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: 29 August - 4 September, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• National Cinema Day is September 3rd
• AMD announces new processors
• NASA delays again as Artemis I launch fails at T minus 40 minutes
• A second attempt later in the week fails as well
• Mikhail Gorbachev dies at 91
• US government puts export controls on Nvidia and AMD products

Monday 29 August 2022

This Saturday, September 3rd is National Cinema Day where 3,000+ cinemas will only charge $3 to see a movie.

The Palantir Pack: former Palantir employees who have spun off about 200 companies.

The concept of "quiet quitting." Do your job and no more. Working from home led many to do much more than their job. They are stepping back to something they can sustain.

Google brings employees back to the building and COVID cases rise. Of course they do.

The IEEE provides several ranking for programming language use. The usual are at the top: Python, the C languages, Java, Javascript, et al.

Sometimes writers that (really) short vacations, like the duration of a nap.

Thoughts on the five-act structure to writing.

Thoughts on writing about the generations of a family. I did this a few years back (around 2010) in a short novel written during National Novel Writing Month.

Some encouragement to start writing. Here is an exercise (I wish I remembered where I learned this, but I don't). Write a memory. It can be anything. It can be three words, three sentences, three paragraphs, or three pages. Repeat tomorrow. Repeat for thirty days. Look at the samples over the days. You have probably experienced great improvement. You are a writer. Repeat.

A little trick to get you writing again: set a reward for writing and give it to yourself after writing.

Working from home? How do you start writing?

Here are a few different ideas on finding the time to write. I like the idea of finding pockets of time, "when I get to write" instead of making times when "I have to write." I also like the idea of sprints. That has worked for me. Write fast for an hour. Quit.

Good health helps a person write. Good lighting helps a person's health.

Tuesday 30 August 2022

Meanwhile in France, if you have a swimming pool, you pay a tax. The governors use aerial photos and AI to spot undeclared pools so they can tax them.

AMD announces their "Zen 4" architecture that can be purchased in late September. This is the next generation of processors for desktop computers. More and better for less money.

More good news for more tech companies in China. More western companies are leaving Russia. Before the door swings shut, the Chinese walk in. Trade high tech for oil.

Social media companies setup "war rooms" to battle the dastardly foes of misinformation during elections. It is mostly a publicity stunt with no substance.

Supply chain woes. It is the shortage of 50-cent chips that are delaying everything. Again, all these companies had the resources to build capacity five years ago. Had they spent the money, they would own the world today.

NASA stumbles again. The Artemis I launch flops. The next launch date is to be determined. So let's talk about a former President instead of incompetency in the current administration. Wait, uh, what?

Leaked photos etc. show the new handheld video game machine that Logitech is building.

Politicians are always a good source of humor. Our current President chides colleges for raising costs. To lower costs, remove regulations that require colleges to hire bunny inspectors.

Let's file this one (or hash tag it) under something obvious that should have been done a hundred years ago: in California, someone will put canopies over canals to reduce evaporation losses of water.

News about how Google now programs ASICs to do video encoding and have tremendous gain in performance in its data centers.

Wednesday 31 August 2022

Ah, software development life cycles, Agile, DevOps, and the like. Some folks get 'er done while other folks argue about SDLC and write articles.

Hearing aids and vision aids integrated into one pair of glasses. Sometimes there is synergy where one and one equals three. This is one.

Strong rumors that Apple is ready to connect iPhones to satellites. Well, we are waiting.

Google starts yet another program to give money to those who find errors in its software.

Research continues on software that writes things for people. The next Mark Twain need not worry. Persons in jobs who are supposed to write, but struggle horribly, should be relieved. So should those who suffer with trying to read junk written by colleagues.

Mikhail Gorbachev at 91. He was the last dictator of the Soviet Union. Not a hero (as many said at the time and still say), just the last in line.

Apple extends its Xcode Cloud with more subscription plans.

Analyzing the data used to train today's machine learning systems reveals a lot of stuff coming from very few places. The 1% are running the world.

We did the experiments, now we try it for real: several states are offering public education online all the time for some students. This is a good thing for a few. Let's hope we use it for the few who need it.

Stronger rumors of updates to the Apple line of portable computers this fall.

This Saturday (3 Sep), NASA will try again to launch Artemis 1.

Thursday 1 September 2022

Royal Caribbean cruise line is switching to SpaceX Starlink Maritime service. This should bring better broadband to cruise ship customers.

I like this site. It is an aid to grad students and researchers who are not professional programmers but will have to do a lot of programming in their work.

I really like this phrase, "Metaverse Money Dematerialiser." We used to call that a sink hole or dark pit or money pit or something. Walk to the edge and throw in you paycheck. Poof. It's gone.

The world seems to be chatting about Stable Diffusion. It is another text-to-image thing. This, however, is from stability.ai and is therefore more open to how it works.

This could be something. It rewrites a paragraph for you.

Yet another tool that writes for you.

Guess what? All that online-school-from-home during our reaction to the virus was a failure. While there are a few teachers and kids who were born for online work, the vast majority were just wasting a couple years of there lives. And when you are six years old, a couple years is a big deal. Fauci and others were wrong. Their declarations wrought disaster on the nation.

It appears that law enforcement across the US has been buying data that shows where you were and when via cellphone location data. This is sort of like entering your home without a search warrant.

Here is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's report on Fog Data Science, the company in the above AP news story.

Here is the EFF's page on the topic in general.

Fog Data Science is doing good technical work. Much of what they do allows people to find their stolen children and other things that are good for communities. Local law enforcement groups have little chance to do these things on their own as they don't have the resources, mostly they don't have the expertise. These companies step in and provide expertise. It is unfortunate (horribly unfortunate) that some folks misuse these tools.

A look at the ASUS laptop computer with a 17" screen that folds. It is too early and too expensive.

Our Dept of Commerce puts more restrictions on the export of GPU, CPU, and other processors to Russia and China.

Lenovo shows a Chromebook with a 16-inch display.

Got a big kitchen? LG has a really big refrigerator with LED panels on the front that change colors and play music.

In California, where there is a high concentration of electric vehicles, governors are asking people not to charge their electric vehicles.

Friday 2 September 2022

A company name Orbit Fab announces plans to build a fuel station in geosynchronous orbit to refuel satellites.

I like this one. It contains 64 research questions that people could investigate in the general area of software engineering.

Google pumps anther $20Million into computer science education.

Micron will invest $15Billion (with a B) in chip manufacturing in Boise, Idaho.

The experts predict big drops in sales of PCs and tablets in 2022 and 2023. These things were over bought during our reaction to the virus.

Moving more data faster: the next USB standard will double speeds again using the same cables.

Leica shows a new project that sits 6 inches from the wall and projects a really big and sharp image.

T-Mobile and Sprint merged. Of course they laid off thousands of persons.

Data centers placed in containers underwater become real. Let's hope they know what they are doing.

Saturday 3 September 2022

Some news from researchers at Meta on how they can read the thoughts of people with a brain interface. It is quite simple at this time and may go no where, but it might be a breakthrough for those who have had traumatic head injuries.

Someone feeds Bible text into one of those text-to-image systems. The disappointing thing is that they feed rather loose paraphrases into the system. The results are not what they could be and pale in comparison to human-generated artwork over the centuries.

Someone notices over confidence in new AI practitioners. They are over confident because they are young and those two things seem to always go together. I find it amazing the similarities between the AI crisis of today and the software crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.

This could be helpful. It is a collection of practices that seem to work in the field of machine learning.

SpaceX is about to launch a bigger-than-they-have-in-the-past satellite hoping to connect cell phones to satellites.

A court in the state of Washington pronounces Meta guilty of violating the state's campaign finance law. The fine, to be determined, will be huge. Appeals will come. The law itself is shaky and be declared unconstitutional.

oooops, our IRS mistakenly posts private information on about 120,000 of us. Trust in government? Competence?

Qualcomm signs up to produce custom chips for Meta's virtual reality headsets.

Our Army accepts the first batch of 5,000 special goggles from Microsoft. Similar to the HoloLens product, these are augmented reality displays for the individual soldier.

Here is a good essay on college costs, loans, politics, etc. Colleges did a great job of telling people, "No college education, no future for you." People bought it and everyone went to college. Prices go up, up, up. Governments regulate, colleges hire more administrators. Prices go up, up, up.

This college student saved big $$$ by living in a van. College students can do this as there is food (cafeteria), bathrooms, and showers on campuses.

We record the highest temperature ever on earth (in one spot, with one specific thermometer, with one day's unique conditions, with one arbitrary calendar, with one arbitrary time piece, with ...).

Intel promotes its latest processors aimed at edge computing.

Sunday 4 September 2022

Coming out of our reaction tot he virus, the Digital Natives returns to in real life.

DALL-E now paints pictures using extrapolation to go big canvas or something.

The heavyweights are in on this one: DNI, NSA, and CISA define new requirements for software security.

The Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) is doing one of those special DoD things that makes it easier for DoD to bypass its own straightjacket rules and buy AI technologies.

Using AI techniques to help research AI papers and other literature. This is "eating your own dog food" at its best.

What do the large language models know about just plain folk? Probably a little, but not that much. There are too many of us.

Trying to reduce fake reviews of products, Amazon delays posting reviews for 72 hours.

NASA stumbles again and fails to launch the Artemis I shot at the moon. They will try again some time after now.

This is a first: Apple has more of the smartphone market than all the Android phones combined. I thought this was the case for many years, but no, this is a first.

The CentOS Linux distribution is gone. In its place comes "Rocky Linux."

A long-term study links ultra-processed foods to cancer and heart disease. Rats, frozen pizza is on the list.