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: 3-9 July, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The war is now 500 days old
• Happy Birthday America
• July 3rd is the "hottest day in the history of the planet" (ha)
• Meta releases Threads --- yet another Twitter replacement
• OpenAI makes ChatGPT-4 generally available

Monday 3 July 2023

It no longer requires a team of rocket scientists or a computer the price of the national debt to build a language model. Therefore, lots of independents are building "uncensored" ones. Let the fun and games begin.

Excellent essay on automation and jobs. We've been here before. Is this time different? Yes. All the times were different.

How to get 4.8million YouTube subscribers. Its all entertainment.

There is a market for turning crypto mining rigs into AI computational machines. Universities and small, small companies cannot afford big boy solutions. They can, however, afford these machines.

We are using closed caption on TV much more than we used to. It is not the old folks with loss of hearing. The younger folks use CC more than anyone.

Our Space Force is still trying to figure out what it is supposed to do.

Building an audience as a freelancer via Topic, Angle, and Medium.

How one writer uses ChatGPT as a writing coach. Use the tools at your disposal.

"I can talk about it for hours, but when it comes time to write.." Okay, fine, don't write. Record your talk. Let the computer transcribe it.

Good, practical tips for improving a homepage.

Tuesday 4 July 2023

Meanwhile in Russia, the Ukraine war created a new industry of small companies that help the governors watch its subjects.

More trade restrictions with China as the US attempts to block China's access to American cloud computing services. In essence, China cannot rent advanced computing.

Meanwhile in America, younger adults are coming out of the pandemic isolation to actually talk to others face-to-face in real life.

Meanwhile on the Internet, change and transition. Twitter changed. Facebook tried the metaverse and flopped. Reddit is on strike. What are we to do now?

Jeff Bezos' New Origin wants an international launch facility to enter the European and Asian markets.

Rumors about Apple making a monitor that is a monitor and some sort of smart home appliance thing.

It is a small market, but AMD has become the dominant CPU supplier in the Linux gaming area.

Red Hat has changed some of its distribution policies. RockyLinux and AlmaLinux move on without Red Hat.

Wednesday 5 July 2023

Because Tuesday is the 4th of July, we have about four Mondays this week. Slow news days.

And now we have the "AI Engineer." I think we had these back in the 1980s. I was one.

A guide to doing "great work."

Measuring the performance of computer programmers. And then there is this: I learned that it's mostly about whether or not they like you and MUCH less about your skills or experience than I had previously thought.

I'll just quote, "Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge has unveiled the world's first analog optical computer which promises to solve optimization problems"

And now AI has its own sticker or meme or logo. Some sketch of some fictional creature called the Shoggoth.

Here is a discussion of the recent developments in AI and how us tech folks tend to be hyperventilating while everyone else is having fun at the beach this summer.

Samsung is pushing hard to be in on the AI boom with some types of processors that lean that way. It is not certain that Samsung will make it.

Not a surprise, the Washington Post is completely wrong on the SCOTUS ruling on affirmative action and tech hiring.

July 3rd was the hottest day in recorded history. Since the recording instruments have changed through the years, these comparisons are silly. "Follow the science" means ignore these headlines as invalid.

This story could be bigger than the Supreme Court rulings of last week. A Federal Judge prohibits government officials from meeting with social media companies. The judge agrees in principle that Federal officials were wrong in encouraging Facebook et al to block comments about COVID, the 2022 election, and other issues. The judge sees that the examples of "this is misinformation, so we are blocking it" all leaned to one side in the political debate. We shall wee what happens next.

Thursday 6 July 2023

Beware of the contributor license agreement or CLA. This essay encourages programmers to NOT sign anything of the sort.

Once again, Tesla is about to introduce the full self-driving capability. The trouble is that no one can agree on what that is or what it will do. Hint: you can't sleep while driving through town.

Here is a good essay on building a personal brand or personal prestige. What are the differences?

And now we have something called "Threads" from Meta. It is to be a Twitter competitor. Meta wants 100 million Instagram users to sign up.

Our DoD is testing large language models on our DoD et al data.

Not everything Tom Brady touches works. He had a big flop in his bet on crypto currency.

Much ado about nothing: OpenAI creates a team to monitor and guard against super intelligent AI.

Meanwhile in Canada, nuclear power is making a big comeback.

Meanwhile in the UK, the universities are writing all sorts of written material on the use of AI. Are they writing or are they using Ai to help write?

Toyota claims to have a new battery technology that, if it is real, will completely change the industry. Stop talking and bring it to market.

Friday 7 July 2023

Good thoughts on large language models and search engines.

We really haven't decided yet what "open source" means in the area of machine learning.

Meta has had Threads ready for a while. Now is the day to strike because... Your guess is as good as anyone's.

Here is an endorsement of heat pumps as the next dominant technology for air conditioning.

The use of ChatGPT drops 10% as the folks who say, "Hey, look at this" have finished with their party tricks.

Folks are using AI to write "books" that appear on Amazon. For some reason (technology probably), these junk books are becoming bestsellers.

We are trying to stop some of us from buying data illegally on the rest of us. Can't make it up folks.

OpenAI releases GPT-4 into general availability. You have to pay, but if you want it, you can get it.

Where the money is: the cloud computing market grows another 22%. It is up to $500Billion a year.

Meanwhile in Europe, regulators are investigating successful American companies so they can take some money from them.

30 million of us sign up for Threads in the first 24 hours. That is a big number, but not big enough, yet.

Saturday 8 July 2023

I like this piece. It is a conversation with real technologists about how changes in technology affected how they approached their careers. I read Grady Booch's book on Software Engineering with Ada. It changed many of my attitudes on technology.

A company "loses its mind" and adopts AI for everything. The names are withheld to protect the guilty.

Researchers at North Carolina State Univ created a gel that enables 3D printing of metal at room temperature.

Meanwhile in India, they will launch a rocket to the moon hoping to land a rover there.

And Threads already has 95million posts or threadettes or whatever they will call activity.

Lots of claims that this and that software can detect essays created by software. One minute of fiddling can make the software-create essay pass through all the detectors unnoticed.

This AI stuff is proving valuable to people with disabilities. There is some good in all the fluff.

This is all over the Internet, but take it for what it is. Our FDA approves a very expensive shot that slows one type of dementia in some people. It is not a cure. It is not that great.

And we see much more in the news how this is the hottest week in the history of earth. Only we, with our grit, determination, and brains could withstand this. We are the pinnacle of mankind's accomplishments. (not)

Must-see 10-minute video on how Tabasco is made. Great stuff!

Some people are using ChatGPT to really improve their output. More text pumped out per hour is up, up, and up. Most of us are still "just gettin' by" in our jobs.

Protestors learn super simple and super cheap ways to disable the robot taxis in San Francisco. Put a cone on the car's hood.

Some folks from Harvard think they have found alien technology on the sea bed.

Sunday 9 July 2023

The big tech companies are trying to steer the current administration into a better way of working with AI. Of course they do know better than the government employees.

And now we have an app that summarizes YouTube videos. I like the idea.

This is something about the 5th epoch of distributed computing. I think little of these made up "epochs" and the like.

Meanwhile in rural China, we have the king of "tornado beer" drink and such. Chairman Mao would not approve. Zhou En Lai might have smiled. But that's almost ancient history.

I'll just quote this, "Chip giant Nvidia quietly acquired OmniML, an artificial intelligence startup that helps machine-learning models run on devices, rather than in the cloud"

This is important: software and computing enable farmers to weed their crops using a laser instead of herbicides. The reduction in chemicals in farming is huge and affects society far more than software that answers questions and takes tests for students.

Software that uses old maps to create 3D models of long-gone neighborhoods. Intersting,

Once again, someone succeeded too much. OpenAI faces law suit about how it mined the Internet for what we know.

Meanwhile in America education (schools), we have more technology to watch more people more of the time.

The world economy moves on computer chips. China, with its large and inexpensive labor force, still makes a lot of these for US and European companies.

Perl 5.38 is released.

Meanwhile in China, when a white-collar person turns 35, their career is over.