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: 27 April-3 May, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Tests show that AMD processors surpass Intel's in some respects
• DJI updates its Mavic Air personal drone
• Quarterly financial reports arrive with tech companies doing great

Monday 27 April 2020

It is Monday, which is always a slow day, and with the Wuhan virus there is almost nothing in the news other than the world is about to end.

In Israel, the Supreme Court rules that tracking people by their cell phone for public health needs a bit of scrutiny. Governments worldwide are rushing into this idea. I am happy to see that some persons are wanting to slow the rush.

The government of Australia releases its form of tracking the innocent until they do something wrong. The government of Germany, having been blemished by events of the last century, is a little slower on this.

Our Geological Survey has released a new map of our moon with greater detail of the ups and downs of its surface.

We already have reports that the rush for everyone to build ventilators was...well, money not well spent.

AMD vs Intel: tests show that AMD is not winning most of the time in performance. The situation is more complex, however, as once again the buyer must consider their own factors and decide what is important to them.

And we have this story in which economists from the World Bank suggest that governments (spending someone else's money) should pay people to do stay-at-home jobs. Don't ask for isolation, pay for it.

Tuesday 28 April 2020

The rich get richer. While tens of millions lose their jobs, a handful of tech companies are roaring economically.

DJI updates its Mavic Air personal drone with a better camera and more flight time. $799 buys loads of fun.

Construction companies and others are increasing their monitoring of workers to prove that they are abiding by new regulations. Otherwise, they have to shut down.

Strong rumors that Apple is delaying production of its next iPhone by at least a month.

I like Seth Godin's thoughts on being bored and spurring forward motion.

While some states are easing stay-at-home regulations, the San Francisco Bay Area pushes the orders to the end of May for 7 million residents.

It appears that Oxford University is in the lead of the race to create a coronavirus vaccine.

Wednesday 29 April 2020

Oracle becomes the cloud computing home for Zoom. Money flows readily.

Google's CEO announces that no one will return to the office until June 1 and then return a few at a time.

Alphabet (Google) has a good financial quarter.

AMD has a good financial quarter.

Google has its own teleconferencing service called Meet. They are gaining 3million new users everyday. That is a large number, and it is larger than it was a couple of weeks ago.

Google's Cloud computing services rose 52% year-over-year this past quarter. Money rolls in.

Not everyone is doing great this financial quarter. See, for example, restaurants, movie theaters, et al.

Not everyone is doing great this financial quarter. Ford motor company, for example, lost a few Billion$$$.

Thursday 30 April 2020

Mixing law enforcement with health care. Please proceed with caution.

Microsoft has a good financial quarter.

Microsoft Teams has 75million daily active users. The definition of success has changed.

Facebook has a good financial quarter.

During the great virus panic of 2020, people go to Facebook. Three billion people have used it in April.

Clarity we may not want: Canon has software so that we can use a good camera for our online meetings. Maybe we don't want others to see us that clearly.

“The expansion of shelter-in-place, or as we call it, forcibly imprisoning people in their homes, against all their constitutional rights, is, in my opinion, breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong, and not why people came to America and built this country...”—Elon Musk

Friday 1 May 2020

We now have the Raspberry Pi High-Quality Camera. At $50, this is quite impressive. This product is not for everyone.

Microsoft renames its Visual Studio Online to Visual Studio Codespaces and drops the price of this online code editor.

Amazon has a good financial quarter.

Apple has a good financial quarter. Their profits are about one billion$$$ a week.

Amazon tells its west coast office employees to work from home until October.

Twitter's financial quarter was mixed as it has millions of new users, but is still not profitable.

NASA awards three commercial contracts to do something related to putting persons on the moon in 2024. Each company has its own concept of how to land on the moon. Perhaps something will come of the $1billion being spent.

Saturday 2 May 2020

OpenAI has trained a network to write new pop songs. Clever stunt. Perhaps something here will come to something useful.

May Day, what some persons used to call the International Worker's Day, brought some coronavirus versions of the blue flu to Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, FedEx, Target, and Walmart.

The hunt for common sense in artificial intelligence. This is becoming more difficult as "common" becomes less common.

We are all using these video conference things on the Internet. And these things are collecting lots of information about us. We obtain what we buy. No cost tools mean...well, what do you think?

Yet another person shows how to make medical equipment for far lower cost than the current devices used by medical professionals. This thing with the ventilators will fill warehouses with things that we will not need next year.

Schneier on those new "contact tracing" apps for phones: "The idea that contact tracing can be done with an app, and not human health professionals, is just plain dumb."

Thoughts on the future of telecommuting given the events of 2020.

Sunday 3 May 2020

Slow news continues. The world has nothing to do but moan about a situation we created. The null set implies the universal set, and once in the universal set, there is no exit.

Obtain the Jupyter notebooks for a famous AI course from github. No cost.

Now that many of us have been working from home for weeks, some organization become serious about ensuring that we are actually working. Turn on the web cams and keyboard monitors. Trust?

Once again we hear how difficult it is to hire good design engineers (for the low salary that we wish to pay them). What we lack are independently wealthy persons who go to college and can design because they think it is a good way to spend their time while they spend their inherited money.

The playful technique to writing. It works for some writers on some occasions.

"Most people who aren’t writers really hate writing. Once I realized how much most of my clients hated writing, I realized how much leverage I had among business owners who needed content, but didn’t want to do it themselves." Good point. If you like to write and can do it well, there are plenty of people who want to meet you.

The idea of using formatting to have key points pop at the reader. I works.

How one writer produces two novels a year. One goal (she has many) is 1,000 words a day. That gives 150,000 words in five months—a novel. 1,000 words can be written in an hour. (40 words-a-minute (not fast typing) is 2,400 words an hour)

The Puzzle-Piece Plotting ploy. (enough Ps) Okay, take what you know. Put it on the page or screen. Now you something to connect. Fill in the gaps with other puzzle pieces.

Author Jack London and the notebook. His never left his side. Never.

More journal writing. It is one of the few things that I recommend everyone do.

I like this expression of an idea: don't write what you know, use what you know—The goal shouldn’t be to WRITE what you know, but to USE what you know. So you know what it’s like to be somewhere where you’re SUPPOSED to be enjoying yourself, and you know the odd shame you feel when you are not: when the night isn’t living up to the perhaps unreasonable standards you had for it. Okay, now set that party in Nazi Germany. See now? You USED what you KNEW, but you gave it FLAIR. You gave the reader a reason to give a crap.

"Writing isn’t for me. It’s for the reader. It belongs to the reader."

I like this. Someone has described what most of us are experiencing on Zoom and Teams and all those other video chat things we're using now.