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: 7-13 September, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• 25th year after 9-11
• China builds more industrial capacity
• America backs away from more industrial capacity
• Apple has a big event with an iPhone with a folding screen

Monday 7 September 2026

Meanwhile in China, 12.7million new college graduates (a record in the history of anyplace on earth), a sluggish economy, 18% unemployment, high expectations, etc. collide. The Communist Party of China won't like the results. And when they don't like something, they stomp on it. Is there any hope of a revolt against single-party rule?

OpenAI's systems have another "incident." Quoting further: Disclosures of rogue AI activity need to be mandatory. Good grief. Test your systems. Specify your systems. Practice sound engineering. Has anyone heard of engineering? Or are these folks just playing around as if they were still in graduate school?

We know how tools that build tools. One risk is these things are connected to the Internet so these new tools can run amok. Oh well.

How to smuggle for fun and profit. Pirates, smugglers, buried treasure, adventures on the high seas. It all continues.

Quoting the headline: Tim Cook's pay package indicates he will remain very active at Apple Good for him.

anthropomorphism: treating a machine like it was a human. Journalists do this all the time when describing software (AI usually). Well, I don't blame journalists much as they are merely ignorant. The same with lawyers. People who know how to multiply to matrices do not have that excuse. Let's stop being silly. Software does what people program it to do.

For three decades, the folks in Texas have attracted business (many run out of California). The anti-datacenter push is slowing that.

For a decade, people in Nairobi wrote college essays for rich and lazy American kids funded by rich parents. It was a lot of cherished money flowing into Kenya. AI replaced that.

Journalists sue technologists. The journalists will probably win as they are cozier with lawyers.

So far, AI has created more jobs than eliminated.

Tuesday 8 September 2026

Not much Internet viewing as my schedule continues to be interrupted.

The folks at OpenAI describe their views on artificial general intelligence and the like. They want everyone to be open about how close they are coming to such.

Let' s let the software write the software. There has been progress in this effort. Those who didn't learn to program and were not suited to it have long wanted to do away with those pesky programmers (those folks who didn't know how to dress and acted nerdy). Still, it takes a programmer to have the current slate of AI to write useful programs.

It appears that Apple is yet to learn how to build its foldable phone.

I don't understand this piece. But there is a Linux distribution called Omarchy and this guy who loves it and how it interacts with AI agents.

I like this term: de-brainrotting. Many years ago, when I still wrote software, several programmers would work the crossword puzzle at lunch instead of talking about programming problems. It was a similar exercise.

This piece advocates programming with highly-cohesize and loosely-coupled modules. That is a good concept. It is quite old. Generations tend to forget and rediscover this.

Wednesday 9 September 2026

No Internet viewing today.

Thursday 10 September 2026

Quoting: A Republican-led Senate subcommittee that oversees disaster management is investigating OpenAI's handling of the Hugging Face breach in July. Whew. We are safe now (not). I was worried there for a while, but now that a Senate subcommittee is on the case, wow! (not)

I didn't know that folks were expecting 10%+ growth in the economy due to AI. Perhaps I should pay closer attention to these things.

Now we have something called the "loss-of-control risk" with AI. Sigh. It appears that people are writing viruses and other malware and calling such "AI."

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the Governor signs an executive order effectively banning datacenters. I guess they have enough industry there already. Good for them.

Friday 11 September 2026

This is the 25th year after 9-11. No comment.

Meta releases software that is supposed to be a useful digital assistant.

OpenAI soves a new math problem in 88 hours. Okay, that's four days this week. Solving math problems at that rate means they sove 90 a year and we move on to something. Surely some of these problems help people, right?

These young programmers these days. Back to the day when you didn't have a hundred computers available.

Here is one summary of Apple's 9 September big event.

Quoting the headline: Google Cloud and Accenture form the Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group to train up to 1,000 Accenture forward deployed engineers

Qualcomm and Amazon partner. Qualcomm knows how to design and build hardware. Amazon has the big business to take advantage of it.

I suppose one day I will have a phone with a folding screen. I don't know about paying $2,000 for a phone. We shall see.

Meanwhile in Europe, Google go along with the regulators and admits this is a big drop in the quality of service to customers. That's what regulators usually accomplish: poor service to people.

Meanwhile in China, they continue to build datacenters as fast as they can. Datacenters are factories and industrial capacity.

Meanwhile in Argentina, climate, land, and energy are attracting big tech.

LG's smart TVs are sensors collecting data on the family in the living room. I wrote a short story about this over ten years ago.

Meanwhile in Finland, a cold place where people welcome heat generated by datacenters, Google plans tens of billion$ of datacenters.

Meanwhile in America, we now hate datacenters. Tax breaks for business is a local issue and has caused arguments for a hundred years. There seems to be no settlement of that argument in sight. If you fear that big tech will go to your neighbor and you feel you need the jobs, you pay. Otherwise, you watch the jobs go to your neighbor. Same question as always.

We rediscover that garbage in produces garbage out. Use better data, not more compute power.

Quoting the headline: The NSA, CISA, and FBI issue a joint advisory warning that Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, are conducting industrial-scale distillation campaigns Real news that is not news.

OpenAI and Samsung are working together on the things they work on.

Saturday 12 September 2026

Fear and loathing at Automattic.

Record with permission of the other people involved. I don't understand how adults don't understand this.

For the first time in a long time in computing, we are now paying more for the same thing. For decades, we paid less for more.

Coming Monday, all the version 27 operating systems from Apple. I am looking forward to macOS 27 with its improved foundation model AI capability.

The folding screen from Apple appears to work. Folding screens are a technial marvel. Do we need that marvel?

About the make a major motion picture? Buy the iPhone 18 Pro.

For folks like me, all these new phone gadgets are not nearly as important as the new A20 processor. This processor will be in portable and desktop computers in two years.

Meanwhile in Florida, the Attorney General sues Netflix. This is for the money, uh, er, I mean this is for the children.

Quoting the headline: The American Federation of Teachers and Microsoft agree on AI privacy standards for schools, with legal protections that hold Microsoft liable for breaches

Anthropic claims to have saved the rest of us by foiling the plots of evil scientists.

More from the heroes at Anthropic.

Adobe claims a billion (with a b) monthly active users of its systems.

I don't like this story. If you succeed in technology, you must then have an army of lawyers and lobbyists. I don't like this.

Meanwhile in California, the lawmakers restrict addictive features of social media. Do they specify which features are addictive and which are not? Inquiring minds want to know.

Sunday 13 September 2026

It appears that our current President is pushing to put datacenters on Federal lands. Industrial capacity for the next 20 years.

Meanwhile in England and Wales, the ne'er-do-wells have adopted the newer technologies to do what they do.

Mr. Altman says that OpenAI will NOT go public this year.

The folks with the hardware are shifting from crypto mining to AI computing.

The tech celebrity CEOs seem to be agreeing on slowing AI research. Those who have made it want to put controls in place to hinder those who want to enter the market. Nothing new here.

Oh the headaches that come with quick wealth. It must be tough waking up one morning to learn that you, your children, and grandchildren will never have to toil. Go back 30 years and talk to those who suddenly became wealthy at AOL.

Meanwhile in the US Senate, regulators gotta' regulate. This time it is AI. Last time it was something else. Next time it will be something else. Same thing, gotta' regulate. What else do they have to do?

OpenAI continues to offer big discounts to US government agencies. Good for the taxpayers in the short term. It kills smaller competitors, and that is bad in the long term.

It is election season in America. MIT will track how these chattering bots chat about politics. I guess there is some benefit in this.

A US court rules against a successful Chinese company and tells it to pay a big fine. Real news that isn't news.