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: 3-9 April, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• LSU wins the women's college basketball championship
• UCONN wins the men's senior division AAU title (also called the NCAA championship)
• Sony is building a new handheld Playstation
• Finland joins NATO, this is a big deal

Monday 3 April 2023

LSU wins the women's college baskball championship.

Tesla set a new production record for itself in the first quarter of 2023. I live in the Virgina suburbs of Washington D.C. We have lots of Tesla owners here.

Meanwhile at Carnegie Mellon University, experiments in sensors lead to charges of invasion of privacy.

PINE64 updates its Star64 single-board computer lineup starting at $70 with more power than anyone had in anything 30 years ago.

Ford drops AM radio from everything but their commercial vehicle. I believe this to be a public safety error.

A primer on copyright. This is boring but necessary.

Thoughts on reading and writing essays. These are longer and more thoughtful pieces that are worth the investment.

The glory of writing about things you are supposed to.

The greatest compliment you can give a writer, "I read what you wrote."

The thrive as a writer, do different things. Write different types of things for different audiences and different publishers and media and more variety in everything.

Some thoughts on organizing the time we waste so we don't waste so much of it.

Some different ways to start a story or find a story worth starting.

Tuesday 4 April 2023

An analysis of Twitter with Elon Musk running the show. They call it brain death.

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) releases Codon, a Python-based compiler that allows users to write Python code that runs as efficiently as a program in C.

Time to become adults at Google as cost cutting reduces many of the free things Google employees enjoyed.

Fear and loathing in looking for a job and submitting your resume to persons who never read it.

Sundar Pichai of Google promises they will be bold with AI. That will happen real soon now.

A fallout of a global economy is that one action here affects lots of folks there. TikTok producers in the rest of world will collapse if their US market goes away per a ban.

It appears that the sales of Apple computers have slowed like the sales of PCs.

System76 updates another line of its laptop computers. These are Linux-only machines made in America.

Meanwhile in Europe, PC and tablet sales drop and drop and drop after the panic buying of the pandemic. Experts expect some return to normal this year.

And in Russia... this reports on how a tenth of the IT workforce left the country soon after the invasion of Ukraine. If we ever get this mess straightened out, could we please do a Marshall Plan type recovery in Russia once and for all? Let's make Russia part of a peaceful Europe and give common decency a chance.

A group at Stanford releases its annual AI index. Industry, not research universities, is running the show. Good and bad in that.

This links to Stanford's 2023 AI Index.

Upon further review at Google, they announced a limit of 5 million individual files on Drive. Then they said, "Naw, that's okay."

Someone at the ACM is quite critical of the draft of the new C standard C23. I agree. New compilers will break perfectly fine running code and force expensive rewrites. When the bureaucrats start require this, the money will drain away.

Our National Institute on Aging is building a database to help research into Alzheimer's disease. $300million over six years. Too slow. When it is (not) finished, we won't remember where we were.

Wednesday 5 April 2023

Khan Lab Schools in Silicon Valley is using AI to help teach kids of really rich people. It is all working fine in this small case.

Thoughts on running a search engine that looks at shadow libraries that hold copyrighted materials, bypass paywalls, and other things that some folks love or hate.

The viewership of Sunday's LSU-Iowa women's college championship was twice as large as prior record.

Where the money is: the WWE is valued at $9.3Billion.

Meanwhile in Japan, the governors are spending $7Billion on chip manufacturing. While the US CHIPS Act was $50Billion, the Japanese will probably spend more cash on actual chip manufacturing.

This seems to be a big deal. Microsoft has a gadget with lots of goes-inta and goes-outta. Why is this news?

Musings on "dangerous" and "safe" AI research. How about discussing faulty systems engineering and just plain old mistakes.

Bloomberg has built their own large language model called BloombergGPT. It is based on their own financial data and is solely for financial work.

Here is the research paper on BloombergGPT.

Google uses its own Tensor Processing Unit instead of Nvidia's processors. Google claims its processors are all-around better.

Excel, and other spreadsheets that handle CSV files, is a good data science tool.

Thursday 6 April 2023

I love this. Might as well call it, "How to waste everyone's time at work while making people think you are working."

Here is a Github repository claiming to allow experiments with large language models on a laptop computer.

Where the money is: we are an obese nation and here comes chemists to the rescue with all sorts of new stuff to melt away the fat with just "a few" adverse side effects.

The ChatGPT software system, like all software systems, contains errors. This surprises some adults, and I guess I'm not surprised anymore by that kind of non-adult behavior.

Lower-income persons find it more difficult to move into internships at high-end companies. It takes several generations to climb the economic ladder.

American tech companies lay off tens of thousands in America. They cannot do that in Europe as labor laws prohibit it. Result? Expect less hiring in Europe in the next decade.

Strong rumors that Sony is building a new Playstation handheld system.

We may have seen the end of the video game tradeshow. Companies stream their announcements and such to the public. No need to leave the house.

Some good clean summer fun, at a price. This water gun is electronic powered, costs $179, and blasts away from 50 feet.

The IBM Model F keyboard will soon be available again. This is the keyboard that came with the first IBM PC 40 years ago. It was a real keyboard born of decades of IBM typewriter experience.

People can witness an event and remember it incorrectly in just seconds. Few admit to this common occurrence.

I hope they didn't spend much money on this survey as the results of obvious. People will take a pay cut to work from home.

Friday 7 April 2023

Little Internet viewing this morning.

We have claims that Mr. Zuckerburg is spending all his Meta time on AI. Metaverse?

This could be interesting. It is a program that allows typing shell commands in English (download a picture of a dog) instead of shell commands.

Some notes actually using a large language model. They call it LLMOps.

This is now a trend: Amazon and other big tech are cutting back on employee benefits. IBM jobs were good, but not great. Amazon, Google, et al are now in that phase.

I suppose folks need reminders of this: if it connects to the Interent, someone will hack into it. Some garage door openers can operate from your smartphone via the Internet. Hence, other folks can easily operate your garage door.

A look into how Microsoft is trying to quickly put AI-type of help into their Office products.

Saturday 8 April 2023

A blog post from someone working for an AI company. Panic is a good description of the industry. ChatGPT upset everyone's apple carts.

A report from the Cerebral Valley AI conference. Again, research for its own sake is over. Products. Shipments. Income.

The latest version fot eh Chrome browser now has WebGPU.

There appears to be some link between gut bacteria and Alzheimer's. There are still more unknowns than knowns.

More from Google's CEO on, "We have to get this AI into everything we do."

How the world, and common computer user interfaces, appear to folks with color blindness.

At least one person has a grasp of the obvious with all the AI stuff, "AI algorithms are trained on data. By its very nature, data is an artifact of something that happened in the past."

The next iPhones, coming real soon now, are coming out of India, not China. The pandemic showed once and for all that China is not a reliable trade partner. Perhaps the subjects of the Communist Party will act.

Meanwhile at Tesla, those private car videos were saved and served as entertainment for Tesla employees. Of course they were. And the TSA employees at the airport save and share the body scans and ... keep going. Of course it happens.

Musings on the new laws in Utah about social media. Let's not confuse practical enforceable laws with political grandstanding. The latter occurs much more often.

Meanwhile in Asia, the Chinese governors are spending $500million to ring the continent with undersea fiber optic cables. Of course they will use them for surveillance. See Tesla story above.

When you call an apple a dog, everything else gets messed up. Leave it to the government to call "rural" as "urban" and mess up the rest of the rural.

A recent conversation about gender and sports and legal proceedings led to the conclusion that this sure is a rich country. We have so many spare resources and time and money that we can go to court over the weirdest things. We are an odd lot.

Microsoft adds its image generator to the Edge browser. I don't have the feature yet, but coming real soon now. Type a phrase, see a picture. Can't draw? Now you can.

280 Walmart locations have electric vehicle charging stations. Multiply that by ten. Coming some time after now.

Flittering around the halls of Congress is something called the RESTRICT Act or "the TikTok ban." Of course it is full of silly nonsense.

With the passage of time, more and more of the features of Apple's own processors becomes available to Linux users.

Sunday 9 April 2023

At least someone understands why big tech wants folks back in the office. A fast jump to work from home would devastate the economy and make the customers of big tech so poor they would stop buying from big tech.

In time, work from home will be normal and cities will be okay. Home prices will be okay. There is a lot of time to pass before the future becomes the present. Lots of folks will lose big in the transition. Change hurts. Rapid change hurts more.

Here is a tutorial on DevSecOps. Good stuff in theory. As with most methods, practice rarely matches the theory.

Cultural bias coming through AI. It can be as simple as how a culture smiles for photographs. Worldwide, we all do it differently.

How and why journalists should leave Twitter. It is unfortunate that few did, but the great majority of today's journalists are merely good-looking models who can read a little.

I missed the date, but Finland joined NATO this past week. This is a big deal that the Russians will not like...at all. Finland is on the northern border and is, or was, a vacation spot for Russians. A thorny relationship goes back to the Winter War in 1939 as the Red Army had a small "tune up" for WWII. The Fins caused the Russians far more trouble than everyone anticipated. Sound familiar to Ukraine? Anyways, more encroachment by NATO --- at least Moscow sees it that way.

A review of the Dell XPS 13 laptop. This is the standard industry laptop (unless you work in government which uses far cheaper stuff). We live in a Dell age, i.e., no one gets fired for buying Dell.

In praise of the telephone that fits in your pocket and allows you to send and receive calls where ever you go.

Back for its 40th anniversary, Return of the Jedi will be in theaters later this month.

And once again in America we have a "leak" of a huge amount of classified documents.

For computer programming enthusiasts, here are the latest Tiobe rankings. I don't understand how some folks consider SQL a programming language.