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: 13-19 February, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl
• Lufthansa grounds flights over IT issues
• We have found ways to trick Bing AI search and such

Monday 13 February 2023

Interesting equating of the fall of Twitter to the fall of the Tower of Babel. Only 150 friends is what a person can juggle. The scattering to other platforms seems natural.

Comcast ends free access to Peacock. This began during the pandemic. It's over.

The Opera browser adds capabilities from ChatGPT.

It took less than a week for a college student to use a prompt injection attack to hack into Bing's new ChatGPT-powered search.

A look at liquid neural networks that can change shape and form during operation.

The Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl. The accepted narrative is that both quarterbacks played great games, the Eagle quarterback gave away the game on a fumble-touchdown. Seven points on the fumble, three-point margin of victory.

NASA finds more things on Mars that may indicate water used to be there. We have other explanations for what was found.

How one couple runs 25 blogs with $1million in revenue yearly (that is not profit, they pay a lot of writers).

Thoughts on freelance writing. Good luck with it as it will be difficult with low or no pay for a long time.

More on freelancing, this time on the end of the career. How do you save for retirement? Save half of your earnings and live on half. That isn't enough money to live? Well, the answer is simple, self-employment isn't working for you. Go back to writing in the evenings and weekends for extra cash.

The concept of the creative ritual or habit. I have few if any that I have been able to discern. Perhaps I am merely blind to them.

Here are several methods for writing a book. They are basically about different ways to create an outline or different ways to keep a large collection of details organized. I am not smart enough to keep it all in my head.

The art of the personal essay.

Tuesday 14 February 2023

Microsoft will show how it has combined ChatGPT with its Office suite real soon now (March is promised).

Looking ahead to the next bunch of large language models and how people will jump into them. The major addition of ChatGPT is that companies will now throw their new stuff to the public much sooner. People are accept experiments more than in the past.

Fusion reactors are almost here, maybe ten years. I've been hearing that since I could spell "fusion." This time? Maybe.

It appears that Meta is not finished cutting jobs. More layoffs are coming.

At least someone has a firm grasp of the obvious, "AI language models are ... excellent at predicting the next word in a sentence, but they have no knowledge of what the sentence actually means."

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, is backing a company named Ishtari that builds models of military hardware in computers. This technique speeds the design and construction of systems at a much lower cost. They are doing this so the US stays ahead of China (which is doing the same).

Andy Jassy built the money machine that is Amazon Web Services. His year as the CEO of Amazon has been a financial disaster.

oooops, all that tele-health when we were are afraid to go to the doctor's office wasn't secured properly. All sorts of medical records have been hacked.

Zoox makes self-driving vehicles that don't have steering wheels or other controls for people to use. They have been ferrying people to and fro on their campus in Foster City, California.

If you have an hour and a half and are curious about crypto currency and such, here is a video explanation.

Wednesday 15 February 2023

From the March/April 2023 of IEEE Software, "There are only two problems with becoming a software company: getting started and keeping going."

The simple concept of setting priorities on problems. The biggest is the filter or saying, "No, I will not work on that."

Speculation on a possible hardware subscription from Apple. This would extend to Macs and everything else. This is not rent-to-own but simply rentals.

Blue Origin quietly announces that they are working on how to make solar panels from ore found on the moon. The factory would be on the moon.

It's about time: a joint team at Caltech and MIT have made a pill loaded with sensors that passes through the human body and monitors everything. This eliminates exploratory surgery and a lotta' guessing.

This is a long piece on defining an engineering strategy. I'll need some time to read this.

A side conversation caused me to search and led to finding this article. This is a well-worded piece about Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. Keep this for future reference. It is well worth it.

Google has a new 5Gbps internet plan for $125 a month. It is only in four cities.

When you pay $50Billion to own Twitter, your Tweets go at the top of the list. Some people who claim to be adults think this is some sort of a scandal.

The founder of TSMC told former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the CHIPS act she passed was a joke.

Microsoft's new AI-enabled-something-or-other Bing stumbles out with lots of comic mistakes.

The Guardian "exposes" a company in Israel that sells what are publicity campaigns. Many, however, label them misinformation because the campaigns don't fit their agenda.

Microsoft just cut the last thread holding Internet Explorer in Windows 10.

Let's drive from Michigan to Florida in an electric car. LET'S NOT! It just doesn't work. But, but, but, but will cry the critics. It just doesn't work.

Quick News Update: Lufthansa has grounded all its flights. Their computer is down.

Thursday 16 February 2023

A review of the history of the Rust programming language and why it is gaining in popularity.

This is a simple and underused concept: automate repetitive tasks.

No surprise here as an audit shows that our Internal Revenue Service is hopelessly behind in computing.

From Latin America, we learn about the English language and its often negative influence on developing a technology industry.

Qualcomm announces its latest update to 5G modems the Snapdragon X75.

Rumors that we will finally see Apple's mixed reality gadget in June of this year.

I'll just quote this, "Microsoft's Bing chatbot has been unleashed on the world, and people are discovering what it means to beta test an unpredictable AI tool."

And now we have an industry of creating fake receipts. Show up at a restaurant or store with a receipt, accept the merchandise, and leave.

Friday 17 February 2023

Once again, we have a little hope with dementia. This time, researchers have a better grasp of brain disease in a few children. The insights could help research into brain disease in the elderly. We pray.

Japan's space launch industry has worked for a decade to cut the cost of launches and become competitive with SpaceX and others.

Google is scrambling to bring a chatbot to the world. Memos reveal that everyone (EVERYONE) is to help test what they have.

If you have a couple of hours, this explains how ChatGPT works.

Our regulators are now telling the electric vehicle industry how to operate their businesses.

Google has 175,000 employees with a giant HR Department and procedures for everything. And few if any of these employees are thinking.

Mr. Zuckerburg was all excited about the Metaverse a year ago. Since? Nothing but wasted money.

Excellent analysis by Google on Russia's year-long cyber war against Ukraine.

Please be cautious when letting your children (up through age 21) use TikTok.

Microsoft and Parallels partner so that we can run Windows 11 in a box on the Apple-powered Macs.

Meta introduces a new cubicle for the office that is supposed to block noise much better.

Our Dept of State issues a declaration on the responsible use of AI in the military. Will our Dept of Defense soon issue a declaration on the responsible use of AI in diplomacy?

Saturday 18 February 2023

This is a good essay on using software to help write source code. As with all tools, it changes the practice of programming which makes it easier for some persons and more difficult for others.

People in different places use the same words differently. Time puts people in different places.

Another indicator of the PC market crash after the panic buying reaction to the virus. Lenovo has its worst slump in 14 years.

"What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people." -- Joseph Weizenbaum And no wonder people are surprised about using Bing and ChatGPT and the like.

Google announces a date in May when they will put all our reminders in one place for easier use. No longer putting, "Look at the To Do list in the TO DO list."

Amazon will require office staff to be in the office three days a week in May. Where I work, the big employer has completely mismanaged face-to-face work with bad results.

Let's file this under, "I hope they know what they are doing (but they probably don't)." Genetically modified trees are planted in Georgia.

It is likely that our armed forces are shooting down balloons that are aloft legally as hobbies. Never has so much taxpayer money been spent on ... uh, er, nothing.

Sunday 19 February 2023

Starlink is increasing its offerings for satellite Internet service. Global Roaming is the new service. Details are absent at this time.

I guess someone wants this: Google's Meet has a phony background that moves as you move your camera.

Someone has used software to beat software at Go. The new software isn't better at the game, but instead probes the first software for weaknesses.

This person is a hacktivist. He is not in an army, he is not employed by a nation, and he is working in the cyber world to defeat a nation.

Going way, way back in the history of science, it appears that Leonardo da Vinci mused about gravity, the motion of bodies, etc.

We are starting to use the batteries in these electric vehicles as batteries so we can watch TV during power outages.

The search for desktop PCs that are made in such a way that allows easily installing Linux. Given the glut of PCs on the market (thank you panic buying), this holds some promise.

I'll just quote this, "If you have something to do at home after work, do it right away when you get home, before you sit down."

People are taking great pleasure in showing that software delivered by big tech has errors in it. This has always been the case. Why the new interest in something so simple and commonplace.

A great medical science breakthrough (NOT): if you get sick, you are likely to get sick again.

This is probably more than you want to know about playing Monopoly, but here it is.

And more things I never knew about Monopoly.