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: 14-20 November, 2022

Summary of this week:


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


Monday 14 November 2022

emTwitter cuts 4,400 of its 5,500 contractor jobs. Bidenomics at work. And people still voted for this.

Our X-37B spaceplane returns to earth after two years in orbit. It is now part of the our Space Force (no longer Air Force). No one knows what it does.

One of our Senators declares that Congress will fix Twitter if Mr. Musk doesn't. Gosh, wow.

Looking back at what Warren Buffet has said about crypto currencies for years. A mirage.

Horrible crash at an air show in Dallas over the weekend. I was once told by a WWII pilot, "There ain't nothin' bigger than the sky and their ain't no reason for two airplanes to be in the same place."

Seagate announces what it calls "dual-actuated drives" that deliver twice the performance of earlier models.

Tips for new freelance writers from an old freelance writer.

How do you write 10,000 words in a week? One at a time. And there is other advice in here about goals and planning and putting your fingers on the keys and banging away.

I like this piece about proofreading. Just before publication, how can you catch all those little errors?

And there is a market for senior, i.e., old, writers writing for other old(er) people.

This is one of those posts where the title is much better than the content. Content writing can be an art and those who do it well astound most of us.

"The best thing about being a writer is never having to say, 'You should've been there.'" Because the writer can describe it in a way that reader was there.

The long view of being a writer.

Love this title, "The Politics of Fiction." Yes, we make up a world and explain the real one in the made up one.

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Tuesday 15 November 2022

Basic website that will create a GitHub "business card" for you.

The people who "run the world" are not smarter than the rest of us. First we have to determine who the people are who are running the world.

Demographics: population of the world is now over 8 Billion. This will soon start declining.

Check out Jupe. They are making popup housing units for camping and other things. $30,000. Not cheap.

This is supposed to be good news for laid-off tech workers. Just go through all the mess of insurance and having your paid time off go back to zero.

This tool is supposed to let a programming create a development environment and copy it anywhere without using Docker containers.

We note a new design for an "AI processor" that uses analog representation instead of just the 1/0 binary. The designers claim it needs 1/1000th the energy of traditional computers.

Coming real soon now is the GPT-4 model. This promises yet another leap in machine learning.

Stronger rumors about the wonderful things that will come from Apple's VR/AR headset for only $3,000.

Dell updates its server line of computers for better high-performance computing and the like.

Amazon to lay off 10,000 corporate employees.

An article about how the Apple Store retail went from glamour to more like being a floor worker at JC Penney. Union now!

Jeff Bezos announces that he will give "most" of his billion$$$ to charity. Climate change is high on his list. Also is "unity for humanity."

Google was sued by 40 states. It will pay $392Million (with an M). A very small figure for Google.

How the rich and famous lived in the 1980s.

ooops, the Russians wrote software, faked a US company, and our government bought it.

Data data everywhere...Waymo is using its self-driving cars to collect weather data and provide real-time, local weather maps.

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Wednesday 16 November 2022

Tesla is to have a big event on 1 December about their big electric trucks.

NASA puts a little bitty cubesat in orbit around the moon.

How to hack into a Starlink terminal using a soldering iron.

Remember the name Mukesh Ambani. He runs the biggest business in India, which will soon have the largest population of any country on earth. He is worth $90Billion today, and growing and...

Part of the Meta layoffs was the entire team devoted to AI research infrastructure. Without the O&M guys, operations and maintenance, nothing works.

If you collect enough data on social media (the rumor mill), you can hear about a pandemic before the government does. And let's not call this "AI."

This study provides insight into how the Chinese are trying to hire for AI skills. Again, let's now call this "AI."

Nvidia creates a research team in Israel to work on autonomous vehicles.

Goldman Sachs, they predict the economy, predicts $154Billion-a-year spent on humanoid robots.

Honda shows some new electric vehicles that may provide mobility to those who need it. The technology is here. It is time for companies to provide solutions for people who need help.

A review of Nvidia's RTX 4080 graphics system.

A Federal jury in Texas rules that Intel owes about a Billion$$$ for patent infringement.

Qualcomm updates its Snapdragon chips so that next year's Android phones will be better than this year's android phones. The old phone still make phone calls.

Meta AI has created a large language model based on 48million academic research papers. Given this data, it is much better at searching academic research papers than other language models. That is no surprise, but only big-dollar companies like Meta can do this can of work.

Public libraries are creating music streaming services that emphasize local musicians.

After years and years and tears, NASA launches a capsule to the moon. No people on board, but it's a start.

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Thursday 17 November 2022

Some technology history about the "like" button on Facebook. Some adults seem to think that was significant and changed western civilization. Perhaps the definition of "adult" has changed.

One person's experience trying to use the new Apple Emergency SOS Satellite thing.

Amazon opens their Virtual Clinic in some states. It provides some medical advice that is supposed to be real medical advice.

Several apps that bring text-to-image to Apple computers with Apple silicon processors. "Man sitting at a table."

A round up of this year's tech layoffs.

Predictions that tech layoffs in India will become much worse.

Nvidia and Microsoft annouce their plan to build an AI supercomputer. And we probably shouldn't call this "AI."

I'll just quote this, "Nvidia and Nuance Communications Inc. are working to change that by bringing medical imaging AI models directly into clinical settings."

Some things companies can do to keep their employees. There are many ways to have paid time off. American companies only seem to know one.

Nvidia comes out of the pandemic prosperity. Gaming and crypto mining are down while data centers are up.

Dell pays $1Billion (with a B) to settle a lawsuit over stocks.

Qualcomm shows a prototype of basic augmented reality glasses. They don't have a product, but they have processors that others can use to make these glasses.

This is BIG: Intel introduces FakeCatcher. The system detects deep fake videos in real time with 96% accuracy.

Amazon is offering "early outs" to employees. Retire early before being laid off.

If this wasn't about taxpayers' money, it would be funny. The Dept of Homeland Security, 20 years into its existence, is "an agency no one wanted and everyone is stuck with..." Time to disband it.

Qualcomm has a new name for the processors it wants to see in personal computers: Oryon.

The social network called Mastodon is growing. Here is there odd URL.

Fedora 37 has been released.

Testers show that Apple's AirPods work pretty well as a hearing aid. You need to buy an iPhone as well. Still, this shows the technology for the hearing impaired is available and is inexpensive.

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Friday 18 November 2022

And now we have "effective altruism." There are worse things a person can do with time and money. Some have found that this movement has lost its way. Some, like me, would say they were headed in the wrong direction from the first step.

The Linux Foundation Europe (LF Europe) has started an open-source software project to build a telecommunications stack so that everyone can have their own telephone company or something?

We have hyper inflation in the graphics processor industry. Bigger and more $$$ come along with more performance. How about the same performance in a smaller size and a lower price?

Need a software architecture? Are you sure? That old phrase YAGNI (you aren't gonna' need it) applies here. The great majority of the time, four-syllable words to describe simple software are a waste.

The super rich want to live forever. I doubt they understand what they are saying.

The folks at Hacker News discuss how to earn a living without killing yourself in a cubicle.

It appears that Google has gone through the exercise of "let's identify the bottom 6% so we can fire them at the right time."

ooooops, it seems that Facebook had employees who would hijack users' accounts and do the types of things that hijackers do.

Big updates to Google search.

Flipping through the headlines on a number of news sites shows that the entire world rests on Twitter. When Twitter goes, the world will collapse. Odd that adults would actually write such things.

There is a spike in respiratory illnesses among children. We must wonder about those rushed-to-the-public vaccines of the past two years.

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Saturday 19 November 2022

Yet another discussion of the 40-hour work week.

Let's go back 20+ years and consider distributed computing and making Amazon run.

No kidding, this is pretty amazing. Watch the video to see how Notion AI generates writing from a few prompts. If this is not a faked video, this changes many things. This is the basic mimicry we see under the banner of "artificial intelligence." It is mimicry. Nevertheless, it can be quite useful. It sure saves a lot of typing.

The concept of Data-Community-As-A-Service.

Meta AI released Galactica to help science researchers. It was pulled three days later because it didn't work. Does anyone at these places know how to test things?

For $149, you can buy a machine that will cut vinyl records. Let the fun begin.

Microsoft adds a feature to Teams that keeps American Sign Language interpreters in a large window all the time so that viewers can always see them.

Elizabeth Holmes, once the darling of the media as a woman leader in tech, is sentenced to 11 years in prison. She was a fraud.

There are hundreds of open jobs at emTwitter.

Fred Brooks has died at 91. The Turing Award winner wrote "The Mythical Man-Month" wherein he stated, "Adding manpower to software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer."

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Sunday 20 November 2022

IBM attempts to enable smaller groups to train and use the massive and expensive machine learning models.

Dell and Intel are working to build data center servers that use much less electrical power. And, by the way, what does it mean to use 3 times less power? English please.

Information on Google's mixture-of-experts method of creating AI models more efficiently.

Is the AI winter here? All these tech layoffs may mean, "yes."

China takes the lead in the number of papers accepted at a semiconductor conference. Numbers are not alway significant.

Data centers generate heat. It is a bad idea to build a data center in the glaring hot sun of a hot place. It seems that some big tech companies are just figuring out this common sense.

emTwitter restores Mr. Trump's account. Mr. Trump says he won't use it.

I am interested to see if the mainstream media will promote Mr. Trump's campaign for President the way they did it in 2016. Reporting on Mr. Trump raised ratings and ad dollars. He ran a low-cost campaign because he received free TV time. Will they repeat?

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