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: 8-14 June, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Apple holds WWDC, many improved things, no BIG THING
• The World Cup begins this week in North America
• And all those non-citizens attempting entry are not all entering
• SpaceX IPO this week
• Mr. Musk becomes worth a trillion dollars
• The New York Knicks with the NBA championship

Monday 8 June 2026

Apple's WWDC is this week.

Quoting the headline: Meta says ~20,000 Instagram accounts may have been hacked in a recent attack

Nvidia and LG make more business deals.

Microsoft claims it will walk the tightrope between helping national defense and behaving well at the same time. I hate to admit it, but there are Federal government employees who will tell Microsoft et al. to do horrible things.

A look at Dell's XPS 14 premium laptop computer. After several years of stumbling and bumbling, Dell has returned the premium to this XPS machine. Good.

Ah, 42 years old and still going strong: the International Obfuscated C Code Contest

Two persons arguing for the wealth tax in California. What they fail to mention is that in the big dips in value of companies, these billionaires lose million$ in stock value. Will governments pay them back money on their business losses? If you tax their business gains that are held, will you rebate the business losses that are held? Of course not. And that is the point. Capital gains come at a no-guarantee risk. That is why capital gains tax rates are lower. This encourage investment in jobs.

At least one other person understands the role of coding, what we used to call programming, in the bigger software engineering.

Lessons on licensing for writers. This is different from royalties.

More thoughts on making a living as a writer.

I love the title of this piece: Be So Good the Robots Are Irrelevant

Another good blog title: Is Your Author Profile Stagnant?

Complaints about how AI companies train on our words and then use our words for their benefit without pointing readers to writers. Well, that is the situation. Adapt.

Bad ideas can lead to good ideas. Keep thinking. Bad experiences can lead to good ideas. Keep thinking (and writing).

One writer's lessons for spending ten years writing online.

I like this short post from Seth Godin. Real artists have always used the latest technology to create art.

Tuesday 9 June 2026

The field of robotis is basically so immature that groups often start in the wrong direction. A year later, they toss it all out and start over.

Some small steps of progress in small nuclear reactors.

Quoting: Technical debt lives in your code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt lives in the artifacts you may have never wrote: the goals, constraints, and rationale for why the system is the way it is. We intended to get around to it, but... well... you know.

Tim Cook's last WWDC keynote address. Here is one summary.

Meanwhile in Ireland, there is a bring-your-own-power policy for datacenters. Elon Musk is doing that in Memphis and is being criticized for it.

Our Dept of War has a new list of religions for chaplains to use. The list dropped from about 220 to about 30. I don't have a link for this because the list changed several times in the last 24 hours and I can't find the "official" list.

More big numbers in big tech. Google orders 3million processors from Intel.

Blame it on the iPhone. Birth rates in the US started dropping the year the iPhone was introduced. Accidental co-occurrence? Many think not.

Quoting: Microsoft has shut down 70+ of its own repositories on GitHub after hackers pushed malware Well, the ne'er-do-wells keep doing what they do.

In a no duh moment, our Dept of Defense labels several big Chinese tech companies as ... well, those companies help the military arm of the Communist Party of China, a.k.a., the People's Liberation Army.

In the past couple of days, I learned of the Apple Foundation models. I can run some basic chattering bots on an Apple with the 5-year-old M1 processor in complete privacy. I am still learning, and this is quite basic. Linked are a few notes just released as Apple improves. These three are quotes.

New APIs for integrating AI models and extended agentic coding in Xcode 27 provide developers with powerful new ways to build and refine their apps

Apple Intelligence brings powerful AI capabilities into everyday experiences

Introducing the Third Generation of Apple's Foundation Models

Almost a hundred USA colleges are now offering degrees in AI. What happened to all those degrees in Data Science? What happened to all those degrees in Cloud Computing? Alas, jump on a bandwagon and call it something current.

Meanwhile in China, there is a plan (not actual work in progress) to spend about $200Billion on AI datacenters. Just like the college story, try to be current while falling further behind.

Here we go: Tokenomics is beginning.

Wednesday 10 June 2026

Some details about Apple's new Apple Intelligence.

Here comes the OpenAI IPO. $$$

Apple shows their new Core AI tools for developers.

The chattering bots were supposed to run over Google search. Well, it didn't happen.

Yet another piece showing that the current slate of AI systems are become the all-in-one interface between users and useful data.

A dire prediction for jobs in some sectors. Quoting the headline: Tata's chairman predicts AI agents will cut half the jobs at Tata Consultancy Services

Experts agree that AI will change work (I hope they didn't spend much time to reach that conclusion). They disagree on everything else about AI and jobs.

The Dutch company ASML sees a big rise in its stock value this year.

Meanwhile in Ohio, OpenAI, with money from Nvidia, plans a super duper massive AI datacenter. They estimate $500Billion (with a B) cost and 10GigaWatts of power. That is about 10x the power requirements of the biggest datacenters being built today.

With the World Cup beginning tomorrow... A referee from Somalia was detained at Miami airport and eventually sent back to Somalia. Let's see how stupid some folks can be. Before coming to the US from a country that has a questionable background in recent months, buy a new not-smart phone and computer. Do not have social media on them. Blank out your past affiliations that have contacts with anti-US organizations. Let's see, what else? How about some common sense?

Meanwhile in Seattle, another meaningless vote as city council stops all datacenter construction. There are not big datacenters planned inside the city limits. This does nothing but gives politicians a chance to be on the evening news. And that is the point of being elected to office --- a chance to be on the evening news.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, Quoting the headline: SF voters reject the Overpaid CEO Act, a union-backed ballot measure to raise taxes on any large business where the CEO earns 100x more than the median employee

Meanwhile in China, Quoting: China starts operations of the world's first wind-powered underwater data center

Apple updates its foundation models to the third generation.

Thursday 11 June 2026

The numbers for the SpaceX AI1 satellite are all big enough to be silly. And they have permission to put a million of them in orbit. Cost? If you have to a$k, you can't afford it.

And now we have Claude Fable 5. Of course it is better, but this time better costs more. Not good.

Someone at NASA must be kidding. Whatever happened to "keep it simple?"

How Apple became the big winner in AI. Remember, "The computer for the rest of us?" Well, Apple has AI for the rest of us. 98.6% of us won't be creating agentic agent agentizers.

When it comes to programmers writing in English, "Most Developers Use AI as an Assistant, Not an Author" And that probably goes for just about every one else.

Meanwhile in Russia, not the king of censorship but pretty darn close, the Internet is being turned off quite often. People are actually resorting to cash and folding and unfolding and folding paper maps.

And then there is reverse censorship of sorts. Quoting: Conservative and Reform UK MPs have increased their volume of posts on X since Elon Musk's takeover

In a move towards efficiency in government (quite a novel concept), our OPM awards a contract to Oracle. $400million sounds like a lot, but $40million a year is not a lot.

Our FBI claims a great victory against Chinese spies.

The big AI companies start a race to the bottom to see who blinks first.

Meanwhile in China (quoting the headline): Chinese companies are implementing quiet AI-driven layoffs to avoid labor laws that require government approval for job cuts exceeding 10% of a workforce

Oracle reports a big financial quarter.

A few folks at Anthropic delve into social engineering. Good luck with all that.

Real news that isn't news: the head of Antrhopic (an established company) proposes raising the barriers to entry for AI companies that are not yet established.

Give me VISA card to an AI agent and let it do the things that AI agents do. What could possibly go wrong?

A side note of this survey. Democrats are supposed to be the party of the working people like welders and plumbers while Republicans are white collar jobs. Uh, well, the survey shows the opposite.

Quoting: Tests reveal that when people are ambling about, they have a natural tendency to turn to the left and walk in an anticlockwise direction. I trust they didn't spend a lot of money on these tests as this result has been known for several hundred years. It has to do with the right leg (right-dominant people) being stronger. People, unless they have the discipline to walk towards a landmark, will walk in a big circle.

Friday 12 June 2026

I like this one. Google's charity arm will give $50million to train skilled workers to build datacenters.

I also like this one. Anthropic to give $150million to train people at non-profit organizations how to use Anthropic's system. The danger is that some non-profits are simply political lobbyists.

More evidence that everyone wants to buy a part of SpaceX. The wager is that this will be the Apple or IBM or Standard Oil of this century.

And lest we forget, SpaceX is not even close to being profitable.

Here comes the JAWBONE Act. Remember the past President who told Facebook to censor posts from folks who disagreed with official policy?

AI companies and systems change fast. If you are to sign a contract with one of these folks, stipulate that if they change something, you are allowed in.

Meanwhile in Japan: Kioxia. Never heard of it? Me neither. It has just passed Toyota ad Japan's most valuable company.

Everyone wants in to buy some SpaceX stock at the IPO.

Meanwhile in China, the party gives commercial approval for a brain implant. In America, we are still experimenting. Our lawyers won't let our industry lead the way.

Another example of how keeping it simple works.

Folks think that AI companies, very few of which are profitable, should share with the public. Again, if anyone is sharing AI profits, there is nothing to share.

Quoting the headline: Everything is Recorded Now

Saturday 13 June 2026

Let's all get a soft, furry robot pet thing.

From a practitioner, AI progress is real, fast, and important.

More and more folks are agreeing that programming is a small part of software engineering. Will any of the people who interviewed me for software engineering jobs give me back pay or an apology or even a thought?

How about a grayscreen iPhone (like the good old black and white TV shows)? It is unfortunate that many apps cannot adapt to such.

This is simple, yet insightful. Quoting: There are no points for effort in software development. What matters is solving the right problem at the right time.

And here is the Rivian R2. It is smaller and made smarter. Time teaches. At $60,000, folks, this is still a luxury car.

By some form or accounting or another, Mr. Musk is now worth a trillion $$$. That is a million times a million or something like that.

The year of the quantum computer is in sight, I think, if you squint hard enough.

Prosperity comes to a town in South Korea. All these datacenters and AI boom and such are sending waves of money to all corners of the planet. Rich Americans are now standing in the way. The datacenters will go elsewhere as will the money.

Our Federal government has another spat with Anthropic labelling Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as something that should not be exported or made available to non-US citizens. Sigh. So a US citizen pays $20, gets access, and sells it to North Korea of a million$ or something. Uh, well.

And state-level Attorneys General are fussing with OpenAI.

"Soul crushing" work at Meta. When you are paid $300,000 a year to sit in an air-conditioned room and peck on a keyboard and you complain... Yes, this is a classic first-world problem.

Still at Meta, employees are using AI systems from other companies and running up the electric bill or some such bill. Cries to use their in-house tools instead. Sigh. Money. Tools. Product. We are still in the chaos region.

Our Dept of Justice approves Paramount's $111B purchase of WBD. I guess our government has given itself the authority to do these things to businesses.

The owners of Roku want to cash in. Why not? You create a company. Work hard for years. Grow older. Become tired. Buy land, build a house, relax. I find it pretty good.

Speaking of trying to make a living and succeeding, MrBeast becomes the first to reach 500M subscribers on YouTube.

Sunday 14 June 2026

Quoting: You use AI in your writing or in your art and you are just a lazy bastard. It really is that simple.

And that blog post caused an angry letter --- written by AI.

If you want to earn money with your writing, you must learning marketing and how to make a cover that attracts rather than detracts.

Skill-based learning and writing. Skills can be learned. Learn the skills in the right order and put it together.

A am confused by this post. None of the characters need to be likable. The plot doesn't need to be likable, etc. Perhaps I misunderstand how this writer is using the word likable.

Is writing fun? Is writing joy? Why not?

Dave Eggers writes on a Mac that has never been, cannot technically work, connected to the Internet. It works folks. Try it.

Meanwhile in Mississippi, a study claims that residents are already paying $10.60 a month tax to pay for datacenters that are still under construction. This may be true, but the group conducting the study clearly has a already-drawn-conclusion to push. We shall see.

Despite all this anti-datacenter stuff, ChatGPT has a billion (with a b) users worldwide. Given this popularity, I have to wonder about the push against datacenters. Did big media create the story that it reports?

The ne'er-do-wells find ways to do what they do online in all those apps that so many people use.