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: 27 March - 2 April, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Microsoft announces major upgrade to Teams
• People want AI work to halt for six months
• Apple announces WWDC for early June
• E3 video-game event is cancelled at the last minute
• Nvidia GPU prices seem to settle, but are high

Monday 27 March 2023

We have a lot of rumors here about Google enabling its tablets to sit on a stand and be a "smart hub" for the home or something like that.

Nvidia pushes away crypto mining and embraces all the computing needs of AI researchers.

Meanwhile in single-board computing, Arduino has a major update to its UNO product.

And more single-board computing, Orange Pi releases its version 5 product that leaps over Raspberry Pi's version 4 product in performance.

Meanwhile in Greenland, they move to permanent daylight savings time. They have a reason as this puts them in the same time zone as most of Europe and that will help businesses.

Someone creates a ChatGPT client that runs on MS-DOS and a 1984 computer. Lots of time on your hands and there are some things less valuable to be doing.

Meanwhile in American public run schools, kids are reading much less. Teach to the test is all important.

Editorial standards, writing, and making a living. Standards put of fences, inside of which you can play to your heart's delight.

Thoughts on finding a "writing tribe."

Great opening, "In the Summer of 2022, after working in Communications and PR for 22 years, I left my writing job to become a writer."

A necessary topic: health insurance. If the writer is ill without medical coverage, everything, including the flow of money, stops.

Finance, another necessary topic for writers. But, but, but...nothing. It is necessary.

LinkedIn and finding freelance writing jobs.

Tuesday 28 March 2023

The plug-ins for ChatGPT are now flooding in.

Some tech history about how Elon Musk initially funded OpenAI but left when they wouldn't let him run the company or something like that.

A 3-D printed hotel is coming to the west Texas desert. I guess someone wants to go there.

Meanwhile at Apple headquarters, their AR/VR headset is coming along and will be priced at $3,000. Who will buy such a thing at that price?

More one-off applications of ChatGPT. This one allows queries and answers from the command line

More hope than reality (at least for today) is the use of the Large Language Models on inexpensive, readily available hardware. Everyone loves LLaMA.cpp, but you have to download a 240GB file to start. MacBook Air computers have 256GB drives.

High-tech meets hard reality in Haiti. If the roads are so bad that you can drive on them, all the tech ordering means nothing.

Chinese companies use names to hide their origin. They are still connected to the Communist Party of China. I wish it weren't so, but ...

Once again, real life proves that bad publicity is still publicity, and that sells products.

Microsoft announces a major performance upgrade to Teams. It will do everything faster and require much less memory. The upgraded Teams will roll out real soon now.

With the passing of the pandemic panic, Zoon has fallen on hard times. They try to rebound by partnering with OpenAI.

Where the money is. The deepfake economy is booming with, what else, porn.

Disney closes its entire metaverse unit. Expect others to follow as Mr. Zuckerburg's folly collapses and will be a footnote in tech fables.

GitHub lays off its engineering team in India.

Wednesday 29 March 2023

An economic perspective on all the recent AI flurry and how the big tech companies are reacting with investment and angst.

How our FBI is skirting the laws (it is supposed to enforce) to obtain data on us. We are surveilling ourselves. Is that okay with us?

Is the next great AI winter (economic collapse) just around the corner? Profits ensure continuing use of the current techniques. Where are the profits?

Once again we see large organizations failing to innovate like small organizations (big tech versus OpenAI).

Let's stop arguing about the philosophy of ChatGPT et al. Let's get on with it, use these new tools, and perform much more in much less time.

More spinoffs of the new chatbots: this is a programming editor that has all the code writing abilities built in.

Meanwhile in the UK, the government has a white paper describing what paper the government should produce to recommend regulation of AI. Moving at the speed of government, sigh, they will never keep pace let alone catch up.

The state of practice in facial recognition and law enforcement. Clearview AI has run a million searches for US law enforcement alone.

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems releases seven GPT-based large language models for generative AI, making them available to the wider research community.

1,000 people sign a petition asking AI companies to pay their employees to do nothing for six months so they can catch their breathe. Not likely to happen.

Our President cites the Defense Production Act to spend $50 million on production of printed circuit boards,

Thursday 30 March 2023

All this new AI that creates or generates text, images, etc. could disrupt economies, industries, and job$.

This research papers contends that ChatGPT et al can replace low-wage people in labeling things.

And here is OpenFlamingo, an open-source reproduction of DeepMind's Flamingo model.

And here is Lemon8. Owned by the same Chinese group that owns TikTok, it has shoot to the top ten on Apple's App Store.

Something like this would be quite helpful. It claims to treat S3 storage as a local disk drive.

Google partners with Replit to make a tool that writes software much like and better than Microsoft's GitHub Copilot.

Among the jobs cut at big tech were those associated with "responsible AI." Expect a train wreck as RAI is being emphasized in government. Is someone being reckless? Is someone wasting time?

Google bumbles and stumbles a bit chasing AI. Its Brain and DeepMind quickly try to cooperate.

Our FDA has new powers claiming that medical device manufacturers must prove their products meet certain cybersecurity standards in order to get their approval. More red tape. Higher consumer prices.

Apple announces their WWDC event in early June.

The AI boom is powered by Nvidia. $$$ flows to Nvidia from all directions.

Friday 31 March 2023

Here is a long interview with the CEO of Mastodon. Can it be the next Twitter? Does anyone WANT TO BE the next Twitter?

Here is an online book on the history and practice of streaming entertainment to us over the Internet.

We are now in the year of efficiency or lean and mean or something. Employee evaluations at big tech have changed accordingly.

This Github repository is a collecting point for all things educational about large learning models and associated technologies.

Speculating about the chip shortage. Times are changing. We are in a transition to newer chips. This is a major factor in the shortages.

The hotest job on the market is the "prompt engineer." These folks improve the performance of both the chat bot and the persons trying to use the chat bots.

This is a tech publicity stunt. Nokia is putting 4G Internet access on the moon. Yes, THE MOON. Someone will use it there, right? Maybe. Probably not.

Where the money is. Microsoft has put ads onto the new Bing AI search page. If the companies cannot make money, these things will go away.

E3 is the video game industry's big big event. It hasn't met since 2019 (that virus thing). This year's event was just cancelled.

A grand jury in New York indicts former President Donald Trump. This is a dangerous precedent.

That letter calling for AI work to pause for six months? Uh, well, uh, ya' see, maybe some of the signatures were fake and maybe some of the folks didn't read the whole thing and uh maybe...

This laptop is a combination of laptop and daring fashion. I suppose it works as a laptop. It will have everyone in the coffee shop looking at you.

Considering the price tag of Nvidia GPUs. The performance is up. The price is sort of the same, but still over $500.

"If we want things to get better, it helps to encourage people who are eager to make things better."---Seth Godin

The flip phone is making a comeback as younger people are tired of smartphones and always looking at a screen.

Not all is well in the commercial space exploration business. Virgin Orbit lays off almost everyone and ceases operations.

Intel Labs releases new AI models that improve depth perception in monocular vision. Ok for cameras etc. now. How about for persons who have lost an eye?

Saturday 1 April 2023

Here is a Tweet thread discussing transformers and attention and GPT and BERT and ...

Speculations about how these AI companies will make money. They will sell services online. It will be a "generative cloud" similar to today's cloud services providers.

Research into seeing in the dark. Clever work. Could this help people whose eyesight has failed them?

It appears that plants vibrate which creates a pressure wave or a sound. So, they "cry" at a frequency that people cannot hear, but some animals can. This is supposed to be significant.

OpenAI is investing in a company that makes robots. Revolutionary?

Google is taking a wise path in releasing and now updating Bard. After basic language, now they are improving math and logic. Answering programming questions is coming some time after now.

Our FTC is about to file suit against Amazon. More selective application of justice.

Former President Trump was indicted this past week. No doubt he violated something or other. Then again, so have lots of folks, even and especially famous folks. Why investigate this person instead of that person? Selective application of justice by those in position to decide. Not the American way, but the American way of practical application when limited resources forces, or shall we write "allows," choosing what to do today.

Meanwhile in America, folks are moving from the core of metropolitan areas to a little out in the country. This is a small movement, but a reversal of prior years. Work from home.

Here are the bottom ten cities in America. Folks are leaving these places for pastures and remote work.

Always exercising power over citizens, our Dept of Treasury has new rules that eliminate most electric vehicles from tax credits. "Buy what we tell you to buy!"

We have a shift in how Americans pay income tax to our government. There are notions of "free" tax filing (we regret to remind that "there is no free lunch"). There are obvious risks ("what could possible go wrong?") here, and I doubt folks in government have thought through all of this.

Sunday 2 April 2023

A programmer's first project in Colab and all that. It works pretty well.

A little work and thought shows that staged news videos are just poor-quality theater. Folks usually don't examine American journalism this closely. Too bad.

Abstraction and other types of basic problem solving. Still needed more than "the lastest tools."

It seems that March 31 was world backup day.

Meanwhile in Latin America, makeshift motors on bicycles are cheap alternatives for gig workers. There are, however, drawbacks.

More large models that shrink and can be run on one CPU and one GPU (where everyone is). Keep optimizing for small size.

Microsoft and Google --- tech incumbents who have apps used by hundreds of millions --- have put their AI stuff into those products. OpenAI, ahead in AI, has no products.

Meanwhile at Veterans Affairs, electronic health records just don't work. More money, more time, less service.

Meanwhile in the UK, more and more farming is done by immigrants on a special visa. Yes, there are problems with how some persons treat some other persons.

Law enforcement run amuck. It is quick to arrest someone and S L O W to release them once everyone learns they were mistaken. Admitting mistake is really hard to do.

The city of San Francisco is in crisis. People work from home. The office buildings are empty. The governors are scheming how to finagle taxes and such to do something. They cannot see obvious solutions.

Meanwhile in Holland, farmers are angry about Microsoft building data centers.

SpaceX hires a company to build lunar rovers the size of cars to send to the moon on 2026 flights. Well, will it happen?

I end this Sunday with the news that there are no health benefits to drinking alcohol. It is simply bad for us. No, it doesn't do this or that or the other thing. Those are just myths concocted by those who like to consume alcohol.