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 July, 2022

Summary of this week:

• Yes, the Russians are still bogged down in Ukraine
• Tech companies against adding the leap second
• Nvidia and AMD: the next generation GPUs will consume more power and generate more heat
• More improvements in machine learning from UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon
• More than anything else, folks want flexibility in where and when they work
• Quarterly financial reports: Apple great, Amazon okay, Intel bad
• Wikipedia proven to influence court decisions

Monday 25 July 2022

Yet another industry executive touts the promise of AI and how we need to be doing more today. Intel is happy to sell you some stuff to send you off in their direction.

Server-less, cloud-agnostic, distributed computing. Do these guys ever listen to what they are saying?

Now here is someone who has a sense of reality. Start small. Learn. Be patient. Shooting for the moon is a bad idea for 98.6% of us.

Intel will be making semiconductors for MediaTek.

Once again, China shows that it is an unreliable business partner as more COVID shutdowns clobber its own industries.

China continues to build its own space station.

This story is everywhere: a chess-playing robot broke a finger of a seven-year-old player.

An experiment create jet fuel from solar power and simple elements.

Working in an office everyday as a copywriter is not all bad.

Various famous and succe$$ful writers also had primary careers in other fields. Writing was a side job.

How writing a novel has influenced the lives of some writers.

I like the advice given here about the role that scenes play in a novel and advice on writing scenes.

No matter what, continue to learn.

A half-dozen things that keep some persons from being creative.

Tips on writing Internet content that is easy to scan.

Some good ideas on creating questions to ask someone and then later write.

Different types of context and how to use them in writing.

The concept of "write to market" or simply noticing what is selling now and write that. It helps make money.

Tuesday 26 July 2022

We the taxpayers have just loaned Government Motors $2.5Billion (with a B) to build batteries for cars.

Apple settles out of court with Koss over headphones technology patents.

I like this post. I has some thought. The topic (TikTok, Facebook, social, TV, video) isn't interesting, but the history and future estimations are.

And we the taxpayers have bought our President a roll-around Zoom gadget for $7,000 that isn't even made in America. It is made by a Norwegian company.

Best Buy tries a smaller, fancier store that looks like the Apple retail stores.

Meanwhile in America's heartland, the high cost of fuel has bumped up the cost of everything. WalMart says people only buy gas and food and go home.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt shares his thoughts on bias in AI and nuclear weapons.

All the big tech companies are now against the practice of adding a "leap second." Other experts have added 27 seconds to our clocks in the last 50 years.

A non-profit group is removing plastic junk from the oceans. There has been good progress so far but, at the current rate, will require 1,000 years to do the job.

LG has a monitor that is taller than it is wide. Works pretty well.

Well look at this: use small, efficient integers in machine learning and the accuracy drops only half of one percent. Efficiency!

Nvidia updates the AI software that uses its GPUs to include more open-source software.

Thoughts on data centers and how to do them better.

Wednesday 27 July 2022

The Saudis have a $1Trillion (with a T) project on the drawing board to build a 75-mile long skyscraper city.

Also on the drawing board is this rocket that uses a whole bunch of steam powered engines to life heavy objects into space.

We may actually have a real laptop computer with swappable parts.

I hope this works. The search feature in gmail is supposed to be improved. I don't care if its AI or anything, just make it easier and work better.

Researchers at UC Berkeley have improved machine learning for robots so they can walk sooner.

Meanwhile at Carnegie Mellon, not to be outdone by Berkeley research helps robots learn real-world tasks by watching people perform real-world tasks.

Putting basic AI tools and sensors to work in combatting animal poaching.

Researchers from Stanford define what household robots should be able to do. This will allow other researchers to build towards a common target.

This desire has been building for a generation, and the pandemic accelerated it. People do not want to be in a certain place at a certain time. Sounds like a good job if you can get it. Do what you want, when you want, from where you want, and be paid well. Some professions lend themselves to this ideal while others do not.

News from IBM: data breaches cost more money than ever before. The average is $4.35Million.

One area of the economy that is not slowing is online ad revenue.

Fear and loathing at Meta.

VW cranks up the production of electric vehicles in Chattanooga, TN.

When law enforcement says there is an emergency, do you hand over all the data right now or wait for a court order? It all depends on person-to-person trust and a history of knowing one another.

I find this Seth Godin post on management and bringing people into the office for a purpose to be excellent.

Meanwhile in Russia, the economy is not as bad as was predicted. The experts were wrong on the power of the Russian military. The experts were wrong on the effect on the Russian economy. Do we see a trend here?

Analysis shows that the newest MacBook Air is more significant than first glance: it has zero part made by Intel.

Google improves the 3D visuals of places in its Maps.

In a couple of years, Russia will abandon the International Space Station. China is building its own. Russian will build its own. Does the US have the willpower to build the next generation?

We now have the 90-day rule. If a company can keep an employee for 90 days, the employee is likely to stay at least a year.

Thursday 28 July 2022

The title of this story is about reversing baldness. The real story, however, is about regenerating dead or dormant cells. It would have significant impact on aging and cancer treatment.

Micron advances the production of NAND. This will double the size of solid-state disks.

More medical technology research: using light to stimulate the cochlea could significantly improve hearing for some.

A candid assessment and description of current AI practice as not being reliable. It wasn't meant to be so.

We now have a privately formed Open Source Intelligence Foundation. They will attempt to boost the practice and profession.

The new Gmail user interface is now out for everyone.

Meanwhile in China, smartphone sales drop drop drop. The governors there are killing their own jobs and industries.

Chainalysis creates a Government Solutions Subsidiary.

It appears that the next generation of GPUs from Nvidia and AMD will use a lot of power and generate a lot of heat.

Most of us are driving cars that collect data all the time. There are dozens of unknown companies that are using that data. At least they would send me a Christmas card or something as thanks.

To date, Amazon has the great bulk of US government cloud-computing contracts. The rest of the providers are trying to create teams to share the wealth.

Google releases a new video editor. It is available only on Chrome OS. Coming real soon now to everyone else.

A look at trail cameras and how suburbanites like me could use them to watch the deer and fox wander through the yard.

I don't know much about proteins, but DeepMind claims to have uncovered all proteins known to man.

Friday 29 July 2022

RStudio is changing its name to Posit.

Cyber security is important to everyone. Cyber security training, however, is boring. Seems to answer is pretty simple.

The world of virtual pop stars in China and Japan. These folks work seven days a week for years in a row. Money? Yes. Value? Not so sure.

Nvidia updates its NeMo Megatron artificial intelligence development tool.

For the time being, it appears that computing is recession proof. As the economy falters, companies look to automation to improve.

Apple buys a lot of land for a new office campus in San Diego. If no one is going back to the office, why do this? If think if the work is interesting and exciting, people will go to it.

For the first time in its history, Meta (Facebook) has a drop in revenue.

Unofficial notice that the pandemic is over as Amazon reduces its warehouse workforce by 99,000.

Intel continues to sell its side businesses.

Quarterly financial reports come in from the larger tech companies.

Intel looks bad. Its CFO says this is the bottom and they will climb hencforth.

Apple has a record-high for the third quarter of the year.

Amazon had mixed results. The pandemic eased, and that hurt. Otherwise, they are doing fine.

Congress walks through the steps to send $52Billion in taxpayers' money to semiconductor manufacturers in the US.

And we prepare to spend half-a-trillion dollars of taxpayers' money on man-reversed man-made climate change.

Another unofficial sign that the pandemic is over is that PC sales have fallen dramatically.

Intel moves its support for graphics away from embedded processors to stand-along GPUs.

One hope with all this electric everything is that it spurs research towards batteries that are practical. The batteries in today's electric vehicles are not practical. The energy spent to mine the materials, make the batteries, and disposes of the batteries far outweighs any small gain we have from using an electric car or bicycle.

Saturday 30 July 2022

We learn that in Google offices, they use gLinux for desktop Linux. No one else gets a copy.

The future of roadside charging stations from Tesla. Let's see how long this lasts and when everyone races to the bottom with crummy bathrooms, poor lighting, and $5 cokes.

In 18 months, Amazon is turning off Amazon Drive, which is basic cloud storage. Amazon shifts its focus to cloud storage of photos and such.

Worldwide smartphone sales dropped in the last 12 months. Apple's share grew, but Samsung is still the world leader.

Our Dept of Commerce further restricts shipment of semiconductor-making equipment to China. This will hurt China's economy in the short term. In the long term, the Chinese will develop their own capabilities and the US will have less influence on them. History repeats itself. Folly.

A new AI tool advances the state of the practice in restoring old photos.

Click to this site to try restoring an old scanned photo.

I tried the image enhancing tool mentioned earlier. It works quite well.

An in-depth review of Dell's current XPS 13. This is the state of the practice in higher-priced portable computers.

MIT and Autodeck develop a system to help folks build things from Legos. More high-tech talent aimed at problems that probably don't deserve the resources.

The governors in Japan are sending 1,000 people to Silicon Valley to learn how to start new businesses.

It appears that professionals read Wikipedia and that influences their professional actions. I suppose this is some sort of an endorsement to the encyclopedia that we all have written.

Sunday 31 July 2022

The US and Japan are creating a research facility for semiconductors beyond the next generation. Some see this as risk reduction in anticipation of China attacking Taiwan and removing TSMC from world markets.

In-depth thoughts on TikTok, Facebook, and social media as we have known it for a generation.

Once again, the world's great problems solve themselves in the marketplace. Social media won't destroy civilization. Either it will fade away or become civilization. This time, it fades away. Sorry if you were hurt during it time.

Perhaps the idea of a nation being self sufficient is a couple of centures gone. Nations, however, are still spending billion$ on the concept.

"If it's worth caring about, it's worth writing down."---Seth Godin

The remains of a space launch rocket from China have fallen out of the sky.

Sheepherders in Australia find large chunks of space debris.

Tons of Chinese rocket junk fell into the Indian Ocean.

Just another example, but this story from five years ago shows how the professional journalism publications are often just plain wrong while the amateurs are correct. And we (don't) need Congress to subsidize journalism to save the world.

How long should your book be? Long enough, but no longer. See, for example, the 66 books in the Holy Bible. Each has a different purpose, prose, and length.

I like this piece, I like it a lot. Write a letter to someone else about yourself. Can be quite the learning experience.

How writing and the sciences overlap. You need to tell a story.

What annoys readers and how to avoid that. That is, of course, unless you want to annoy readers.

How one writer uses Scrivener.

I enjoy any piece of writing on writing that mentions brevity and clarity.

Stuck on a piece of writing? Here are some tips on how to gain a different perspective and continue.

Musings on audiobooks where a person does not read the book. The voice is all from software.

Some tips on how to write shorter sentences. Let the reader breath now and then.