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: 13-19 November, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza fighting continues
• SHOCK: Sam Altman booted out of OpenAI
• Microsoft has lots of announcements with AI and their own processors
• Off shore wind farms aren't working as promised
• Apple is finally adopting a text messaging standard

Monday 13 November 2023

It is a Monday after a holiday weekend in the US. The news is a bit slow today.

Despite all the hype and everything, these large language models and chatter bots may not make it financially. There have been many technology wonders that splashed into the limelight and then failed.

And now we have the "overemployed." These are white-collar professionals who have remote jobs. They have two or three full-time jobs. They can juggle tasks, hire helpers, etc. and be paid double and triple salaries.

Meanwhile in the UK, a grocery store chain is removing self-checkout and bringing back people. Some major US companies are considering the same.

In the meantime, our former former President has become an expert commentator on all things related to AI.

Book editors, are they good or bad? Eight qualities of good ones. Nothing exceptional or surprising here.

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."---Maya Angelou. I tend to agree.

If you run into seasons where you cannot write, here are some tips. Myself? I have to write everyday. Otherwise I go bonkers.

How much do you fix as you write? How much do you leave till later? The answer is, of course, "Just the right amount."

A few techniques to get writing again or for the first time and build confidence that the words will come.

One writer's 13 steps to writing a novel.

A long essay on the fiction-publishing industry.

You don't have to write alone if you don't want to. Join a community. Start a community. One writers plus one other writer is a community.

"A writer takes the raw materials of real life and crafts them into a story." Real life is all around everyday. You don't have to hitch hike the world to see it.

Tuesday 14 November 2023

A small example of writing code that may be longer than needed, but is easier for other programmers to understand.

Practical lessons learned by a programmer trying to build some hardware.

Some promise of new techniques to read brain scans and find Alzheimer's. This is basic machine learning and pattern matching.

A call for the Java programming era is over. Time to move on. There is a huge code base that must be maintained for decades. Otherwise, yes, new applications new language.

Saving for future use as I may need to learn new techniques in software agents.

Going along with the agents, we have, "AutoGen is a framework to develop LLM-powered applications using multiple agents that are able to communicate and orchestrate among each others."

Rural tourism is a thing for some people. Hochatown, OK is such a place. I don't get it, but whatever.

Who has the fastest super-duper computer? AMD-powered Frontier is #1 with Intel-powered Aurora at #2.

In the server GPU market, Nvidia upgrades its H100 to something called the H200. Another year, another increase in performance.

People are working diligently to save old video games. I guess there is some good in this.

Boeing signs a $52Billion contract to deliver airliners to Emirates.

ExxonMobil is an energy company, not just an oil company. They are moving into lithium mines in the US.

Wednesday 15 November 2023

Dire prediction that being able to program a computer will no longer be a desired skill. It will just be something old people used to do.

Deeper thoughts on going back to the office building. If you have to wear noise-cancelling headphones in the office, well, it's just a place for noise and not for working as a team.

Tesla is trying to find something for their car owners to do while charging their batteries. Eat, watch a movie, whatever.

If you are an AI researcher and live in the bay area, OpenAI and Google are stealing each other's people and paying million$$$. The $$$ figures are unbelievable.

"Think of LLMs as booksmart Harvard graduates who can Google anything to answer any question you ask them."

Here is an effort to create an open GPT market.

Good explanation of RAG Retrieval Augmented Generation. "In-context learning is the ability of an LLM to learn information not through training, but by receiving new information in a carefully formatted prompt."

Success leading to failure. OpenAI stops sales of ChatGPT+ subscriptions due to lack of compute capacity. I bought a $20 per month subscription.

A quick study: people think that that faces (white faces) generated by software are real people more than they think the same of photographs of real people. Fooled ya'. The same is not true for faces of color.

Finally, a neural network system predicts weather better than other methods. I demonstrated this 30 years ago. Why did it take so long?

Law enforcement employees are believing facial recognition software quickly and stopping all other investigations. Duh. This is automation bias: the inclination of people using computer technology to uncritically accept what machines tell them.

The AI sweat shops: it seems that the AI companies are hiring teens worldwide to train their systems.

Meanwhile in America, pedestrian fatalities are at a 40-year high. Big pickups and SUVs with their high front hoods are the main culprits as drivers simply can't see walkers.

Jeff Bezos spends his spare time on his $500million yacht, which is the biggest in the world. When does it stop being a yacht and start being a ship?

The end of an era: Chuck E Cheese retires its robots.

Thursday 16 November 2023

It appears that those guys and gals in Congress have averted a government shutdown and kicked the can down the road to January when we can do this all over again.

How the work-life balance conversation is simply the wrong conversation.

Thoughts on optimizing a system this way or that way. It is a trade off.

If you want to run a nuclear reactor, you need fuel. That fuel is not simple to produce.

This long essay considers why everyone wants Nvidia to sell them some processors, and why Nvidia just can't make enough of 'em at any price.

This person quit playing poker full time for big money and went back to a regular job. There are good reasons. The glamour isn't so glamorous after a while.

How to create a pressure wave in a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) silicon-and-piezoelectric chips. This means you can build teeny tiny big sound speakers.

SpaceX will shoot off its really big rocket this weekend as the second orbital test of the Starship commences.

For those interested in meta models and architectures and the creation of such, this is a good essay.

Microsoft is having its Ignite conference this week. Here is one summary of the opening-day announcements.

Microsoft updates its Teams meetings with new features that make it seem like we are all together again. Except, we don't want to be all together again. What was that meeting app that started with a Z?

Meanwhile in America, the news paper is a small minority source of news. The phone and the computer are the biggest sources of news with social media sites being more popular that washingtonpost dot com.

Microsoft shows its own processors for its data centers. They have a general CPU and a processor for AI applications. Everyone wants to build their own processors.

What's in a name? Microsoft changes the names of its products. "CoPilot" is now the name for just about anything related to AI.

This article attempts to explain the various CoPilots and what they do. My frustration is that these things "roll out" to a few people now and then and are late.

And we have Microsoft Copilot Studio to extend CoPilot in one way or another.

If this works, it will be GREAT. A new Teams features cleans and decorates your home behind you so it all looks much better than it is.

Finally, a good use for all this AI stuff, "Be My Eyes AI offers GPT-4-powered support for blind Microsoft customers"

ooooops, in Los Angeles about a quarter of electric vehicle charging stations, well, uh, they don't work.

ANOTHER MUST SEE VIDEO: and this is funny (until we start crying). Generative AI stuff has distinguished David Attenborough narrating a geek guy's life.

Offshore wind energy projects aren't, well, uh, they aren't working.

Friday 17 November 2023

Some folks use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) all day everyday. Why? Why not. It works for them. Excel rules some worlds, and VBA supercharges it.

An essay on using OpenAI GPTs to make my own version of am AI thing. I've tried to do this several times and I am disappointed in the capability.

Meanwhile at Amazon, return to the office building or you won't receive any pay increases. Some will stay home and forego the money. The place turns into a government environment. Just do enough to be paid.

An attempt to explain "serverless" server systems. Its a bunch of folks making up terms that only they know so they will be superior in some sense to some people.

Fear and loathing at X with anti-Jewish and pro-Nazi goings on.

Fear and loathing in America's newspapers as a third of them are gone. Rural areas are most affected as they have 1 or 0 local news sources (even online).

Meanwhile at Apple, finally we will be able to send text message to non-iPhone friends and neighbors.

Coming next year to Amazon, we can buy cars on Amazon. Oh joy. Perhaps some good will come of this.

Disturbed people draw pictures that are disturbing. And, yes, those people use AI text-to-image software to make disturbed images. The software is just a tool. It isn't disturbed. It's like a pencil.

Qualcomm updates its Snapdragon 7 processors for mid-range smartphones. Of course they claim some type of AI processing.

Bluesky, one of those Twitter alternatives in the age of Musk, claims two million active users.

I am surprised that this surprises some people. Working an actual job means you are working during the day and can't just run around doing whatever you feel like doing when you feel like doing it.

Want to become wealthy? Spend less than you earn over a long period of time.

Microsoft has created a Windows app (not yet available) that runs on Macs and other Apple systems.

Saturday 18 November 2023

This report comes from a survey of 1,500 people who work in technology. The topic is AI. What is actually happening?

I love this: "Pipeless is an open-source computer vision framework to create and deploy applications without the complexity of building and maintaining multimedia pipelines. It ships everything you need to create and deploy efficient computer vision applications that work in real-time in just minutes."

Working on open-source software projects and the subject of passion and money.

Let's use the terminal window and the CLI (command-line interface). A lost art? Not so much.

BIG TECH SHAKEUP: The world's most famous recent celebrity tech CEO Sam Altman is booted out of OpenAI. Co-founder Greg Brockman out as well.

We now have a long list of companies that stopped advertising on X due to anti-semitic comments on the platform.

Meanwhile at Amazon, Alexa is fading into the past as managers move engineers from Alexa to other AI areas.

The folks at Cambridge Dictionary have a "word of the year." This year's winner (loser) is "hallucinate." That is the stupid term that folks use to describe when a chattering bot gives the wrong answer. Somehow "wrong" became "hallucinate," a.k.a., stupid.

Well fella's, it appears that the gals live six years longer than us. Is that bad news or good? I'm not sure. Let me ask my wife.

Golden Anniversary: Ethernet was invented at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973.

Silver Anniversary: Half-Life is 25 years old.

"Roman Abramovich handed over a secret stake in a Russian advertising giant to two of Vladimir Putin's close friends including the man known as Putin's wallet, leaked documents show. "

Microsoft updates its small language model Phi. Now from Phi-1 to Phi-2. Optimize for size and lose just a little performance.

Google is building a competitor to GPT-4. They are having troubles and are delaying its rollout.

Sunday 19 November 2023

And today is my 65th birthday.

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, co-founders of OpenAI and recent employees thereof, are already plotting to start a new company.

Study shows that since the release of ChatGPT, the jumber of freelance consultant jobs has dropped as have the earning of the few consultants who are left. Just ask ChatGPT.

SpaceX launched its Starship for the second time. It went farther and higher this time before self-destructing. Progress. Slow and expensive progress.

Meanwhile in Europe, Germany, France and Italy have agreed on so form of AI regulation. They are trying to bring the rest of the EU into their agreement.

And out in the land of OpenAI, plenty of folks seem intent on bringing Sam Altman back as CEO and all that. Fear and loathing in the Bay Area.

This is how you do it. This Uber driver started her own shuttle business and makes more money working fewer hours. It still works. Capitalism still works.