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 December, 2022

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas
• Everyone uses Lensa to draw cartoon of themselves
• A "breakthrough" in fusion that fizzles out
• Some hope for a new cancer treatment (co$tS million$)
• Twitter remains in the news

Monday 12 December 2022

NASA was able to send an unmanned craft around the moon and back

It is that time that we see these "best of the year" articles. This one is about technical breakthroughs.

This research argues that remote workers are more engaged with co-workers, even after three years at home.

It is called "base editing." It is a form of biological engineering and it cure a teen of incurable cancer.

Meanwhile at Lawrence Livermore, we have a positive fusion reaction. Nothing practical coming for a long time without a surprise along the way.

The Linux 6.1 kernel released.

A new TIOBE index of programming languages surprises many with Python in first place, C second, C++ third, and Java fourth.

Here is some good advice on how to listen to feedback or critique of our writing. Breathe, listen, take notes, breathe, and breathe slowly.

Practical legal advice to anyone who really wants to be a freelance worker.

Some notes on resource management and how that practice applies to a freelancer.

Tuesday 13 December 2022

This is a good explanation of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 with lots of illustrations.

Some stories from people who created ideas that became money makers.

Here is a long piece on TSMC: someone sort of agrees with me that this is the most important company in the world.

How long can a Tweet be? How about 4,000 characters. I remember 140.

Record this as the year when we loved to use Lensa to make cartoons of ourselves.

Ladies take great caution in using Lensa to create images of yourselves.

In the eyes of some, Microsoft remains the best managed company in the country for the third year in a row.

I guess The Atlantic doesn't have to be balanced or objective.

Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas. He ran FTX, lost billion$, and it seem lost billion$$$ of other persons' money, too.

Some history of video games.

ChatGPT generates text. How do you prove it generated the text or I generated the text? It's just text.

A review of AMD's latest graphics processors. They perform on par with Nvidia at a lower price.

Our Air Force has successfully tested a hypersonic missile. It is only a test, but it flew this time.

Wednesday 14 December 2022

An attempt to put the fusion "breakthrough" in perspective. Sorry folks.

Some uses for a chatbot that sort of make sense.

This is a pretty good paper on the origins and lineage of ChatGPT.

Considering how to use software to resurrect old hardware and vice versa.

Meanwhile at U.C. Berkeley's Sky Computing Lab, researchers have a tool that may enable running cloud projects at much lower costs.

Some experiments to do with ChatGPT.

Amazon in a very bad light. They built a distribution center in Tijuana, Mexico. It remained a slum. Lower wages than others in the area.

How students in China easily cheat on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (Toefl) exam.

And, of course, the journalists are afraid of AI writing essays. They realize that their skills aren't that special.

Open-source intelligence is bigger and better than ever. The US appears to be slow at adapting to the newest world.

Apple updates iOS. Here are the latest goodies.

Google's executives are moving cautiously into chat stuff that mimics humans.

Thursday 15 December 2022

Reuters analyzes how Russia continues to obtain technology from the west despite all the bans because of Ukraine.

In a rare unanimous vote, our Senate wants to ban TikTok from all government-owned devices. Seems like this legislative ban is unnecessary.

The Linux Foundation announces the Overture Maps Foundation. 

Dell shows the concept of a laptop computer that can be popped apart (no screws) in 30 seconds. This is a concept machine; it is not for sale.

Microsoft bans cryptocurrency mining from its online services.

Signs that "the party is over" at big tech. Everyone is cutting benefits and perks. This is a replay of the dot com bust of the late 1990s.

Here is a lengthy report on engineering productivity in this sort of work-from-home world.

I write a few words on the subject of Verification and Validation. An older but still sound concept.

Friday 16 December 2022

The Rest of World publication looks at the tech markets in 21 of the less-travelled cities of the world.

Some thoughts on rebuilding social media via heavy use of RSS.

Apple has a new app called FreeForm. Up to 99 persons can draw on one canvas at one time.

No matter which way we go or how far we go in computing, it is still about the I/O (input and output).

Upon further review, the governors of San Francisco decide not to have police robots that use deadly force.

It's about time...researcher build robots that use their arms to help prevent falls.

DeepMind and University College London researchers adjust a 70-billion parameter LLM to generate statements that maximize agreement among folks with differing opinions.

Apple ups performance in its system so that the Stable Diffusion AI image generator runs in half the time.

Edge computing to the extreme: Amazon has been experimenting with image analysis software that runs on an imaging satellite to reduce imagery sent down to earth.

Those electronic cigarettes used for "vaping" have lithium batteries in them. The amount of lithium batteries thrown in the kitchen trash can each year contain enough lithium for about 6,000 Teslas.

A visit to the Computer Village in Lagos, Nigeria. I visited one such place in Lagos in 1995. And another one in Peshawar, Pakistan in 1981. Wonders of the eye and nose.

Saturday 17 December 2022

No Internet viewing today.

Sunday 18 December 2022

My Internet viewing is curtailed for a few days.

This is the story of how Amazon has worked with the Ukrainian government to move data out of the country in suitcase-sized solid-state computer storage units called Snowball Edge, then funneling the data into Amazon's cloud computing system.

Apple, Google, and Mozilla collaborating on a browser benchmark called Speedometer 3.

emTwitter remains in the news. They are suspending accounts of "journalists" who track Musk's (and his family's) daily movements. Hypocrisy abounds among these journalists who formerly touted that Twitter could ban conservatives because Twitter is a private company. Now they scream "First Amendment" when Twitter bans them.