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: 1-7 June, 2026

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Big announcements from Computex from Nvidia and everyone
• Microsoft jumps in with new computer hardware powered by Nvidia
• AI continues to be THE NEWS
• Government and AI: public become part owners?
• Government and AI: Presidential National Security Memorandum

Monday 1 June 2026

This story is all over as Jensen Huang spoke at Computex. Quoting this headline: Nvidia Says Anthropic, OpenAI Among Users of New Vera Chip

Our military runs a hackathon called Operation Jailbreak. Integrate disparate systems now. It is about time we did something that made sense.

The Atlantic looks at Pangram. That is the gold standard tool for detecting AI writing vs. human writing. Pangram claims a 1 in 10,000 false positive rate. Pretty good, except when there 100,000,000 pieces of writing and ... well people get sued.

Nvidia shows DGX Station for Windows. No price given, this is coming real soon now. This is a super duper computer on the desktop.

And here is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduces the RTX Spark laptop. Also coming real soon now and also no prices announced. They will use the N1X CPU from Nvidia.

And more Nvidia and Microsoft and Windows. Quoting: Today at NVIDIA GTC, Microsoft and NVIDIA announced the world's most powerful and efficient thin-and-light Windows PCs ever. Accelerated by NVIDIA RTX Spark,

Meanwhile just a short flight away from Computex in China, the regulators claim more power. They can do that there as the regulators are the Communist Party and China is, well, you know, a one-party place.

AI adoption and the J Curve. I prefer the chaos change model from Satir and Weinberg.

Meanwhile in Iran, they also have access to all these chattering bots and they use them. Those folks aren't stupid. Again, all this current slate of AI systems reminds me of the push to control cryptography systems decades ago.

Dell shows a $599 version of the XPS 13.

A new desalinization technique comes from research.

Quoting the title: The social contract of writing. Another quote: Anything written after November 30, 2022 is to some degree affected by the proliferation of LLMs. (That is the birthdate of ChatGPT.) If you want to read and read and read things neither written nor affected by the chattering bots, try The Holy Bible. It is also quite enriching and life changing.

Dean Wesley Smith with some thoughts on making money through copyrights and licenses and long-term writing.

And more from Smith about writing to make a living. Writing an hour a day won't make a living. Writing four hours a day is a starter if maintained for five or so years. It takes time and effort. Yes, there is a person here or there who writes one book and is set for life. That person is not me and not you either.

Thoughts on writer's block. Perhaps that is the wrong name. Funny how writers, who are supposed to have many words, pick the wrong words to describe a lack of writing. Something like that.

Maybe the better social media promotion for a writer is to stick to writing and forget about social media promotion.

Sometimes other people write, or have written, the same book you are writing. Keep writing. Keep writing. Keep writing.

Tuesday 2 June 2026

Rumors on Apple's grand strategy for smart glasses.

More information on the aftermath and effects of the Blue Origin rocket disaster.

A applaud this: stop wasting time on job interviews. Bring candidates onto the job, pay them for a week, and experience how it works. Of course this won't work in government jobs, but nothing works there.

And yet, short-sighted managers create ways to not experience people on the job.

The concept of slowing processes when they should slow. Someone calls this old idea by a new name --- backpressure. Call it something.

Someone understands the role of AI. Quote: focusing on the technology itself doesn't accomplish much. You need to have a product. Coca Cola can use AI for many things. Their job, however, remains to make, market, and ship soft drinks.

More common sense. Who cares if a humanoid robot can dance or flip. Crack an egg. Pick up a child. Scrub a pan.

OpenAI releases a report titled: The Next Era of Knowledge Work, How Codex is helping people navigate the complexity of modern work This goes to the low-code and no-code concept. It also highlights the mechanical and repetitive nature of what knowledge work became.

Meanwhile in China, more censorship. The Communist Party of China had practiced censorship for decades. They are pretty good at it.

Also in China, research labs want Nvidia's processors despite the Communist Party attempting to block imports.

AI is already hitting the wallet of IT consultant firms.

Big tech is hiring the BA and MA crowd as it seeks to understand people better than the average programming nerd understands people.

HPE reports a good financial quarter.

The value of IBM's stock is rising steadily and rapidly.

Anthropic files papers to begin an IPO in 2026.

Never missing a chance to grab someone else's money, Bernie Sanders has a plan to take the money from AI companies and use it towards what he deems best.

Another jobs boost from datacenters. The return of the night watchman and other security guards. Not great jobs in some respects, but job$ that pay and support families. Folks, it's not about wealth, it is about families and income security and home.

With the AI wealth boom comes the private clubs. Yet another job-related outcome. No, I am not in a private club. Yes, I understand the desire-ment.

Perhaps it is remote work, not AI that is hurting entry-level jobs. There is some thought here. Entry-level employees need to be around older employees to learn "how it's done here." With remote work becoming practical, the young employees don't have that learning.

Wednesday 3 June 2026

A couple of quotes from this piece: Nvidia Introduces First PCs Designed for AI Agents. And of course: PCs with the new chip will be targeted at the premium end of the market. So they will co$t a lot.

Perplexity claims a new idea for searching they call Search as Code.

Intel claims that its next AI chip, coming real soon now, and will perform better at less power and much more goodness.

Google promises to do good things at the datacenters per water usage.

GitLab shrinks its staff (350 jobs or 14%) and exits 22 countries.

The governors of India want to advance in AI but they, like many, don't have the datacenters.

Some numbers from the global market: ChatGPT has a billion monthly active users while Claude has 56million (with an m). That is a huge difference in market share. Claude use, however, is growing fast -- very fast.

Palo Alto Networks reports a big financial quarter.

Quoting the headline: Marvell shares closed up 32.52% on Tuesday after Jensen Huang hailed the chipmaker as the next trillion-dollar company at Computex

Microsoft partners with the Mayo Clinic to build AI systems based on the clinic's data. Let's go back to calling these knowledge-based systems instead of AI since that is closer to being literally correct.

Microsoft announces the Agent Control Specification. This is supposed to help developers speak the same language about agents and what the agents can do.

Quoting the headline: Microsoft announces seven AI models, including a reasoning one and an ultra efficient coding one fine-tuned for GitHub, for businesses and to lower its costs. Everyone wants in the act right now.

I like this idea. Perplexity announces that its Personal Computer system will keep sensitive data on local models and other work on cloud computers.

Microsoft announces new computer hardware that is really super duper computers. No prices announced. Coming real soon now. These are powered by Nvidia high-end processors. This is real compute power sitting on the kitchen table.

Our President signs an executive order on AI. It bears little resemblance to the EO discarded a couple weeks ago.

Mathematicians sign something called the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. This link is one place to obtain the original document.

Thursday 4 June 2026

Microsoft Scout: an executive assistant. Now we are getting somewhere. Software that does something useful.

And Microsoft Project Solara: again, something that does something useful.

Meanwhile in China, they continue to take small steps towards reusable rocket boosters.

Creating new jobs as a tech company from the use of AI.

Meta learns that educated and skilled people don't like to be tracked. Meta also learns that most of their employees are educated and skilled.

Kent Beck: We're accumulating code faster than we are accumulating trust.

Our current President moves about 8,000 GS-15 and above into the real world. All jobs are temporary -- not guaranteed regardless of performance.

Thoughts on datacenters in orbit. Well, let's see it work.

Quoting the headline: SpaceX wins a property tax exemption for its planned $55B Terafab chip facility in Texas, despite Texans threatening legal action These things usually don't work out for taxpayers.

Anthropic is about to open itself to public investors. Well, now we shall see the man behind the curtain.

I like this piece. It introduces despotification. Mr. you-know-them, the celebrity founder CEOs from Altman to Zuckerburg, accumulate power and ruin everything.

Google introduces their AI Edge Gallery for macOS. Run on your powerful Apple computer.

Meanwhile online, government agencies claim that China's Communist Party is flooding social media platforms with fake people. These fake people then target US military and civilian employees to gain national security advantage.

Back and forth: YouTube overtakes Netflix in average daily viewing globally. YouTube and Netflix? What happened to CBS, NBC, and ABC? An old man wonders. And what happened to Warner Brothers and all those folks?

Finally, recursive self-improvement. Surely these guys have been working on this before now.

Quoting the headline: The US data center build-out is falling behind schedule; JP Morgan says 60%+ of data center capacity planned for completion in 2027 isn't yet under construction Concrete and steel don't move as fast as bits on a disk drive. Elon Musk learned that lesson at Tesla.

Quoting: While much of the PC industry faces challenges, Apple's MacBook Neo is showing strong momentum. The lower-cost notebook has attracted more buyers than expected, People like a good bargain.

Friday 5 June 2026

The numbers of arbitrarily large for the SpaceX IPO. They are all bigger than anything before.

Ah, AI agents that run a business for you. There is little new in these ideas, but if you call it an AI agentic agent thing ...

The damage was less than feared and Blue Origin vows to resume New Glenn flights by year's end.

Meanwhile in China, where folks do what the Party tells them to do, workers let the cameras watch and record them working to compile data and train robots.

It's about time, Microsoft brings more Unix command-line utilities to Windows.

Google says its new model will run on any computer that has 16GB of memory. We shall see.

Someone has a grasp on reality. Quoting: Weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It's nothing but weights. And toss in some linear algebra. That's all it is, folks.

Quoting the headline: Starlink says that it has 12M+ active customers across 160+ countries, territories, and other markets, up from 9M in December 2025

It appears that software running around the Internet has surpassed people running around the Internet. The machine is keeping the machine busy enough to cause buying more machine so that ... wait, this goes around in a circle. Did someone think this through?

Anthropic, who has already made its money, is calling for everyone trying to make money to slow down. Nothing new here. The established create barriers to entry.

Oh, and by the way, Anthropic is running recursive self-improvement as fast as it can before the regulations arrive.

School districts claim, in court, that social media companies are undermining education. Well, gotta' find some excuse for falling test scores.

Meanwhile in Arizona, the regulators are working tirelessly to ensure that datacenters pay their fair share for electricity. Well, those billionaires who created all those jobs gotta' be fair, you know, huh.

The mainstream media's campaign to sour Americans on leading the world in technology is working.

Amazon updates its warehouse robots, nothing more than little platforms that roll around and lift pallets, to respond to spoke English instructions.

Saturday 6 June 2026

So much for, "Know that AI wrote that. I can tell."

In the same vein, "And over time, that creates this bizarre situation where people start mistaking centuries-old writing techniques for evidence that somebody secretly outsourced their article to a chatbot."

Quoting one person who never uses AI because, "I enjoy doing all of the things that AI automates."

Let's cut the glee about humanoid robots. Quoting: Maybe the robot can pour a glass of wine, but can it pour it out of any bottle and into any glass in any environment? That's actually a lot harder than having a robot do a backflip in one stage demo.

Quoting: There is no getting around the fact that, in the last year, code has gotten much cheaper to create. And if all you need is code, just chat it. The trouble is, code is rarely all you need in the real world.

Quoting: The wealth of the future is controlled by the countries and companies who control the physical bottlenecks of AI. As I wrote last week, "Hardware is the new software" Factories that make semiconductors are like the WWII factories that made ball bearings.

Satya Nadella of Microsoft has a good grasp of reality in business. Microsoft has its business. It will do well as long as it focuses on its core.

Upon closer inspection, Meta's latest glasses have the technologies to recognize and label the faces the wearer sees. This isn't offered as a feature, yet. And Meta, could simply be collecting data on everyone who encounters a wearer.

Have you used an app lately? Have you had a chattering bot use the app for you? I have done the latter. Instead of reading a Word docx into word and exporting it as a PDF, I drug the docx into the chattering bot and told it to convert to PDF. Instead of using pandoc to convert just about anything to just about anything, I told the chattering bot to do it. I suspect the chattering bot called pandoc and ... poof.

Shield AI is attempting to build a leading-edge autonomous drone for the military. They are having plenty of problems.

Let's have the public become part owners of AI companies. Profits would then be funneled through the government to be disbursed to the public. I think this is what buying stock in a company already does only without the gross government inefficiency.

Our President signs a National Security Memorandum on AI and national defense.

A one-day drop in the stock value of US semiconductor makers. Time to buy.

The legislature of New York says, "We don't want datacenters!" I am sure that tech companies will abide by those wishes and create jobs in other states. And were there any planned in New York? This is what politicians often do: just stand on stage and make meaningless gestures. All the while, other folks do real things.

Sunday 7 June 2026

Microsoft and Mac users with Word etc. are about to collide.

Meanwhile in Europe, the governors pledge to remove dependence on American software.

And still in Europe, everyone is praising Ukraine's quick climb in AI and robotics in warfare. Still I question, "If Ukraine is so smart, why are the Russians still in their country?"

Quoting: The secondary market for decades old, low-tech John Deere tractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix Well, forward to the past.

New Jersey just lost a thousand jobs to Texas.

Google will pay SpaceX about a Billion $$$ a month for compute power.

It seems the Internet is buzzing about OpenAI turning ChatGPT into a super app (whatever that is).

And changes are in progress at LinkedIn with paid celebrity influencers doing what they do.

Raspberry Pi continues to do well financially. The greatest education project in the history of history. The founders should be awarded the Nobel or be knighted by the king or something.

How a corporation holds sway over contract workers who are not legally its employees. It is a free market. There are laws and lawyers.

Meanwhile here in Virginia, gun sales have doubled over last year due to our new Governor's firearm bans coming up. Those laws will be declared unconstitutional eventually and the meaningless defense will waste taxpayers' dollars. Well, given all that, the folks who make and sell firearms are having a jolly old good time.

A report on all the electric power being used by datacenters. Folks, not all datacenters are for AI. Does anyone remember cloud computing? Gosh, that seems like ancient history.

Believe it or not... less-expensive electric vehicles are selling better than luxury models. Believe it or not... this surprises some folks whose birth certificates label them as adults.

UC Berkeley reports a jump up in failing grades in computer science classes. The students use AI to do their assignments and then fail exams because... well, because they don't know the right answers. Also, a fall in math skills doesn't help the students, either.