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: 20-26 February, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine---we hit the one-year anniversary
• And all the experts were wrong, wrong, and wrong about it all
• President's Day in the US where we disdain former Presidents
• Microsoft adds more XBox games to Nvidia's streaming service
• Amazon signs on with Hugging Face
• Samsung shows its smartphone-to-satellite communications
• MediaTek does the same
• Motorola has a key fob that uses satellite communications

Monday 20 February 2023

Today is President's Day. We are supposed to honor our past Presidents. At one time it was for George Washington. Abraham Lincoln was sort of tossed in as well as his birthday happened to be in February. I forget if this week we consider Washington and Lincoln good guys or just more goofs that stole their way into office. It seems that we elect people to be President and afterwards consider them to be goofs or worse. Of course, we never take the blame for picking goofs or worse. It appears that to be remembered as a good President, you need to resign after one month in office.

The worst use of AI and software is those chatbots that answer the help line phone for companies. Hire a competent person, please.

Where do OpenAI, Google, Amazon, et al get all that text to train their systems? From the Internet. And they are not paying anyone for their help.

Using electromagnetic technology to find ancient ruins that have been buried by thousands of years of dirt. People once lived in North America. Something happened to them.

This is a new one for me. It is "lucky-girl syndrome." I suppose their is something to a positive outlook. I wonder if any of these girls have heard of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale?

The concept of the minimum viable product and the abuse of the notion. Two of the three words are adjectives and subject to interpretation. This is not a place for the timid and faint of heart.

IBM has been running an AI Supercomputer in its cloud as a cluster of computers. We have returned to the Beowulf Cluster of the 1990s. I think that is good.

If you want to make money as a freelance writer, you need some business skills.

A few overriding concepts that can make you "a better writer."

Good notes on using time to separate yourself from something you have written.

Some basics on Creative Writing. I've never taken such a class. Perhaps...

Tuesday 21 February 2023

Out of no where, in an instant...Meta has thousands of employees who are poor performers. Here come more layoffs. Magic.

It appears that lots of smart folks consider ChatGPT to be much smarter than it is. It is just mimicking what has been given to it. Mimicry is not intelligence. It is a typing saver.

Apple and Google have a (no longer) secret deal whereby Google pays Apple money and Apple doesn't develop its own search engine.

A couple of years ago, OpenAI bought the URL "ai.com." Type that and you go to ChatGPT.

One teacher is using ChatGPT et al in a practical way to teach how to use these things and what they can and cannot do.

Some notes on how real people in real jobs are using ChatGPT et al to accomplish real work in less time. Again, my stress is that these tools reduce typing. Copy, paste, edit, move on.

Google releases new versions of Chrome that save battery life.

Linux 6.2 arrives. It can run natively on Apple's M1 processors. Buy an M1-powered Mac, run Linux on it.

The art of having artwork printed on printed circuit boards for home electronics projects.

Microsoft is about to release Teams version 2.0 real soon now. Supposedly in the works for years, it is much more efficient, loads faster, uses less memory, processor, and battery and is just more swell all around.

Wednesday 22 February 2023

Once again, we see someone who has "made it" in an industry calling for regulation of that industry which prevents others from "making it."

While the computing industry is moving to cloud providers and closing their data centers, there are many who are going back to their own little data center in their own building.

History of childhoods of exceptional (very exceptional) people. Yes, the parents usually were rich, but there are things the middle class could do to educated their kids to be exceptional.

While on the topic of rich children, they are moving away from the internal combustion engine and all the roads that make cars useful.

This works quite well: sketch something (badly), type a few words, and it generates a photograph.

Practice it here.

oooops, our Dept of Defense had a cloud-based server holding a gazillion emails and it had no password.

Microsoft partners with Nvidia so that the XBox PC games will be available on Nvidia's GeFroce Now streaming service.

Amazon signs a deal with Hugging Face. The big tech companies are hiring the little companies that know AI.

Google adds more "radio" features to YouTube Music.

Researchers identify supposedly anonymous users of the metaverse. Privacy in the VR world doesn't seem to exist (despite promises).

Lectric shows a new ebike that carries much more cargo. At $1,500, industry experts say this is a really low price. I differ on that.

Subway (the sandwich place) will build electric-vehicle parks with playgrounds and such. Stuck charging your car? Some here, buy a sandwich or five while the kids play.

Thursday 23 February 2023

At least one other person is not afraid of all this mimicry coming from software.

Andrew Ng's company is offering a new service called LandingLens to make creation and use of computer vision software easier.

Automation and the possible (probable?) loss of jobs.

Meanwhile in China, they have a $5,500 electric car that is outselling everything. Of course it is. It is practical and inexpensive.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, a company called Gogoro is making it big with little motorcycles that use swappable batteries. No recharge stations; just battery swap stations.

A look at life and lots of death in Ukraine. This is not from the east coast US media, so it is worth while reading.

Big tech is cutting jobs. The severance packages are pretty darn good.

Nvidia has a big big drop in revene this financial quarter. Panic buying as a reaction to the virus ballooned expectations.

Crypto currency and blockchain continue to function with a few adults in the business. Example, Google Cloud has partnered with Tezos to act as a validator on the proof-of-stake blockchain network.

Apple has quietly been working on a blood glucose monitor that doesn't require pin pricking to bleed. They are making progress.

Artifact goes into general release today. It is a personalized news reader built by Instagram's co-founders.

Mercedes continues to partner its auto-making expertise with tech companies' AI and processor technology. The latest to sign on with Mercedes is Google Cloud.

Google announces plans for employees go come to the building a few times a week and share desks with others. Five years ago, this was benevolent. Today it is malevolent.

Out Dept of Justice contends that Google Maps has been too successful.

30% of work in the US is now performed remotely. The figure is almost 50% is large urban centers. The national average is six times higher than in 2019 (before the panic).

I guess we can all rest better at night because researchers have determined why zebras have stipes. They stripes confuse horseflies.

In more-beneficial research, MIT folks have created a method of scanning a person's heart and 3D-printing a soft replacement pump.

Friday 24 February 2023

Notes on a conference on spreadsheet risk management. People make horrible mistakes with spreadsheets.

The Brookings Institute contemplates future regulation on generative software. At least they use the word "mimicry" to describe it. That is the first group to use the word after I did.

Here is a new course from MIT on Data-Centric AI.

This essay is four years old, but the title grabs you and the essay makes a lot of sense, "Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences."

A long read on nuclear fusion. I've read these articles since I took physics in high school (way back in the third quarter of the prior century).

These mimicking software systems are coming to the lawyers. That may be an interesting combination.

A side effect of some of this new software is that we can impersonate other persons. One reporter breaks into a bank account using this technique.

Gen Z goes to TikTok for news seven times more often than the rest of American adults. Let's recall that TikTok has close ties to the Communist Party of China.

This is a good paper on mental illnesses in American girls and several major contributing factors. One of the factors is social media.

Samsung plays a little catchup with Apple by finally bringing a 5G NTN (non-terrestrial network) modem that will enable two-way communication between smartphones and satellites.

The Internet Movie Database IMDb is older than Google and Wikipedia. This article discusses some of the few persons who have written plot summaries of the decades. Will AI software replace the summarizers?

Google extends the audience and availability of its Magic Eraser image-editing feature.

MediaTek (Taiwan) will show a new chipset that puts two-way satellite communications on smartphones. They use the 3GPP Non-Terrestrial Network standard instead of a custom system like Apple and Samsung. This is coming at MWC.

Saturday 25 February 2023

We have reached the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A stalemate exists. This war provides us with yet another example of how all the experts are usually wrong. (1) The Russians were going to succeed and Ukraine would surrender in a couple of weeks. (2) All wars would be short actions. Fight, win, and withdraw quickly. (3) The speed and veracity of 21st-century war would mean the expenditure of few resources. (4) Brutal actions of rape etc. would not be part of wars any longer. I guess we could go on with how the experts were wrong here and will be wrong the next time. See, for example, the recent virus and the many incorrect statements and actions by experts.

This is just the start with plenty of legal challenges and rulings to come, but the US Copyright Office says AI-generated images do not receive copyright protection.

Some history of how a graphics processor is quite efficient at running the algorithms common in machine learning. Hence, Nvidia has dominated the market.

This GitHub repository has the source code that allows running Stable Diffusion on Macs with Apple silicon.

Here is a growing list of the experiences of using software that helps the task of programming, e.g., Copilot.

Got a brand new degree in computer science? Trying to get a job? This is a look at job prospects over the past 20 years.

A few hundred thousand skilled computing professionals are out of work. Many are starting their own businesses.

The Dish Network is, uh, well...just plain broken.

Behind much of what the big tech companies are doing in AI research is the Nvdia A100 processor ($10,000 each). $10,000? Way too expensive, right? Consider what an equivalent computer would have cost 10, 20, and 30 years ago. These are technological marvels. I hope we are using such wisely, but I have my doubts.

Meta releases LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), "a state-of-the-art foundational large language model designed to help researchers advance their work in this subfield of AI.

We already have rumors of what Apple will to in AR/VR headsets in 2025.

This $99 keychain fob, Motorola Defy Satellite Link, allows just about everyone's smartphone to have two-way emergency satellite communications. Worth while. Good use of technology.

Strange stuff on college campuses. Report a fellow student for reading an important historical document as harmful. Huh?

A look back to three years ago and a thing called corona virus. How the panic ensued and many things changed and many things just stayed the same.

Strong rumors about an updated MacBook Air coming from Apple real soon now.

Sunday 26 February 2023

Here is an article discussing the civilian targets in Ukraine hit by the Russians. Bellingcat is an excellent source that uses sound techniques to verify imagery. What is surprising to me is that the destruction of civilian infrastructure and the resulting deaths is surprising to some persons. It is a war waged by Russia. Of course this stuff happens daily.

Here is a summary of Google's annual survey of cloud computing and AI.

The data shows that going "cloud native" costs more not less money.

This story is quite slanted towards Ukraine, but still provides some insight into the information war with Russia.

Homeowner's associations want nice green lawns. That isn't a practical idea any longer in many places.

Training bias in machine learning systems goes into the mainstream. It appears that ChatGPT and MS Bing mimic the political left more than the political right. Technical fixes are simple. Political fixes...not so much.

The war in Ukraine is a first for technological nation-vs-nation in this century. Unmanned vehicles are everywhere. Home defense means having your own little drone with a camera.