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: 29 June - 5 July, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The United States of America is 250 years old this week
• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The World Cup continues in North America
• Supply and demand brings inevitable rises in prices of home electronics
• Anthropic's models are released by the current President

Monday 29 June 2026

Americans are still spending online with gains above inflation.

Meanwhile in the UK, they have to do something differently.

Meanwhile in the US, we have over 100,000 license-plate-reading systems installed. How did we get here? I don't remember the discussion leading to the decision. Of course some people in some jobs misuse them. That's people.

Meanwhile in South Korea, more hundred$ of billion$ go into new chip-making factories.

It is basic supply and demand. The result is the low-end markets, like home computers and phones, will see rise in prices.

Google claims to have alerted over 11million people in Venezuela of the earthquake of 24 June minutes before it happened. That's a good start if it is true.

Meanwhile in Australia, the governors are embarrassed because the teenagers are still able to use social media despite the best efforts of the censoring adults. What to do? More of the same. Increase beating until morale improves.

Ah, finally, someone reports on the farce of the World Cup hydration breaks. Stop the game and show two minute$ of commercial$ each half. In flow$ the money. Fan$ hate it. Pay more for ticket$ or simply take a break. Major League Baseball takes a two-minute break for commercials every half inning.

Speculating about Neptune and Uranus and such. I guess there are less productive things to do with your time. To me, it seems like a waste of technical talent and highly educated people.

I guess I should learn what microtension is and then put it in my writing.

Two quotes: Titles Do Not Sell Books. And: So brand your books to your name, play down the titles. Build a name brand. And let your fans follow your name.

I love this title to a piece: Great Way To Lose A Day. The day was lost, but it was GREAT nonetheless. And for writers, that great day can become a line of stories and novels.

I like these thoughts on short stories and the end of a story.

Paraphrasing here: Tim Ferriss on book sales performance over the last several years; he argues that the current decline in self-help book sales is related to people's growing use of AI.

Tuesday 30 June 2026

In the 1800s, cities in the US "reclaimed" land. See Washington D.C. as an example. Today, we know better or something and won't do this. We also need more land than ever.

Use AI to write software. Nothing new. Do it completely locally.

Great resource: a Fintech Engineering Handbook, Patterns for building software that handles money

Weill miracles cease? It appears that Intel is back in the chip making business.

Predictable and predicted: the regulators in the Trump administration allow Anthropic to release its models.

Once you become much more productive with a new tool, you just can't stop being much more productive. It is almost an addiction. You have to work longer not shorter hours.

Okay, the novelty has worn off. Now it is time to use AI smart as in the way a business person count$ $mart.

High-tech high earners in the bay area are no longer high earners. They thought they would have a house by now. The AI millionaires next door have priced them out of the market. Time to move to Tennessee.

AI and air traffic control. Good grief. These are basic math analytic problems that were solved long ago. Why haven't we been using them? Labor unions. There is no new technology here.

And here is another one: political campaign managers. Again, the analytic math has been around for decades.

Marc Andreessen joins a DoD Defense Policy Board. Maybe he can help fix the back-office morass.

Industrial espionage lives on.

Our Supreme Court rules that there are no independent agencies in the Federal government. The Constitution notes there are three branches. You are in one of the three branches and subject to the person administering that branch. You are not outside the three branches in your own little kingdom.

Folks want to watch the World Cup online. There are many places on the black market, I think we call it the dark web, to watch.

The Swiss have more than secretive and secure banks. They have a little-known R&D hub in Zurich.

Wednesday 1 July 2026

So as not to let SpaceX have the market for satellite phones, Rocket Lab buys Iridium.

Deep thoughts on technology and innovation. We seem to be stuck. Too many leaders are too specialized in one thing and lack and broad perspective.

I like the ideas in this piece. Instead of the computer following me around, confine it to the computer room or office or where ever we confine it. Go to it when I want.

I haven't followed this story, but a guy is born poor in China, becomes a billionaire, leaves China, comes to America, and is sentenced to 30 years in prison in America. Well, it is a story. Probably won't be a Disney movie, but will be a movie.

And another story with enough twists and turns to be a pretty good movie. The tale of Anthropic, dangerous algorithms, egos, bruised egos, and such.

One way to look at this is South Korea has become a colonial power. They import raw materials and export, and I mean EXPORT, highly finished goods. The same can be said of Taiwan.

Strong rumors about the innards of the iPhone 18 models.

The governors of Japan toss in $6Billion (with a B) to develop Japan's own foundation AI models.

Vint Cerf is retiring. He helped invent this thing call the inter-network of computers.

Tim Cook does what he does best: hold reasonable discussions with reasonable people. I wish the folks in the White House and from Anthropic would hire Mr. Cook as an advisor.

If ya' can't beat 'em, buy 'em. SpaceX cuts the prices of Starlink in the Memphis area.

Jobs: Microsoft to cut about 2% of its 220,000-person workforce. That is several thousand unemployed persons.

It appears that our current President is making a few Billion $$$ (with a B) on the side.

Numbers can be deceiving and let's not confuse correlation with causation, but (and that is a BIG BUT) those American companies spending the most on AI are also hiring the most people. Uh, isn't that backwards? Increased productivity with new tools brings expansion of business and hiring new people. Who woulda' thunk it?

Rumors out of OpenAI is that efficiency is coming. Make it work; then make it work better.

Anthropic introduces Claude Science. It is a system to help scientists do research inside one environment instead of jumping around.

Thursday 2 July 2026

Well, it's a start. Someone powered a light bulb from a fusion reactor.

AWS invests a billion $$$ into a unit of forward-deployed engineers. This is an old practice, and I have to wonder why it took so long for AWS to do this.

Tesla starts testing its Cybercab. If you have no pedals and no steering wheel, you reduce the number of parts in a vehicle by a large number. That is a good idea.

Perhaps we are nearing the end of the chatbot era. The agents and loops and all such returns to programming are gaining market share. Pretty soon, people will be using compilers. Just kidding on that last remark.

Real news that isn't news: a European court rules that a successful American company has to pay a few Billion (with a B) dollars to European regulators.

Meanwhile in America, survey says we adults want bans of social media to those under 16. Those under 16 were not asked as that is already banned.

OpenAI discusses giving 5% of its stock to the US government, sort of sharing the wealth. Of course this brings several thousand questions such as, Who in the Federal government gets the stock? What does the government do with the stock? And so on.

Apple basically orders about 10million foldable phones from factories. These foldable phones have not been seen by anyone, yet.

What happened to those pledges from big tech to go green and be emissions free and all that?

Coming real soon after the 4th of July, voluntary regulations on AI will be announced.

At least one person agrees with me: we are in the chaos phase of change due to the current AI systems.

Stupidity often accompanies the best of intentions. See, for example, this attempt by Californians to do something with manure and oil. Gosh.

Meanwhile here in Virginia, in Henrico County, the school administrators are asked to cut electricity bills. Oh, by the way, there are several dozen datacenters in the county that were welcomed by, uh, er, well, those same folks asking school administrators to cut electricity bills. Oh, perhaps they didn't know what they were doing back when

Friday 3 July 2026

Cheap home robots? $10,000? Really? That's a pretty expensive inexpensive.

Meta is basically trying to be an AWS.

Okay, Anthropic stopped squabbling with the White House. Round 1 is over. Now what are we going to do for the next week or ten years?

The inside story of Google's Reader. Why did they turn it off? It was so good and useful and practical.

After 25 years at Cornell University, arXiv leaves to become an independent nonprofit organization. Great place to find information.

BitTorrent is 25 years old.

I guess I am just too old for this stuff. Here is a headline. I don't understand any of it. Quote: Spotify removed 500K+ streams of Malcolm Todd's Earrings after a 70% surge in 24 hours sent it to #1 on Spotify USA and coincided with suspicious Kalshi wagers

Fear and loathing at Meta.

Tesla to impose a $200-per-week limit on AI use. Either the managers at Tesla are stupid, which I doubt, or the engineers are wasteful. That latter is probably the case.

Sam Altman proposes an AI version of NATA or something like that.

Amazon claims 396 satellites in low-Earth orbit as a first step in its Starlink competitor.

Quoting the headline: Filings: Trump purchased up to $5M each in Broadcom, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia stocks on July 23, the same day he unveiled his AI action plan

Analysis of technology continues to show that putting datacenters in orbit doesn't work. Perhaps Mr. Musk knows something that no one else knows. That is possible. More likely is that he is selling an idea and looking for investors. He isn't lying deliberately, he simply believes.

Saturday 4 July 2026

Happy Birthday United States of America.

Our FAA attempts to make it easier for supersonic flight to attempt a comeback.

Sometimes I just shake my head and scratch it and wonder if these guys realize what they are doing and saying. It seems to be a surprise to professionals to think that you should understand what you are doing. Really? Perhaps something is lost in translation.

This is probably a good use of AI. An intern can do some work and everything must be checked.

Get back to basics. Meta (Facebook) makes its money on advertising. It is not a technology company.

Quoting: school is mostly loss functions: well-defined problems graded against known answers. Therefore, the valuable work of the next decade is everything that can't be graded

Quoting: Microsoft unveils $2.5B Frontier Company to embed AI engineers inside customers This is the forward-deployed engineer concept. It often works.

And now we have skill engineering.

Meanwhile in Japan, Micron breaks ground on its ~$9.3B Hiroshima factory expansion

End up in court and risk revealing your trade secrets. Hint: stay out of court.

Let's not be naive: have a better relationship with the President and all the President's appointees and you will be awarded more government contracts. And then pause and ask, "Do we want more government contracts?" Government contracts aren't that profitable.

Predictable and predicted: here in Virginia, us resident taxpayers are spending million$ defending laws passed by our Democratic legislature and governor. The laws were unconstitutional from the start. As stated, predictable and predicted.

Sunday 5 July 2026

And we have a caveman plug-in to reduce the tokens output by LLMs. Saves money. Grunt.

Microsoft tries again with changing Copilot. Maybe this time it will work for consumers.

Some evidence that students using AI hurts their learning. The hurt sometimes doesn't show for two years, but it is there.

Looking for a world where there is only one app. And that, of course says the AI-company guy, is AI.

Another way to cut the cost of LLMs et al. is to put the long prompts into an image. The chattering bot reads the text in the image and somehow is tricked into not charging as much. As the word leaks, the companies will fix this.

AWS takes the first steps to retiring Mechanical Turk.

Computer-based learning and tailored curriculums are old concepts. The Alpha School takes those another step. Rich folks are using the program to the tune of $50,000 a year. As always, especially with kids, results vary.

Apple raised the price of its computer. But wait, others are lowering the price of Apple computers. I am confused.

Some thoughts on nation-against-nation warfare and how companies become involved. Contrary to the piece, this is nothing new.

The folks at Microsoft didn't write the tax codes of different countries. The folks at Microsoft read the different tax codes of different countries.

Quantum computing: in theory, there is much potential. In practice, nothing yet.

Let's apply all sorts of statistics to NBA champions. This piece focuses on star players who missed key games in the playoffs.

Quoting the title: How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi How did this happen? Simple: Regulations. The UK is trying to build a high-speed railway. Just like California. Big money spent on meeting regulations. No physical work accomplished. Maybe people will learn????