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: 17-23 June, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Nvidia has a new partner: Arm
• Facebook releases its own blockchain-based currency: Libra
• The horrible life and work of Facebook content moderators
• Slack has a very profitable opening day

Monday 17 June 2019

Tuesday 18 2019

Troubled youth, suicide, and seeking help online. We reap what we have sowed.

How Thorn uses facial recognition from Amazon and lots of donated time from engineers to find missing and exploited kids.

Thoughts on what "privacy" means today and how the social media giants want government to use their definition.

Once again we learn that we don't like computers talking to us and back and forth.

Nvidia announces a new partnership with Arm.

How our Border Patrol let a contractor keep license plate data when they shouldn't have and how it all was stolen. And some people wonder why some people don't want government to run these types of programs.

Wednesday 19 June 2019

Facebook releases Libra: “new global currency powered by blockchain technology.” So maybe it isn't quite a cryptocurrency.

A few presidential wanna-bees want to halt Facebook's Libra until they approve of it, as if they would understand any of it.

It appears that several of the world's super-est supercomputers are geared towards running pattern recognition algorithms (what we now call AI).

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, announces a major housing campaign in the SF Bay area. $1Billion (with a B) and lots of land devoted to it. If this materializes, good for Google.

Pull Panda makes and sells tools for GitHub (owned by Microsoft), so Microsoft has bought Pull Panda and made all its products free for GitHub users.

IBM releases a new technique to help predict breast cancer sooner and more accurately.

Seth Godin on knowing something by heart.

YouTube finds a way to use augmented reality so that we can spend more money on makeup.

Some members of Congress want us to start abiding by the 4th Amendment to our Constitution.

A few experiments demonstrate "seeing" around corners with sound. The idea is pretty simple.

Thursday 20 June 2019

Facebook content moderators have awful jobs in awful conditions. This is how you make lots of money. You expand your user base to sell ads. Of course you can't monitor all the content. When you try, you overwork persons in horrible conditions, but you keep the profits high.

More delays at NASA in building a rocket ship to the moon. It seems we did this 50 years ago, but somewhere forgot how.

Here is a robot that washes dishes. No, it won't work in the home real soon now.

Headline says it all: Apple, Google, and Facebook Are Raiding Animal Research Labs

Oracle rides gains in cloud computing to a good financial quarter.

The trade wars and data wars spill over into H-1B visas.

Forward to the past as Apple moves back to a non-compatible computing platform.

Interesting conclusion about the mental health benefits of only one day a week employment.

Friday 21 June 2019

The state-of-the-practice in data transmitted with light in a room (lifi) is advancing. Still, it may not become widely used anytime soon.

Slack has a big opening day on the stock market with its value growing about 50%.

Fake News, Fake News, and now we have Fake Businesses filling Google Maps.

Google pretty much drops out of the tablet market. They'll still make phones and a few things in the laptop computer form factor.

Walmart is installing more cameras near the checkout area to catch thieves. The use of computing, however, is bringing warning signs.

News Flash (not): we don't think the social media companies are removing "offensive" content well enough. I forget when we were required to watch such.

Glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating. Some say this is bad news. Others say otherwise.

Data analysis shows Facebook use has dropped since data analysis was used in the 2016 elections, but Facebook's own data analysis has a different conclusion. We need more data analysis to find the truth, or do we?

Saturday 22 June 2019

Veteran astronauts pitch in on efforts to return to the moon. #1: a change in management. Insiders have known this for decades.

Our National Labor Relations Board hears complaints from fired Tesla employees.

The value of Bitcoin surges this week, but it is still only half of its previous high.

It appears that we are in an undeclared cyber war with Iran. I trust that those who make decisions are making decisions and not merely slipping into unknown territory.

NASA hacked because of Raspberry Pi on the network? NO. NASA was hacked because they connected their internal network to the Internet. Don't connect it! Keep the door closed and no one will come in. This isn't rocket science.

Microsoft's new Windows Terminal is actually here now.

Our FEMA has a system to send presidential alerts to all of us in the event of disaster. Yes, it is easily hacked and we can all receive fake news over it.

If you like maps or like presentation concepts or like rivers (especially the Mississippi), you will like this article.

Sunday 23 June 2019

Instagram, attractive people, and advertising. Its a natural. The ladies in this article are showing firearms. That is only one industry that pays models to show images of their products.

iRobot (maker of Roomba vacuum cleaners) buys Root Robot (make of educational robots).

The oddity of Tesla. They created demand with a charismatic front man. Is anything sustainable? In 50 years, will people wonder about why any of this happened?

How does Amazon ship goods to us in a day? Profits elsewhere fund a non-profitable business. One day, perhaps, the competition will dissolve and Amazon will raise its prices to a sustainable level.

Someone left the door open and the deep fake videos as running amok. Let the games begin. I have written an essay on the topic that will appear real soon now. The solution to avoid being deep faked is quite simple.

There is much a stir about Microsoft preventing its employees from using Slack. (1) It is a good thing to require your own employees to use your own products. They learn what is wrong with them. (2) It is a good thing to require your employees to use the other guy's products. They learn what is right with them.

People are recorded literally being asleep-at-the-wheel in Teslas on the freeways. Safe at any speed? A dangerous experiment.

Hot Desking: short-term savings in real estate. Long-term folly. We like to have our own little place to sit on a regular basis.

One "solution" to bring higher productivity and lower real-estate cost is...ready?...let people work from home. We seemed to have known this all along, but we had to try other things first.

More folly in a postmodern world: teach computer science instead of physics. Of course the answer is to teach both, but someone will manage to make that foolish as well.

Some history of the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code programming language. Sometimes we over develop things until they are no longer useful.

Struggling to start clicking the keyboard? Here are a few tips to start writing.

Time is not the reason we don't write. It is merely a handy excuse. We have other reasons.

Excellent editorial from George Will as he compares and contrasts socialism with sociability. There is a difference despite recent efforts to redefine both.

This is great: Billy Wilder's tips for writing screenplays and just about everything else.

State the story in six words. Give it a try.

Writer's block—a reframe. Lulls in energy at different times in writing show us what type of person we may be. That understanding helps us to work and work better.