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: 27 April - 3 May, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Musk and Altman go to court
• Federal government finds ways to use Anthropic systems after all
• America still feuds with Iran, gas prices remain HIGH

Monday 27 April 2026

Meta was buying a Chinese AI company called Manus for $2Billion. The governors of China say, "No." Manus moves to Singapore. The saga continues.

Meanwhile in California, some folks wanted to tax the wealth of billionaires. Some billionaires started talking to one another about that. Now there is an organized network of billionaires in California who frequently talk about what the legislature is doing out west. Hmm, seems to be another case of doing something that brings the opposite result of what you wanted. Beware. Think things through to the end.

Microsoft is trying to figure out this AI thing in Windows 11. I for one cannot make Copilot in MS Word do anything useful. I jump to ChatGPT and it reformat Word documents as Copilot doesn't work (for me).

OpenAI publishes a five-point paper on AI principles and such lofty things. "Do no evil" wasn't sufficient.

Some of the folks at Palantir are worried about a descent into fascism. Caution when technologists toss about political science words. They are usually incorrect.

And we know have a product that scans the eyes on the faces of our ZoomerTeams meetings to tell if they are a real person. I guess this is needed by someone.

Ah, fond memories of the Zip Drive from IOMega. I used them.

Anthropic software is banned inside America's Federal government. It is, however, still being used quite often.

This piece is a bit slow, but it is deep and reading quietly is worth the time. Quoting: Marianne Moore identifies the three psychological elements necessary for persuasive writing: humility, concentration, and gusto. The piece goes on to elaborate these three words.

Finding all the little things written and bundling them into books.

Keeping track on the white board. Excellent! Visual. You can see it.

Freelance isolation and finding writing friends.

Write less and make more $$$. Find advanced writing niches. You have to be an expert and be able to write with expertise.

Tuesday 28 April 2026

Tesla starts manufacturing its Cybercab. It is a self-driving car with no steering wheel. These vehicles will be wonderful for those who cannot drive themselves, and that is a fast-growing market.

A little twist on managing engineering and leading engineers called agentic engineering management.

Thoughts on AI burnout. I find much of this burnout has little to do with AI. The fellow simply worked with a group of lazy people who took shortcuts as, "just how we do things here." Quote: I prefer to avoid AI usage for ethical, practical, and financial reasons.

Google to pour up to $40Billion in Anthropic.

This piece proclaims that we live in good times, but they are boring as we haven't seen jumps in tech in 50 years. We got Facebook, not colonies on other planets. We still use rocket engines.

Messrs. Musk and Altman head to court to see if someone stole a non-profit organization or whatever it is they are going to court to settle.

Quoting the headline: Study Finds a Third of New Websites Are AI-Generated. How about a studying showing how a third of websites use this, that, or the other tool. They are just tools to make products.

This is probably a trend that will take over everything: pay-per-use for AI systems.

Bookstores are retuning in America.

Quoting: Framework began shipping its new Laptop 13 Pro this week. And the Ubuntu variant is outselling the Windows variant

Why have a rearview window when you can have an HD camera and display and all sorts of other things that won't work with the battery fails?

Meanwhile in America, state government officials have found a new way to haul money in from successful companies. The privacy fines on companies in 2025 exceeded the prior five years combined.

Per inside information, OpenAI is not hitting its growth targets.

Where the money goes: social media scams.

Wednesday 29 April 2026

Strong rumors that OpenAI is making a smartphone.

And rumors that Apple, that certain smartphone maker, is planning to "Ultra" products for next year: a foldable iPhone and a Mac with a touch screen.

Meta agrees to buy lots of solar power.

Microsoft and OpenAI sign deals that go around in circles and I can't follow it.

Note how all these stories are about OpenAI, Meta, Apple, Microsoft et al.

Someone seems to have a firm grasp on the world of research labs. Yes, non-linear. Long study, then a burst. That's if everything works well. It's usually long study, more study, and a paper in an obscure journal.

This is a twisting tale of big finance, AI, international competition, and who knows what else. Big money was spent with the belief that American AI would dominate and pay dividends. It might all be a waste as open-source AI may be free to use.

Quoting the headline: Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies have leased 1M+ square feet of London office space. Whatever happened to doing intellectual work from home?

Here we go again, the driverless cars are coming. One of these days this prediction may come true.

Oh, but wait: in China they suspend driverless cars due to mishaps.

Meanwhile at the Pentagon, some common sense rules as it is never wise to put your eggs in one basket.

And at the White House, folks are creating loopholes and such so that our Federal agencies can use Anthropic's tools. Good.

Quoting the headline: Microsoft is rolling out Copilot 365 to all of Accenture's roughly 743,000 employees, in the biggest enterprise deal for Copilot

It is NOT okay to steal a charity. I agree. Let us wait and see if that describes the Musk-Altman conflict.

Seagate reports a big financial quarter (44% gain). Everyone wants to buy computer hardware.

Quoting the headline: China's National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen unveils the Lingshen project, aiming for 2+ exaFLOPS performance using a domestic-made CPU-only architecture. Some of us remember a time when the idea of China building its own technology like this to be unthinkable. A little free enterprise goes a long way.

AWS and OpenAI partner.

I like this. Train an AI model on text that stops at 1930. How did people write "way back then?"

The "screen" seems to be the ultimate baby sitter.

Thursday 30 April 2026

Our Dept of Homeland Security is buy more large drones. I suppose at sometime it became a bad thing to attempt to secure our homeland. Funny how that works.

For some reason I have seen several articles recently about infrasound and its affects on people. The Ghost in the Machine is an old paper explaining all this. I suppose something happened recently to rekindle interest in the topic.

Quoting: Arizona State University rolled out a platform called Atomic that creates AI-generated modules based on lectures taken from ASU faculty by cutting long videos down to very short clips then generating text and sections based on those clips. Professors do not like the results. That stems from them not realizing what they are saying. That is common.

Quoting: ...with the raw speed of coding assistants. Without boundaries, they generate unmanaged liabilities rather than functional progress. Perhaps I am just tool old for some of these practices. Using a tool without boundaries falls to the fools and clowns. IBM software developers? Really?

Quoting the headline: DOGE duo ducked security rules during Treasury stint, GAO finds In my experience (four decades), the security rules were created by well-meaning folks that, nevertheless, prohibited accomplishing work.

An OMB survey says that the use of AI in the Federal government increased 75%. In my experience (again, four decades) someone said, "Using AI is good. You will be rewarded for using AI." Hence, people responded to the survey, "Yes."

Big tech is spending BIG $$$ on hardware. Concrete and steel and copper.

We are nearing 50% for all smartphones to have emergency connection to satellites. Good.

Good intentions and unintended consequences. US schools point students to YouTube for educational video. US students wander off into other stuff. Good grief. Do we hire intelligent adults in the school system?

Once again, the battle between government and private industry with AI is akin to the old battle with encryption.

Samsung reports a huge financial quarter. For an established company, this harkens back to the great PAN(dem)IC.

Alphabet reports a good financial quarter.

So does AWS.

Almost everyone reports big gains. Qualcomm is an exception with a down financial quarter.

Google's Gemini can now create files to download. I would have thought it could do that a year ago.

Meanwhile in Manhattan, AI startups are leasing big office spaces. The owners of the offices are not complaining. The offices are much, much bigger than needed. Status. Ego.

Yet another story about how Ukraine has advanced in current warfare far beyond everyone else and all that. Well, pump a trillion dollars into their military and they should improve. And if they are so good, why can't they make any advances against the outdated, outmoded, and corrupt Russian military?

Strong rumors that Apple is abandoning the Vision Pro. Folks just aren't going to wear headsets. The smart glasses may work.

Friday 1 May 2026

SpaceX creates $200million Mars-colony bonus of Mr. Musk. Can we drop this bit about Mars. Might as well go to Death Valley.

This is an odd story. A large piece of a SpaceX rocket will strike the moon any day now. They claim that other pieces have struck the moon before. Seems like these landings or collisions would have gained more media attention.

A case of success leads to failure: GitHub cannot keep up with the stuff created by Copilot.

Amazon started making processors for itself a few years ago. Now it is a $20Billion business.

Quoting: A day in AI now feels like a year in any other industry. (from semianalysis@substack.com) I completely agree. And I cringe when I read of yet another government agency trying to let a contract so that a company can study the applications of AI for a year and then ... nothing matters.

Blame it on the war. That's probably a good place to start.

Let's manufacture humanoid robots. Why? Does a Roomba look anything like a human? Nope. It works.

Quoting: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's nonprofit, Biohub, is committing $500 million to help create better AI simulations of the human body.

Qouting: AI ... could create a permanent underclass as people are rendered useless and unemployable. I agree that it COULD. I am not sure that it WILL.

Here comes XBox mode to Windows 11. I appears that the game console is going away. This is made possible by the ever-increasing power of the processors in ordinary kitchen-grade PCs.

Saturday 2 May 2026

It seems that everyone is making processors for AI. And it seems that everyone is make big buck$ doing it.

Okay, these "prediction markets" are nothing more than gambling on stuff...all kinds of stuff. "I betcha' he dies before his next birthday" has become a real bet with real money.

Intel has a big financial month.

Western Digital reports a big financial quarter. We have returned to the 1960s when hardware was the big cost in computing and software was an afterthought.

SanDisk's quarterly financial numbers are unbelievable.

Atlassian reports a big financial quarter. They are a software not hardware company, so software isn't dead yet. Remember when we chanted "software ate the world?"

Apple continues to simply print money.

Roku reports a big financial quarter. Forget TV and such. This is an advertising company.

And everyone is using Reddit.

Where is all the money going? It is being stolen by the North Korean government. They hack for money, not military advantage.

Strong rumors that our NSA, home of the U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), is using Anthropic's Mythos to test Microsoft et al. systems for security holes.

Meanwhile in Iran, the question is not, "when will this end?" but "who is in charge here?"

Are we headed towards a third opium war in China? $1million for an Nvidia processor as the rulers crack down on smuggling processors.

Our Dept of War is signing contracts with all the major suppliers of AI systems with the notable exception of Anthropic. The big ego heads are still fuming.

I'll just quote this one: Demand for AI-generated Bible content is high. Christian writers and teachers want illustrations.

Sunday 3 May 2026

Executives and tech leaders are leaving Boston Dynamics amid pressure from its board to hurry up and build humanoid robots.

OpenAI employees are disturbed because company managers won't tell law enforcement when users discuss how to conduct mass shootings. Side warning: these employees know this because they are reading the discussions users have with the system. Privacy?

Maryland bans surveillance pricing or market-based pricing. Well, regulators gotta' regulate.

Meanwhile in China, a court rules that you cannot fire people and replace them with AI. Gosh, lawyers cannot be that stupid, can they?

Software system outperform emergency room doctors. This was true back in the 1980s. People then, however, would sue because the software systems were not 100% correct. The systems were more correct than people, but the medical organizations were deploying systems they knew were not perfect. Today, we accept the imperfections and take the improvement.

Ubuntu's servers have been down for more than a day.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, if you want to be considered for an Academy Award, humans must write and act. No software. We fight over the number N as in "the next N words."

This comes as a shock to people who consider themselves adults: companies pay people who favor those companies. It's called advertising. It's sort of an old profession.

And now we have "podslop." Yes, AI-generated podcasts. How did AI get the adjective slop? There are so many possible slops out there. What a wide open marketplace.

Regulators gotta' regulate: new regulations stating that you cannot use AI if it generates more content than we can regulate.

At Apple, success rarely leads to failure, but they are on the brink with the Mac Mini. That machine has become the favorite for running AI agents. At this moment, demand is far ahead of supply.

More work, more food: late night food deliveries are rising in America. The reason? One theory is that people are sitting up at home using AI to work and work and work. I tend to agree with that theory.

We discover that sound can extinguish fire. The pressure wave disturbes the oxygen enough to keep the fire from using it. The waves are 30-60 Hz. Great stuff. This could change things in major ways. Put out the fire. Don't ruin everything with water.