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: 3-9 October, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine and they are retreating
• Tech companies are hiding their model building behind universities
• Google updates its phones and introduces a smart watch
• Google closes Stadia
• The pendulum swings again as it appears that Elon Musk will buy Twitter
• Several new text-to-video systems are introduced

Monday 3 October 2022

Academic research groups can avoid copyright law. Then they sell the data models to commercial companies. The big tech lawyers found a way around the laws.

The North Koreans have hacked into several widely used open-source software products. They now access millions of computers.

Intel's Mobileye files an IPO. They have been working on self-driving car technology.

Tim Cook of Apple joins the long list of smart persons who just don't see any good coming from this "metaverse."

Thoughts on plots and stories and novels and how all those things go together and fall apart.

Notes on editing and making a second draft. Note, the second draft is often better than the first draft, but it is still a draft.

A listing of literary magazines that pay $$$.

Some ideas about sending your writing to a university press for publication instead of the "New York publishers."

Tuesday 4 October 2022

Tim Cook praises augmented reality (AR). AR has always held great promise and obvious applications. I'm still hopeful.

Stadia, Google's game streaming service, is done. No surpises.

Your co-workers are laid off. You keep your job. You have a lot more work to do. Who is better off?

This new company in the UK are reinvented how to manufacture automobiles.

New hallucinogens work against depression without the hallucinations.

Tesla shows a humanoid robot. Looks like the early Terminator.

Tesla updates its Dojo super-duper-computer.

Wednesday 5 October 2022

Arm lays off 40% of its staff.

Micron is building a chip-making factory in upstate New York. $20Billion now, may $100Billion over 20 years.

Walgreen's turns to machines to fill prescriptions. There is a labor shortage (some say). Jobs will go away (almost certain).

Much is being made of Amazon and how they are not hiring for the time being.

This study concludes that drinking coffee is good for you. I'll stop reading coffee studies now.

The big rocks that landed in the ocean and killed the dinosaurs also produced tidal waves. I hope we didn't spend much money on this study of the obvious.

Here is an IEEE story on the world's largest camera.

Some computer programs write software that eliminate jobs and save money for companies. Sometimes the programmers eliminate their own jobs.

We now have Matter 1.0. This is the first standard for connecting in-home computing services.

As of today, Elon Musk is buying Twitter. This story has change too many times to count.

Thursday 6 October 2022

There appears to be a correlation between the popularity of the Hallmark Channel and the sale of firearms in America. Is one causing the other? (NOT)

A review of Intel's new graphics processor boards that are priced to compete with established makers and help PC gamers play on.

It appears that the era of political ads on social media is already fading. Now we can concentrate on baby pictures from distant relatives.

This is SIGNIFICANT: DeepMind finds a faster way to multiply matrices. This calculation is performed in many places all the time. This will improve many things.

From Chainalysis, "The Middle East and North Africa are the world's fastest-growing cryptocurrency markets."

Google releases its own text-to-video system called Imagen Video.

This is a good explanation of how these text-to-image systems work with lots of good illustrations.

AI in a restaurant can predict your order. So can anyone who has seen you twice. "The usual, please."

I'll just quote the headline, "Machine learning can accurately predict a scientist's gender based on citation data alone"

Here is Meta's Make-a-Video system for text-to-video.

Some in Congress want a Federal law about the use of facial recognition technology. I guess they don't have much to do these days.

Friday 7 October 2022

Our president pardons all who were convicted of "simple possession" of marijuana. The simple possession clause means something to lawyers and such.

Google shows its Pixel 7 phone.

Google enters the smartwatch market.

A group of American robotics companies pledge not to "weaponize" robots. We shall see what this means in a world that has plenty of mean people.

Amazon quits work on its little autonomous delivery machine.

Samsung shows what is to come. The company is still profitable, but much less so. Orders are down, inflation is rampant. Thank you Bidenomics.

Princeton joins the small but growing list of universities that could stop charging tuition and stop taking donations. The gains on its endowment will pay for everything forever.

It seems that we are destroying disk drives and dumping them into the ground when we could continue using them.

Saturday 8 October 2022

A firm grasp of the obvious: without tech breakthroughs in batteries, we won't be driving electric cars in ten years. Sorry folks.

More restrictions on sending chips and chip-making machinery to China.

Americans can now access all their electronic health records. Of course someone had to have scanned your old records etc.

Microsoft will have a big event next week. Here are the stronger rumors about new hardware.

Still in the research phase, but this technique for estimating the chances of heart disease works in one minute from a simple scan of the eye.

Electronic Arts updates its PC gaming system.

The holidays are coming. This article shows the discounts that the laptop computer makers are offering.

The value of the US dollar is at a 20-year high.

It is often painful to be proven that you are correct. Former Soviet and now independent nations knew all along what Mr. Putin would do. No one listened.

Apple changes its branding of its portable computers from "notebooks" to "laptops." I prefer "portable computers."

Google will open its first data center in Japan in 2023.

Sunday 9 October 2022

Leaders in the White House release a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. General platitudes.

Netgear launches new hotspot combining 5G and WiFi6 and dwarves7 (just kidding about the 7 dwarves).

The desire for something like Java (write once, run anywhere) in the graphics processor field.

Different factors are summing to a weak, weak market for personal computers ahead.

This is a major reverse in direction: to save money, don't move to the cloud.

Living in a van (by choice, not necessity) works for a few.

After running for 23 years, the Weather Channel's Weatherscan will be turned off in December.

Backers of the Rust programming language are now creating an official style guide.

Where the money is: ransonware attacks hits a major US chain of hospitals.

Canonical extends its cybersecurity services to its free tier of Ubuntu Linux users.