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 March, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• US and Israel continue to battle Iran
• And the war with Iran is causing rising costs in many places and industries
• Chuck Norris dies at 86
• Our President releases a National Policy Framework for AI
• Paul Brainerd dies at 78. He invented desktop publishing.

Monday 16 March 2026

Foxconn reports a big financial quarter.

Big tech agrees to share information on scammers. Good.

Microsoft reduced the amount of Copilot AI in Windows 11. They feared bloat, and reducing bloat is good idea.

Much of the videos online on the Iran war are fake, generated by AI. And a study shows that most of those exaggerate the Iranian military capability.

New-found footage exposes the Patterson-Gimlin bigfoot film as faked.

Some details emerge about how the North Korean governors put fake people into remote jobs in America.

The challenge of writing science fiction is the science part.

The concepts of structure and fitting a story into a structure.

And going the other direction, never let anything get in the way of a good story.

In praise of the journal or the ugly notebook. It isn't for finished things. Practice, fail, flop, learn, and move.

Tuesday 17 March 2026

Jensen Huang gave the keynote address at Nvidia's big event yesterday Here is one summary. I find many philosophical points and few specifics.

Some thoughts on open models in AI and how to exist without direct competition with the closed models.

If there is big money gambling on an event, there is big money available to change the event. We've always known this, but there seems to be some adults who are still surprised by this.

A company called Manus introduces another AI system that runs on the files on the local computer. Good. We are getting somewhere that is truly practical. They call it My Computer. Nice name.

Nvidia jumps into the thisClaw and thatClaw marketplace.

And Nvidia still does a few things in the world of computer graphics. That is where it was born. Nice to see they still pay some attention to it.

Big old encyclopedia sues OpenAI for using its materials without pay or permission.

Ah, the estate sale. Here is comes. Older folks kept everything and the great majority of it is still good. That set of fine china used once a year for 50 years is quite good.

Wednesday 18 March 2026

Work during the day and have the computer work during the night. I guess this is more than the Unix cal utility.

This seems useful: autoresearch. Run experiments, alter them based on results.

Let's build some gainfully employed robots.

The old way Quote: Every app you use is full of moments where someone decided good enough was good enough, not necessarily because they lacked taste, but because they lacked time. And now this is gone. AI does all the slow work quickly. We don't lack time. My head hurts (and that headache is a real problem).

How much sales is enough? Nvidia shoots for a Trillion$.

The managers at OpenAI try to F O C U S.

The future of software engineering with these agent chattering bot things. At least they use the word "engineering." Perhaps some of these coding cowboys will settle down to the engineering of systems. It can be boring, but it works.

More than I ever wanted to know about GLP-1 and the search for the one-a-day pill.

After studying about 400,000 chat messages, researchers confirm that these chattering bots mostly reply, "Yes, you are right." No wonder we like to use these things.

New term for me: Hacker House. New trend in San Francisco: rent a luxury mansion as a place to work 24 hours a day.

Google et al. give $12.5million to The Linux Foundation to hunt for AI-generated bugs.

I grinned when I saw this one: companies are tracking the token use of employees to see who is wasting money.

If a company can turn off its product when it doesn't like you, have you actually bought the product?

This is probably the most "no duh" stories I have seen in months.

Meanwhile in Iran where censorship is alive and well, they now have more censorship.

The big AI companies are moving towards what the original Volkswagon was: something small, efficient, does the job, and is practical. Good. Finally. Let's go.

Intel shows a new processor for high-end gaming laptop computers.

Quoting the headline: Amazon begins three-hour deliveries in about 2K US cities and towns and one-hour deliveries in hundreds of those areas. A little thought, a little practice, and efficiency is possible. And people wonder why Elon Musk simply gave up efforts to improve our Federal bureaucracy.

A large portion of the fertilizer used on American farms used to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Want a job? Rural schools in America need teachers.

Split spacebars come to gaming computers. The split space bar was a feature of the IBM Executive typewriter that had a proportional font. We return to the past.

Some folks want to prevent their neighbors from selling the family land for a datacenter. Okay, buy it yourself. Instead, in America, we try to regulate our neighbors out of their money.

I recommend reading this piece and its references. AI is affecting jobs in an indirect way. The slop from AI flooding the Internet is ruining businesses and costs jobs. AI job replacement studies do not consider this.

Thursday 19 March 2026

The home built in a factory and hauled to the home site should be less expensive, but it isn't. There are many factors to consider. This is a good explanation.

It appears that the Perplexity website is the place to go to use AI chattering bots and agents.

I strongly recommend reading this. Don't ask, What will our kids do? Instead, ask What will we do?

Play XBox on the Windows 11 computer. Coming real soon now.

Interesting thoughts summarized with a couple of quotes. (1) AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. (2) The marginal effort to go from spreadsheet to software just collapsed to near zero.

And some reasons why AI won't just make everything faster everywhere. (1) Every layer of approval makes a process 10x slower.  (2) the start of the pipeline (AI generated code) is so much faster, but all the subsequent stages (reviews) are too slow (3) the majority of time needed to get anything done is not actually the time doing it. It's wall clock time. Waiting.

Meanwhile in Europe, they are trying to find ways to do business by running around the Iran war.

Meanwhile in China, governors of cities are offering small living and office space to people who want to start AI-enabled, one-person companies.

PwC (used to be Price Waterhouse Cooper or something) tells its consultants to use AI or find a job elsewhere.

Anthropic uses their tech to interview 81,000 people about AI. Then they had to use their tech to summarize all the answers. Some reading.

Here is the type of stupid story I hoped we could avoid. There was a problem, and the culprit was a runaway rogue AI Agent. NO STUPID! The problem was someone wrote some software and turned it on without testing it properly. Good grief!

Micron, an Idaho-based semiconductor designer, reports a huge financial quarter.

Anthropic is steadily taking over the business AI marketplace.

I can't keep track of the players in this story. It appears that the Russians are hacking away at everything in every roundabout way they can find.

Our Federal government admitted that Microsoft's computer security systems were, well, uh, not secure, but approved them for use anyways.

Friday 20 March 2026

Chuck Norris has died at 86.

In the news, Amazon is dropping our US Postal Service to deliver packages. The USPS is crying foul. This will hurt them as a semi-government and semi-business.

Starlink provides better Internet access on airlines than other systems. Nothing is better in all perspectives.

An in-depth piece on how OpenAI's Codex works.

Fear and loathing in college Computer Science departments.

How to start a startup company.

Expected today from the Administration are ideas for AI regulation or non-regulation.

Blue Origin seeks permission to put 52,000 satellites in orbit. Really?

I am happy to see this piece. Someone has learned what many have tried to teach. (1) separate content from formatting. (2) Write one format, and use pandoc to  translate to all other formats.

From OpenAI, they are focusing all efforts on building one app to handle them all or rule them or something.

Star Wars here we come. Well, not really, but our US Space Force takes a first little step towards buying a satellite that can maneuver, and shoot down other satellites.

Finally, somebody gets is. Quoting: AI should be treated like a fast typist that is carrying out your will.

Deeper thoughts on computing and the current trends in AI. Quoting: The world is a place where unexpected futures unfold, but in somewhat predictable ways. As humans, we can envision almost all of them with roughly the same amount of effort with a very similar amount of time given to each thought. Computers can't.

Remember when Zuckerburg declared the whole world would be a metaverse and he renamed his company to Meta? Does anyone remember that? $80Billion (with a B) down the drain. Oh well.

Saturday 21 March 2026

Meanwhile in China, robotics companies everywhere. Predictable and predicted. They had a one-child policy for decades. They ran out of people and they do not allow immigrants in. Hence, they need machines to care for the elderly. In America, we have immigrants, so we don't have robots.

A fool is born every minute (someone famous once said that). You can bet on any future event (why would anyone bet on a past event?). This is all nonsense, but there are nonsensical folks about there with money.

This story won't die. If Anthropic doesn't want to participate in national defense, fine. Just go away.

Anthropic integrates its Claude Code with several social media sites. The push stems from the concept that many folks can't live without their gee whiz app. The AI companies make gateways to these apps. There is something about this that ties to the "fool is born every minute" story above.

And there is something about this story that ties to "the rich get richer."

Microsoft leans back to the Windows environment. Perhaps it isn't the cash cow it once was and Microsoft might sell it off to another company.

I find this concept promising. OpenAI wants to build a system that assists with research. They have a few steps to reach the goal with some coming this year.

Rumors that Amazon will try to make another smartphone. Their 2014 attempt was a flop. Maybe this time.

This is a practical device for Internet access. The writer here uses the Starlink Mini to write from anywhere. Those responding to natural and man-made disasters have to more important use cases. This is a good thing.

There is a war in the Middle East (isn't there always one?). Oil supplies are squeezed? How to battle the energy crisis? Work from home. Is anyone listening?

Here is the National Policy Framework on AI. This is a framework, not a detailed and prescriptive document. It contains basic principles. Many will be aghast at them. I like them for the most part.

Sunday 22 March 2026

I'll just quote the headline as Mr. Musk is at it again: Elon Musk announces Terafab, an Austin-based project run by Tesla and SpaceX to manufacture robotics, AI, and space data center chips for Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX

I see stories like this and maybe there is some public relations genius behind all this.

Palantir is all in on AI for the battlefield.

In the era of cutting jobs, OpenAI goes the other way and announces 8,000 new jobs this year.

Updates coming to the Firefox browser. These sound pretty good. Let's see them real soon now.

Folks want to crush the Internet Archive. I don't like that idea. Quoting: Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper,

Here comes the Tesla all-electric semi-trailer truck. Actual drivers say they like it.

The praise keeps coming for the MacBook Neo. Apple has brought a MacOS machine to a lower-priced laptop. And folks like the colors they can choose. I guess that is important to some folks. Just give me aluminum that looks like aluminum.

It appears the Boeing and Lockheed Martin have forgotten how to build space launch vehicles.

Twitter and tweeting are now 20 years old. I was an early adopter as the system was and still is an excellent means of communication for emergency personnel in areas hit with disasters.

Paul Brainerd has died at 78. He created PageMaker and also created the term "desktop publishing." I jumped into the desktop publishing but didn't have the money to buy PageMaker. Those things seem like nothing today. Nevertheless, they changed the world 40 years ago.