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: 14-20 September, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Everyone wants pacing AI
• Well, not everyone
• Links to Mr. Amodei's essay
• Link to Microsoft's Humanist AI Code of Conduct
• Corey Doctorow explains the silliness behind the OpenAI-Hugging Face stuff

Monday 14 September 2026

Everyone wants to talk about "pacing AI." What happened? Everyone wants to halt datacenters. What happened?

It's called negotiation. Some businesses make huge profit margins until some consumers learn about the margins and how to negotiate. No news here.

The pacing of AI development and big finance.

Big plans at our NSA. Let's see.

Big tech continues to toss billion$ back and forth. The datacenter is the factory and bring industrial capacity. The AI-focused datacenter brings increased productivity to businesses across the greater economy.

Here is an opposing view on datacenters as some see them as pollution centers endangering the health of Americans. Then use some sense and cleanup the act. We learned to live with auto factories.

Anthropic claims profits two quarters in a row.

Those who have already made it in big tech AI want standards that will help keep upstarts from starting up.

The ruler of China wants a BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) for AI.

To no surprise, our current President is pushing for more push and less pace on AI. He is a businessman. He wants business.

Ah, Flock cameras, reporter's cameras, and so on. If a person, regardless if he works for Flock, feels endangered by someone following him, he can call the police. Enough said. If you se up a camera in public to film something in public fine. You don't, however, follow a person when they drive away.

Meanwhile in California, Uber and Lyft drivers pretty much cancel their jobs. The self-driving vehicles are waiting to take their place.

Forget the prompt, "Write me an essay." There are large and complex documents that give teams of people fits and headaches. There are some new AI-based systems that help much. And then there is the question, "Why are we attempting to write such large and complex documents? If we can't write them, who can read them.

If you are serious and trying to make a living at writing, "Keep Track and Back Up Your Writing"

Tuesday 15 September 2026

A long piece about AI as normal technology (AINT). I generally agree as I don't see any magic in the current slate of AI systems.

Here is Mr. Amodei's essay on pacing AI.

Mr. Altman meets with Mr. Trump.

OpenAI buys a camera technology company for a mere $300million (with only an m). Hint, hint, what does this portend?

More OpenAI news: they have hired people to look at the prompts and answers other people are sending and receiving. This is a way to improve the performance for everyone.

Nvidia releases a variant of a graphics card tailored for AI operations. They pack in 84GB of memory. That is 2.6x bigger than before. The processor will probably be priced somewhere around $10,000. Pretty steep for home use, but it can make sense for some businesses.

The 27 versions of all of Apple's operating systems are here.

Quoting the headline: Trump slams Dario Amodei, saying (I omit the quote marks as that messes up my editor, sorry) the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades! I tend to agree with Mr. Trump on this one as the basic engineering mistakes being made by some of the AI companies are astounding.

Microsoft publishes a Humanist AI Code of Conduct. Per a quick review, I go along with Microsoft's document. The software is a tool for people to use when they wish and not when they don't. Duh (or is it No Duh)?

We continue the angst about license-plate-reading technology.

Wednesday 16 September 2026

Meanwhile in Europe, climate change and AI. Pixie dust and fairies. Same stuff. A funded re$earcher convince a lawyer to fund more re$earch.

We don't want cash, we want real money. Or something like that.

SK Hynix, a company based in South Korea, may make memory components in America.

This story must be important as I have been seeing on the Internet for a week. Someone at Google has mapped the brain of a fruit fly in its entirety.

Quoting the headline: Cybersecurity experts claim that AI leaders' apocalyptic hacking predictions are technically incoherent and reflect an unfamiliarity with the subject. I tend to agree.

Guess what? All this mainstream media hyperbole about datacenter construction being halted is, well, it's just bologna.

Smart glasses without a camera coming from Meta. A picture is worth a thousand well-chosen words. Most folks, however, don't have well-chosen words. They will talk all day and not describe anything in enough detail for a smart system to be smart.

Ah, lawyers telling scientists what to do in science. Isn't it grand? It's sort of like lawyers telling medical doctors what to ... uh, er, uh, never mind.

This is news to me. There is something called the Future of Life Institute. They recently held a Pro Human Assembly. All good stuff. Right?

Jensen Huang chimes in with logic. Sorry Mr. Huang, the emotional types have won this one.

Meanwhile in the Middle East, the Iranians et al. are blowing up datacenters and driving out technology industry. I guess if your money is all oil, you don't want neighbors to have a different source of income. Perhaps that is the real topic of this US-Iran fight.

Meanwhile in China, the rulers don't want their subjects to travel to other countries. This story mistakenly calls the people "citizens" instead of "subjects."

Thursday 17 September 2026

Cory Doctorow on the OpenAI-Hugging Face thing. He understands the situation. The folks at OpenAI may not understand the situation. That is too bad given all the compute resources they have and their high salaries.

A lesser-known use of pattern analysis and machine intelligence (some folks lump that into today's AI) is useful for facial analysis. Much of that is cosmetic, much of that is life saving.

Government experts are proposing nuclear-style protections (regulations) on AI.

And of course the misguided have a way to put AI to work in warfare. Again, pattern analysis. Older than me, and I am old.

Researchers learn that the ne-er-do-wells are scamming the lonely hearts club.

Quoting the headline: Google, Nvidia, and Emerald AI launch the AI Energy Management Alliance to advance data centers that dynamically adjust electricity use based on grid conditions. It is about time they do something to improve their public image. And that is the subject of all this broo-ha-ha: public image.

Big tech celebrity CEOs to attend the White House dinner for the ruler of China. At least our current President understands the deal making that occurs at such events.

Speaking of celebrity CEOs, our current President, and deals ...

AWS admits they cannot restore data stored at Mid-East datacenters that were, uh, er, well, blowed up by the Iranians.

Generac, they make those nice home generators, signs an $8Billion (with a B) deal with Amazon. A Generac kept my brother alive for several weeks after a hurricane in Louisiana.

User testing of the $2,000 Snap Specs smart glasses. Cool stuff. Nice stunt. Life-changing technology for those who cannot see well. Stop the nonsense. Let's use these things for good.

It appears that Anthropic is merging a couple of its systems with one user interface, i.e., they are making the stuff much easier to use.

This is the type of thing that happens when the celebrity CEO talks to the press before talking to the people who built the company and made them a celebrity CEO.

Rumors that Apple's engineers are developing processors that will be servers in datacenters.

Want to change US government policy? Do what college football franchises do. Get a billionaire or two on your side.

Quoting the headline for entertainment purposes (and for some of this, this is quite entertaining): Internal documents: Chinese hacker-for-hire company ZRON is selling stolen foreign intelligence and using AI systems to make the data more accessible for police

Mistral, Mozilla, Firefox, AI browsing, fun for all.

Friday 18 September 2026

Meanwhile in France, if you are wearing a camera, you should not point at a woman in public as that is wrong in some way. I guess we have to decide what privacy people expect while in public places and what are public places.

To their credit, Anthropic's employees are eating their own dog food.

Much of the utility of the current slate of AI systems is they reduce typing. Anthropic "redesigns" something so that, once again, there is less typing.

Andrew Ng once again shows common sense, and common sense seems to be greatly lacking these days. AI is ending the world is code for, "Please,someone in Washington D.C. pass a law to keep new companies from eating my lunch."

Meanwhile in the Bay Area, tech jobs are down.

Meanwhile in Scotland, King Charles hosts a group of big-name tech executives.

Saturday 19 September 2026

AI safety groups. Sounds like a jobs program for engineers. I probably don't understand all there is to this.

Meanwhile in India, I am not sure what all this is, but it seems that companies and individuals are being required to work for the government at no pay.

Cries to get rid of these Flock cameras means a few thousand people lose their jobs. Odd how that works. No, it isn't odd. Predictable and predicted.

Consider: someone receives approval to build a datacenter all legal and such. They begin. Tens of billion$ are loaned. Then the anti-crowd appears and halts the project. The loans go in the trash can. Who suffers now that your local bank is about to go bankrupt? Yes, consider.

Google's Gemini hacked into several companies. Again, poorly built software and inadequate testing. Nothing is rogue. Everything is incompetence.

Money continues to pour into Anthropic.

Meanwhile here in Virginia, Gov. Abigail Spanberger signs an EO to slow down datacenter approvals, create an AI task force to evaluate workforce displacement, and more. Oh wow, now we are safe. She is an unpopular Governor who would not be elected with the election were tomorrow.

And more AI safety is coming to California as well.

Someone has a grasp on reality. Of course the dominant US AI companies are talking safety and regulation so that startups can't start up. That is what established business do.

The Clarity Act was supposed to do something wonderful in America regarding crypto currency. The bill was stopped in Congress.

It appears that some of these mathematics breakthroughs by AI companies are nothing more than copying in-progress research work by humans and then through one method or another (we have a deal you can't refuse), the AI solves the problem.

This is a long story about Flock cameras and a group reminiscent of the Monkey Wrench Gang. They physically broke into a Flock camera and copied all the data. Analysis showed what many suspected.

It appears that someone at the New York Times has come around to reality regarding big tech and America's government-funded schools, i.e., public education. Why does it take some folks so long to understand what is happening?

Sunday 20 September 2026

Congress is now going to Protect College Sports. It appears that most colleges are running their athletic programs at a loss. Hmm, fire those folks who can't run a program. Hire smarter folks. Costs have risen. Cut salaries. And if nothing else works, don't have athletic programs. What? The world will come to an end if a college focuses on education and lets entertainment fall to the side?

Real news that isn't news: government AI regulations have holes big enough for tech companies to push a datacenter through.

Meanwhile in the medical field (where people die if you are wrong), some are worried that there isn't enough high-quality data to train AI systems. Well, then don't use faulty systems! Good grief. Where did all the adults go?

This is a good use of computer vision and pattern recognition in medicine. It classifies instead of generates. That simple difference seems to be lost on folks.

Meanwhile in California, they attempt to outlaw free speech. It seems if money is involved, when is money not involved?, you cannot talk.

More real news that isn't news: technology experts say that lawyers are not technology experts.

Here is a lesson in how to be fired or have your department of government reduced to nothing or both. Be tone deaf to what is happening in larger government circles. And then tell everyone that you are tone deaf.

Let's note a few things about "smart" TVs. They have computers in them and run software. They are connected to the Internet. Every ne'er-do-well in the world is also connected to the Internet. Hmm. What could possibly go wrong? Some folks, who qualify as adults, seem surprised at how these things work.

This was predictable and predicted: folks do stuff in taxis that don't have drivers. Folks are in a little space with no one watching, so we do whatever. Well, folks are watching and some folks disapprove of "whatever." This article makes it spicy by discussing sexual activity. There are many activities that are far more harmful.

What does it mean for AI work to move too fast? It means some people at some companies make more money if they don't spend the time and money to test systems before putting them on the Internet. It's really quite simple. It comes down to bigger paychecks, and some folks will do just about anything for bigger paychecks.