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: 16-22 December, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Intel buys Habana to gain inference-processor technology
• Palantir wins $111million DoD contract
• Healthcare company hacked for ransom $$$
• Boeing's Starliner fails in orbit

Monday 16 December 2019

Our Dept of Defense awards $111million to Palantir.

Our FCC takes RF spectrum away from the auto industry. The auto industry hasn't used any of this for 20 years, yet protests the decisions.

Fuss and vexation over the sale of the management of the .org stuff. Someone wasn't involved, and now they are upset.

Boeing's woes with the 737 continue. Someone there made and mess and tried to hide it and then someone else saw it all and then...

 Apple updates all its operating systems.

One technology reporter makes a deepfake video. It is possible, but it has difficulties and requires some computing power ($522 in AWS machines).

HP updates its Elite line of portable computers. They start at $1,500 and are thinner and lighter.

Tuesday 17 December 2019

Real news that isn't news: the hyperbole about how easy it is to deploy AI systems is hyperbole. It takes time and expertise.

Intel buys an Israeli company named Habana for $2Billion. They have expertise in building inference processing hardware.

Tim Cook lends his name and time to the cause of improving education for girls worldwide.

Once again, experts are on record as being wrong. This time in economics as the worst President in history has brought a strong economy without inflation. That is the trouble with experts, they really don't know much more than anyone else.

Where the money is: New Jersey's largest hospital system is hacked and held for ransom. Forget government offices. Go after healthcare.

Wednesday 18 December 2019

Vice does some white-hat hacking on the Ring camera system and finds plenty of security holes.

Facebook is adding part-time, community fact checkers to have humans look at stories that it's software identifies as probable fakes.

Headline says it all: LifeLabs pays hackers to recover data of 15 million customers.

Success: the top four downloaded apps of the decade all belong to Facebook.

GAN neural networks generate things that are like things. Here come the user interfaces generated by neural networks.

All these night modes to help us use our devices until bedtime could be doing the opposite of the intention.

And we now have a neural network that solves calculus problems.

Cut the cable and watch PBS on YouTube. Sesame Street online anytime.

Thursday 19 December 2019

Amazon, Apple, and Google cooperate to create standards for Project Connected Home over IP.

Some Europeans create a small, robotic bug that crawls around and survives swats from a fly swatter.

A new cancer treatment shows some promise. Grow 10,000 tiny cancers from a person's body and experiment with them to tailor a treatment.

What is your 8-year-old child doing? This one made over $20million this year on YouTube or somewhere.

Remember Project Kuiper: Amazon wants to launch a few thousand satellites. They have a new office building for thousands of persons in Redmond.

Regulators in the UK are finding ways to give themselves more regulatory power over successful American companies.

A Federal judge rules that Edward Snowden cannot profit from his book. I suppose the judge has that authority.

Strong rumors about what we will see CES 2020 next month. Better, better, better.

Friday 20 December 2019

Travel day. No Internet viewing.

Saturday 21 December 2019

Boeing launches its Starliner for the first time, but it fails in orbit due to technical difficulties (what other kind of difficulties would a spacecraft have?)

A detailed study confirms what everyone already knew: when you train machine learning algorithms, they perform well on data like used in training. If 11% of the population at large is not "white," the algorithm will not work well with persons who are not "white."

Apple has a (previously) S E C R E T team working on turning iPhones into satellite phones.

Reports discover that if they can track a secret service agent, they can track the President. Again, everyone already knew this. And again, this is a question of resources in the right place.

Facebook and Twitter improve their censorship tools and remove accounts they deem were created artificially to cheer on our current President. And these companies have no political agenda or something like that.

Being the CEO of Google Alphbet whatever pays well.

The current administration in Washington allows chooses to allow the rest of us to choose what kind of light bulbs we buy.

Walmart continues to find ways to entice us into the store instead of ordering from home. Such is the retail business. It has been so for a few dozen centuries.

Sunday 22 December 2019

20 great workspaces from the past year. Many, however, have chairs that hurt my back just looking at the photo.

Our FBI is working with companies to put false data in places that thieves will mistakenly nab.

Wired inteviews Lt Ge Jack Shanahan, the director of the Joint AI Center for the Pentagon.

Not everything the Silicon Valley Six tried the past ten year worked. In case we've forgotten, laugh on.

A tour of five garages where billion$$$ companies began.

Boeing's Starliner couldn't find an orbit, but it did manage to hit the ground this morning.

Imagining the lives of ordinary people on an ordinary day. Writing those lives into stories. Entertaining others.

A look at the balloons that sit at 75,000 feet and watch over us.

How one writer started a writing conference and succeeded, i.e., writers showed up and became better and brought their friends the next year.

Practical, specific tips for better search engine optimization.

"Never let a dead, droopy, or sawdusty sentence—a sentence not worth reading once, let alone twice—stand." This is difficult. You have to pour 100% into E V E R Y   S I N G L E   S E N T E N C E.

Writing chapter summaries for a non-fiction book.

Some of the more famous and financially successful writers of the last couple of generations have been single mothers.