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: 12-18 September, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• More export restrictions on technology to China
• Several commercial advances in driverless taxis and food delivery
• Google contracts with NIST to make chips that will make making chips cheaper
• Ethereum switches algorithms for crypto currency
• That switch will collapse GPU use for mining and change several related markets

Monday 12 September 2022

I really like this system. Use a AA battery and run neural networks for a week without replacing the batteries.

Gartner predicts that one of the next big things will be digital twins of a customer. Model your customer well, i.e., understand the customer, and you can excel.

An analysis of the export ban on Nvidia AI chips shows that analysts don't know who will suffer more, the US or China.

Boston Dynamics is working with customers to improve the capabilities of the robo-dogs they have sold. The robot didn't have many "smarts." The new moves, however, will allow customers to add smarts.

Machine learning mimics human output. One area where it is a little simpler to mimic is some marketing.

Strong rumors that our current president will impose more export restrictions on chips and chip-making technology to China.

Good old John Deere is about to sell self-driving farm equipment. Some farmers are worried about all the data the machines will collect. And these machines will college a lot of data.

We have some really bad photos of Meta's coming AR VR headset.

I find these tips on editing to be practical in that they work in the real world.

If you want to go fast, take a break.

More writing advice along the same lines. Think, write, think, write. A little here, a little there, day by day.

Many folks need permission to write. Many need all sorts of things to write. And many folks have everything the need, but just don't realize it.

A call to donate books to libraries in need. Here in Reston, Virginia, our library throws away books.

I'll just quote this, "Far more important than talent is persistence."

Writers are usually their harshest critic. Many times their own criticism is paralyzing.

The idea of writing for a newspaper. They still publish in paper and online. Someone writes and is paid.

Writing your passion. I call this writing with the energy. If something is burning inside you, write it. Write it now. Go with the burning sensation. I have woken at 4 a.m., sat at the computer, and written 1,500 words in a an hour. On a good that, that is a full day's writing.

This post lists 17 upscale hobby magazines that want good articles.

Tuesday 13 September 2022

Must-see video on a text-to-video software capability. It also allows free text entry editing.

A good discussion on the topic of well-written software. Several mention Donald Knuth's published code.

This piece has good advice about careers and choices. Much better than the average.

I love this article, "Text Is the Universal Interface."

This article reminds us that we are still in the very early days of transformers and large language models. We haven't figured out how to use them, yet.

Meta is handing its PyTorch AI libraries to the Linux Foundation which created the PyTorch Foundation. I suppose there are tax implications in all this.

It appears that Google has cancelled work on its PixelBook and is stepping out of the laptop computer business.

Cruise, a unit of GM, will have self-driving taxi service in small areas of Austin and Phoenix before Christmas.

ooops, a new hack means shows how to steal a Tesla with ease.

Finally, a Nissan Leaf can power a house. This means you can use the vehicles batteries as batteries.

Money doesn't solve everything. The Gates Foundation put a billion $ into farming in Africa. Flop.

Google has been working on laser-based communications technology. They have spun off a company called Aalyria to continue the work.

Uber Eats teams with Nuro to have driveless delivery of food. No drivers to pay.

Once again the expert are wrong (as is the usual case). Contrary to predictions of doom from climate change, the Atlantic hurricane season has been unseasonable quiet.

Wednesday 14 September 2022

We repeat the lesson that "there is no free lunch." Cloud computing was supposed to make all this less expensive. In many ways, the opposite has occurred.

IBM shows new LinuxOne servers that use far less electrical power.

Students are using AI to write their essays. Cheating? Was going from pencil to a typewriter cheating? Was going from typewriter to word processor cheating? Each of these changes revolutionized writing. Cheating?

We have a real problem with land mines scattered the world over. Some hope with drones, video cameras, and machine learning to detect them in otherwise harmless settings.

There is some progress in using machine learning to detect Alzheimer's many years sooner. Computers are good at detecting small changes in large quantities of numbers.

It seems that we now have eyeglasses with facial recognition built in. This is from an Air Force base security contract.

Those little delivery robots need to get tougher and bigger to survive pot holes and cracks in the sidewalks.

In an unusual move, South Korean regulators fine Google and Meta tens of millions $$$.

More tech foundations: the Linux Foundation creates the OpenWallet Foundation.

I am paraphrasing here, the US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has signed a cooperative research and development agreement with Google to develop and produce chips used to develop new nanotechnology and semiconductor devices.

Apple is to use TSMC's latest 3-nm technology for its products in 2023. Expect big gains in performance.

Ready for the work-from-anywhere life, Logitech has a new line of webcams that cost about $150, are moveable for better angles and lighting, and are much much better than a laptops built-in camera.

Another ship company is building a ship that you buy into and live on all the time. The ship cruises around the world constantly. $1Million buys a tiny condo. You pay $2,600/month more for food and amenities.

Another proof that machine learning algorithms are great at mimicking behavior, someone trained an algorithm with hate speech. No surprise that the result were bots that pumped out 15,000 such posts everyday.

Thursday 15 September 2022

Space exploration fans have moved to Boca Chica, Texas to watch SpaceX. Of course they have disturbed the locals and everything else.

Harvard's Office of Technology Development (who knew they had such a thing?) has granted a commercial license on its battery technology that just might make it all practical.

Meanwhile in China, they are testing magnetic levitation (maglev) cars.

Amazon releases an updated Kindle reader. Yes, they still make those things.

Yes, some persons still buy and use floppy disks. I have a bunch of 5 1/4" floppies I wish someone could read.

Nice little essay that puts senior employees in the future. They know answers now that you will know in 10 years.

Someone is trying to put mirrors is space to bounce sunlight around and make solar cells work at night.

Intel, Arm and Nvidia are proposing an 8-bit floating point standard. That would make AI calculations much more efficient. I hope it works.

I'll just quote this, "Walmart is launching a virtual try-on tool to help shoppers see how a shirt, dress or another clothing item would look on their own body."

Google Photos adds new features to its Memories service.

100% of us are paying for electric charging stations for the 1% of us who drive expensive electric cars.

The Ethereum cryptocurrency has changed its algorithm to something that uses much less electrical power.

HP shows a little gadget that rolls around and prints layouts on the floors of construction sites. This will save a lot of time. Jobs will be lost, but some claim there is a shortage of workers.

Experts, who have been wrong about everything related to Russia, now predict that the Russian army has been depleted and Putin is in danger.

An in-depth look at Intel's graphics technology and "up scaling."

Research and development is high-risk work (financially speaking). Google just cancelled half of its R&D projects.

Friday 16 September 2022

If you like to watch rockets explode, this is a must-see video. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin test flight exploded. Everything functioned as it should in an emergency.

Zoom is trying to expand backwards to email. I thought ZoomerTeamz meetings were to replace email?

Five years of data show that solid state disks (SDD) are more reliable than the good old spinning disks.

GitHub shares a half dozen things you can do with its CoPilot that are not the primary functions.

Meanwhile in Antarctica, we can now receive broadband Internet service from SpaceX's Starlink.

Data leaks: is it a crime or is it information sharing that benefits everyone?

Several of the pioneers of the deep learning craze agree that it has not "hit a wall," but will continue to flourish.

This is a nice article explaining AI super resolution. It is a relatively new approach to upsampling or adding in detail that didn't exist. We used to use bilinear interpolation which was a 2D version of basic interpolation (which used to be taught in high school before calculators).

Writing about change and automation, Kurt Cagle throws in this one that I also experienced: When I started writing, I was making about $20,000 a book to write about HTML and JavaScript. Today, writing a book is a fool's errand unless you try changing how people think about things. I don't think I've made a profit from a technical book in the last decade, despite having written a fair number of them.

More fussing about the use of facial recognition technology in law enforcement. If someone harms one of my loved ones, I will demand you use this tech to catch the bad guys. Otherwise, I distrust you using it. We can't have it both ways. We can't pick and choose when and where these things are used. If we restore public trust in government employees, we solve the great majority of our problems.

Arm shows its processor roadmap into the future. They are moving towards the big applications in data centers and high-performance computing.

Our Congress finally has an application programming interface (API) for its (our) data. This is long overdue and provides us with a much better insight. Wait, do we want to see inside this mess?

Tech companies pledge to our current President that they will work against "extremism." "Extremism" is a subjective term that is often weighted towards one political opinion or another on this day or that.

Gathering evidence without search warrants. This is bad for all of us.

Vietnam and the Phillipines are leading the world in the adoption of cryptocurrencies.

It appears that an 18-year-old hacked Uber. Either that or an Uber employee is having a lot of fun.

Some persons in Congress are pushing the idea that Americans file their taxes "for free" instead of paying TurboTax and others. Of course, the IRS will spends billion$ of taxpayers' money annually to run this "free" service.

Reading this little post shows that the World Health Organization knows that a virus originated in China, spread worldwide, and killed millions of people. If everyone knows this, where are the reparations due from China?

Perhaps this indicates an improving outlook in the economy or the mood of people: lines are forming at Apple stores to pickup the new iPhones.

Some clever things you can do in the Chrome browser.

Saturday 17 September 2022

Microsoft Teams and what can go wrong. This week, we learned that Microsoft Teams had a security hole the size of the grand canyon or some outrageous example. And lots of folks have connected Teams to this and that and some other thing. This means that trusting Microsoft to have its act together was a huge mistake. Teams has about 300million folks using it on a regular basis. It had to be secure, right? Wrong, wrong, and more wrong.

Google's Cloud Platform group announces more and better cloud database services.

After several decades of the WIMP interface, the command line interface is still powerful and growing in influence.

I highly recommend this report. It draws from surveys of company executives. Big news for freelance works: companies want you for short-term projects. (short is subjective)

For some, "work from home" has become "work from another country." The same is true for attending school online as some counties in the US are wary of folks living in other states and other countries yet still taking advantage of top public education in top counties. Seems like a good case for competition among government groups.

Intel is dropping the Pentium and Celeron names from its line and simply call its processors "Intel Processor."

A Federal Appeals Court upholds a Texas law that the social media companies don't like. Meta et al claim they cannot block hate speech (subject term) given the Texas law.

EVGA builds graphics cards. They have been working with Nvidia for over 20 years. No more.

The move to the metaverse and other things have been very bad financially for Meta, Facebook, and Zuckerburg. The Silicon Valley companies heartily backed Mr. Biden for President. His time in office has been a financial disaster for all of them.

The NFL's Thursday Night Football was on Amazon this week. Technically, it all worked.

A look at the new Asus ZenBook laptop computer. At about $2,000, it is a competitor with the Apple offerings.

Meanwhile in America, where we elect our governors (we still do that, right?), we believe our governors are too old (why then, do we elect them?). We want term limits, age limits, and cognitive tests (keep out the senile (a subjective term)).

Got an extra $115,000? Get this beautiful AirStream RV built on a van. This is great stuff, but the price is outrageous.

Our current President is backing wind mill technology that costs 50% more. Great way to spend our tax dollars?

Ethereum just switched from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). Who cares? Everyone who owns expensive graphics processors. Those processors costs too much to run to mine crypto currency. An industry just collapsed.

This is a boon for those doing machine learning. GPU prices will drop dramatically making it much cheaper to build machine learning computation systems. Expect a boom in that.

Sunday 18 September 2022

Yet another call for using AI in education and having government regulators require it. Sigh.

A different approach to understanding what neural networks are doing and comparing different implementations.

Thoughts on improving security via GitHub.

This is a nice essay on the art of writing directly-testable requirements and designs or formal specification.

More evidence that mining for crypto currency is no longer viable. There are many, many, many powerful computers turned off and up for sale. Gamers and researchers rejoice at new low prices.

Our Dept of Homeland Security is studying the cross section of extremism and gaming. Perhaps they can study the cross section of extremism and main-stream media. "Extremism" is subjective, and many studies of it classify left-wing thought as the middle of the bell curve. There are no left-wing extremist in such a world.

I like this. The Journal of Universal Rejection. There is a lot happening here for writers. Since there is no fear of rejection (everyone is rejected), you are free to write without worry.

Forget the jet ski. The rich rich rich buy their own two-person submarines.