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: 19-25 June, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Juneteenth holiday in America
• Tourist submarine visiting the Titanic is missing
• Confirmed: the sub imploded, all five on board are dead
• Many small steps taken in AI and machine learning as expected

Monday 19 June 2023

Today is the Juneteenth holiday in America.

Apple sure knows a thing or two about the external appearance of their products and how to pack 'em into a box.

More praises for the new MacBook Air with the 15-inch display.

The Asus ROG Ally is a handheld game console at $700 with plenty of processing power to play anything.

More information on Apple's Mac Studio desktop computer. Great processing power. No monitor or keyboard or mouse. It seems expensive, but is a better value than the Mac Pro.

I'll quote this great title and subtitle from O'Reilly, "You Can't Regulate What You Don't Understand: Or, Why AI Regulations Should Begin with Mandated Disclosures"

Bellingcat had their third hackathon. These events are where enthusiastic persons work real hard for free and invent things. Amazing what happens when talent meets enthusiasm meets worthwhile problems to solve.

We seem to go through this every few years: PC users switch to Apple Macs. Design and total cost of ownership used to be the reasons. Now it is silicon and such.

It appears that Intel will build a chip-making factory in Israel.

Facebook changes it algorithm and media sites take a big hit. No prior notice and no explanations.

SpaceX puts into orbit a major telecommunications satellite to serve Indonesia.

And here we go again: yet another Billion$$$ for rural broadband.

Tuesday 20 June 2023

Out of boredom, programmers are creating and solving (badly) imaginary problems for their customers. Just do enough and stop. This is a failure of systems engineering.

This GitHub repository attempts to remove the complexity of experimenting with large language models.

Here comes the company town and the company store. The governors of Mountain View, Ca. approve a 30-year plan for Google to build housing for its employees near its offices.

GPT-4 gains the significant ability to use other tools.

Meta was ahead in AI. Well, it was. Now it's behind.

This GitHub repository attempts to make GPT-4 a much better programmer.

Nano-tattoos may have reached a practical milestone where they can be used for real applications.

Here is something practical in medical engineering. This little device clips on a smartphone and measures blood pressure.

Meta introduces a new system called VoiceBox. It is a text-to-speech system that would be a great benefit to blind persons. It also helps with audio editing and other voice functions.

Here is more information on Meta's VoiceBox.

Society's sickos learn to use the latest tools to create child sex images.

Big story in the news today is that a tourist submarine to the Titanic wreck is missing.

Where the money is: I don't understand all the details of this story. Teens are stealing million$$$ online. They are clever enough to fool the experts.

Researchers are studying bias among researchers who study bias in disinformation campaigns. In plain English, many researchers lean strongly to one side of the political debates. Their research results show their leanings.

Financial forecasts for video gaming. The world is changing, so the market of video games is changing as well.

Wednesday 21 June 2023

Here is a complete course on GPU programming.

And now we have the Tesla Giga Factory. Combination Disneyland, plant tour, watch your car built in 1 minute, and who knows what else.

If the doctors tell you they have nothing they can do to prevent your death, would you take just about any medicine? What do you have to lose?

Apple is trying to trademark photos os apples. I guess the legal team has something in mind.

Enough people are putting text created by ChatGPT on the Internet that ChatGPT is reading all this stuff and retraining itself on it. This is a case of "eating your own dog food." These things were never supposed to run in a closed loop. Predictable and predicted.

A Tesla hacker finds a hidden and advanced full self-driving mode that is present but not available. He drove a simulation of the capability. No, we are not at science fiction level yet.

Note to all us users of Google's "free" services. If they don't sell ads on the service, they drop the service. Gmail isn't going away anytime soon, but some of the lesser-known and used features may be going away.

With little else to do with his time, our President rushes to regulate AI. OpenAI did the industry a disservice by putting ChatGPT out there. It is a cool tool that anyone can use. This brought the attention to the techno-ignorants in Washington D.C. And that is the worst thing you can do.

Now is a good time to be in the chip-making industry as governors everywhere are throwing someone else's money (taxpayers' money) at the companies.

We have lots of fussing as our former President faces jail time while the son of our current President has a sweet plea bargain deal to stay out of jail. It would be nice if these folks would their problems to a place where help was available and move out of our way.

Much of today's AI is known as "supervised learning." Humans tell the software what something is. Millions of humans are doing this job (that's a dog, not a cat) at low pay all over the world.

With nothing else to do with their time, some of our US Senators are investigating safety at Amazon warehouses. This is a local issue, not a Federal one. If you have to stretch current law so that you can pry into someone's business, you have nothing to do with your time and are nothing but a busybody.

Our government now recommends that we all be screened for anxiety.

I guess we need a new version of the Turing Test as the original one has been beaten.

Thursday 22 June 2023

I guess all of us now have a "side hustle" or attempt to have a second source of income. It is still disliked by the bosses.

A good set of example prompts for using GitHub CoPilot.

Trying to dance around censorship, Chinese subjects use Reddit to converse.

A video tour of the Barbie dreamhouse. Folks, this is a billion-dollar enterprise.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) teams with AI startup Aleph Alpha to offer GreenLake for Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet another service to enable easier AI work.

Let's start somewhere. This detailed piece describes an architecture for developing software with large language models.

The mind of a "liberal" politician: We must act now or "risk losing its only chance to regulate" AI. Gosh. No need to act quickly to save lives or something. We must act quickly to regulate commerce.

Dropbox is slowly releasing new AI capabilities to search and summarize what we store there. Slowly. I can't use any of them, yet.

I thought we knew what we were doing when we closed our schools for the pandemic. Seeing how test scores continue to fall, perhaps it was all a big mistake.

It appears that Google is preparing a new standard called "Chromebook X" to raise the bar higher-performing Chromebooks.

Intel now wants its manufacturing division to make chips for other companies and make a profit.

Friday 23 June 2023

Microsoft demonstrates the idea of focusing on the training data with a relatively small model called Phi-1. It performs much better than much larger models.

Build good tools and people will use them, even when you don't want them to do so. Some folks who label data for AI are using AI to label data for AI. This is bad.

Fear and loathing at TSMC's chip-making plant in Arizona.

Stability AI improves its model for generating photographs. Notably improved are images of the human hand, which is something these types of programs struggle to do.

Google has succeeded too well for too long in advertising. Now the US and the EU want some of that money.

The Argonne National Laboratory and Intel have installed all 10,624 blades for the Aurora supercomputer. The performance is off the charts (something called an ExaFLOP) and the machines has tens of thousands of processors containing processors.

Yet another reason why people will stop learning foreign languages: YouTube now can dub your video into another language.

It is official as wreckage is found of that tourist submarine that went missing a few days ago while touring the Titanic wreckage.

Harvard jumps into using an AI ChatBot as an assistant instructor for a computer science course.

I guess our taxes have to go somewhere: someone in our government "loans" Ford $9Billion for electric vehicle batteries or something.

Meanwhile in America, the quality of the new automobiles being sold is falling to record lows.

Saturday 24 June 2023

I'll quote this quote as it is outstanding. In the real world, real businesses solve real problems with real constraints. "You have to realize that not every company is running out of California, and not every company has a Modern Data Stack. The rest of us live in the real world, where people have to work in a typical warehousing environment and generate millions of revenue using Teradata."

Another example of coming back to reality is the TinyStories language model. Much, much smaller than the big boys, it works pretty well.

Here is an article from 1960 predicting the same predictions that predictors predict today. We haven't moved as far as we think.

I like this one: this series of tweets discusses why college professors (and most experts) give bad advice. See, for example, our recent pandemic and all the bad advice the experts gave. Experts are usually wrong. That means experts are wrong most of the time.

Yes, software can listen to meetings (like the local school board or county supervisors or Congressional committee) and write a report on the meeting.

And this software is better at analyzing and labelling your trove of photographs.

We may finally be ready for a home robot butler. See the video.

"Most decisions that you make are not nearly as important as your ability to change them in the future." Well said.

I'll just quote this, it is good, "The hottest new perk in tech is freedom, How small tech companies are using remote work to compete with the big guys."

Reddit's income grows about 40%, and this is deemed a bad year. What?

I have never heard of the social media app, but it had 20million daily active users. It seems the 95% of those weren't real people but software impersonating people.

Lots of money flowing to India which is the world's most populous country. Amazon to put in $15Billion (with a B).

Google to put $10Billion (with a B) into India.

Google News is being blocked in Russia where censorship is alive and well.

We now have the concept of "worker's privacy." Folks, if someone is paying for your time, they own your time and what you do during that time. Unless you have a special contract with your employer, you cannot expect to hide while at work.

Sunday 25 June 2023

It is predictable that after the catastrophic failure of a tourist sub that we hear news that everyone predicted this would happen.

Walmart is opening doctor and dentist facilities in stores. Walmart has the locations and the patrons in place for this. It will work well. Clean the kids' teeth while parents shop for groceries.

DEFCON hacker teams will attempt to break into a satellite in August. I have no doubt they will succeed. It is a matter of numbers.

Amazon Fire tablets, the best value in computing, are 50% off on some models.

James Cameron points to flaws in the Titan submersible's design.

Next year, Apple moves to a 3nm fabrication process instead of the current 5nm process. Think of it this way: your lawn mower engine remains the same size but has twice the power and consumes half the gasoline at the same price.

If you are extremely rich, you do extreme tourism. Why not? It's their money and they are paying a lot of salaries. Let us understand that final point. Those who died on the Titanic tour paid for the submarine to be built. They paid the salaries of the persons on the ship above. They paid the salaries of the persons who built the ship above. They paid the salaries of many persons in the middle who made the arrangements. They didn't take a pile of 250,000 1-dollar bills out back and burn them.

More on the trend to work-from-home as a job benefit. New companies offer this more than old companies. Google, Facebook, Amazon are old companies.

So far, there has not been a great migration from Twitter to something else. There have been several "this is it" proclamations, but they all stalled.

Several hundred experts predict what all this AI will bring in the next ten years. Note: experts are usually wrong. Also note that predictions are usually wrong.

For the disabled, our world is not inviting. We aren't doing much in technology to help.

Meanwhile in Russia, a mercenary army sort of threatens Moscow.