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: 8-14 May, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Tech layoffs continue with Intel and LinkedIn this week
• Venture capitalists pour money into anything related to generative AI
• "Everyone" is reading the 8things.pdf paper on large language models
• Google I/O 2023: more AI in everything
• Taiwan has run out of people, hurting its semiconductor industry

Monday 8 May 2023

The iMac is 25 years old this week.

Like the Soviets did decades ago, the CCP Chinese are thinking harder and crunching numbers less to keep advancing in AI without the latest US hardware. Ask any grad student how to finish their dissertation with good hardware. There are ways to work harder and smarter to still "git it done."

Sam Altman on permanent remote work. He feels it doesn't work. There is synergy in groups and the technology we have isn't good enough yet.

Meet the humans who train all these AI systems. Americans get $15/hour with non benefits. Folks in poorer countries get much less.

It appears that recycling plastic creates teeny tiny microplastics that go into the water system. The whole thing has been a farce from the start. Just ban it and go back to glass.

Slack adds conversation summaries and text generation.

The metaverse is gone. Facebook is stuck with the corporate name "Meta." Too bad for them.

What one writer uses in her writing businesses. These are businesses that earn mone.

Ah, the six-word story.

Ha! The writer in the family. Long story that I won't tell.

A quiet and steady journey to "becoming a writer." I suppose the post is about making a lot of money as a writer.

How long does it take to write a novel? Well, the day you finish, it has taken your entire life up to that point. Oh yes, there are other answers. Some time between a couple weeks and ten years.

Tuesday 9 May 2023

Warning about passkeys, i.e., about how big tech companies are implementing them.

Economic trends are changing the way AWS charges for cloud computing. Are the good old days gone?

Bill Gates writes about his self-proclaimed breakthrough in nuclear power. Let's hope this works.

Tips on using images.ai to produce the image you want.

Here is another good text-to-image site. I love these things.

How to do chrono-location of a photo: determining when a picture was taken.

Chuckle and wince a bit at this article. Bored at work? Sit there and do something interesting.

The governors of China banned crypto currencies two years ago. The subjects of said governors continue to do so.

Strong rumors that this week Google will show how they will integrate their AI into their services.

At the moment, Palantir is thriving financially.

LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) cuts 716 jobs (about 4% of workforce).

Intel plans more layoffs.

Warren Buffett said the key to avoiding mistakes is to write your own obituary and live up to it.

Where the money is right now is generative AI. The venture capitalists are pouring it into anyone who claims anything in that area.

Facebook has 3Billion monthly active users and 2Billion of those are daily active users. Still, some folks fret about its viability. Are you kidding?

This could be fun... At this year's DEF CON, hundreds of hackers will cut loose on the large language models and show all sorts of things the LLM makers may not want to see.

ooooops One company that makes electronic health care software admits that a mistake exposed the health records of a million of us.

Wednesday 10 May 2023

Rivian and its electric vehicle company town of Normal, Illinois.

This is the paper that "everyone is reading now." The authors analyze large language models and explain what they find.

Here is a summary of the paper.

More material on this "maybe these microservices won't work for the rest of us."

GitHub expands the ability to search for source code to the rest of us.

emTwitter is cleaning out old expired user names so the rest of us can jump in and use them.

Strong rumors that Google will finally show its Pixel Tablet tomorrow. It will have Google's own Tensor processor.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and ChatGPT, continues to be the world's newest big celebrity tech CEO. He doesn't have the money, yet, but has more fame than most.

Not having much else to do with their time, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued its first ever health advisory on social media use.

The bottom falls out of the tablet computer market. Sales are down, down, and down. So why aren't the prices falling as well?

Wendy's partners with Google for a computer that takes your order at the drive through. We shall see how this works.

AI everywhere, IBM announces Watsonx, a new platform that delivers tools to build AI models and provide access to pretrained models for generating computer code, text and more.

Microsoft expands its early access to the yet-to-be-released 365 Copilot. I'm not on the list, so we wait.

The folks at OpenAI reveal that they are "working on" some explaining capabilities for GPT-4.

I love this post from Seth Godin about working with people who actually work and ship products.

Folks are building a Sky360 network to constantly monitor the skies and spot any UFOs.

Thursday 11 May 2023

This Github repository allows calling a variety of LLMs like you would call OpenAI's.

Here is a listing of important Python libraries.

Amazon has, or had, a secret project to infuse new AI into its little Astro robot.

The pandemic gave employees leverage over where and when they worked. Bye bye. Layoffs now reign and if you want a paycheck, you do what you are told.

Tips on using Github CoPilot in test driven development.

And how to use large language models in many ways in software development.

Now we have enough AI story generators to have a top ten list.

Google I/O 2023 was yesterday. Here is one summary of the announcements.

This is an interesting essay on AI and "escape from accountability." Will we all soon proclaim, "The AI thing ate my homework."

Everyone wants to work from home? Okay. Companies hire folks in Latin America who will do your job at less than half the pay.

Google starts Project Tailwind. It is an AI-assisted research and writing tool or sorts. I signed up for the waitlist. Let's see how this goes.

Google releases MusicLM. It is a text-to-music app.

I love this post from Seth Godin on teaching and all forms of conveying information.

Microsoft's CEO says, "No pay raises this year." Well, okay for those at Microsoft who have enjoyed overly generous pay for years with lots of perquisites.

Friday 12 May 2023

The folks at Hugging Face have yet another new tool to use large language models. It deserves some experiments.

Stack Overflow is a site where programmers go for advice. At least they used to do there. Traffic is shrinking as the chat bots provide a better alternative.

This Github repository contains a private text AI tool.

A company called Vast announces hopes to launch a private and commercial space station in 2025.

This would be something huge if it happens: Microsoft signs a deal to buy power from a nuclear fusion reactor in 2028. Such a thing does not exist and may be from the fabled un-ob-tanium.

To answer the question in the title of this article, "Yes, we can build models at half the cost (and half of that and half of that again)." We have learned how to do this. Now we are learning how to do this more efficiently.

Taiwan produces the worlds integrated circuits. Taiwan hasn't produced enough people in a couple of generations to maintain this technology position.

Meta announces an AI Sandbox for advertisers so they can create a variety of ads for their products. The first release is limited to a small group of companies.

Anthropic has expanded the context window for Claude --- its flagship text-generating AI model from 9,000 tokens to 100,000 tokens. This means, in one use case, kids can dump an entire book into it and let it write the book report. There are other use cases.

The crypto mining companies have all the hardware and experience the AI companies need.

I'll just quote this, "Apple's current market capitalization of about $2.7 trillion this week exceeds the entire market capitalization of the United Kingdom, the third biggest stock market in the world."

It appears inevitable that spinning disk drives will be away. Folks have been wrong about things like this before.

Saturday 13 May 2023

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: Elon Musk has found a person to be CEO of emTwitter. The person's name has not been released. Mystery. Silliness.

Stability AI has a new product that creates animations from text, images, and other video. The fun begins for some. Careers end for others.

Research shows that the variation of IQ among siblings is about the same as that in the general population. I guess this means that IQ is not inherited much at all.

Here's another story that is all over the Internet. Microsoft has been making training videos for its employees. The show is a hit. It has been on 7 years and employees watch back episodes for fun.

Big tech has laid off about 300,000 folks. Little tech is hiring many of them.

One person thinks that with AI the good times will continue to roll as AI will bring the need for far more programmers.

Meanwhile in Germany, they are trying to move away from semiconductors made in Asia and North America.

Meanwhile in China, they are trying to adjust to the trade war with America concerning semiconductors.

Here comes Apple's mixed reality headset. Get ready for it to be ... not so good. Will Apple's reputation for improvement cause folks to buy it anyways?

Now even the lawyers are trying ChatGPT. Uh, wait, how will they all make a living?

As of today, the big tech companies are letting everyone else use their AI models for products. Next year, this could stop. Then what happens?

Meanwhile in real America, two thirds of car dealerships don't sell electric vehicles. Real Americans don't want them. Someone please tell the rich elites about this.

It appears that it is easy to fool some people who just can't imagine that others would be trying to fool them. The topic here is fake academic research.

Pay TV (cable, satellite, etc.) falls back a couple of generations. Back in 1992, this was growing and exciting. Now it is shrinking away.

Sunday 14 May 2023

With all these new AI tools that boost productivity, allow me to mention two websites I found in the past few months that have done more for me than AI and such. archive today helps me read information that would otherwise be blocked from me. The other is Capitalize My Title. It gives me the correct capitalization of the title line for blog posts and other writings. These are truly amazing and helpful.

Bellingcat has stories of tracking Russian ships. Those folks at Bellingcat are sharp.

And information on how Bellingcat finds the location of photographs practically worldwide.

Meanwhile between walls separating the US and Mexico, (yes, there is such a place) potential immigrants are using smartphones to order food from Uber Eats. I guess this story is true. Only in 2023.

Our Dept of State is hiring data scientists. The jobs are at the GS-13 level... what a joke. Are they kidding? Qualified data scientists earn far more money than that, and to work for State would mean working for people who don't understand what you do.

Being influenced by what we read. That is true even if what we read is "written" by a computer. It's just mimicry of world history.

US colleges are trying to train semiconductor manufacturing engineers. I think the influence of the CHIPS Act is overstated. Much of the money goes to social programs mislabeled as manufacturing.

We all eat. Groceries is a huge market. Amazon now has 3% of the market, but wants more and more and more of it.

Asus shows two thinner GPU cards. They shed bulk by moving much of the heat dissipation to an external module.

Asus shows a handheld game console. Amazing computing power in something the size of a paperback novel.