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: 12-18 June, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• ODNI admits that the intel community is illegally buying data on US citizens
• AMD announces several new processors for home and data centers
• OpenAI releases new large(r) language models
• Reddit groups hold a blackout to protest change$ in API use
• Bill Gates visits China
• Big hack of driver's license data bases
• The dog days of summer are here

Monday 12 June 2023

How today's AI can change these jobs. Tomorrow's AI? No telling.

New terms for me from geologists: we have "ultra-low velocity zones" and "low-shear-velocity provinces" way down inside the earth.

We are supposed to be in the middle of a shift in hiring. Employers are to now look at skills instead of college degrees. One warning: don't let someone trick you into demonstrating a skill before hiring. That is often a way to get work for free.

Cosmetology brings in robots with computer vision to do eyelash extensions. I don't know what that is, but I like the demo videos.

Someone has a grasp of reality. It is much too soon to try to regulate AI to form occupations. Congress doesn't know enough; neither do regulators.

Believe it or not, Second Life is still around and it is the metaverse as it has been for 20 years.

A reporter buys a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia. It is the last hard copy encyclopedia you can buy. Encyclopedia Britannica stopped printing in 2012.

Real news that isn't news: TikTok sort of didn't tell the truth to Congress.

Some thoughts on Barnes and Noble's new old look. Here in Reston, B&N closed a few years ago, but is opening a new place in the next few weeks.

This post has many links on many topics including a good share on AI and writing.

Is your writing career a ladders, road, garden or something? How about it is my writing because that's just what I do.

Phrases and slang that are often used incorrectly.

The SMART goals and how writers can use them. This means smart, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound.

Time management for fiction writers. If you want to write for money, you have to work. You have to be wise in how you use your time.

The author's website. These are easy to create these days with WordPress and other tools.

The author's portfolio and how to use ChatGPT to expand it with new pieces.

Yet another list of new AI writing tools.

Tuesday 13 June 2023

What happened to that Tesla pickup truck? It had many basic flaws that made it impossible to drive on the regular roads.

Some people are paid to work on open-source projects. Other people do it for fun as they don't need the money. Guess who has the obvious advantage?

The big advantage Apple has with its Vision Pro is the army of Apple store developers.

The ability to read data from encrypted chips has just become much cheaper and much more available.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: thousands of Reddit communities are staging a blackout to protest something or other.

A deeper look at Apple's new 15" MacBook Air."

The concept of lateral thinking and why all these chattering bots will not replace many people at work.

Salesforce pushes hard on AI as the future of business.

Surveillance tech run amok. Well, the folks who think they are doing good things by watching their lesser others are running amok.

A closer look at the updated Mac Studio. It is a good value, but sometimes the price of a good value is too high. This is especially true for a computer that requires a good and expensive monitor and doesn't come with one.

More folks running amok with surveillance. It seems that some citizens grant themselves special status to collect information on other citizens. This is bad for all citizens.

Here it comes: big American cities will charge tolls to drive downtown. New York City is the first, and others will follow. Politicians cannot resist other people's money.

Wednesday 14 June 2023

Here are some thoughts on how to put images on websites and such with several tags that most browsers may not understand.

Here is an example of success leading to failure. Grow an online community fast. And then the fast growth kills the sense of community.

Once again we have the idea of a floating city that will... uh, er, float. How? Not sure yet.

AMD updates its line of processors for the desktop consumer market.

And AMD updates its line of processor for data centers as well.

Finally, AMD shows new high-performance computing processors for data centers that integrate GPU and CPU onto massive chips.

Not having much else to do with their time, folks in the Biben administration are trying to regulate how they will regulate AI. Google proposes an approach that differs from that proposed by the other big tech companies. Google's idea has NIST issuing guidance and each agency doing their own work. The other approach is to create a new department that regulates everything. Experience shows that Google's approach will cost the taxpayers much less and accomplish the same.

We've entered the era where Large Language Models are like versions of MS Word. OpenAI releases new models with new capabilities and pricing.

Researchers discover yet another way to steal encrypted information that was thought to be safe. This one uses a camera pointed at LEDs. Simple. It works.

Here's another case where much is made of the chattering bots. Doctor's ask, "How can I break the news?" They could "Google" the same for the past 20 years.

Want a tech job? Say the magic letters "A" and "I."

Some of us are old enough to remember how Japan was going to conquer the economic world. Didn't happen. Recently, China was going to conquer the economic world. Same outcome.

Thursday 15 June 2023

"Researchers warn..." Of course they warn. Some practitioners are doing stupid things to train AI systems. The systems are training themselves. The closed feedback loop is obviously a stupid idea.

Meanwhile in Argentina, someone discovers that foreigners working there are more profitable than locals working there. US colleges discovered this decades ago and it has ruined many colleges created to educate the American middle class.

Meanwhile in India, Apple is competing with Apple in iPhone sales as Indians buy the less expensive used models.

Once "small problem" with all these chattering bots: they lose money every time a customer uses them. Not a good business model.

WordPress releases a tool that can write blog posts for us called the Jetpack AI Assistant. It is free to use for a limited time, then they charge lots of money.

Zoom, yes they still exist as Teams has clobbered them in the marketplace, has an AI feature that summarizes meetings you missed.

Aha! We finally have an AI that is useful. A camera records a cook (chef) making a meal and creates a recipe auto-magically.

Some insight into one side of the Reddit blackout.

The work and satisfaction of finishing projects. Finish something. There. Done. Next. Point back to the growing stack of finished works. None will be perfect. All will be finished.

Fifteen years ago, there were 1,000 active satellites orbiting earth. Today there are 7,000. This is probably good news. Thanks to SpaceX and others who wanted to return to space.

Meanwhile in Europe, the European Parliament, a main legislative branch of the E.U., passed a draft law known as the AI Act.

Razer updates its Blade 14 laptop with newer AMD processors.

The Mechanical Turk workers, people who are very interested in any tool that allows them to accomplish more in less time, are using ChatGPT et al to the fullest extent.

The National Music Publishers' Association is suing Twitter for playing music without paying royalties. The suit is for $150,000 a violation which would basically mean Elon Musk turns over his bank account.

Friday 16 June 2023

The new way to do business. Have content for human consumption and content for computer consumption. I've done this for several years now.

Intel to build a $4.6Billion chip-making factory in Poland.

What blackout? Reddit's managers say that 80% of its top forums are still online.

Meanwhile in China, Bill Gates visits and pledges million$$$ to partner with Chinese governors to battle diseases.

The big tech companies, with their large language models and AI, are negotiating copyright agreements with media outlets.

Meanwhile in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Amazon opens a little of its promised HQ2 campus. It is nothing like promised before all this work-from-home took over. There have been many fights with local government about tax breaks and promised jobs and all that. It is a small start.

What's in a brand name? Intel drops the "i" from in front of numbers on its processors.

Apple is already discounting its new MacBook Air with the 15-inch screen.

You sign long-term deals with a country, and one day a war starts. The US is still sending $1Billion a year to Russian to help its nuclear power industry.

Meanwhile in America, folks really don't want to commute back to the office building. Pay cuts are preferable to commuting.

It was 30 years ago that both HTML and PDF had their first specifications. Some of us remember this well. What was Adobe doing leaving PostScript behind and going to this pee-dee-eff?

Saturday 17 June 2023

I am travelling and not viewing the Internet as much this weekend.

A recent study claims that our Federal government could save $100Billion by reducing duplicated efforts. My guess is 10x that figure.

Our Dept of the Interior awards Peraton a Billion-dollar contract to help with cloud computing.

A study of Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) crowdsourcing platform, where users can offer and perform tasks such as text summarization, shows that nearly half of the summaries came from AI. Data pollution at its finest.

A call for non-programmers to contribute necessary efforts to big open-source projects.

A closer look at this year's Apple Mac Studio. It is high performance at a higher price.

The commercial space launch business has not all been good. Virgin Orbit flopped and has finally sold its assets to Firefly Aerospace which has had launch failures of its own.

ooooops, millions of us had out personal information exposed with hackers breaking into driver's license databases in several states.

Some history that led to the current AI boom. It is not just technology, it is real estate, tax base, homelessness, housing, health care and all those pesky things that come along with old business and new business.

I'll just quote this, "Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Bill Gates to discuss the global rise of artificial intelligence." Did you ever think these two guys would be so old as to fall off the front page and just be footnotes?

Sunday 18 June 2023

Chip makers (electronics, not potato) now have something else to worry about: the energy consumed in manufacturing. Its all about the carbon.

Once again, we try to distinguish things that can be used in war from things that can be used in peace. Folly. Pure folly.

Top architecture firms are using "AI" (here we go again) to design office buildings.

This person booted Linus some 292,000 times to find an error in the kernel. He succeeded. It only took 21 hours, which is much less time than I would guess. It shows what capable people can do.

This is an excellent piece about the reasons "no one needs to learn to code." The history of those who just don't want to do the work is long and documented. Get to work. Do the job.