Dwayne Phillips' Day Book

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.


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This week: 15-21 August, 2022

Summary of this week:


Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday


Monday 15 August 2022

Some rumors about the next updates to the entry-level iPad.

American tech companies hire talent from India and first-generation Americans of Indian descent. Apple leads the way in working with and around the Indian caste system.

Researchers attempt to link self-supervised learning algorithms with human learning. The similarities are superficial, but there are similarities.

Fumbling and bumbling in government agencies as they attempt to spend $42Billion on rural broadband. By the time they have a map, they will have consumed all the money.

Meanwhile in Germany, nuclear power plants don't look so bad with the Russians acting badly.

I don't understand all of this story, but it seems to be easy to claim to own music and charge other people money.

Some tips on things to do that impress editors. Send in written pieces on time or early.

How to start as a writer. First tip is correct, start writing.

One way to apply basic problem solving to writing. Maybe that is why...

Notes on moving a book to the big or little or streaming service screen.

Some ideas on how to start writing again on that thing you started a long time ago and stopped.

Follow these steps, it says, and quickly have 1,000 followers on your blog. Perhaps.

How to write chapter 1: start wherever you feel like and write chapter 1 whenever you feel like it. Lazy? You are writing. That is not lazy.

Writing thoughts as they come. There are so many thoughts. And some people have writer's block.

And how do you fill the hours of your day?

One writer's thoughts on what it means to write a novel. Interesting that a writer would make a video instead of writing a post.

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Tuesday 16 August 2022

Researchers in China build a magnetic levitation train that uses magnets that require no electricity. This works fine as long as you have "rare earth materials" to boost the power of the magnets. The phrase "rare earth" means very expensive and difficult to find. Hence, this is not practical unless the rare earth materials are commonly and inexpensively found.

AWS launches its service to provide private, internal 4G and eventually 5G networks.

The tech industry has "gender problems." Hmmm, does the dental hygienist industry have a gender problem? No, because it isn't as affluent.

Google's Android version 13 is here. There was a time when companies didn't number things "13" as that was bad luck.

Apple announces September 5 as the date that employees must return to the office three days a week.

The market of streaming services is a tough one full of competitors. Customers switch services often.

A recession may be here soon for chip makers. They aren't good at predicting the future and they know it. Folks in Washington D.C. aren't any good at predicting the future either, but they think they are.

The Russians give a glimpse of the space station they will build by themselves at the end of this decade. No details given. It appears to be science fiction.

The United Arab Emirates is trying to make indoor farming without soil work for them. Soil reclamation would be a better solution, but folks don't like to do that one.

The Linux kernel version 6.0 is released.

The US officially bans the export of advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology.

Researchers have take collagen from pigs, created a substance like a thick gel, and used that to repair the eyes of persons. This has worked on 14 persons, so it is all very early in the research.

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Wednesday 17 August 2022

Got $3,500? The Odyssey Ark from Samsung is the ultimate monitor for gaming for doing anything with a computer.

This is what we should be doing with technology: 3D printing saves a baby's life by printing the missing parts of her skull.

NASA builds a robot for underwater work. Perhaps NASA could build a spacesuit for people to wear in space?

More and more mention of "superclouds" that will be the next thing to make money for vendors.

Researchers have a new technique that summarizes video. This is a TLDW (too long, didn't watch) feature.

No surprises here: data leaks are not leaks but almost always someone breaking in and leaving a great big hole in the dam.

Nielson, the folks who have tracked TV viewing since TV started, will now track viewing of Amazon's Thursday Night Football streaming.

Apple expands its use of manufacturers in Vietnam.

Australia's highest court rules that Google is not a publisher. This overturns rulings from lower courts.

Alienware releases two new gaming monitors. They also note that these can be used by programmers in their day jobs before playing games all night.

This is some type of leading economic indicator. Apple lays off recruiters. They won't be hiring anyone for a while, so recruiters are not needed.

Coming next week, AMD will show its new Ryzen 7000 processors for desktop computers.

Boom is going to build supersonic airliners, after it builds a factory. At best, the first planes will fly in 2026. Still, airlines are buying the planes.

Hearing aids now are approved for over-the-counter sales. No doctor visit, etc. This has been the practice for several years. The hope for those of us with hearing loss is $200 devices (not $3,000 ones). We also hope for much better audio from the companies that make high fidelity headphones. Music over hearing aids is lousy.

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Thursday 18 August 2022

Microsoft releases a preview version of its Dev Box for developers to access cloud resources.

Google is attempting to model basic human interactions for its robot business. They are using PaLM or Pathways Language Model for the work.

Broadcom has a new processor chip to upgrade network communications in data centers.

Meanwhile in Las Vegas, we have a driverless, electric vehicle, taxi service from Lyft.

Reddit provides a toolkit so that developers can build apps that work with Reddit. The community grows.

Stronger rumors that Apple with have an online event on September 7 to show a new iPhone.

Microsoft increases the capabilities of Windows widgets in the Win 11 task bar.

The governors of China, who subsidize and exert forms of control on all industry in China, are critical of US subsidies for chip manufacturing in the US.

Those "public" electric vehicle chargers simply aren't working well. EV owners are unhappy with the experience. Gas stations work better as fuel dispensers.

NASA updates the software on the Curiosity Mars rover to give it a big boost in travel speed.

Administrators at the CDC admit that the Center performed poorly during the reaction to the virus. Instead of holding persons accountable, they are reorganizing.

The current dry spell in Europe reveals "hunger stones" that mark droughts and famines in history. Of course, we have better agriculture and transportation and we can have droughts without famines, right?

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Friday 19 August 2022

An online systems design course. (1) Excellent topic. (2) Good use of GitHub.

An overview of the organizations that are pushing towards practical fusion energy generation. I am afraid that the leaders are spending billion$ on ideas that will cost billion$ to implement.

Rocket Lab announces that it will send an unmanned vehicle into the clouds of Venus. No government funding involved.

A look at the ravynOS project. They want something as good as Apple's macOS, but with all the freedom of something like FreeBSD.

Ready or not, we enter the era of artificial intelligence in the military. Actually, that started before WWII, but we like to claim uniqueness these days.

Our Defense Information Systems Agency creates its own innovation incubator called DISAWERX. Let's hope something good comes of this.

Researchers at Nvidia produce a 3D video of an object based on a set of basic images (photos). On top of this, the operation takes 1/1000th the time that it took two years ago.

Cloudera has a new product that makes it easier to build a lakehouse in the cloud and perform data analytics.

The use of "location intelligence," i.e., where are my customers?

How much did we spend on the cloud? What? How organizations lose control and wake up to sticker shock.

How to move machine learning to the cloud.

Nvidia upgrades the performance of those streaming games to browsers.

Streaming services are now the most-used source of TV programs in America.

It appears that Qualcomm is trying to enter the market of making processors for data center servers.

Samsung is now on its fourth generation of folding smartphones.

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Saturday 20 August 2022

Here is a two-hour presentation that walks through the basic of neural networks and learning.

Not much has changed: those who do the work are often spending time in meetings ... just because that is what we do.

Google is still pushing the programming language Kotlin for writing Android apps.

This San Francisco area "restaurant" serves grain bowls (not my favorite) and has no people inside. The food is such that machines can pump out those grain bowls.

Stanford engineers create a "compute in memory" (CIM) chip that performs calculations common to machine learning using far less electrical power.

Over the next few months, Google will change its search engine. "the aim is to minimize the frequency with which users are disappointed by search results" Prediction: someone will feel slighted and claim discrimination.

America provides Ukraine with more military hardware including better surveillance drones. I trust these things can be tracked for their lifetime by the US. We don't want these in the wrong hands ten years from now.

Our NIST continues drafting and distributing AI risk management framework documents.

Our Library of Congress attempts to update its software for tracking Copyrights. Did you know that "recordation" was a real word? I didn't.

All sorts of grievous vexation over Meta and Zuckerberg's really crummy graphics in a presentation earlier this week.

This photographer found all he needed with a $850 Fuji instead of a $2,700 Sony.

A recent study shows...about half of all cancer deaths come from preventable factors. Smoking, drinking, obesity are the top three factors. It is my wish that coming out of the pandemic we will all strive to be healthier. This includes not taking medicines with side affects like "reduce immune system." Please, please, do what we can to be healthier.

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Sunday 21 August 2022

Our Dept of Veterans Affairs continues to struggle with Electronic Health Records (EHR).

A little side note on America's government-administered schools, "increased spending on K-12 education has enlarged schools' administrative staff 88 percent while student enrollment has grown just 8 percent." Gosh we have well-administered schools, but we aren't educating the kids.

Yikes! It seems that IRS employees who carry guns fire their guns accidentally more times than intentionally. If you see something, walk away and take cover.

Someone tested whether a Tesla would run over his kids. It didn't. YouTube banned the video. I lost count of the stupid things done here by all parties involved.

Too much time on your hands. An engineer turns actual little Lego bricks into actual little computer displays.

If you have $50,000 to spare, you can go into space (100,000 feet which is sort of into space).

This has been making the rounds. New images from the new outer space telescope disprove the Big Bang Theory. The theory is still a theory. The data brings many doubts. Sensing things that are far away is difficult. I expect the theories to be wrong.

A short post about FileZilla. It transfers files and has done so for 20 years. A good open-source utility.

And we now have a better machine to better throw and kick footballs at practice. Good use of tech talent? Well, there are worse things we could be doing.

A review of an expensive ChromeBook. The idea was an inexpensive machine to connect to the net, i.e., what we used to call a "dumb terminal." We lost our way somewhere.

Since 1938, The University of Michigan library held a one-page memo written by Galileo. Experts now agree that page is a forgery. Now the library can show a document that fooled the world's best experts for 84 years. Which is a better exhibit?

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