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 January - 4 February, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Tech layoffs continue
• Big tech has big financial quarters (with fewer employees)
• A new type of browser from The Browser Company
• The Apple Vision Pro is now in the stores at $3,500

Monday 29 January 2024

The Japanese did land an unmanned craft on the moon. It, however, landed upside down. It still functions a little bit.

Parts of the Panama Canal are unusable because of low water. This is bad management of resources. Of course, we blame it on climate change. Of course, the scapegoat for everything that ails us.

The crypto currency market is gone. What do you do with all that hardware? Start generating generative AI models.

A new study says... exercise four minutes a day to block dementia. My mother walked hours a day and suffered dementia. So much for new studies.

A review of the Unix Wars for the 1970s and 1980s. I remember them well. Some argue that Mac's operating system is a lone survivor of that era.

A study shows that "AI is taking over the world" is foolish hype. Companies are not racing to adopt AI. Company leaders are trying to solve the everyday problems of leading people and managing work. Nothing new here.

This could change a few things. It's a new search app that reports all results in a web page.

"Experts are worried." Here we go again. When will we learn about how often the experts are just plain wrong?

Meanwhile in China, the governors (the Communist Party) is pouring money into its chip-making industry. They may flood the world with inexpensive (subsidized) parts.

While in America, the regulators punish successful American companies.

Going to a writing retreat? Some things to consider to benefit more.

Some trends in ghost writing.

Some ideas in direct sales for writers.

The one rule no writer should break (in the opinion of this piece's writer): Don't Rush.

Got an English degree? Want a job? Here are some tips.

Tuesday 30 January 2024

Our Federal government does its biggest AI learning project ever. And it is nothing compared to private industry.

Don't have time to do it? Make the time. It is a decision. Do this or let it go and do that. We cannot do it all.

It appears that the idea of putting solar panels on the roof of a house is a bad, bad idea.

Layoffs at iRobot. Purchased by Amazon, this is part of a merger or takeover.

MetaAI updates its code generation model, Code Llama 70B.

Every organization that has a computer now has a Chief AI Officer. If you can spell "AI" you've got the job.

Meanwhile at IBM, get back to the office three days a week or join the unemployed. The order is for "managers" only.

And yet another study on return to the office. This one shows that companies aren't more profitable while employees are less happy with their jobs.

Here is an AI-powered tool called Scalene that is a profiler for Python code. It suggests new code that is more efficient.

News on how the US intel community is trying to gather information that has already been gathered and is in plain sight.

Gosh, I recognize all the places mentioned here. These are older software repositories on the Internet. I even had the Walnut Creek CD-ROM.

Neuralink, yet another Elon Musk endeavor, has implanted a chip in a human brain for the first time.

Wednesday 31 January 2024

Spend some time at this website to see cost of living. This place lists the price of a Big Mac at every McDonald's in America.

This warms my heart. Popular software isn't as usable as understandable software. Documenting your work has always been something I do much to the derision of peers. Aha!

The tech industry is in the midst of yet another big layoff period. What does this mean? There is more to it than lost jobs and heartache.

Programmers are using AI to write code. A study concludes, "Code churn -- the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored -- is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline." Predictable and predicted. Of course this goes the route of all other AI-generated text. Ask, copy, paste, EDIT.

Alphabet and Google announces a good financial quarter while cutting jobs.

Microsoft announces a good financial quarter while cutting jobs.

Big layoffs at Block.

Big layoffs at PayPal.

College sports: who has the biggest income?

College sports: the flip side, who has the biggest expenses?

Meanwhile in Russia, despite a morass of a war, the banks are making record profits.

Not having much else to do with their time, our Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is paying local government to install solar panels. Do those things work in a blizzard?

Big layoffs at UPS.

The folks at Raspberry Pi are preparing to go public.

Thursday 1 February 2024

All hail Anguilla whose Internet domain is dot AI. You get the picture. Lots of money flowing to that place for nothing.

I love the title of this post, "How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent"

This seems to be an important item to some people: paying ChatGPT users can invoke other GPT-specific GPTs on the GPT store. Well, why not? Make sense? I don't know.

It appears that iRobot, once dominating the market in home robotics, is fading. Remember America On-Line?

A chip manufacturing plant is coming to Indiana.

Meanwhile in America, us adults use YouTube and Facebook. We leave the TikTok to the kids.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, Google signs a deal to buy electric power from offshore wind farms. Why other than publicity?

Nvidia drops the prices of its RTX 4080 Super graphics card to $999. This is the last offering in this product line.

To show that our Federal government is saving us from the Communist, or at least is claiming to do so...

Our Dept of Justice claims to have thwarted a major cyber attack from China.

Our Dept of Defense adds more Chinese companies to a list of those Chinese companies that help the Chinese Communist Party and its military arm. Let us not forget the the People's Liberation Army is NOT the army of China. It is the army of the Communist Party of China.

Our FCC wants our FCC to declare junk phone calls that use AI illegal so our FCC can arrest those ne'er-do-wells. You can't make up this stuff.

23andMe loses all its value. It was once valued at $6Billion (with a B). Now? Worthless. I never understood how people would look at their results and say, "I never knew I was 25% native American." That meant one of your four grandparents was 100% native American. How could anyone believe such nonsense?

Friday 2 February 2024

Google is bringing out an advanced version of Bard. We will, however, have to pay to use it.

Microsoft Research has a technique called Layer-Selective Rank Reduction (or LASER) that reduces the size of a large language model and improves its performance. Large is probably always too large in these things.

Can you "cheat" in a job interview by using ChatGPT et al? Well, what is cheating? Is using available resources cheating?

The state-of-the-practice in text-to-video software. As usual, Andreesen Horowitz have excellent content.

Notes on how to test a large language model.

Notes on creating a custom GPT.

Meta had a big financial quarter.

Amazon had a big financial quarter.

Coming real soon now from Apple is Generative AI in all sorts of products and services.

Meanwhile in Ohio, the $20Billion project from Intel is delayed by the slowness of money coming out of the two-year-old CHIPS Act.

To boost performance and compensate shortages in commercial processors, Meta will be putting its own processors in data centers this year.

The Browser Company (great name) brings its new type of browser and search to the desktop. I will have to try this.

YOU GOTTA LOOK AT THIS! Researchers put a head camera on a baby to help teach AI how kids learn. Really cute kid. No comment from the mother.

Google's Bard now draws pictures.

Saturday 3 February 2024

Much of the hype says that if you are not neck-deep in AI by now you are lost. Folly. Pure folly.

ChatGPT et al can be excellent teachers or helpers to learners. Ask questions, check the answers, move on.

NASA has become a group of contract managers and has finally admitted such. They are asking for proposals on how to go to Mars.

Consider the cargo bicycle. Study shows that once you use one, you won't drive your car as much. This holds for some people in special circumstances.

Coming real soon now from Google, better recommendations for places in Google Maps from (what else?) generative AI and LLMs.

The Wall Street Journal lays off 20 persons (30% of staff) at its Washington D.C. bureau.

Meanwhile at an Apple store near you, $3,500 gets you a Vision Pro to strap on your face.

In a quiet part of Apple, work on autonomous vehicles is moving ahead quietly.

Meanwhile at Meta, they claim that work at their Fundamental AI Research lab is being done by an unprecedented percentage of women.

The last calendar quarter was a big one for the cloud computing industry with record growth.

READ THIS ONE: a story about a tiny college in rural Ohio closing and the results on farm kids in the area. I went to high school in rural Louisiana. Having a college nearby meant much to all the farm kids in the area. More than people realize. Hail to Southeastern Louisiana University.

Most smartphones process the images taken with their cameras (image sensors with lenses). What is real? Yes, what is REAL?

Perhaps I need one of these lights that hangs around the neck. The eyes are growing dimmer.

Lay offs appear to be just about everywhere in every sector of the economy.

The Messenger is another tale of how newspapers fail: bad managers. I believe it all started in the 1980s with Good Morning America calling itself journalism until people believed that it was actually a news program.

Sunday 4 February 2024

If you are a writer or artist, you must market your work. There are a few standouts who can leave marketing to someone else. The rest of us have to work harder.

Apple has been using its own configuration language called Pkl ("pickle"). Apple has released this to everyone.

More on big layoffs in the tech sector.

Neuralink is not the only brain implant company. Elon Musk is bringing publicity to the industry.

I guess this is important as everyone is reporting it: Google will rename "Bard" as "Gemini." I guess someone cares.

Meanwhile in America, law enforcement is using body cams. Now there are mountains of video and no one to look at any of it. Enter AI and software and tech that has been around for a long time,

Beware the experts. We have an entire industry to creates fake data and phony research papers. And then bribes journals to print this junk. 98% of scientists agree? Are you kidding?

Every country in the world wants to build its own AI super-duper-computer (so some say). Nvidia is ready to sell hardware to them. $$$