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: 25-31 May, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Wednesday's SpaceX launch of persons cancelled due to weather
• A SpaceX engine test in Texas explodes
• On the second try, SpaceX puts Americans into space
• Riots due to police killing another citizen
• Remote work may give older persons a second chance
• GE quits the light bulb business after 129 years
• Canon releases software to Mac owners can have cool webcams, too
• Wearing masks prevents the deaf from reading lips and expressions
• President signs executive order re: social media content and legal protections
• Further testing shows, all this virus shutdown was a bad idea

Monday 25 May 2020

It is Memorial Day in America. This is not a happy holiday. We remember someone who died much too young and didn't marry or have children or see children grow to adulthood. We wonder what would have happened in our lives had that person not died in defense of liberty. And during the current virus situation, some of us wonder about liberty.

A look inside our DoD's Joint AI Center.

The JAIC plus Booz Allen Hamilton, $800million over five years.

GitLab ran a phishing test of its own employees. 20% failed. And that is a high-technology company.

There is evidence that older people will face less age discrimination in the work-from-home world. The younger employees are more accepting when an old person is in a little Zoom/Teams window.

Microsoft's HoloLens headset helps reduce the number of human doctors walking through wards of contagious patients. How will the system tell the patient that there is a team of persons behind the one person in the room? The patient needs to know that.

Tuesday 26 May 2020

Self-driving vehicle researchers are using some of the mountains of data they have to simulate driving and continue "training" their technology.

Delving into security issues in software. It is about managing the use of memory and how a program does and does not track everything. Of course the C programming language is blamed for being what it is. No one blames the universities that mis-teach programming.

Australia performs the experiment for the rest of us. The COVID-people-tracing app does practically nothing for pubic health.

The rich (have the ability to) get richer. The big tech companies have mountains of cash. They can pay salaries, weather the storms, and continue to create new things.

Persons continue to burn 5G antennas. Never underestimate what some persons consider fun.

Stronger rumors emerge about the next iPhone. These things have become image processing machines that have a radio attached.

The Internet is aflutter about the SpaceX launch of persons into space on Wednesday. Weather, however, may delay the party.

Wednesday 27 May 2020

Facebook, dividing and uniting, and studies of people: when did we anoint Facebook as the test tube of the world?

Apple is opening 100 retail stores this week with an emphasis on curbside delivery.

All this curbside pickup of goods isn't working for businesses as sales of electronics and such are projected down 14% this year. The end-of-the-world crowd caused a panic and destroyed 1,000x lives than a cold virus.

Another economic fallout from the great shutdown of 2020: families cannot afford college as they spent those funds to survive.

Apple updates the third digit of MacOS to 10.15.5.

Hey employers, Google is giving working-at-home employee $1,000 for computers and furniture.

Sony modifies one of its cameras to optimize for live video and podcasting.

YouTube decides that is bad to disparage the Communist Party of China.

Shame on television "journalists" who played an Amazon-supplied promo as objective news.

Thursday 28 May 2020

How the deaf have suffered more during the current virus. You cannot read lips or facial expressions of persons who are wearing masks.

Researchers find a couple dozen new malware attacks related to USB thumbdrives.

When did we decide that Facebook ruled the world of information?

Still under $100, this Raspberry Pi 4 has 8GigaBytes of RAM for $75. And that includes a large number of software projects out there. How many? 100,000 or more? Who knows.

Canon releases software so that Mac users can now use a high-end Canon as a webcam for those early morning ZoomTeams meetings.

Boeing—remember them, they make airplanes where people sit next to one another and go places, remember going places?—lays off 12,000 persons. More to come.

It is almost June, so Microsoft is releasing a major update to Windows 10. They do it twice a year.

After 129 years, General Electric is out of the home lighting business.

Friday 29 May 2020

Speaking of lawyers, the ACLU sues Clearview AI for something to do with facial recognition technology.

An interesting stunt: Jay Leno takes Elon Musk on a drive with the Tesla truck inside a Boring tunnel.

Qualcomm shows its first chips that support WiFi 6E.

VMWare has a very good financial quarter as the market for virtual anything booms in the virus era.

Americans would rather go to the grocery store than order online and (pay to) have groceries delivered.

Lo and behold, further testing for this current virus indicates that it is pretty much like other viruses in that more people "have it" than thought earlier. And life goes on. That makes all the denominators bigger, which means that it isn't the plague, i.e., it isn't this thing that will kill the world. Okay, maybe someday Fauci and his ilk will admit that they overreacted and ruined the economy for no good reason.

Scientists in China pretty much deny that this current virus started in China at all. Who? What? Us? Here? Nah.

Uber stepped out of the renting-electic-bicycle business. The are "recycling," i.e., destroying 20,000 bikes and selling the crunched stuff for scrap metal. Did you know there was a national bike shortage due to closed factories?

Yes, there is a sucker born every minute. We have a $350 5GBioShield. Its seller claims it "is the result of the most advanced technology currently available for balancing and prevention of the devastating effects caused by non-natural electric waves, particularly (but not limited to) 5G, for all biological life forms." It is an old, recycled thumb drive, so old that it only holds 128MegaBytes.

Saturday 30 May 2020

SpaceX will try again to put persons into space today at 3:22 EDT.

To show that this space travel has its significant risk, SpaceX had another explosion during a rocket engine test at its facility in Texas.

Sony announces a Playstation 5 event for June 4th.

One of the larger tragedies of this virus situation is that political leaders and media further divided the citizens. This is a shame for all of us.

More employee firings for posting less than positive comments about their employers. If you want to speak, fine. No one guarantees your job.

Open-source practitioners are bringing TinyML to small, inexpensive processors. This will enable little things like toasters automate basic tasks. This is the point of all AI, have things do things for us so we won't have to.

Some people miss the office so much they are building virtual models to visit daily. Can I pretend to work in the woods on cool spring day?

Remote work is difficult. We haven't adjusted. We are trying to make the office the same when it isn't.

Even the big tech companies are hurting economically. Google won't hire nearly as many contractors as intended.

Researchers are showing that much of the praise given to recent AI and machine learning techniques is not warranted. There are old techniques that still perform better. Fact: if you put "AI" in your proposal, you are more likely to receive money to do the research.

Sunday 31 May 2020

There is rioting in America this week. In Minneapolis, a moron who happened to be a "law enforcement officer" (I use quotes as his actions are contrary to what such a person would do) killed a man he was holding. The moron is white and the deceased was black. Hence, the rioting. The mayor and governor should have resigned as they are responsible for the actions of state and local employees. Of course they didn't, so we have riots. Arson doesn't correct murder, but neither does elected officials acting as if they are neither responsible nor accountable.

SpaceX puts Americans into space. It has almost been ten years. One day someone will show how NASA was out performed by a guy who smokes pot during interviews.

More experts chime in on the Wuhan virus. This group of experts say that the death toll is much higher than reported. Where did we find so many experts?

As Apple retail stores open, we learn that the Apple Geniuses are also medical professionals who perform exams and admit only the healthy. Am I the only person on earth who thinks this is absurd?

The concept of writing with a group of persons all contributing.

Writing frustration and all this quarantine stuff and all piled on top of one another.

One look at MasterClass and writing.