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: 27 July - 2 August, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Good quarterly financial reports arrive
• More and more information on the OpenAI hack of Hugging Face
• Someone is hacking into water and sewage systems across America

Monday 27 July 2026

Being paid billion$ to not use what you own extends to the RF spectrum and satellites.

And even greater detail about how OpenAI didn't test their system and it hacked Hugging Face and all that. There was something to prevent such "escape," but that wasn't tested either. Oh well.

The Chinese release open models for AI. The big US tech companies have closed models. Which way are we going? Oh, by the way, the Chinese open models were built by stealing from the commercial, closed models.

Meanwhile in America, to use AI and not pay as much, companies are mixing use of low-price Chinese models with higher-price American models.

The defense-industrial base is pouring billion$ into drones and autonomous systems.

The AI companies eye the education market. Can they displace Canvas, Blackboard, et al.? Can they displace the college professor?

Mr. Altman has a surprisingly good grip on the reality of people. Quoting: AI hasn't led to 4-hour workweeks because people are competitive

While the Russian army is still in Ukraine, US and Russians exit the space station after 241 days and parachute land in Kazakhstan.

A new middle class of content creators: Workers ditch office jobs not to become celebrities, necessarily, but to piece together an income online Sounds like fun to me.

Meanwhile in Germany, censorship returns.

Let's put sensors and AI systems on garbage trucks. Americans violate countless regulations, most of which no one knows exists. Trash reveals the violators. Oh what a paradise for the regulator$.

I love this headline: AI Fiction Is Easy to Detect Because It's Stupid and Bad

If you go to a conference or take a class, you might as well get something out of it.

This seems to be a common theme no matter who is President, Governor, or on the local Library Board. When all is chaos, that is the easiest time to write. Just explode onto the computer screen.

How not to promote a new book. $44,000 spent spurred the sale of three books. Just three.

Some research, experiments, and reports on software that is supposed to detect AI writing. False positives are dropping, but false negatives continue. That means these things are rarely mistaken when they say, "That piece you wrote wasn't written by you."

I like this piece. It contains writing advice from Robert Louis Stevenson. Yes, that guy. I like this.

Tuesday 28 July 2026

Yet another multi-hundred-billion$ deal among big tech companies.

Next Starship launch is supposed to have a controlled descent with the now famous catch on the launch pad landing.

Have far can you go if you drive only on the roads? That is an isochrone. And yes, Google Maps now has an app for that.

This piece has a great title: AI is Oil, Not God AI is not ready to take over, but it can make a lot of money.

Contemplating real intelligence and what the computer version can do for us. Forget the hype; stay realistic.

Software can now write software. Software is yet to identify useful problems and apply itself to them.

Meta to put $14Billion (with a B) into a datacenter in El Paso. That's about the level their Louisiana datacenter was, but the funding has now increased about 20x.

More ten$ of billion$ for another datacenter in Texas.

Apple hops back over Nvidia to become the world's most valuable company.

Mr. Altman goes to Washington, again.

Quoting the headline: Amazon files an FCC application to deploy a constellation of up to 5,105 satellites starting in 2028 I guess Blue Origin is supposed to have the launch capability for these.

Politics and development of land. This is how major companies work with local groups. Disneyworld was built this way. So was Las Vegas. Not many complaints about those places today. Of course this is arguable and argued. There is no end to it.

There have been some big box office hits at movie theaters the last couple of years. The trend, however, is down. Entertainment is at home due to low-cost, giant TVs and all the services on the Internet.

One expert predicts that Apple's slow approach to AI will save them when the AI bubble bursts.

Quoting: A new analysis of 89 major geological events over the past 260 million years ... Good grief. A fine theory as theories go, but that is all it is.

And here we have a case of a man arrested, tried, convicted, and served a time in prison by mistake. No one noticed the mistake in all this stuff. The defense attorneys didn't notice the mistake. Who is doing this stuff?

And now we have the new Open Secure AI Alliance. It will save us from something. Good intentions. There are worse things to do with resources.

Wednesday 29 July 2026

Lots of text was available to train the language models. Not so much for the models for robots.

I don't understand how this works, but it appears that parts of Peacock network will appear on parts of YouTube.

Quoting: Nvidia Bets on Ilya Sutskever's New AI Lab

Reminder: Nvidia publishes more open AI models than anyone.

I love this title: Open Source Must Be Fun (Or It Will Die)

Moonshot AI (great name) is a new rising star in the AI world.

The Russians show that they too can charge anyone in the world with any crime they like and hope someone extradites the person.

Quoting: Google DeepMind has dismantled the team behind AlphaFold, its Nobel Prize-winning AI system for predicting protein structures,

"done well with thoughtful people" Mr. Zuckerburg has good intentions. But in this politics-dominated world and all the distrust, could we really do this? I wish we could, but that is merely a wish.

SK Hynix reports stagger numbers for the financial quarter. A growth of 257%!

Seagate reports a big financial quarter.

And now we have a Pacing the Frontier Initiative.

Folks want our government to pace AI development. I guess that means sort of regulate it until I say that is too much regulation.

Visa cuts 7% of its workforce or about 2,600 jobs.

Strong rumors about Apple in 2027 and a line of home appliances.

In the US-Iran war, it is on again, I think, the Iranians hit two Amazon data centers in Bahrain. Easy targets, lots of publicity.

In order to avoid, "AI wrote this, you didn't" writers are inserting grammar and punctuation errors into pieces. Well, I don't know, , perhaps I can do that two.

Thursday 30 July 2026

43 years ago today, my wife married me. This side of heaven, best thing that ever happened to me.

Claude Mythos Preview was able to break into the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

We've stopped programming and started managing agents or whatever we call it this week. We are managing so much, we aren't getting any work done. That, my friends, is called bad management. You've gone from being a good programmer to a bad manager. Nothing new here.

Here comes superintelligence (maybe). Will everyone have access to the tool and the good times?

It seems that Anthropic is competing with its business partners.

You let people bet on everything and pretty soon people start to wonder about everything. Predictable and predicted.

The Federal Communications Commission added two categories to its Covered List: robots and power inverters. I don't understand the power inverters part, but the robots part is to keep Chinese robots out. They would probably phone home.

This robot ban seems to include some simple vacuum cleaners.

Thinking clearly ... seems to be the tortoise and the hare story. Slow yourself, think through the unsolved problem. Basic problem solving.

Meanwhile in China, there are AI boomtowns, but there is little benefit to the average person.

The airlines are squeezing more dollars out of passengers as they have learned how to adjust ticket prices more quickly. Agility means bargains are gone.

Samsung reports a BIG financial quarter with $$$ pouring in.

Here is a shift in business strategy at Intel. For the first time, they are selling processor design. This is how Arm runs its business, selling intellectual property instead of building hardware.

More quarterly financial reports arrive with good news from:

Robinhood

Arm

Microsoft

Meta

Qualcomm reports a down quarter.

Quoting: OpenAI is launching a new program Wednesday that will provide 100,000 academic researchers with free access to its advanced AI models through 2027 The researchers will receive a $200-per-month service at no charge.

Meanwhile in America, 3/4s of the adults say the non-adults should not have cell phone access during school. 9 11 was a long time ago.

Now is a good time to be an electrician who can travel to a job site.

Microsoft announces big improvements coming to Copilot real soon now. It confuses me why ChatGPT and Claude can manipulate MS Office files better than MS Copilot can. I guess I just don't understand how this works.

Meanwhile in Australia, Qantas sets a time-aloft records by flying a commercial airliner for over 24 hours. This was a test, no passengers. The airline is buying a couple dozen special planes to routinely fly passengers 20 hours aloft. Gosh. An economy seat for that long. It hurts to consider it.

Friday 31 July 2026

Some folks at OpenAI claim that money is rolling in at the business and, despite all the hoopla at other AI companies, they are doing quite well.

Here comes DoorDash Air. They have approval from the FAA for drone deliveries.

Quoting the Wall Street Journal Headline: China Closes the Satellite Gap in Space Race With the U.S. Oh, by the way, the ability to launch multiple satellites well with one booster also means you can have multiple independent re-entry vehicles and reign now nuclear warheads on different cities.

Ah, someone finally writes about it: Treat prompt changes like code deploys

We could be seeing the end of an era in computing where year after year and decade after decade next year's computers were more powerful and less expensive. Now we go to more power is more expense. It was a wonderful time to be in computing.

Quoting another Wall Street Journal headline: The Rise of Million-Dollar Companies With Just One Employee

The cold email, it works sometimes.

Now we are commening on the commenting on the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (it has become an incident).

We could be at the point were the datacenter collapses and the local language model lives on. Sort of like the 2008 mortgage collapse.

Meanwhile in China, Xi Jinping called for more defense applications using autonomous and AI technologies

Meanwhile in New York, the state sues Kalshi for illegal gambling.

Real news that isn't news: the Chinese are stealing AI capabilities from American companies. No wonder they make surprising advances.

Sony reports a good financial quarter.

So does Apple.

So does Reddit.

So does Amazon.

How to spend a trillion $$$ and not be the government of the United States.

How to gain favor with the President: given million$ to various non-for-profit enterprises.

The market value of semiconductor makers popped up yesterday. A little surprise.

Microsoft gained $450Billion (with a B) yesterday. That sets some sort of record.

Not to be outdone by OpenAI-Hugging Face, Anthropic claims that three of its models broke out and broke into systems.

OpenAI announces price cuts for the use of GPT models.

In a milestone, Amazon's Zoox receives a permit to operate as a taxi with no driver and no steering wheel. It still has a type of brake pedal. These things, if they really come to fruition, will be a great boost to handicapped and elderly.

Saturday 1 August 2026

When you do business in China, you must be prepared for ... doing business in China (with the Communist Party of China).

The search for the solid-state battery.

Microsoft made great progress is storage technology that remains readable for 10,000 years. It isn't a good business as almost no one wants to buy it.

AI code testers etc. are making the distribution of software different with hundreds of bug fixes coming in each release.

And we enter an era of more apps coming faster. Perhaps they will do something useful. Often the numbers wins. Many more apps means a few will be good. A few is more than none.

Meanwhile at a UN AI conference, the Chinese argue that their open models are best for all. They didn't seem to mention how they stole intellectual property from commercial American AI models to build those open models.

It would have been a good thing to buy stock in Amazon two days ago.

And OpenAI finds more cases of its software "escaping containment." These firewalls, I guess we call them by many names these days, have holes in them. Task software to find the holes, turn it on, let it run, and the result is predictable and predicted. Any surprises here? There is such a thing as an air gap.

The ne'er-do-wells turn their attention to water and sewage systems.

This story is ... well, beyond description. Google added a feature to its overhead photos where people could change the images. Uh, did anyone think that folks would add bomb craters to the Washington Monument? That was a simple silly case. Others were far more serious. Never underestimate what some people consider "funny."

OpenAI claims a billion (with a B) active users. The definition of success has changed. I don't doubt the claim.

Wired reviews the updated Alienware 15 Gaming Laptop.

Sunday 2 August 2026

Let's build a new nation, but it isn't the old nation state. Where to start? Some experiences.

BOOM. AI. BOOM. We saw this back at the start of the personal computer era around 1980. The number of computers being used by people hands on, that doesn't count embedded systems, exploded. Here come the AI processors with the number high-level Nvidia processors doubling every nine months. That sort of blows past Moore's Law or something. In the next five years, all these datacenters will come on line. BOOM. AI. BOOM.

More on the cyberattacks on water and sewage systems. If you connect it to the Internet, well let's stop being surprised.

Here come the practical smart glasses with cameras and microphones. And how will we ensure privacy? Hint: we won't. We will all become sensors.

Meanwhile in China, everyone wants an electric vehicle. These work in China because the party limits travel. In America, hop in the car and drive 3,000 miles as you please. Not so in China. The party determines where you can drive, monitors you, and limits you to the party-installed charging stations. And the big problem comes in a couple of years when the batteries need to be disposed.

I like this piece. I'll note it here instead of with the links about writing. Two quotes: (1) Writing is the best way to think clearly about a topic. and (2) Blog (write) about things you don't understand yet

This isn't an original idea, I've discussed it many times with others. This is a good way to state it: If it's work - if the task has to be done and no one cares how - then it's fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and how the task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn't make sense to use AI. Many college and other teachers are struggling with this. Why? This is simple. Just say, "Students, today we are practicing how to calculate square roots of numbers by hand. You won't do this on the job, but it is a good mental practice to grow a few skills. One day, if someone pays you to produce a table of square roots, don't do it this way. That would be wasteful."

Along with the above, two quotes. (1) Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate. (2) Bosses Horrified as AI Native College Graduates Hit the Workplace