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: 11-17 May, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• President Trump visits China
• Google introduces the Googlebook computer
• It is a second golden age of computer hardware

Monday 11 May 2026

I'll just quote from the headline: clerical and administrative workers, 85%+ of whom are women, are among the most exposed to AI-driven displacement and least equipped to navigate it. The rich (knowledge rich) get richer, the poor (skills poor) not so much.

And now we have YouTube Whisperers. These folks advise YouTube influencers to make better videos, have more audience, have more ad dollars. YouTube keeps inventing jobs.

Nvidia has money and they are investing it in AI companies with Billion$.

There is a bust in Hollywood in television production. Writers have been pushed into AI data-labeling and evaluation work. AI is the new version of waiting tables.

Amazon bought tens of thousands of vans to deliver its own goods. It has worked well. Now Amazon is competing with FedEx and UPS to deliver anything for anyone.

Datalines through the Straight of Hormuz are at risk. There are data lines across land that are being used instead. This Iran war and such is bringing about the thing that should have happened decades ago: alternate ways to move resources.

Oops. The bottom is falling out of the electric vehicle market as Ford's sales drop 31%.

Voice-to-text apps are much better. Cubicle farms are now full of programmers talking instead of typing. New tools, new patterns of work, we are still in chaos.

I recommend reading this short post from Seth Godin.

More notes about writing memoirs. Stop with the history and details. What are you trying to convey?

Writers notice things. Different writers notice different things. What can I learn about what I notice? I guess this is meta noticing.

I learn about hypergraphia or graphomania. It is an intense urge to write or draw. Oh well, is there a cure?

Then combine this urge with a writing practice or the things you do around your desire to write, that help, hinder, distract and move you towards your goals.

Quoting: Good writing can't be taught. But a willing writer can always learn. Perhaps I agree with this.

Tuesday 12 May 2026

Meta is tracking every single keystroke from its employees to train AI. The employees are sick of it.

It must be nice to get $30million in stock for being an OpenAI et al. employee. It is not nice when several thousand of these people live in your city and real estate become unaffordable for everyone else.

Shifting from Markdown to HTML as an output of AI systems. I like the TeX output even more. That is just me.

Understand completely then do. Do then understand. Both are wrong. That isn't how it works in real life. One or the other, however, is a pretty good way to teach and learn.

Our current President is about to meet with the leader of China. Trade, trade, and more trade are on the agenda. Lest we all forget a few things, (1) China owes us for defeating Japan in the second great China-Japan war, and (2) US trade made 21st century Chinese industry, and oh, there's that thing about locking away tens of millions of people because of their religious beliefs.

Crime pays. Instructure paid the ransom to free Canvas back to use by schools.

Metrics: be careful what and how you measure things. Folks find a way to boost their "performance." This is like putting your step counter on a machine.

Meanwhile in Washington D.C., government agencies battle over who gets to do what. No wonder Mr. Musk threw up his hands and left in disgust. Agency heads think they rule the world.

More companies are eager to build datacenters in orbit. I can't see it, but all these smart people see something. Perhaps there is more to this than I understand.

Apple tightens verification of those attempting to gain discounts via declaring themselves a student.

I'll just quote the headline: Anthropic's Bug-Hunting Mythos Was Greatest Marketing Stunt Ever, Says cURL Creator Lots of publicity backed by nothing but air.

The real capability and money at Nvidia are not hardware but Compute Unified Device Architecture or CUDA.

Water, water every... oh, wait, uh, er, maybe not. A datacenter construction site somehow uses 30million gallons it wasn't supposed to.

Wednesday 13 May 2026

Our current President visits China.

Jensen Huang is travelling with our President on this China trip.

Mr. Musk's lawyers are trying to pull Microsoft into the legal case with Mr. Altman.

They claim this is real as two humanoids make the bed, a very simple bed to make.

AWS announces that Anthropic's Claude is available through AWS. This story sort of goes around in a circle, but AWS has a new service and its Claude Platform.

Someone rediscovers that if software is running in the background it doesn't have to be as fast as interactive software. Many of these things the AI folks discover are jaw dropping to think that computing professionals claim to discover them.

GitLab lays off employees and replaces them with AI. They do, however, promise to spend the saved salaries on the business. Well, where else?

This piece rambles all over the place. One statement I find worth quoting: most companies don't see the point of AI because it's not intelligent enough to do anything valuable. This will probably remain true for some time.

The Washington Post reports that 7 in 10 Americans are against datacenters. I guess the 3 in 10 are all plumbers, electricians, carpenters, cement workers, pipe fitters, delivery truck drivers, gravel workers, am I leaving out anyone who works in industries related to building? Oh, and there are the operational types from Caterpillar generators and the gas generators and the fuel delivery people and ... well, there is probably a few others.

The makers of gas turbines certainly like data centers. Again, it's not just the folks who work in the factory to make gas turbines. Thousands of jobs support those jobs.

It seems that the world needs to solve the Strait of Hormuz problem. There are several ways to do this, but to date none are being implemented.

The story of highly educated Chinese immigrants, Silicon Valley culture, AI companies, and everything else. I am happy to see that education in China blossomed despite the Communist Party of China.

Quoting the Financial Times headline: Analysts say AI fervor in the US and Asia has spread to Europe, boosting stocks like STMicro and Nokia, as investors seek the AI boom's pick-and-shovel stocks

They might as well put pictures of NAND and DRAM chips on money.

Quoting the headline: After 133 Years, Princeton Is Going Back to Proctoring Exams

DeepMind puts AI into the humble on-screen mouse pointer. I love it.

Google integrates various AI things into Gemini Intelligence. New stuff all the time.

Google shows the Googlebook computer. A high-end Chromebook that has lots of other things as well. Dell et al. will be making these.

Our Dept of War continues to use Anthropic systems.

One of these days Amazon will just store the goods we buy in our garages.

Thursday 14 May 2026

Coming to Android later this year, a bunch of that AI stuff and such.

If you like big rockets, SpaceX just broke another of its records for big rockets.

Quoting the title: Why senior developersfail to communicatetheir expertise It has something to do with reverse psychology and upside down desire to make things easier for other persons or yourself.

AI economics if a few words: maximize revenue per watt. This means you maximize tokens per watt and revenue per token.

What is code? I would love to sit down with the writer and a few others and discuss this.

SpaceX wants access to spaceports that ring the globe. Why not? Ship ports ringed the world. Airports ringed the world.

An old joke: Man says, "Doc, I broke my arm in three places." Doc, "Don't go in those places." Programmer, "AI is rotting my brain." Me, "See prior old joke."

Tech jobs: LinkedIn laying off 5% of its workforce.

Meanwhile at Harvard, they go back to grading on a curve and limit an A to 20% of the class plus four more. That is a curve heavy on the right side, but a step in the right direction.

Study says: It's not a misconception --- mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others

If this works, I will buy one the first day. Researchers at Columbia University tune hearing aids to brain control. Think about the person in the room whom you want to hear and the hearing aids do it. It seems that an eye-tracking device would do the same.

The governors of China are offering big $$$ to its subjects who went elsewhere for education. Come home and make tech here. The Communist Party won't bother you much (until it does).

Foxconn reports a big financial quarter.

Jensen Huang's foundation donates $108.3M worth of AI computing time to universities and other nonprofits.

Microsoft puts more AI into the Edge browser. I wish they could have Copilot do something useful inside Word.

OpenAI wants an international AI governance body like the International Atomic Energy Commission. Oh, yes, the IAEC has been so effective (not), let's follow that model.

Microsoft has been running a cybersecurity tool it calls MDASH. It uses AI agents. MDASH will be available to some commercial customers real soon now.

The customer money is rolling into Anthropic.

OpenAI now has an office operating in our nation's capitol. Get a job there? Have you ever commuted into the District of Columbia? Are you kidding?

Friday 15 May 2026

Amazon commits to using good old Alexa to help us spend our money and shop.

Let's go geothermal to power AI. It is about time.

I like and recommend this short piece on the AI Market. One point: Anthropic leads in spend despite a higher unit price, Google leads in volume

With AI, (quoting) The old asymmetric broadband model of fat downstream and thin upstream was engineered for passive consumption - that model is finished.

Someone found a practical, good use of Claude: it was useful in recovering BitCoin that was untouched for 11 years... $400K.

Antrhopic commits $50million per year in money and resources to the Gates Foundation for the next four years.

Cisco cuts 4,000 jobs.

Thoughts about Google et al. hiring forward-deployed engineers to help companies use AI and replace people.

The money continues to flow into the companies that make computer hardware.

Another computer hardware company receiving money, money, and more money.

And with all this money flowing to the hardware companies, they cannot meet demand. Prices are rising. For the first time in a long time, we pay more for more.

More layoffs from Meta.

Meanwhile in California, new taxes proposed on tech to make up for financial mismanagement by the governors (Democratic Party). Regulators gotta' regulate. Politicians gotta' tax.

Ford, who knows something about energy conversion machines like the internal combustion engine, moves into Energy and makes money.

Here are Anthropic's thoughts on US-China policies towards AI.

Saturday 16 May 2026

A first, color imagery on top of LIDAR.

Bold statement (quoting): Figure AI says its humanoid robots can now run full eight-hour shifts autonomously using its Helix-02 AI system

Great headline: The great memory panic of 2026

In olden times, you picked a programming language and lived with it for years. Now, if you picked wrong, let a chattering bot translate it for you.

The price of electricity jumps 76% in some areas of the US. The datacenter is to blame, of course. What about the rise in the price of gasoline and diesel?

The concept of open source everything as an industry strategy.

Quoting the headline: ArXiv to Ban Researchers for a Year if They Submit AI Slop

The celebrity CEO and credibility and trustworthiness. I can only imagine if there had been a Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs court case in which they brought in all the folks who had heard sales pitches from those guys in the formative years and recalled all the whopper tales they told.

And now we have the snail mail clubs. You join a group of pen pals and send and receive letters and cards that people write with pen and paper. Folks are tired of digital texts and the like. I smiled when I read this.

SpaceX shows details of its revisions to the Starship.

Sometimes it is humorous to compare the results of independent surveys. For example, Americans would rather have a nuclear power plant than a datacenter next door.

Honda loses $9Billion (with a B) building all electric vehicles.

Sunday 17 May 2026

A look at SAS. The founder is still the CEO after 50 years. Slow and steady now moves into the AI age.

Striking gold or not: 10,000 programmers hit $20million in 5 years. The rest? Still working and paying the bills month by month.

One look of the laptop computer market today. The reviewer trends towards Apple.

There are a few new jobs created by the rush to the current slate of AI systems. Lots of communication jobs. Can you explain? Can you tell a story?

It has been five years since the last James Bond movie. How have we survived?

Some folks have too much time on their hands. We have Halupedia. It is a Wikipedia that AI made up out of silliness. It grows and grows.

Elite members of the Iranian diaspora meet to discuss their home country. What's the harm? And these rich folks didn't have to give up a weekend. They are trying to do something positive.

Meanwhile at our Dept of State, they are trying to bring in AI to save time. At least they are trying.

Here's a self-driving car. Price is only $150,000. Toys for rich people subsidized by not-rich tax payers.