Using Chatbots Effectively for Learning and Research ... #1 BASICS

Last update: Thursday 4/23/26 7:25am

This is the first in a series of notes that will suggest effective strategies for using chatbots as tutors when you want to learn a new subject or as research assistants when you want to create your own solutions to problems. 

Like our Useful AI News page, these notes will be written for the benefit of computer savvy users who use chatbots to interact with large language models (LLMs) rather than write code to interact with the models via their APIs (application programming interfaces). 

Full text ➡ HERE

Amazon + Anthropic = Massive replacement of blue/white collar employees by robots/autonomous agents

Last update: Wednesday 4/15/26 13:38pm

Amazon recently announced its intentions to replace a high percentage of its blue collar staff with robots. In the same time frame, Anthropic, Amazon's genAI partner, reported that large enterprises will be able to realize substantial increases in their profits by replacing substantial segments of their white collar staff with Anthropic's autonomous agents. 

Full text ➡ HERE

REVISED: Pentagon vs. Anthropic -- Trump fires "Mad Dog" Dario

Last update: Monday 4/8/26

This final version of an evolving report explains how Anthropic induced the Pentagon to cancel a partnership that never should have occurred.  It retains much shorter versions of previous sections of the report that discredited plausible alternative explanations of the breakup. The revised report does not include a final section yet in order to give the editor more time to consider the disturbing implications of a possibility that he has been rejecting for the last five weeks.

Full text ➡ HERE

DARPA -- America's reliable source of game changing technology

Last update: Tuesday 3/10/26 12:38

DARPA identifies new technologies that could have dual use, then engages leading experts in our universities and other research institutions as consultants and/or contractors in a cluster of interrelated component projects, each of which develops selected aspects of the needed new technology. DARPA also alerts some production companies of its new tech from time to time and obtains their input as to how the new tech could be enhanced to achieve greater commercial success.

Full text ➡ HERE

Apple's iPhone as the prototype for China's future success via its dominance of rare earth processing

 Last update: Monday 3/8/26 11:05am

Deng Xiaoping, the 'father of modern China', implored his country's leaders in 1992 to greatly enhance its power by attaining a position of unchallengeable dominance of the world's markets rare earth elements (REEs).  Rare earths would be for China what oil was for the Middle East. Ever since then, China has been developing an ecosystem that is centered on its rare earth mining and processing assets. 

China's evolving ecosystem facilitated the phenomenal success that Steve Jobs achieved by locating the production of his visionary iPhone in China. In other words, China's successful production of Jobs' vision was a 'proof of concept' for Deng's vision. China's ecosystem would ensure that the iPhone's success would be a prototype for future success, not a never-to-be-repeated one-off. 

Full text ➡ HERE