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: 10-16 July, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Amazon has its summer sale or Prime Days
• Intel stops making NUC line
• Lawrence Livermore National Labs installs new supercomputers
• Apple has bilingual Siri
• Google adds 43 languages to Bard
• The actors go on strike in Hollywood
• The shine is gone from Meta's Threads

Monday 10 July 2023

The Washington Post cries foul about the government telling social media companies what should be censored. Historical note, this is from a newspaper that once accepted a Pulitzer when it published a work of fiction as a real news story.

Google tries to move into the lucrative health care industry with a large language model.

Threads is now up to 100million new accounts in only five days. This will probably break some kind of meaningless record.

Foxconn pulls out of a $19.5Billion (with a B) deal to build a chip-making plant in India.

Evernote, the darling application of many, lays off all its US staff and moves to Europe.

Finally, someone has a grasp of reality in all this electric vehicle hyperbole. 90%+ of folks don't need an EV with 2,000 pounds of batteries they will never use.

A question that people keep asking but no one is answering, "Why are there so many programming languages?""

A spaceX booster has flown 16 times. This is some sort of record.

Big cities are still hurting because of remote work.

The "Super Hero" system to blogging. Taking some lessons learned from that genre of movies and fiction.

Tired of blogging? Tired of writing? Some of us would ask, "Tired of breathing?"

Want to write about your family without making everyone mad? Good luck with that one.

And this link also brings questions about, "I read your book! You stole my story!" When someone tells you about what happened at their 4th of July family renunion, can you put that in your next novel? The legal answer is, "Yes." Maybe your friend will hate you.

Odd little things learned in research. "story ideas are everywhere if we only take the time to look"

If you find yourself with nothing to write this summer... 100 prompts.

That Hemmingway fella sure said a lot of interesting things about writing. And, more importantly, he wrote all the time.

The concept of the "filler word" and how to avoid it.

Tuesday 11 July 2023

We see that if you wish you can build a large language model that behaves well enough to trick folks into thinking that it behaves well all the time.

Meanwhile in Las Vegas, we have a dome thing or something that breaks all the prior Las Vegas records for entertainment.

A report from a person who has been using ChatGPT with Code Interpreter. Wow.

Meanwhile in earth orbit, someone finally manufactures medicine in zero gravity and receives permission to bring the stuff back to earth.

Real news that isn't news: regulators want regulations that favor the established companies and hurt new, small, innovative companies. The field is AI, but the regulating is almost universal.

We need software to detect essays written by software (I guess?). Much of this software mistakenly labels essays written by non-native speakers as written by AI. oooooooops.

Lazy managers and fake work: these are real and are really hurting the tech industry.

Meanwhile in China where the Communist Party has a hand in everything, the Communist Party is putting its hands into new AI companies.

Today and tomorrow are Amazon Prime days or the summer sale. This post has some deals on tablets. There are many other things on sale. And again, the Amazon Fire tablets are the best value in computing.

Here is something you don't see everyday. A man is caught smuggling 360 computer processors taped to his body. What is rare is that he was caught. The great majority of such smuggling is not caught (bribes work).

Wednesday 12 July 2023

Thoughts on running code at the "edge" of computing.

Thoughts on design and how some people do it.

Here is a different idea of putting satellites into orbit. Use a vacuum and a kilometers-long concrete tube to achieve speed. The cost per pound would be a tenth of a percent.

Nvidia is far ahead at building processors used in machine learning algorithms. Intel, AMD, and even Amazon and Google are trying are building similar processors and trying to make a dent in the market.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is installing more super-duper-computers. One will be extra powerful for classified work while the other is for unclassified work.

For the past 18 months, global PC shipments have fallen. The slide continues. Bidenomics and adjusting to the results of the pan(dem)ic.

Intel has decided to stop making its Next Unit of Computing (NUC). Others will continue to make these small-form-factor PCs. I have an Intel NUC upstairs as a spare Windows machine.

More commentary on cloud computing and AI applications.

Chinese hackers, no doubt connected to the Communist Party, broke into US government email accounts on the the cloud. The accounts were on unclassified networks, but...

Meanwhile in Russia, censorship of everything including the Internet continues. It appears that Wikipedia will soon be banned in Russia.

Generative AI, the kind that draws pictures and writes essays, is pushing out low-cost workers who live in low-cost areas around the world.

The use of Linux as a desktop operating system is not up to 3%. Of course this is tiny, but bigger. I don't expect an avalanche anytime soon.

Thursday 13 July 2023

Microsoft is laying off more and more people. Bidenomics at work.

Distributed computing (we used to call it parallel processing) is so common that people are forgetting it once was special. Therefore, there is much waste involved in the industry.

Anthropic introduced Claude 2, a large language model (LLM) similar to ChatGPT. Let the games begin.

If you can wade through this you will learn all the details of GPT-4. It probably cost $63million to build.

Here is an attempt to draw pictures representing the history and current state of everything social media.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): it is an attempt to beat addiction by stimulating the brain with electricity and magnetism.

Meanwhile on the moon (yes, the moon), mankind may land six different vehicles on the moon in the next six months. Let's see how it goes.

Meanwhile in China, their JD dot com released a large language model for domestic use.

More languages: Apple introduces a bilingual Siri.

Sony pours several Billion$ into R&D on video games research.

More languages: Google adds 43 more languages to Bard.

Chainalysis, the best source for anything related to block chain tech, reports that crypto crime is down but ransomware is having a record year.

Meanwhile at our airports where the TSA suspends the Constitution, facial scan is sort of voluntary... sort of.

Meanwhile in China, Intel announces a special version of an AI processor that meets new regulatory restrictions.

Google launches NotebookLM to a very limited group. Sigh. I'm not in the group.

Friday 14 July 2023

Meanwhile at the bottom of the ocean, it appears there are gold deposits. Undersea technology has reached the state where it is profitable to mine it.

Meanwhile in China, they have sent the first object into orbit on a booster using methane for fuel.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet. Elon Musk forms a company that seeks to understand the universe. Good luck with all that. Sounds like a tax dodge scheme.

Thoughts on the future of computing with data and such. The cost to be a programmer is low. Therefore, we have a billion programmers churning away. Someone will hit something useful and profitable.

Thoughts on looking for a job when everyone else is looking for a job.

Software is now writing software. Writing software, however, is about 10% of software engineering. Programmers should not fear anything. Learn to do the entire job.

A study of 453 persons who write much of the day shows, "The writers who chose to use ChatGPT took 40% less time to complete their tasks, and produced work that the assessors scored 18% higher in quality than that of the participants who didn't use it." It is a worthwhile tool.

And one writer at the New Yorker used a writing tool to replace himself. The tool works. Note, the writer probably violated intellectual property rights laws when he "trained" the tool.

The Associated Press signs a deal with Open AI. The AP's text library becomes available to Open AI to better its software while the AP gets access to use the software.

This year's Prime Day was better than last year's, but it didn't meet predictions. Again, the mistake predictors are not at fault. Someone else is.

The actors go on strike in Hollywood. Should an actor sign away rights to their face forever? No. And who would sign such a bad contract?

Microsoft Office switches its default font from Calibri to Aptos. The font is bigger, so there will be fewer words per line.

Saturday 15 July 2023

Draw a crummy sketch and Stable Doodle will make you a pretty good picture. Love it.

The finance world is about to install ChatGPT. Look out.

The era of the enthusiastic programmer may be ending. Maybe. The era of the enthusiastic writer, poet, painter, actor, engineer, architect, et al is still going.

Is Li-Fi technology finally here? Much higher data rates than WiFi and, unless you are in line of sight, no one can eavesdrop.

It appears that Meta will soon avail its large language model LLaMA to commercial use.

Meta releases CM3Leon or "chameleon." It is a text-to-image system that, Meta claims, is just as good as anyone else's and uses much less computing power.

A hundred million folks (or some large number like that) joined Meta's Threads in the first few days. It cost nothing to try. Well, many tried for a day and stopped.

Executives from Intel and Qualcomm are going to Washington D.C. to talk with regulators. Well, that might be interesting to hear. Experts on doing talking to folks who just watch and figure out how to take money from productive folks.

I can honestly say that I have not seen one minute of any Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movies. Why won't Mr. Cruise age gracefully?

One tech person moves from Los Angeles to Indiana. Life is good in Indiana and a lot of places that are not on the west and east coasts. Louisiana is another.

NASA's Space Launch System is a hallmark of NASA. It costs too much and its schedule is too long. And both cost and schedule grow. And Congress continues to fund it.

Sunday 16 July 2023

The AI boom was supposed to fix inner-city real estate problems. Sorry. That isn't happening.

Meanwhile in Russia, the governors ban Apple devices from government employees as they fear the US is using Apple as surveillance devices and such.

And now we have the Real-Time Crime Centers in over a hundred American cities. This is the stuff from the movies where the big screens in the dark rooms allow some citizens to closely watch some other citizens.

The Nintendo Entertainment System turns 40 years old. Aptly named, it changed entertainment in the home for better or for worse.

This is the kind of thing those folks on Oak Island are seeking with all the holes they've dug. Gold coins, 700 of them, from the mid 1800s.

As I predicted, folks aren't using AI at work. You have to learn something and desire to be more productive at your job. Most of us are happy with the way things are.

Meanwhile at Stanford, everyone wants to take a class about AI. The same thing happened when I was in grad school in the 1980s.

We now have software that can decipher yet another ancient language that no one could decipher before. What will we learn?

All this AI software takes a lot of computers running hot hot and hot. Climate change? Can the software fix the climate before it destroys it? Is this all silly?

ChatGPT was not the first software system that would write essays and such. There were others before that are still churning and writing.