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: 5-11 December, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Monarch Tractor and Nvidia produce a robot farm tractor
• Chinese government employees steal $20million from US COVID-19 relief fund
• Apple delays its car project to 2026
• Boeing builds its last 747
• Microsoft announce communities for Teams
• Our Dept of Defense finally awards its big cloud computing contract to four companies
• Twitter under Musk is still in the news
• The US and Russia trade prisoners: an arms dealer for a basketball player

Monday 5 December 2022

This is a long read, but worth the time. The New Yorker talks with Cory Doctorow about just about everything.

The Computer History Museum releases the source code for PostScript. It was from Adobe and changed printers and printing.

The Shirky Principle (new to me): institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Monarch Tractor and Nvidia partner to build driver-less tractors that are basically rolling super duper computers.

One of our Senators urges car makers to continue putting AM radios in cars. I hate to agree, but I do. The AM radio is a good emergency notification system. It is simple and reliable.

Tips and tricks to make writing a habit. I suppose this is a challenge for some. For others, we just write all the day because we don't know what else to do.

Some examples of novelist who had some fame and who started their writing lives by writing copy.

Here is some basic and good advice on writing.

Here are some ideas on working with a professional editor. The IEEE assigned a professional editor to me to help me with my first book for them on software project management. It was a good experience, and the quality of the book rose significantly.

Thoughts on writing 1,000 words a day. It isn't that difficult or it is the most difficult task in history.

Tuesday 6 December 2022

Apple optimizes Stable Diffusion to run natively on its own M1 and M2 processors.

The folks at Together have trained a large language model using a new approach that uses low-performance, common networking technologies.

Students at SMU built a "baby" supercomputer from 16 NVIDIA Jetson Nano modules. Great stuff.

Intel Labs and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found new machine learning techniques to help detect malignant brain tumors.

And now we can write code with a pencil. I used to do this. I would write code in "coding sheets," turn those in to the input/output room, and keypunch operators would punch the cards for me.

The software writes the essay. Great for some persons and their readers. Great for writing students?

Further thoughts on letting software write for us.

Software (AI and other) is becoming quite good at automatically enhancing images. Here is a piece listing 10 best.

Coming real soon now, Google search will show six pages of results instead of just one.

It appears that hackers working for the government of China stole at least $20million in COVID-19 relief funds. In the past, such actions by nations against other nations brought declarations of war and the like.

It looked like crypto mining in Texas would boom. That didn't happen.

Our Congress is considering a Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. One side effect is less news on the Internet. I didn't know freedom of the press needed competition and preservation in America. I suppose I was wrong (not).

TSMC announces even more billion$ to be spent in Arizona. This is good for America. I don't think it is good for Taiwan as the island is now less valuable to the world if the Communist Party of China chooses to invade.

Meanwhile in America, our Dept of Homeland Security has extended the deadline for Real ID to May 7th, 2025. Our DHS (a cabinet-level department in search of a purpose) keeps telling the rest of us that we are not secure and that only they can provide for our security.

I'll just quote the headline: Construction starts in Australia on the world's largest radio telescope

Wednesday 7 December 2022

SpaceX introduces Starshield which is a variation of StarLink intended for government use.

Considerations of paying those who work on open-source projects.

The Q&A site Stack Overflow has been flooded with responses created by software (ChatGPT). They now ban that practice.

This piece includes an example of generative software writing a three-paragraph essay on a complex technical topic. It works pretty darn good (or well).

GitLab has a good financial quarter and its stock jumps 20%.

The new gun control act (must have a permit before purchasing a firearm) was halted by a judge. It is probably unconstitutional. I'm not a lawyer, but I can read.

Kodiak Robotics wins a $50million Army contract to develop autonomous military vehicles. This is a small contract these days, so it might bring good technology to the Army.

Meanwhile in the US Congress, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was removed from the defense spending bill.

And in China, more robots on the job has reduced the number of humans on the job.

Rad Power Bikes now has a three-wheel electric pedal vehicle. Nice, but at $2,400, not practical.

Much is being made about Apple announcing it will use chips made in America. That hasn't been the case for ten years.

Once again Apple slows its work on an electric and autonomous car.

Our reaction to the virus means that half of downtown offices are empty. This is good if you don't want to commute, but bad if you have a restaurant or many other things downtown. Convert empty office buildings to housing and schools. That isn't happening.

Thursday 8 December 2022

For those who like to fiddle with doomsday scenarios...this site allows you to crash an asteroid in your neighborhood and learn what what happen. Most folks greatly underestimate what a big rock would do.

Google adds yet more features and filters to its search. These may help narrow searches.

Importing those pesky CSV files (they're everywhere). Here is a tool that may help.

It appears that galaxies are not evenly distributed. The universe is lop-sided. This will upset some major theories.

And Chrome adds several search shortcuts.

Thoughts on the data world and the data economy.

Our CDC awards a $443Million contract to Palantir.

This is a big story and we will hear more about it in the coming days: our Dept of Defense awarded its highly anticipated enterprise cloud contract to Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. The contract is called Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability. 

Thoughts on why we don't have self-driving cars now and won't have them for at least ten more years.

Meanwhile in Lebanon, there are enough power-generating dams still functioning (at least a litte) to power crypto mining.

Google introduces Simple ML which allows creating simple machine learning models inside Google Sheets.

Great video showing the change in social media that we have used for the past 20 years.

Noise cancelling headphones with an air filter, only $900. I suppose there are persons and situations that would warrant such a device.

Apple stops all plans to scan photos for child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Apple advances a new Advanced Data Protection that promises end-to-end encryption on iCloud backups.

In a first (with many more to come), the Attorney General of Indiana officially sues TikTok for privacy and exploitation of minors issues.

Microsoft adds a "communities" feature to Teams to extend the usefulness of Teams away from the office and into the home.

This is an historical milestone: Boeing builds the final 747.

Friday 9 December 2022

Thoughts on abstraction in the designing and building of systems.

For the first time in a long time, jobs for computer science graduates are not that available. A "long time" means long enough that people forgot what to do when unemployed.

Microsoft updates its Visual Studio to make remote development easier.

We have a couple of stories on engineered plants to make things better. We hope these folks know what they are doing and are managing the risk.

A French company has genetically engineered a houseplant that cleans the air in your home 30x better than they average natural plant.

And we have a new strain of wheat that withstands the heat of climate change. In the past, nature took care of this as some strains of any plant were better at the conditions than others. Those that were good for conditions thrived naturally while the others died naturally.

How Uruguay is luring tech entrepreneurs from Argentina. The promise is stability and security.

Our FDA has approved the Dexcom G7 wearable glucose monitor. It can connect (no wires) to an iPhone.

McDonald's ventures into the digital-order-only and drive through or pickup only type of place. (notice I didn't call it a restaurant)

Under our current President, our Federal Trade Commission is "going after" big tech.

GitHub releases Copilot for Business with all the features of Copilot and enterprise licenses and such.

Somebody spent all the time to try to figure out why babies sleep so much. So their parents can rest, that's why.

Microsoft adds a video screen recording feature to its Snipping Tool in Windows 11.

DeepMind has a new code-writing AI system called AlphaCode. It does pretty well, but the usual caveats apply.

Government Motors (remember when we the taxpayer bought GM?) is building 40,000 public charging stations for all those electric vehicles for which batteries cannot be made... Of course this won't work.

Saturday 10 December 2022

One person's experience with pair programming.

The Pacific island nation of Vanuatu has no Internet connection and hasn't had for several months.

Musings on the history of tech changes that changed everything. And then we consider these large language models that write prose.

Are the programmers waiting for the compiler to finish? Buy faster computers so they don't wait. Eliminate the time they have for thinking? Back in ancient times, we had days between submitting a job and seeing the results. We thought a lot. Maybe that was a good thing.

Strong rumors on how the Google foldable phone will appear.

If you can't beat 'em, copy 'em. Amazon copies TikTok with a new feature.

eSports was hot and the money rolled. Not so much anymore.

Meanwhile back in Vietnam, censorship lives on.

The best device for listening to music and those ZoomerTeams meetings is the one you have with you. This writer uses $15 earbuds with wires. I do too.

DeepMind has now adapted its software to write movie scripts, sort of. It's called Dramatron.

This is what happens when your company is bought by a company that just buys companies. Stellantis owns Jeep and is closing a Jeep factory in America so they can make electric vehicles.

Sunday 11 December 2022

Back in 1992, an 11-year-old runs a bulletin board service.

Working a white-collar job at Amazon was like working at IBM a couple of generations ago. I "was."

"Google thinks a lot about it's reputation." That can be risky in business as others, who don't care, plunge ahead with AI chat.

The Washington Post considers all these computer programs that write for you. Editors still needed, but the Post has needed editors for years.

Twitter is still in the news. Verified accounts return at about $10 per month.

Seth Godin on software that writes for us, "It means that assigning rudimentary essays in school or average copywriting at work is now a waste of time." Yes, they were always a waste of time, but now it is obvious.

A Twitter thread on job interview tips. Times have changed. 40 years ago, this was really bad advice.

The ease with which we can generate fake photos is now...really easy. Don't believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.

And now we have NLPaaS (Natural Language Processing as a Service). We used to call these things software libraries. The -as-a-Service seems to bring more money.

Excellent tips on writing shell scripts in bash.

This appears to be an excellent place to start writing with AI software: The Wordcraft Writers Workshop.

Researchers built artificially intelligent agents with the ability to seek out new knowledge by asking people questions. This is slow, but it helps "train" software to perform better.