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: December 26, 2022 - January 1, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The week between Christmas a the New Year (little news)
• The trials of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried are in the news
• We are inundated with retrospectives of 2022 and silly predictions of 2023

Monday 26 December 2022

Some research shows that programmers who use AI to write code believe they are doing better, but...reality disagrees.

It appears that Microsoft's NotePad is gaining tabs for editing several files at once.

A look at all the works from 1927 that move into the public domain on 1 January 2023.

At age 85, Donald Knuth is still astounding us with thoughts, lectures, algorithms, and general wisdom.

More use of AI as a writing tool, and more ethical questions about that practice.

General themes for those writers who wish to earn money from their writing.

Thoughts on those who influenced your writing. For me: (1) my father who spoke in public several times a week, (2) Christian G. Bachman who was an early national expert on laser radar, and (3) Jerry Weinberg to name three.

Why write short stories? Fun, enrichment, and maybe a little money. You are much more likely for a short story to become a movie than for the same to happen with a novel.

Nothing to write about? Hah. This is one piece with 112 topics.

Just starting as a freelance writer? Twenty places that will publish and pay (at least a little $).

The concept of the minimum viable product in freelance work and new markets.

And here is one of many lists we currently see on these AI writing "assistants."

Thoughts on self publishing.

Lessons learned by sending almost a hundred queries on one novel.

The synopsis: summarize a novel in less than two pages. It sharpens the mind and often the novel.

Tuesday 27 December 2022

The news is slight and slow as we are in the week between Christmas and the New Year.

There appear to be about two dozen companies in the world who make graphics processors. The big market is in high-performance computing and the calculations used in machine learning algorithms.

The cold snap in the US caused many crypto miners to turn off for a few days. The compute load dropped 40%.

Nobel Prize recipient calls crypto currency a useless Ponzi scheme. As an investment, yes. As a money-transfer-hiding method, no.

Wednesday 28 December 2022

Predictions of economic doom as conversational AI is coming for the white-collar jobs, too.

The curse of the data silo. Information is here and there and if you are here you cannot see the information that is there. Waste, waste, waste.

Some hints on Google's response to ChatGPT.

One person's thoughts on a personal wiki and how to keep track of all the stuff a person knows.

Lessons learned by one cloud engineer.

Someone should stop this: a company in Mexico is dumping stuff into the atmosphere in an effort to change the atmosphere that we all share.

Claims of big advances in an otherwise stuck industry which is autonomous vehicles.

An MIT study concludes that a small tax (3%) on robots will reduce income inequality.

This is a good article on Open-Source Intelligence tools, i.e., finding information on the Internet.

This is really good: it helps you find OSINT tools.

Either the pandemic is over or we all panicked and bought far too many gadgets way back when. Let's go with "the pandemic is over" as we don't look so silly with that explanation.

It appears that "shadowbanning" (your account is still working, but no one sees your posts) actually exists.

It's that time of year when we see predictions for next year. The predictions are usually "more of the same" and rarely predict new things.

Microsoft improves the formulas on Excel online (Microsoft 365).

Thursday 29 December 2022

Here is a resume builder (free to use) on GitHub.

LG shows a new line of home appliances with much simpler controls. Our dishwasher needs much fewer controls. It is a nightmare.

Amazon is testing drone deliveries in California and Texas. This includes a good video.

An attempt at explaining how GPT-3 evolved into ChatGPT.

College students in China create a cheap coat that hides a person from cameras and infrared imagers. It is pretty simple, which leads me to believe that military units worldwide don't have anything like this.

Some writing professors at UCLA have a firm grasp of the obvious. Rather than fear all these essay-writing software packages, they embrace them and seek new ways to teach using these tools.

And then there is the typical piece from The Atlantic that bemoans all these things. Recall that they typewriter was originally called the "writing machine."

More evidence that the reaction to the virus brought panic buying is that the sales of graphics processors for home computers is down 20%.

It appears that 2022 was the year of the "cozy game." This is a noncompetitive pursuit where you leisurely leisure about.

I like these articles on the worst of the year. The billionaire tech bros who never grew up were some of the worst.

The hacktivists made a big comeback in 2022. Hackers with no obvious stake in a nation state affecting world history.

Researchers have shown that large language models, e.g., GPT-3, can predict dementia early and easily given a person's speech.

The immigration policies in Canada have grown the Waterloo-Toronto corridor to have more tech employees than Silicon Valley. Once again, politicians have ruined a good thing in America.

Friday 30 December 2022

I like this GitHub repository. It lists top AI papers from 2022 with a video explanation of each.

Researchers at Stanford build PubMedGPT 2.7B which is a language model trained on biomedical literature which delivers an improved state of the art for medical question answering.

Yet another prediction that computer programs will no longer be written by programmers. One of these days this prediction will come true. Maybe not yet.

Edson Arantes do Nascimento dies at 82. He was better known as Pele, the soccer player from Brazil.

In Europe, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are using heat generated by their data centers to heat homes. This brings the question, "Why did it take so long for such an obvious practice?"

The most important company in the world, TSMC begins production of chips using 3nm process at factories in Taiwan.

Our Dept of Homeland Security cannot secure its own buildings.

SpaceX launched 61 successful Falcon 9 launch vehicles in 2022. This is some type of record. NASA? Who?

Saturday 31 December 2022

Western civilization has officially come to an end: we now have text-to-PowerPoint software!

This is a fascinating history of artificial intelligence with an emphasis on machine learning and neural networks.

This is a massive, online book on the Linux command line and shell programming.

Predictions for the coming year regarding software development and DevOps.

Tesla now is the leading selling car in Europe with most of the vehicles built at Gigafactory Berlin.

oooops, someone leaked the specs on the yet-to-be-released Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card.

Hyperbole about the fall of big tech and their over-glorified leaders. They are still rich and still dominate markets.

And hyperbole about the fall of cryptography. Those who misused it were more famous than the boring people who know what they are doing.

Sunday 1 January 2023

The future of "live performance?" If its an avatar, is it live? or real?

Due to "the economy," everyone is cutting their orders for semiconductors from TSMC. Biden-flation and Bid-economy and all that stuff.

I guess I am ahead of society on this one. I have a personal blog (or two) already up and running.

And now we look forward to CES this week in Las Vegas.

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