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: 15-21 May, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Apple shows new OSs that help with access to tech for waning sight and sound (elderly, me)
• Pinball machines are back
• Billion$ spent in India by the government and Amazon
• A video game sells 10Million copies in three days
• Montana law bans TikTok
• ChatGPT comes to the iPhone
• Nvidia series 40 at new low prices
• Jim Brown, football and movie star, dies at 87

Monday 15 May 2023

Musings on AI chattering and learning how to ask better questions. It appears that Google's systems are helping us create questions.

Experimenting with Google's Magic Editor. It makes image fakery so easy to do.

Impersonating hactivists. A new one. The Russians are leading the way.

It appears that Apple is testing its own M3 processors in real machines. Maybe be end of year we can buy these.

Is this the end of AM radio? Bad idea to remove a reliable communications channel.

Do you have a story? Are you writing a novel when it is a series of short stories? Consider.

As with all research, check at least two sources. Wikipedia is good. ChatGPT is good. etc. is good.

Checklists? Yuck, I'm a creative writer. Yes, checklists. Simple tools that help.

Travel writing and ten travel blog sites.

Some ideas on making writing a habit.

Tuesday 16 May 2023

Thoughts on open source projects and how to increase productivity by limiting contributions and the like.

This is a map of GitHub. It takes a little practice to make it useful, but it has some promise.

Someone at Oculus has seen the new Apple headset ahead of the rest of us. This person seems to like it.

Talking with Google's Sundar Pichai on recent items in Google news.

This is a long article on scaling and other recent topics in AI.

I like this essay. So much so that I read the entire thing, and that is unusual for me. Find a problem you want to solve. Working on what you want to solve is far easier than other things.

Our TSA, in an ever expanding effort to do less and less, is now testing facial recognition systems to speed citizens through long waiting lines created by the TSA. This is a great job. Create problems. Ask Congress for money to fix the problems you create. Create more problems, get more money.

It appears that our IRS has spent our money so that government can compete with private industry, clobber companies, and cause layoffs.

The open-source large language models are gaining traction. Once again, it is a numbers game. The more folks that have access to tech, the more and better the products.

Together is a new company seeking to gather resources for open-source creators to build AI systems.

This is the home page of Together.

As promised, we can now make phone calls through our Windows 11 computers paired with iPhones.

oooooops, another 5.8million electronic health records are stolen.

Hurray! It appears that the cash envelope system of budgeting money and expenses is making a comeback.

Our current economic woes have brought white-collar layoffs. Despite doomed predictions, those jobs will return when economic sense does as well.

Wednesday 17 May 2023

Long musing about the recent Google I/O event and AI.

A contest to create the worst user interface and user experience. Reminds me of the Obfuscated C programming contest from a generation ago.

I'll just quote this, "Scientists in China have developed a new technique for 3D printing of ceramics in the air without the need for supportive structures." If you have studied Chinese sculpture, this makes sense.

Looking to the oceans for renewable energy. I hope some of this actually works. Then again, any energy generated in the ocean must be wired to the shore. We are not supposed to live at the shore per the climate change folks. And those same climate change folks are pushing renewable energy from the oceans. Of course none of this makes any sense.

And now we have enough "free AI tools" to write articles listing the best of them.

Comparing ChatGPT and real life people in labeling the subject of text.

Meanwhile in China, the governors are regulating AI. No surprise as that is censorship---something well practiced by the CCP.

Some of us are old enough to remember how Japan's economy was to overtake the US's and all that. That didn't happen, but there are signs of adjustment and comeback for Japan. Their population drop, however, is a major concern.

Apple is showing new features across its products that will have those of us with waning sight and hearing to use just about everything in our homes.

Police confiscate phones. They eventually auction them. They are not wiping them. Abuse follows.

Elon Musk points to the obvious: service workers have to show up at work. Rich folks work from home. Increasing the divide.

Quote, "Google Cloud launched two new AI-powered solutions that aim to help biotech and pharmaceutical companies"

Got $400? Get a 4,000-piece Lego Bat Cave.

In case you haven't noticed, Tesla doesn't advertise. They may start to do so.

A happy story: the pinball machine is back!

Thursday 18 May 2023

Tesla continues to make progress with their robots that "look like robots." They can now walk.

Our US Senators, not having much else to do, hold a hearing on AI. They vow not to repeat the mistakes of the early days of social media. What were those mistakes? Oh yes, they didn't tax everything.

Now that AI can generate things, we want to do so on our pocket phones,

We have yet another person who has "made it" in AI stating that governments need to regulate those who are new and trying to "make it" in AI. Same old story: the established want governments to hold down the competition.

News out of Google is that their PaLM 2 (Pathways Language Model) breaks all records for the data used to train it. Only the tech giants can do this. Even our Federal government cannot do this.

It appears that Google is readying AI tools for advertisers and YouTube creators.

Amazon's cloud services will invest $12.7Billion in India.

Grammarly introduces Grammarly Business. This is an AI-based tool (what isn't AI-based these days?) to help folks write better.

The definition of success continues to change: "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" sold 10Million copies in three days.

It's good to be the CEO of Nvidia.

Amazon vows to put more "AI" into everything to make us all happier to spend our money.

The governors of India put up $2.1Billion in incentives to bring computer hardware makers to their country.

A college professor used ChatGPT as a plagiarism checker. He failed students. Of course, he failed to use the tools correctly and will probably be sued by many folks.

Friday 19 May 2023

The developers of GitHub's CoPilot share some technology history.

Stability AI releases StableStudio---their latest text-to-image system.

Those who sell services to those who commute into the city to the office are just plain hurting with no relief in sight. Back-to-the-office grew to about 50% of pre-pan(dem)ic levels, but stopped thereabouts. Down town restaurants et al cannot make it. Commercial real estate is crashing as well.

Meanwhile in Montana, a new law bans TikTok (Chinese Communist Party). Other laws banning foreign-controlled information scoopers are pending.

Along with the work-from-anywhere trend, only 1.6% of Americans will move for a different job. Thirty years ago, the number was 29%.

A paper from Nvidia on synthetic data and having cars detect far away objects.

And we have so many AI-this-and-that photo fixers that we have a best-of list.

And Nvidia announces yet another new family of GPUs made for video gamers.

Amazon had big ideas for drone deliveries. So far, it is a big flop.

Meta shows its work on its own processors designed for AI work. They call the series Meta Training and Inference Accelerator or MTIA.

OpenAI has released ChatGPT for iPhone.

Apple's Personal Voice technology makes it much easier for ALS suffers to "bank their voice." That process used to take weeks. Now it takes 15 minutes. A huge benefit. This is the tech we should be building.

This could be the start of something big: this "laptop computer" drives augmented reality glasses. There is no screen. Everything is project in space for what would be a 100" screen.

Meanwhile in China, a myth or dream is dead. Gen Z'ers in their mid 20s have a life saving of $1. This was not what was promised. Monthly income is $600.

Saturday 20 May 2023

Stop worrying about artificial intelligence, it appears that the brains of are dogs are getting bigger. They will take over soon.

Not all human languages "tokenize" the same. This is quite a challenge for those working with AI and all this natural language.

I like this one: it is a small set of utilities that allow you to read a web site and summarize it from the command line.

We won't worry so much about the dogs taking over when you look at this robot that appears to actually do a few things.

Grievous vexation at Apple over the three-stooges-like approach to building an augmented reality system.

The Washington Post touts this as a national tragedy, but young people are going to college to learn something that will get them a job instead of fluff.

Jim Brown, football and movie star, dies at 87.

This may be the end of a short era as attendance at a Bitcoin conference drops to half of what it was last year.

LinkedIn has a problem with accounts for people that don't exist. Only believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. Link only to folks you know.

You gotta' see this. New software that let's you completely change photos. See the videos.

And here is the research paper describing what they did.

Meanwhile in politics...uh, er, I mean in manned space flight... NASA picks Blue Origin to build the second lunar lander for a 2029 mission to the moon.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, America "must" supply airplanes first built 40 years ago to end the war with Russia. Of course the F-16s are newer than 1983, but really folks.

Sunday 21 May 2023

Americans still use pagers. Probably over a million of them are in use. They still work just fine.

Meanwhile at the FBI, analysts misused collected information a bit---a couple hundred thousand times. And some people wonder why some people wonder.

We are moving towards a "decentralized web." Some folks fear this idea. Imagine, like-minded people will gather in clubs and talk about like-minded things. Who knows what "they" will do without proper supervision from "us."

It was a simple idea: the former crypto miners would use their hardware to run AI machines. It is more complicated than originally conceived.

One person buys an old iPhone instead of a new one. It still works just fine. And you save money, too.

ooooops, some HP printers turn into big paperweights after a software update.

Some folks are shocked at what it cost$ to return the office.

Owners of electric cars don't buy gas, don't pay gas taxes, and don't help maintain roads. Therefore, states are putting high registration fees on electric cars to make up the difference.