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: 18–24 January, 2021

Summary of this week:

• Shortage of integrated circuits worldwide
• Synthetic cornea restores sight
• Joe Biden is inaugurated in front of an eerily tiny crowd
• Raspeberry Pi releases a $4 Pico controller
• Virgin Orbit puts satellites into orbit
• Alphabet cancels the Loon balloon project
• Jack Ma re-emerges

Monday 18 January 2021

Predictions that AI will replace IT jobs in ten years. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Around and around it goes at GitHub. They now want to rehire the person they fired for using the word "Nazi." Adult are supposed to be able to say words.

First toilet paper, now integrated circuits. Makers have fallen behind in the year of the virus.

It appears that earlier predictions that "the virus will disappear the day Mr. Biden becomes President" underestimated the Democratic Party. This is a crisis that cannot be let go. It provides all sorts of opportunities for expanding the state.

China, the originator of the virus, is the only country to grow its gross domestic product, i.e., their economy is booming.

Tech workers appear to be leaving San Francisco. Rent is down, but it was an unbelievable levels.

And 1 in 14 of us caught the virus this year. How does that compare to other viruses in other years?

As the days pass, we see more persons saying, "Well, maybe it isn't such a good idea for a few companies to be able to censor people." This is just one of those things written by those persons.

Tuesday 19 January 2021

The Return of the Regulators. Big tech readies for more regulation from a Democratic administration. Again, real news that is not news. How long will it be before we hear, "Well, we didn't like his antics, but we liked his policies."

The VLC media player now runs natively on Apple's M1 processors.

Wear a smartwatch, detect COVID before you know you have it. Cashing in on a relatively short-lived virus.

This is real news, this is real technology, this is real science. A 78-year-old blind man recovers his sight with a synthetic cornea implant. Forget all the nonsense in the mainstream media and out of the enlightened districts. This is science.

It has always been a joke to add "what year?" to predictions. Well, no longer funny. Dr. Fauci—our leading expert who follows in the footsteps of prior leading experts by being wrong more often than not—says we can sing in church in mid-autumn of 2021. We were told that would happen in 2020. oooops. And it is so nice for a government regulator to tell us how we can practice religion.

It appears that Microsoft Teams records a lot of stuff and tracks the users.

This is not science as there is no explanation. It is merely a reporting of facts in the UK where the threshold to be admitted to a hospital is what happens in the UK only. 30% of those hospitalized by COVID return to the hospital in five months. 12% of those hospitalized by COVID die within five months.

Wine 6.0 (recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator) is released.

Expect products with WiFi 6E in the coming months. Better bandwidth, better everything.

Wednesday 20 January 2021

Mr. Biden is to become President of the United States today.

Qualcomm has a small update to its Snapdragon line of processors for smartphones.

You would think the folks at Facebook wanted higher profits—being silly folks, of course they want higher profits. That is what for-profit businesses do.

Our President—Mr. Trump still is the President—makes it a bit more difficult for foreign actors to use US cloud computing to hack the US.

Jack Ma emerges from  somewhere. He is still with the living.

An interview with Dries Buytaert, who started Drupal 20 years ago.

Brave (a browser) is the first to implement IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). This is a different approach to using the Internet in which files are accessed in a decentralized approach. There is more privacy and perhaps faster performance.

Forward to the past: some PCs are generating so much heat these days that they are keeping folks warm during the winter. This used to happen back in the tube-technology days.

"Tolerance doesn’t mean permitting behavior that undermines the community. In fact, it requires that we put the community first. Instead, it’s a willingness to focus on contribution instead of compliance."—Seth Godin

Microsoft joins with GM and Cruise in $2Billion deal for cloud computing and autonomous vehicle technology.

Social media company MeWe adds 2.5million users in a week. The next Parler? Prime to be banned? Proceed with caution.

Planting trees—lots of them. A pretty good idea.

Thursday 21 January 2021

Our current President signs executive order reversing the executive orders of our prior President. It seems I've seen this before.

Amazon continues its moves to become part of the Biden administration. Somewhere, someone at Walmart is rejoicing.

Cute trick. The US Digital Service made a new White House website. Hidden in the HTML is a "help wanted" ad from them.

Come real soon now to a laptop near us, Samsung is producing OLED displays for laptops.

Intel has struggled in manufacturing its designs the past few years. Now Intel outsources some of this to TSMC.

Friday 22 January 2021

Our President's plan for COVID. As expected, it expands the role of government. What is disappointing to me is the lack of science from people who keep saying, "Follow the science."

Our portable computers will have "taller" screens this year.

Raspberry Pi releases the $4 Pico. The real news is that the Raspberry Pi folks are designing their own processors now.

Parler loses in first court battle with Amazon. I'll leave the commentary—and there is much on which to comment here—to others.

Intel has a better-than-expected financial quarter. This is one of those mistakes by estimators wherein no one is fired for making a mistake.

IBM has a worse-than-expected financial quarter. They aren't moving to cloud computing and machine learning fast enough.

Google (Alphabet) cancels its Loon project of building high-altitude balloons that would bring broadband service to isolated areas.

One of the arrested vandals blames our prior President for her crimes. Well, you can't expect people to take personal responsibility, can you? Huh?

The party of our President also blames social media companies for the Capitol vandalism. Again, we can't expect personal responsibility for personal actions, can we?

Our President signs an order providing "a federally guaranteed right to refuse employment that will jeopardize their health, and if they do so, they will still qualify for unemployment insurance." I trust they have thought this through to its logical conclusion.

A simple technical project: use the voice recordings of someone who has died as the voice of a chatbot on computers. Good idea? Perhaps not.

The NY Times et al have chided Americans into keeping kids indoors during the year of the virus. Now the same group chides American for not have the housebound kids do the approved indoor activities, like reading the NY Times et al. It must be nice to be appointed to the role of parental advisor for a nation.

Saturday 23 January 2021

Strong rumors that Apple will bring back card slots to its laptops. Coupled with the return of the mag-safe power plug, it appears that Apple admitted its mistake of removing all ports and requiring "dongles."

The big tech companies spent about 20% more in lobbying Washington D.C. in 2020 than 2019. Mark one more industry that had it good in the year of the virus: Congress.

The “school-in-a-box” server is coming in an effort to avoid Internet censorship and Internet blackouts around the world.

The 25th James Bond film is delayed again as the reaction in the year of the virus has shuttered movie theaters.

An employee of the ADT home security company watched home dwellers having sex etc. He did this 9,600 times over the years. Secure? Private? Really?

The Defense Intelligence Agency has been buying location data on American citizens to conduct investigations. DIA lawyers believe this is a legal loophole in Federal law.

Research in how to board airliners faster and with more safety. Alas, these things go no where as persons on all sides resist.

Folks post pictures of all the folks at the Capitol vandalism. It appears there was little thought in this exercise as one of the outcomes is that a "fair trial" becomes almost impossible with this type of pre-trial publicity.

Sunday 24 January 2021

Once again, we witness a fundamental weakness in supervised learning: the training data can contain things that embarrass one way or another on one day or another.

This is a somber article about the Wuhan virus (without naming it) and the past year. Still, the author writes that 20% of deaths are in the US. How can an educated person quote such nonsense? The numbers themselves testify that the numbers are just plain silly.

Larry King dies at 87.

Some encouraging news about the current virus vaccines, with a reminder that the experts are usually wrong.

Chrome 88 is released.

Thoughts on focus and writing something worth writing.

Thoughts on becoming a freelance writer and what success might be for each person.

Perhaps now that we have a different person as President, we can stop with the "how can I possibly write while the world is so horrible?" stories.

The "beta reader," i.e., someone who will (at no charge) read you yet-to-be-published book and comment on it.

The future of being a freelance writer or a freelance anything. Coming laws from a Democratic Congress and President could make everyone an employee. Great, huh? Well, not really. A magazine will only print articles from employees. Printing my article will make me an employee, and I become too expensive. Hence, they will only print articles written by a few full-time employees.

The struggle to "be noticed" with what I write. Search engine optimization (SEO) has always been touted as the secret. Perhaps. Perhaps not.