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: 5-11 September, 2022

Summary of this week:

• Queen Elizabeth II dies at 96
• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Ukrainians appear to be capturing territory held by the Russians
• It is Labor Day in the US
• College football begins in earnest and overshadows the US Open tennis and major league baseball
• Apple shows new iPhones and Watches

Monday 5 September 2022

The governors of India are pushing $10Billion to attract chip makers. It may work, but it is risky.

The governors of China keep pushing new technology to watch their subjects. They now are ready to watch virtual assistants.

We now have the NAFO or the North Atlantic Fellas Organization. Hacktivists are some of the more effective "groups" fighting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. All nation states and rich companies take note. A small group of competent persons with time on their hands can whip bureaucracies.

Meanwhile in Europe, the price of natural gas just jumped 36% because the Russians turned a valve.

Note, the city of Jackson, Mississippi does not have potable water in its faucets. The link is to one of many stories in the national media. There are all sorts of culprits to blame. One, that is not mentioned much, is that one political party has been sitting in the elected seats for decades. The nearby suburbs that are incorporated under different governors have no problems. Again, little is mentioned of the causes or fixes, only blame.

Today is the Labor Day Holiday in America. I am not sure what we are commemorating on this day.

One example of how the Ukraine military and civilians hacked Russian systems. If it is connected to the Internet, it will be hacked. Stop being surprised.

And now we have "quiet firing" in which the employer makes a job so bad that the employee quits. It is much cleaner when someone quits than when someone is fired.

Myths about writing that stop some folks from writing. I never heard these when I started writing. I guess I was fortunate.

The device-free workspace. Pen, pencil, paper, and maybe a few books. This is almost essential for writers.

The concept of the novel blueprint. It is something to help you from getting lost along the way.

This post is better than the title. It has ideas that can help a writer.

One author who runs her business shares some lessons. More and more writers are finding themselves running more of a business than ever in the past.

Don't expect to make much money writing a book. It just doesn't happen.

Some tips for writing copy for others.

Tips for those trying to write for money. WRITE EVERYDAY and send your writing to buyers. You may get a 1% return, but that is greater than zero and often leads to a repeat customer.

This is about a summer writing routine. I guess you can apply the advice to any of the four seasons of the year or to any arbitrary period of time.

Tuesday 6 September 2022

After 25 years of hiring software engineers, programmers, developers or what noun they use, Netflix introduces levels for these folks to spread pay and of course to save money.

A natural outcome of allowing people to work from any location is basing pay on your location. Lower cost-of-living locations brings lower pay. This is a shock to some folks.

There has been some success in transmitting power through the air using lasers.

This may actually work in practice: new designs for air conditioning parts are coming. They key here is that they are too complex to make by older techniques. 3-D printing the metal parts, however, can do it.

Meanwhile in Russia, those who write on Wikipedia about the war in Ukraine are in for lots of problems.

Here is a look at technologies that enable the elderly to live in their homes much longer. Most are available today.

The move to cloud computing environments continues to accelerate.

It is still a little premature, but we are close to text-to-video or computers creating moving pictures.

And just in time for the school year, we have a tool that writes for us. It is available at the popular app stores.

Here is a similar writing tool that is supposed to do the "drudgery" so that people can do the fun and creative stuff.

Thoughts on swarms of drones for military use.

Real news that isn't news: a European regulator fines a successful American company (Meta) $402Million.

School districts across the US are contracting with the SpaceX Starlink service for broadband in rural areas.

Russia is stalled in Ukraine; its supply of semiconductors is gone.

Russia fights back on the energy markets. Can Europe get by with low energy in the coming winter? Will Europe trade semiconductors for natural gas?

Meanwhile in China, the recently banned export of AI chips from AMD and Nvidia is hurting Chinese research universities.

Wednesday 7 September 2022

In China (where the virus started but we cannot call it by that place) there is a vaccine that you inhale instead of inject.

Strong rumors that Apple will have a subscription service to help pay for those really expensive iPhones.

LinkedIn is struggling with scams. Large numbers of profiles are of people that don't exist.

Google announces an event for October 6.

Meta announces an event for October 11.

Got $10,000 and some major productions to record? Sony has a camera for you with remote control of movement.

Meanwhile in Germany, nuclear power plants remain as the Russians turn off the natural gas.

Released 47 years ago, "Jaws" is back in movie theaters and people are flocking to see it.

Some explanation on stable diffusion and generating images from text. We are at the point where you can do this from home and have lots of fun.

Qualcomm releases new processors for smartphones.

What's in a bill? The details are the $50Billion CHIPS Act are finally released.

Thursday 8 September 2022

Elon Musk claims that Tesla will have a robot that performs boring human duties this Christmas.

We have a JavaSCript library for running machine learning in the browser.

We have more webcams that keep your face in the middle of the picture. The reaction to the virus and all the ZoomerTeamz meetings created a market for this.

Real news that isn't news: European regulators are discussing how they will regulate AI work. Lawyers telling scientists what and how to do is always entertaining and often destructive.

This story is all over the Internet. The Los Angeles Unified School District is being held for ransom.

Apple had their big autumn event announcing new iPhones, Watches, and AirPods. This links to one of many posts online about the event.

Amazon is content to let people work from home. The decisions are made at low levels. Most folks do come back to the office a day or two a week.

We will have a Steve Jobs Archive. Forget the Presidential libraries, in the future will be the online archives.

And we have the official portraits of the Obamas. I guess the paintings are stylish or something. The Trumps were beneath the Obamas, so the ceremony was delayed for a few years.

Friday 9 September 2022

Queen Elizabeth II dies at 96. There are many news reports on this event. I have chosen the Wikipedia entry.

The race is on among retailers of all sizes and shapes to become the new "gas stations" by providing electric vehicle charging stations.

The problem of employee turnover and loss of knowledge is hitting software developers.

GitHub's own research shows that its CoPilot is working well. This is not a surprising result.

Another "trust us, we are doing a great job" story where the head of our Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) tells us that DISA is doing a great job with innovation and everything else it touches.

Two-wheel and three-wheel electric vehicles are all over the roads in Asia. Regulators there allow them on the roads. Regulators in the US...well, we regulate.

Inflation robs retirement savings. Therefore, people are "un-retiring" in big numbers.

Chainalysis claims to have recovered $30Million of $600Million in cryptocurrency stolen by North Korea's Lazarus Group.

Our White House Office of Science and Technology Policy proposes crypto-mining regulations based on environmental reasons. Current practice uses too darn much electricity. So do night games in baseball, football, etc. and all games in basketball, hockey, etc. and on we go.

Intel shows details on its new line of graphics processor boards for desktop computers.

Streaming entertainment hits the bend in the curve. Shows come and go (and when they go, they are gone). Prices rise, salaries fall.

The world of electric vehicle charging is trying to grow up.

Nvidia's big event conference is coming in a couple of weeks. Rumors abound about new products and services.

Virginia has over a third of America's hyperscale datacenter capacity. That is more than China. Thank the old America On-Line. The linked post is in error by calling Virginia a "state." It is the "Commonwealth of Virginia." No, I don't know the difference.

Saturday 10 September 2022

Roblox, a California company that does online video games, is gaining popularity in Russia as everyone else moves away from Russia.

Amazon is buying Cloostermans. Who cares? Everyone. The Dutch company makes machines that move stuff around in warehouses. Speed of delivery and loss of jobs.

How the editors at Wikipedia kept up with all the events surrounding the death of the Queen and the naming of the King. And as Americans, we are enthralled by all this.

Researchers discover a coincidence in number of slaves in 1860 and number of guns in 2022 in a county.

This morning, my wife and I are going to the Shenandoah River at Front Royal, Virginia to paddle a litte while on the water. We started this tradition 29 years ago on our 10th wedding anniversary.

Pack a leading-edge Intel processor into a 3.5-inch square circuit board, and you have a WOW! single-board computer.

United airlines ups its purchases of small "flying taxi" vehicles.

Nvidia's newest top-of-the-line graphics processor hits benchmarks at 4.5 times the speed of the most-recent model.

Sunday 11 September 2022

This is different: the world's first conference for people who do not want crypto currency.

Someone lays out all the Apple AirPods in a comprehensive comparison and explanation. I think that someone has too much time on their hands.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, it appears (reports on this war have always been sketchy) that the Ukrainians are taking back areas that were captured by the Russians. The Russians may have a net loss of territory in this conflict. They have also scorched areas that they lose. The rebuild will cost the West a Trillion $$$.

NASA selects the RISC-V system for the next generation of something called the High-Performance Spaceflight Computing processor (HSPC).

NASA and a group of major contractors form a coalition to train a generation of space technology workers. Of course, NASA has to put people into space to make this relevant. We shall see.

The Perl programming language has changed so much that it is hardly recognizable to some of us who used it in the late 1980s.

This man has written a song a day for 5,000 days. What started as something (can't imagine what) has become a living.

Nvidia is working with the United Nations to bring data science and such to Africa. This will help create a new market for their products. Let's hope overall good comes from this.

This is a good discussion of active learning and how it can solve a number of the problems encountered in recent machine learning efforts.

With lots of time on their hands and nothing else productive to do (a good case for taking the day off), a group do deputy assistants to this and that meet at the White House to create new ways to regulate people who actually practice technology for a living. There is no end to this type of thing under our current President.