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: 28 November - 4 December, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine as winter approaches
• Reduced prices everywhere on everything sales
• The world starts to spin on its axis after a five-day weekend
• Twitter still dominates the minute-by-minute news
• COVID-19 protests in China
• Twitter stops deciding what is correct concerning COVID
• USAF shows B-21 bomber

Monday 28 November 2022

It is Monday after a five-day weekend. The world resumes spinning on its axis.

To prevent people from seeing the anti-government protests in China, the Communist Party of China has flooded social media with "nuisance" posts.

For the record, the news is still full of Twitter this and Twitter that.

Today is Cyber Monday which means there are lots of discount prices just for today. Tomorrow is Tuesday after Cyber Monday which means there will be lots of discount prices just for tomorrow and then...

The woes of remote work that actually accomplishes work.

And this week's notes about writing.

Writing and such with the long game in mind.

Writing and writing by watching these YouTube channels.

The en dash and em dash and dash and yes, these are important.

Some suggestions for thinking creatively. These also apply to just plain thinking - something that isn't done much these days.

Thoughts on the use of italics in writing.

Ome writer's method for creating a long synopsis of a novel before attempting a complete written novel.

Some tips to help start writing again after a long hiatus.

I spent too much time looking at this piece to not mention it here. It is bad. Don't read it. They say that a writer needs to develop communication skills as a soft skill. Writers ARE COMMUNICATORS.

Thoughts on literary themes.

Tuesday 29 November 2022

arXiv dot org now connects to Hugging Face Spaces to show demos from some papers.

Going green with an electric vehicle? Pause and consider the mining needed to make all those batteries.

Tesla does its first 500-mile run with its all-electric 18-wheeler. 81,000 pounds of full load.

I'll just quote this: OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game.

Some 20,000 Foxconn workers at iPhone City China have quit their jobs. The amazing thing is that is less than 10% of the crew.

Where the money is: Google is hiring for its cloud computing services.

Google has licensed its machine learning models aimed at detecting breast cancer.

Amazon builds its own processor for high-performance computing on its AWS cloud services. This competes with its partners Intel and Nvidia.

The new management at Twitter has decided that it will no longer be the arbiter of truth concerning COVID. Odd thing about the virus. It is reported to have killed a million Americans. Such shows that there is great uncertainty about the situation. And those who are certain about the uncertainty are also certain about what should be said even though there is great uncertainty.

This is sort of a milestone as the Vietnamese auto industry sends a thousand electric vehicles to the US.

I love this. It is audio history. Sounds of things that are going away like typewriters and such.

It appears that cheating on tests goes far behind high school and into space agencies.

Rolls Royce succeeds at powering a jet engine with hydrogen as fuel. This is still quite early in development.

This one affects me: yes, it is difficult to understand what actors on TV programs are saying.

Wednesday 30 November 2022

Considering Git Notes which is a little-known but powerful feature of Git. It allows amending commitment notes.

Laid off? Laid off several times? Here are some good, practical tips. Most deal with the emotion of the situation and the reaction to the event.

Here is the GitHub site for JupyterLite which is a JupyterLab distribution that runs entirely in the browser.

Here is a description of Nvidia's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling).

Tesla has succeeded with sales of its Model 3 car. Now it moves into the natural next step of redesign for ease of manufacturing. Next will be the redesign to ease maintenance.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and UKC Berkeley build a four-legged walking robot at "low cost." The hope is to have something cheap enough and robust enough to work in homes.

Here is some research work to build an ASIC optical sensor that can train machine learning models for a tiny fraction of the cost of current methods.

Some experiments with computer-controlled cars show that they can help eliminate those traffic jams that occur for no real reason.

Some promising results in make clothing that confuses computer vision systems, i.e., the cameras don't recognize you as a person.

The Picsart text-to-image software is creating a million images a day.

Doing more with the same: OpenAI's GPT-3 model is now creating longer and better strings of words.

And Twitter this and that stays in the news. Elon Musk is a genius. He has maneuvered all this free publicity.

Despite layoffs in other sectors, Amazon is still growing its AWS cloud computing. More jobs and more data centers.

Amazon shows SimSpace Weaver. This enables city managers to run city-scale simulations of natural disasters etc. in the cloud. Such simulations require far more computing than city governments own.

A new drug is hailed as a breakthrough in the treatment of dementia. The benefits, however, are very limited. This shows the difficulty of the problem.

Thursday 1 December 2022

SpaceX has doubled the price of the Starlink broadband service in Ukraine.

Some of the governors in China understand some technology items. China pushes towards the open-source RISC designs to avoid economic sanctions.

Snowflake had a big financial quarter. Some see the future being not as good, so the price of the stock dropped.

OpenAI shows ChatGPT. Answer question, sometimes incorrectly, sometimes correct to the point of irritation.

Honda promises hands-free driving on all its vehicles in America...a long time from now.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, "robots can be used 'as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers are imminent and outweigh any other force option available to the SFPD.'"

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are trying to use magnets to try to create fusion energy generation. All wild experiments so far.

Cord cutting continues as cable companies lose another three-quarters of a million customers in the last 90 days.

Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac dies at 79.

Friday 2 December 2022

GitLab publishes a Data Team Handbook on (where else but) GitLab.

A list of must-read books on data science.

From May this year, a research paper on MLOps.

bellingcat provides yet another lesson in open-source research and investigations.

Our FCC authorizes SpaceX to put another 7,500 satellites in orbit for Starlink. Not sure when the FCC became the arbiter of orbits.

DeepMind's AI is now between people at Stratego. This must be important to some people.

This is a major story: Disney has software that makes actors look younger or older in video without employing skilled makeup artists.

This is an excellent post on the value of some AI at work. To quote, "AI doesn't take over jobs, it takes over tasks."

This is disturbing. Something in the water or the air or the medicine is causing sperm counts to drop.

Saturday 3 December 2022

Some folks like to play with fire as they have dug up old viruses from the Siberian permafrost. We hope they are careful.

Engineers at Alphabet have built some 100 robots to test performing simple tasks at the office building.

"Alexa, make a story," and then Alexa makes up a story. Clever and helpful to some rich people. Maybe something practical can come from it.

Sony has a new set of sensors (Mocopi) that track movement so that your avatar moves like you. Seems like the avatar should move better than you, but that comes from a clumsy person.

This is a book or encyclopedia on engineering management on a GitHub site.

We can now test new medicines on small specks of tissue instead of needing folks used a guinea pigs.

120 Gbps is coming with USB4 spec.

A GitHub site with code to run Stable Diffusion on Apple Silicon with Core Machine Learning.

We now begin a "late stage trial" of a headset that flashes light and sound to combat dementia. That would happen one hour per day. Perhaps something can come of this. The good news is that the government has granted late stage trials, so this has moved along.

Amazon has its own airplanes to ship good. They aren't all full. Amazon wants to rent the empty space, but is struggling.

Finding money where there isn't supposed to be any: DuoLingo is thriving at teaching languages. We were all supposed to be using computers to translate by now.

We are looking at low water levels on the Colorado River. No one expected the level to be this low. It will cause power generation to cease. Many blame "climate change" (why not, there are no responsible people). How about blaming California for using too much water and ignoring the Pacific Ocean?

A week's stay at an off-the-grid cabin. Of course the solar panels work in the Swedish summer with 16 hours of daylight.

Our Air Force shows the new B-21 bomber which looks remarkably like the B-2 bomber and is decades away from flying.

"xrOS" is the name for Apple's operating system for its AR/VR gadgets coming real soon now.

Edward Snowden now has a Russian passport.

Sunday 4 December 2022

Our TSA is testing a facial recognition system to verify if your face matches that on your driver's license. This is a gold mine for the company that makes the devices, and the taxpayers are funding it.

Meanwhile at Northeastern University, well, it's so bizarre it's hard to explain. Administrators put sensors in desks to monitor something. Students complained, then broke through the weak cybersecurity, then ...

Apple continues to moves manufacturing out of China. China has proven to be an unreliable business partner. Will these moves usher to removal of communist rule?

Thoughts on the possibility of an AI-caused disaster and the government reaction to it. Good read.

A look at the Lensa app that uses your self-portraits and creates art work of yourself. Puts real artists out of jobs.

Researchers use AI to "predict far into the future." Well, not really, but they have combined existing techniques in a new way to predict answers that the software will produce.

Thoughts on identity resolution.