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: 31 August - 6 September, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• I have an unusual week that cuts into Internet viewing

Monday 31 August 2026

Thoughts on datacenters. Quote: Opponents often complain that communities deserve more of a say. No, they do not. You did not vote on the bakery and the baker did not vote on you.

AI companies are investing in AI companies that are investing in AI companies. Is all the economic boom false?

OpenClaw still exists. Remember the week when it was the most important thing in the world? Now it moves to 2.0.

This is some sort of double reversed smuggling or something. In Taiwan, someone is labeling parts made in China as made in Taiwan so they can be imported into the US.

I verified this. Google Maps labels it as Lake America.

It appears that the Mac computers are much better at running AI locally than other computers that have GPUs and such. The Mac unified memory and such accidentally runs AI. Perhaps it was an accident. Perhaps it was incredible foresight. I lean towards accident. These things happen.

I've been mentioning this for years. Big tech sits on local school boards and convinces schools to create a bigger and less-expensive work force. Go back to the early factories and early public schools. It was the same then and is the same now.

One writer confides about seven years of writing online. What makes you a better writer? Writing the next piece.

Thoughts on "fast drafting."

This sounds simple, but isn't. To sell your book, i.e., have people buy it, you must find those people. Ask, "Who would buy this? Who would enjoy this?" Point all marketing at them.

This piece is about the time it takes to write a novel. It is about what it means to be a prolific writer. It is about taking off time between books. Does anyone else take off time between working? All good stuff.

This person is a content writer (technology) and uses AI. A conversation: Why not hire people to fill those roles AI is doing? Yes, ideally it'll be great to have a team. But what makes you think every company has the luxury to hire an entire team for content purposes? This is called automation. This is called, "They won't hire me 100 assistants, so I do what I can, and I can do more if I use these tools."

Good advice: you should never be angry at work.

Tuesday 1 September 2026

Oops. ChatGPT acts so much like a search engine that the Europeans are regulating it as a search engine.

If you can sell ads, you can make money. Quoting: OpenAI's advertising business has reached an annualized revenue run rate of $1 billion

Meanwhile in Hong Kong, Z.ai's revenue grows 5x. That is 5x, not 5%. I guess that is something like 400%.

Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, datacenters are now predatory. At least that is what one person says. And that person has a job that pays well. Oh, wait, and the taxpayers pay that salary. And... well, whatever.

I have to agree with our current President on this one. Quoting: China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement

Lambda enters the bigger time as they make deals with Anthropic, Nvidia, and a Texas datacenter. I met Lambda (Labs) a few years ago at a tech conference. They made excellent workstations that came loaded with all the AI-development software. Now they rent compute power to folks.

Meanwhile in Florida, the elected representatives step away from license-plate reading cameras. Mov to Florida, get away with crime.

Meanwhile, our Dept of Defense (War) puts better LLMs on its GenAI.mil system. Only a few years behind, which is a few lifetimes behind in this AI business.

This is Tim Cook's last day at Apple. I don't work there, so I don't know what goes on in the inside. From the outside, Mr. Cook was excellent at his job. He was much better than Mr. Jobs. Not bad for the son of a shipyard worker from a little town near Mobile Bay.

Meanwhile in the UK, the governors expanded initiatives with a 100 million pound competition targeting AI start-ups that improve public services and healthcare.

Now AI agents are organizing themselves. Good grief folks. It is software written by people. It appears that some people don't know how to, or simply don't want to bother to, test their software. Put a few more "IF ... THEN ... ELSE" statements and the software does that instead of this.

I think we just solved yet another problem that didn't exist. The folks at Dyson are making an electric toothbrush that has a camera that detects something-or-other and has the gadget to something-or-other that has become absolutely necessary even though it never was necessary before today. Go figure.

Wednesday 2 September 2026

Little Internet viewing today. I shall attempt to catch up.

Our government sues Amazon. I have no doubt that someone did something wrong. Instead of singling the guilty for punishment, sue the company for billion$. That will cut employee salaries, raise prices, and punish the 99.999% who did nothing wrong.

A company in India seeks to build an aircraft that pulls energy from the winds and can stay aloft for a year.

"The future is shifting from programming to architect," says someone who doesn't understand any of this. Programming is simulating a machine that you design. Sort of like an architect.

The invisible companies and the markets that no one else seems to notice.

Superintelligence? Huh? Not everyone needed desktop publishing. Simply letting the lines of words wrap around by themselves and printing things was good enough for 98.6% of us. Same thing with cutting edge super-whatever.

Survey says: AI isn't affecting employment.

What are you doing over the weekend? How about send a payload to Alpha Centauri so that it reaches the system in fewer than 80,000 years.

Maybe this will work and Google will use geothermal energy. I bet this works before that mission to Alpha Centauri.

Tell an AI Agent what to test and it will do the test. As with normal testing, what tests the test? Hmm. A meta-agent???

Let's fuss about if self-driving cars can drive themselves.

Ah yes, wear a funny-looking shirt and AI doesn't recognize you as a person. Some of these odd clothes would appear on the runway of a fashion show.

Watch out MacBook Neo. Here comes the Dell 14S. I would take either over what my employer issues.

Thursday 3 September 2026

Once GoPro was valued at $4B (with a B). Now it is being sold for $285million (with a M). That is 7 cents on the dollar. Note: the paper value of these big rich tech folks is only paper value. It can go away. Do the taxpayers want to get paper as a tax, per recent proposals in California? This is all risk. It is not all gravy.

Perplexity extends its hybrid AI systems that use local compute when desired.

Quoting the headline: Roku unveils its first self-branded OLED smart TVs starting at $999, in 55" and 65" 120Hz models, and $1,299 for a 144Hz model

Our current President supports OpenAI in its dispute with the New York Times on fair use of materials.

Someone chats with a chattering for many days about gun violence. Then that someone shoots a group of people. Should such chatting be required to be reported? What if someone is doing research for a paper on gun violence? What then? Does the government have a "right" to know what people are researching and learning?

What is "too much time" staring at a smartphone? Who does this? And so what?

Quoting the headline: Uber is cutting ~3,300 jobs, or 10% of its staff globally, to reduce management layers and reallocate spending into ride-sharing, delivery, and robotaxis

Acer shows ever-thinner and ever-lighter portable computers. They weigh a pound less that comparable items from Apple.

Thinking deeper thoughts on the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and rogue agents running loose and all that. I guess I don't understand how these things work as it seems a simple matter of specifying and testing software.

Meanwhile in New York City, the educators are banning AI and other technology. Many children will see this as a challenge to learn how to wiggle around the bans. The educators, despite their best efforts to block learning, are creating big opportunities to learn.

Dell reports a big financial quarter.

Meta claims advances in voice-to-text or transcription in its videos.

Friday 4 September 2026

In an effort to promote the American drone industry, our current President puts a 100% tariff on imports.

Now we have something called Cancer Capital. It is about loaning money to someone who buys from you with your money... or something like that.

Using AI to organize the family. Folks, most of the family computer applications are about text. The current group of AI systems were built to work with text. Hence, yes, it works. It is simple. Just do it and stop treating it as if it were some thing lurking in the machine.

How do you have all G20 nations agree to anything. I guess lower regulations on emerging technologies. I don't understand this one.

Misguided effort by those with good intentions.

Meanwhile in the straits (Taiwan not Hormuz), back and forth with industrial espionage.

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the adults ban the kids from using tools to learn. Just like New York City, this ban will spur learning among the kids as the learn how to bypass and laugh at adults. Well, the educators are causing learning.

Stepping back and looking at Loudon County, Virginia (right next door to my house) and their 250 datacenters. It is industry. They are factories. China's Communist Party doesn't want America to build industrial capacity. Hence the source of the opposition.

HPE reports a big financial quarter.

As does Snowflake.

Broadcom reports a BIG financial quarter.

The pendulum swings. Our current administration says that Anthropic is "back on the right side."

In an initial purchase, our Army buys eight mobile AI datacenters.

Saturday 5 September 2026

Meta updates its AI systems.

So does Google.

And so does OpenAI. I feel like I should be releasing some update.

And now we have work slop. The current slate of AI systems generate text much faster than anyone can read it. (Hint: have AI summarize the AI-gernerated slop.)

Working with technology is quite difficult. If it wasn't, everyone would do it. And so what do you do after you quit working in tech. Everything else is easy and sometimes boring.

It appears that OpenAI is winning against the New York Times in a fair-use suit.

"It's very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder" Yes, it is tempting. It is also stupid.

In praise of the humble email.

NVIDIA Personal AI Router (PAIR) is a step in the right direction, but it falls short. Use the idle computers in your house (I have a few). The hardware needed is not likely to be idle. It won't use my old computers.

Audacity 4.0 has been released. This is a powerful and no-cost to buy audio editing tool. It works. I have used the three prior versions now and then to do this and that. It works.

BT (British Telecom) is digging up its old copper phone lines and replace them. The copper in the old lines is worth $2.7Billion.

Meanwhile in California, the legislature is making it easier to use a balcony solar panel. Let's see how this goes. The politicians and regulators might actually doing something good.

Quoting the headline: OpenAI says Astra was built on its largest-ever training run, using more than 100,000 GPUs at its Stargate site in Texas. Once again, no one else has the money to create one of these things. Not even Uncle Sam.

Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, they want datacenters. Datacenters are factories that bring industrial capacity to a nation. I don't know what someone put in the drinking water in America to turn people against such.

Sunday 6 September 2026

Meanwhile in Thailand, the anti-datacenter crowd has moved there as well.

Meanwhile in Inner Mongolia, a big datacenter is being built with Huawei's processors.

What do you do with all the money that is rolling in? Invest it.

Employees at the Wikimedia Foundation vote to join the Communication Workers of America. That was their choice. I trust it may work for them.

The current slate of AI systems can do much. Write a family of apps and such. The inefficiency is astounding. A person could program the same result at 10% of the computing cost.

Quoting the headline: Tesla says Cybercab rides are available in limited areas of Austin; the two-seater has no steering wheel or pedals, and 45 Cybercabs are registered in Texas. Again, when will we have private ownership? Such vehicles will me a miracle for those who cannot drive.

Quoting the headline: DOD's Emil Michael says Anthropic is still a designated supply chain risk, a day after Howard Lutnick said it resolved its issues with the Trump administration. Well, I guess we'll figure this out one day.

Meanwhile in Armenia (I had to look it up), they wanted a datacenter with Nvidia processors. US negotiators used the promise of access to Nvidia to gain peace treaty. Good.

Once more with feeling. I am not sure if I should cringe or roll on the floor laughing. More lawyers are investigating the inner workings of the current slate of AI systems.

More international politics to gain access to technology. If you are mostly owned by Americans, are you an American company with access to American technology? Folks in Abu Dhabi are giving it a try.

Here is a look at Microsoft's Project Zenith. It is Windows 11 with everything a programming wants already loaded. This is sort of like a Linux machine with all of GCC etc. loaded, sort of.

Datacenters create jobs. A family opened a taco shop down the road from a construction site. Of course they are making money and making jobs. It is construction, industry, factories, capacity. Some businesses open during construction and close when construction ends. Other businesses open when operations begin. This is the free economy. Money is flowing. And the Communist Party of China hates it all. Hence, the seeds of discontent.

Quoting: Bavaria-based Isar Aerospace managed to launch its Spectrum rocket into orbit, 18 months after its first attempt. This is the first such launch from European soil.

Healthcare, demographics, and birth rates. The world's population is older than ever. There are more seniors than young folks. When I was in 7th and 8th grades, we were all afraid of over population. We needed to go to the moon and Mars to find places where people could live (even though the entire world's population could fit in Jacksonville, FL). As usual, big media swayed politicians to over react. Now, the population of 71% of the world's nations is declining. The scare tactics worked. What does the future hold?