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: 29 May - 4 June, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Computex is this week, many product announcements
• Nvidia announces more super computing for AI
• Nvidia hits the $1Trillion market value milestone
• Meta shows a new AR/VR headset a week before Apple

Monday 29 May 2023

Researchers at the University of Washington present QLoRA (Quantized Low Rank Adapters). It enables fine tuning a huge language model in one day on one GPU.

Meta shows their "MegaByte" method that fundamentally alters the process of tokenizing to permit much great parallel processing and efficiency.

Here is another attempt at a private (no Internet interaction) method of examining your local files. It is called PrivateGPT.

Here is the GitHub repository for PrivateGPT.

A long article from a survey of people about the use and affect of AI in the workplace. More tools to do the work. Did carpenters take a cut in pay when power tools powered by rechargeable batteries arrived? Nope. Same thing here.

In light of Montana's ban on TikTok, musings on state-by-state bans of apps. It just won't work.

Nvidia shows more products that enable the big tech companies to build big AI products. New super-duper-computers.

Naver, South Korea's dominant internet search engine, is building large language models for specific governments worldwide. This will enable governors worldwide to monitor their subjects closer. Censorship and repression gains new tools and lives on.

There is little good news coming from NASA as its Space Launch System (SLS) simply hasn't worked as planned.

We have yet another form of golden handcuffs. Folks working from home don't like their jobs, but like working from home so much they stay in their crummy job.

Confidence and writing: write something, anything. There, you did it! Now do it again.

Some tips for freelance writing and the business of making enough money to have enough.

I suppose that it is possible to get calluses on your hand from writing with a pen or pencil.

From pens and pencils to a computer mouse that causes carpal tunnel. I must be missing something here.

I guess since I don't have a degree in it, I am only a citizen journalist or citizen editorialist or a ... perhaps just a hack writer.

History on the writer's strike of 2008 and how today's strike might end and what might come next.

Tuesday 30 May 2023

Computex is this week in Taiwan, so there are many new service and product announcements.

Using Docker containers for simplified data science development. "Simplified" is a subjective term. Maybe this all isn't that simple.

Once again we read about lighter-than-air airships making a comeback. With new structural technology, maybe this time.

As some of us have learned through experiments, building real applications with these LLMs has problems that haven't been solved, yet.

Nvidia and MediaTek will work together on the information and entertainment systems in cars.

Arm updates its mobile CPU designs.

ooooops, Managed Care of North America (MCNA) Dental had a ransomware attack and the health records of 9million of us are out there. Don't ya' just love electronic health records?

MSI shows a group of new laptop computers that are not for gamers (MSI's traditional customers) but for everyone else.

Private efforts to find ships sunk in battle in WWII.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says "everyone can be a programmer." AI allows us to speak to the computer and make it do things.

Intel will now put VPU (Video Processing Unit) technology into many new processors. The workloads keep growing, so computers need more processing power.

Wednesday 31 May 2023

Should your source code be "clever" or straightforward and easy to understand by the person who has to maintain it five years from now?

Chinese apps, which are connected to the Chinese Communist Party, are popular in America. Heed the warnings and stay away.

This is a good essay on why AI advances don't mean making money or disrupting industries. There is more than just building a better mousetrap.

Email addresses come and go. If you are building a product, don't use a customer's email address as their unique identified.

Now we are getting somewhere: this company is building a robot butler like we saw on the Jetsons. See the video.

Sometimes (almost always), reality isn't as fun a job as working for Google, Amazon, Meta, et al. Lower pay. Not pampered. Dull projects.

Chinese entrepreneurs seek to avoid the stain of the Chinese Communist Party by moving offshore. I find the article interesting in that is uses the old phrase "mainland China."

I like this: the BabyLM Challenge. The goal is to build not-nearly-so large language models. Those little ones can run on all sorts of practical computers.

And on the large end of the spectrum, Foxconn (maker of many chips and such) is betting that the demand for the server-sized AI processors will boom.

Nvidia hits a milestone as its value crosses the $1Trillion (with a Tr) value. It dropped down, but it will stay above that line.

Real news that isn't news: the personal information of TikTok users is being stored in China where the Chinese Communist Party has easy access to it.

This is a story about GitHub closing its San Francisco office building. The real story is about how the managers wanted to have an office building that was better than working from home. They succeeded at that for quite a while.

It is time to stop all the plastic bottles and go back to glass. We could never recycle the plastic and everyone who knew anything knew this.

Thursday 1 June 2023

Career advice: stop thinking of yourself as a "junior" anything. You know much. On the other hand, don't put yourself onto others as more than you are. It is a fine line.

A look at Intel and its woes of the past ten years. Once the inventor of all, it took several wrong turns under poor management. This kind of thing happens often as just on group of "leaders" can kill decades or centuries of success.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: experts sign a one-sentence warning about AI erasing the human race.

A long essay on what it takes for big tech to be big tech. This relates to the story above of how Intel fell a few rungs of the ladder.

Rumors of how amazing the displays are on Apple's yet-to-be-seen AR/VR headset.

This small study shows that the drug semaglutide reduces obesity much better than a placebo. Note, this study only involved a couple hundred persons.

Strong rumors of Apple testing and soon releasing new iMacs with powerful M2 processors.

And more rumors about Apple's WWDC this month.

And we have a company that will launch satellites to create a worldwide network of Bluetooth, yes those very short range devices, devices. This would be quite a change. Let's see if anything works.

Where is that file? Our Dept of Defense creates a Records Management plan of some sort to allow us to find our information that cost us much to create.

Friday 2 June 2023

This is localGPT, an offspring of privateGPT. This is yet another attempt to let a large language model analyze private documents.

Some plans for OpenAI by their celebrity CEO. They are short of hardware as they don't have eno:wugh GPUs.

Bye bye teachers. A growing number of students and their parents favor learning by asking chatGPT questions.

A look at JetZero and its ideas on the blended wing body airliner. Maybe one time. Perhaps I will sit in one in my lifetime.

We have arrived: it is still early and the movies are only about ten minutes long, but we watching movies completely generated by software.

Just a week before Apple's big show, Meta provides a peek at its newest AR/VR headset.

More American taxpayers' dollars flow to companies sending good to Ukraine. This time its SpaceX with an undisclosed amount of satellite Internet services.

Back to the office at Meta where persons assigned to offices must occupy them at least three days a week.

Another result of the pan(dem)ic is lakes of hand sanitizer in plastic bottles. Two things that are harmful in one package. The exercise adds another chapter to history where the experts are usually wrong.

How the idea for Nvidia was born drinking coffee and eating Grand Slam breakfasts at a Denny's in Silicon Valley. This is America.

Want to run AI large language models on premises for privacy? Rent powerful machines from Asus at $10,000 per month. It will work. It may be worth it.

Saturday 3 June 2023

This is a description of transformers and a catalog of transformer models.

This is a good article on why a large language model is not a product and turning one into a real product is difficult. Good, practical engineering.

Just a couple of days before the big Apple event on Monday, we have strong rumors about what we will see.

ChatGPT moves in on jobs. Of course the Washington Post gets it wrong. ChatGPT didn't replace anyone. People decided that they didn't need other people, so they fired the others and are using new tools to do their jobs without them.

Here is an in-depth piece on the hacker-for-hire industry in India. Educated persons live in a low-cost-of-living place. They have skills for hire and access to communications. It's a natural. This is a branch of the hacktivist community. Those with money and power, beware.

Would you take a "free" TV if you agree to answer surveys and such?

Meanwhile in Hollywood, this software that generates thing is scaring everyone. It will write scripts, create fake sets, create fake actors, create, create, create. Wait a minute, isn't this what Hollywood does now? Create things that don't exist because that entertains us?

NASA begins yet another isolation exercise to see how folks living in tiny spaces on Mars would get along with one another and themselves.

We've heard this promise before: VW says it new van will be in the US next year.

Predictions about how AI will affect the office workers. New workers with little skills will benefit the most. Middle age and middle skills folks... too bad.

Amazon, ever eager to move into new markets, is in talks with cellphone providers to offer wireless plans for $10 a month.

Meanwhile in Switzerland, they are putting solar panels between railroad tracks to generate electricity. We shall see if anything comes of this.

Sunday 4 June 2023

And we return to the crux of supervised learning, and that includes ChatGPT et al. When you train these on the Internet and the majority of the Internet is in the English language you should not be surprised that English works best.

We are about to launch a little satellite so that DEF CON hacking teams can try to hack into it. A good research project where no harm will be done. Prediction: the hackers will tear the little satellite to pieces. It's a simple matter of numbers.

MSI has a new laptop with an Intel EVO rating. Well, that sort of says the machine has lots of processing power and a long battery life. It is efficient. We shall see.

Researchers at CalTech claim to have beamed solar-based energy from space to earth. Jerry Pournelle advocated a full-force push to this technology instead of sending the army to the Middle East after 9/11. Had we followed Jerry's advice, we would have energy independence now and would command the energy market worldwide. Think about that one for a while.

I love this essay from Seth Godin about medical treatments that do little more than tell us we should be better. "It's all in your head." Of course it is. Where else would it be?