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: 21-27 November, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The World Cup is on in Qatar
• NASA flies the unmanned Orion capsule around the moon
• GPU sales hit ten-year low
• Zoom's stock price has dropped 90% in the last two years

Monday 21 November 2022

The Russians are still in Ukraine. It seems that some governors of Russia would declare victory and go home to save money. There is the factor of national pride which can neither be defined nor measured that is at stake in Russia. That can easily be overestimated and incorrectly judged. Still, lives are lost every day. Money, which can be spent on other things, is spent on war machines. And when the Russians do leave, the western powers will pour hundreds of billions into rebuilding Ukraine. The American taxpayer will be the primary source of that money.

The American mid-term elections appear to be almost over. The Republicans did not gain both houses of Congress as expected. That is a surprise given the drain on the economy of average Americans due to inflation (Bidenflation as some call it).

Money is pouting into India for eSports.

Yet another recall at Tesla. This is for a bad tail light.

Great, I love this. xkcd comic shows visual integration. Use a different visual perspective and you can see small changes in a line.

Murphy's Law illustrated yet again as folks aren't plugging in a cable correctly on the new Nvidia graphics card. If the cable is plugged in incorrectly, the unit should not power on. Bad design.

One day we will call the "pandemic" the "parentesis" as we changed culture for a while. Work? What was that?

The concept of putting a freelance writer (or any other profession) on retainer. It brings good things to the freelancer and the employer.

This is a motivational piece for writers who just have too many things required of them to leave time to write.

The first draft or "pile of words."

Stuck in the middle of writing a piece? Here is some advice on how to back up a few steps, look at the piece in different ways, take it apart, put it back together again, and resume.

I don't like the title of this piece, but it contains good advice on writing and copywriting. One of the big tips is that this is a job. Approach it like a job, like a profession. Use professional practices.

Some writers earn money writing about food and the places that have food.

You know you are a writer when... Nice little notes.

The notion of co-living spaces and how to find them.

How one writer moved from fun writing to making money. Look at what the market wants. Write that.

Work the phones and earn $10 an hour. There are many customer support types of jobs.

Tuesday 22 November 2022

Gosh, I didn't know that journalists needed Twitter to keep them honest. I thought that's what editors did.

Some people in government agencies appreciate the emergency communication value of Twitter. From the first day, Twitter was good for this. Few, however, noticed.

H-1B visa holders are in America for jobs. Layoffs mean they must leave the country.

Amazon hardware, especially Alexa, has done nothing but lose billion$$$ over the years. Many in that group have been laid off. That's business.

How the Communist Party of China continues to work on cyber security and state-sponsored hacking.

After 50 years, NASA has an unmanned craft fly around the far side of the moon.

Predictions that neuro-technology will one day be doing brain scans of cubicle workers during the day. Are we ready to learn how little thought is occurring in such places? (just kidding folks)

Kangas is a library of code that reads multi media at scale.

Growth slowed at Silicon Valley. Now we cut costs. We did the same thing about 20 years ago. Fun times are over.

Wednesday 23 November 2022

TSMC to build yet another advanced chip-making factory in Arizona. Good for the USA, probably not good for Taiwan.

Dell has record profits. Still, the stock price falls as some predict a weak future. Bidenomics.

How much electrical power does it take to make a new big big big language model? Not much is known, and I doubt we want to know the answer.

Another machine learning question? Are we focusing on the English language too much?

Stanford researchers attempt to step back and evaluate all these language models.

Is this creepy or comforting? Yes, we have the technology to create a digital person that mimics a deceased person.

I like this. This is a good use of technology. The machine spots individual weeds in a field of crops and sprays just the individual weed. This uses a tiny percentage of the chemicals.

Exploring the idea of recording everything all the time and letting the computer process it.

One prediction for the future of programming: little programming languages.

A look at pronatalism. Have eight kids. Every kid has eight kids. Repeat for 11 generations and you have about 8 billion healthy, smart people.

The governors of New York state feel they already have enough jobs as they have a new law prohibiting crypto mining.

Sales of graphics processors dropped to a ten-year low. Now is the time to buy. Buy hundreds and put them on the shelve. They will never be less powerful. One day...

Meta's AI research claims to have a system that achieves "human-level performance" in cooperating with humans on strategy. This has never happened before.

HP will join the other tech companies with thousands of jobs lost in the coming months. PC sales are the named culprit with HP.

America has a shortage of dogs that can find bombs. Another outcome of our reaction to the virus. We shut down everything that had face-to-face interaction.

The "value" of Zoom stock has dropped 90% in the last two years.

When NASA launched the Artemis rocket, it pretty much destroyed the launch pad. Not good.

I'll quote this quote, "Ukrainian resistance to what appeared to be overwhelming force reminded the world that democracy is not about accepting the apparent verdict of history. It is about making history; striving toward human values despite the weight of empire, oligarchy, and propaganda; and, in so doing, revealing previously unseen possibilities."

Thursday 24 November 2022

This is Thanksgiving Day in the US.

Alphabet prepares to layoff 10,000 persons.

A Swiss company claims to have a new battery technology that cuts charge time to just a couple of minutes.

Coming real soon now is a SuperGPS that is accurate to within 4 inches. There are some applications for this with most dealing with safety of vulnerable persons.

Thoughts on doing open source research and the hazards of the task.

Some thoughts on leading people who work in data science. Often, the leaders have no understanding of what people are doing. I have been the worker in these situations.

The writer of this piece attempts to describe data fabric.

Diplomats from the US and China, not having much of substance to discuss like human right and limits of government, argue over a climate theory.

Amazon, no longer needing lots and lots of computer scientists, closes its online learning service in India.

Musings about the big economy, interest rates, and strategies of the big tech companies.

Amazon is taking a big risk and entering the made-for-theater movie industry.

Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion Version 2.

Friday 25 November 2022

This is a second Monday as yesterday was a holiday. Perhaps the world will remain idling and await the next real Monday.

Considering some of the many benefits of writing by hand. Take meeting notes by hand. Type them later. It helps.

TSMC is about to invest $32B (that's a Billion) in a fab for 1 nm production.

Almost overnight, the job market has changed in Silicon Valley. If you are a government agency trying to hire a Silicon Valley company to do good work for the government, this is a great time.

Thoughts on breathing and how it affects the brain.

Recent research on dementia suggest gene mutations are one source of the problem. This may lead somewhere.

Nice piece on recycling water on the space station and in California. California just won't pull drinking water from the ocean, an obvious thing to do.

Combining computing and robotics to putt a golf ball. Silly. Perhaps someone can make enough money with this to fund research that matters.

Note this lawsuit over how machine learning uses data for which the people have not paid. Is it piracy to read all the code on GitHub to train CoPilot?

Saturday 26 November 2022

In case you haven't noticed, yesterday was Black Friday with lots of reduced prices. It appears that Black Friday lasts 42 days.

Intel introduces a custom pay-per-use processor. The processor you buy has all the features they can make. Depending on what you pay, they will turn on features (or not).

Here is the GitHub site for WinkNLP: a JavaScript library for Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Those really really ultra super duper big language models need more and more data to train. As those models grow, the data needed to train them is not growing fast enough.

Thoughts on using the command line. I use the command line daily, all the time. I suppose that is not normal.

Some thoughts on a relatively new weight loss drug. It is semaglutide.

This must be important as it has been all over the Internet this week. Tesla is now selling full self driving on some vehicles.

Far, far away in the Middle Kingdom, there is a place called iPhone City. This is in China and is yet another sign that China isn't a reliable business partner.

I guess we needed this or someone has too much spare time, but now we have over 500 Palm Pilot apps ready to run in our browsers.

I'll just quote the headline: Russian tech giant Yandex reportedly looking to break free from its home country.

I love this post and the idea from Seth Godin. Next time you "announce" something important, print it in all uppercase LIKE THIS ONE. How does it read now?

Sunday 27 November 2022

Thoughts on "Everything as Code" which is Infrastructure as Code stated another way.

Not having much to do (all crime has ceased in America, not), our Dept of Justice is investigating if a piece of software allows landlords to "collude" on setting rent. If a group of landlords raise rents, this creates a market opening for someone with lower rents.

Mom, Dad, three boys and 300Million YouTube subscribers. Live views of kids playing. What is significant, is this is not a surprise.

NASA claim record for distance of space flight by a vehicle designed to carry people (but didn't carry any people).

Also having not much to do, some of our Senators want tech companies to explain features. The features come and go in the time it took for a letter from Congress to reach the tech company. Some folks just don't get it.

Some "ethical" tech gifts.

If you have money and knowledge, you can build your own network for really, really fast Internet to the home.

I'll quote this one. It is the basis of writing to learn, "A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing."