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: 24-30 August, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Dolly Parton dies at 80. She did much good for her community.
• Apple shows the M6 processor
• Perplexity and Nvidia show a much-improved local AI system
• Meta settles out of court and pays $18B (with a B) [lawyers get a third]
• Nvidia buys Hugging Face for about $13Billion (with a B)
• We are going to have a U.S. Space Academy

Monday 24 August 2026

An unusual day with much less Internet viewing, but a few things.

Nvidia raises the prices to access its AI systems.

Meanwhile in China, the robot Olympics sees running robots break human records in several track and field events. This is a stunt. Put explosives on one of these things, let it loose. Forget open warfare as this is the perfect assassination machine.

Amazon's robotaxis are now on the streets. Again, private ownership for those who cannot drive themselves. Amazon et al can gain much in the public eye by donating these vehicles to those who need them. Don't call it an AI datacenter. Call it the compute center than runs transportation for the needy. Boom.

AI greatly reduces the expense of optimizing software for speed.

Finding problems that are worthwhile to solve.

How one consultant and writer uses AI in 2026. I find the use to be pretty sophisticated. This person is also writing more by hand instead of AI. I am doing the same with writing.

A different way of thinking about the new idea. Quoting: If you try to only write about ideas that are truly brand-new, you will restrict yourself to writing about ideas that weren't important enough to be considered before: in other words, trivia and ephemera.

I like this from Mr. Godin. Assume misunderstanding. Give the benefit of the doubt. I learned years ago that, "To write is to be misunderstood."

Some history of the mystery store and novel.

Some thoughts on the "hero" in fiction.

More good advice from Seth Godin. Quote: The system would like us to be insatiable on its behalf, but that's not an invitation we're required to accept.

Tuesday 25 August 2026

Now this is a waste of time: preparing 20-year-olds to be Chief AI Officers when they are 40 something. By then, no one will remember how to spell AI.

And just as big media has turned Americans against datacenters, the economists proclaim how much better America is than Europe. The datacenters are like the factories of the 1940s that won WWII. The datacenters will prevent WWIII.

Our current President speaks in favor of datacenters. Folks, these are the engines that are driving industry today. Don't want industry? Don't want jobs? Don't want someone to pay taxes for you? Okay.

Real news that isn't news. Since the 1970s, tech companies have put their foot into America's schools to develop a market for their products.

The supposed value of BitCoin is back up.

Strong rumors that Apple is about to upgrade the Mac mini with better processors. Remember that Claude bot thing that everyone ran on a Mac mini? I think it is now called OpenClaw or something. I just looked at the Apple store. I would have to wait four weeks if I ordered a Mac mini today.

Speaking of ... Meta will have its own version of OpenClaw.

I read stories like this and I don't know if I should cringe in fear or roll on the floor laughing. A group of lawyers are going to investigate the detailed workings of software systems.

This story is silly as it states the idea that the US military does not already have access to Ukrainian battle data.

There is so much jargon in this headline that I am not sure what to make of it. Anyways, Nvidia has a rack of equipment they would love to sell that performs quite well. This is super-duper-computer type of stuff.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, we see arrests of those who are smuggling Nvidia processors to China.

More news on smuggled Nvidia processors. The Russians are getting enough of them to put in one-use weapons aimed at Ukraine.

Strong rumors that Apple will have an M6 processor in the good old iMac by Christmas.

A good argument against "easier is better" in applying for jobs.

Wednesday 26 August 2026

Dolly Parton dies at 80. She did much good for her community.

Bill Gates writes an essay on AI. It seems if you are a celebrity tech person you have to write 5,000 words or more on AI.

And Mr. Gates, in hindsight that is questionable, says his time with Jeffrey Epstein was a mistake. Let's not understate that. He was just trying to raise money for good causes.

Big finance struggles with datacenter construction.

Meanwhile in America, a quarter of us use AI for what ails us. Five years ago, this question didn't exist.

Meanwhile in China, the population is shrinking. The idea of China running short of people was silly for almost all my life. The party turns to robot makers to solve the labor shortage. Chinese factories fund the Communist Party. The Party must keep the factories producing or the Heavenly Mandate will change.

Meanwhile in India, they are ordering the parts to build more datacenters. The datacenter is the factory of this century. Those factories power industry that are important to national economies. Of course factories take land, power, water, etc. They always have.

AWS plans to turn off Mechanical Turk. It provided a few jobs and money to some.

Quoting the headline: UK filing: in FY 2025, OnlyFans paid out $6.3B to creators, net revenue rose 10% YoY to $1.55B, and creator accounts hit 5M; 5,076 creators made $1M+ since 2016. These things are stunts to the great majority of people. Still, for some, it is a job that pays to support families, and I think that is a good thing.

Nvidia shows the Jetson Orin Nano 2 (they have to work on the names of these things). This will be available early next year. No prices yet, but predicted to be around $300. This are little super computers that people can use to build things. Great stuff.

Perplexity and Nvidia bring a system they call "Portable Computer." This is a big step to a single piece of software that runs all the current AI systems on a local computer. No Internet connection, no meter running, no fees. A Linux machine to run this costs $4,000 and up. This is basic business economics. If the machine enables the person to produce, buy it.

OpenAI claims big compute power and less electric power for its own processor over Nvidia processors.

Apple shows the M6 processor.

Apple updates the Mac Studio with better processors. Rumor was that Apple would drop that computer from its lineup.

Thursday 27 August 2026

Apple's updates to the Mac Mini and Mac Studio are aimed at running AI locally.

SpaceX to spend $100billion (with a B) to build Starbase Louisiana.

Something good may come of this concept for a Knowledge Compressor. Reduce the tokens in text while maintaining all the knowledge or meaning.

Engineering Theater, quoting: All these things look like engineering and are probably found in plenty of teaching material for engineers. What makes them theatre is the fact they're being dished out to tick a box. I seen plenty of this over the years. Clever label.

Perhaps everyone losing their job to AI was a bit of hyperbole.

Those Russians speed cameras were phoning home all along. Everything from China? No doubt the same.

Per research, a third of all web pages are now written by AI. This site is written by me. Don't blame this stuff on AI. And then, we have the loopback of AI learning on what AI wrote and you have inbreeding of sort.

More on how Amazon is scanning books for data to train AI. The process rips books apart with the side product being mountains of loose paper. This is all in a warehouse in Las Vegas and is next door to where Amazon prints eBooks.

Meta agrees to settle lawsuits on child addiction by paying $18Billion (with a B). The lawyers get a third. Do the math.

Raspberry Pi writes an official guide to building a cyberdeck. This is all new to me. It looks like something every high school senior should do. Well, not every high school senior, but that's the basic idea. Build things.

That ambitious Chinese mission to the moon? Maybe next year.

I have lost track of the iPhones. They are up to model 17. I think I use a model 6 or something back in the single digits.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, they give Elon Musk a medal for allowing them to use Starlink to battle the Russians. And once again, I note how the Ukrainians are doing all this gee whiz advanced stuff but fail to push the Russians back to Russia.

In the anti-datacenter movement, public polling says ... If public polling, were right, Hillary Clinton would have served two terms as President and Joe Biden would be on his second term.

Friday 28 August 2026

Quoting the headline: Nvidia Agrees to Buy Open Source AI Platform Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion Commentary: WOW!

Maybe this will work as there is some promising results for a treatment of pancreatic cancer.

Now that LLMs work, let's make them more efficient.

I'll just quote the headline: Salesforce just put its entire CRM inside Claude - and says you'll never need its app again. Commentary: WOW! Really folks, I have come to feeding Word documents into a chattering bot and telling it to reformat it thus and such. Why use the app to do the same?

Some folks at Cornell built an app that identifies what type of bird you see. 42million downloads since 2014. That's pretty darn good.

I am not sure what this means, but Anthropic built a browser into Claude Cowork.

Someone figures out that its a bad idea to install Chinese-made equipment in the national power grid.

HP reports a pretty good financial quarter.

Nvidia, on the other hand, reports a BOOMING financial quarter with revenue up 106%.

Judge blocks Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic. I thought that story went away a long time ago.

Folks at Uber ate up their 12-month AI budget in 3 months. Well, you have to adjust the budget or let everyone just twiddle their thumbs the rest of the year.

Google updates Gemini Notebook. Now, if you buy a book from Google's store, you can import it into Notebook and ask questions about it.

Get your kids, or the kid in some adult you know, a $400 micro Duck robot from Hugging Face.

More information on the $25,000 Slate electric vehicle. The 200-mile range means I could use this seven days a week. My wife could use this as well. Long trips mean switching to the gas-powered vehicle. If the US regulators would get an actual brain, they would allow many other types of smaller and less-expensive vehicles on the road.

Saturday 29 August 2026

Nvidia, circular finance, the AI boom, and predictions of bad times to come.

Once again I read that the small models have arrived. It is sort of like reading that desktop Linux has arrived and Windows and MacOS are doomed. Perhaps one day, but probably not.

Then: we wanted kids to go into the trades because we needed electricians, plumbers, et al. to build and build. Now: we hate datacenters and all our young people in the trades have no work. I think "then" was two weeks ago. What a bunch of looney tunes representing us in government office.

Meanwhile in Indiana, SK Hynix (a South Korean company) breaks ground on a $4Billion factory. Datacenters are factories, too. Seems some factories are okay while others are evil. Go figure.

Meanwhile in Texas, the contempt for Flock cameras increases. Just another tool for law enforcement. If we hire people to work in public law enforcement and those people are ne'er-do-wells, we have a bigger problem than some cameras.

This piece argues that AI growth and money is different from prior tech, e.g., the Internet. AI grows in two ways: (1) number of people using it (still growing) and (2) the amount that users use. The AI companies figured out how to charge per usage instead of a flat rate. MS Word is a flat rate. It costs the same regardless of how much I use it. Claude et al. costs more the more I use it. Bottom line? Money, money, and more money.

Some folks in our Federal government don't want some foreign powers to access our best technology. Those foreign powers easily work around the rules. So what do you do? Make more rules. They seem unable to make meta rules.

Meanwhile in Beijing, folks gather at the AGI Bar to unwind, share ideas, and share more ideas.

Meanwhile in America, our FBI reports "the largest year-to-year decline in violent crime rates since FBI estimations began in 1936." By the way, gun purchases and gun ownership are up, up, and up in the last ten years. Accidental co-occurrence? This is a complex situation and saying one thing causes another thing is problematic. It is, however, an interesting note of two facts.

From Seth Godin, each one of us is " a philanthropist, doling out attention and cash to the behaviors you care about. Invest wisely."

I had not considered this angle, but it appears there is something here. The current rage against datacenters, i.e., building industrial capacity, may be spurred by influencers working from the Communist Party of China.

To go along with the military academies for the Army, Navy, and Air Force, we are now creating a U.S. Space Academy. Details forthcoming.

I like this report on AI writing the Internet. Excellent data, graphs, and explanations. There is some indication that training AI on the Internet actually caused better writing not "slop" as is often stated. That is why some human writers are being sloppy on purpose so as not to be labeled as AI. I recommend reading this piece.

Sunday 30 August 2026

For some reason I find this humorous. I guess I like it when someone tricks experts. Quoting research that: identified a number of names that co-authored hundreds of AI-generated academic papers, articles, and books. The authors don't actually exist, but are instead names that large language models repeatedly produce when tasked with generating experts in certain fields.

To improve officer safety, or some other excuse, ICE is buying $1million worth of robot dogs from Boston Dynamics.

Meanwhile in India, tales of datacenter displacing people and returning nothing.

Quoting: governments feel compelled to pursue a digital transformation by outsourcing key control technologies to cloud hegemons. Resulting dependencies complicate efforts to regulate them, as governments rely on cloud hegemons for the very technologies that underpin economic governance.

Linear algebra. I took that course in college in my senior year. I didn't learn much as somewhere I had learned how to multiply vectors and all that. And I went to a little rural high school in Louisiana.

Watch out for robots from China. They will phone home. And they are built on Nvidia hardware and software which will also phone home. Uh, wait a minute. We are going around in circles or something.

Meanwhile in California, it appears that Linux systems will be exempt from age-verification laws. Android and MacOS, both of which came from Linux, are not exempt. Go figure. It is obvious that rich tech folk are the targets, not the technology.

Another victory for big media as Americans now hate cameras used by law enforcement to catch car thieves.

Cars are bursting into flames. There are many causes caused by electronics that stay on all the time. The EVs, however, are worse as fire fighters rarely have what is needed to extinguish the large battery fires.

New from Google, Dreambeans. Quoting a headline: Google's Dreambeans, its weirdest-named AI tool to date, will turn your life into a cartoon.