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: 24 February-1 March, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Stronger rumors that Apple is moving away from Intel
• Yet more concerns about coronavirus in the US—sick of the sickness
• Microsoft says it won't have a good quarter due to you know what
• The Game Developers Conference cancels
• United Airlines won't fly to Japan
• Fat cats lose billion$ as the stock markets fall

Monday 24 February 2020

Tech "experts" are pessimistic about the more tech will bring less democracy. Of course, most tech experts have a fuzzy idea of what "democracy" is.

Gary Kasperov predicts most US jobs will be replaced with AI. I doubt it as that would take decisive action by company executives, and that rarely happens.

Headline says it all: Flat-Earth Daredevil Mad Mike Hughes Dies in Homemade Rocket Launch.

Physicists continue to argue about how the Star Trek transporter works. It was just a silly TV show folks. Let it go.

Tuesday 25 February 2020

Intel shows new products for the enterprise side of the 5G world.

Trying to understand who among us edits Wikipedia and where those editors live. I find nothing surprising here. The editors live in major cities and university towns.

Stronger rumors that Apple will move away from Intel processors for Macs in the next 18 months. Maybe this time the rumor will be true.

Lenovo updates its ThinkPad line with new processors from Intel and AMD.

Microsoft says that the next Xbox will have a 12TeraFlop GPU. Processing power at lost co$t is amazing. People will be buying these machines and programming them for AI machine learning and Bitcoin mining.

Apple leases a few hundred thousand square feet of office space in New York City.

The updated ZX Spectrum is being delivered.

We go to Mars, we find unexpected things like frequent earthquakes. Being there often disproves theories made from afar. Still, we claim to know the temperature of the earth 10,000 years ago to a tenth of a degree.

Have to cut Internet viewing short as my battery is about drained.

Wednesday 26 February 2020

Mozilla is adding a "sandbox" security feature to Firefox for Mac and Linux.

Schools have always wanted to know the location of students. Students now carry GPS computer communications systems (cellphones). Marry the two and we have a controversy.

Our Dept of Defense adopts ethics guidelines for the use of AI.

Waymo has doubled its number of employees in the past year pushing for a breakthrough in autonomous vehicles. At some point in time, someone is supposed to make a profit at this.

It seems that our National Transportation Safety Board spends a lot of time investigating the few fatalities in self-driving cars. The tens of thousands of other deaths...not so much effort.

We don't pay $$$ to use Facebook. Twitter, YouTube, et al., but we expect them to make persons behave at election time. We sure want a lot for nothing.

After 14 years of work, next week we will see the follow-on to Half Life: Black Mesa.

Amazon opens its first supermarket with 5,000 items in 10,400 square feet and no cashiers and no cash.

Our NSA sets a record for least value produced for $100Million spent.

Yet another study shows that all this ride sharing has accomplished the opposite of one of its major goals.

Thursday 27 February 2020

In an effort to run around all possible future copyright actions in music, two musicians who are also programmers generate every possible melody and put them all in the public domain. Fascinating attempt at owning everything and giving it all away. Of course it may not hold in court.

Courts rule that YouTube et al. are not government organizations. They can let people post or not post.

Machine learning and catastrophic forgetting. OpenAI may have an answer.

In California, someone who has not contacted the usual suspects has the coronavirus.

Where there is fear, there is a con artist an money to be stolen—fake coronavirus-safe masks are appearing.

ooops, Clearview AI, sellers of one of the best facial recognition systems, says it had a data breach where its list of customers was stolen. Coming soon, said list of customers to be published.

The misuse and abuse of the English language. Orwell wrote of this several generations ago. Nothing has changed much in the last couple thousand years.

Manipulating stock prices from the outside and then taking advantage of the swings. Folks have figured out how to do this and are making lots of money. It is legal and, after all, its just fun and money (or something like that).

Friday 28 February 2020

Strong rumors that Apple will have a keyboard with touchpad for the iPad real soon now. This pushes the iPad closer to the laptop computer.

Data centers draw a lot of energy. Is computer sharing like ride sharing? Does it save or bloat?

Rumors that Walmart is creating a Walmart+ service as yet another try to compete with Amazon Prime.

Microsoft joins the growing number of companies dropping out of the Game Developer Conference due to...well, what else?

Facebook cancels its annual F8 conference. Same reason.

The Rasbperry Pi 4 model now has 2GB of RAM—still at $35.

Just like in a bad novel, health workers go into a quarantined area and walk out into the general population.

Saturday 29 February 2020

So much for all that accreditation by social media outlets: a 17-year-old creates a fake political candidate and is okay'ed by Twitter.

Google, Amazon, and others are limiting airline travel of their employees on company business. They are afraid of you-know-what.

Facebook provides a tool to change regular photos into some sort of 3D image. Cute and works to a point.

Managing a person's work via an algorithm shows that human bosses are really pretty nice folks. The algorithms don't cut anybody any slack.

United Airlines stops flying to Japan because of you-know-what.

The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco has been postponed to some unknown date. Some are report it is cancelled. Same difference.

For those who never tire of hearing Hillary Clinton talk (I suppose there are some persons out there who fit this description), she is starting her own podcast.

The coronavirus caused the stock markets to fall this week. Hence, those super-rich folks who own the companies lost billion$$$ on paper. Sometimes the fat cats lose. Their stock values are always at risk.

Sunday 1 March 2020

The Transcribers of Reddit. These are volunteers who type detailed descriptions of photos on Reddit so that the visually impaired can listen to the description when they cannot see the photo.

Boeing admits to not testing some things in its Starliner before it failed its "smoke" test. They claim that they didn't take "short cuts," but tried to explain how they saved time with what they did. Had it worked, they would have been geniuses. It didn't work.

It appears that some plants pull minerals from the soil. That can be changed into metals. The plants are basically mining ore at low cost. Perhaps one day something will come of this.

A prototype of SpaceX's Starship has a catastrophic failure during a pressure test. The video is here. These things explode quickly and violently.

If a report is not published, is it a report? Never mind. Our Dept of State claims to have read 2million false reports about coronovirus on Twitter.

How a penetration tester's mother walked into a prison and enabled hacking the entire place. Security? It was a nice middle-aged lady. What was the harm?

The 2020 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit is cancelled due to you-know-what.

A simple exercise to improve what you have written in fiction. Pick an interesting word (or 20) from anything (book, magazine, etc). Use that word or three to change a sentence in your fiction.

How this writer changed her life with (1) writing fiction 10 minutes a day and (2) exercising 10 minutes a day.

How one single mother worked and worked and built up to $100,000 a year as a news and content writer.

Ideas for finding pictures for your next book cover, blog post, etc.

Looking for images that are free to use? The Smithsonian Institution has release a few million of them.

The use of a Work-in-Progress notebook while writing a longer piece. It is the artist's version of the engineering notebook. At least as an engineering it appears to be so.

How to build a good writing workspace. Nice stuff with pretty pictures and total bologna. Stephen King wrote in a trashy single-wide trailer. He closed the door. I write where I happen to be. Just do it folks. Stop finding excuses like not having the right place.

The notion of the commonplace book.

More journal ideas. For some writers, the journal is the thing that keeps them going each day. They need something to push them forward.