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: 20-26 July, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The AI boom continues
• OpenAI accidentally hacks into Hugging Face
• The hundred$ of billion$ keep flowing

Monday 20 July 2026

Marketing and influence. Everyone has the power to do this.

If you make your living suing bad drivers, you don't want bad drivers replaced by computers driving cars.

The ne'er-do-wells find yet another way to abuse technology to abuse other people.

Our President: Let's have global freedom of expression. EU: Not so fast with that. We are happy taking money from successful American companies.

Current AI is a non-profit group building AI systems that folks worldwide can use freely to live. I like this.

The final of the World Cup, just the one game, brought $5.69B in bets on just Kalshi and Polymarket. There is no estimate on how much was bet worldwide by everyone on every corner of every village. Sports is entertainment. People want entertainment. No matter where they are, rich or poor, etc.

Here is a Kodak 35mm film camera for $35. Point and shoot as they used to say. Great stuff. I love it.

AI, coding, and the engineering of systems. Quoting: AI has dramatically reduced the cost of starting work, but production-ready polish remains a challenge.

Financial independence: you don't quit working, a.k.a., retire, you can switch into an occupation that is less lucrative but more fulfilling.

The Zilog Z80 8-bit CPU is 50 years old. Wow! Great system. Zilog stopped production a couple of years ago. Someone, however, is about to release an open-source, drop-in replacement. Great history. Great system.

Quoting the title: Publishing is always changing. Substitute just about any word for "Publishing."

Quoting the headline: Publishers file lawsuit against Google for AI training Good luck with all that.

Write a book about a TV show or a movie or a play or another book. Write a book... period.

This is a good piece on the standard manuscript format for writers.

I love this: Write Toward the Questions That Unsettle You

Tuesday 21 July 2026

Note: two things we discuss much now that we didn't discuss four years ago. (1) AI. (2) International soccer. Funny how times change.

I learn of the ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic. I guess these are little ads created by the chattering bots. The ads are full of errors.

Big tech trading billion$ of this for that.

Quoting the headline: India's first privately developed rocket reaches orbit on dramatic debut launch

I guess we'll stop call them smartphones and start calling them AIphones or AI-phones or something. I doubt it. Remember when everyone was going to have a 3D-TV? Yeah, that didn't happen either.

A lot of these chattering bots impersonate something that is smarter than my friends and relatives. Certainly faster at typing. Quoting: I think we overrated intelligence. Sigh. New tools. Use them and keep thinking hard thoughts.

And these new, better tools bring us back to something some of us have known for a long time: Having fewer but smarter people outperforms the alternatives. The smarter people know how to use tools better than everyone else. Say it. Do it. Boom. Done. Move on. Smarter people can do that in smaller groups.

In comes AI; out goes rational decisions. It doesn't have to be that way. Folks are afraid to pause and think. It is the pausing that brings angst.

Meanwhile in China, the party assumes it knows what it is doing regarding AI and business.

I missed this one: GitHub allows some folks to pay other folks for working on open-source projects. There is real money in it. This especially works when those working and being paid live in developing countries where wages and costs are 1% of other places.

This is all legal. Some big tech, however, is hiding datacenter debt. The debt is much bigger than some think. Unlike governments, which seem to never pay debts, companies eventually pay debts.

BOOM! South Korea is shipping semiconductors to the rest of the world in unbelievable numbers. They have a 180% gain this July. There are a lot of ships leaving the peninsula. Oh, and what are they doing in Communist North Korea? Huh? Huh? Any guesses?

Dropping like a rock are human visits to web sites. Intelligent searching and summarizing are changing things. It is the summarizing. Hint to web sites: put a big summary up front!

There goes $1.5Billion (with a B) to a class-action suit. The lawyers are the ones pocketing the money, not the writers.

Watch the skies as here come the attack drones. No, this isn't Ukraine. We shall see what comes of this.

Blockade a place and they develop their own resources. Predictable and predicted.

Is technology from China a legitimate competition? Maybe, but I doubt it. I suspect much of the quick gains from competitors came from stolen technology.

Wednesday 22 July 2026

Finally, hardwire a model into silicon. The speed is amazing.

AMD tries to move into the market for rack-sized systems for datacenters. A cool $5million gets you a rack.

Changing mathematics and the practice of theoroms and proofs.

Now we have agent swarms. What's next? Agent hurricanes? Agent tidal waves?

New tools replace old skills. Know anyone who remembers how to change a typewriter ribbon? People long for the day they used their old skills. Those typewriter ribbons put ink on your fingers. I took great care not to put that on your shirt.

Good grief, who isn't involved in the Paramount - Warner Brothers deal? It's entertainment. It won't determine open-heart surgery.

Meanwhile in America, we are using Chinese AI systems a little more than half the time.

Quoting the headline: Memo: the White House OSTP plans to redirect federal research funding from universities to individual scientists I like this! Of course I don't work at a university and I wouldn't mind receiving some grant money to research topics of interest.

University researchers sue Anthropic for violating their patents in neural networks.

Volunteering to power datacenters without raising the electric bill rates of the average Joe down the street. Well, it might work.

The founders of Google left California for Miama. They are bringing a lot of high-paying, white-collar jobs with them.

OpenAI puts a few million $$$ more into the American Journalism Project. That is one way to ensure good press reports about you. Pay the journalists.

Putting money into the pockets of lawmakers, a.k.a., lobbying. OpenAI and Anthropic spend more while Meta spends less.

I like this one. A mobile app that creates personalized children's stories. Of course, I don't make a living writing children's stories.

Google claims its newer Gemini reduces costs by running more efficiently.

Business is good at Mercor. I looked at working for Mercor. Experiences of folks who did that were mixed with more than half reporting not being paid and waiting a long time to know if they were going to be assigned work and all sorts of bad news.

Meanwhile at our Dept of Defense (War), they are limiting the token usage folks have as the price is going up too high.

Everyone is going gaga (is that a word?) over the Kimi K3 AI system. China is catching up. Open-weights are catching up. Again, perhaps we will find that someone was borrowing a bit too much to build that thing. Anyways, it is here.

Thursday 23 July 2026

Nvidia designs a CPU, not a GPU. With its own CPU, they don't have to buy them from Intel or AMD.

Quoting the headline: Jack Dorsey is taking on Slack with Buzz, a group chat platform for teams and their AI agents

This is one of those stories where software wasn't tested. It ran around doing things it wasn't supposed to do. I uncovered errors in other software. I guess the result was good. The method was wrong.

What a bunch of bologna. Describing poorly tested software as "misaligned AI escaping containment." Someone wrote software that opens files, reads files, deletes files, etc. Nothing new. They didn't test it properly and it started deleting too many files. "Escaping?" Let's be real.

Good grief. Someone is trying to change the definition of a software factory. They are so young, they don't know the name was already taken.

Of course AI cannot find the errors in its own code. It is the definition of correct.

OpenAI has a hit with ChatGPT Work.

These chattering bots spit out the most probable text. The value of information is in what is unusual (the sun didn't set yesterday). Hence, the chattering bots produce information with little value. There are no plot twists or interesting things. And yet, we write proposals for government contracts with them. Must be that government contracts are boring. Well, I have to agree with that. They are boring.

Texas Instruments continues a comeback reporting a big financial quarter.

Intel and AMD are selling a lot of processors in China. Big markup, big money.

Research conducted at universities is published (publish or perish). Research conducted at commercial companies is hidden and makes profits.

The gig economy and such are being subsidized by the American taxpayer. Federal aid to poorer people means Amazon et al. can pay much lower wages. Yes, this is a racket.

Jostling with big tech, we now have The Little Tech Association.

Google will spend $200billion (with a B) this year building stuff that will help build stuff. Google is not alone among the big tech companies. Money is flowing. Executives are gambling.

And more hundreds of Billion$ being reported in funny ways from Google. These numbers are so big, how does anyone keep track of them? It seems easy for someone to tuck away a million$ here or there.

Google is approaching a billion monthly active users of its Gemini AI system. Google's numbers are far lower than Anthropic's, which are far lower than OpenAI's.

Alphabet reports a big financial quarter with Google Cloud leading the way.

There was a time when having 15million users was a big deal. Not anymore.

Yes, evidence that Moonshot AI's Kimi stuff was built with smoke, mirrors, and smuggled computing power.

And more news about that.

Strong rumors that Apple will update all of its computers real soon now.

Folks in Georgia are welcoming an OpenAI datacenter.

Friday 24 July 2026

OpenAI has a new system they call Presence. It has something to do with voice chattering bots and such.

Now, something worthwhile. It is a system that that restores vision lost from age-related macular degeneration. And it has approval in America and Europe.

And now we have calm technologies. I guess that is what people used to do when they took the phone off the hook.

The unsustainable of many of these new AI companies. Can anyone spell "dot com boom (bust)?" Maybe this time won't hurt so much.

The old story of training your replacement who will take your job.

This is a strong case that AI has not reduced the jobs in the marketplace.

Real news that isn't news: European regulators fine a successful American company $890million.

When the Communist Party tells you that using American processors is treason, you don't use American processors. Treason in dealt with quickly and ruthlessly.

Money is flowing through South Korea.

The numbers of dollars flowing through big tech these days is staggering. Hundreds of billion$ is the norm.

Our Dept of Defense signs a contract with Oracle. These ten-year, $7billion deals often last ten years, but almost never spend the full $$$.

Intel reports a good financial quarter. This follows the good report from Texas Instruments earlier this week. The old hardware makers are recovering.

Times are bad at Patreon.

Study says: folks in America are using AI to help in their jobs. AI is not replacing jobs. This is all poor management. We are still in the chaos phase of change.

Firefox 153 is released.

Quoting: The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf

Quoting the headline: Drinking 5 Cups of Coffee a Day Could Reduce Heart Risk

Saturday 25 July 2026

SpaceX is declining commercial customers for its Falcom 9 booster. Government customers are still being served. Everything else is going to Starship.

Meanwhile in China, there is a national effort to catch up with America's AI processor hardware.

Why type with your fingers when you can talk to the chattering bot? They call it ramble coding.

Samsung and Broadcom sign a $200billion (with a B) deal. These numbers are ... I have run out of adjectives. Sure there is inflation, but really.

Quoting the headline: Nvidia and SK Group unveil a $500B+ AI initiative (with a B) Again, numbers too large to describe.

American tech companies are cutting more jobs than announced. This study shows about 140,000 jobs cut so far this year.

Apple wants to use international parts when selling products internationally. Translation: Apple wants to be profitable.

More commentary on how the OpenAI system broke into the Hugging Face system. Folks, you have to test software. Also, if you connect systems together, they are connected. If you connect systems and run untested software, don't be surprised when surprises happen. Yes, I am an old naive person.

This is mostly political posturing and bluster, but it's about time someone said something. The EU extracts hundred$ of million$ from US companies every year in the name of "fines." It is the cost of US companies doing business in Europe.

This is laughable. Meta will use software to ensure that users are people, not software.

Echo location, how bats find their way through the dark. A study shows that humans can do the same with 10 weeks of training.

John C. Dvorak dies at 80. I am old. Many of the people who wrote about computing in the 1980s are passing.

Sunday 26 July 2026

Quoting the headline: Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 delivers near-Fable 5 performance at half the token price

The ne'er-do-wells are figuring out how to trick the chattering bots into teaching them how to do the dastardly things that ne'er-do-wells do.

Meanwhile in China, the rulers have a strategy of building open-weight models that folks in the developing world can afford to use. This will ally developing countries with China instead of the western democracies. It is a long-term plan to build a sphere of influence.

Meanwhile on college campuses in America, the administrators are cutting the use of AI detectors to watch students. It is all about the money. The false positives, i.e., students wrongly accused of AI writing their papers, cause law suits that the colleges lose. You can't bleed money because the software isn't 100% correct.

The Empire Strikes Back! College professor puts a trap in a take home test. 32 of 35 students step into the trap. Clever. I think some students learned something valuable.