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: 8-14 August, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still stuck in Ukraine
• Congress is passing the ultimate is horribly named legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act
• And the new law eliminates all electric vehicles sold in America from subsidies
• $80Billion going to the IRS to cleanup decades of bad management (it won't work)
• Our FBI raids the home of our former President---hype on all sides

Monday 8 August 2022

Meanwhile in Congress, we have the "Inflation Reduction Act." Aren't those Congress persons such good kidders...naming a climate change bill like that? Actually, this is Build Back (a little bit) Better or Build Back Better 0.8 or something.

Meanwhile in China, we have completely driver-less taxis.

Samsung updates its OS for its newer smartphones.

Coming from MG is an electric car made in China that will cost about $32,000.

Some new gadgets for the "smart home." These companies would be doing much better with "friendly home." The great benefit of these things is that, if built correctly, they can allow the elderly to live in their own homes much longer.

DeWalt now has an adapter that lets us use our power tool battery to charge our laptops and phones.

Our reaction to the virus let us work from home. Many jobs work from anywhere. Welcome to the Great Salary Convergence.

A hobby. Build a model rocket that will land, not crash. Seven years of experiments.

Here are videos of the rocket hobbyist.

Thoughts on ghostwriting or writing under someone else's name.

Using a "place" in fiction writing.

One person's experience in writing for a living for three years.

Some early thoughts on using blockchain technology for copyright protection.

Thoughts on stalking or chasing the things that are curious to you.

Looking at many different tools that are available for self publishing.

Rules are aplenty for writers and writing. Try them. Follow the rules that work for you and forget (break) the rest.

Tuesday 9 August 2022

Here is one set of definitions for all the folks involved in what some call "data science."

Note to leaders of persons: "You just don't have the power to turn someone into something they're not, in the short time that's available."

In the era of Bidenflation and Bidenonmics, it isn't easy for recently graduated computer programmers to find a job, any job.

Coming in December, our first commercial space walk. Fun, fun, fun.

Once again we have an example of someone building an AI system that is a technical marvel, but was not built or tested correctly.

GitHub is changing to improve the security of open-source coding projects.

Palantir has a big growth in revenue, but its stock price falls. I'll never understand these things.

Nvidia's income falls as we come out of the pandemic. This is pretty good news for consumers as we can now buy GPUs at retail prices.

Qualcomm is buying billion$ more in chips from GlobalFoudnries of New York. Bussines is booming.

oooops, Congress just passed a big electric vehicle subsidy. The ooooops is that none of the vehicles sold in America today qualify for a penny of it.

Intel shows its newest GPU units for desktop and laptop computers. No prices announced.

Much is being made of the FBI search of the Trump residence in Florida. This is bad for America. One party wins an election and investigates the inner details of the prior party. Of course they find bad things. The inner details of any organization contain bad things said in (presumed) private. This turns America into something we don't want. This is a bad precedent. There will be another election one day, and another party will "win" and they will investigate the prior party and send the FBI into someone's home and...

Meanwhile in China, a decades-long quest to eliminate the need for American semiconductors has been foiled by the simplest human failing: greed.

India fails to place several satellites into orbit due to problems with its rocket engines.

Wednesday 10 August 2022

We now have a sensor that can see several meters below the bottom of bodies of water.

Strong rumors of Apple selling AR/VR headsets next year.

An in-depth article that agrees with me in that TSMC is the most important company in the world. It holds the key to an invasion of Taiwan by China.

Once again we admit that we really don't understand what is happening here on earth. Yet, some claim to know the temperature of the earth to a tenth of a degree 20,000 years ago.

We see that one-fifth of the money in the Inflation Reduction Act goes to the Internal Revenue Service ($80Billion to IRS).

Our century's version of Ford vs. Chevy is Databricks vs. Snowflake.

The American way: succeed in business until our Dept of Justice sues you for succeeding in business.

The Washington Post has a good article about how bad the managers have performed for years at the Internal Revenue Service. $80Billion won't fix the problems. Competent people will fix the problems. The problems are that people in government create rules for themselves that prevent them from working efficiently.

Wasted resources: Nvidia is developing technology so that the avatars in the metaverse will look more like real people. Who cares about any of this silliness?

Google is trying to embarrass Apple into adopting RCS (Rich Communication Services) over the old Simple Message Service (SMS) or plain old text messages.

Google brings its Read Along reading tutor to the desktop. I works pretty well.

Microsoft's OneDrive is now 15 years old. They have major user interface changes coming real soon now.

The imaging part of a camera is so cheap now that Canon has a line of transforming camera toys. Great fun.

Ford starts taking orders for its updating electric pickup truck. No surprise as the prices jumped up up up.

I'll just quote this, "A group of 18 tech and cyber companies said Wednesday they are building a common data standard for sharing cybersecurity information."

How do you take over the Internet in a country? Simple. Kick in the door and point a gun at the head of the poor guy working there. Things haven't changed much.

Nvidia makes a big contribution to the documentation of its GPU drivers by putting them out on its GitHub site for all to read.

Thursday 11 August 2022

Despite all the complaints, and there are many and well founded complaints, Java is still the most-used programming language.

Researchers are finding ways to help RF energy pass through walls. This will improve WiFi performance in buildings that were built before WiFi existed. It also brings forth nefarious applications.

Strong rumors that Apple is switching all its devices to charging from USB-C. Standards. Do it just like everyone else.

All this talk about businesses using AI is just talk as only a few are actually doing anything noteworthy.

Researchers at MIT create a system that can answer college-level math test questions.

An old idea is gaining new life as researchers at MIT have advanced the concept of programmable and variable resistors. They form the building blocks of analog neural networks.

These systems that create images from text are supposed to have safeguards against creating offensive images (whatever "offensive" is this week). A researcher finds ways to bypass these safeguards with mixed languages.

Samsung had a big marketing event and showed the upgrade to its folding-screen smartphone. It is pushing a $2,000 price tag.

The social media habits of the American teenager. This is a good study. TikTok rules the world. I wonder what the members of the Communist Party of China think of American teens.

Microsoft sends its library of emoji to the open source world.

Our FCC denies SpaceX access to the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund $$$. This reverses a 2020 decision by the same FCC on the same pot of money.

The combined holdings of Disney now make it #1 in the world in streaming subscribers. They have just passed Netflix.

What amazes me is that a newspaper can do a 5-minute study on a tech company and find mistakes made by that company. It is as if all genius resides in newspapers and old the dumb bunnies in the world work at successful companies.

The folks at Lumina are working on a desk that is actually a large display. No price guess yet, but the unit will come real soon now (probably 2023).

After a year and more of fixing problems, Boeing delivers a 787. Let's hope the American company is on track.

Friday 12 August 2022

This week in the news, our FBI raided the Florida home of former President Trump. Much is made of this and the papers the FBI was seeking. There were other methods available, but they were discarded in favor of this big splash.

Privacy on the iPhone? Facebook and Instagram can track all sort of things.

Vector graphics, raster graphics, CPU, GPU, and the like.

Now that some of the ice has melted in Greeland...billionaires are mining there. Hmmm, so there is some good in all this.

LG has a television with a 97-inch screen that vibrates, and that makes it a 97-inch LOUD speaker.

A case of attempting too much technology to a simple problem. How do you make a store without a cashier? You don't have to use cameras and computers and all sorts of body position analysis.

OpenAI releases its tool with AI models that have been trained to detect undesirable content in applications. Free to use.

Amazon improves its Elastic Block Storage to make backups easier.

LinkedIn adds features for image display.

Once again, the experts were wrong about Russia. When do we stop calling them "experts?"

Will America fail where China failed in trying to catchup to Korea and Taiwan in semiconductor manufacturing?

A tale of reverse engineering code, writing software, and having the same software used by for-profit companies.

Building systems that note the cellphones that are near you. Then you keep a log to tell if someone is always near you. Paranoia? Not in some situations.

New experiments on color perception cast doubt on a theory that has been believed for 100 years.

Saturday 13 August 2022

Speculation about smartphone sales in 2022. Apple is more optimistic than most.

Amazon has produced a show called "Ring Nation." It is something like "America's Funniest Front Door Home Videos."

Top of the Internet at the end of the week is an outfit called Tornado Cash and nefarious activity.

One young man's experience with riding an electric skateboard into adulthood.

Mounting electric vehicle chargers on power poles. Nice, until you live where are the power lines are powered and there are no power poles. This isn't practical, yet. It is still a stunt for the rich.

The governors of California see gold in off shore wind farms. They don't know what to do with worn out parts other than to bury them in someone else's back yard.

Folks have used wind power for centuries. Most of that time, however, the blades that turned were made of wood. When the wood wore out, you burned it for fuel. Now we make much better blades from synthetic materials. When they wear out, and the do wear out, we, uh, well, we, don't know what to do other than bury them in giant pits the size of strip mines and hope no one digs them up for a thousand years. We don't know how to build practical wind mills for electric power generation, yet. Perhaps one day.

ooooops, someone discovered that the installer for Zoom allows you to hack into all the Apple computers in the world. Back to the drawing board.

"The first challenge is finding the focus and patience to work on the asynchronized adoption of important ideas. And the second is to not sacrifice the larger goal in a frenzied hustle for the big break."---Seth Godin

United Airlines has ordered a hundred of these flying taxis to transport rich customers between the airport and downtown places downtown. They will have a pilot, and that makes the technology much easier. They are electric powered, and that makes selling the ride to the rich much easier.

Researchers try to explain why our minds "get tired." They don't have it yet. They are trying to find chemicals that are exhausted when we feel mentally tired. Of course, then you can take a pill or drink something to keep the mind fresh and churning out brilliant stuff.

NetBSD 9.3 is released. In addition to new things, it can run on hardware not built in 40 years.

A teenager, who didn't know any better, built an efficient electric motor that doesn't use rare-earth magnets. This could be a really big deal. Much of today's wind mills and such use rare and expensive materials. Those materials could spur WW III.

This is an excellent piece on working from the office and other places. A key quote, "...built their success in the Before Times and had the resources to live close to work and ensure their kids were looked after. For most workers, not so much. So, yeah ... works for you, boss." This is the crux of the matter. It is commuting. I live in the Washington D.C. suburbs. Living in walking distance to D.C. jobs is REALLY EXPENSIVE. Worker bees (paid over $100,000) cannot afford it. Hence, they add two hours a day commuting to their eight hours a day of work.

Rumors about a September event from Apple. Lots of announcements about things that...I just don't care about new wireless ear buddies.

Sunday 14 August 2022

This Reddit discussion is a good summary of the folly of much of AI/ML research: "67 authors, 83 pages, 540B parameters in a model, the internals of which no one can say they comprehend with a straight face, 6144 TPUs in a commercial lab that no one has access to, on a rig that no one can afford, trained on a volume of data that a human couldn't process in a lifetime,"

Researchers have built some eye glasses that could replace those silly VR headsets. There is much work still to be done, but some hope.

Next month, Ethereum will make the big switch to proof-of-stake.

Excellent piece on a real survey of open-source researchers and the tools they use.

And now we have "superclouds" of cloud computing. Yet another product and service that some folks want to $ell to some other folks.

Folks at the 25th Black Hat conference spent a lot of time discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how things just didn't go as expected. Beware the hacktivist. If you have a big, successful company, behave or they will come looking for you.

The TIOBE Index of computer programming languages keeps Python at #1 and growing.

Researcher lend more evidence to the idea that the Wuhan virus began in the meat market. If the Chinese are going to participate in international travel and business, they should clean up their food distribution.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab edge closer to making fusion a reality. There have been a few experiments with promising results, but still not close to reality.

Alphabet spent about a billion $ to build a smart neighborhood in Toronto. They flopped because they didn't understand what the people wanted.

Trying to make sense of the new law and tax credits on buying electric vehicle. All "good stuff," but no EV sold in America today qualifies for a penny.

Here is an in-depth discussion on long COVID. My theory has to do with what doctors do to harm people at the hospital and in basic treatment. People who have led healthy lives react badly to some forms of medical treatment.