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: 10-16 April, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine, everyone awaits the spring offensive
• Al Jaffee (Mad Magazine) dies at 102
• It is official, PC sales have crashed after the pan(dem)ic
• The Russians continue to obtain US-made chips
• Apple moves from China to Thailand and India
• Dept of Defense Top Secret documents are leaked to the world
• Elon Musk starts an AI company
• The price of Nvidia graphics processors have returned to being sky high

Monday 10 April 2023

A brief and flawed recollection of the history of AI.

Pretty good paper relating eight observations on large language models.

This seems to be an obvious use of robot "legs," but I guess some researchers lack a grasp of the obvious.

Software is generating pretty good fake images. Software is pretty good at detecting fake images. So are people who try harder.

Someone agrees with me that the recent "AI" systems are "much more effective at mimicking the kind of interaction you might have with a human." It is mimicry. Nothing that amazing. Bad advice? Sometimes, and sometimes people give bad advice.

Our Congressional representatives consider regulating AI. Herds of do-gooders and ne-er-do-wells descend on the hallowed halls.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation now has an online code editor. This helps folks with just the basic Internet connection, screen, and keyboard a place to learn to program.

Tips on making more money as a technical writer. Do more, learn more, write more, expand.

Mindfullness meditation and the art of banishing writer's block. It is all about focusing on one task and rejecting distractions.

Working with another person when writing a biography.

Go out there and write on social media. Go out there and write on fill-in-the-blank.

There is a point in time and mind when the first draft is finished, you breathe, then you continue.

Tuesday 11 April 2023

This system is called Tabby. It is like CoPilot in that it writes code. This system, however, runs at home. Not on the Internet.

Another generation discovers that all jobs are temporary. Except, of course, those in government.

Claims that Meta is paying up to a million $$$ a year for games programmers.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences claims to have landed a rocket vertically at sea.

Here is a complete report on the crash in the sales of computers used to work from home. Even Apple hurt badly.

If sales of these computers are down so much, why haven't the prices dropped? There should be a surplus of new computers at slashed prices.

Meta's verification program requires users to give their full legal name. Recall, Mark Twain was not a full legal name. The same goes for many famous creators and entertainers. John Wayne for another example.

Al Jaffee has died at 102. He was the cartoonist genius behind Mad Magazine. Several generations of teenage boys lived for that publication.

Large language models are moving into the open-source world. Good to be transparent or bad to be let loose in the wild?

The Khan Academy delivers Khanmigo. This is a software-assisted (AI) tutor.

OpenBSD 7.3 is released.

And now we can debate the intelligence quotient or IQ. It rose for decades in America, now it is falling. This gives weight to the concept that the testing is very flawed.

Wednesday 12 April 2023

Some how to on how to make a GitHub profile dynamic.

We have video evidence of driverless cars stopping in the middle of the road and causing traffic jams.

Return to work in the office is no longer something companies want. They now demand it. Lots of layoffs means lots of potential employees. Be in the office or you are fired.

More evidence that yet another generation learns that all employment outside of government is temporary.

A new company attempts to make one-time-use clay cups that are just plain better than plastic and paper (so they say).

A vain attempt to explain AI models. Sadly, not a successful attempt.

Meanwhile on Reddit, the moderators try to ready themselves for mountains of text automatically generated by the chatter boxes.

Meanwhile at emTwiter, Mr. Musk buys 10,000 GPUs to build AI models.

Microsoft is changing with the times (let's see if users revolt). The PrtScr (print screen) key will soon open the Snipping Tool.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, our new friends have identified an old foe: the Russian who led the hacking campaign on the 2016 US Presidential election.

Thursday 13 April 2023

Here are a few examples of prompts and prompt engineering.

Adventures in the brutal job market.

Turn on a couple dozen software bots in a simulation and observe. They mimic the humans who programmed them. The future is like the past.

Meanwhile in the corporate world, Twitter is gone as a company as it folds into Mr. Musk's other holdings.

Meanwhile in India, the all-knowing government has given itself the authority to delete social media posts that are incorrect or that it doesn't like, whichever comes first.

Thoughts on greatly extending the "memory" of large language models.

Generating old photos of China.

This is important work as researchers have a way to monitor the elderly without cameras. Folks can live where they want safely.

Despite all the talk and talk and talk, the Russians are still obtaining US-made semiconductors.

A review of the Nvidia RTX 4070: a $599 high-performance GPU. Things just keep getting better for power-hungry consumers.

Databricks releases Dolly 2.0. This is an improved large language model that has open-source code and training data. It runs like ChatGPT and is more trustworthy.

LinkedIn announces a verification program that doesn't cost money, but you have to provide your home phone and driver's license to them. Privacy?

Apple continues to walk away from China as a business partner. They are to build Macs in Thailand.

And more Apple movement away from China as there is a boom in iPhones coming out of India.

Where the money is: Taiwan is selling more and more chip-making machines to US companies.

Power generation from wind and solar is up to a new record. Beware: efforts to make these machines efficient depend on toxic chemicals and non-degradable materials. Short-term gain, long-term pain.

Friday 14 April 2023

Skip that PhD program in AI. Instead, go to work for a tech giant and make THE BIG BUCKS $$$.

Fear and loathing in Meta. The year of efficiency (is that right?) plunges a generation of people into reality.

The European Space Agency is about to launch its largest deep space mission to the moons of Jupiter.

Layoffs in Silicon Valley are sending tech talent to other places in the country. There are personal losses in real estate etc. In five years, most persons will be happier. The transition, however, is painful.

Connect several LLMs together in a pipeline or framework or scaffold or whatever buzzword we use this week. Basic notion: today's gee whiz thing is tomorrow's subroutine we use in various ways. Nothing new here despite the breathless claims of revolution.

Here is an interesting concept for an online book. It is about the R programming language, but with no mention of statistics and the like.

Microsoft is updating its HoloLens 2 headset from Windows 10 to 11.

Meta open-sources its Animated Drawings projects. Check the project. It is wonderful.

Here is where you can animate drawings. Great stuff.

A look at headphones and which are good and which are good to wear while playing video games.

Wishing ahead to a new Mac Pro from Apple this year.

Amazon releases Amazon Bedrock to developers. It is software that generates chats and images and such for businesses to help sell products.

Saturday 15 April 2023

Start with a quote, "Starting this June, four volunteers will spend a year pretending to live on the red planet inside the Mars Dune Alpha habitat." Here we go again. This has been done before at great taxpayers' expense. Let's keep burning money.

Amazon extends the availability of their CodeWhisperer to individuals at no charge.

I love this site. It is a search engine built especially for computer programmers.

And here is yet another search that allows us to easily state where to search (and not search).

Discussing some of the problems with Foundational Models in AI and the popular chatbots.

Much is in the news this week about a 21-year-old fella' who put classified documents on the Internet for the world to see. This is the world of the hacktivist. And, we sadly report, the typical hacktivist is a 21-year-old or younger who lives with their parents or grandparents and has club meetings in their basement while eating Dominos pizza and playing video games. The information is in plane sight, someone grabs it, and tells everyone else. It is quite simple, and the big, powerful organizations don't have any answers of how to stop this.

Rumors about super-duper laptop computers coming from Apple this year. They are so good they will reverse the big sales decline post pan(dem)ic.

Looking for something to do in his spare time, Elon Musk starts X.ai. It is a new AI company that with a fresh start can be more agile than the old research companies.

A woman spent 500 days alone in a cave in a study of what happens to people who are isolated.

Millennials, folks in their 30s, spend more time playing video games than those in their 20s and teens. A frozen generation?

Red Hat, started in a wife's sewing room, now moves to provide cloud services and compete with the big boys.

Nvidia, whose sales of graphics processors slumped after the crypto-mining collapse, is now soaring again. Prices on eBay et al are higher than ever for Nvidia products.

I love this. Overemployed hustlers (they work more than one full-time job at a time) are using the new chatbots for fun and profit as they can produce much much much more content in less less less time. These are hyper-efficient persons who have found jobs that are actually quite easy to do if you are organized. The problem with most organizations is that they are not organized and are grossly inefficient. Quick, nimble, smart people run circles around them.

Sunday 16 April 2023

How Apple has enabled older iPhones to keep working with software upgrades. That slows people from buying cheaper Android phones.

One person's good experiences with using a cell phone that has a physical keyboard.

The plight of immigrant farm workers in the UK. It is the same story as immigrant farm workers worldwide.

Thoughts on the amount of water that is used by AI-churning computers. They do consume water in one way or another.

"The OpenAssistant project started in December, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT." Just a few months later, volunteers have released an open-source alternative that works.