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: 3-9 August, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Mexico is now #2 server supplier to US, only behind Taiwan
• New voluntary AI testing goes into effect (it is secret)
• CloudFlare builds a browser tailored for AI Agents

Monday 3 August 2026

No Internet viewing this morning. Below is a longer-than-normal list of things I have seen about writing.

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.

More on the standard manuscript format. People still use this. And they have good reasons.

What is your writing process, i.e., how do you go about writing a book or large piece? There are many methods. What is the goal? What do you want to do?

Quoting: How can inspiring writers get published? Write a good book.

I like this piece titled: How I Sold 1,000 Copies of My Self-Published Memoir in Five Months It has good, practical marketing ideas that aren't expensive and returned on the little money invested.

• 1. I talked to readers while I was writing.
• 2. I spent money strategically.
• 3. I talked to everyone about the book.
• 4. I learned not to pigeonhole my book.
• 5. I didn't travel (much).

Dean Wesley Smith: I have in the 20 years since indie publishing started made far, far more money than I made in the 20 plus years in traditional publishing.

Another excellent quote from Smith: Writer's Just Don't Understand Copyright

Quoting the headline: The Evolution of Academic Idioms, How Writing a Paper Has Shifted from Print to Digital Services

Tuesday 4 August 2026

Quoting the headline: Apple Is Reinventing Itself as the World's Biggest Subscription Provider

Meanwhile in Montana, they are experimenting with a new model of medicine and experiments.

Larry Ellison, billionaire, bets it all on AI. You know, these guys whose wealth is on paper, can lost it all. And there is no refund for capital losses.

Speaking of having it all on paper and betting and losing ... see this guy.

Once again, someone admits there is more to engineering software systems than writing code. Still, none of those job recruiters have called me to apologize. What gives?

I am unfamiliar with Mr. Hank Green and his work. He announces that using LLM is not healthy for him or good for the world. Perhaps.

It is quite unfortunate, but we have many ne'er-do-wells working as law enforcement officers. We have all made poor decisions regarding the hiring, retention, and training of such persons. It is all our responsibility to do better.

More reports of ne'er-do-wells in law enforcement.

A frequent refrain: we are building bright, shiny, new, big places to house computers while we aren't housing people in a decent manner and manor. There is some merit to the refrain. Also, plenty of ignorance.

Meanwhile in Japan, someone discovers that they are dependent on China for drones in industry.

Meanwhile at the New York Times, someone discovers that tourists in China are tracked closely by the party. Gosh. Well, it takes the Times a while to grasp the obvious.

Meanwhile in America, some states are taxing datacenters. The result will be higher costs for all Americans at just about everything since just about everything is connected to a computer or one sort or another.

Surprise: Mexico is now the second-largest computer server supplier to the U.S.A. only behind Taiwan.

Meanwhile in China, the Communist Party realizes that if OpenAI and Anthropic can accidentally hack into companies, what can they do to China if they really want to hack.

This is wrong and harkens back to the actions of the prior presidency. Our government is warning people about what they say on the Internet. Wrong.

Quoting the headline: Amazon becomes the fifth company to reach a $3T market cap, joining Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple The definition of success has changed.

Palantir reports a booming financial quarter.

Quoting the headline: The White House says it has met its deadline to establish a voluntary framework for evaluating advanced AI models No one outside the White House seems to know what this means.

Perhaps some explanation will come from today's meeting at the White House.

Meanwhile in Europe where regulators gotta' regulate, a new EU regulation provides the ability to extract more money from successful American companies.

Wednesday 5 August 2026

SpaceX is buying 130,000 acres near Pecan Island, Louisiana. Build a space port on the Gulf Coast. Amazing stuff.

We've gone from no silver bullets to no magic wands. AI is being applied to medicine. Actually, heave numerical methods and enough compute power to run a million experiments in a short time. Still, no guarantees.

Quoting: The most important skill in prompting is expertise in the domain you're prompting for. Well, it is good that someone gets it.

And now we have AI Tokenomics. Will anyone make any money from all those tokens being processed?

Meanwhile in Silicon Valley (the idea, not the place), the question has changed from Are Chinese open models any good? to Should we be using the Chinese open models? If you use them, when do you become dependent? And most learned people in the field understand how the Chinese built their models.

Running software, endlessly, that creates software. So you manage the computing and the endlessly running software. Tools change. What we do to accomplish the same thing changes. Nothing new here. Let's stop acting surprised.

Mathematicians on how the latest tools are affecting their work.

The content battles at Reddit continue.

Starlink is booming with subscriptions doubling in the past year. They are running good ads on television. Stay connected. Stay tuned.

More news from SpaceX $$$ as AI revenue is up 247%. Good grief. How much is that?

And more huge growth numbers from SpaceX.

Pinterest reports a good financial quarter. But a rise of 19% seems so small compared to these colossal numbers from other places.

AMD reports a big financial quarter up 50%.

More cyberattacks against water and sewage facilities in the US. Don't connect these things to the Internet!

The ne'er-do-wells find more ways to hurt others. Fake bad things. They used to call this framing someone. I don't know if anyone knows that slang any longer. Again, the best way to fight this is the build a reputation so that people know you would never do these things.

The current President's underlings have a new AI framework for voluntary testing. The only people who know the details are those closely involved. It isn't TOP SECRET, but it might as well be.

Who made money in the gold rush? The guy who sold pants (Levi Strauss). Who is making money in the AI boom? The guys who build big diesel-powered machines - Caterpillar. Look at the edge. See the real money makers.

Schools are buying MacBook Neos instead of Chromebooks and low-priced Windows machines. No wonder the rest of us have to wait weeks to get a Neo.

The result of many return-to-the-office mandates is that people realize the folks running the company are a bunch of unethical liars and cheats. Not a good result.

Meanwhile in North America, the Linux desktop hits 10% of the market.

Turn on a fan, and the blades disappear into motion blur. Cause a drone to spin, and it disappears the same way.

Thursday 6 August 2026

This statement may be startling, but it is true: When Apple Inc. releases Siri AI this fall in iOS 27, it will instantly become the world's most widely distributed artificial intelligence chatbot.

There was a time when people who could multiply large numbers in their head were useful. Now they are not. And with these new software tools, more such people are becoming interesting novelties, but little else.

This is optimistic, probably won't come true, how AI will give workers a third of their day to just think and ponder.

Let's call it AI-driven development. That doesn't have the vibe of vibe coding and sounds more formal than hobby programming. Let's see what folks do. More letters and syllables.

Meanwhile at Google, folks are having to wait for computer time (we used to do that in the old days before everyone owned their own computer). At the same time, Google is selling buildings full of computers to competitors. Sounds like the left-hand department needs to cross the hallway and talk to the right-hand department.

Apple sued OpenAI. OpenAI sued Apple to dismiss the suit. Neither company wants to have all their hiring practices discussed openly in court.

Someone hacked into the computers of the North Korean hackers to learn that the North Koreans have hacked 1,640 companies in 57 countries in the past couple of years.

SanDisk, an old and established company, reports quarterly revenue up 372% (how do you even calculate that number?). And then their stock price drops because someone thought that wasn't good enough.

We love DoorDash. Well, some Americans do. I personally have never used the service, but business is way up.

Not everyone is doing well. Etsy cuts 220 jobs or 12% of its workforce.

Quoting: Elon Musk says SpaceX has decided to build exclusively on Nvidia

Showing once again that hardware is the new software (a phrase I coined), Anthropic is designing its own processors to run Claude.

Uber wants to have driverless taxis in 15 cities before Christmas. That is one way to stop drivers from sexually assaulting passengers.

Friday 7 August 2026

Starting a company to work on thought-to-text with no implants, a.k.a., telepathy.

What are code reviews even for? Good question. Most people answer incorrectly. That is why they jump on AI doing the reviews for them. What a shame. What a loss.

Folks love to compare the current AI frenzy to the dot com book and bust. I watched that boom and bust. Companies brought in ping pong tables and weekends in Vegas. Now companies are paying $400K per year and building datacenters the size of towns. Different. The same?

Open models. Grab them at no cost. Run them locally. Have lots of power. What could possibly go wrong? The ne'er-do-wells come along and answer that question.

This must be really important as the entire Internet is buzzing about it. Closest photos ever of the surface of the sun.

Continuous learning is supposed to be the world's most difficult problem. I doubt it.

A Saudi group buys Electronic Arts for $55Billion. The Saudis tried to buy professional golf, and that didn't quite work. Now they are buying the video game industry. And that probably won't work either.

There is something called a suicide cluster (remember "going postal?") and it appears the US Cyber Command is one. Five suicides in the past month.

Fear and loathing amongst the AI staff at Google.

Someone is going for 10 trillion parameters. If we have a continent-size datacenter ... you may see where this is going. Build a computer the size of the planet and it will have artificial general intelligence or sense making or super intelligence or something impressive.

Instead of charging companies for token use, just do profit sharing. Well, why not? Microsoft could have done this with Word decades ago.

Meanwhile in New Mexico, a judge ensures that tech companies will never be based in New Mexico as a $567Million fine is levied on Meta.

More big financial quarters reported

Atlassian

Cloudflare

Roku

Coming next year from OpenAI, a $300 gadget no one wants or needs.

Western Digital reports revenue up 44% and its stock falls 10%. I guess I should be accustomed to these things by now.

Google's DeepMind claims better weather prediction. Predicting the weather seemed like an obvious application of supervised learning and neural networks. I wrote about that in the early 1990s. Finally, someone is doing it well.

SpaceX-Tesla (we'll have to start calling it that) confirms they will build a chip-making factory outside of Houston in a $16.8Billion deal.

Chainalysis reports that violent crypto attacks, e.g., home invasions, kidnappings, and hostage situations, are up to a new record. So far, more than $30million has been stolen. Literally point a gun at someone and tell them, "Your crypto wallet or your life."

ChatTJB: it's just a guy answering questions for money. Great.

Saturday 8 August 2026

Quoting the headline: AMD acquires AI chip startup Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models into silicon

Quoting: If you opt-in to having your data used to improve the models, you get more than a 10x discount on using those models. This is the deal Meta is offering.

Open AI models are free to use locally. Still people are paying OpenAI et al. It still isn't simple enough to use your own. I recently asked for one command and boom running text processing. Don't have it yet.

Meanwhile in Russia or the New York Times (sometimes I confuse the two), we learn that there are actual private businesses trying to survive the war with Ukraine. There is collateral damage in war. I guess maybe there is no collateral damage as it is all total war. Ask the folks at Amazon whose datacenters are being blown up by Iranian missiles.

A milestone in international trade: both South Korea and Taiwan pass Japan in export$.

Big tech invests in big iron.

SpaceX, I thought they built rockets, is building datacenters. Everyone needs more computers. Perhaps "need" isn't the right word.

The ways things are becoming: CloudFlare builds a browser for AI agents to use, not people. It doesn't have the things people use as they are needless to AI agents. They call it Kitesurf. We have been building software that makes software easier to run for decades. Nothing new here.

Now we call it the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident. OpenAI makes a formal presentation. Does anyone remember the movie The Oxbow Incident?

Sunday 9 August 2026

Google shifted last week. Instead of trying to have the world's best chattering bot etc., make money on cloud computing. Gemini and NotebookLM are good enough. Make money instead.

Spiralism: some folks take their chats with these chattering bots too seriously and convince themselves that themselves are important something or other. It's just software extruding text based on probability.

How to move money around sanctions and blockades and such.

Build a datacenter. Then build a power plant for it so no one's electric bill goes up. Then everyone gets mad at you. At least according the New York Times.

More Amazon news and how to quietly build a datacenter. This is what makes people mad. Folks discover that they live in a system of their own making in which they have no say in business, factories, taxes, etc.

Meanwhile in South Korea, hardware is the new software (as I have written). And a hardware rush, like the gold rush, has changed everything. Folks don't like change.

Quake is now 30 years old. The 1990s were a wonderful time of new things.

Yet another case of being ahead and playing the government's silly games only hurts you.

Testing if the current slate of AI systems can run a newsletter without people. The answer is, "Probably, yes."

Trying to detect if something was pumped out of AI probabilities or if a person wrote it. Good grief folks. Don't you have something better to do with resources?

Meanwhile in America, Flock has a competitor in license plate readers. The competitor is Axon.

More advances in efficiency as AI models are easier to run on local, low-power hardware. I am still looking for the natural language processing application. One step install and all that.