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: 19-25 December, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Mr. Zelensky visits Washington DC (with his olive drab sweater)
• Less Internet viewing this week
• And there is less in the news this week
• FTX remains in the news with Mr. Bankman-Fried in the US on fraud charges
• Democrats in Congress once again vote that they don't like Donald Trump
• And most of America had unusually cold weather this week

Monday 19 December 2022

No Internet viewing today.

Tuesday 20 December 2022

All this remote work has gutted downtown areas. San Francisco is one example. The long-term results are yet to be seen.

The monthly active users of Mastodon grows from 300,000 to 2.5million. Twitter? What is (was) that?

Apple moves MacBook production to Vietnam.

OpenAI releases Point-E, create a 3D object given a text prompt.

ooooops, our IRS stumbles and releases the detailed records of 112,000 of us.

Google releases end-to-end encryption for gmail.

Banana republic time: the precedent is set. If a political party wins the House after a President leaves office, we prosecute the former President for something-or-other.

Wednesday 21 December 2022

No Internet viewing today.

Thursday 22 December 2022

Mr. Zelensky addresses the American Congress. Of course he is more popular than President Biden.

Google scrambles a bit due to the popularity of ChatGPT.

More fallout from this work-from-home trend as the big companies are cancelling their office leases.

I love this regarding Facebook and Twitter, "Turns out maybe we didn't need antitrust reform: we just needed two obscenely rich tech CEOs to be totally out of touch with humanity."

Strong rumors that Apple will not build the iPhone SE-4 --- a lower-priced phone.

Here is a fun twist on all this image generation stuff: insert yourself into history.

Friday 23 December 2022

Andreessen Horowitz looks ahead to big ideas in 2023.

Starlink now claims a million users of its satellite broadband.

And now we try pattern recognition to recognize text written via pattern recognition techniques.

Strong rumors that Apple is making its own search engine and trying to greatly improve its local Spotlight search.

This story is deep and wide in many ways: Eric Schmidt is funding a couple of dozen high-level positions in the Biden administration. Yes, he is paying the salaries of government employees.

Government agencies are prohibited from sharing data on citizens. So, they sell it and buy it and run around the law. Clever, hey? or just plain unethical?

TSMC looks to build its first chip-making plant in Europe.

Sam Bankman-Fried is back in the US on fraud charges and is out on $250million bail. That's a lot of bail money.

How to burn more calories while walking. And if you walk like this, people will give you plenty of space.

Mastodon is "succeeding" in a way that may doom it.

Saturday 24 December 2022

McDonald's is testing a restaurant where the customer never sees a human employee.

This is a good piece on agility in project funding and execution. It is all relative and much depends on trust. Do we trust the persons who are risking resources?

AMD is helping its newer graphics processor run on Linux systems.

And now we want to classify "aging" as a disease. Gosh, I have been sick since the day I was born. Woe is me.

Hotels can't hire workers (lots of reasons for that). Daily room cleaning...GONE. Little robots that help cleaning are arriving slowly.

Perhaps too much time on your hands: an engineer fixes up an old typewriter that types answers to questions on paper. The GhostWriter.

I like this essay on the Yard-sale model and how random events don't result in even outcomes of money. Hence, we have a few super-rich folks sort of by luck. You remain middle to upper-middle class by not playing games with money.

Sunday 25 December 2022

No Internet viewing today.

On a personal note, I was in Louisiana the past 10 days. I hauled 4,000 pounds of trash to the dump,burned another 1,000 pounds, and helped move another couple thousand pounds of items. It was exhausting.