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: 7-13 June, 2021

Summary of this week:

• Apple announces new OS things, no hardware
• Bezos to fly on first Blue Origin launch
• Google is building an undersea cable down the east coast to South America
• College enrollment drops dramatically

Monday 7 June 2021

It is Monday. A slow news day.

Apple's WWDC is this week with the big keynote at 1pm PDT. More rumors and bets on what is announced.

The Dell/Alienware Area-51m R1 laptop was supposed to be upgradeable. Swap out the CPU or GPU or whatever. Well, it isn't, and someone is suing.

This must be important as it is all over the Internet: 18 of the 1,000 top sellers on Apple's App Store are scams. They convince users to buy things that are not needed.

Walmart will give 740,000 employees smartphones to track work schedules. The employees can use them for personal items as well.

Robots are delivering expensive food to persons in Miami. They are little rolling ice chest tubs with enough sensors to avoid bumping things and persons.

A different type of vaccine is coming this summer.

Our Air Force wants to use rocket ships (SpaceX) to deliver cargo worldwide in an hour.

Tuesday 8 June 2021

Apple's big event was yesterday. Here is one summary of it all. No new hardware! That was a surprise.

It's about time: Apple creates a Digital Legacy wherein they will grant access to a deceased person's accounts upon proof of death.

Our FBI and the Australian Federal Police ran an encrypted messaging service that suckered criminals into using it and incriminating themselves.

Jeff Bezos will go up in Blue Origin's first manned spaceflight. The line between something and stupidity is quite narrow.

Google is expanding the availability of its Stadia game streaming service with with Google and Android TV services later this month.

Ford shows us the new Maverick "truck". It's a compact SUV with a pickup bed. Hybrid power. Lowest price is $20K.

Our FDA approves a new Alzheimer's drug. There is no evidence that it does any good, but why not?

An interview with a Microsoft social scientist on AI (it's neither artificial nor intelligent).

Boeing and our Navy have a successful test of a drone refueling an F18 in flight.

Researchers at MIT were able to put computer processors into a "fiber" that can be woven into clothing. Still early, but promising.

Wednesday 9 June 2021

Here it comes folks. Chipotle raises its prices 4% as the cost of everything has risen.

oooops, we see the downside of consolidated cloud computing. When one thing fails, many things fail. Reminder: the Internet was designed for resiliency, not efficiency.

Adobe now has more apps written just for Apple's own M1 processor. Operations per second should double.

Russia's governors use Twitter et al to their advantage and deny use to opponents. The Russians sure know how to play American social media companies.

We continue to argue about facial recognition. It is an invasion of privacy and must be banned. Oh wait, it allowed apprehending the Boston Marathon murderers. Oh wait, now what?

Where the money is: Americans profited $4Billion in BitCoin in 2020.

Apple adds lossless audio the its Music.

Geography of oceans just became 25% more difficult as we now have a fifth ocean---the Southern Ocean joins the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic.

By some measure from some measurer... we reach a Carbon Dioxide level that matches the record of 4 million years ago. This means the earth has been "this bad" and survived it at least once.

McDonald's is testing voice understanding to take orders at the drive up window. Results are 85%, and that is better than I would expect.

Thursday 10 June 2021

We enter new highs (or is it lows?) of fake science and fake news.

Apple didn't announce a new laptop at WWDC, but the predictors find clues to justify their error.

Google is building an undersea data cable to run along the eastern US, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.

Here is a closer look at the new NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti (they have to improve their naming scheme).

Facebook will allow employees to work from home permanently. Of course there are limitations.

Strong rumors that Facebook will sell a smartwatch next summer. The healthcare market has become the driver for these devices, and there is big $$$ in healthcare.

In China, you better work hard REAL HARD because the boss is always watching.

Walmart is now selling an Android TV streaming device. They put the Onn brand on it. The prices are really low. In my experience, the Onn brand is a great value.

Samsung's newest 50MegaPixel camera sets a new record with a small 0.64 micrometers picture element.

In China, where subjects are happy to "volunteer," they are vaccinating 20million persons a day.

Us American taxpayers are buying 500million vaccine doses to give to other countries. Aren't we nice? When did we discuss this? I missed it.

Friday 11 June 2021

A productivity boom is predicted based on new techniques of using computers. "The first is technological: the past decade has delivered an astonishing cluster of technology breakthroughs. The most important ones are in AI: the development of machine learning algorithms combined with large decline in prices for data storage and improvements in computing power has allowed firms to address challenges from vision and speech to prediction and diagnosis. The fast-growing cloud computing market has made these innovations accessible to smaller firms."

I note stories like this where AI systems outperform humans. Humans have built machines that outperform humans for some 50+ centuries. This is not news.

Amazon, plagued with injuries at its warehouses, gives $12million to the National Safety Council to soothe worries.

Amazon joins other big tech companies in allow some work from home permanently.

Our National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation (govt job titles) wants to release our data to AI researchers. I trust they know what they are doing.

Nvidia acqui-hires DeepMap, a new company with expertise in maps, to improve its self-driving vehicle technologies.

There is a new Polaroid camera. It is small, the photo prints are small, it is cute and will be fun at 4th of July picnics.

Microsoft is expanding its gaming offerings to smarter TVs and is building its own TV "stick."

The prolonged year of the virus has given a dramatic drop in college enrollment. The surprise is that some persons are surprised at this.

Saturday 12 June 2021

This could be interesting: Facebook introduces TextStyleBrush, an AI research project that can copy the style of text in a photo using just a single word. With this AI model, you can edit and replace text in images. This helps those who want to forge handwritten notes... among other things.

SurveyMonkey changes its name to Momentive.

Signs that Apple is quickly moving away from Macs that have Intel processors instead of Apple's own.

We have grievous vexation at our FDA over the approval of an Alzheimer's treatment. The treatment appears to do nothing, and advisory board members are resigning in protest.

Google will start releasing Chrome OS updates on a four-week cycle.

The era of the flying taxi may begin mid-decade. Airlines are buying now so they can focus on flying people 20 miles or less. They are worried that flights of hundreds of miles will go away.

I love this XKCD cartoon about the declining science in "follow the science."

We now spend as much time discussing what Apple isn't doing as we do discussing what Apple is doing. Too many predictors backtracking.

Sunday 13 June 2021

How many decades and billions of dollars will it take to build a railroad between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It will run through neighborhoods of the rich. The cost will be paid for by the not-so-rich nationwide.

Should government, with unlimited funds and no requirement for profit, compete with private industry? Internet service providers have a bad reputation due to poor customer service practices. Nevertheless, they have provided Internet to the majority of the country.

Again we struggle to understand if our Macs at home will run the new Monterey MacOS.

The cost of celebrity: Blue Origin auctioned the seat next to Jeff Bezos in his space ride. The ticket went from $4.8 to $28Million in ten minutes.

A commentary on infrastructure as code and how we are building things that will need maintenance. Will we have any maintainers 20 years from now?

McDonald's is trying speech understanding software at drive through windows. McDonald's is being sued for violation of privacy laws. Well, the engineers tried. The lawyers weren't paying attention.

We see photos of NASA's Space Launch System. Years behind schedule with large cost over runs, this rocket will leave the ground later this year, or maybe next year, or maybe...

Thoughts on writers working with smaller publishing companies. This has worked well, amazingly so in some cases, for many writers.

"If I give you my idea and you write it we can split the money 50/50." Nobody needs someone else's "idea." Sorry.

The role of "intuition" in telling a story. Perhaps if I knew what intuition was, I could comment on this.

Some thoughts on the role and value of a writing mentor.

"Your biggest reward from writing has nothing to do with money." Aha! Someone gets it.

Some steps to improve writing. I write better today than when I was 21, 31, and 41. I learn things that I have been doing incorrectly and I correct them. Then I hope to find ways to convey my thoughts to another person.

How one writer created a side business of editing other writers' writings.