, but many adults don't understand that. Folks, it is a real war. Regular life does not exist. We have no concept of that in America.

Wednesday 25 February 2026

Quoting: Amazon is now the biggest global company by revenue. Walmart was previously the leader for more than a decade.

A couple of quotes here: Building An Elite AI Engineering Culture In 2026. And The gap between elite and average teams is widening, not closing.

Someone has a firm grasp of the obvious. Quoting: AI should be treated as an amplifier of human capacity rather than a replacement.

AI, directed by a smart and competent person, can generate a software product quickly. This portends ill for those persons who are neither smart nor competent.

Anthropic claims that Chinese companies created 24,000 accounts to access its systems and steal something or other. 24,000 accounts is a lot of time and money.

New and good tools are turning everyone into engineers. Well, not really, but the new tools are helping more people build things.

And with these new tools, we return to the same old problem best stated as, "We've just go to get organized."

A new technique called Dictionary Compression could completely change how applications send data over the web.

After two months, Nvidia still hasn't sold any H200 processors to China.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet this week. The first trans-Atlantic undersea fiber-optic cable (1988) is being pulled up. The materials can be reused.

HP asserts the price of memory chips is a significant factor in rising costs of laptop computers.

It appears that folks in India are using Gen AI and account for 20% of the world market.

Here is how America's teenagers are using these chattering bots. School work is half of it.

Here is a rumor of note: Apple is to have a laptop computer with a touch screen this year. The "why doesn't Apple have a touch screen" question has raged for several decades.

Dario Amodei refuses to allow our Dept of Defense to use Claude any which way it wants. Our Secretary of Defense hints that he will invoke some Defense Production Act or something to seize the company or something. And our Dept of Defense can actually do that.

Roku rockets from a $500million loss in 2022 to a $88million profit in 2025. It's all in the wrist action (that was a punchline from an ad when I was a kid).

Thursday 26 February 2026

Google attempts wireless (fiberoptic cable-less) laser communications on a city-wide scale.

Quoting, big bucks: Meta Platforms  has agreed to buy 6 gigawatts' worth of artificial intelligence computing power from Advanced Micro Devices in a deal valued at more than $100 billion that could result in Meta owning as much as 10% of AMD's stock.

Use AI or else... Tech companies are mandating employees use the new tools.

A programmer has been using Claude Code and laments, "How long until these motivated folks just do this themselves?"

Another lament (sort of): This is Google in 1999. Wow! This is the best things in AI will ever be. (This is the best?)

Telegram: where the fake jobs are.

VW has self-driving cars in testing in Europe and the US.

Amazon to put $50Billion in OpenAI. These numbers are staggering. How much money is 50 billion dollars? How can OpenAI absorb that much investment and still lose money on every prompt?

Quoting the headline: The UK's Virgin Media O2 launches Europe's first satellite-to-mobile service

Snowflake reports a big financial quarter.

Anthropic won't work with our national security. Our national security tells other companies to not work with Anthropic.

Nvidia reports a booming financial quarter. How can an established company report numbers that up 75%?

Talk to your PC to open a file, open an email, etc. Who would want to do that? How about someone whose hands don't work? And so on. If we do the right advances with this AI stuff, we can help those who truly need help. Let's do that instead of making cute videos.

Big tech companies sign up to build their own power plants. But what about the pollution? How do we think the existing power companies generate electricity? Hamster running in wheels?

Samsung has an event and shows lots of new things.

Friday 27 February 2026

Once again, some Google employees don't want to do business to aid our national security. Sigh. Ignorance is bliss or something like that.

And once again, it's okay for the Communist Party of China to use American AI systems to do terrible things to people. Americans using AI systems to protect democracy? Oh, no. Sigh.

And the rulers at OpenAI decide that maybe they should tell police when they notice someone promising to go kill a bunch of people.

Meta to use Google's TPUs.

Dell reports a good financial quarter. Perhaps everyone buying now instead of waiting for PC prices to jump up due to resources going to datacenters.

Speaking of price jumps in memory, industry watchers predict falling purchases of smartphones.

Burger King brings OpenAI in to help coach employees on customer service in restaurants. How about cleaning the bathrooms?

A couple of quotes from someone who knows something: (1) It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months and (2) As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable.

I think they are asking the wrong question. Instead, "What's the point of homework when you go to school to learn?" The article tries to questions the point of education and learning and how schools should adapt to the world.

Meanwhile in American schools, we spent $30Billion on computers given to kids in 2024. Result? Lower test scores on standard tests. Stupid? Yes, of course. We ran the experiment and received the results. Now adjust.

Saturday 28 February 2026

Thoughts on good programmers and the current state of vibe coding. The better programmers are also better at vibe coding. You think maybe they are simply smarter than everyone else?

This is long, but worth reading about AI and what you do at work and if you are underpaid or about to be unemployed.

We continue to make small steps towards little machines that crawl inside our bodies, sense, diagnose, and deliver health care.

And now we have Nano Banana version 2. That is either the worst or best name for a piece of software ever devised.

The grevious vexation between Anthropic and the Pentagon continues. Oh what fun or silliness.

Thinking of AI Agents in terms or Leverage or Function.

Want to buy something from TSMC? Order now. They are booked solid for the next two years.

Do you sign a contract with a government agency that your partner refuses to sell to? I think that is the question. It is all confusing and, given my experience, this is a personality clash more than anything else.

OpenAI signs up with our Dept of Defense. Details are not released.

A little confirmation of my hint at personality clash as OpenAI's says their terms are just what Anthropic wanted and everything is fine.

The wheel keeps turning: rumors are of yet another new and better AI processor to be announced by Nvidia in March.

If you don't like what your company does, quit your job.

OpenAI claims 900million weekly active users. That is a little shy of 3x the population of the US. And they are losing money on every user. One day, perhaps.

Real news that isn't news: NASA announces a delay in schedule. Perhaps one day... someone will clean house at that agency.

Strong rumors about what Apple will announce next week. The big one IMHO will be the lower-price laptop computer using a processor that is plenty good enough. We've been down this road before and folks tend not to buy these things. Maybe it will work this time.

Sunday 1 March 2026

Fear and loathing for those at Amazon whose jobs were not cut.

Use AI, be more productive, and work longer hours. Wait, how did that third one get in there? It has something to do with change and experimenting and learning new things. The first sentence describes me. Many of us are curious. Here is a new tool. Learn. Explore. Does learning, exploring, experimenting count as work or fun?

Meanwhile in China, they don't want folks to be too productive. They don't want layoffs and the riots that will bring.

Anthropic declined our Dept of Defense and BOOM, its Claude became the #1 app in the country.

The US and Israel strike Iran. The supreme leader of Iran is killed.

It's not slop because it was created by an AI. It's slop because it's slop. -- Seth Godin

Meanwhile in the US, our teenagers say their peers are all cheating with AI. That's the problem vexing our teens. The teens in Iran are facing something else.

More Star Wars movies. Really? Why?

I guess I need to learn how to have agency. What does that mean? Here is a definition: Essentially, having agency means being a proactive, rather than reactive, force in your own life.