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: 20-26 March, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• More and more chatter about AI and OpenAI and ChatGPT
• Nvidia holds its conference this week with lots of announcements
• Google begins rollout of its chatter system called Bard
• Gordon Moore dies at 94
• Databricks releases a much smaller and just-as-good language model

Monday 20 March 2023

Tales of angst at Tesla over Elon Musk's push for a self-driving car. Wrong direction. Build automobiles that can follow one another.

TikTok claims 150million active users in the US. That is almost half the country (men, women, children). Unlikely to be true.

And another Chinese video editing and showing app has 200million active users worldwide.

Rumors of Amazon building a web browser with, of course, AI built in.

Someone has built a camera with a trillionth-of-a-second shutter speed. That would probably be useful for something.

Researchers at Brown University have a little cubesat in orbit. Built for $10,000, it has a $20 computer and runs on AA batteries.

The folks at System 76 update their mini desktop computer with new processors from Intel. A small and very powerful $1,000 computer. Toss in a monitor or two and...

Some hints that even with a quarter of a million tech workers laid off, the job market is still pretty good.

Tuesday 21 March 2023

Researchers in Finland have built little tiny flying robots that can do the job of bees (polinate plants).

Someone has built a Raspberry Pi gadget that is a brain-computer interface. Price about $350.

At this time, it may be possible to train a large-language model for under $100,000. To date, such a task ran about $5million minimum.

News Flash (not): we aren't good at predicting the future.

Some personal anecdotes about what blogs and website have done for a few people.

Voice cloning is gaining more capability. Five seconds of my voice is all that is needed. Then I can automatically record my voice reading a book. This is also a huge help for those who have lost their voice from illness.

This story is about the Russia-Ukraine war. Hidden in the story is the idea that journalists now call journalists "open-source analysts." Journalists have always held themselves in high esteem.

Microsoft and its Nuance Communications subsidiary have a new system to transcribe clinical notes. This reduces office work in the health care industry. It may be a real good thing.

Someone has thought this over for a while and concludes that all this AI could cause layoffs in high-end high-paid jobs.

It appears that there is a premium cellphone market and that premium phones are now half the global market. If more than half the folks have premium phones, those are no longer premium, they are average? Huh?

Calls to slow down on all this rush to AI. Rush? These things have been in the works for all my life.

ooooops, OpenAI found a security hold in ChatGPT and shutdown everything for a while.

Acer is now making an electric bicycle.

A detailed example with analysis of an essay produced by ChatGPT. The software can be quite useful. Like all tools, there is skill in using it.

ASUS changes course with its new RISC-based, low-cost, single-board computer.

Amazon cuts 9,000 more office jobs. This is on top of the 18,000 already cut.

Ikea is using small flying drones to count stock in its stores.

Wednesday 22 March 2023

Quote, "Prompt engineering, or In-Context Prompting, is a method of influencing the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) without updating the model weights."

This website is a collection of thousands of command line entries that do some useful things for some persons.

In controlled tests, an airplane is powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

Predictions that describing something in text will produce a video of such. This is coming real soon now. Probably sooner than expected.

Injecting some reality and reason into the ideas that AI will very soon replace a large group of computer programmers.

I am happy to see that at least one person has a grasp on the concept of testing.

Nvidia is holding a conference this week, so expect announcements.

Nvidia shows its DGX Cloud service so you can pay about $40K a month to build machine learning models.

Nvidia announces cuLitho software library to speed the design of semiconductors.

AnandTech has a good article on the top-to-bottom updates of GPUs from Nvidia. This goes from high-end to laptops.

Nvidia modifies a processor so that it can be exported to China. Let's see how long it takes to hack into it and access export-banned capabilities.

Bill Gates has an essay on the age of AI. It is here, now.

And we have more government regulations attached to money from The CHIP act. It appears that instead of helping US manufacturing, it is a social engineering bill.

Amazon is closing the website for digital photography review DPReview. Sorry to see this go. A great source of information.

Let's put AI to some good use, huh? Nvidia teams with Medtronic to improve its endoscopy tools.

Google is slowly releasing access to Bard, it's own AI chatbot thing like ChatGPT.

Another unintended consequence for Russia and its war in Ukraine is its space program is crumbling. When Putin is gone, the US will have a big opportunity to spend big money in Russia and make Russia a capable ally instead of a drunken foe.

Thursday 23 March 2023

Here is an early review of Google's Bard.

Microsoft continues to add AI stuff to its products. Now Bing can access the ability to create images.

Nvidia's new H100 NVL is built to greatly reduce the time a large language model needs to answer questions.

This is an excellent essay on technology, economics, and how we are about to see another major drop in the price of technology that advances everything.

Adobe releases a new tool called Firefly which lets users type commands to quickly modify images.

This is bad news if you depend on a bank to safeguard large amounts of money.

This GitHub repository has "Typst is a new markup-based typsetting system that is designed to be as powerful as LaTeX while being much easier to learn and use. "

What's next for NASA? Don't build a space station. Instead, rent rooms in space station hotels built by private industry.

This GitHub repository lists many open-source alternatives to OpenAI's very successful ChatGPT.

Yes, we can use ChatGPT et al to plan trips, make reservations, and all those sorts of things.

All these new AI software systems mimic what they are fed as input. Simple enough. Those who feed documents into the system for mimicry do not "teach" the system to answer things they find objectionable. Of course that is subjective. Beauty (and filth) is in the eyes of the beholder. Some beholders find some other beholders objectionable. Therefore, we find "those people" building their own system that no one on "our side" would ever use. Several examples of this human trait follow.

Mozilla starts a new division that will build "trustworthy" AI systems.

The New York Times reports on a group of dastardly conservatives who have built their own AI system.

Microsoft's GitHub adds to its Copilot to allow users to ask questions via voice or text.

The Turing Award goes to Bob Metcalfe. He helped invent Ethernet. If you are reading this, you are using Ethernet.

Microsoft (after two years) is slowly releasing its Loop software.

And now for something that is F U N !!! A new ultra portable guitar amp that has more iPhone features than anything.

This man moved from San Francisco to a town of population 1,000. He's is working from home. His income is almost 10x of the average of the town. This is the life.

Friday 24 March 2023

Here, sooner than expected, is an open-source AI chat bot: Open Chat Kit.

Put this under "of course, why not?" If an AI system RTFM "reads the friendly manual" it can perform better.

And put this under "it's about time." A system uses AI to separate chest x-rays of healthy and not-so-healthy folks. This was done decades ago.

I like this. They have combined several recent technologies. Software scans all the local news outlets (text understanding). Software combines everything (abstractive summarization). Software converts the summaries from text to voice. Software puts those voice recordings on Facebook or the like. You have a local "radio broadcast." All automatic. No manual intervention.

Accenture will lay off 19,000 people.

What's a billion $$$ among friend$? Apple to drop that much to make movies for theatrical release.

OpenAI announces plug-ins for ChatGPT.

An opinion that large language models are not a fad like crypto is or was or something. My prediction: we will be bored with this in a year. We'll keep using it, but it will become like the wrapping of text to a new line like in word processors. It was a wonder at the time, but unnoticeable after a year.

The CEO of TikTok testifies before Congress. No surprise here as no one was impressed or convinced.

Once again, the folks that run Twitter change their minds about blue check marks and verified identifies.

"Industrial capture" is happening in the AI industry. A small number of companies have the great majority of expertise and resources.

A trend in American communities is the adopt of license plate reading cameras. Most communities adopt this after terrifying crimes.

Meanwhile in Utah, a new law says that teens get on social media only with consent of their parents.

Saturday 25 March 2023

Gordon Moore, who started Intel and whose speculation about the rapid growth in hardware technology became a "Law" quoted countless times, has died at 94. This is a major step in time in the computing age.

Databricks open sources its own not-nearly-as-large language model called Dolly. Two orders of magnitude smaller than OpenAI's ChatGPT (6 vs 175 Billion parameters), it performs almost as good. We have quickly reached the point of maturity in this area where we moved from "it can work" to "it can work much more efficiently."

More information on license plate readers and surveillance coming to American neighborhoods.

This news story from Baton Rouge explains why neighborhoods are quick to install these systems. A horrible crime caused action.

We now have enough of these amazing chatbots that we can run comparisons. ChatGPT, Bard, Bing, Dolly. Like to good old days Wordperfect, Word, Wordstar ...

And we have more murmurings about how the worldwide pandemic started in China. The key phrase is "Data collected in 2020 --- and kept from public view since then" Oh, someone knew something and was censored.

This is the first legal ruling by one judge. Expect many appeals, but for now the Internet Archive is doing bad things by scanning books and running a National Emergency Library.

oooops, how many contradictions can a President make in one statement?

United Airlines announces some electrical flying vehicles in Chicago in 2025. New word: decarbonizing. Is that physically possible?

Sunday 26 March 2023

30,000 Amazon employees don't want to return to the office. HR says, "too bad."

Are these large language models the end of programming? I don't hink so, but I will agree that they will greatly reduce typing.

JP Morgan jumps into biometrics to let customers pay with palm print or facial recognition.

AI work has run into a wall with hardware. The processors needed to run in parallel flop.

Some folks at Microsoft Research test GPT-4. One major conclusion is that the standard tests uses for the past 20 years no longer apply. And there are claims of Artificial General Intelligence, those are mostly hype and hope.

Undersea data cables: boring, not shiny, but incredibly important to everything we do today. The US and China are battling under the seas for data dominance.

Once hooked, it is hard to move away. America, and American entertainment industries, is hooked on TikTok.

We have jailbreaking, or modifying a system to remove its restrictions and rules, of these new AI things. Are the breakers thieves or patriots? Once again, Hacktivism and the Hacktivists are a new type of person in a new type of world.

Nostalgia. DoomLinux is a distribution (fits on a thumb drive) that has just enough stuff to run the 1993 version of Doom. Love it.