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: 24-30 April, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• More classified documents found online
• We could have a breakthrough to reverse hearing loss
• Private company almost lands a craft on the moon, but fails
• Facebook use continues to grow
• Regulators block Microsoft's purchase of Activision
• Intel has biggest quarterly loss in history

Monday 24 April 2023

It appears that the document leakers were putting classified documents online much longer than previously known. I guess no one scrapes the Internet for such on a regular basis. Seems like that would be standard practice, but I guess not.

Samsung promises to release a robot this year to actually help folks do things at home.

Big media companies are now jumping into the use of AI in their endeavors. Its a tool. Use it productively.

What would billionaires look like if they were poor and lived in squalor?

More from people who are wisely using this ChatGPT et al to accomplish work. Think folks. Work.

Using ChatGPT to play Dungeons and Dragons. It is good for some aids and not so good for others.

This is quite elementary, but researchers at Georgia Tech have built a roll-around robot that hits a tennis ball.

MiniGPT-4 is here. It is open source and has many image-based features.

I'll just quote this headline, "AI is taking the jobs of Kenyans who write essays for U.S. college students" Who is losing their job to automation? Poor workers.

Many schools moved to less-expensive Chromebooks instead of Windows/Mac machines. Now we have mountains of old hardware to be disposed.

Much of the tech layoffs have been to remove the dreaded "middle managers" and only keep the programmers. Of course there are many problems with this idea.

The plot grid as an organizing device for novels. This is a new one to me. How did I miss it?

Here are tips on using ChatGPT to find writing jobs.

Tips on using ChatGPT to improve grammar and readability.

Creating a writing portfolio.

This post has a dozen or so practical writing tips.

Tuesday 25 April 2023

Much smarter ways to prompt ChatGPT.

And more smarter ways to use ChatGPT with better prompts.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, Dawn Aerospace is building a rocket-powered spaceplane designed to fly to space twice per day.

THIS COULD BE BIG!!! It is still early, but researchers at Harvard are developing a drug that causes the hair cells in the inner ear to grow again and eliminate hearing loss.

The world of corporate spying. Its actually quite simple as folks are happy to meet anyone who will listen to them.

Arm is attempting a major step into new territory with a processor design far beyond their norm.

"Google's Bard AI chatbot can now help you code and create functions for Google Sheets"

CATL (world's biggest battery manufacturer) announces a new condensed battery that will have almost double the energy intensity of Tesla's 4680 cells.

This is a good guide on what to do when a layoff hits you. It is really good advice on what to do now even if you feel safe in your job. Ensure you can access things from your personal email.

The world's data paths are undersea cables. The world's fishing boats continue to tangle and damage those cables.

Meanwhile in Europe, Microsoft succeeds too much again. The Teams video conference software has become a standard. Including Teams in Office is a violation of some regulator's regulation.

Google Cloud announces its Cloud Security AI Workbench.

I like this quote, "a persistent blind spot in Silicon Valley thinking: a tendency to overestimate the power of information technology and underestimate the complexity of the physical world."

Leaders of northern European countries try to make the North Sea a giant windmill and generate all their power.

Yet another great big language models comes from Stability AI and it is called StableLM.

California residents now have 15.million electric cars. Let's see how that works ten years from now with all those batteries to dispose.

Wednesday 26 April 2023

The really smart (or at least really rich) folks are betting that nuclear fusion is just around the corner.

It is nice to work from home. If you are early in your career, however, you should go to the office and work with others who know what they are doing.

Amazon is moving towards open-source projects as earlier close-source projects hurt them badly.

The governors of China are pushing towards an official digital currency.

Here is actual video of Google's folding smartphone.

Here is a study of actual use of chatbots in the workplace. Lower-skilled persons benefit the most from having an AI assistant.

This could be lots of fun: the Biden Administration seeks to outlaw bias. Opinion is bias, so we are outlawing opinions.

OpenAI made a big mistake with ChatGPT. They succeeded too much too fast. Here come the regulators.

The history of keyboards and all that. Fascinating to folks who are fascinated by technology history.

Nvidia releases NeMo Guardrails, an open source toolkit for making AI-powered apps.

AMD announces two new processors for handheld gaming. They are using 4 nm technology.

Google Cloud is profitable for the first time.

Cloud computing also continues to grow and bring profits at Microsoft.

Also growing is the global demand for refurbished smartphones. Apple is leading the way.

Meanwhile in Washington, folks who have never made a thing are going to spur research into making advance integrated circuits. We are from the government and we are here to help (ourselves).

It appears that the attempt to land a craft on the moon by Japan's ispace has failed.

"The reason that it's difficult is that in order to explain something, we need to really understand it first." Seth Godin. I wholeheartedly agree and see failures daily.

Thursday 27 April 2023

And we have yet another new chatting thing on the Internet.

"Explaining tech's notion of talent scarcity"

SpaceX launches the first of an intended 250 satellites to bring 5G connects all over the place.

How Cubans are using navigation aids, smartphones, etc. to raft their way to the US. It seems that exile groups would make such apps easier to use.

This idea has a lot of merit. There is the low-code/no-code movement. I call it hobby-level programming. You use big libraries of code, write ten new lines, and you have something useful. The new chatbot can write those short pieces of code or make it much easier to do so. Hobby programming has just become much easier.

Palantir shows its artificial intelligence platform (AIP) to aid military planners.

The accounting and consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers will invest a $billion into AI work with Microsoft and OpenAI. Lots of training and hiring.

Not having much to do, our US Senate starts a bill banning kids under 13 from joining social media.

Amazon backs out of the healthcare business by closing its Halo division.

Samsung joins most of big tech by reporting a bad financial quarter.

DraftKings plans a new sports streaming service. They are flush with cash from folks betting and losing.

GM stops building the Chevy Bolt. The average sale price of an electric car is $60,000. Expensive toys for rich people.

LG's SuperSlim laptop computer is now on sale. It really is slim and has a 15" screen.

Facebook is still thriving amid Meta's "year of efficiency," layoffs, and the metaverse flop.

Meanwhile in Britain, regulators stop Microsoft from buying Activision for $69Billion.

Linux kernel 6.3 is released.

Friday 28 April 2023

And now we have a GPT that helps with penetration testing. What next? CookingGPT to cook dinner?

And despite all the layoffs and post-pandemic return to sanity, computing tech is still a pretty good field for jobs.

Virgin Galactic achieves a long-awaited milestone in its attempts at space tourism. Maybe they have enough cash to survive until their technology is good enough.

Microsoft increases the integration of the iPhone and Windows 11. It is slowly coming.

Our government's Office of Personnel Management has lofty goals to be some sort of "best there is" for holding data about Federal employees.

Data on retirement savings in America. This has good charts that you can manipulte to see different variables.

Using data to show how some folks who use data are wrong a great majority of the time.

Dropbox lays off 500 people or 16% of its employees. My son still has his job there.

A lot of quarterly financial reports came in this week. They are up and down with most being down. Intel is down. Bideneconomy.

Fear and loathing at Apple over falling behind in AI.

Given all the economic bad news, Sony still sells over 38million PlayStation 5 units.

Microsoft is dropping its name from keyboards, mice, etc. and putting the "Surface" name brand on them.

Saturday 29 April 2023

There was a time when... if you knew how to use a computer-based word processor, you had an edge in getting a job. Now if you can use a chatbot... same thing. New tools, new skills, same practices.

The new chatbots can write computer programs... well they can write short, basic computer programs, the kind you could copy from here and there. Let's see how this shakes out.

I must have missed something along the way. $500,000 salaries for programmers? All I did was help defeat the threat of world communism. We weren't paid anything like that.

Here we go again for the 99th time. Take someone who succeeds in business and they are ready to run the world. Of course this doesn't work.

Some folks at Carnegie Mellon University have built teeny tiny hydraulic machines that can push back on touch screens. Perhaps some good will come of this.

The use of cloud computing services only grew by 19% this quarter compared to 32% last year. Still, this is growing and growing and raking in the money.

Celebrities are moving to Bluesky from Twitter.

This is bad for all Americans: our President is given questions and answers printed on cards when he takes questions from reporters. The reports shine as does the President. The journalists and the White House are working together. There is no honest objectivity in the media. This is bad for all of us.

Reddit is testing chat channels like those on Discord.

NASA announces that Russia announces that it will stay with the space station through 2028. Their cutoff date was 2024.

VentureBeat (a leading publication on venture capital and technology) is one of a growing list of such that uses AI to help write its articles. It was a big deal when companies started using computer word processors to help write. New tools, new uses.

Shocking news (not): some tech companies have found ways to "cheat" at gaining H1-B visas.

It is a matter of numbers; it always has been. Chinese government hackers outnumber FBI cyber staff 50 to 1. This is the norm everywhere in all cases.

Sunday 30 April 2023

GPT4free is threatened with a lawsuit from OpenAI. You can go around a long circle to access things for free despite the creator's desire for pay.

"The end of pop and the rise of the long tail and AI brings us back a century. Just like it used to be -- small circles of people, not mass markets. But this time with endless choice and a business model that is hard to visualize."--Seth Godin

A guy used a few of the latest AI software tools to make a pizza commercial in three hours. No camera, no microphone, no actors, no script, nothing. It works. Some people are ready and willing to be productive.

Okay, the pizza commercial guy is worth a few giggles. It was a stunt. Let's get serious here. The new tools are like going from the typewriter to the word processor times 1,000. Some people see that and are using it. Others are engaged in analysis paralysis and are debating all sorts of things that are fun to debate but produce nothing. If you have people working in an office, get into these new tools. Your competition will.

And to show how using these AI chat things is important, this educator finds that some businesses are scooping up people who know how to use these things.

Warren Buffett is in his 90s and is worth billion$$$. He loves McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Dairy Queen.

This is all complicated, but some Amazon drivers in California join the Teamsters union.

RedHat makes it to its 30th anniversary.

This is good, really good. An Iowa State Univ professor shares his lessons in a graduate course on using data science.

This is a great illustration of real programming using AI software. The person writing the questions is an expert at specifying software. Few have this expertise.