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: 5-11 October, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• More Billion$ fly around in the AI business
• Margaret Hamilton died this week at age 90
• More malware released by AI companies
• A hurricane hits the Florida peninsula

Monday 5 October 2026

Technology has jumped a few steps up the ladder. Here is the story of one person who has ridden the jumps.

Here is a thought about the great pyramids in Egypt: they were built so that they record information about the earth and mathematics. Measure this and that and you have information that is useful elsewhere.

The ne'er-do-wells find yet another way to do what they do.

Token for the chattering bots are the new money. In China, the black market flourishes.

Some folks at Anthropic are meeting with some folks called religious leaders. Some folks like this trend. Others scoff. I would need to see the details and meet the nice folks involved.

Meanwhile at Anthropic, the company matches charitable gifts with stock giveaways. Nice for charities but not nice for future shareholders.

Quoting the headline from Wired: Muse Creates Detailed Profiles of All Your Friends and Family

Here's a paraphrase: In an X reply, Elon Musk says that SpaceX will rename its AI unit SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI (super intelligence).

Quoting: Car thefts in San Francisco are down almost 59% for the first eight months of 2026. License-plate reading systems reduce car thefts. We've decided that such systems are bad. Who is we? Why did we decide that?

Some of us try to keep AM radios in vehicles. Forget the entertainment value. These things are basic emergency communications. They work.

This writer loves doing ALL THE WORK himself. No employees. No loss of control. No sleep... oh wait, I tossed in that last one.

A classic review of a classic book: The Psychology of Computer Programming. I had the good fortune of knowing Jerry Weinberg.

Write 670 words of fiction each day (type 30 words a minute, that is about 25 minutes of writing). That isn't much as it is little more than a page a day. At that pace, however, a writer writes four novels a year. WHAT???!!!??? Yes. Those are 60,000-word novels.

If you put your hands to the keyboard, or even dictate your stories, you will find that you can write much faster than you can publish your own work.

How C.S. Lewis spent every day as a writer.

One person's reflection on 20 years of blogging. We are at that point in computing history where the blog is 20 years old plus or minus a few. My blogs will hit that mark in a couple of years.

Are we living in the death of reading?

Seth Godin calls this a handoff doc. I have worked jobs that used these under different names. Could a chattering bot do this for me?

Tuesday 6 October 2026

The governors of South Korea plan to toss a few million$ and build a frontier AI model. Note, people know how to do these things. The roadblock is renting enough computers to do it.

Imitation is flattery until it isn't.

Here come the lawyers and the insurance companies. AI makers beware.

Hardware continues to be the new software. Big tech is trying to buy a magnetic head old company.

I pause to shake my head about some of these stories. Etched is a new company that makes AI processors, I think. I have never heard of them. They are now valued at $50Billion, probably more today than yesterday. $50Billion (yes, with a B) is a big pile of money. The folks in the photo all look like they are still in high school. What is the source of all this money?

Ghost, let's build a PC that runs AI locally. The folks in the photo do look like they are still in high school.

This analysis claims that Anthropic's subscriptions offer 5x value over OpenAI's. That is not 5%; it is 5x. Hmm.

Quoting: Reflection AI, the startup billing itself as America's answer to open-source Chinese AI, is releasing its first model, called Beam.

Meta and Microsoft build their own AI tools. Their employees like to use Claude instead. The corporate managers are putting an end to that.

We don't agree with ourselves about whether or not our Dept of Defense (War) is still using Anthropic systems.

I didn't know we had a Billionaires Index. It seems we do. Anyways, the gains this year are all in the tech industry as the other B folks lost a little money.

Hackers stole records belonging to roughly 8 million Danish citizens and residents from Denmark's Central Person Register. These government systems are supposed to be safe, secure, private, and all that. DON'T CONNECT IT TO THE INTERNET! I suppose that is difficult to understand.

Wednesday 7 October 2026

Someone looks at ChatGPT for Teens and declares that it isn't good enough for America's teenagers.

Meanwhile in Europe, the regulators are figuring out new ways to extract money from successful American companies. Before shouting, "Good! Take money from the billionaire$." Recall that millions of Americans are part owners of these companies and will be sending some of their savings to European governments.

Split and merge in the AI industry.

The ne'er-do-wells hack into an Arizona court system's files and steal personal information for over a million folks.

Some deeper thoughts about open-weight AI models and their possible use in cyber attacks.

OpenAI claims its systems are solving all the world's math problems.

Big tech companies continue to toss around ten$ of billion$. These numbers are unprecedented.

Strong rumors of coming Apple and LG smart-home products. How smart is my home? How smart will my home become? Enough silliness. Some of these smart home systems can enable the elderly to live in their homes safely. That can be a great thing. Then their is the economic impact to assisted living facilities, those companies, and those jobs.

There are other people in the world who have built AI models that work well.

Quoting the headline: Meta, Walmart, Instinct, Shopify, Sierra, Stripe, and others publish the Personal Agent Protocol to standardize and secure how AI bots interact with businesses

Considering the American consumer (not businesses), OpenAI's ChatGPT still dominates the market.

Anduril is awarded a $2.95billion contract with our Navy.

Let's try to put some of all this in perspective. Mr. Amodei was paid $18million last year to run Anthropic. That puts him about equal to quarterbacks in the NFL who sit on the bench and only play when someone else is injured.

Stop the brain-drain panic with AI researchers. China continues to lose talent at a 30-to-1 rate.

And the findings of the research are!!!! If we are to stop switching what time it is from standard to daylight savings, we should standardize on standard. Gosh, I hope they didn't spend a lot of money on that study. The problem is, if you didn't spend a lot of money and study something obvious, no one would pay attention.

Thursday 8 October 2026

Meanwhile in India, fewer entry-level jobs for new graduates.

The Association for Human Mathematics, I didn't know we had such an association, doesn't like the mathematics work claimed by OpenAI and tells its members not to work with OpenAI any longer.

Datacenters are industrial capacity, i.e., they are factories that produce in a nation's economy. To date, China lags behind the U.S. They are gaining, especially if politicians in the U.S. continue to fight against our national interests.

Quoting: Ethereum researchers say crypto users should consider an orderly migration of funds to fresh addresses, warning AI could threaten private-key security before quantum computers do.

Meanwhile in the business world, OpenAI has gained on Anthropic to the point where they are splitting the business market 50/50.

Samsung reports a huge financial quarter with revenue up 127%. Someone, someone finds a dark cloud here with that revenue number less than estimated. Someone needs to fire the estimator.

State Attorneys General sue a Chinese company for not telling them it was a Chinese company. Did anyone think to ask way back when?

Got $5,999? Need some local AI power? Microsoft is now taking orders. It is a simple return-on-investment calculation. If you need privacy, you compare the cost of programmers vs. hardware.

Friday 9 October 2026

Fear and loathing at OpenAI.

Another view of the events at OpenAI.

Layoffs coming at Netflix.

Whoosh! Global PC sales plummet. Prices went up as the price of parts went up. Another take: Tony Kornheiser used to call PCs "You're personal Google machine" or something like that. We could now call PCs "Your personal ChatGPT box." If all you do on the PC is as ChatGPT et al. questions. You don't have to replace the PC nearly as often.

Anthropic offers to teach presidential candidates how to set policy (that Anthropic likes) on AI.

Fussing about the H-1B visa program. Of course there have been abuses by employers. Still, there are benefits to America.

All this backlash against Flock means Flock employees are losing their jobs and paychecks and won't be able to support their families. All because a few law enforcement persons abused their positions and access to information. Are you Flock haters happy now?

Quoting the headline: Satya Nadella and Michael Dell were awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by the White House

Also quoting this headline: President Trump awards Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, and Sergey Brin the National Medal of Science at a White House summit promoting innovation

Apple announces a big event in a couple of weeks. Big rumors about computer hardware including what many have been desiring for years: a touchscreen computer. I don't like touchscreen computers as I have a habit of putting my fingers on the screen.

Our current President really wants people to use the term "Super Intelligence."

Amazon drops the Fire tablet series and replaces it with Alexa Tablets that cost ten times as much. I don't like this. The Fire tablet was the best value in computing. $100 of hardware, a tablet plus a keyboard, was all that was needed to write the next great novel. Gone.

Meanwhile in Russia, the Ukrainians finally blow up a datacenter.

This headline says it all: We're still figuring out the side effects of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs

Once again, the managers lag behind the workers.

The Emmy awards move from network television to Amazon Prime Video.

Margaret Hamilton died this week at age 90. She came out of MIT and helped NASA write the software that sent people to the moon and back. The hardware was quite limited. The human brain power wasn't. This story has made the rounds of the Internet all week. That is good news. We are losing the people who invented computing in the 1950s and 1960s. Time passes.

Saturday 10 October 2026

Remember how TikTok US was to separate itself from China and the Party? No, they don't remember either.

The sales of video game falls just like the sales of PCs. Hardware costs are up. People just aren't paying the higher prices.

This makes sense: use older memory designs that cost less the make. Ensure the new processors are compatible with the older components. Good grief. How long did it take to figure out that one?

Not to worry about datacenters. The US Senate is investigating and all will be well. Good grief.

False advertising? Of course it is. Tesla renames their "this car drives itself" capabilities in Europe to avoid the regulators.

When will someone standup and say what is happening? AI companies are releasing malware on the Internet. They can use all the "agentic" language they want, but it is just malware.

Back and forth: now the Trump administration mandates companies immediately notify them when they have yet another rogue agent doing what rogue agents do.

Gasp. Executives at Anthropic and OpenAI are practicing risk management.

Back to datacenters. Someone finally gets it. Don't ask folks if they want a datacenter. Ask if they still want to use their smartphone, take photos, see movies, etc.? Those wonderful things we like all come through datacenters. Block datacenters and you go back to paying Comcast for everything.

Sunday 11 October 2026

Microsoft releases its Decision-1 model. This does not generate text like those chattering bot. Instead, is classifies or decides.

Meanwhile in Japan, they are experiencing cyber attacks right and left. And at one time Japan was to take over the world in AI. Some of us remember the Fifth Generation plan.

Satya Nadella has the idea of returning to basics. AI is a pieces of software. There are basic things you do around the software in case the software has errors in it.

Largely a mechanical task that required hundred of hours of human effort, Anthropic's Claude ports classic video games to browsers. Supposedly a hundred ported in one night.

I remember GoPro. They dominated until poor managers crashed the company. In its place are two Chinese companies battle in the market for smart cameras. I'm not sure what a smart camera is, but I know a lot about computer vision.

Fear and loathing in the book publishing business. Publishers tell authors to write the books. Publishers tell their employees to use AI to summarize, draw pictures, etc. It seems to be smart on both tasks. Some disagree.

AI companies move to cute little cuddly mascots. It's advertising.

Meanwhile at a museum in Spain, we see one of the greatest home computing projects ever. Someone took 30 old Mac Mini computers still with Intel processors, built a cabinet that resembles a Cray supercomputer, and voila'. The result has more compute power than the original Cray. There are worse things to do with your spare time.

Move to a lesser home compute project. Cover you Mac Mini with art work.