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: 26 July - 1 August
Coming out of the year of the virus, we are buying cars, driving, and looking for parking spaces.
People have always hired other people to help them "spread the news." The "news" didn't have to be "true." Nothing new here.
I love this post from Seth Godin on how we teach arithmetic (badly) and math (could be much better).
We are now manipulating the RNA in food crops. I hope we know what we are doing.
....eSports sort of appeared at the Tokyo Olympics this year. It will be there again.
New technology, same old practice: change evidence to get a conviction. This is bad for all of us. Someone in the public employ lies. The public loses. There should be a higher standard and a higher pay. Public employees will take the higher pay, but not the higher standard.
Intel will begin making chips for Qualcomm. Intel plans to catch TSMC by 2025. We shall see.
Tesla finally becomes profitable---even without those carbon credit payments.
Folks are not watching the Tokyo Olympics. A era has passed.
.....A lot of financial reports are in and they are good for most tech companies.
AMD's second quarter revenue doubled over last year's.
Alphabet had a record financial quarter as YouTube ads hit $7Billion.
Apple had a record financial quarter with big Mac and iPad sales.
At Microsoft, Xbox hardware sales spike 172%.Whoosh, ka-jing, money.
At LinkedIn, they have their first $10Billion year.
And the prolonged year of the virus was good for those who steal data for profit.
Some sort of perspective on tech and the virus. At Google, they make about 1 1/2 billion $$$ profit every week. I know Google didn't start the virus. I know that, but gosh, these numbers after the virus are so big I find myself wondering.
Our CDC reverses again and calls for a return to masks for everyone.
.....The prolonged year of the virus was very good to Samsung. No links here, but the same is true for PayPal, Qualcomm, Facebook, and the list goes on. While we are at it. The year was good financially for me. The same is true for most of us who worked from home and didn't miss a paycheck. I am rich as are all who did the same work from home bit. The year benefited the haves and hurt all our neighbors who didn't have. It is like the whole think was arranged by the rich to push the not rich further away into their not rich communities. We chose to do this.
Twitter re-opened some offices two weeks ago. Now they are closing them again.
I am compelled to write something about the CDC and the glorified position that Americans have given to them. CDC says jump, we jumped. CDC says rest, we rested. CDC says jump again, we jumped again. This is something we chose to do. Americans are good at heart. We want to help. We want to be good neighbors. We comply for the good of our neighbors. I hope at some point we think about what we are doing. Our actions to help some of our neighbors have irreparably harmed some of our other neighbors.
And I am lost on the rationale of some I see on television. They marched with black lives matter because the government misbehaved and lied. They lost faith in the government. Then someone else in government says jump and they jump without question. We must believe the experts in the government. But you just marched because the government cannot be trusted and now you disparage those who say, "I don't trust the government." Someone please educate me on how rational, thinking adults reach these conclusions.
OpenAI proposes a new language "Triton" for programming GPUs. They claim it is much easier to use (looks like it) and has the same level of performance as the specialized languages we currently use. We shall see.
Google also invokes a vaccination mandate.
.....Motorola updates its line of smartphones in Europe.
Time passes---original Kindle readers will now fail as the 3G cellphone system goes away.
Increased hacking (ransonware) leads to increased demand for those who know how to stop hacking. The key question is will the new employers listen to those who know what they are doing?
Intel continues to push into the concept of the modular, you-can-upgrade-it gaming computer.
Big tech CEOs continue to advocate for pro-immigration laws and regulations. Regardless of opinion on the politics, let's not forget that more immigrants mean more possible employees which means larger labor force and lower wages. These CEOs have a vested interest in the immigration issue.
LinkedIn allows employees to work from home as long as they wish. Expect to see many other organizations reverse the back-to-the-office movement.
It appears that the test of strength will be dropped from the Olympics. Too much money and greed.
.....Intel updates its processors for workstations with a model with 38 cores.
Persons who work at a Google subcontractor join the United Steel Workers union. Many see this as a big deal, something new in the tech world. It isn't as many tech companies already have many subcontractors that have many employees who are in labor unions.
Our Dept of Justice says that the Russians hacked many of its employees' email accounts. What we don't read is the punishment of those employees whose practices allowed them to be hacked.
An in-depth look back at how Intel had a bad year in 2020 and fell behind in manufacturing.
Real news that isn't news: Russian hackers continue despite warnings from our current President.
Our June heatwave was the highest recorded in North America. Given North America is several billion years old and we have weather data for a couple hundred years, no reasonable analyst would draw any conclusions.
Extra time + skill = playing Pokemon on a Pebble smartwatch.
.....Headline from the Washington Post: "Vaccinated people are ready for normalcy - and angry at the unvaccinated getting in their way" Spreading hatred and division. Please stop.
Someone is faking the positions of warships from many nations. This could cause a shooting war by the persons being fooled.
The most-watched source of Olympics coverage is TikTok. NBC spent a lot of money for nothing.
One way or another, "Never Gonna Give You Up" has a Billion (with a B) plays on YouTube. The definition of success has changed.
This story is just one example, but we now have "breakthrough" cases, i.e., where a vaccinated person has VODID-19 Delta Variant (odd how the name is now longer). This is sort of like folks getting a flu shot but still getting the flu. Oh wait, you mean the Delta Variant is like the flu? Well, that changes everything.
Good news about the Delta Variant: it is the flu. Crazy? Look at this NewsMax article (as far right as you can go?). They quote someone from Johns Hopkins. Then someone looked at the official numbers in the UK. The numbers confirmed what the Johns Hopkins expert said. The Delta Variant is like most virus mutations in that it spreads easier but is much less deadly. Crazy? So I looked at the Washington Post (as far let as you can go?). We are in the late July surge of 2021. Compare the number of cases per day to late July 2020. The numbers are about the same (about 7,000). Compare the number of deaths per day to late July 2020. This year's deaths are about a third of last years. The percent of persons who have it and die is about what we see with the flu. Good news. I think. https://www.newsmax.com/reagan/chicken-little-delta-variant/2021/07/30/id/1030608/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/?itid=hp_pandemic
The new TI-84 from Texas Instruments features programming in Python.
Coming out of the prolonged year of the virus, everyone wants to hire computer programmers.
.....