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: 30 March - 5 April, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• US-Israel still battle Iran
• Much of the war with Iran is on the cybersecurity front
• Artemis 2 gets off the ground
• Microsoft Outlook fails on Artemis
• And everything is AI
• And the ignorance surrounding AI is enomous

Monday 30 March 2026

Amazon helped produce the movie Project Hail Mary. Last year, I think, Apple had the big hit with F1 about racing. If you have money and fund enough projects, one will hit now and then. Nothing new in the entertainment industry.

Folks are cutting back on those ZoomerTeams meetings for job interviews. Too much AI-enabled ... cheating is the word they use. How about smart and resourceful people smartly using their resources?

Some history of Apple's Mac computer. And then there was the commercial.

Great quote: Anthropic's viral moment is waning.

The US and Israeli war on Iran ... has upended the global economy.

Amazon makes a big investment in rural deliveries. Smart move? If it works, it will be rare for a private company to invest in the empty spaces of rural America and succeed. Taxes made rural postal delivery, electric power lines, and telephone lines. Can Amazon do it?

The use of computers in K-12 schools may have passed its peak. Textbooks and paper are making a comeback. The COVID PAN(dem)IC went too far and showed that there is much more to learning than staring at a screen.

Writing books on writing books. How to write a novel in five days while travelling.

Writers are being falsely accused of trying to publish AI-generated text. Everyone seems to be an expert at "I just know it when I see it." Good grief.

Writing in the face of AI. Someone else can copy half the Internet in the time it takes to type a page. So what?

Writing is not just putting the words on paper or on the screen. Walking around no where is writing. Eating popcorn is writing.

Thoughts on "the heart of the story" whatever that is. Folks, just write a story. Beginning, middle, end or whatever. If people enjoy it, they enjoy it.

Nice piece, "Of Pens and Swords"

Thoughts on going to a writing retreat. I have written before about declaring today a writing retreat and acting like I was on a writing retreat and simply writing. That idea doesn't work for many people.

Tuesday 31 March 2026

A $10Billion datacenter coming to Findland. We have reached the point where this isn't news and is hardly worth mentioning. Hmm, the world has changed quickly (again).

The folks at Raspberry Pi report a big jump in revenue and a big fall in stock price. Well, I guess the finance folks understand how this happens. Anyways, the single-board computers are able to run some of these smaller language models and do cool stuff now.

India becomes one of the world's biggest makers and exporters of smartphones. China, due to COVID etc., is not a reliable business partner.

Meanwhile in California, regulators gotta regulate even when they aren't in a regulator job.

Trouble comes when you allow gambling but try to limit the topics for gambling. It is money. Pure money.

Deep thoughts on AI safety. I suppose I am in the minority on all things AI as I have knowledge of it going back to far to be comfortable for most folks and most discussions.

One of the great things about calling software AI is that when the software does something unintended and the programmers didn't test the software properly, everyone can say, "The AI did it! The AI is the bad guy! Blame the AI!" Great excuse.

Great piece on the Smartphone Theory of Everything in which we blame everything on the smartphone. Cry until you laugh; laugh until you cry.

Apple has its official 50th birthday tomorrow.

This piece claims that the AI layoffs are not due to AI productivity. Companies are reducing payroll to reduce costs. They invest the money hoping to not be left behind in technology. Once the chaos settles, they hire people in new jobs.

$8billion and 16 years later, the GPS software still doesn't work. Every ten years or so we need a new story about a colossal software failure. Why does it always have to be a government program?

Ah, woe is us. Quoting: The rise of AI agents that tend to computer tasks on demand has put users in the position of managing smart, fast digital workers rather than having to grind through jobs themselves. Want a grind? Try raising a family in Iran these days. Oh, and try Cuba as well. And we have No Kings protests in America. Foolishness.

Oops, maybe some of those microplastics results in the lab are due to the gloves the people wear. Measuring something changes it. I guess some people forgot or never learned that old saying. Good grief.

Wednesday 1 April 2026

Meanwhile in Europe, some folks are trying to move away from Microsoft and other American systems.

War raises prices and disrupts business. That is a couple of reasons why this war with Iran is surprising.

Microsoft continues to pour billion$ into Asia.

Meanwhile in South Korea, exports of semiconductors are booming.

Oops, robotaxis in China stop and crash.

Meanwhile in NYC, the new mayor reverses course and allows city government to use TikTok.

Intriguing, a 100Hz tone does something to the inner ear and reduces motion sickness.

The value of Microsoft stock has dropped 21%. Time to buy.

Meanwhile at airports in America, we are seeing an accidental denial of service attack. The long lines are caused by people showing up hours too early. They make a crowd, and that causes more people to show up earlier and increase the crowd and that ...

The governors of Iran say they will now attack American companies operating in the Middle East. I wonder why they have waited so long to do so.

Meta and Ray-Ban update their smart glasses.

Quoting the headline: Nvidia invests $2B in chipmaker Marvell and says the two companies plan to work on silicon photonics tech, enabling high-speed data transmission

A milestone as in 2025, Vietnam surpassed China as the leading supplier of laptops and game consoles to the US for the first time.

And back in Iran, the governors are throwing all the hackers in the country at every target they can find.

Thursday 2 April 2026

Dario Amodei and Sam Altman are the new Steve Jobs and Bill Gates or the new anyone and Larry Ellison.

The accelerating change in the current AI systems. The bottleneck is someone saying what they want. Nothing new here.

OpenAIs Sora was new and really good. Then it was pulled off the market.

Right out of science fiction. See "The Island" from 2005.

Hiring fewer, better people brings super-high salaries for a few and unemployment for everyone else.

AI agents could take us back to the age of freeware and shareware.

Quoting: Entire Claude Code CLI source code leaks

Insert microbubbles into the bloodstream to deliver medicine, break kidney stones, and do all sorts of other things.

Running these LLMs efficiently via inference engineering.

A long piece that says: It's easy to design governance in theory ... but nearly impossible to enforce once billions of dollars and strategic advantage are at stake. In other words, money talks and bull walks.

You can finally change the goofy Gmail address you chose years ago. I guess my choice years ago was practical and boring.

Yet another case of misguided teachers not understanding core skills or what the words core and skill mean.

Cloudflare builds a replacement for WordPress. The call it EmDash.

Meanwhile in China, trade blockades are doing what they usually do, i.e., spur local industry to grow and fill the gap.

Meanwhile in India, Oracle has cut 20% of its workforce.

The Artemis 2 fly around the moon mission left the ground yesterday. NASA has put four people into earth orbit for the first time in a very long time. The flight is far from over. Pray for the four passengers.

Raspberry Pi raises the prices of its single-board computers. They cite increases in costs of memory chips as the reason. Blame it on the datacenters.

Quoting the headline: AWS' operation in Bahrain was damaged after an Iranian strike

Friday 3 April 2026

Saturday 4 April 2026

OpenAI buys a tech industry talk show. Conflict of interest?

Here is an impressive improvement in robotic hand manipulation. This is quite difficult.

This is an impressive speech-to-text system. It's called Wispr Flow. I can't figure out how to pay for it or the price. Have to look at this.

From zero to $1.8Billion (with a B) in two months and $20,000. AI helped build that.

Quoting: Amazon is a bad example of why it is okay to burn loads of cash during growth. The strategy doesn't always work out, especially if it is not executed correctly.

More quoting: Two releases this week, however, suggest we're starting to enter a second phase of open source agentic coding projects. The first brought us clones, this next phase brings us reimaginings. Let's write yet another version of Word Count.

Our National Labor Relations board is trying to eliminate 5,000 Amazon jobs on Staten Island.

You can't build a datacenter without parts. You can't buy American parts if the factories to build them don't exist. After decades of bad policy, we are trying to catch up.

Quoting: Despite hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, nearly half of planned U.S. data center projects are being delayed or canceled. They just can't find the parts.

Per data from LinkedIn, everyone is hiring for AI. I guess having done fundamental research in AI a few years back eliminates me from all of those jobs.

Now we have the regulators fighting over who can regulate the prediction markets. Money in gambling, money in politics, and the results are not surprising.

Meanwhile at Microsoft, they will be able to build the largest large language models real soon now.

Microsoft puts $10Billion into Japan.

We are now pointing to literally snake oil as a weight-loss drug.

Meanwhile on the way to the moon, Microsoft Outlook stopped working. Why is anyone trying to use Outlook in that situation?

Sunday 5 April 2026

Meanwhile in Hollywood as elsewhere, support staff are learning how the current version of AI systems can handle text. We do this where I work. Text extruding machines.

While in Bollywood, they don't have union contracts like Hollywood. Hence, they use far more AI in movie production.

Meanwhile at Microsoft, quoting the headline: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only and Don't rely on Copilot for important advice

Meanwhile in the UK, the governors wants more Anthropic as opposed to the US DoD that wants less.

People continue to attempt to change what an addiction is. Doing something for hours doesn't mean it is an addiction. Top musicians became top musicians by practicing for hours every day. The same for top people in many professions. The same for startup founders who work 16 hours a day. That is not addiction. Playing a game for hours is not addiction.

And now we have cognitive surrender to AI. I guess we also did that when we started using spell checkers. huh?

I think you have a great idea for a product. Come live in my basement while you work on it. On second thought, I'll pay your rent so you can live across town.

So many people are using Anthropic's systems that the company is reducing what is allowed.

Quoting: Iranian strikes have rendered two AWS zones hard down in Dubai and Bahrain

Mercor and others are buying stolen goods to train their AI systems. Yes, you wrote that. No, you don't own it. It was paid for hire.

I like this, quoting: Gen Z is driving a rise in sober tourism, and the industry is changing in response.