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 July, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Qualcomm announces big upgrade to processors for smart watches
• Samsung has big investment plans and factories for Austin, Texas
• SpaceX has become as space-launch machine
• More signs that the GPU and CPU shortage is over
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx

Monday 18 July 2022

Research shows there are some big gains possible for playing video games.

The new video game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge sells a million copies in the first week.

Machine learning usually mimics us, with all our faults. There is some evidence that "formal education" is a good training ground first. Combine excellent thought with human tendencies.

An AI system that detects bias in news stories and attempts to fix them. I don't find a use in this. Bias is pretty easy to detect, just look at the frequency adjectives and adverbs.

The call for digital transformation in government agencies. Keep calling, good luck.

The top data lake solution vendors. The usual names are on the list.

It appears, at least so far, that GitHub's Co-Pilot is actually helping real programmers in their jobs.

Where do you writer? It changed for many of us during the reaction to the virus.

Writing and connecting with other people.

Write what we know, unless we do the other thing.

"Every vocation requires a knowledge of tools," unless, of course, when it doesn't.

This piece is a bit odd, but gives excellent advice on speaking to groups of people. It is easily extended to writing to groups of people.

If your goal in writing is making a living, you are running a business. Set business policies and stick to them.

Tuesday 19 July 2022

Members of our Congress, always looking at new technology to regulate, want to push mountains of regulations on crypto mining

SpaceX has become a space-launching machine with practically one launch a week. That rate is 10 times faster than anyone else's

Asahi Linux is already running on the Apple M2 processor

It is summer. The temperature rises. Some years are hotter than others. In my home, we are having a cooler-than-normal year

The governors of Russia fine Google $358million for not censoring what they wanted censored. Globalization probably went too far. The nation states strike back at international business

One person's experience with reviving old home computers with Chrome OS Flex

Wednesday 20 July 2022

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: Amazon Prime's movie page look more like Netflix's.

A list of the more popular data analytics techniques and their uses.

More analysis of the Uber files and the shameful acts perpetrated at the company worldwide.

The CHIPS Acts is rolling around in our Congress. It will help some American semiconductor manufacturers, but not all of the companies equally.

Word leaks from Apple that they are slowing hiring. The caution sends their stock price down.

Microsoft continues to add features to Teams.

Just maybe, perhaps, the chip shortage is waning as Alienware and Dell release new laptops with new CPUs and GPUs and displays.

Microsoft switches back to allowing the sale of open-source software on its apps store.

Google is putting a few dozen prototypes of its augmented reality glasses on the streets for testing.

Our House Judiciary Committee released documents showing the successful commercial companies are engaging in commerce. I hope we didn't spend much taxpayer money on this investigation.

The state of the practice in Windows laptops that cost $500 or less.

Microsoft releases a system that helps train flying craft without flying them.

Netflix lost 1.3million subscribers in the last three months. Perhaps we are going back to the movie theater.

Thursday 21 July 2022

Reports from tech brains that left Russia quickly. Things will be bad in Russia for the next couple of generations. The west should step in and do it right this time.

The folks at Google create a yet another programming language. They call this one Carbon.

Qualcomm announces its next generation of processors for smart watches. More processing power, longer battery life, and smaller package.

In a 20-year plan, Samsung shows how it will invest maybe $200Billion in the Austin, Texas area.

China's SMIC continues to advance in size and capability. China's governors, however, will have to solve their frequent health crises and political instability.

The governors of China continue to crush their own technology industry.

Ford shifts resources to find the money to build electric vehicles. They lay off 8,000 people.

Samsung claims to have sold 10million foldable phones in 2021.

Dell's XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition is certified to run the latest Ubuntu. That means all the hardware parts will work as expected.

This is certainly ambitious: two new companies pledge to launch vehicles that will land on Mars in 2024.

Friday 22 July 2022

We are in the age where software produces text similar to what we feed it. We call this artificial intelligence. It is mimicry, but the marketers like the first term as it sell$ more.

Andreessen Horowitz move their headquarters to the cloud.

Apple shows others how to fend off anti-trust investigations. Be nice. Be present (near Washington D.C.). That is called lobbying and it cost$.

Meta is spending big money on education in the metaverse. I think it is silly. My 13-year-old grandson things it is awesome.

A look at the 2022 updated Amazon Fire 7 tablet. At $60, it is a tablet. It isn't a supercomputer.

Amazon continues to expand the use of electric-powered delivery vans. None in my neighborhood yet.

Must see video: it is possible to clean that filthy vehicle.

New tunneling technology may enable rewiring much of the US.

Saturday 23 July 2022

Google, already in a hiring slow down, freezes hiring for two weeks.

Amazon adds features to Alexa to make the virtual assistant assist more.

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) hacking unit is back at it. They create SolarWinds and are now building more nefarious malware.

Google's method of "Structured Interviewing" to hire people who will work (the way Google wants them to work).

One business owner's bad experience with a company he hired to change his website.

Facebook is changing the appearance of its site. I haven't seen any difference. And this article is an excellent example of how not to write such an article. This is easy: show an image of the old Facebook next to an image of the new Facebook. That is lost on this site. Don't they have editors?

This is a logical conclusion, and I am happy to see it: fake or augmented data is improving the performance of machine learning systems.

Once again, someone consider programming languages to use in artificial intelligence work.

In some states, some acts are illegal. Is it wrong to also ban the spread of information on how to break the law? Especially if those laws protect human life? Would it be wrong to ban speech that teaches people how to make bombs to blow up shopping malls filled with people? This isn't an easy question. Many in the media are treating it as such.

I'll quote to keep the words straight, "Microsoft announced today that it resumed the rollout of VBA macro auto-blocking in downloaded Office documents... " They have reversed positions on this several times.

Excellent images from space of the low water levels near Hoover Dam. Drought and over use by Californians have caused this. California needs to use the obvious sources it has for fresh water.

This must be important as it is all over the Internet: Google fires the employee who said their AI is sentient.

Politicians need to take care with the "no one is above the law" statement.

Ignorance is bliss: all week the Internet has run this story of a robot dog with a "submachine gun." Some folks don't bother googl-ing terms they don't know.

Sunday 24 July 2022

Our Dept of Defense attempts to leap the "valley of death" that it created in procurements. We have met the enemy, and it is us.

Google Cloud opens a new region in Mexico.

Clarifai Inc. creates a Community to share data in AI work.

"Google LLC today announced that Google Workspace, its cloud-based productivity suite, has received Impact Level 4 authorization from the U.S. Defense Department." For those involved in all this, it means Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) is now okay.

And Google provides information about the Russian cyber war in Ukraine. Again, when did private companies that made billion$ with search engines become the experts at international warfare?

Driving simulators and trainers for self-driving vehicles have used crummy scenes in the past. New research points to the value of Generative Adversarial Networks to change that.

Mitre and researchers at the University of Texas, Austin have formed a partnership to work towards ethical AI.

If you would like to read a great description of God's creation, read this.

Our Congress is mulling a data privacy act. We hope they mull it for another century as the reality of these things are usually different from their intentions.

Car manufacturers moan and groan about supply shortages. If you depend on others, you will often be disappointed. That is not a new lesson.

This is fascinating to those of us who have journey to where Louisiana meets the Gulf of Mexico in the region of the Mississippi River.

And now we have Monkeypox. I wish we react to this with more wisdom than the last emergency.

IBM's cloud computing business is booming. Behind that boom is its Red Hat Linux division.

A new Linux distribution is here. So what? More code was contributed by software that mimics human programmers.

Meanwhile at Lake Tahoe (a Zoomtown), real estate prices are out of reach of those born there. This was predictable and predicted.

This is terribly disappointing. It appears that landmark research into Alzheimer's Disease was...well, faked. Just a bunch of bologna. Fooled people for over a decade.