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: 1-7 May, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Writer's strike begins in Hollywood
• Intel and AMD have record financial losses
• More and more chatting AI apps are here
• Google announces it folding Pixel Fold phone
• Text generators are used to flood Amazon with books

Monday 1 May 2023

System 76 adds three new lines of laptop computers that are built to run Linux with lot of GPU options.

A Chrome browser add on puts ChatGPT inside the Google workspace software Docs etc.

We have a prototype of a machine that once fitted inside the eye can restore some sight.

The Hollywood possible writer's strike pulls in the chatbots. Mindless dribble can be written by software mimicry.

Doctors are using the chatbot to answer patients' questions. Again, basic information that is out there almost everywhere. Simple mimicry.

Success leading to failure. Mark Zuckerburg goofed on which direction to go. The losers were employees who were laid off to pay for his mistake.

A professional works one day a week at Waffle House to learn why there is a labor shortage in America.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, Russian solders digging trenches at Chernobyl are getting radiation sickness.

It takes fewer people to build an electric car than it does to build a gasoline-powered one. United Auto Workers are losing jobs.

Cardio Drafting: how one writer takes notes while exercising by dictating notes into the phone.

Tips on how to use the new AI tools to write more.

"Describe Your Book in Two Sentences" Substitute just about any endeavor for "book."

Resume writing: "The most important thing I learned is to use the employer's keywords in your cover letter and resume. "

Thoughts on User Experience (UX) writing.

And we return to travel writing. You can deduct the writing expenses from income taxes.

Tuesday 2 May 2023

MLC LLM is a universal solution that allows any language models to be deployed natively on a diverse set of hardware backends and native applications, plus a productive framework for everyone to further optimize model performance for their own use cases.

Here is a deep learning compiler for the PyTorch world.

Here is a way for programmers to use AI instead of be replaced by it. New techniques for new tools.

This library incorporates AI chatting into the popular Pandas library.

Strong rumors out of Amazon that AI is being used to greatly improve Alexa.

SpaceX is betting $2Billion this year that the Starship will bring back money one day.

Gordon Lightfoot has died at 84. I had no idea what an Edmund Fitzgerald was, but I remember sitting in the parking lot at Southeastern Louisiana University listening to Lightfoot sign of that wreck. I sat in a hot car dripping perspiration, but I wouldn't get out and walk in the shade until the song was over. I couldn't leave it.

This may lead to something big. Researchers have a noninvasive systems that collects brain recordings through fMRI and produces entire sentences of thoughts.

To show that we still like to go sit in a dark theater and watch a funny movie, the Super Mario Bros. Movie has pulled in a Billion$ this year.

Mastodon tries to make it easier to switch to them from Twitter.

Not having much else to do, taxpayer-funded folks at the White House want to monitor how companies use AI to monitor workers. Citizens monitor how citizens monitor citizens. You can't make it up.

The Writer's Guild of America is on strike in Hollywood.

We just discover 20,000 new mountains under the planet's oceans. This shows how little we know about our planet. Still, some folks want to spend Billion$$$ of other folks' money because they know the temperature of the planet 10,000 years ago.

Folks are using the new AI text generating stuff to create news sites.

Rumors that Microsoft is developing its own processors to compete with Apple's own processors.

IBM stops hiring people for back office work. It appears that basic software can do those jobs just fine.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, soldiers are using video game controllers to remote control weapons.

Wednesday 3 May 2023

It is all about the input and output. One of the major reasons that ChatGPT is WOW! is that we can type conversational things, not special computer geek speak.

Someone studied all those ZoomerTeams meetings and learned about the annoying technology and how we annoy one another with it.

Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and laments where AI seems to be going.

Stronger rumors about a new MacBook Air with a 15" screen.

I'd love to listen to this "conversation" as industry geniuses visit the White House to talk with our Vice President about AI.

AMD, like Intel before it, reports a bad financial quarter. The pan(dem)ic brought too much buying. Now, no one needs a PC.

Not having much else to do, a couple of our Senators introduce the Kids Online Safety Act. Those who have read the draft claim it harms kids more than helps them.

A group of former OpenAI employees found Inflection AI and release a chatter called Pi (Personal Intelligence). Go to heypi.com to try it.

Some criticism of the user interface of ChatGPT and the like.

The non-profit code.org creates TeachAI to, well, you know.

Microsoft is about to sell a version of ChatGPT wherein your data is not mixed with everyone else's. This is the only risk keeping many organizations from using it.

Always willing to take money from others in the form of taxes, folks at the White House propose a 30% tax on the electricity used in block chain computations.

Here's a list of the world's most-used web browsers. Apple's Safari moves ahead of Microsoft's Edge, again.

Thursday 4 May 2023

GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is a near monopoly in its market. Well, are we supposed to outlaw it or something?

Everyone who is anyone wants to be on Bluesky. Current users are selling invites for hundreds of dollars.

Recent college graduates are shying away from the big tech companies. The word is getting around on these layoffs.

These new Chatting software things are an excellent source for learning. The professional educators aren't sure what to do with them. If I can "ask questions" of software and get good answers, why should I hire a teacher?

Things are going well at Rocket Lab. They trail only SpaceX at launching things into space.

We have some new techniques in machine learning and computer vision to help doctors see tiny fractures shown in x-rays. This should have been available years ago.

I love this headline, "CEOs are getting closer to finally saying it --- AI will wipe out more jobs than they can count"

These researchers reverse engineered ChatGPT to lean what books the software "memorized." Alice's Adventures in Wonderland tops the list.

Real soon now, our Supreme Court will hear a case about how technologists use published works, which are protected by copyright, to make their software that then publishes works.

A few details on the writer's strike in Hollywood and how AI chatter things are a big issue. Note: these things didn't exist 12 months ago.

News Flash (not): regulators in Washington deem it essential to regulate new technology. (gosh)

Recent US rules to restrict shipment to China of advanced computer hardware has slowed Chinese tech... just a little bit.

Meanwhile in India, everyone wants to AI and there isn't enough people to go around. Huge salary jumps for those who choose to stay in India instead of going elsewhere.

This is a news: Gen Z (10 to 25 years old) are buying flip phones instead of the $1,000 smartphones.

The trial period for Microsoft's smarter Bing search is over. Now everyone, with a Microsoft account, can access the GPT4 Bing.

Slack is being updated to include AI that helps create "workflows."

AMD announces a new series of processors for the ultra-thin portable computers.

Friday 5 May 2023

"In this repo, we release a permissively licensed open source reproduction of Meta AI's LLaMA large language model. "

A few Chinese residents, who were a little more equal than their equals, lived the high life in Silicon Valley as government-sponsored venture capitalists. Times change.

Ah, those clever fellows at Microsoft. If we click a link in Teams or Outlook, Microsoft opens the Edge browser instead of the "default" browser.

Eli Lilly claims to have a new drug that slows the onset of Alzheimers by about a third. This shows promise, but for all the expense the little gain is not worth it.

Meanwhile in Europe, big tech companies are combining forces to compete with SpaceX's Starlink.

Google is adding a blue checkmark to gmail to verify users. I don't have such a checkmark yet.

Apple's financial quarter: profits are down, but I would take them.

Apple had a record financial quarter for services and iPhones. Notice how Apple didn't have layoffs like the other big tech companies.

OpenAI, with the hottest product in the world, lost $540Million in the last financial quarter.

The Khan Academy introduces a ChatGPT as a tutor.

And more chatting software that writes for us. AI startup Hugging Face and ServiceNow Research have release StarCoder (cool name) that writes software etc.

It appears that Microsoft is working with AMD to build processors for AI and other Microsoft applications.

Apple remains cautious with AI. Again notice that Apple didn't have layoffs and has more profits than anyone.

It is official: Google shows the folding phone, Pixel Fold.

Once again it appears that the spouse of a public official is paid to do something or nothing. The appearance of impropriety is there. Was it all illegal and improper and unethical? Those who ponder such are pondering.

Saturday 6 May 2023

This is a good tutorial article from Nvidia on the topic of these Large Language Models (LLM).

Hmm, maybe this idea of serverless and microservices and such just doesn't work.

Whooooosh! Little open-source experimenters are achieving chatbot performance 90% as good as Google ande OpenAI at 10% of the cost. The "genie is out of the bottle" or whatever cliche we wish to use. Make it work, then make it work better. That is a fundamental of building systems. OpenAI and Google et al the big boys made it work. Everyone looked at what they did and are making things much better pertaining to efficiency. Now you don't need super duper computing and $10million to make chattering software.

Thoughts on the Mojo programming language. It is as simple as Python and as fast as C, or so some claim.

Aha, perhaps a good use of this software that generates things. Amazon is working on such software to create advertising for clients who want it.

Strong rumors that Google is about to show a new way of displaying search results using more imagery and video.

Sunday 7 May 2023

Thoughts on multi-core processing.

This is solid gold: odd prompts that sort of trick ChatGPT into forgetting its restrictions and giving the user much much more.

Generating videos with software, a few images, and some text.

Google Cloud partners with Teradata on cloud-based AI and analytics.

Anaconda, with 35million active users, buys EduBlocks to move into education.

Bluesky, learning from the headaches of Twitter, is not allowing heads of state on the platform.

Discord, moving towards the mainstream, is changing the format of users' names.

These text-creating software things make it possible to churn out a book in a day. Some folks are doing that. Are those real books?

Continuing with the above, let's go to a place where people speak English. They have educated people and a low cost of living. Because of that, wages are low. The people have access to the Internet and these chatbots. A person can use the tools at hand to create a 300-page book in a day. A "publisher" makes an eBook suitable for Amazon dot com. The publisher also has the writer review the book under several different names and accounts. And here we have it. Half a dozen books a day show up on Amazon. The books are probably pretty good in that they convey information that is correct. There may be some writing hiccups, but "real" books have those as well. If lower-paid people can use technology to do this type of thing, why pay some one more money to do the same thing. Times change. To write books AND make good money, you need to do something special(er).

This is news to me: the International Olympic Committee now has something called the Olympic Esports Series.

Marissa Mayer is still with us and running an AI-based company doing small and useful things.

Python 3.12 is released.