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: 24-30 October, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Our response to the virus greatly degraded learning in American schools
• Microsoft launches a small form factor PC with ARM processor (calls it a Dev Kit)
• Elon Musk now really owns Twitter
• Apple has yet another record financial quarter
• Meta has lost 3/4s of its value due to that sill metaverse idea
• Google and Amazon agree on Android fragmentation

Monday 24 October 2022

Tips for copywriters to edit their content, not the fine points of grammar and punctuation.

Tips on how to read the edits someone else made to something you wrote. It's not personal; it's just business. Right? Maybe.

Trying to understand the work of an editor for writers.

A question for writers, "Who are you reading right now?" The styles of the writers make a difference.

Thoughts on the art of saying "No" for a writer or any freelancer or anyone in general.

Take care whom you ask, "Is this any good?" It is difficult to find people who will provide valuable answers.

Yet more thoughts on writing in a journal, which is a practice I recommend for almost everyone.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is next month. I don't like seeing all these articles about how to do half the work in October.

More results are in: closing the schools during the pandemic hurt learning. During the pandemic I spoke to several educators who admitted that it wasn't working, but the politicians decreed it.

Musings on Apple's iPad product line.

The "creator economy" didn't work except for a few exceptions. Are there ways to allow more persons to earn something? If you write books, you knew about how all this worked decades ago.

It seems that software on GitHub that is supposed to help secure a computer contain malware. Researchers found thousands of these.

Strong rumors about big performance upgrades to Apple computers. The upgrades for the Mac Pro (desktop supercomputer) are particularly impressive.

More computers in cars; fewer places to have your car repaired. And this lengthens the time to have your car repaired.

The gaming website Steam hits 30million users. The exponential rise is amazing. 20million users two years ago. 15million users five years ago.

Tuesday 25 October 2022

The GitHub page of the Open Data Discovery Platform.

A little time and other resources on hand...hackers overclocks an Intel processor to 8.8 GHz. This breaks some type of world record.

The concept of a network better than VPN to ensure privacy on the non-private Internet.

Amazon seeks to be as good as Google's DeepMind at machine learning and general AI research.

Apple is now selling a physical door lock for our home's front doors that can be unlocked via the iPhone etc. This could be wonderful for some families. Of course, it could be a tragedy.

And now we have text-to-edited-image. "Add a bandana to my face." Done.

Google attempts to identify recyclable materials on conveyor belts. Recycling has been a great disappointment. Perhaps something like this may help.

Google shows its Frame Interpolation for Large Motion (FILM) algorithm. The idea is simple, interpolate images into video to create super-duper slow motion video. Of course reality is not as simple as the concept.

Engineers build a better helmet for fire fighters. So far it is about navigating around a place where you just can't see well.

This is a good advance in robot-assisted surgery.

Microsoft open-sourced its FarmVibes.AI. This should help farmers worldwide.

Microsoft releases a competitor to the Mac Mini: small box with an ARM processor inside. Microsoft calls it a Developer Kit instead of a user product.

A look at MacOS 13 called Ventura.

Wikimedia adds simpler editing tools and more help as they try to gain more new editors for Wikipedia.

Lots of taxpayers' money spent on UFO investigations. The Dept of Defense has an investigation. Now NASA has another investigation.

Recyclable plastic was a dream that didn't come true. Perhaps 5% of what is advertised as recyclable is recyclable. Go back to glass bottles if we want to recycle anything.

Wednesday 26 October 2022

This is an excellent article on learning who programs and operates the cruise missiles the Russians are using against Ukraine. This work was all done via publicly available information, i.e., open source information.

This post has some good history on big data and engineering and all the related things.

Cybersecurity, or the lack thereof, at Twitter with whistleblowers, insiders, angst, and intrigue.

Relativity Space prepares to launch its first rocket. They use much more 3D printing than anyone else in the market. Will this work? We hope so.

Researchers show a new optical data transmitter (laser) that breaks all records and can transmit the entire Internet in a second.

YouTube rolls out new features.

Someone at MIT has a firm grasp on reality, "Cars are still cars---even when they're electric"

Bloomberg publishes a 105-page story on cryptography with emphasis on the blockchain and money.

A reviewer uses the Microsoft Surface Pro 9. It has an Arm processor; it doesn't really work, yet.

A review of this year's version of the Microsoft Surface Laptop.

This story about Microsoft summarizes the entire industry: the cloud computing business grows as the desktop computing industry declines.

The purchase of GitHub by Microsoft has been good for business with the annual revenue and the number of active users tripling.

The Washington Post reports how our Federal government passes laws and regulations that are full of holes so that friends in industry can make more money while our government folks claim they are doing good stuff for all of us.

Thursday 27 October 2022

A new website called ExplainPaper is supposed to summarize a journal paper and answer questions. You must create an account.

This pieces claims that Passkeys are here. No more passwords. This should be working some time after now.

Python 3.11 is released.

We now have a phony steak. We've had these bad things for decades. The new product is supposed to be all plants.

This is a good essay on agility and how it applies or misapplies to businesses and software development.

We move forward into the past to learn that given all this data we collect, we are using magnetic tapes to make safe copies.

Technology business are taking a downturn. Seagate is to cut 3,000 jobs.

Argo AI, which had raised over $2Billion in loans, is closing completely. There is hope that some of its employees will go to work at Ford and VW.

Samsung, still profitable, reports a 23% drop in profits.

Strong rumors that Apple will release an iPad next year with a 16" screen. That is a big tablet. That will make some folks very happy.

Our Federal government stopped buying telecom equipment from China. Our state and local governments still buy telecom equipment from China.

The definition of success has changed as several social media services have billions (with a B) of active users.

If you pay to use Google's Workspace, your storage just ballooned up from 15GB to 1TB.

Friday 28 October 2022

I like this article on changing an IT system or a business. And I like this sentence, so I'll quote it here, "The majority of consumers in the modern market want to feel exactly the same way when using technology for work as they do when using it for personal interests."

Tesla says its cars drive themselves. Adults know that is just an ad. It appears the our Dept of Justice has few adults.

An in-depth paper on computer file systems and how writing data to files is not as simple or secure as we might assume.

And now we have Starlink satellite Internet access for moving vehicles. It is very expensive. Buy $2,500 of stuff and pay $135 every month.

Microsoft bought GitHub four years ago. GitHub seems to be doing fine and improving its services.

As of today, it appears that Elon Musk really is buying Twitter.

There are some interesting aspects to this new product. It straps on your shoes and has motors that allow you to walk at a running speed. They are too expensive ($1,500) to be practical. There are applications of this technology to helping disabled persons with mobility.

Just in time for the mid-term elections, our Dept of Agriculture releases $759million for rural broadband.

Google Cloud releases Blockchain Node Engine, a fully managed node-hosting service.

During the past year, Meta has lost about 3/4s of its value (drop from $1Trillion to $270Billion). Mr. Zuckerburg's infatuation with the metaverse is ruining the company.

The opposite of Meta, Apple has a record financial quarter. Apple's profits are over $1Billion per week.

Elon Musk now owns Twitter. He removes the CEO, CFO, et al.

McDonald's is about to bring back the McRib sandwich for a limited time. They claim a big boost in traffic at their restaurants whenever the McRib appears.

Saturday 29 October 2022

Our National Archives and Records Administration is ahead of schedule in its program to digitize 500 million pages of paper of records.

You may have noticed how MS Word and Gmail are suggested words as you type. That is (was) artificial intelligence. We use tools developed in AI research (like a thermostat at home) without realizing it and without caring how the gadget works. I have always held that AI was a field of research. Once something made it to practice, it was no longer AI.

Here is a report on Meta's progress in a speech-to-speech tool that translates languages in real time.

This is an excellent essay on "rules" that make shell scripts work better.

Analysis that shows Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter is a big mistake. It is a money-losing company.

Predictions that the global population will stop growing and start declining and how this will be terrible.

Grievous vexation over the Elon Musk Twitter and "free speech." Following policy instead of censoring arbitrarily...policy is arbitrary. Oh well, this could be entertaining to watch.

YouTube reformats its page with tabs for long-form content, another for Shorts, and a third for Live videos.

Qualcomm and Arm continue their legal back and forth. Arm changes its licensing as a result.

And we have musings over TikTok and those organizations previously known as nation states. Folks, if it is a company in China, the Communist Party of China is inside it.

I am inventing a new term: emTwitter. That is Twitter under the guidance of elon musk. How do you like the term?

The E.U. sets 2035 as the date for no new non-electric cars. This may work in the E.U. as the population is relatively small, private car ownership is relatively small, and government regulation has always been relatively high.

Apple employees who are in a union learn that being in a union is not all good for them.

Where the money went: Americans are sending their kids to Europe to attend college where the tuition costs are much, much lower.

Lego will quit selling its Mindstorms Robot line of products at the end of this year.

Google and Amazon finally agree on Android fragmentation which led to the creation of Amazon's Fire operation system. The biggest effect will be on smart TVs. I hope it will allow Amazon to load the mainline Android on its line of Fire tablets.

Meanwhile in China, a new windfarm will break the prior world record held by China. We hope that all those parts that are not recyclable won't cause too much long-term harm to the environment.

Sunday 30 October 2022

From Bellingcat, a tutorial on how to examine a photograph for clues as to its location. There is much information in a photograph.

Amazon continues to add machine learning services to SageMaker.

And now we have a scam common to dating apps called "pig butchering."

This is reality in business. The economy is down. The big tech companies realize this. They are working on products that make money now. The fanciful can wait for better days.

A long story, but this gist is Netflix and other streaming services aren't using anything special as hardware.

Musk's first days at emTwitter seem to be fine. People want to leave and Musk wants layoffs. Fewer employees and everyone gets what they want.

Meanwhile in China, Xi Jinping was elected to a third term as Secretary General of the Communist Party of China. The stock market there quickly crashed. Coincidence?

Research shows that disinformation sites use the Google Ads service to raise money. Research shows that such sites also use browsers, text editors, light bulbs, and electricity to raise money. Are we going to ban those things from people whose opinions we dislike?

"Pranksters" show how easy it is to manipulate American journalists.

There is some evidence that using medicine to reduce blood pressure also reduces the occurrence of dementia.