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: 19-25 October, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• SpaceX reports a huge financial quarter
• The datacenter deals continue despite the American election season
• PHP has security holes. Everyone is atwitter.
• Greece bans teens while South Korea builds datacenters (who will have better jobs?)

Monday 19 October 2026

Quoting the headline: Google DeepMind says four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft without any human help in 27 hours and 14 minutes, costing $1,620 The first part of the headline is pretty impressive. I guess it is as I haven't played Minecraft. The second part kills the first part. Who would spend all those computing resources on this stunt?

Women now use these chattering bots as much as men. I guess that is a good thing.

Oh, to be a kid again. I have four grandchildren, but one will be 18 by 2027. Does he still count as a kid?

Someone in the datacenter industry is smart.

Intel introduces a new series of GPU aimed at the datacenter. The machine has an unusually large amount of memory. This is for inferring over large contexts.

Quoting the headline: Europe's three biggest industrial companies are cashing in on the AI boom

Seth Godin on ways to use your commuting time well.

What programming languages are programmers using? R moves up a bit. C remains very strong. Python remains at the top.

Meanwhile on LinkedIn, they are doing things to flag posts as written by AI. Before your post is labeled AI, someone has to read it. Hmm. I write my own posts there. I wonder if folks think they are AI?

We learn a little more about the Saudi OpenAI employee and how he put a listening device in a conference room.

Quoting the headline: Websites Are Closing Their Doors to AI Agents

As a writer, do things the way you do them. Until you want to do it some other way.

A review and test of different grammar checking software. And note, they all use AI, and that is okay.

For several hundred years, we have been using writing as an evidence of work. Now, these chattering bots chatter out hundreds of pages of text in seconds. New tools. Time to adapt. We are still in the Chaos phase of change.

Learning the craft of writing from Sylvester Stallone. Yes, he studied films to learn to write "Rocky." He worked hard. I am sure people thought he was a nut.

Tuesday 20 October 2026

Amazon managers say they will spend about $20Billion (with a B) spread across several things in Germany next year.

If you want to go to Europe and get the highest download speeds, doesn't everyone want to do that?, don't go to London.

There aren't many people around who can read and revise some programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic. Hence, OpenAI tunes up their code-writing systems in those languages.

Meanwhile in Australia, a regulator finds a new way to extract big $$$ from successful American companies.

The rich can position themselves to be richer. Mr. Schmidt will become much richer when Anthropic goes public.

Take a walk through the Meta Supercluster in Ohio.

Interesting twist. These smart TVs have computers that can be reprogrammed to do what you want. Some are using vibe coding to remove ads from the TVs. Good.

Apple teases a bit more for its big event next week.

DHS tells Federal agencies to remove systems from a Chinese AI company. Huh? How were these systems installed in the first place?

There are many predictions that the American political party that specializes in regulation will gain control of some or all of Congress. If you are an AI company, hire your lawyers now.

2027 will see major rises in datacenter capacity online. Big bump in industrial capacity.

Meanwhile in America, (quoting the headline) Shootings Hit Decade Low in Q3 2026

Americans moved to Europe in the last couple of years. Things aren't as great as they imagined. Health care? Not as good. Standard of living? Much lower. Hmm.

Meanwhile in Florida, someone hacks into the DMV with the usual results. Don't connect it to the Internet. Is that hard to understand?

Another ne'er-do-well uses an army of AI agents (wow, that sounds impressive) to hack into all sorts of big-name companies. John Deere is an important company. Cripple the food production of a region or nation and you have done much harm.

Amazon invests in nuclear power.

Japan launches a mission to the moons of Mars. The ambitious goal is to return rocks from one of the moons.

Remember Elizebeth Holmes? She had a blood testing company that was nothing more than a fancy scam. A documentary movie is out about her. It appears that it is quite a good movie.

Wednesday 21 October 2026

Meanwhile in China, party leaders don't like the American government removing DeepSeek (nice name, think about it) from government systems. All the more reason from removing it. Government contracts are nice income, but they are not lucrative. Meta, Apple, Google, et al. did not become the financial giants they are on government contracts. Being booted from a government system is bad publicity, but will not break a company. This value of government contracts is access to information.

Meanwhile in the UK, money is flowing through Nscale and datacenters.

Chinese culture is different from American culture. Some may not realize that. Some may not also realize that this leads to vastly different questions and answers concerning pattern analysis and machine intelligence.

Meanwhile in the west, more fussing and fear and loathing about who controls AI and who regulates it and who knows what's best.

Samsung pushes its high-end manufacturing processes into factories in China. This is good for China in the short term, but bad in the long term as it hurts the development of Chinese companies.

SpaceX is making a pile of money on Starlink.

That Starlink news is just part of a huge financial quarter for SpaceX. An established company with revenue up 161%.

Here comes Santa Clause: Amazon to hire 300,000 seasonal employees.

The definition of success keeps changing. Meta report 10.9million downloads of Muse in its first 40 days.

Hate Flock. Consider Firefly. Their systems (some call it AI) monitor cameras and quickly, much faster than humans not using their systems, dispatch emergency relief to emergencies. Same thing as Flock with a different application. And yes, one day we will read about a few persons who misuse the systems.

Society media continues to grow. The old mainstream media continues to fall. New times. New tools. Change and adapting. Some do, some don't.

Quoting the headline: Businesses Cloud AI Nscale, Anthropic In Talks For New $45 Billion AI Cloud Deal Those numbers are for Billion$ with a B.

OpenBSD 8.0 is released.

Another warfare innovation from Ukraine. Quoting the headline: Ukraine Claims World's First Drone Evacuation of Wounded Soldier. I still have to ask the obvious question: with all these grand innovations, why can't Ukraine push the Russians out?

Thursday 22 October 2026

Barclays to lay off 5,000 people. That is 5% of the workforce.

Big job cuts at eBay.

AI and the building of empires. Predictions of American and Chinese empires existing next to one another. This is from Foreign Affairs. I don't mention that publication often.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, they have the first-ever strike in the semiconductor industry.

Walmart opens their store to AI agents to browse and buy.

GM announces an AI version of OnStar.

Texas Instruments reports a big financial quarter. TI is still around. Once it dominated large segments of the technology industry.

OpenAI et al. are examining mouse brain cells. The side note is the big story: these companies have so much money and so many resources that they can experiment in all sorts of things that have nothing to do with the main business.

Meanwhile in New Mexico, a court fines Meta $25billion (with a B). No doubt this will be appealed and reversed. Many lawyers will be paid huge fees on all of this. Funny how that works, only the lawyers make money.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet. AI systems found a security flaw in PHP.

PPG makes paint, you know, that boring stuff. They know chemistry and coating things. PPG is making a mint on datacenters. Yet another company with employees supporting their families with jobs brought by industrial capacity, a.k.a., datacenters.

Meanwhile in Canada, they have a crime-stoppers database. It contains records of tips on crime, i.e., people who know something say something leading to the arrest of people. Yes, I am mentioning this because it was hacked with all the person information of those providing tips revealed. Don't connect it to the Internet!

Our Dept of Homeland Security will now be testing a heat-ray weapon for use at the souther border. Well, what could possibly go wrong? Lots of things.

Friday 23 October 2026

Meanwhile in Greece, ban teens from social media and provide age verification software. I am still not sure how you verify ages on the Internet. I guess you can fingerprint everyone and put fingerprint readers on all the machines. There are still ways to work around that. Oh well, good luck with all that.

Meanwhile in South Korea, hundred$ of Billion$ (with a B) being tossed about for datacenters. Consider these two news stories. Something tells me that South Korea will be far ahead of Greece in jobs, education, health care, and ... well, the list goes on.

Verification? Spotify thinks it has a plan for family verification.

New rules on investing in high tech in countries of concern (I like that term).

OpenAI lowers its valuation. It's still over a Trillion (with a Tr) dollars.

I didn't know we had an Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). Are they gonna change the name to SI instead of AI? I doubt it.

I'm not a big finance guy, so I don't understand all the words in this headline. It appears that some folks in the UAE invested $30Billion (with a B) into OpenAI. The numbers are astounding, at least to an old engineer from Sweetwater, Louisiana (don't look, you won't find it on a map).

Again, I don't understand all these finance terms, but these numbers are astounding.

Aha! Caught 'em. Someone finds 32 high-end Nvidia processors running on Chinese systems illegally. 32? That's not even a drop in the bucket. More like a little condensation on the outside of the bucket.

NASA fiddles around with the specific number of Starships needed to fuel one to go to the moon and back. Big picture: NASA still doesn't know what it is doing.

Same song, 99th verse (or something): some Google employees quit to protest the company having government contracts.

Quoting: Anthropic has launched Claude Duet, an AI agent aimed at professionals and small businesses that competes with Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.

Saturday 24 October 2026

Excellent essay from Seth Godin on meetings and their failures. The Chief Decision Officer can help immensely.

Meanwhile in Russia, the Ukrainians are having drones fly into Russia and destroy datacenters. This is industrial capacity and factories. In WWII, nations bombed the factories of other nations to cripple their capacity. Same thing today. Datacenters are factories and industrial capacity. Other nations love it when you block construction. You play into their trade-war hands.

Starlink (SpaceX, uh, Mr. Musk) is acquiring access to cellphone networks in an effort to become US' fourth major cellphone network.

One note from the PHP cyber security incident is that the PHP Foundation has one full-time employee and 14 volunteers. That is it. That is all.

Want to rent some computers from AWS next year? Sorry. It's all booked. They need more datacenters to power more industry.

Quoting from OpenAI: This post describes how we secure the environments that we use to train and evaluate frontier models. It appears they do create a testing environment. Given they have "rogue agents that escape," their testing environment isn't that good.

More reports on how global PC shipments have declined. This one cites a 21% drop. Many blame the rise in prices on components. That is one factor. Another is that computers last a long time. Another is that the apps that we used to run on the computer we now run elsewhere. The PC is more of a terminal than a computer.

Wired reviews the Ray-Ban and Meta smart glasses that have no camera, just a microphone as input. That eases the privacy concerns of some, but eliminates the vision benefits for those whose eyes don't work well.

I love this article. Wired found actual mechanical watches, you wind them, that sell for under $400. Great pieces of machinery.

The new ingenious apps people have created for the foldable iPhone. Great stuff.

Sunday 25 October 2026

Let's talk AI and business money. Outside the companies making AI, no one else is seeing greater profits and productivity.

Computer-based training has been around for decades. Before that, we had headphones and record players (33 1/3 rpm). Now some claim to use the latest software (AI). Of course these things work. Of course you can misuse them and falsely advertise great results. No news here, but folks at the New York Times don't have much else to do.

Block shows a new speech-to-speech AI system that was trained only on speech with no text involved. I guess this is useful for something. The application doesn't come to mind.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, Starshield is back up and running. Will we come to a day when two warring nations both use a tech from one company. That company will have the power to turn off all the weapons. Then the combatants will throw rocks at one another or something.

Here's a hobby project for a weekend. Buy 150 cheap bluetooth speakers ($10 each) and stack them up for a wall of sound. There are worse things to do over a weekend.

More anti-factory information from Wired. Don't want a factory in your town? Fine. Some other town will receive the economic benefits. A town doesn't have to give away everything to have a datacenter. Be smart. I guess that advice holds for just about everything. Be smart.