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: September 28 - October 4, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• OpenAI releases Dots
• Mozilla has a big update to Firefox
• Our President releases a plan for AI companies to regulate themselves
• Ken Griffin gives $3Billion (with a B) to Carnegie Mellon University

Monday 28 September 2026

Meanwhile in China, they haven't put up an iron curtain (yet), but the Party in control restricts exits. You will remain here until morale improves.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, the US government prevented use of the Microsoft operating system and application. In response, the Dutch have their own Unix operating system and applications.

Nvidia tries to make something to stop AI agents from escaping. "Escaping?" Good grief.

I like this headline: Hundreds of people attended a pro-AI party in DC on September 26, in what the organizers called a counterprogram to the bipartisan psychosis over data centers

Ever wonder what software is running in the background on a multi-tasking operating system? It appears that the Internet is an multi-tasking network of computers. People use the network. Software, however, is the dominant user.

Our Dept of Homeland Security attempts to automate the handling of FOIA requests. What could possible go wrong?

Mr. Trump has Mr. Amodei over for dinner. Nice.

It appears that self-driving cars drive more safely than humans. The exact numbers are disputed, but, it is hard to imagine drive worse than some people.

Forget the fussing about datacenters. Americans have bought technology over the past couple of generations. All these smart phones and photos and everything. They all use datacenters. Want fewer datacenters? Change back to a flip phone, the kind that doesn't even have a camera.

Tuesday 29 September 2026

Grade inflation? A trophy for everyone? Big fussing as our Federal government limits the prize of High Performing to only 40% of the employees. How about 10% being the limit?

Our US Senate, not having much to do with their time, passes the Protect College Sports Act. Troubles are expected in the House of Representatives. Here's a thought: remove all athletics from schools. Put them in clubs. Naw. Just kidding. That would result in things like, oh, say, the Premier League and other failures (not).

I didn't realize we had a Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.

Meanwhile in India, the governors put $25Billion into the "Deep Tech" industry. Again, I didn't realize there was such a thing.

I love this headline: OpenAI apologizes for its AI models breaching Australian government websites. Gosh, we're sorry. We should have tested our software.

Google has an eight-year plan to turn off ChromeOS. I guess that will be the end of the Chromebook idea.

Cool name: the Human Control Over AI Act

Forget all the hoopla. Anthropic lost $42Billion (with a B) last year. Someone keeps pouring money into an otherwise failing business.

While we are tossing around Billion$, AMD agrees to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B.

I am all for this: companies are learning to make their AI systems more efficient.

In a milestone that is largely unnoticed (it's not AI), SpaceX launches its Starship rocket into orbit for the first time, deploying 26 satellites.

Mr. Zuckerburg introduces an enterprise-level AI system aimed at businesses instead of consumers.

Ben Thompson on how software is using software for us. We task one of these chattering bots, the chattering bot passes the task to Excel or Expedia and reports back the answer. We are programming in English with an expensive compiler. More people can accomplish more with less education. So, what happens to education, the educators, and the schools?

It appears that American citizens privately own about 40million rifles of the standard from Mr. Stoner and Armalite. "Armalite Rifle" is what the "AR" means in AR-15.

One town doesn't want a datacenter, citing "a distrust of both the AI moguls and local government representatives." Oh, aha. We distrust the local elected representatives. Finally, someone has a grasp of the obvious.

Wednesday 30 September 2026

Hey America. We have a new website. America dot gov. It actually looks like a website not an unemployment benefits application.

Ken Griffin gives $3Billion (with a B) to Carnegie Mellon University. Yes, this is some sort of record in the history of the world. Education is a good place to give money. CMU, however, already has money, is a private school, and charges a lot of money to attend. $3Billion could educate tens of thousands of people for a century. Perhaps ...

Ten$ of million$ flow from big tech to political campaigns in the bi-annual festivals.

How do you do anything in America today? First, bring in a tax expert to explain how to claim deductions on everything,

Not interested in AI? Fine. Become interested in the financial risk$ people are taking and how that can mess up your checking account over at Wells Fargo.

Meanwhile in Singapore, they understand that hardware is the new software. As a city nation, they don't have much land. They need to figure out how to build elsewhere and claim ownership and tax revenue. They need to rent a nation or something clever.

A report on using OpenAI's Dots. The goal is to make useful features of these chattering bots available to more people. I have written computer programs since the late 1970s. I can finagle the bots to do what I want. Most folks don't have that experience and the skills that come with it.

Bill Gates tells the rest of us how we and the world should be. He can't help himself. He has to do this from time to time.

Our current President releases guidelines for AI companies on monitoring themselves. This is easily viewed as naive. Note, however, that Federal, State, and Local governments do not have the expertise, nor can they afford to hire it, to do the job.

It's official: it's now Super Intelligence or SI.

OpenAI introduces a $500-a-month plan. That's lots of money. If, however, spending $500 a month saves you $10,000 a month, you do it. Better tools, far better productivity. It is that same question as always.

Mozilla releases a big update to Firefox.

Take a general-purpose LLM, run it on a laptop, and tell it to drive a car. Hmm, it works pretty wells given they didn't spend Billion$.

Thursday 1 October 2026

In a thinly vailed effort to bring in money, our Postal Service is putting cameras in mail carrier vehicles. The data they will collect will be purchased by companies wanting data to train self-driving vehicles. I added that last sentence to the story as our USPS won't admit that, yet.

Note, when Elon Musk wanted to power his datacenter in Memphis, people hated him for the pollution. Turning stored energy into energy is often messy. We have done this for centuries.

This is one of the reasons you don't want to take a privately held company public: people have the chance to see your finances and where the money comes and goes.

Remember all that fuss about kicking Anthropic out of government systems?

Is it stealing to grab a copy of someone's data without telling or asking them?

Meanwhile in California (quoting the headline): California Governor Gavin Newsom signs the No Robo Bosses Act, which prevents employers in the state from relying solely on AI to fire or discipline workers. This stuff makes my head hurt. If I plot the times a person checks in to work, put the numbers in Excel, and run a linear regression to predict future performance, am I using AI to discipline the person?

It appears from several stories this week that the evening dinners at the White House while Mr. Xi was in town did much to shape our current President's policy towards super intelligence, a.k.a., artificial intelligence.

Micron reports a BOOMING financial quarter with revenue up 379%. It's hard to calculate percentage gains that big.

Our Dept of Defense (War) brings in big names for a 120-day study on the future of war. Here is a hint of the future: the AI and smarts wins until a couple of guys break into the datacenter, pour gasoline on the floor, and light a match.

Quoting the headline: The UK's MI5 issues a rare espionage alert urging UK universities to cut ties with the China General Technology Research Institute, which funded AI research

Google is paying publishers for their data. The payments vary per how much the data adds to capabilities. Opinions also vary.

A review of Samsung's newest and best tablet computer. It is good. It should be at that price.

Real news that isn't news: studies show the Chinese are spying via software.

Friday 2 October 2026

Quoting the headline: Microsoft AI releases new transcription and text-to-speech models for voice agents

Here is a link to Microsoft's technical description of these tools.

What do you do if you have $8Billion in Grace Blackwell advanced processors? The accountants at Amazon are sharpening their pencils and PowerPoint.

"Researchers" are pumping out papers with AI at double the rate. Quoting the headline: ArXiv limits preprint submissions to two per month per submitter, as AI access fuels a record 40,363 submissions in September 2026, vs. 20,569 in September 2024

As usual, the smugglers are winning as Nvidia processors make their way to China in record numbers.

Worldwide, folks are saying that society media, a.k.a., social media, is bad for democracy. Free speech bad for democracy? Maybe free speech run amok? Still free speech.

Meanwhile in California, lawyers investigate software systems. Should we laugh or cringe? Does anyone else see the absurdity in this?

OpenAI releases a couple of shopping tools. Try on clothes, not actually, but you know.

HP releases a portable computer to compete with Apple's MacBook Neo. They call it the OmniBook 5. $699.

Meanwhile on the California beachfront, they fear the coming Kelvin wave.

Saturday 3 October 2026

Now we have Swarmchasers. They chase the details of AI containment failures, i.e., someone doesn't test their software and turns it loose on the Internet. We used to call that malware. Now we seem to think it is a demonstration of AI's super intelligence or something laudatory.

TSMC continues expanding its work in America.

Ah, so this is how to build a datacenter: have local elected representatives sign non-disclosure agreements. Transparency in government? Are you kidding?

The computing hardware world turns upside down. Now we pay more for less.

Mr. Hegseth pushes the Army toward autonomous warfare. He is an outsider. He is pushing big change quickly. Such efforts are fraught with peril and maybe success.

Anthropic starts the Claude Frontier Academy. It appears that you, as a business, will devote some of your engineers to this training program so that your business can better use Anthropic's systems. No mention of what this costs and how a person like me could join.

The domain suffix for Slovenia is dot S I. Mr. Trump renames AI to SI. The collision brings about predictable and predicted results.

Amazon realizes that it needs to be nicer to the communities that host its datacenters. $1Billion over five years sounds like a lot of money, but is trivial for the tech giants.

Keurig moves to a new format. Everyone wants to have compostable materials. It seems like there are better ways to do that than push everyone to a new standard.

Apple computers use Unix at the base. The old RWX permissions don't seem to be enough today with the AI companies turning malware loose on the Internet.

I'll just quote: Rivian sold more electric vehicles than ever in the third quarter, thanks in large part to the launch of its new, more affordable R2 SUV. The R2 still costs $60,000. I am sure it is a fine vehicle, but way to expensive for my taste.

Meanwhile in Europe, The European Commission has rolled out Element Pro as an alternative to Microsoft Teams. The new software doesn't seem to work well.

It appears that video game systems can identity which hardware processors have been used before. They keep records of these things. If you buy a used machine from a cheater, you are labeled as a cheater.

Quoting: the University of Washington has moved its Global Innovation Exchange {GIX) program to Microsoft's campus in a rent-free deal

Google runs its first test of orbital datacenters.

Sunday 4 October 2026

They told us that spinning disk drives were gone. I think they said this 30 years ago. I'm not sure who they are as such an incorrect prediction surely cost them their jobs. Anyways, hardware continues to be the new software.

We know have a White House task for called the Super Intelligence Force. It seems I would be able to land a spot on one of the things.

I think I am starting to figure out what people mean when they mention safety in AI. It means that the companies are not releasing malware on the world. Perhaps someone can teach me otherwise. I am open to learning.

Global law enforcement, not sure who that is but it sounds ominous, has detained (another ominous phrase) a member of the ShinyHunters hactivist group. The person is cooperating with out FBI to identify and locate fellow hacktivists. I guess this means the good guys are winning but not sure at what price.

There are several predominant file formats in the world. Microsoft's Open XML is one while Adobe's PDF is another. The chattering bots can read and write these formats. Why do we need Microsoft and Adobe et al. any longer?

Some states are making it easier to build accessory dwelling units (little cottages) in your backyard. This brings to my mind questions about who owns the property and who says what you cannot do on your own property and those basic rights. I am, admittedly, a bit old for these things.

Is this the end of hiring based on credentials and back to hiring based on skills? That could be a good thing. On the other hand, it could be a return to, "We hire people like us."

Are we still talking about censorship of school newspapers? I thought we had put this away decades ago. It is quite simple, what is published in a school paper brings legal liability to the school. The student journalist is also liable, but has almost nothing to lose. Sue Harvard for a few Billion$$$ based on the school paper? You bet they censor the paper.

Meanwhile in China, we have real news that isn't news. Of course the AI models answer along the party line. The party has ways of dealing with non-conformists.