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: 26 November - 2 December, 2018

Summary of this week:

• George H.W. Bush dies at 94
• Major earthquake in Alaska
• Ohio to accept Bitcoin for tax payments
• Bitcoin's value has dropped 40%
• Amazon opens its machine learning courses to everyone, no charge
• Amazon built its own ARM server processor for AWS
• Lots of bad news for Facebook
• Big Mouth Billy Bass plus Amazon Alexa
• Car makers have helped Chinese govt follow its subjects

Monday 26 November 2018

Today is Cyber Monday, but the "cyber" part, i.e., shopping online, has erased the individual days.

Lenny: I need this tool. It chats and chats and chats and bores even the bored telemarketers.

Social media, the video camera in everyone's pocket, telecommunications, micro chips...time has collapsed on us. Have we adjusted?

The perceived value of Bitcoin continues to collapse. Yet the miners continue to consume electric and computing power at alarming rates.

The Chinese are trying to DNA-engineer babies. I would heed caution, but they wouldn't listen.

The search for the "lie detecting" machine continues. Human folly has no end.

A look at Microsoft's Airband Initiative to bring broadband access to remote areas. But I thought the Obama Admin's $8Billion...oh well.

This story is all over the  Internet, so it must be important: the State of Ohio will accept Bitcoin payment for taxes. Perhaps sanity will resume some time soon there.

Why don't the tech giants apologize? They don't want to and they don't have to. It's mind over matter. They don't mind because you don't matter.

Tuesday 27 November 2018

This is Amazon's Re:Invent week, so they will have a bunch of announcements.

New from Amazon, AWS RoboMaker: a place in the cloud to design and test robots.

Amazon developed courses to train its engineers in machine learning. Now these course are free to everyone.

Amazon now offers its own ARM server processor alongside those from Intel and AMD: the AWS Graviton Processor.

Apple is offering business and programming seminars just to women. Let's be careful how we discriminate to end discrimination.

For just a moment, but the first time since 2010, Microsoft passed Apple as the world's most valuable company.

Jack Ma, creator of Alibaba and richest person in China, is a member of the Chinese Communist Party. This seems to surprise many people. What is the surprise. The Party controls the country. Why wouldn't it rearrange things so that one of its own succeeds and funds them?

GM, remember we called it government motors?, is closing facilities and laying off 14,000 persons.

Cyber Monday sales hit a new high. All this online shopping continues the trend of about 18% increases each year.

Wednesday 28 November 2018

Lots of bad news for Facebook.

We seem to be in two Facebook worlds. There is the online system that hundreds of millions of persons happily use every day. Then there is a roomful of rich clowns who can't seem to take two steps without falling and breaking their rubber noses.

The "Grand Committee" holds a hearing a leaves an empty chair that Mark Zuckerburg declined to fill.

A former employee charges Facebook with a "black people problem."

"Secret" Facebook documents show an early Russian warning...Does Facebook have Secret documents? If yes, they also have a security leak problem.

AWS takes a small step into blockchain technology.

AWS announces Elastic Inference whereby users attach GPU inference engines to the basic cloud servers to cut inference costs.

Inferentia: Amazon has built its own inferencing hardware processor.

The government of China hopes to make China a brain sink by drawing in researchers with of all else: MONEY.

Put away the electric lights and bring out the candles in France as they are going to close all their coal and nuclear plants.

Thursday 29 November 2018

Amazon is finally "eating its own dog food" as it moves the last vestiges of its enterprise off Oracle onto its own systems.

For the person who has everything, Amazon has a $400 toy car that learns to drive itself. I guess you watch it run circles around the Christmas tree or something.

Integrating technology with nostalgia (perhaps I am being too charitable here): Big Mouth Billy Bass now works with Amazon Alexa. Is this why we invented ... never mind.

Facebook expands its "Today In" local news feature. Of course people can go to it and tell jokes and lie, a.k.a., fake news.

Mark Zuckerburg donated $75Million to a San Francisco hospital. Now SF politicians want to keep the money and remove the name. Funny how they want to keep the money.

I learn a new acronym: ultra-high net worth individual (HNWI). It seems that India is acquiring these HNWI persons faster than any other place on earth.

Friday 30 November 2018

This bride used a 3D printer for everything in her wedding. Did that include the engagement ring? Who said that??? (just kidding)

Microsoft updates its Office line, and with it we have new logos for everything.

How Google kept its China surveillance search engine secret fro its own employees.

It appears that all the world's car makers have been helping the Chinese government watch their subjects.

In 2019, Starbucks will begin blocking content on its WiFi systems. Perhaps someone knows how to do this better than we used to.

Please be careful when riding those nice electric scooter rental things. Gravity still holds...even in the latter days of the second decade of the 21st century.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai et al will meet with President Trump next week.

Nintendo breaks all its records for sales last weekend. Still, some estimator estimated incorrectly. Hence, this is all disappointing news. I don't get it.

Saturday 1 December 2018

President George H.W. Bush dies at 94.

Major earthquake hits Alaska.

Printers, yes the humble printers that us old folks still use, were hacked and printed suggestion of which YouTube to watch.

Congress attempts to allow growing of some types of hemp. Of course the primary result is confusion.

Three cheers for Satya Nadella. The value of Microsoft has tripled under his time as CEO. That is how they keep score in that field.

oooops, 500million hotel records stolen from a computer.

Some members of Congress decide they are experts is supervised learning and facial recognition. If you want to jump into these things, first learn the difference between accuracy and precision.

Some thoughts about tablets and what they are supposed to be and how a specific operating system would make them better in some sense.

We step a little closer to the future and out of science fiction: watch the video for JustWrite from E Ink.

BMW has developed a self-balancing, self-driving motorcycle. Yes, it is still a stunt at this point, but the technology can aid the disabled.

Sunday 2 December 2018

A look at generative adversarial networks that create the deep fake images and videos.

Amazon is becoming greedy (again). This time with name brand products. At one time Sears had name brand products put Sears labels on the products. Do you remember Sears?

$30,000 buys you this gaming rig. Is the potato chip stand included in the price? It looks eerie, like those things the people in the spaceship in the Disney movie used to turn themselves into blobs.

Apple had $52Million in sales on Black Friday from the app store. Moving electrons and moving dollars (about 70%) to developers.

The next marketplace for the tech giants to invade: the driving experience. Of course this will cost consumers a lot of money. Remember the $100 telephone? I have yet to see an automobile that had a modular computing system.

Is this to be, finally, the "Year of Linux?" If you use Facebook and all the rest, you have been using Linux for years. It is simply hidden behind all the glitz.

Pseudo-working: yes, I've done it and seen much of it.

Nice article on good pens. These are gold-plated expensive pens. My go to pen, the Pilot Precise V5, is on this list.

I know nothing about making a podcast. This piece is pretty good.

Writing memoirs and writing a short film. They are similar.

Some little things to buy a writer this year.

Format of a manuscript is important. This post runs through the basics.

30 things about writing. The content is much better than the title.

Pithy statements about the short story.

Somebody writes the stories for those in-flight magazines. Why not us?