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: 15-21 June, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Money continues to flow to anything called AI
• Inflation is being caused by that flow of money
• The World Cup in North America continues

Monday 15 June 2026

The AI excuse reigns supreme in US job cuts.

Prediction markets and inside information. Predictable and predicted. And you can bet on that. Chuckle.

In the wake of US restrictions on Claude's new systems, Europeans reconsider their dependence on American technologies.

The same is happening in India.

An insider's take on what happened recently with Anthropic and our Federal government.

Quoting the headline: AI workers don't work from home - they home from work The work benefits when people chat face-to-face. So live in the office. And that is what many people are doing. The work is fascinating. People love it. Don't neglect your family. And, if you don't have a family, do everything you can to have a family.

Stronger rumors that Apple will have a touch screen on future computers.

I use the vim editor and have for ... decades, not just years. There is a Vim Classic wherein everything is generated via human hands with no AI-Gen code or comments or anything.

Our FBI partners with Google to bust up a "massive AI-powered" ne'er-do-well outfit. They seized $100,000, which is enough to pay off the loan on a car or something. Waste of resources.

Meanwhile in the UK, the regulators gotta' regulate and keep 15-year-olds of Facebook or whatever social media sites 15-year-olds like these days.

AI-generated fakes are getting pretty good, which brings to mind the old advice: don't believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see.

I'm not sure what to think of this story of toy heads tricking Tesla's systems into doing something the driver wants. I guess people reverse engineer these systems and figure out how to beat them. Sometimes a 25-cent toy beats a system that costs a billion $$$ to build.

Meanwhile in Russia, subjects are trying to find cheap ways to beat government-funded systems.

Anthropic comes to Washington, again. I hope cooler heads prevail.

And now we have botsitting. This is the time a person spend preparing everything so they can use a new tool.

Tuesday 16 June 2026

The on-again, off-again war with Iran is off again. Stock prices will rise and oil prices will drop, we hope.

This study leads one to wonder how the open-source models were trained and who influenced that.

An audit shows that it costs a lot of money to run a leading-edge tech company. Real news that isn't news.

More fussing over generating your own power at a datacenter. Some folks require datacenters to generate their own power. Other folks sue over it. And then there is the part about being part of America's national security.

Fox is buying Roku for a cool $25Billion (with a B). Money is flowing in America in this age.

SpaceX had a great opening day of trading.

More thoughts on Anthropic, our Federal government, and potentially dangerous technical ideas. That is what software is --- ideas expressed in technology. Yes, this harkens back 30 years to the battles over encryption or hiding messages from the government employees who felt empowered to know what everyone was thinking.

More real news that isn't news: yes, hackers employed by the Communist Party of China try to steal from American governments and companies.

Describing talks between Anthropic employees and those at the White House, "It's like they just speak in different languages" Well, no duh! Would either understand "no duh!?"

A group of cybersecurity experts decry the government ban on Anthropic.

This is what we should be doing with all this technology instead of fussing about fussing.

The folks who bought the Commodore name have another bit of gadget nostalgia with a flip phone.

Yet another story about the genius of the Ukraine fighting spirit. Yet another day when Ukraine makes no gains on the battlefield. Stop with all this, "Gee, these guys are brilliant."

More woes from college teachers at the lack of skills from their current students. Perhaps closing all the schools in America during the great panic of 2019 was a bad idea. The experts thought it would work.

Wednesday 17 June 2026

Yet another mysterious cancer treatment arrives, sort of.

The AI for the rest of of: Apple Siri.

Quoting the headline: Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Yes, quite so.

SpaceX and Tesla to merge one day? Probably.

Some fact tossed in with some fantasy and wishes for the future. SpaceX and the sentient sun.

Predicting doom for the world wide web. The prediction continues as their will remain a worldwide network of computers holding information in databases, etc., but the chattering bot will be the central interface to all such information.

Running AI models on a 2022 Mac with a basic M2 processor. This is working now. I recently ran a half hour of experiments with an iMac and an M1 processor and the Apple Foundation Models with 20 lines of Python. It worked. Well, here we go.

TSMC cannot meet the demands of its customers in volume. Samsung is one of the suppliers reaping the benefits of that.

There is $7Trillion (with a Tr) in datacenter construction in progress at this time. Lest we forget, this is cloud computing and that is an old technology. Sure, much of this boom is spurred by everyone falling for the AI hyperbole.

Folks in Kazakhstan seem interested in having some datacenters.

I am encouraged by these findings. Probabilities are not certainties. Probably not.

Databricks is hauling in the money, not not necessarily the profits.

A few members of Congress are upset at not being in the room when the Feds talk to Anthropic. Who has the legal authority to do this and that?

Meanwhile in Illinois, regulators just can't pass up an opportunity to take money from successful companies.

Who is on first today? Big tech companies bounce up and down daily.

Forget all the press about AI market share. Here are the numbers. Boring old Google is doing quite well, thank you.

Here come more smart glasses. At $2,200, however, these are not practical. Still, for those with medically poor eyesight, these can be a blessing.

Despite the requests of G7 governments, our current President is not allowing the distribution of Anthropic's Mythos and Fable.

I like what Microsoft is doing with their laptop computer hardware.

Thursday 18 June 2026

SpaceX buys Cursor, ever heard of them, for $60Billion (with a B). If the $$$ doesn't have a B, we don't seem to care anymore. I'd settle for a few Million.

Big stuff rumored for Apple for next year.

Oh woe is me, cry the engineers at Meta where the $300,000 salaries can't salve their drudgery.

For all the hoopla on these AI companies, they simply lose billion$ every year. Sure, says some wise person, they will become profitable real soon now and be the richest folks in the world.

Folks at the White House haven't quite slammed the door on Anthropic, which is another AI company that loses billion$ a year.

Here is a No Duh moment in the spat between the White House and Anthropic. Quote: (there is) a cloud of suspicion that senior officials are picking favorites based on personal and political factors

Our current President shows how to create wealth by saying a few words.

This group of ne'er-do-wells has fun afoul of the FBI. They are lucky. There are many Americans who wouldn't be so lenient with them.

Ah, infransonic vibration. Someone has discovered this and it is now the rallying cry of those who don't want a factory near them.

And we have a study showing how to use AI and how not to use AI.

Beware of anything you buy that is made in China or any of its vassals.

Meanwhile at Nvidia, they show a new framework to help develop robotics.

The use of these chattering bots among USA adults is growing. There was a time when we didn't use word processors and spreadsheets and cell phones and ... New tools.

Trump to Amodei: make a thousand angels dance on the head of a pin.

The stock market gives a thumbs down to Snap's $2,200 AR glasses.

Bernie Sanders just can't help himself. If someone has built something that made wealth, he has to try to take away that wealth.

Forget NATO, let's have a North Atlantic AI Coalition. We'll call it NA2IC. Can I trademark that name?

Meanwhile in Estonia, regulators gotta' regulate. What will they do next? Register butter knives?

Friday 19 June 2026

Life is not always fair. Just because you work for a high-profile company and make a half-million year, well, that doesn't change it.

Some folks are surprised that Mr. Musk would merge Tesla and SpaceX. Why not? Diversification in a major company.

Say it ain't so, but yes, Apple will raise prices due to the higher cost of components.

Meanwhile at Meta, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Quoting: So that's why the company never speeds up, even when everyone in it does. The time that the engineer saved didn't go anywhere good: it landed on everyone who had to read his document. After someone quickly generates something. Everyone goes slower to fact check the AI.

Of course the Apple Foundation Model running on my five-year-old iMac is not as capable as fill-in-the-blank. That's not why I run it SOMETIMES.

To there credit, some folks at Google are able to see good business and jump in.

It's bits and bytes and you can't stop them from spreading. Folks are using the banned Anthropic Mythos Fable stuff regardless of what someone declares.

There is something about people: we love to risk money on the uncertain. Money pours into Kalshi as the gambling industry has found a new home.

Meta rents computers from a datacenter company. Big time. We used to call this, "Throwing money at a problem." Sometimes it works.

Quoting: Z ai's GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Meanwhile in Europe, regulators gotta' regulate, especially when it comes to successful American companies who have lots of money to pay taxes, uh, er, I mean fines.

Apple is buying office buildings in Silicon Valley.

Saturday 20 June 2026

Coming real soon now (in NASA years) rockets to Mars that orbit the planet and watch winds, dust, etc.

Coming soon to an AI near you, the end of the flat rate and watching the meter run as it counts tokens.

Here is an attempt to write computer programs as English specifications. Perhaps something may come of this.

It seems these AI agents are just a mess. If you don't watch them run, you risk destroying useful systems. What happened to testing? This isn't good.

All the economic reasons why open source does not work. And yet, it does work.

Some investments in some companies just hit the lucky lottery.

These numbers indicate that OpenAI is now profitable. The numbers are huge on the plus and minus side, but the plus side is bigger.

The money in big tech is much, much bigger than that in the entertainment companies. Hence, big tech buys the entertainment companies as a side hobby and dictates what is in entertainment.

An AI company called Subquadratic claims to have used sparse attention instead of the usual dense attention to dramatically cut computation and energy use in LLMs. Indenpendent tests are sparse at the moment, but there is a growing body of evidence that the claims are true. This could be a big deal.

We need these more-efficient solutions. The current systems are inefficient as possible. They are consuming vast resources in what I would call just plain lazy engineering. That consumption is raising costs of anything electronic. Since we have a lot of electronics in everything (even peanut butter distribution), everything costs more.

Meanwhile in Russia, the governors are trying to develop homegrown AI talent. A lot of smart folks have left Russian in the past 50 years. The war in Ukraine accelerated that exodus and shuttered the legal import of computing hardware.

Sunday 21 June 2026

Well, somebody gets it. The cryptography bans of the 1990s leading up to today.

Meanwhile in Europe, there is a group that annually publishes a prediction of a future where the US and China rule the world with advanced tech. It bodes ill, very ill, for Europe. Foreboding or silly, there is a trend here where some folks are ringing the alarm for Europeans. Two catastrophic wars in the 20th century had lasting effects in Europe. Is it finally time to awaken?

Meanwhile in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, AI tech is booming. Lots of money flowing to stockholders. They, of course, spend the money and boost everything in their local economies.

Wired reports on home batteries. They might make sense in some cases. If, however, you live in an upper middle class suburb without hurricanes and tornados, you are just being a rich person with a fancy hobby.

In a far more practical story, Wired reports on the benefit of buying a used smartphone.

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has 800+ technical standards. They just put these standards out on the Internet for free access. Hey IEEE and ISO. How about doing the same instead of charging a couple hundred dollars for 20-page standards that say little more than, "do good, not bad." You have to pay the fee to have the standard on your bookshelf so you can obtain a certification and qualify for government contracts. That is a racket.

Meanwhile in Kansas City, MO, here come cameras and facial recognition to the city buses. It is simple, the buses are publicly funded so they are public facilities just like the city government buildings.

Coming this fall from Apple, the M6 processor.

The headline: Are all data science jobs just Gen AI now? The answer: YES. And that is too bad.

Recent experiments show (quoting): it is trivially easy for brands to inject promotional content on sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia with the end goal of poisoning or manipulating the output of AI tools. This is a fundamental property of machine learning. The machine alters itself based on all input. Any input changes the output. No duh.