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: 20-26 April, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Politics in Virginia
• Anthropic's Mythos is out there through backdoors
• And more AI, but more practical and useful (finally)
• Shots fired outside the White House Correspondents' Dinner

Monday 20 April 2026

No Internet viewing.

Tuesday 21 April 2026

Tim Cook retires after 15 years of Apple's CEO. Apple did quite well financially during his time.

Meanwhile in Europe, their is some effort to move away from the US tech companies. Good luck with that. Sincerely, good luck. I hope they can marshall the brainpower and lessen the regulations to do something. It is the regulations that have killed their innovation.

Meanwhile in Germany, at least someone has realized they need to ease regulations on innovation.

Every generation or so we have a story of a massive catastrophe with a software effort. For us now, RTX and their GPS ground control system is the example of stupidity. Billion$ overrun, over ten years late, and all that. Same song different verse. And is it a coincidence that these programs are all with the government? Hmm.

Amazon pours another $25Billion into Anthropic. Will anyone at Anthropic own any of Anthropic?

With the datacenter and AI costs rising fast, GitHub is become too expensive for Microsoft to operate.

MTS (monitoring the situation) launches to watch and tell what happens in tech.

Warning! Warning! AI has an existential threat to humanity!

A Blue Origin rocket fails to put a satellite in orbit. This stuff ain't easy.

It appears that agencies in the US Government are quietly continuing to use Anthropic systems.

Talks between government officials and Dario Amodei seem to have some promise.

An odd story about open-source maintainers struggling to keep up with the bug reports with Anthropic's Mythos.

Here comes inflation in computing hardware. Supply and demand strikes again.

See, for example, the rush to buy little computers from Apple.

The ultra-rich discuss becoming benevolent leaders for everyone else. Is it benevolent or malevolent? Sometimes I confuse the two. I hope the rich don't confuse them.

Quoting the headline: The US DOJ says a judge sentenced two US citizens to a combined 16 years in prison for running laptop farms that let North Korean IT workers pose as US workers. I don't like scams. I am not sure that the guilty are being punished in this case. If you are poor and someone pays you a little dough to put some laptop computers in your rusting single-wide trailer in rural America... well I understand the willingness to take the monty. It isn't an easy life for many.

Wednesday 22 April 2026

Here in Virginia, we vote to redraw Congressional Districts so that the Democratic Party gains five seats. The Party will now have 10 of the 11 Representatives from Virginia. Don't ya' just love politics?

More from Anthropic with Claude Design for creating prototypes and all sorts of other goodness.

And coming real soon now from Apple is a better Siri. Let's see if this one gets a guest spot on a leading sitcom.

Why do we keep calling them vaccines when they are not vaccines? Anyways, this one appears to have some promise.

Someone tries to explain what design is and what it isn't.

How Notion restarted itself without losing its group of loyal users.

Meta to layoff 8.000 people. That is a lot of people at one time. The percentage doesn't matter when its 8,000 people.

Bi-pedal humanoid robots beat humans in a half marathon (about 13 miles). Truly an amazing feat. Still, a UAV of another form would have beat that time easily. The humanoid form is just on great one.

Quoting: John Ternus will become Apple's new CEO after a 25 year career on September 1.

Quoting the summary: AI is scaling into a major economic force at unprecedented speed, but our ability to measure and interpret its impact is lagging --- creating risks for policy, perception, and long-term understanding.

Meanwhile in California, regulators gotta' regulate and, if that doesn't work, take successful companies to court.

TikTok wants to pour $38Billion into Brazil. And some in Brazil are fighting the idea.

Someone at SpaceX has a moment of reality and declares that putting datacenters in orbit may not really work.

Big tech and AI tech are pouring money into politician's pockets. Big money, big influence. This seems to be the American way.

Predictable and predicted: Anthropic's Mythos was to be held closely with very limited release. A group has been using it without permission since day zero.

Quoting the headline: OpenAI releases ChatGPT Images 2.0 with new thinking capabilities, allowing it to search the web to help it create multiple images from a single prompt

The mainstream media is trying to turn opinion against datacenters. This is wealth redistribution and a little controlling the means of production. Old songs that were worn out years ago, but if you have no innovating thinking or little to no thinking of any kind, you play those old records again.

Information is power, and Meta's managers are trying to capture information from its employees every minute of the day.

Quoting the headline: Anthropic started requiring government-issued photo IDs and selfies from some users to prevent access from US adversaries like China, Russia, and North Korea. If this is true, good for Anthropic.

The drug cartels, the ultimate ne'er-do-wells, are bypassing fentanyl and now using something called carfentanil as a lower-cost boost. Carfentanil was developed to kill animals such as elephants and rhinoceroses. There are known preventatives for the drug cartels. We don't seem to use them much. Sorry. I don't cut them much slack.

Wired looks at the best gaming laptops of 2026.

Thursday 23 April 2026

Mike Solona of Pirate Wires has a take on this year's gerrymandering, i.e., fixing elections, "But in reality our democracy is cooked in back rooms by the worst people alive from every political pole," A bit harsh, but I tend to agree.

It appears that SpaceX will attempt to make its own computer processors.

Long ago, Microsoft showed demonstrations of how AI inside its M365 (or whatever they call Office apps these days) would help everyone do useful things. Maybe reality has finally caught up with those commercials.

The rich get richer (by using AI more).

About all those Nvidia processors to be sold to China... uh, ah, well, maybe one day.

Quoting the headline: OpenAI releases ChatGPT for Clinicians, a tool for medical tasks like documentation and research, free for verified physicians, pharmacists, and more in the US

Leave it to a college student to show what you can do with Claude Code by rewriting Claude Code using Claude Code. Well, something like that.

SK Hynix makes memory chips. Everyone wants them. First quarter revenue up 198% and profit up 405%. Yes, these numbers are a bit crazy, but real.

Texas Instruments reports a good financial quarter.

OpenAI introduces workspace agents in ChatGPT. My $20 a month doesn't get it (yet). Folks, its software that allows you to do useful things (sort of like Microsoft Word is software that allows you to do useful things.) Given access to interfaces, which never seemed to be available until recently, I could have written my own software to do these things. I like it. Let's not get carried away with AI glee or fear.

Google shows what it calls Workspace Intelligence. Like the above from OpenAI, it is software that helps do useful things.

Google claims that software is writing its software. That just shows how mechanical much of writing the programs is. Same with writing the words. Now, creating that plot twist in the novel, that isn't mechanical.

Must see video as a robot plays ping pong (table tennis). Yes, this is computer vision operating at lightning speed. It is also physical machines with unlimited electric power and lightweight materials.

It is amazing that some adults are amazed at how a building full of computers uses electric power. Where do you find these adults? Are they literate? Oh, they are journalists.

Google shows what it calls Workspace Intelligence. Like the above from OpenAI, it is software that helps do useful things.

Friday 24 April 2026

ChatGPT gains better image-to-text capabilities.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so beholden and tell your AI what beauty is.

Would you pay $100/month for basic access to Claude Code? Sure, if it pays you back 100x.

Speaking of 100x, Mythos found several hundred cybersecurity problems in the Firefox browser. It did this in minutes instead of the expensive months an expert would have needed.

Elon Musk has big goals. He states them loudly. He also changes them.

Meanwhile in Norway, the governors will parent the kids and ban social media to everyone under 16. This wouldn't work in America, but it probably will in Norway due to its demographics and culture.

It appears that in parts of the world where people save and invest, half of us are using AI as an advisor. Again, it is software that does useful tasks for us.

Meanwhile in China, regulators gonna' regulate more and with feeling this time.

DeepSeek releases new models that are better than its prior models. In a break from tradition to candor, it admits they are three to six months behind the competition. Then again, they aren't really competing with others.

Tired of AI regulators in China? Tired of AI regulators in America? Come to Singapore. Great idea. Why try to build a floating country when this island nation is welcoming.

Yet another story of an insider winning money on these predictive markets and, uh, well, being punished for cheating. When you allow gambling, you have these things. We are waiting on the first giant college sports game fixing case. It will come.

OpenAI launches GPT-5.5. Of course it has more goodness than the goodness in 5.4. We are at the point where being more efficient is more important.

Microsoft is now old enough, 51 years, to offer its first voluntary retirement program.

Anthropic, a company that loses million$ on every prompt and click, is valued by someone who values things at a Trillion (with a Tr) $$$. Oh well, perhaps I do not understand big finance.

I'll just quote the headline: Good luck getting a Mac Mini anytime soon Okay scalpers, get out there and grab what you can and re-sell them for profit$$$.

And I'll quote this headline as well: Gates Foundation To Cut 20% of Staff, Review Epstein Ties Hire good, smart people and most problems don't happen.

Saturday 25 April 2026

Quoting the headline: A Hundred Robots Are Running A Bio Lab. And none of them are humanoids.

And now we have Tokenmaxxing. He who uses the most tokens is doing the most work and getting the most pay. Really? Okay.

Poor Claude. It seems that he is getting tired. These things weren't supposed to get tired.

Here we have assumptions. Let's say this comes true and automation and all that AI make most jobs obsolete. Many people have little to do except pay their bills. Government distributes basic income. WAIT. Why do we have government distribute the money? How about the owners of all the AI-generated money distribute it? They were clever enough to make all that money. They are more competent than government employees. Let the more competent and efficient distribute the money. Crazy idea that will never happen, but at least let's think about it.

This is nuts. You move in with your aging parents. Okay. Then you "pitch in." You pitch in? How about you do it all.

This is some sort of a milestone in computing. With all these datacenters et al. gobbling up resources, e.g., memory chips, we are now paying more for more and even paying more for the same. That has never happened before.

Meanwhile in California, some are trying to make a law that makes it illegal to do illegal acts. You can't make up this stuff folks.

More clever tricks to reduce typing. The great majority of the current slate of AI systems has this as its goal: reduce typing. Sorry to reduce all that money and work to such a simple thing.

It appears that the worn out batteries from electric cars can still work well enough for factory and home applications.

Intel brings back a lower-performance and lower-priced processor for general laptop computers. This is like the Apple Neo using an old iPhone processor and harkens back to the Intel Atom processor of 20 years ago. Come on folks, we don't need super computers to take notes and watch YouTube.

Quoting the headline: US To Create High-Tech Manufacturing Zone In Philippines. I like this idea. It could work if the regulators stay out of the way.

Cars are now rolling computers. Those computers store data. Old cars headed to the junk yard never have their memory wiped. Some ne'er-do-wells will find a way to do what they do.

Even when your business closes, you still have a mountain of data. Someone will buy that from you.

Sunday 26 April 2026

We have a shooting outside the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Per the folks who know these things, Google controls a quarter of the AI compute power in the world. This is surprising to me as I would have thought there were a dozen international players in this market with fairly equal shares.

Forget all this AI stuff, be a bodyguard for a billionaire.

Forward to the past or something: the $100 Tin Can phone. It looks like a telephone from the 1980s. It connects to the world through WiFi. Kids can talk endlessly with their friends. The device does nothing else. What a thought.

Recruiting college freshmen for business. What is this, the NBA?

Quoting the headline: Analysis: Taiwan's stock market value has surpassed the UK's at ~$4.3T, with South Korea close behind, driven by massive gains in TSMC, Samsung, and SK Hynix. The world shifts east. I predicted this in 1980. Little did I think that I would be right. And no, I did not inve$t. And the Europeans continue to regulate themselves into irrelevancy.

It appears that us American taxpayers will one day own Intel.

The market says that Nvidia is now worth $5Trillion (with a Tr). Gosh.

The market also says that Intel is worth more now than at any time in the past 40 years.

Meanwhile in Maine, that effort to ban datacenters in the state comes to an end at the Governor's desk.

Nothing new here, but reality strikes as the established companies do everything they can to hinder the new companies.

Meta signs a deal with Amazon to rent AI processors. That AWS and cloud computing continues to fund the rest of Amazon.

Our current President fires the entire National Science Board, a major part of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Of course the NSF can point to a few major wins in backing science that turned into significant benefits for Americans. Then there is the rest of the wasted money. These government sources of funds, while interesting jobs for a few, really don't pay off for the taxpayers. The overhead is extravagant as is the waste.

Quoting: Claude's user base is notably more affluent than other AI assistants. We are back to Facebook and MySpace. Recall, for a long time, Facebook required a dot edu email address, which many college grads had.