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: 6-12 March, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Microsoft makes Outlook free to use on Macs
• LinedIn is 20 years old
• Stronger rumors of M3 processor in updated Apple computers this year
• Huge announcement from Microsoft: "We will introduce GPT-4 next week."
• Silicon Valley Bank collapses. This isn't supposed to happen these days.

Monday 6 March 2023

The age of the voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, et al) is gone. Or maybe it is about to start again.

Strong rumors of the next computers coming from Apple just in time for Christmas shopping.

We know have software that can imitate a person's voice --- VERY WELL. Scammers are the first to use this as they call up relatives and ask for money, lots of money.

It appears that a large portion of all of us says things on Facebook that the experts (THEM) deem to be misinformation. What? This hasn't been the mildest winter in my life? It sure seems that way. Huh, I'm a bad person for writing that?

Here is an idea that is about 30 years later than it should have arrived: let people live in office buildings AND ON TOP OF THAT let kids go to school in office buildings.

Our FDA wants to change the standard for "Healthy Food." This means all the "TV dinners" will now be unhealthy.

The ISO C++ Committee has completed its work on the C++ 23 standard.

How one writer makes a lot of money selling books directly to readers.

As an independent writer, time is money. There are tools to track how we spend our time. Many are surprised to learn this about themselves.

There are ways to earn money reading books. This post discusses ten of them.

This is a good post on specific steps to take to become an independent editor for hire. It is a business. Be a business person.

Thoughts on an independent freelance writer working for others such freelance writers.

Exploring the role of the book coach. You still have to close the door, sit in the chair, put you fingers on the keyboard, AND WRITE.

One author hires a professional book editor.

Some thoughts on narrative writing.

Tuesday 7 March 2023

This repository contains a high-speed download of LLaMA, Facebook's 65B parameter model.

OpenAI has been the biggest hit in Internet history. No one at OpenAI expected that. Here is a good series of inteviews with OpenAI employees.

Might as well look for the Holy Grail, but people are still trying to find ways to measure how good a computer programmer is.

This is clever. Using some Python and software and geometry, it provides an illusion of depth for a computer screen.

Brave Search (see brave dot search dot com) has added a Summarizer feature that uses software to provide a summary of all the things returned by the search.

Researchers find that Fourier Analysis is able to explain some of the workings of machine learning systems.

Why won't AI cause unemployment? AI is already illegal for most of the economy, and will be for virtually all of the economy. Don't believe that? Read this post.

Microsoft introduces Dynamics 365 CoPilot. It claims to be AI-based software to help with marketing and sales.

Amazon sold $40Billion (with a B) in advertising last year. That is a large number.

Microsoft now allows Mac users to use Outlook at no charge. Microsoft Office in it various forms is not required.

Thousands more job cuts are coming to Meta real soon now. Meta cut 13% of its jobs back in November.

Weight Watchers buys Sequence, a company that works in the telehealth sector. This is all big business.

News from afar about what our government is doing to our industry. The CHIPS Act, which was supposed to boost US manufacturing of semiconductors, has more strings and red tape. Billion$ may be spent with nothing happening.

Honda updates its Autonomous Work Vehicle. This is a practical use of all things tech can bring to moving things in a tough environment. It appears quite useful.

Microsoft announces its own Video Super Resolution (VSR) experiment for the Edge browser. Given a long list of "ifs," blurring videos look sharp.

Google updates a lot of things with its Docs and other online apps. I haven't seen the update, yet.

There is a company in Florida that has plans of building data centers on the moon. Not making this up folks.

Wednesday 8 March 2023

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: a big outage at Twitter is explained by the layoff of one person. Seems like Mr. Musk's predecessors managed the company rather poorly to create this risk.

Believe it or not, there are many companies that still use floppy disks. The supply is running low. If you, like me, have a few boxes of them... well, us old folks can make some money $$$.

To save money on salaries... national, state, and local governments worldwide are using software (written by salaried persons) to decide who gets what. The software is usually flawed and cheats some and rewards some others.

Let's just go with this quote about all those AI software things on the Internet that appear to answer our questions, "the better the model, the more likely it is to repeat common misconceptions." Why repeat misconceptions? Because all they do is mimic.

The BIG MONEY coming from new weight-loss drugs. Did you know there is an organization called the World Obesity Federation?

This is a long read, but probably worth it if you are in this industry. It is Hired's 2023 State of Software Engineers.

I love this site. It gives words as images... auto-magically. For example, the "S" in "snake" looks like a snake, but we can still read it as an "S."

Here is a research paper on word-as-image semantic typography.

Here is another research paper on the same topic.

A new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) shows $154Billion in spending on AI in 2023. It's a good place to be this year.

Researchers from Google and the Technical University of Berlin released PaLM-E. It is a visual-language model (VLM) with 562 billion parameters. It will enable robotics systems to "see" better and perform many new tasks.

LinkedIn is 20 years old. Here is an oral history. In 2009, I found my first post-retirement job on LinkedIn. I have found two more jobs since on LinkedIn.

Wired has a good essay on the fraud-detection industry. The problems, as usual, is that governments are hiring companies to do this without understanding how the systems work. Bad things ensue.

Dubbing is an old Hollywood technique whereby the speech of one language is placed over that of another language. New technology makes it automatic and makes some YouTube stars bigger star$$$.

DARPA, IARPA, and other Federal government research arms paved the way for much of the facial recognition technology available today. Seen now as invasion of privacy, let's not forget that this is how the Boston Marathon murderers were caught.

Stronger rumors about new computers coming from Apple this year. A new M3 processor will be in the new computers.

From Seth Godin today, "Hustlers and con artists can try to cloud the discussion by bringing in irrelevant and emotional arguments, but we can come back to a simple understanding: If two independent entities, without coercion, agree to legally transfer effort or assets without harming others, that agreement should be honored."

Cameras from Ring are pretty good. They are quite useful in many ways. They also give law enforcement great leeway in what they can obtain from us.

The AI Education Project (aiEDU) is a nonprofit backed by companies such as Microsoft, Alphabet's Google, OpenAI and AT&T. Education in AI for low-income schools. This could be worthwhile.

Intel has developed the technology for 1.8 and 2.0 nm fabrication processes. Once these are running, Intel will catch up to other makers who leaped over Intel in the last ten years.

A new company, Sidekick, releases a browser tuned for those with ADHD (Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). This may be the start of something big. It may be a boon to everyone using the Internet.

Thursday 9 March 2023

The big growth at Google is over (for now). Employees are told that they won't see the promotions that happened in the past.

Some notes on how Reddit is updating its product. Many Reddit users don't like this. They like the old newspaper style.

Thoughts on the emergent abilities of large language models.

All across America, state and local governments gave Amazon good tax deals to bring in jobs. Now Amazon is cutting those jobs. The local taxpayers? Too bad.

Great Headline,"The Perils of Working on a C.E.O.'s Pet Project" Those "moonshot" projects were cut first.

Our FBI was buying location data that they could not obtain legally.

oooops, it appears that hackers have broken into a database of U.S. House of Representatives members and staff health records.

Microsoft claims to have added a million new users of Bing in the last month. That gives them 100million daily active users.

AI groups in China have easily evaded us trade sanctions to buy the processors they need.

Nvidia continues to roll even in the face of the collapse of crypto mining. It has made it big in AI research.

The DuckDuckGo search engine dabbles in explaining itself like ChatGPT et al. I'm still waiting to see the new Bing explanation.

Japan has spent a decade trying to build a new, more efficient rocket engine. The first launch failed.

Friday 10 March 2023

Folks at the Indiana University School of Medicine have developed a blood test that indicates the level of anxiety in a person. Does it include measures for what is known as lab coat fever?

Warnings about the current exuberance in investing in artificial intelligence ventures. Most, like any field, do not work financially.

Big tech is laying off tens of thousands. One expert explains it as they hired far to many people to do "fake work."

Predictable and predicted. Working from home has led to a baby boom.

Salesforce introduces Einstein GPT. It is the world's first generative AI for sales, i.e., customer relationship management.

Run stable diffusion in the browser. Nothing else needed.

A look at how our Air Force is testing fighter jets piloted by computer---no human. This is all unclassified in the open press. What is happening secretly?

Roku updates all its devices to OS 12. More live TV. Remember live TV?

Microsoft has put ChatGPT on its Azure OpenAI service.

Some people are starting to pay attention to the amount of electricity used in building those models that run ChatGPT and all the thousands of other things that we don't notice.

Raspberry Pi now offer a global shutter camera sensor for $50.

Grammarly moves from software that edits text to software that generates text with GrammarlyGo. Of course it isn't perfect, but it will save time as it can type faster than me.

OpenAI's cofounder admits that ChatGPT is not perfect. "We made mistakes." This in response to criticism of "woke" responses (what some of used to call "politically correct" or something).

Saturday 11 March 2023

This is a good education and learning source. It is an explanation of many machine learning concepts stored in GitHub.

Sometimes success leads to failure. ChatGPT is so successful (and inexpensive) that OpenAI may not be able to do anything next or make any money. They may simply fail and fade away (like WordPerfect).

This GitHub repository uses a simple technique (4-bits of accuracy) to greatly simplify a large language model while only slightly reducing performance.

More on how AI products can be so cheap to use that no one will make any profits from them.

Researchers at the University of Rochester claim to have superconductors that work at room temperature and relatively low pressure. If this is practical, many things change.

Huge announcement from Microsoft: "We will introduce GPT-4 next week."

A note for history: Silicon Valley Bank collapsed this week. It invested its holdings in startup, which are risky. Too much risk at a time when interest rates and inflation returned under a Democratic presidency.

One thing people love about these new AI-fangled software gadgets is finding mistakes and poking fun at them. It is entertaining.

Entertainment from music is all digital downloads now. On the hobby side are old CDs and vinyl LP (long playing) albums. For the first time since 1987, vinyl has outsold CD.

Speaking of old things being new again, antenna television is back and better than ever.

Our reaction to the virus basically killed movie theaters. They are trying to come back by charging a lot more money. Is it too late and too co$tly?

"With GPT arriving, expect that spam is going to increase 100x, and that it will be eerily personalized, invasive and persistent." Seth Godin. I fear that he is correct on this one.

I learn a new term: "slack fill." That is the mostly empty potato chip bag that makes the buyer think they are getting a lot when we only get a little.

cURL or Client URL turns 25 years old this month.

Yet another bit of "misinformation" is actually true. Here is a case of today's snake oil implanting a little piece of plastic under the skin and claiming all sorts of good will come from it.

Sunday 12 March 2023

A gentle reminder that we have ben through this time of a new technology not being real enough like the old technology.

A closer look at DuckAssist from DuckDuckGo. While ChatGPT mimics the entire Internet, DuckAssist mimics only Wikipedia.

Databricks introduces Model Serving, a service that makes running machine learning models easier.

It seems our Customs and Border Patrol is requiring immigrants to use a phone app that ... well, it isn't good.

Meanwhile in Britain, they call it "lawfare." It is the somewhat legal practice of corporate and personal spying on opponents.

I'll just quote this, "U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) seeks deepfake expertise for propaganda operations."

A look at the profession of the data scientist. Well, opinions differ on this.

A study shows that with some training, folks can learn how to spot text created by software.

And now Congress will probably vote billion$ to give money to the rich companies who kept their money in a failed bank.

Social media sites will start using software to start conversations. Sort of ice breakers at a party. Some folks think this is needed.

Meanwhile in Washington D.C., regulators think they know how cloud providers should do cybersecurity. All knowledge flows from the District of Columbia (not).

Stronger rumors about Apple releasing a mixed-reality headset this year. Technology may not be ready, yet.