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: 16 September - 2 October, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine, the Russians are showing signs of defeat
• NASA hits an asteroid with a spacecraft
• Walmart opens a couple of virtual shopping worlds
• Amazon introduces new hardware including robots and better E Ink readers
• My younger brother Dennis died on Thursday the 29th of September

Monday 26 September 2022

Shop, shop, shop. Amazon will have a second Prime Day event October 11-12.

It appears that Slack and Teams are lackadaisical when it comes to security of apps.

Researchers at Meta AI have new techniques for estimating the bodies of persons in VR applications.

Meanwhile in London, police arrest the person believed to be the great Uber hacker. This is tied to the Lapsus$ hacking group. And yes, the suspect is a 17-year-old male. Forget Russia, China, and North Korea. Governments and big companies need to watch the kids.

Here is the state-of-the-practice in digital cameras. Some folks still carry a camera that is not in their cell phone.

Silicon Alley Insider is running a series of stories on the really, really old folks in high political positions in the US. This one compares the American situation to the Soviet one in the dying days of the Soviets. It is eerie.

A look at book formatting services. You wrote the book because you were good at writing a book. Let someone who is good at formatting doe the formatting.

A writer's retreat can be great. You don't have to go to a foreign country, meet an Earl, stay at a castle, and all that.

Ambiance and "setting the mood" for writing. I like coffee or water or something like that and a chair and a flat horizontal surface or something like that, and it needs to be sometime during the day or night.

Comparing the school day to a writer's day. There are similarities.

Nice thoughts from Garrison Keillor on how narrating your ordinary things to yourself can improve your writing.

Tips on celebrating a finished book.

Thoughts on subtext. "Subtext refers to characters who talk about one thing but really mean something else, and they both know it."

There are many reasons why you don't write true stories. Write them as fiction instead.

Tuesday 27 September 2022

Data, data, and more data, and nothing seems to be happening. Myths and problems.

Surprise me! Napster still exists.

Robotic apple picker. Must see video.

Politics and technology; technology and politics. Starlink activates to provide some Internet access in Iran.

This is a long interview with the leader of Meta's AI group. Much of today's "AI" is a bunch of stunts that lead no where in the long term.

Here is a long position paper from the same AI leader from Meta.

This seems to be a big story. Apple was supposed to have a big event in October to show new computers. Apple, however, may cancel the event and still show new computers.

Cloudflare launches several new services aimed at securing mobile devices.

Here is an in-depth review of AMD's newest Ryzen GPUs.

Here is an excellent analysis of Nvidia's technology and financial footing.

Walmart attempts a few virtual shopping worlds via the Roblox gaming system. Let's see if folks like to walk through virtual stores.

These new AI tools that take text and create images are "trained" using millions of images found on the Internet. Including your images. Is it ok for companies to use my images to make systems that make them money? And I don't get any royalties?

Here is a case for a manned flyby of Venus before a manned trip to Mars. And we still don't know how this will affect the human passengers.

NASA hits an asteroid with an vehicle. This is supposed to be a test of what we do in the movies to protect earth from large rocks falling on us.

And now we start to wrestle with what to do with all these empty office buildings.

Factory jobs in the US are plentiful for the first time in decades.

Wednesday 28 September 2022

Nvidia's new GET3D system transforms images into 3D models. The Internet contains lots of images, but not many 3D models. The models are good for creating video games and 3D simulations.

I have an exceptional amount of experience walking down the roadside. Seeing the eyes of drivers is a big help in feeling safe. Self-driving vehicles need some type of cue like that.

A Cornell Univ, researchers have put enough computing power on tiny robots so that they robots can walk all by themselves. The robots are the size of an ant's head. This is a step in the direction of placing medical robots outside and inside human bodies to find and remove disease when it is tiny.

In a similar vein, Swiss researchers have developed swarms of drones that 3D print structures much like bees do while flying. These drone swarms could build and repair skyscrapers. When shrunk, these could repair our teeth.

Some publications are already using these text-to-image tools to illustrate stories. This is a very quick adoption of a new technology. None of this existed at the start of 2022.

We have a new industry report on the labor shortage in AI/ML/DS and the like. Some companies are paying salaries for these skills. Others are not.

The Wuhan Virus hit. We closed our schools. Kids didn't learn much from home. Now what? Data analysis companies think they can help sort out all this stuff and help kids catch up.

I'll quote from this article on AI use and data, "Data issues are more likely than not to be the reason if companies fail to achieve their AI goals."

Rust is a relatively new programming language that is growing in use in systems applications.

Two companies (Hugging Face and ServiceNow Research) begin the BigCode project. The goal is an open-source software system that can write new software much like GitHub's Copilot.

Another quote, this one about Silicon Valley and the big tech area, "working in this industry is less fun than it used to be, and some employees are less inclined to stay in the industry than they were prior to the pandemic."

Coming real soon now, Intel PCs will be able to make and take phone calls via their iPhones and Android phones.

Intel's Arc A770 graphics card will be available in two weeks at $329. This competes with Nvidia's low-end cards in price and performance. Intel promises the cards will be available, something that has plagued Nvidia.

And Intel promises that its 13th generation desktop processors will be here available on October 20th.

Alienware updates it high-end gaming monitor and drops the price to $1,100.

And Alienware updates its desktop gaming machine with the latest parts from Intel and Nvidia. It also updates the cooling system.

Our Dept of Transportation writes a check for $1.5Billion (with a B) for electric vehicle charging stations. All taxpayers are paying for fuel for 1% of taxpayers.

This is all over the Internet: Intel and Samsung made a display that extends when you pull the edge. This is real. It is something in the lab only. We won't see it in the stores any time soon.

Logitech updates its line of mechanical keyboards and mice built just for Apple computers.

Thursday 29 September 2022

Cloudflare, with $1.25Billion in investment funds behind it, is trying to have startup software companies use its services instead of those from Amazon.

Forget Moore's Law. This is a discussion about the business of building your own chips or depending on others to do so.

An interview with the CEO of Arm. They design reduced-instruction set computer instruction sets. Apple and everyone else buy the designs and implement them for their products.

Here comes a new medicine called incretin and a completely different medical view of obesity.

Some thoughts on a "sensing" organization.

How the software industry is one of the view bright spots in the economic ruin that is Bosnia.

A senior architect in the Dept of the Navy blasts the Dept of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF).

How to learning programming from a ten-year veteran. This is an extremely popular article on Medium.com.

Intel announces a computer vision toolkit and system called Geti.

System76 updates the components in their laptop computers (System76 makes computers just for the Linux operating system).

This is a big deal to some: M&Ms now has a purple candy.

"Too much time on your hands" or "there are worse things you can do with your spare time" someone fixes a 1983 TRS-100 computer by replacing the processor board and writing enough software to make the whole thing work.

Google adds new features to maps to give those in cities better views of things.

Amazon is encouraging call center employees to work from home all the time. This will save money on office space and will make it easier to hire people. This used to be called "farmsourcing" or hiring rural workers at lower wages.

A look at Amazon's Astro home "robot" which is more for security than anything else. It may help the elderly live in their own homes.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) collapse in value. This is true of much of the crypto-anything markets.

OpenAI removes the waitlist for DALL-E. Everyone can use it. Let the games begin. There will be tens of millions of images created each day.

Now we are ready to multiply the use of computer-generated images. Tens of millions of DALL-E type images created. Those will feedback into training for DALL-E which will make it better at creating hundreds of millions of images a day. If you sell computer storage systems, rejoice. If you earn a living creating illustrations for people, mourn. If you know how to use DALL-E, rejoice for a little while until everyone learns how to do it and others make front-end interfaces that make using it trivial.

Amazon introduces its Roadside Assistance service.

Yet again, someone does yet another study that shows yet again that folks are spending too much time attending too many meetings with too little benefit.

Using AI and lasers to zap bugs. That must be the most fun project ever.

Friday 30 September 2022

The items listed on this day may be repeats. I don't know.

I love this one, "Cloudflare has recently made an audacious claim: We could all be doing something better with our lives than deciding which images contain crosswalks or stop lights or clicking an 'I'm not a robot' checkbox."

This is a long piece on Resiliency in Distributed Systems.

This is still in university research, but we see a leap in the accuracy of computer arithmetic.

A long interview on how the current practice in machine learning can lead to big advances in the future. We need to put all this research to practical use and improve the lives of persons.

Here is a summary of Amazon's announcements this week.

Google is working on better ways to search. It is all about the input/output with more emphasis on input. Point a camera, turn on a microphone, etc.

This is a good essay from Kurt Cagle of Data Science Central on the new AI that generates "art work" in the style of lots of artists. Are they stealing your style?

Saturday 1 October 2022

No Internet viewing today.

Sunday 2 October 2022

Troubles with editing this file the past couple of days. Things may be completely out of order.

My younger brother Dennis died on Thursday. This links to his obituary. The past 72 hours are blurred together.