I have not written for a number of weeks, and during that time I had several medical setbacks. At this point I am stabilized and working hard with physical therapy to regain my strength. Not that I am very strong yet, but I have decided to continue with a cruise which my wife and I booked two years ago.
This could be called a vacation, but I am calling it cruise therapy. As for therapy, I will be walking up and down the decks and hallways. They usually have some kind of exercise programs such as balance or muscle building. I will look into that on day one.
We will be flying to Seattle on Sunday, May 10th. The next day we will board Silver Nova. We will depart Seattle, Washington on Sunday, May 11th and cruise to Miami, Florida.
Our first stop will be on May 15 in San Diego, California. The next stop will be on May 18 at Cabo San Lucas (Bahia California Sur), Mexico. After four days at sea, we will stop at Puntarenas, Costa Rica. On the 25th of May, we will transit the Panama Canal. During the day going through the canal, we will celebrate our 58th anniversary. Next, we will spend two days in Cartagena, Colombia. We will arrive in Miami on the 31st. From Miami, we will fly home to Connecticut. There will be 13 days at sea.
We have taken our family on family cruises a few times and they are great. However, I would not call them relaxing. Kids are running around everywhere, doing cannonballs in the pool, and dropping ice cream cones on the deck. What we hear on Silversea is a soft clink of glasses and the occasional whisper of someone ordering another cappuccino. We have been on many different cruise lines. They are all great, but Silversea, in our opinion, is the best of them all.
The butlers with their long black tails are always there when you need them, and they anticipate what you might need, whether it be shoes shined or leaving a bottle of a certain kind of wine in the room, or offering meals to be brought in. Their service is superlative.
The Silversea feature I like most is everything is included. I mean everything. There is no tipping. Drinks are free and unlimited. Wi-Fi is provided by Starlink antennas on the upper level of the ship. The speed is great. Latency is minimal, and you can have multiple devices. All included.
As the cruise proceeds, I will share some pictures like I have from previous cruises.
In this section, I share what I am up to, pictures of the week, what is new in AI and crypto, and more.
t’s official: Tesla Full Self-Driving (Supervised) has now passed 10 billion miles of driving. Their Self-Driving computer has navigated nearly every driving scenario possible and continues to learn, adapt and improve on each additional drive. Doing this helps make sure every ride is safer for the Tesla owner and everyone else on the road. Supervised means keeping your hand on the wheel and your eyes on the road, but I feel comfortable with my Tesla doing the driving. AI is making it better and better.
I love to read books. All the books I have written and the books I have read are in profile. Feel free to view it here. My latest book is Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown. It is quite a thriller.
Here are a few of the more interesting AI headlines from this week, in plain language.
Anthropic had a huge week in finance and products, with reports that their annual revenue run rate jumped sharply while they deepened cloud and compute deals and rolled out new AI “agents” for financial services firms. These agents are designed to help banks with tasks like compliance and fraud detection, and they’re part of Anthropic’s push toward a major IPO.
OpenAI and other big labs continue to emphasize safety and oversight, with new safeguards around how AI systems respond in sensitive situations and fresh discussions about reorganizing their businesses more like holding companies to manage different hardware and robotics efforts. At the same time, governments are moving: the European Union finalized a broad deal on its AI Act, setting a 2027 deadline for high‑risk systems to comply and banning certain abusive uses such as some kinds of AI‑generated child exploitation content.
On the hardware and infrastructure side, Nvidia announced a multibillion‑dollar investment in a data‑center operator to secure capacity for running AI models, while chipmakers like SK Hynix report that big tech companies are effectively lining up and pre‑funding future memory chip supply to keep up with AI demand. Meanwhile, researchers continue to push more efficient AI: recent work claims up to 100‑fold energy savings by blending neural networks with more symbolic, logic‑style reasoning instead of brute‑force computation, a direction meant to tame AI’s growing electricity usage.