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: 17-23 August, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• And everything in the tech news is AI, is anything else happening?
• Hardware continues to be the new software
• Conflict US-Iran continues, why?

Monday 17 August 2026

And now we are calculating the CO2 of datacenters.

It appears that the big tech companies are moving money around and not quite telling the truth.

AI is moving into Hollywood in a big way now. No more just on the fringes. Lower costs! More profits! New tools usually bring such.

Big iron shifts to power the AI boom.

Deep thoughts on how Anthropic is marking text it generates. It is a secret algorithm that varies the probabilities of tokens and such. If things appear outside of normal probability distributions too often, that is the watermark. Odd. Not good.

This piece goes into the techniques in more depth. Fascinating to those of us who are fascinated by such.

And mark this site as a deeper still examination of what is happening.

And here we go. AI companies are creating fake people who real people love like real people. Hmm, Charlie Brown wasn't a real person. Charles Schultz created a fake little boy. Everyone loved that fake little boy. Is there something different here?

Strong rumors about the coming Apple portable computer that will have a touchscreen.

Using WiFi RF as a type of radar and lidar to create realistic images of people.

Linux Kernel 7.2 has just been officially released.

Quoting on AI-written material: There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text --- every rewrite and rephrase changes the meaning of your writing, and if this is done by an entity that doesn't have the most detailed mental representation of what you personally were trying to communicate, information will be lost.

Excellent thoughts on the cover of independently published works. Keep the cover mostly the same. A Author's name is the top third always in the same font and size. People will recognize them faster and easier.

Here is another "common sense" method of detecting AI wrote this or that. This method depends on talking with the writer and asking them about how they wrote something. Vague answers point towards AI. Another explanation of vague answers is fatigue and boredom. Sometimes I just don't feel up to discussing something I wrote five projects ago.

Quoting the title: Kurt Vonnegut's 7 Rules to Write So Well People Can't Stop Reading. I enjoyed reading this.

A warning about using AI to draw the cover of your book that you wrote without AI.

Human writing and AI writing. Let's continue to argue. As someone who HAS written a bookshelf full of books, I can do that again. I can also prompt with great cleverness to generate more text that, frankly, isn't interesting anyways but it brings a paycheck.

I like this post by Seth Godin. I guess I like to make reminders so I don't have to remember. I especially like the idea of the photograph to find things.

Tuesday 18 August 2026

The folks at Anthropic are a bit leery of the power of the systems they are building. In systems engineering terms, they aren't doing systems engineering. They don't know how to test systems or even what systems they are testing.

Quoting: The world's largest, fully battery-powered jet officially completed its maiden flight. The trouble with these things is that they need batteries, which are heavy.

Tell the AI system, "Keep going. You can do it. Be like the little engine who thought he could." Well, maybe not the last one, but the first ones were real."

Tell the chattering bot to write software and how many errors to have in it. There are some actual uses for such.

I love this quote regarding chattering bots that write software: I can now build three wrong things before lunch.

Google starts a program that will somehow reduce the condensation trails over the North Atlantic. I suppose there are places in a given day that have less condensation and would have fewer condensation trails, so you fly through that.

Sigh, it must be tough being in Congress these days. The ignorant misuse new tools to draft legal documents that are ... well, sort of really crummy.

Google to move its phone manufacturing out of China next year. The Party is not a reliable business partner. I would guess that one day the subjects there would toss out the Party in some sort of peaceful or not-quite-peaceful revolution. The Heavenly Mandate does change every hundred years or so.

The billion$ are flying in Ohio over, what else(?), a datacenter. Folks, if companies spend billion$ on these facilitie$ and local county board members are paid $100/month ... uh, do figure. The imbalance is too great.

This is an actual case of investigative journalism. Applause for someone doing their job. They found an Amazon facility where books are scanned to train AI. These are books that never made it to digital and never made it to the Internet. The scanning process, unfortunately, rips the books apart so that the pages are usable for the scanner.

Meanwhile in Kentucky, a rural community fumes over a datacenter deal that may not happen. If you don't want to sell your 500 acres for $26million, don't. 'Nough said. But, but, but, what about everyone else in the community who would benefit? Move somewhere else or do something else. No one ever passed a law that says your neighbors have to do what you want them to do.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, we have more reports about the brilliance of the Ukrainian forces and the stupidity of the Russian forces. Despite all this, last I checked, the Russian forces are still in Ukraine. I don't know what all there is to know about this. I don't understand how the superior Ukrainian strategy and tactics and equipment from the west brings no results.

Meanwhile in California, a Federal trial begins in which states have sued Meta for $1.4Trillion (with a Tr). Well, it's a money grab European style.

Meanwhile in Europe, in the middle of a hot summer we have claims that solar power and batteries are saving the day.

Per a study at Stanford, the MIT headline reads: We still don't know how people are really using AI. The AI companies tell us how their clients use their systems. There appears to be a lack of independent confirmation of those claims.

Wednesday 19 August 2026

And here comes the CyberCab from Tesla. How did we ever live without it? Private ownership of these things is needed by those who cannot drive themselves.

When your business goes bust, you can always sell your data to Google et al.

Let's have robots build steel part for big iron (for datacenters).

Quoting the title: Waymo vs Tesla: Two Ways to Build Self-Driving Cars

Demand outstrips supply leading to a rise in the price of semiconductors.

Datacenter builders focus on better marketing. It is money they didn't have to spend in the past before big media started criticizing them. Oh, yes, this marketing means giving money to big media to run commercials. Funny how that works. Big media says, "We will cause people to hate you until you pay us to stop doing that."

Everyone wants to have a moat around them to protect them. I'd like one... Anyways, Nvidia is building an AI capital moat. I guess that makes some sense to finance folks.

There appears to be much excitement about a desktop app called Berd from a company called Block. I have read two articles and don't understand half the words because they name products not designs. For example, "it's built on Tauri 2 and React 19." Huh? Stupid me. It sounds like a big step in the right direction of running these probability models on a local computer to accomplish work.

There is an old joke about how to make money when every transaction is a loss. The answer: VOLUME. OpenAI and Anthropic are following this with growing volume and growing losses. Amazon lost money for a long time before it became profitable and made Mr. Bezos wealthy. Perhaps these two companies will one day ...

Meanwhile at ICE, employees are barred from wearing smart glasses that have cameras.

Meanwhile in Federal court, attorneys claim that the folks at Facebook are the smartest marketers in the history of the world. The folks at Facebook decline the compliment. That is a compliment, right? Maybe?

This is a story about Meta, Apple, nudify apps, pornographic ads, and some other stuff. I don't know what to think about such stories. Really?

I like this. There is a Dutch company called Fairphone that builds smartphones that can be repaired. They have brought the their best phone to America at only $650.

OpenAI now has ChatGPT for Teens. Do they have a ChatGPT for Old Folks or Retired Folks or Senior Citizens or Folks Who Just Don't Care.

The Dell XPS 13 vs. MacBook Neo. Both now at about $700. Both high quality computers.

TE Wired praises the design of the $25,000 Slate electric pickup truck. This vehicle will be available real soon now.

Thursday 20 August 2026

Quoting the headline: China's Private Rocket Maker Just Landed a Booster Like SpaceX's Falcon-9 This is a huge day for the Chinese. Some of the folks their are bursting with pride.

Folks are settling on the idea of fewer better data. Quality beats quantity. The tortoise beats the hare (not sure about this last one).

That SpaceX Starship that fell into the Indian Ocean some three weeks ago, is back on dry land. The engineers are crawling all over it to learn what they can.

Meanwhile in Virginia, next-door Loudon County has over 250 datacenters that all pump dollar$ into the economy and pay taxes. Big media feels this is evil, so the populace is turning against the job$ and $uch. Go figure.

Backstory is an experimental tool from Google's AI research lab, Google DeepMind. The tool helps determine if an image is real or fake. Good work.

Meanwhile in the UK, we have yet another example of well-intentioned government regulators accomplishing the opposite of what they want.

Our Army is moving "back to basics." Part of that is no more drone assault unit or something.

As school is starting, Google offers free AI stuff and online tools just for students.

Meta launches a Mac app for Meta AI.

Friday 21 August 2026

YouTube approaches million-seller video makers with exclusive contracts. You make video for YouTube and no one else.

Quoting: Moderna and Merck announced on Wednesday that their novel mRNA-based vaccine individually tailored to target a patient's unique cancer mutations was effective in a late stage clinical trial of patients with melanoma

Apple accidentally leaks ten new products. I doubt the "accidentally" part as the folks at Apple are pretty sharp.

What day of the week is it? A simple problem. Apply systems engineering and find a way for computers to to this 3x faster.

What is a datacenter? This is a pretty good description.

Micron makes memory chips in Boise, Idaho. A big bunch of Micron employees became worth millions overnight. Uh, the neighbors are a bit jealous and would like the rich to pay for the community bar-be-que and such. Jolts to the system upset the system.

And sudden wealth in crypto, AI, and online betting is jolting thefinance of political campaigns.

Viva Las Vegas. Here come the robotaxis.

Meanwhile in China, here come robots to flag traffic and give tickets in the city of Hangzhou.

Not all is up in technology as US video game hardware spending fell 29% YoY in July.

Meta is buy hundred$ of million$ each year to rent Microsoft computing. Microsoft Azure smiles all the way to the bank.

In a couple of days, China launches to the moon --- unmanned, but impressive.

Meanwhile in Finland, a new study shows children who accumulated more screen time as they grew up tended to show BETTER cognitive processing during adolescence.

Saturday 22 August 2026

As if the world doesn't have enough vibe coders already, (quoting) Slack launches Slack Code, where teams and AI agents build together

Mr. Musk says SpaceX will b able to catch the Starship on descent real soon now.

Quote: Every one of the 170 Tesla robotaxi rides logged in Austin over two weeks ran with no safety monitor on board. Great work. The real test and the real benefit is when these vehicles are privately owned by people who cannot drive themselves. That is what we should be doing with all this "AI stuff," serving people who would otherwise be stuck.

In defense of the junior engineer. They still add value, much value.

Meanwhile in China, we observe that a couple of people working diligently for several decades have accomplished much. Now, if they can just keep away from the Communist Party of China.

Some thought went into this piece on "the end of open source." I agree that the potential for the ne'er-do-wells to make a mess exists. I don't agree that it will happen, much, soon.

Waymo designs its own processor for self-driving cars.

And now we have the subtle fakes (instead of deep fakes). There is no end to what the ne'er-do-wells will do.

And some good guys respond at GetRealSecurity dot com.

Deeper and highly critical thoughts on how Antrhopic is watermarking text.

The natural language processing AI systems continue to advance. Note, the open-source systems lag behind, but the lag is decreasing with every month.

Big win for big media as Americans now hate datacenters and jobs. The politicians, always bending to the slightest change in the breeze, change as well.

Apple cuts its computer vision staff. The main loser is the Vision Pro. There are other areas, however, that lose as well.

Our Dept of Energy investigates if Chinese lidar sensors are a national security threat. Dept of Energy? Who? Why them?

Meanwhile in Ireland and other places, Apple pays $43billion (with a B) in corporate income tax in 2025. Yes, companies pay taxes. Some will say, not enough.

Meanwhile in China, a place in Inner Mongolia has become the center of the AI boom. It has all the stuff datacenters like.

Sunday 23 August 2026

Meanwhile in South Korea, forget coding boot camps. Everyone wants to attend a semiconductor school so they can get those big bonuses. Again, hardware is the new software.

Quoting: Nvidia plans to use its $6B deal with Poolside to build an open-weight AI model.

Not content with just hacking US water and sewage facilities, Iranians hack a power plant in the UK and turn it off for four days. Don't connect it to the Internet! How complicated is it to understand that?

Quoting: Inherent, a London AI lab founded by Google DeepMind alumni, says its AI agent just outperformed much larger models from Anthropic and OpenAI using a fraction of the size. I am encouraged by this. The UK was long thought to be hopelessly behind in AI research. No longer true.

Micron to pour $10billion (with a B) into a research lab in Boise.

I have to give a big No DUH to this one. Those who use artificial intelligence intelligently do better. Substitute just about anything for artificial intelligence in the prior sentence. No duh.

Meanwhile in China like Europe, there is a small movement from MS Windows to Linux.

Someone claims that New York City has more tech talent than San Francisco.

Quoting the headline: Rush Rescue Mission for NASA's $500M Space Telescope Fails

Lithium batteries are everywhere. And they light themselves afire under common conditions.