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: 18-24 May, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Musk vs. Altman ends, statute of limitations expired
• SpaceX has its IPO
• Big layoffs continue
• Huge profits at Nvidia
• Our President makes news by NOT signing an Executive Order (AI)

Monday 18 May 2026

Meanwhile at Standford, A.I. has made deception easier and more remunerative than ever before. They are learning. Maybe not what some want them to learn.

Toss in $200Billion with a few smart people, and you too can make rapid gains in AI. Too bad our Federal government doesn't seem to have the second half of the first half of the sentence.

Meanwhile in China, like everywhere else in the world, computer hardware makers are solid gold.

Waste not, want not. I think that is how you say it. Anyways, Apple is doing that by grabbing part$ out of storage and making new product$ with them.

We know have the big two (OpenAI and Anthropic) as they grab 90% of the money all the AI startups are grabbing.

This piece argues quite well that the worldwide decline in birthrates matches the introduction and growth of smartphones and social media.

Meanwhile in America, our schools continue to fail as scores on Math and Science tests continue a decline. We have all failed at how we hire and retain those who operate the government-funded schools.

Here is the latest on what programming languages are being used. C is still up there. Visual Basic is still up there. That one surprises me.

Clever, turn flow for writers into an acronym FLOW.

How long is a book, i.e., how many words. The answer, of source, is, "it depends" (on the genre of the book).

Quoting the title: The Story of You: How Much of Myself Should I Put In a Book? The answer: as much as you want.

Again quoting the title: Social Media is Redefining the Author's Job Adding to the quote: as long as you care what other people think or say or write or video.

Tuesday 19 May 2026

The lawsuit of the century ends in a thud as the jury rules the statute of limitations expired. Musk vs. Altman, or whatever it was, is gone. Everyone, however, has a look into Mr. Altman, and it was not good. The link is to one of many, many versions of the story.

The story of Andy Jassy as CEO of Amazon.

SpaceX has a big test of the new Starship Tuesday.

Yet another new gene therapy treatment that no one can afford.

One engineer relates how he used AI a year ago and today. It is like ten years' changes in other technology arrivals.

Getting a job via the side door instead of the front door. The writer believes there are several ways that a person can gain the attention of employed people and find a job.

Git is 21 years old. Perhaps its day has passed.

Quoting: Seems like 25 years of people pushing test-driven development was good preparation for what's coming.

Trying to step back and take a look at the big picture. Companies are spending money on hardware, concrete, steel, and electric power.

Meanwhile in Richland Parish, Louisiana, Meta is now to spend $200Billion (yes, with a B) on a datacenter. Of course it has turned everything in the Parish upside down. And of course some are profitting while others are getting nothing or worse.

Quoting the headline: The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers

Amazon Alexa+ AI-generated podcasts. That is a mouthful. Forget the magic. Feed news articles into a system. It summarizes them. Fine, done that for years. Now to a text-to-voice of the summaries that sounds like two nice folks chatting. Viola'. Podcast. Clever trick, but that is all.

I learn what an encyclical is. I guess I have seen many of these in my life without knowing that term. I guess I have written a few as well.

This story made the rounds for a day. Mr. Schmidt was booed during a graduation commencement in Arizona. Idiots.

Wednesday 20 May 2026

More on how Apple is using old parts to build new devices and making lots of money doing it.

Meanwhile in America, we don't need no stinkin' Aay Eye! Or something along those lines. It is a combination of jealously of the guys getting rich and the draw on resources. Of course, the folks (from CEOs to tradesmen) are not complaining.

Same song with a different verse. We have new tools seemingly falling from the sky like rain drops. We haven't adjusted to the change. Chaos still reigns. We don't have the time to settle into a new status quo. One of our areas of chaos is that we are too slow to reach a new status quo. Those who can move through change faster will win (whatever winning looks like).

Google announced many things at their I/O event. Here is one summary.

Meanwhile in China, trade wars. Ban in the import of this and the export of that.

Meanwhile at GitHub, troubles with malicious code and breaches and the like.

While America is hating AI, hundreds of Billion$ (with a B) is becoming available as gifts to charities. Where are the charitable organizations ready to receive and spend it?

Meanwhile in Singapore, the governors are signing deals with American tech companies.

Quoting the headline: Scoop: Trump AI executive order seeks early government access to advanced models And what, pray tell, would the government employees do?

The layoffs actually happen at Meta with over 10% of the staff being cut to be replaced by people who know how to spell AI.

Quoting the headline from WIRED: Demis Hassabis says companies looking to replace developers with AI may be due to a lack of imagination and a lack of understanding of the future. At least one person has a firm grasp of the obvious. It is too much for others to understand this.

Google claims an explosion in their processing of tokens. He is probably telling the truth with these numbers. Boom, Boom, and Boom again.

Talk to Google. Okay, this can be useful, quite useful.

Microsoft plans Snapdragon X2 chips in the new Surface Pro and Laptop real soon now (2026).

Microsoft shows a new line of portable computers for business (AI) users. These cost more ($1500 to $2000) and deliver more. Is more needed?

Watch this company: Armada. They make portable datacenters to put AI computing at remote locations. Looks good for disaster relief for one application.

Thursday 21 May 2026

Tesla will bring out its electric tractor truck real soon now. The promise is it will cost less and perform better than everything on the market.

OpenAI suffers a serious brain drain as folks are leaving to join their old buddies at Anthropic.

The race does not always go to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Something like that. Ask the guys at Sony whose Betamax was superior to VHS.

Little story: a website just disappears. Big story: just because it is on the Internet, it can disappear. The Internet Archive still has copies, but ... well, you know.

In a similar vein, open-source projects can die and wither away.

Jeff Bezos sits and talks about things. One is the billionaire tax. Of course he is correct in stating that our governments do not have a revenue problem but a gross inefficiency spending problem. Mr. Musk tried but gave up when he realized how badly things were done.

AMD to put a cool $10B (with a B) into Taiwan's chip-building industry.

A study claims that datacenters in Phoenix raise the temperature of downwind neighborhoods by 4 degrees F. Hmm.

AMD shows a $3,999 little powerful computer to do AI locally instead of paying someone else $733 a month to rent computing. We shall see more of these things.

SpaceX is booming in the Starlink business. Not so much in the Starship business. As we head to an IPO, these actual financial number$ appear.

More jobs linked to datacenters. xAI buys about $3Billion (with a B) in power generators. The companies that make those generators buy parts from other companies. Everything is shipped by truckers. Jobs, jobs, and more jobs.

Nvidia reports Q1 net income up 211% YoY to $58.3B. How can an established company have such jumps in income? This is astounding.

More huge financial gains for Nvidia.

Big layoffs at Intuit.

An entry-level employee learns that she would, "she would get to offload the kind of grunt work that early-career developers have long been saddled with to AI tools such as Microsoft's GitHub Copilot."

Friday 22 May 2026

Jeff Bezos on Project Prometheus.

Read his lips, "No more layoffs (this year or week or something)."

Someone realizes there is more to programming than typing in a language's syntax. Gosh, I hope they didn't spend a lot of money to learn that one.

A practical, but still quite expensive, exoskeleton arrives. This is nice to help folks hike, but let's make ones that help folks stand from a wheelchair and walk.

Big news: our President didn't sign an Executive Order (on AI).

Once again, the hacktivists. Don't worry about the North Koreans. Worry about the young person living in a grandparent's basement with nothing to do but hack folks.

How rogue nations finance their ne'er-do-well activities.

Lenovo reports a big financial quarter.

Several tech companies pour $125Million into UCLA research labs. This is small money to the tech companies. It is also huge money to the research labs.

The weather and road conditions in Silicon Valley are not the same as they are in other parts of the country, e.g., Atlanta. Duh!

Quoting the headline: Meta joins TikTok, Snap, and YouTube in settling with a Kentucky school district to avoid a trial over claims the platforms were designed to addict kids Question: were the creators of The Flintstones and Gilligan's Island ever sued for making TV shows that kids couldn't wait to return home from school and watch in the afternoon?

Yet another case of not properly testing software. When it fails, blame AI, not the development team for poor testing.

Yet another waste of taxpayers' money from California: pay companies to be inefficient. Come to think of it, brilliant! Who knows more about being inefficient than a state government?

Will OpenAI become known as the MySpace of AI and Anthropic as the Facebook?

You know those companies that make the big TV cameras used at sporting events? Did you know them? They will be gone by the end of the decade.

SpaceX's Grok AI system is not being used in the Federal government beyond a few scattered cases. This bodes ill for SpaceX's IPO... or does it?

These folks made a movie with real actors, writers, directors, et al. but 80% of the spending was on AI.

Microsoft now allows us to remove that floating Copilot icon from our work.

Once again, the Democratic Party is the best friend of the firearms industry.

Saturday 23 May 2026

Not as much Internet viewing today as we are travelling.

Here is the AI Executive Order that our current President did not sign. Big news by not doing something.

The folks who run Samsung wanted to give a little extra bonus to employees who make memory chips (extremely high demand for those chips). 100x over everyone else's bonus raise the ire of everyone else.

Immigration, green cards, going back to your country of origin to apply for your green card again, and the tech job market. Fun (not).

The New York Times, a somewhat reputable source, reports that our spy agency will buy about $9Billion worth of AI processors.

The world-wide battle for computing hardware is crunch the Chinese auto industry.

Sunday 24 May 2026

Quoting the headline: AI is killing the cheap smartphone. Unintended consequences. Who'da thunk it?

A look at using the new voice write-a-book or something on Google docs.

Dell claims business is booming as they build servers for datacenters. No reason to doubt the claim.

And once again, computer hardware is the new software.

I don't like this. Quoting the headline: More than 340 local news outlets are limiting the Internet Archive's access to their journalism

Forget the celebrity politicians and how the "journalist" chase them ignorantly. Quoting: Despite geopolitical tensions, Chinese and American AI industries remain intertwined through research networks, collaboration, and a shared cultural identity.

Standard time zones are established by geography. You are where you are. Special time zones, e.g., Daylight Savings Time, are established by politicians. Whom and what do you trust?

Step back and take a bigger look at tech layoffs. Nothing new here. It is the usual.

A group at Oxford studied and has reported on health. People don't like the report ONE LITTLE BIT. If you have bad health, it is due to the choices you made in life. And quoting this VERY UNPOPULAR LINE: Alcohol is toxic, don't drink it.