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 August, 2018

Summary of this week:

• Lenovo releases a new thinner lighter yet still powerful laptop
• Nvidia shows its Turing GPU architecture
• Censorship continues to grow
• Los Angeles to use body scanners at subway stations
• Amazon is poaching YouTube stars

Monday 13 August 2018

Software is trained to identify programmers by their unique styles. Programmers do have their own styles. This has been known for years and has been used in court cases regarding intellectual property.

Lenovo releases an even thinner and lighter and powerful portable computer.

Once again, this time with a flourish, the hackers at Defcon show the folly of computer voting machines. When will election officials care?

D&D Denial and Deception (not dungeons and dragons): it is as old as the stick and the stone. Some of us wonder why some adults wonder that this is happening.

If course China has spent more $$ on 5G sites. They can afford to as they confiscate whatever they want. Is that what we want in America?

"It sounds ridiculous when you say that out loud, doesn’t it?"—Seth Godin Say it aloud. How does it sound when it comes from my own mouth?

ooops, the air-tight security of Amazon Web Services isn't quite so.

We may soon be able to run Windows 10 on Chromebooks. Isn't that opposite of what they entire project was supposed to do?

Tuesday 14 August 2018

ooops, it seems that those body cams worn by police are easily hacked so that someone can substitute and edit the footage that is later used in court.

Vimeo jumps into the already crowded room of censor and censorship.

Reddit is censored in China. When censorship is allowed in any place it arrives in every place.

Facebook acqui-hires Vidpresso to make its video more interactive.

Nvidia presents its next-generation GPU architecture called the Turing GPU architecture.

Headline says it all: Netflix, Amazon Video, and Xfinity are accidentally re-creating cable TV

News Flash (not): a bunch of political candidates in the US this year have large security holes in their websites and campaigns.

IBM has spent years on AI-related research into treating cancer. No results. Human biology is still beyond start-of-the-art computing.

Linux 4.18 is released.

Wisdom itself abides only in the California legislature as it will soon tell all companies who should be on their Boards of Directors.

Wednesday 15 August 2018

Forward to the past: "AI" software that diagnoses eye disease very well and "explains" the diagnosis. We did this back in teh 1980s. I am dumbfounded as to why it took so long to do it again.

And the Chinese government watches, i.e., spies on ethnic minorities that have fled China due to persecution. And Google and others are helping the Chinese government do this while they protest everything that the American government does for the benefit of Google employees.

Something is wrong at Instagram as hundreds of users have reported their accounts hacked.

Twitter succumbs to peer pressure and joins the censors. When did censorship become a badge of honor in America?

A look at iPhone repair shops in China who obtain parts from other suppliers, not Apple or Apple-authorized suppliers.

Examining those really big portable computers with 17-inch screens that weigh a ton.

Microsoft now allows us to auto-magically backup folders from PC to the OneDrive cloud. That's nice, but about ten years behind everyone else.

Most young Americans are rejecting the concept of capitalism. And who has failed to teach these people? Government-run schools. What did we do to ourselves?

Invasion of the body scanners: Los Angeles to use such at subway stations. Invasion of the lawyers plays next.

Trade Wars? We haven't seen anything yet. The government of India may enact laws that effectively ban Amazon and other non-Indian owned businesses. Many countries have laws limiting foreign ownership of businesses.

Nvidia quickly announces their first products using the Turing GPU architecture.

Thursday 16 August 2018

I am rushed today, so not much Internet viewing this morning.

How social media went from hero of free speech to bum of whatever it did wrong. IMHO, the experts predicted a presidential election and were all wrong. In effort to avoid looking stupid, they found a scapegoat.

Facebook boasts about how good it is becoming at censorship.

Amazon is trying to buy a bunch of brick-and-mortar movie theaters.

Amazon is trying to poach YouTube stars away from Google.

Friday 17 August 2018

More insight into the Chinese government's surveillance state.

Nvidia's revenue grows 40% and its stock falls 6%. Someone estimated incorrectly. A good financial quarter despite the silliness.

Part of Nvidia's report reveals that crypto mining is sinking into a deep, dark hole. It looks like it's over.

Intel acqui-hires deep-learning company Vertex.ai.

Best Buy acquires GreatCall—the company behind the "senior (un)friendly" phones.

Google makes it easier for hearing aid makers to stream audio (phone calls are the big ones) from Android phones and mobiles.

Google's American employees are finally protesting Google's cooperation with the Chinese government's censorship program.

Some morons in Silicon Valley are removing the AMPEX sign.

Saturday 18 August 2018

Ars Technica looks back at 20 years of covering the Apple iMac.

Further evidence that the rush to mine crypto-currency and all things GPU blockchain related are over, at least worth the while of GPU makers.

Something new is solid state disks: more form factors to improve efficiency in data centers.

Stronger rumors and technology leaning the way of Apple going to ARM processors for the Macs.

Security holes in irrigation systems show all sorts of mayhem is possible. DON'T CONNECT IT TO THE INTERNET AND IT WON't BE HACKED. Is that difficult to understand?

Facebook is now in trouble from regulators for letting advertisers target their ads at likely consumers.

And on a Saturday morning, a wonderful video of sheepdogs herding thousands of sheep. The wonders that God's hands have wrought.

Research shows that putting simple errors in software—and lots of them—leads hackers down the wrong pathways and wastes their time. It is like putting small, empty safes all over your house to drive burglars nuts.

Put an electronic chip under your skin so you can open doors and buy stuff at vending machines. This post relays one company's experiences.

Europe hasn't produced a single, world-wide, dominant tech company. A small population and large regulations are likely causes.

Sunday 19 August 2018

Our President blasts Silicon Valley social media sites for slanted censorship. We in America aren't very good at this censorship thing. It think that is good.

Facebook proudly announces their censorship plans for the coming election season.

A call for all of us to stop tweeting and resume tumbling (Twitter and Tumblr).

TripAdvisor succeeded, i.e., people write of their travel experiences and places. Now that "everyone" reads it, the flakes flock to it to "write reviews."

The big American tech companies have dramatically increased their use of H-1B visa workers.

This is news to me: job applicants are not showing up for job interviews. I've never missed one, but 99.9% of mine ended in a dark hole. What is happening? Oh, I am old.

The "gig" economy, i.e., everyone is under-employed and under-paid, and the writer.

How to write how to books and articles.

For writers, science magazines that pay for articles.

How one writer breaks all the rules they taught us in school and manages to survive. Try things for yourself. Practice what works for yourself.

Declare that your current book (or whatever it is you are writing) is finished. Ship it (somewhere somehow). Write another one.

Writing myths (a couple of many) (1) Writing slowly equals writing better and writing quickly equals writing poorly. (2) Rewriting makes stories better.

Some things some of us writers want and how to use them for motivation.

Make stories and characters twist. This is a long, but good quote, "'You take someone who’s a potato farmer in Idaho, and you expect a certain thing from them. How do they subvert those expectations? ... the answer is in resisting the instinct to simplify and instead focusing on those very traits that don’t seem to fit the usual narrative... this is the point at which a character starts to have dimension."

Thoughts on the one-sentence story concept.

Brand Journalism: something different, but a way to make money by writing.

This is a long and excellent post on the various ways to earn money while traveling.