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: 12-18 October, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Microsoft shows new compute systems in a big scale
• Meta releases Wonder and Wonder Full
• Apple has a big event to show smart home products

Monday 12 October 2026

More silliness around artificial, or is it super, intelligence. Let's hear from the Theology majors on technology.

Some praise for X, formerly known as Twitter.

This is America. We talk. Our soldiers talk about what happened during drone testing. There is nothing newsworthy here.

A few folks seem to understand the intelligence value of traffic cameras et al.

Meanwhile in China, they are pushing to use their energy towards industrial policy that means datacenters and AI.

Strong rumors that the AI companies want to either build their own smartphones or have much more processing power in smartphones to run LLMs locally.

AI companies move to use the words Super Intelligence and SI. They know where the regulators live.

Having physical machines do people-like tasks is much more difficult than generating text from probabilities. Hence, they robotics companies are five years behind the NLP companies.

Meanwhile in Louisiana's Richland Parish, Meta is building a big datacenter. The locals are building businesses and hiring people. Hmm. Perhaps these datacenters aren't all bad?

Employees are spending more time checking AI-generated materials than they are saving. Well, if you are an employee sitting in a cubicle, you have to fill the hours doing something.

If the numbers are believable, we reach a milestone where the internal combustion engine now powers less than half of new cars.

Thoughts on the travel memoir. And it adds a few things about those who join the Peace Corps.

Putting the ordinary moments into your fiction writing.

Thoughts on writing a mystery story or novel. I have to try that some.

The story seeds: little notes jotted here, there, everywhere that spur stories. Weinberg called them fieldstones after the practice of building things from stone. Story seeds is an agriculture concept. Same concept for writers. Did you notice? There is a story.

Tuesday 13 October 2026

I'm confused. I'm not sure what is what in this bundle of services from Mr. Musk's companies.

Folks in China buy over a million processors from Nvidia. I guess it was a small order given all the export-import restrictions.

This report says all the chip shipments to China from Nvidia have fallen.

Still in China, the smartphone market is past saturation. Sales have dropped six straight financial quarters.

It's not just in China. Smartphone sales worldwide have fallen. This is the same as the PC sales falling. It is costing too much for something people don't need to replace.

More from China, mathematicians unite to be united on AI or something worth uniting about.

It takes a lot of people and machinery to ship all the products Amazon ships. A million robots and 1.5million people.

Meta releases Muse Wonder. This is the latest greatest AI model in the world. And they have a boosted version call Muse Wonder Full. At least they are clever with the product names. But seriously folks, they surpass everyone else in standard tests of these things.

With Meta's leap in AI performance, Mr. Zuckerburg is not ready to slow down AI.

Microsoft announces the Maia 300 AI accelerator hardware system. Apple had the right idea all along. So did every company that built its own compute hardware. Hardware is the new software. And yes, these companies are all imitating IBM of the 1960s.

It costs a lot of money to build a factory in today's compute world. And factories pay for themselves.

People are finding ways to sell their data. Hmm. I have a lot of data. Any takers out there?

Meanwhile in France, hackers take control of grocery store refrigerators and ... well, they do what ne'er-do-wells do. Connect it to the Internet and this is what happens. Perhaps folks will learn, but I doubt it.

The Russians attacked datacenters in Ukraine. The Ukrainians responded in kind. Predictable results.

Mr. Torvalds likes using AI in programming.

Wednesday 14 October 2026

Meanwhile in China, it seems that their industrial growth comes from local governments actively competing for business. Sort of like states fighting over who gets a datacenter instead of denying datacenters on their soil. Funny how a communist country has grown all these businesses locally. Now, let's go put another moratorium on datacenters (not).

Meanwhile in Ukraine, they are complaining the SpaceX is hurting their drone missions but denying service to anything moving faster than 100 mph.

Meanwhile in Europe, Google DeepMind and Google Cloud are giving compute power and $3million in credits to researchers. Long story: years ago I kept asking AWS representatives if they had a student plan for grad students. Finally, someone told me they don't give away compute to anyone. Oh well. Short sighted.

Meanwhile in Russia, the Ukrainians continue to destroy datacenters. That is industry. Instead of smashing the ball-bearing factories, you hit the data factories and cripple the economy. This is the 21st century. This is industry.

ASML makes the machines that make integrated circuits. They cannot keep up with demand.

Meanwhile in America, we attempt to build a secure drone technology supply chain, i.e., no parts from mainland China.

Speaking of China, those folks dominate the world in humanoid robot production.

Big name AI researchers sign a petition to create international AI safety something or other to do with safety. I guess this sounds better than, "Let's keep software companies from releasing untested software."

Meanwhile at Microsoft, they continue to find and fix record numbers of security holes. This begs the question, at least in my feeble mind, who has known about these security holes and what have they been doing all these years?

This is an odd story out of OpenAI. An employee put a listening device in a conference room to record what people said in meetings. Perhaps meetings are OpenAI are far more substantive than at all the places I have worked. No one would have wanted to record any of the meetings I attended.

Meanwhile in Texas, our FBI claims to have dismantled 40+ laptop farms operated by the North Koreans. Get this: the North Koreans used these places to impersonate Americans and obtain remote jobs in America. That way, they could work for American wages. They all work for the North Korean government. Hence, the Kim dynasty wants American jobs for its people. Seems like the folks in India figured out a way to do that decades ago. Perhaps there is more to this that I don't understand.

This describes how Anthropic learned that git was no longer powerful for their source code control. Anthropic built its own tool and, this is the really hard part, moved all its code over to the local tool. This is a well-written case study in software construction and operations and maintenance for 2026.

Quoting the headline: Google says users with a standard account can now build personal Android apps for free in AI Studio and will be able to share them with friends in coming months

Apple held a big event to show new smart home products. Here is one summary.

And Apple, as expected, has a brilliant and entertaining video showing how their devices work.

In Reston, Virginia (where I live), we are seeing more of these cargo bicycles. You can't pedal them in any practical sense unless you are an olympic athlete. With the electric motors, however, they look fun and make sense.

Meanwhile at America's largest supermarket chain Kroger, they are cutting 3,000 corporate jobs. They have 400,000 employees. AI is cited in greater efficiency and productivity.

Thursday 15 October 2026

Quoting the headline: Survey: nearly 40% of US adults, and ~50% of those aged 18 to 29, participate in an online community Side note from me, those social media places all use datacenters to operate. Hmm. Moratorium on datacenters? Hmm.

American companies bring in people from other countries to work here. Then they learn that these folks are working for their governments back home feeding them intelligence.

TSMC, an established company with a long history, reports a booming financial quarter with numbers up over 50%.

Chainalysis reports that we now have autonomous commerce where software is buying and selling. Start a computer program. Let it run. Let it buy things (oooops, that could be a problem).

The ne'er-do-wells figure out how to send a billion (with a B) rotten emails trying to steal other folks' money.

Consider this: General Motors sells automobiles to Federal, State, and Local law enforcement agencies. The vehicles permit law enforcement officials to cover more ground, see more of what is happening, and solve more crimes. Some law enforcement officials, however, are rotten apples and abuse their positions and use these vehicles to do things they shouldn't do. The general public learns of these rotten apples and the uproars causes General Motors to collapse as a corporation employing thousands of people. Now consider Flock. Hmm.

And here we have the case of a company not protecting vulnerable users. Let's see... an elderly person who can barely see, can barely hear, does not have good physical coordination, etc. can still sit in a car, start the car, and drive it on the street with everyone else. Is the car maker not protecting vulnerable users? Perhaps there is more to this than I understand.

Someone needs to open a dictionary and find the definition of "secret."

Anthropic continues to report large and growing financial number$.

Apple is now worth $5Trillion (with a Tr) in some measure or another.

It seems that some folks just don't honor their signature on those non-disclosure agreements.

Shocking news (not): Rogue AI agents from China are discovered roaming about seeking whom they may devour.

Nvidia invests a couple Billion $$$ more into European start up companies.

I've seen this story in a few places this morning. Anthropic is telling people Anthropic's software testing is so bad their software will act like a virus and infect all our smart home appliances. Seems Anthropic created a problem and needs to solve their problem. Are there any adults working at Anthropic?

Friday 16 October 2026

Meanwhile in China, everyone is taking a course in AI.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, the governors are pusing Billion$ to America for factories and such. Why are they doing that?

It's all about selling advertisements.

Quoting the headline: White House's AI task force gets to work

Folks are tossing about number$ for Anthropic's IPO. $1.5Trillion (with a TR) or $2Trillion. That is two-thousand-billion dollars. Most of the nations of the world are not worth that much money.

As usual, everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else regarding the availability of Starlink access in Ukraine.

This is a long piece (95 pages) on understanding what is happening inside the neural networks that comprise the current slate of AI systems.

The folks at Volvo announce they will have point-to-point driving in their vehicles by 2030. This prediction is far more based on reality than what people were saying ten years ago.

Quoting this headline as it is believable but still hard to believe: Memo: Accenture has told many employees, some of whom had been spending as much as $1,000 monthly, that it will now only spend $29 a month per person on Claude

If you have several powerful Apple computers, you can run a version of Meta's Muse locally. This is privately owned, local AI infrastructure. A little datacenter in the den. It is expensive compared to a MacBook Neo, but once again if the cost pays for itself in efficiency and productivity, it is worth it.

Big tech jumps in with million$ to pay for the ballroom at the White House.

Testing the latest Nvidia RTX Spark Superchip in a Windows machine. It does well on AI.

Saturday 17 October 2026

Anthropic releases a report on the changing nature of work and hiring. They are hiring far fewer entry-level technology people. Note, this is at Anthropic. It is not at the car repair place or the grocery story or the electrician shop.

Another report coming out of Anthropic, their employees are far more optimistic about huge accomplishments coming from AI agents. Folks, it's pretty simple. Write software that performs experiments, analyzes results, and tries again. Run it 24/7 on a datacenter-size computer. No duh. This isn't intelligence, it is the brute force and ignorance approach.

And the folks at Anthropic have learned a new skill: how to lobby Congress and write legislation.

Apple claims that everyone wants to buy it folding iPhone. Perhaps this will reverse the fall in smartphone sales.

Quoting the headline: In its first meeting, Trump's Super Intelligence Force says it plans to commission a report on AI risks and develop protocols for labs to provide early warnings. Note how they have already contradicted themselves. Oh well.

A review of Microsoft's latest Surface Laptop Ultra (gotta work on the name). Better hardware, but the software can't get out of its own way.

Organizers cancel the 2026 Grace Hopper Celebration. Registrations and sponsorships dropped below sustainable levels. This was a big event for young women to network with people and find jobs.

The New York Times is fussing about campaign ads that don't divulge the software tools used to create the ads. Why would someone have to reveal all the tools they use? It's just another type of software. Who cares if you use video editing software from Microsoft, Apple, or Adobe, or someone else? Why does the New York Times need to know?

Ubuntu 26.10 is released. They have some silly name for it.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet this week. We, who is we here?, will no longer have the leap second correction to clocks.

The KDE project has its 30th birthday. I am old enough to remember when these things started.

New tools change occupations. Nothing new. In this case, recent software makes decompiling games much, much easier. No need to spend days doing it.

Sunday 18 October 2026

Industrial expansion in the US hits a wall. It was probably going too fast. Now it is probably moving dangerously too slow. The Chinese have no such delays.

Similar problems occurring in the UK.

Anthropic is developing software that will negotiate contracts. Are they kidding? Their software has shown to be full of errors. Negotiate contracts?

These numbers are incredible, but the reporting seems reliable. Disney is acquiring a company that was going bankrupt. Disney agree to pay 66 persons from that bankrupt company about a million $$$ a year for three years.

Google claims a big advance in quantum computing.

MapQuest, remember them? They are still here from 1996. Anyways, MapQuest puts a feature in its maps showing us locations of license-plate reading cameras.

The feuding and fussing continue about Starlink access in Ukraine.

I am so old I didn't know wired earbuds went away. I never stopped using them. Bose has a new noise-cancelling set.

Quoting: Google is expanding its Android Earthquake Alerts System from 98 to more than 200 regions worldwide. Let's consider this a moment. This is networked surveillance and data gathering. This case, however, is good. Right? We decided this was good. Right? When did we decide that?

Big data leak in the school system in California. The public contributes to pay for this. Someone in government hires people to administer this. Those folks fall flat on their face and hurt all the people who fund their jobs. This is not working. Don't connect it to the Internet.

Blue Origin says it is updating its Florida space-launch facilities.

Yet another report on yet another Universal Basic Income experiment. The results are always the same. If everyone in society, the "universal" word, received the income, the results would be far different. Everyone in the program gave large portions of their money to friends and family instead of using it to improve their lives. If, the thinking goes, everyone received money, the recipients wouldn't be giving it away and draining their own resources. Gosh. No conclusions.