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: 4-10 May, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Ted Turner dies at 87
• Tesla passes a government certification to approach self-driving
• 5% GPU use in datacenters, oops

Monday 4 May 2026

Predictable and predicted: US export policy means China doesn't buy Nvidia processors (legally that is) and the Chinese are now building their own.

Meanwhile on Polymarket, we have a major rich-poor divide with 0.1% of users earning 67% of profits.

Meanwhile in Japan, here come the datacenters.

Want to be in vogue in the fashion world? Marry one of the world's richest men and have him spend his money.

The Mac Mini has fallen into the limelight as THE machine to run AI locally.

More on running AI on a local machine instead of paying the billionaires to rent compute time.

Microsoft releases source code of MS-DOS. This release is from the earliest-found version.

Meanwhile in California, the regulators gotta' regulate. This time they are coming after bicycles with electric motors. Those machine go too darn fast. They also need license plates, i.e., send money to regulators.

A few technique to write research or technology papers so that people can read and understand them. When I wrote my PhD dissertation in Electrical and Computer Engineering, one of the faculty advosors told me, "Your writing is too clear and easy to understand." Oh well.

I grinned as I read this piece. Watching people and noticing is a writer's thing.

A memoir question, "Are you going somewhere, or are you reclaiming something?"

First note, this is a good piece about teaching a class about your memoir.

Second note on same piece: this took five years to write the memoir. I don't write like that. I cannot understand how it takes five years to write anything. I am writing about the typing of words, not the thinking and research, just the typing of words. It seems someone would have to type awfully slow to take five years. Type the words, put an end to it, and go to the next book. At least that is how a writer's life appears to me.

One writer's experience dictating the first draft.

Quoting: Ever feel like you're having such a hard day or week or month that you're not sure how to write anything at all?

I like this piece by Seth Godin on the dislocation the fast changes today are bringing to people. "Nostalgia" was once considered an illness. Maybe it will be again.

Tuesday 5 May 2026

SpaceX tries for rocket maintenance to be as fast as airplane maintenance. The space shuttle was supposed to do that 40 years ago.

It appears that America was short of electric power capacity. The richest nation on earth couldn't power a light bulb. Monumental regulatory stupidity. Okay, perhaps that comment was a bit harsh, but you get the point.

Musing about AI agents and the stuff they don't do.

It appears that OpenAI has been running on high risk. Adults have been hired to try to fix this.

AI in the browser? It could work.

Prompt engineering is still here. Is it? Depends on the definition, but I would say, "YES."

We are witnessing a gold rush in computer hardware. Try to imagine the costs of a computer right now if China had invaded Taiwan and shutdown the factories there.

Strong rumors that the OpenAI phone will be in stores next January. Question: will OpenAI still be in business then?

Consider the pharmaceutical industry: they are using AI, but not so much for drug research. It is a good office tool and helps with manufacturing. The difficult things may come later.

Quoting the headline: New Mexico child safety trial: New Mexico asks a judge to declare Meta a public nuisance and to order it to pay $3.7B A simple money grab.

Palantir reports huge growth. Big $$$.

And here comes emotion AI to track employees to see if they are ... well, something or other. I wrote a short story about this over ten years ago.

Meanwhile in South Korea, AI systems are talking to the elderly so they won't be so lonely. This is a tough one. You are hiring a machine to visit someone and talk with them. Still, there are many people who would benefit greatly from this.

Perhaps is it time to go buy a dozen Mac Minis and hold them to sell in six months at a good profit.

Early rumors about the MacBook Ultra. This would be Apple's first touch screen computer and it would replace everything on the inside to provide more compute power and lighter weight. Price? Pricey.

More on using "sound" to extinguish fires.

Big tech backs efforts to put AI literacy in public schools. I thought they wanted data science in high school. Or was that programming in high school? Or was that ... ? Never mind. Same goal. Increase the number of people who can fill jobs so that you can pay people less money.

Wednesday 6 May 2026

Amazon continues its efforts to be the IBM of this century. They continue to branch out into other areas.

SpaceX starts making solar panels. These are to power the orbital datacenters. My prediction: these will go to earth-bound solar applications. This will be like flying to Mars, oh, er, well, how about the moon?

GameStop is trying to buy eBay. These are two second-tier giants.

This makes pretty good sense: put a datacenter at sea. Power it with the ups and downs of the sea.

Just about everything you would want to know about the actuators in humanoid robots.

Justing quoting the headline: Document: SpaceX proposes a $55B investment to build a Terafab chip facility in Grimes County, Texas, with potential total capital expenditures reaching $119B Grimes County currently has about 30,000 residents. Let's see, at $55Billion, that's about $2Million per resident. Whoosh.

Quoting: Armed with some Python and a white-hot sense of injustice ... This article is about using AI to not hire people. The quote highlights something about people wanting to be treated right or fair. If they are not, here comes the white-hot sense of injustice and dedication to a task you have never seen in your life. It is much better to be just and righteous. Beware the hacktivists. They are not motivated by pay or patriotism.

It appears that some folks are relying on an AI description of video. Okay, fine for a first glance, but only fools would rely on the description without checking. Right? Huh? Come on folks, let's act like adults.

More job cuts blamed on AI. We are still in the chaos phase of adapting to all these new software tools on the job.

Samsung reaches a $1T valuation.

Super Micro reports unbelievable numbers in its financial report. This company, I had to research it as I had never heard of it, is 30 years old. For an established company to see such a jump is quite rare. This kind of news is repeated daily. Such is the computing hardware boom.

AMD, yet another computer hardware maker, reports a big financial quarter.

Intel's stock jumps 12%+ and hits a new all-time high. Yes, that Intel. The one that makes computer hardware.

Anthropic plans to spend about $200B on Google's cloud and chips over five years. These stories are common.

Big Publishing sues Big Tech (Meta in this instance) for not paying copyright fees.

Teenagers are smart and they learn quickly. They are doing just about everything to work around these age-verifying software systems from the really smart adults.

Thursday 7 May 2026

Ted Turner dies at 87. He put all the Atlanta Braves games on national TV. He created CNN (we have to discuss if that was a good idea).

I love this statement: AI lowers the floor instead of raising the ceiling.

Coinbase is firing around 14% of its employees.

New definitions: Cognitive surrender is when AI output quietly becomes your output and you feel there is nothing left to check. Cognitive offloading is delegating to AI but still owning the answer.

AI in programming is a new tool (not the revolution most people tout, but an increment) and new tools bring change. We don't like change, at least most of us don't like change.

I love this title: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing I am living it.

Arm reports a big financial quarter. More computer hardware makers making more money.

Arm is about to cash in on datacenter business. Well, if everyone wants to build a datacenter and you make processors for datacenters, why not?

In search of the shared reality. Is this really true?

Our Dept of Defense awards Scale AI a $500million contract.

DoorDash reports a big financial quarter.

Perhaps all those pledges to use green power by a certain date were a bit hasty.

Apple boosts what it spends on research and development.

Quoting the headline: Corning and Nvidia partner to open three advanced manufacturing plants in North Carolina and Texas dedicated to optical tech for Nvidia

OpenAI gathers a group of researchers from across tech to address the compute problem in the current AI systems. One basic idea is to be smarter about where and when computations occur in the entire process of training to using systems. Perhaps the compute could be shifted to better the efficiency.

MIT weighs in on balcony solar power.

Friday 8 May 2026

Anthropic signs a deal with SpaceX to use the Colossus 1 datacenter in Memphis. They have 220,000 Nvidia processors there. That is a large number.

SpaceX is slowly moving away from the Falcon 9 booster and towards the Starship.

Quoting: Anthropic has reached a growth rate that could make it 80 times as big this year.

The Musk-Altman feud-trial surfaces past of who was trying to invest in whom and lots of other stuff.

America turns to Instagram for information on health and wellness. Is that a good idea?

Big tech is investing in concrete and steel. Perhaps too much.

Hackers hack into Canvas. The host company turns it off, sort of. This is used by 9,000 educational organizations.

Mix politics, government, efficiency, AI, and a Federal Judge, and you get ... a mess. And everyone involved has the best of intentions. That is the sad part.

CoreWeave reports a big financial quarter. And, as it often does, the stock price plummeted.

CloudFlare reports a big financial quarter.

Now we are discussing actions that harm humanity. Okay, let's just say that someone uses a text message app to send instructions to someone else on how to kill hundreds of people at a public gathering. Was the maker of that message app involved in actions that harm humanity? And let's just say that someone uses several home computers running Windows 11 and they engage in sending biological weapons into the water system of a major city. Was the maker of Windows 11 involved in actions that harm humanity? Was is this? Are we to outlaw tools?

Yet another article on how Ukraine's military and industry are so innovative and far ahead of NATO on how to defeat the Russian Army. Still, they haven't pushed the Russian Army out of their country. Is it possible that both statements are true?

They are making progress on an underwater roadway between Denmark and Germany. They are not digging a tunnel. Instead, they are sinking pieces that will connect together to make a tunnel of sorts.

The companies that make PC motherboards are unable to do so this year. They just can't get the parts for them. The datacenters are, we've heard this story a million times, consuming everything.

Here is the concept of the distributed datacenter. Put a unit that is bigger than the air conditioner but not huge in the backyard. Connect the computing power of that unit to other units in the neighborhood. It is a shell game. While not requiring a massive increase in electricity generation capacity, these units will quickly sum to the same number. Just a little at a time and no one will notice, right?

Saturday 9 May 2026

New technologies for nuclear power have much promise. Regulations and regulators, however, are in the way and will delay things for decades. Unless...

AI in Github is a case of success leading to failure. Why are other companies having success lead to success?

Ah, the perils of metrics and awarding folks when they meet a measured target. You have to think it all the way through.

Quoting: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Tuesday that the later release 2026 Tesla Model Y is the first vehicle to meet the agency's new benchmark for advanced driver assistance systems. I note this because this past week I met a young man with poor eyesight and other disabilities. His Tesla took him places he otherwise could not go. My granddaughter has poor vision. This type of thing can change her life when she starts driving. This is great.

This story has been simmering for the past week with rumors of what will come of it. Perhaps now, government and industry will cooperate for our good. That would be nice.

Close to home, everyone's home, was the Canvas collapse yesterday. Schools struggled. Colleges postponed final exams (George Mason University did). When everyone uses the same software in the cloud... that is efficient. Efficiency sometimes brings great risk. Lessons learned by others and not learned by some.

Success leads to struggle as Apple's Neo computer is selling much faster than anticipated. Looking at the online Apple store, several of their computers have have a wait a week or two delivery. Such was not the case in the past when I would order a computer and it was delivered to my house in two hours.

We don't want no stinking datacenter! Really? It appears that some people know how to talk to some other people in a reasonable manner. Good.

Quoting: Skyrocketing hard drive and storage costs caused by the AI data center boom are making it more expensive and more difficult for digital archivists, academics, Wikipedia, and hobby data hoarders to save data and archive the internet. Woe is us heard everywhere except from those who make and sell storage hardware. The good times are here for them.

Mexico City continues to sink. Now, however, we have a radar satellite to watch it go.

Quoting: Not many people realize that [fiber optic cables] can detect acoustic waves.

Sunday 10 May 2026

The ne'er-do-wells find a way ... Take these AI agents, whatever they are, and run with them to breach data sources and do whatever ne'er-do-wells do with data.

Speaking of data, our Dept of Labor's data, and we know that is always correct to ten significant digits, unemployment in the IT sector rose a little last month.

A couple of quotes from this AP piece: Tech is turning increasingly to religion in a quest to create ethical AI... a surprising about-face on Silicon Valley's longstanding skepticism of organized religion. I find this good. I hope something good comes of it.

For those of us who struggle to hear what people are saying, these glasses listen, do voice-to-text, and show the text inside the glasses.

Schools cut use of tech. This is another case of, "I guess we didn't know what we were doing during COVID." The experts are usually wrong. The great PAN(dem)IC was yet another case. Will we ever learn?

It seems that Bigfoot is alive and well along Ohio's Mahoning River. At least people are calling the police with sightings.

Nvidia has received most of the notice in the AI boom. Nevertheless, AMD, Intel, Micron, and Corning (and let's not forget Caterpillar) have seen the biggest gains.

Quoting the headline from this week's Canvas affair: The Biggest Student Data Privacy Disaster in History Canvas Hack Shows the Danger of Centralized EdTech

Bizarre dreams and mind wandering.

Oops. We panicked and bought too much ice cream, uh, or GPUs. Companies discover they are only using 5% of the GPUs they bought. Someone is going to have a fire sale in the next three to five years. Mountains of GPUs sold for pennies on the dollar for home and small business use.