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: 11-17 October, 2021

Summary of this week:

• Amazon announces "no return to the office, ever"
• Microsoft and Nvidia build world's largest language model
• Congress wants to regulate algorithms (good grief)
• Apple has an event next week to show new computers
• New portable photo printer is here
• The Great Resignation continues
• William Shatner goes into space at age 90
• McDonald's to test a meatless burger

Monday 11 October 2021

Always behind, Congress and others focus on regulating Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Those are the past, not the present, not the future.

And the old folks at Saturday Night Live understand how far behind Congress is.

Caution for Halloween. Dr. Fauci says it will be fine. He has been wrong more times than right.

Headlines, data, and science. Washington Post story about military personnel refusing the "order" to be vaccinated. In the same article, they show COVID deaths over the past 18+ months. The numbers are less than military members killed in accidents. And we are spending $$$ to vaccinate these persons. Science?

Thoughts on writing and making money from that writing.

Writing can be fun. Try to keep it that way.

Note to writer, it's your job to make them get it.

One method of writing a novel in November (NaNoWriMo) is to write a lot of it in October. Cheating? There is no such thing as "cheating" in "making up stuff" or writing. The result is you have a novel at the end of an arbitrary period of time. Great. Success.

Persevere or listen to everyone else and stop? Such is the type of question a writer faces. Many others face similar questions.

Write "A BOOK" and everyone expects another. Really? A book is just another thing you wrote. It isn't you. It doesn't define your life.

Tuesday 12 October 2021

Some actual data related to IT employees working from home. All the tools are here. Is the culture?

Google Docs is 15 years old. Google started it by buying a company called Writely. I had used Writely. I once wrote a book using nothing but Google Docs.

Ampliganda: a new word that merges propoganda but it is information amplified by the volunteer efforts of all of us.

Microsoft and NVidia create a new largest-ever language model: Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation (MT-NLP) with 530 Billion (with a B) parameters.

Microsoft changes how it markets and distributes Windows System for Linux (WSL).

Despite claims in the (largely ignorant) media, China is not an AI powerhouse.

And we have a completely different opinion from Nicolas Chaillan, former Chief Software Officer of the US Air Force. The Chinese sped past the West because their companies had to work with their government and they spent no time concerned with ethics.

If you have an office job with Amazon, you won't have to return...ever. Maybe.

Wednesday 13 October 2021

Apple announces an event for next week to show new computers.

Some of our elected representatives in Congress want to regulate algorithms. Gosh. They are so much smarter these days (not).

Nokia shows a $199 smartphone that has 5G capability. It simply works simply and inexpensively.

In the prolonged year of the virus, our reaction to the situation was to rush out and buy laptop computers. Now we have a shortage of them.

Print photos like we sort of used to do for $2 each on this $150 printer.

The Great Resignation continues as people quit their jobs in record numbers. I think that one day many of these persons will wake up and understand that they need a paycheck and cannot proclaim, "take this job and shove it" as the old country song said.

Some history on Microsoft's Project Turing to push into AI and language models.

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations shows that if we put solar panels on half of the world's rooftops, we would power the planet and bring great relief to the other half of rooftop owners who wouldn't have to put a thing on their roof.

Video game history: how Nutting Associates made "Computer Space" in 1971, flopped, then formed Atari, made "Pong," and changed the world.

Thursday 14 October 2021

Headline says it all: US overtakes China as biggest bitcoin mining hub after Beijing ban

The Counter-Ransomware Initiative is on now with 30 countries joining the US in a Zoom meeting. Russia and China were not invited (neither was North Korea).

Acer's glasses-free 3D display comes to a laptop.

Facebook now protects a group it calls "involuntary public figures" to include activists and journalists. Question: can you become an activist by posting activist items on Facebook? Will Facebook, however, delete all your activist posts because they are activist? I'm confused.

Microsoft will have an independent group review all its government and especially its law enforcement contracts. It used to be a good thing that an American successful company helped its government. I guess we know better now. Will it be okay for Microsoft to sell Windows and Office to government agencies?

William Shatner, age 90, takes a short trip into space with Blue Origin.

When China has a big problem, it has a BIG problem. Current big problem is 65million empty homes. That is enough to house France. What do you do with all that?

Everything is out of stock, short of stock. Really? We seem to have a surplus of excuses, a surplus of arrogance, a surplus of "we are the toughest generation ever because we can live through all this thing that we chose to endure."

20 years ago, Microsoft chose Intel for the processors on Xbox. Now they apologize to AMD.

The old "reverse the polarity" trick seems to work on the fake-face generators.

Acer expands its line of computers that have antimicrobial materials.

Friday 15 October 2021

Apple sells 13% of the world's smartphones and gets 75% of the profits. Must be nice.

The story behind an American company that specialized in misinformation. It appears that the Russians' efforts were overrated.

Google, the Russians, APT28, Fancy Bear, and a bunch of other folks and activities leading to stealing money via the Internet.

Stronger rumors about what Apple will show in computers next Monday.

Microsoft will shut down LinkedIn in China.Just to "challenging" to operate in the PRC.

Alienware is now 25 years old and has a new design for its desktop gaming machine.

Dead end streets in San Francisco are becoming the elephant's graveyard for self-driving cars. Software bug causes confusion in the navigation of the cars.

OpenBSD 7.0 has been released.

Saturday 16 October 2021

China now has its own space station with three persons there setting up shop. They are banned from the International Space Station for, well, you know, stuff the Communist Party does on a daily basis.

Conflict of interest coming: buried in the current $3.5Trillion spending plan is a Billion $$$ to pay the salaries of journalists. Hmmm.

Meanwhile in China, crypto mining is banned but miners are hiding at government-owned farms and using the farms' electricity to run their machines.

Meanwhile in the US Federal government, here come hardware security keys to reduce malware attacks.

Meanwhile in Moscow, we have the use of face recognition to ride the subway.

A review of the new Polaroid instant camera. Yes, sometimes we just want to hold a real photo print in our hands.

It appears that those vaccination lotteries did nothing but waste taxpayers' money.

Meanwhile in Fairfax County, Virginia, my wife and I voted yesterday. Once again, new voting machines. We have never used the same voting systems two elections in a row. This shows me that Fairfax County has more money than it can spend. And on the ballot was a measure to raise money for schools. Just stop replacing the voting machines.

Lest we be distracted by the current prolonged year of the virus, we find that plastics used in shipping materials contribute to 100,000 deaths a year every year.

Here we have some welcome innovation in the telecommunications and computing world with Pine64 and their PinePhones. It is a smartphone. Then you plug it into a monitor and keyboard and it is a Linux computer. I like it.

Sunday 17 October 2021

"In general, if an organization needs to do something that uses computation, and that task is too expensive today, it probably won't be too expensive in a couple of years."

For the past couple of days, this has been the most important story on the Internet: McDonald's will try a meatless hamburger.

Western civilization is safe, we have an official Minecraft gaming chair.

Turning cybersecurity education into a game. This has been done before successfully.

Impersonating illness. It happens. American teenage girls are adopting "tics" or jerky motions. They are imitating what they see on TikTok. We do this. I believe much of the virus illness is from this as well. COVID is what we are getting now, so it is what we are getting now. And when all you see is the COVID kills you, you die of COVID.

Headline says it all, "A restaurant owner is paying his teen workers to do their homework before their shifts, in an attempt to retain them during the labor shortage"

The workplace: fewer hours, same output. Our reaction to the virus has proven a few things most workers would rather not have proven...such as they goof off a lot at work and the employers really don't need so many employees to get the job done.

Researcher finds malware distributed through Microsoft365 OneDrive.

TSMC will build a semiconductor factory in Japan. I believe that TSMC is the most important company in the world.