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 March, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• US and Israel still battling with Iran
• Praise rolls in for the MacBook Neo
• More and more AI news

Monday 9 March 2026

Meanwhile in the UK, survey says half of the adults use these chattering bots for financial advice.

Meanwhile in the Gulf, the one over there in the eastern hemisphere, all the AI investment that was happening might not happen. They tend to have wars over there and investors tend to shy away from explosions.

And now we have "AI brain fry." Back when writing books on computer instead of yellow legal pads and typewriters began... well, the writers were overwhelmed with all the things they could write. They didn't have to choose to write one thing, they wrote ten things instead. Fatigue wins.

Forget trench warfare and drones in Ukraine, the war in Iran is fast, precise, and driven by AI targeting.

Quoting the headline: A study finds LLMs from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI can facilitate academic fraud, specifically helping non-researchers submit fabricated papers to arXiv

M5 Max MacBook Pro (couldn't those smart folks at Apple create a better name?), anyways the machine has flames coming out of it as it has processing power to surpass just about everything.

Meanwhile at McDonald's, we now have the Big Arch which seems to be a double whopper from Burger King or a double from Wendy's or something like that.

I like this one: the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric.

And I also like "AI Washing." Lay off people, say it is because of AI when really you were a moron and hired too many people doing inefficient and unproductive jobs.

AI doesn't get a copyright. Some person pushed the button. Blame or credit that person.

One writer's experience in taking everything in their long-running blog, feeding it into a chatbot, and letting folks ask questions.

Dean Wesley Smith starts a series of Indie publishing and myths in 2026. Myth #1 You Can't Get Your Books into Physical Bookstores

The memoir and the essential question.

20 Ways to Get Paid as a Writer. Well, some ideas here.

Quoting: when a moment of change is upon us, it's human nature to resist it in some capacity. 

Podcasts for writers. I'll have to try these.

The Oxford comma and other ways to write with clarity. It is worth the effort.

Editing or revising can be tricky. Pause and consider what you are attempting.

More on editing. This piece, however, is about what to do with all the comments and edits another person sends you.

And here is the long-rumored MacBook Neo. It runs on an A18 Pro processor that was built for the iPhone. $599 ($499 for students) price tag with a 13" screen. I am waiting for performance reviews.

Tuesday 10 March 2026

Let's do a live test on real things ... often a bad idea. Crash into an asteroid, what could possible go wrong? Yikes.

Quoting the headline: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years. And I have to add that I don't know if I will be alive in ten years.

It appears that the GNU Public License is on its way out the door.

A firm grasp of the obvious. Much of the current fussing on AI and government and all that is the clash of individuals with big egos who huff and puff loudly.

New times at Apple. There is much to the Neo and its marketing.

Quoting: companies claims that they can get by with way fewer people in the age of AI does seem to be true. More of my own thoughts to come later.

These numbers are amazing: Apple made about 55M iPhones in India in 2025, up 53% YoY from 36M in 2024, or about 25% of total iPhone production

xAI aims to build a natural gas power plant in Southaven, MS which is right next to Memphis, TN

Quoting: Nvidia is pitching NemoClaw, an upcoming open-source AI agent platform for enterprises. How many homonym variations are there for claude?

Looking at the MacBook Pro 16" (M5 Max).

As expected, Anthropic sues its former customer the Dept of Defense or War

Microsoft shows Copilot Cowork. Microsoft is trying to take the power of Anthropic systems and package them for folks who can barely spell AI and model. It is business. Microsoft is International Business Machine.

Part of Microsoft's push is a $99 per month E7 subscription.

I like this move: the right to use cash.

Wednesday 11 March 2026

The world splits in half or at least two pieces. One has a 10x productivity increase and that isn't enough. The other piece still scoffs at all this. Where are we?

More big money flowing around the tech industry. Someone or some nation is rich. The size of these business deals is astounding... at least to me.

Meanwhile in China, folks in offices are using OpenClaw. The Communist Party disapproves.

Coming from OpenAI is generative video. It will be here real soon now.

Here come the age-verification laws. Regulators gotta regulate. Oh, and old folks like me still have to verify.

Due to inflation pressures, the sub-$1,000 portable computer will disappear.

Showing they are always a couple of years behind everything, our US Senate approves the use of generative AI at work.

Microsoft steps in to support Anthropic.

Oracle reports a big financial quarter.

This is some sort of milestone as YouTube passes Disney to become the biggest media something-or-other in the world.

Gemini Agents move into the Pentagon. After typing this, I have to pause and think how that little sentence makes sense in today's climate.

Meta acquires AI agent social network Moltbook. A month ago, Moltbook didn't exist. The world accelerates.

Google rolls out Gemini-powered AI capabilities across Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive.

Another review of the MacBook Neo. People like this machine from Apple.

New, but not new: job applicants want GPU budgets as part of their compensation. We used to ask for conference and travel budgets as part of compensation.

Thursday 12 March 2026

Google Research releases a system to help track groundwater and flooding. A useful tool. This is what we should be doing with all this technology.

Meanwhile in India, the governors dump $10Billion into domestic chip making.

Meanwhile in Africa, the governors are dumping billion$ into Chinese-built surveillance tech.

Quoting: Amazon pushes employees to integrate AI across their workload despite their concerns that the company's half-baked tools are creating more work

Meanwhile in China, they are going crazy over this OpenClaw thing.

Meanwhile in Abilene, Texas, Microsoft steps into a data center project that Oracle abandoned.

Nvidia, not content to own the world's hardware market, steps into make AI models.

Quoting the headline: Perplexity reveals Personal Computer, a cloud-based AI agent running on your Mac

Quoting the headline: WordPress Debuts my.wordpress.net Private Workspace

Meta shows four new processors that will be here in 2027 or something like that.

Intel shows new processors claiming they are the most powerful for gaming on PCs yet.

Quoting the New York Times headline: How Ukraine is working to make drones with as few components from China as possible, prioritizing self-sufficiency in producing a crucial battlefield weapon

Prices for using AI are falling. The open-source models are catching the best-performing commercial models. And where does this lead us? Don't invest in the old companies (OpenAI and Anthropic). Go to the newer companies, i.e., those that are two-weeks old or younger. Huh?

Let's relearn history again: productive individuals do not make productive firms.

Friday 13 March 2026

Meanwhile in Hong Kong, they want to by a crypto currency hub.

For a couple of generations, we lived in the information age where being a liberal arts major meant literacy and information. Perhaps we now shift to an AI age where all the reading and writing is extruded for us. Hence the age of the vocations begins where the carpenters use AI to write contracts for them etc. Oh, and this shifts power to conservative political parties.

Survey says: some programmers like the idea of being the boss and telling AI what code to churn out.

I'll just quote the headline: Emil Michael says Anthropic's Claude models would pollute the DOD's supply chain because they have a different policy preference that is baked in

Remember when data was the new oil. The governors of Ukraine promise to share its battlefield data with its allies.

Smart glasses, smart phone, not-so-smart people in courtrooms. Sigh.

Meanwhile in Europe, perhaps closing those nuclear power plants wasn't such a good idea after all.

Meanwhile in America, Honda backtracks on building electric vehicles. What happened to all those electric vehicle? Hmm?

Another praise and salutation for the Apple Neo computer as it is easier to repair.

Saturday 14 March 2026

Project Maven: few names in the DoD bring chills or yawns or something. And we have a book coming that tells all the ... well, you know.

Meanwhile in Moscow (the one in Russia), Internet blackouts are becoming common as censorship lives on.

There are currently two stories about AI and warfare. The first is that China is leaps and bounds ahead of us and this is terrifying. The second is that our defenders are using AI and this is terrifying. Choose the one you like. Of course, the best choice is no warfare. Perhaps AI can increase diplomacy and reduce warfare.

Survey says: 80% of US physicians use AI. The most common use is paperwork. Folks, the current round of AI is good at text, it was built for that. Doctors, thanks to that US President whose name is associated with medical care, have tons of paperwork these days. Put two and two together and it makes sense.

Boom$$$$ Our Army awards Anduril a $20Billion (with a B) contract.

Strong rumors that Meta will layoff 20% of its workforce.

Anthropic boosts the context window of its offerings.

Suspend belief for a moment around personalities. If your company isn't right, start over. That makes sense, and many companies have done this in the past.

Every now and then, someone tries to bring us back to reality: Most Americans are patriotic, hardworking, neighbor-helping, America-loving, money-giving people who don't pop off on social media or plot for power. It's the terminally online news junkies who are detached from the actual reality.

I am surprised at the overwhelming response to the MacBook Neo. I thought it was a good idea, but folks are jumping on it. This harkens to the Intel Atom processor idea that most computer users don't need a supercomputer.

More praise for the MacBook Neo. Quoting: the MacBook Neo beats every modern mobile processor from AMD, Intel and also Qualcomm

The loss-leader time of AI services is approaching its end. Here come the co$t$.

Quoting the headline: Facial Recognition Error Jails Innocent Grandmother For Months. Once again, hire good, smart people and most problems go away.

Sunday 15 March 2026

AI killed the video game.

And AI is pushing up rents in San Francisco. They call this a recovery. A recovery from what? No one could afford to live there before any of this.

Rumors of what we will see at Nvidia's big event this week.

War and rumors of wars. The Straight of Hormuz is closed. Helium production falls.

It seems that it sells better to blame it all on AI. There must be an excuse for what ails us, and AI is easy to spell.

Because of foresight, Apple isn't raising the prices of its computers like everyone else. They better manage the supply chain.

A review of Apple's updated MacBook Air. M5 processor and all that stuff. Perhaps it can compete with the Neo.

The investors in TikTok are paying the US government $10Billion for something or other. Let's not have the money fall into a hole at the Dept of the Treasury. Instead, earmark it for something useful and put up big signs. For example, road maintenance at all national parks paid for by TikTok.

Small solar panels are coming to America. Yes, there is a political fight over stuff. No, you cannot just plug into your apartment and electrocute someone. Good grief. Safety is paramount in America, so we cannot trust people to have any sense.

And we have a large wind power system up and running off the east coast. No, these things really aren't as good as advertised as huge pieces fail after a few years and do not degrade when buried in huge pits. They pollute more than fossil fuels and make us dependent on human slavery in mines.

AI will end computer programming as we know it. The code editor that completed typing for us ended computer programminga as we knew it. The compiler ended computer programming as we knew it. The personal computer ended computer programming as we knew. I can continue with the examples.