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: 10-16 August, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Mr. Zuckerburg write a long essay on AI
• The billion$ continue to flow in the compute industry
• Google has a big event and shows new phones
• A drought in Europe (blame somebody or something)
• And everything is AI

Monday 10 August 2026

Mr. Zuckerburg criticizes companies, whose closed AI models are much better than his company's, for building closed AI models.

And Mr. Zuckerburg gives a positive outlook on what the current slate of AI systems can do for individuals.

So far, China dominates the world market in humanoid robots. Again, the two-arms-and-two-legs form of humanoid robots isn't a good form for most tasks.

And staying in China, Nvidia systems still dominate AI building in the labs.

Everyone is taking short courses in AI and trying to gain certificates of one type or another.

I am surprised to read that people still write "seedy" to describe people and places.

The Royal Navy discovers that Chinese components are indeed phoning home.

Meanwhile in America, the backlash against datacenters continues. Chalk up another victory for anti-business "journalists."

More information on the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident (I like that title). Again, if you write a poor spec for a system and don't test it well enough, you have problems. Nothing new here. A complete lack of systems engineering.

Yet another Linux distribution.

This is a little different: given a URL, this browser doesn't go to the website, it builds a website. Yes, it is inventing its own Internet.

I like this thought from Seth Godin: the library is about possibility, not data. Any member of the public can walk in, and there it is. Knowledge for the absorbing.

I like Seth Godin's take on rejection notices. They said, "No." Stop there. Don't read any more.

Tuesday 11 August 2026

There are problems with these systems that read license plates. The rate of error is pretty high. "Pretty high" being subjective. If a police dog chews off your face because of an error in the system, pretty high becomes unacceptable. The lesson, which law enforcement is not learning, is simple: don't depend on the system by itself. Have a human confirm what the system indicates.

Meanwhile at Apple, it is about time for some sort of rebirth of the smart watch.

Meanwhile on Mars, the traffic isn't heavy, but the terrain is a challenge. This little guy chugs along autonomously.

Here come the sodium-ion batteries. More political science and less chemical science? Nothing comes from China. All ingredients come from here.

The software created by software has better quality than even a few months ago.

News flash: big tech does not have ALL the money in the world. Even Amazon's AWS, an early pioneer in cloud computing, has a limited amount of processors for its own engineers to use. Renting is more profitable than engineering. Engineers, smarten up.

The tools change; how we work changes.

ChatGPT no longer accepts, "Write this in the style of Ernest Hemingway." Time to be more inventive in the prompting.

Now we have Revision Prompting. It takes me back to RCS or Revision Control System. That was several generations before Git.

I don't understand how these things work, but the value of Intel is up 146% this year.

Meanwhile in Western Australia, law enforcement agencies are trying facial recognition technology.

Meanwhile on the network of interconnected computers, PatronView (I had to read a while to understand what that is) reports that 99% of visitors are software bots, not people.

Anthropic is trying to have the biggest IPO in history. I guess that will mean something to some folks.

Renting ten$ of billion$ (with a B) of compute power. That's what the big companies do. Has anyone calculated the number of processors per person we do now? Jerry Pournelle broke through with his "at least one processor per person" meme (we didn't call them memes back when he did that). Anyways, I used several of these chattering bots everyday (paid $20 a month). I wonder how many processors I use daily.

I'll just quote the headline: Filing: Sergey Brin donated an additional $20M to Building a Better California, which fights California's wealth tax, bringing his total contributions to $102M

These numbers seem to big to be real, but I guess this is accurate. $500Billion (with a B) to finance more computers.

OpenAI branches its business into specialized areas of AI models and systems.

I found a copy of Mr. Zuckerburg's recent essay on AI. Several URLs failed, but this one worked for me. The essay has about 6,500 words or 13 pages of standard printed text.

Wednesday 12 August 2026

More fear and loathing about these chattering bots and class work in school. The teachers haven't figured it out. That is a shame and that shows the abilities (lack) of the typical teacher.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, AI money collides with real estate. The rent is so high that it passes New York City.

A look at AI research in university labs. I did that once. The problem today is the frontier of knowledge requires a billion-dollar datacenter. Hence, college professors are researching smaller problems where the solutions could pivot the entire industry. That isn't easy, but research never was easy.

Meanwhile at Google, a few new buttons on the home screen.

Learning from a million hours of video of people. Well, its something.

Here is a no-duh statement: Local models are never going to be as powerful. Gosh, gee, my MacBook Air won't perform like the datacenter down the street?

This one puzzles me. I would have thought the iPhones left metadata in the files.

I am at a loss to explain how finances like this work. This is a startup company (what is that anyways?). They raised a billion dollars (with a B) several months ago. Now they are raising another of those dollars with a B. How?

I guess there are worse ways to use all this technology, algorithms, and compute power. Solve the great first-world problems to track how much you exercise to burn calories because you eat too much and have too much to eat.

Hackers for the Communist Party of China use all the open-source tools to break into government servers on Taiwan.

A tale of a big hit that keeps on hitting: Candy Crush (never played it) continues to be popular 15 years running with 81.5 million monthly active users. Consider that Presidential candidates in America don't receive that many votes ever.

We love to bet on anything and everything.

Unbelievable financial reports from ...

CoreWeave

Super Micro

Here is another trillion-parameter (with a tr) model being computed. This time it is Nvidia crunching the numbers.

Google claims a billion (with a B) monthly active users for its Gemini.

Quoting this WOW headline: TSMC and Sony plan to form Advanced Vision Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, a $4.69B joint venture in Japan to make next-gen smartphone image sensors from 2029

Meanwhile in New York City, free enterprise is becoming not-so-free enterprise. The experiment has been performed already. We already know the outcome.

I have to agree with the last few words of this headline: AI is automating formulaic tasks. I agree even more if the headline ended with "smart people are automating formulaic tasks." The latter has been happening for decades and centuries.

McDonald's has a loyalty program. That means they store all your purchases. Of course they can predict your next purchase. Like the waitress at the little city cafe knows what you order for breakfast every Tuesday and Thursday. The other places of business do the same.

There is big money in computer hardware. Those processors might as well be made of solid gold. Hint, the ne'er-do-wells know this, too. Hence, stealing shipments.

Thursday 13 August 2026

SpaceXAI update its agents to loop and be a group of agents. This is the usual advancement in software. Have something that works. Next, loop over it.

A private company in India launches a rocket. This may not be legal. Folks are so happy and proud, no one seems to care that it isn't legal.

Some one has a firm grasp of the obvious. If it is connected to the Internet, some one will break into it. The headline: Everything hackable will get hacked

A look at River AI. The vision is my personal AI assistant that runs on my hardware and knows and learns about me and helps me do my stuff.

Elon Musk is building factory that will be the largest building on earth. Didn't he do that once before?

Quoting the headline: Make everything look like a software project. I did this some 30 years ago. Glad to see someone is catching on to me.

Meanwhile in Australia, Meta claims to remove about a million teens from its system.

TEXT

Hardware is the new software. AI system demand drove a 5x (I think that is 6,000%) growth is shipments of the solid-state disk.

Meanwhile in India, if you are going to train robots to take your job, you might as well be paid a little extra.

Lenovo reports a BIG financial quarter --- revenue up 43%.

Meanwhile in Silicon Valley, AI continues to create jobs on its edges. This time jobs for wealth managers take a jump up.

Meanwhile in China, food delivery drivers are up 10million persons. This is a sign of growing wealth among many there. Will they continue to live under the rule of the Communist Party?

Meanwhile in America, let's call it what it is. Our government is hiring mercenaries to fight cyber wars.

Cerebras reports a BIG financial quarter with revenue up 74%.

Google had a big event yesterday. Here is one summary of it.

Is this the end of journalism or merely the future of journalism? This piece is about RunTimeWire, which is one of such news organizations. Much of the writing in journalism is mechanical and easy for software to mimic. There is nothing new here. Just the collision of technology with an already-declining profession.

Once again we have law enforcement personnel misusing the technology they have at work to lurk over friends and family. This is not funny. This is not a joke. This should be prison time for those who do such.

This isn't a big study, but its results warrant more research. Quoting: taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease out of 443 occupations. ... roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer's, compared with 1 in 60 people overall.

Those rolling-around autonomous "guards" don't seem to be working and no one is buying them.

Friday 14 August 2026

Northrop Grumman, one of those old, stodgy, and slow space companies, puts satellite and repair capabilities in orbit.

Acceleration accelerates. Our COVID panic did this. Just as it finished, AI exploded and the acceleration continues.

Quoting: Palantir is a vertically integrated outcome based software solution provider. People are trying to copy the success. The success took many years of failure to find success.

If you only have time to read one piece on AI this week, read this one.

Meanwhile in Quincy, Washington, ten years later a datacenter is paying benefits to the local economy. Folks, these things work for communities. Even if they fail, there is a building with power, HVAC, and data lines.

Meanwhile in Europe, here come a couple-thousand self-driving taxis.

Hardware is the new software. Applied materials reports a BIG financial quarter.

The money continues to pour into OpenAI. The 2026 revenue will be twice that of 2025.

Still, Anthropic leads OpenAI in the use by businesses.

Quoting the headline: OpenAI launches Computer History, an opt-in feature that turns recent computer activity on macOS into memories and a timeline Privacy is an issue here. Still, I do this, that, and the other thing in order everyday, so ...

Talk to your little robot vacuum cleaner. "You missed a spot," will be the most stated comment.

Quoting the headline: Tech hardware companies report the highest US CBP tariff refunds at $2.5B across six companies, including $2.2B in refunds to Apple alone; Amazon received $640M. I don't understand how this works. Our government is paying Apple $2.2Billion (with a B). Huh?

Some law enforcement officers misuse data from Flock and other places. Flock changes some policies. Who is to assume that Flock employees are more honorable than law enforcement officers? We need someone to be honorable, honest, just, and right.

Wired reports on the best computer monitors for home or for the office where folks are expected, not allowed, to bring their own hardware.

And Wired reviews the new Dell XPS 13.

Saturday 15 August 2026

The Chinese are already manufacturing humanoid robots in VERY LARGE numbers. America is far behind and trying the recover. Without big money and bit patience, that won't happen.

The return of effective altruism. I guess it will return. What folks don't realize, it has always been here. It just wasn't put in the newspapers.

It appears there is confusion and ... well, confusion inside OpenAI as folks try to learn who is on first.

It appears that we are dividing the world in half not based on property ownership or the means of production, but on silicon and semiconductors.

Here are predictions that Anthropic's income is exploding with no end in sight. Both Anthropic and OpenAI appear to still be in the steep part of the S curve.

Nvidia owns ten$ of Billion$ of Intel and SpaceX.

OpenAI claims to have more revenue from businesses than customers.

Meanwhile at Cambridge, this is an ugly story.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the find advanced Nvidia processors in the wreckage of a Russian cruise missile. How did the Russians get the parts? Easy, they stole them. The capabilities are a leap beyond what the Russians can "legally" obtain.

The Godmother of AI (I've never heard of her) claims that AI is replacing the desire to learn among kids. The kids are learning. They, however, are learning something the adults don't want them to learn. This is not new. Many years ago, college freshman were being taught the syntax of programming languages, e.g., how to program in Pascal. That is not what they students wanted to learn. They wanted to be doing far more advanced work.

Sunday 16 August 2026

Meanwhile in Europe, they are in a drought. Of course we blame climate change. We have to blame something when something hurts, right? I mean, we can't just take it.

Don't blame the hardware: Microsoft has raised the price of Windows licenses and that contributes to the rising prices of computers.

Be careful when making predictions in this world where everything is stored and is searchable and findable.

SpaceX launches two satellite-carrying rockets only 38 minutes apart. This sets some type of record. Who cares about that? The company is large enough and has enough expertise to have a launch factory. NASA? Never mind.

This is silly. A report of how workers have software and computers do tasks instead of giving those tasks to a human co-worker. This is AI! No, it's not. We have been doing this since the first computers of the 20th century. And, by the way, I have no human co-workers to which I can delegate tasks. I, for one reason or another, have never had such. I always had to do it myself. But the computer was there. First, I delegated spelling checking to it. Next, lining up the margins. Or was it the other order? Who cares. This report is just silly.

Meanwhile in Malaysia, the economy is good and growing. Driving the growth is the semiconductor manufacturing. Ask folks there is banning datacenters in New York is a good idea. The AI or hardware or cloud or whatever boom you want to call it, it drives jobs worldwide. Consider that. You want to help the developing world?

Quoting the headline: Chinese citizens are more optimistic about AI than Americans because AI is seen as a practical tool in China that disrupts a smaller share of its population

Meanwhile in Congress, folks are using AI without checking what they are doing. A great new tool needs a little tweaking now and then.

This is a sorry tale of a father using a photo of his daughter when she was a child and turning it into porn and making money. We are a sorry lot.