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: 2-8 March, 2020

Summary of this week:

• The coronovirus panic continues
• SxSW is cancelled
• Honeywell builds a quantum computer
• Tech jobs concentrating in fewer places
• Walmart to be the first 5G hubs
• Ampere shows an 80-core server processor
• SETI@home ceases operations after 21 years
• And we lose an hour of sleep this week changing from a four-month standard time to an eight-month special time

Monday 2 March 2020

The NY Times tries to summarize the week of panic in the tech industry due to the coronavirus. Seems that all these educated persons would have a better idea of what to do.

Apple had a good 2019 in the Indian market. Recent political changes, however, may reverse all that.

It seems that Washington state may have the greatest concentration of US persons with the coronavirus. That is good news for everyone else at movement from that place is relatively light.

Walmart, with all its physical location across the country, may become the early adopter and hub of 5G use. Go to Walmart to stream everything and then go home to watch it.

10,000 sign a petition to cancel SXSW. As of now, the event will go on.

With China locking everyone in the their homes, air pollution has dropped dramatically.

Over 3,200 Amazon delivery drivers will lose their jobs in the next two months. Amazon is firing some companies and hiring others. Perhaps the drivers themselves will be hired by the new winners.

Microsoft's GitHub will store code archives in an arctic vault. I guess in 100 years people will learn something from this.

Tuesday 3 March 2020

Apple to pay $500Million in a class action lawsuit over slow iPhones.

Facebook starts issuing reports on its censorship program. They call the bad guys "coordinated inauthentic behavior."

Users of Reddit are noting disinformation on the web. I guess good will come of this. "Hey, you know that isn't true."

Facebook and Twitter cancel their appearances at SXSW. The organizers of SXSW say they will continue as planned.

In case the store is all out of hand sanitizer in the you-know-what panic, here are some recipes to make your own. Of course, these ingredients are also probably not available.

Researchers at Google build a cheap, four-legged robot that taught itself to walk using a type of AI.

Google et al. are telling Silicon Valley employees to work from home.

The governors of China, in a never-end effort to prevent their subjects from saying anything negative, have created yet another law making it a crime to saw that the coronavirus is bad or something like that.

Nvidia moves their San Jose technology conference to online only due to you-know-what.

Wednesday 4 March 2020

Honeywell, of all companies, claims to built a top-of-the-line quantum computer.

Tech jobs in the US are increasingly concentrated in a small group of cities.

Google cancels their I/O Conference due to you-know-what.

HPE had a weak financial quarter.

Strong rumors about the next computers from Apple. The displays are becoming bigger.

For a limited time only, Google and Microsoft are making their conference tools free of charge. This is to allow more companies to cancel their conferences due to you-know-what.

It appears that the governors of China have a grip on the coronavirus there. Lock downs and other things they imposed on their subjects may have worked.

Silicon Valley big money is backing anyone but Sanders on the Democratic side. They have warmed a little to the current President and the good economy.

Thursday 5 March 2020

And IBM cancels its big, annual developer conference because of you-know-what.

Microsoft asks their employees on the west coast to work from home because of you-know-what.

Google is now doing job interviews online instead of fae to face because of—hate to keep repeating it—you-know-what.

In court we learn that the CIA used "123ABCdef" for its password to hide its hacking tools.

MIT study shows that fact checking stories often leads to the opposite result as intended.

Facebook provides some information about their AI tool they use to find and remove fake accounts. Censorship by algorithm.

British police scan 8,600 faces and arrest 1 person. Good news: the vast majority of us are just plain good folks. Bad news: wasting tax payers' money.

SETI@home ceases operation. For 21 years, they sent data to persons worldwide and used their unused CPU power to analyze data.

Simplicity in systems works well. This is why brevity and clarity are often found together in communications.

Ampere shows the first server processor that uses 64-bit data, is ARM based, and has 80 cores. For the last decade, all research should have been done on n-core and forget the specific number.

Friday 6 March 2020

Nvidia acqui-hires SwiftStack—an object storage software company.

AMD shows a new architecture for GPUs for data centers.

A drone boat does the tedious work of surveying underwater to find history in sunken ships.

Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang starts a non-profit to continue his ideas on universal basic income.

The governors of Santa Clara County in California ask the big employers (guess who?) to not have employees travel and not have "mass gatherings."

Google's DeepMind releases predictions about the spread of coronavirus. They skipped some peer review steps due to the seriousness of the event. Let's hope that skipping steps won't be a mistake.

TCL shows several fold-able and roll-able phones.

Microsoft releases PowerShell 7.

RedHat cancels their annual Summit. It will be free to watch online.

One of the better commentaries I've seen on the coronavirus.

Monitors continue to grow in size and fall in price. Here is a 43" monitor for around $500.

Elon Musk wants to build a Starship every week and settle Mars with 1,000 of them. Perhaps some good will come of this enthusiasm. Why the infatuation with Mars? There are better places to go.

Saturday 7 March 2020

Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter pledge to pay support staff who are paid hourly wages even though they are not needed since the regular staff is working from home. These are publicly owned companies. Stockholders are paying for this.

The Mayor of Austin, Texas declares an emergency and cancels SxSW.

A German company makes faking face ID harder to fake by detecting live skin. This beats the idea of hold a photo in front of the camera.

Our government indicts two persons whose jobs were to indict those government persons who were breaking the law. This goes around in some kind of circle. Trust loses.

The gig economy, a.k.a., part-time jobs suffers the most in the coronavirus panic. Stay home, no work, and no pay, but wash you hands.

"For most freelancers, the hard part isn’t doing the work–it’s being tricked into believing that they have to be the lowest bidder to succeed."—Seth Godin

"The coronavirus panic is dumb"—Elon Musk

Seth Godin on the possible end of the handshake. There are places where hugs are the norm. Will that die as well?

The attempt at rescuing Barnes & Noble. Run the stores better. More local decisions. Simply do it right for a change.

Fascinating story of how the plutocrats were using Clearview AI and its recognition of just about anyone's face long before law enforcement hired Clearview.

Sunday 8 March 2020

Last night we had one less hour of sleep or something like that. Most of us dislike this "change your clocks" thing. Sigh. Someone could write an encyclopedia on this subject.

I like this one: the 1-50 rule. What can you do in one day that will provide 50% of the product?

The return of cursive writing. It is almost considered as special as calligraphy once was.

Someone in the Utah state government hired an AI company to gather data from all the state's data feeds and analyze it to learn something. Someone presumed a lot of trust in all this.

A power plant in New York State is consuming 15MegaWatts of its own power to run computers and mine Bitcoins.

Smartphones need a new name to let us know that they are start-of-the-art cameras with a phone attached to them.

In North Korea, the government employs hackers to ... what else? Steal money from everyone else. Its the Communist way, right? Somewhere along the line of history this all turned upside down.

A study shows that among the more-popular browsers Edge is the one that sends the most of your information back to companies.

Yet another list of which programming lanauges are the most popular. Pascal is on the list. A smile comes to my face.

A reporter tries Panera's unlimited coffee subscription at $9 a month. Few want to drink bad coffee at any price.

Some thoughts on how Satya Nadella changed the culture at Microsoft. First, he had to accept the truth that most employees had accepted that working at Microsoft was a dog-eat-dog proposition.

At least someone understands that living on Mars would be horrific. Why go there?

Strong rumors about the next computers coming from Apple. That is if we are brave enough to have a mass gathering in the face of you-know-what.

Some deeper thoughts on travel writing.

An exercise in finding writing exercises in a good pieces of writing, e.g., a good novel. I find the Holy Bible to be an excellent source. It is, after all, a perennial best seller.

A post about proofreading for pay. It is a freelance side job that works if you, like me, want to make some money from home in semi-retirement.

Finding ideas for writing and "writer's block." "I dare you to try to tell a newspaper editor that you can’t finish your story because you have writer’s block."

How one writer gave up on blogging and was able to move into freelance writing for companies to earn a living.

Earning a living as a writer? Have a company hire you to write their materials. Shooting for the best-selling novel? Good luck, but don't expect luck to come through for you.

Six tips to being able to write more in the same amount of time. I love the one about taking notes all the time.

The concept of knowing how much time is required to write something. This answers the #2 most-important question of work: when'll ya' be done?

Stuck? Not sure what to write right now? Here are seven exercises to begin.

Going back over the idea of passive and active voice.

Basic tips for better writing. If you haven't tried these yet, do so now.

Troubled about what to do next? Pretend that today is tomorrow.