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: 24-30 July, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• AI is watching is all drive
• Twitter drops the bird logo, uses an "x" for now
• EU wants to put EV chargers every 60Km
• More AI regulation coming
• China's economy continues to fail
• 30 July 1983, Miss Karen Bundy married me

Monday 24 July 2023

A little comment on the Russians and Ukraine. The Russians showed their incompetency by flopping in what should have been a ten-day trek from the border to the Ukrainian capital. The US and NATO showed their incompetency by flooding Ukraine with enough arms and intelligence to whip ten Russian armies to no avail. Perhaps it is good news that the world's major powers have become so incompetent at warfare. Then again, competence in warfare may mean fast, short wars with much less loss of life and property. Incompetence means more death and destruction. We are an odd lot.

A growing number of people would rather use their phone for just about everything than the system that comes with their automobile. Yes, Apple is smarter than Ford and GM.

These offshore wind farms are collapsing before they begin. They cost too much money for what they produce.

Let's turn city busses into surveillance platforms for the city police. What could possible go wrong?

We have technology to record a little of a person's voice and imitate it forever. Voice actors don't like this.

Meanwhile in the UK, a group of studiers say that cutting meat consumption will save the planet. None of these studiers earn a meager living from raising meat.

Simple lessons for leaders of people in a few cartoons.

This is an excellent essay on how to use these chattering software things and when not to use them.

JupyterLab 4.0 is released.

Twitter is changing its logo. For now, we have a cute little "x."

If you can't communicate as well as they do, sue them. Schools are suing social media platforms.

Thoughts on Hollywood, Silicon Valley marketing, and actors and writers and such.

Using the software Ai tools is new. We haven't adjusted yet. For some, productivity is way up while wages are stagnant.

And here we are: those traffic cameras as feeding super-duper-computers with AI software. Yes, we are catching criminals we didn't before. Yes, we are also harassing the rest of us.

Tuesday 25 July 2023

I like this: basically a book on how applications run on a computer. Good reference.

The managers at Reddit are trying to keep the big subreddits running.

It appears that Sergey Brin is walking the halls at Google again.

Sam Altman has a hit product in ChatGPT. Let's not take that and crown him king of the world or something.

And now we have "Barbenheimer." A combination of many factors made this past weekend a big $$$ one for movie theaters.

Strong criticism of Elon Musk at emTwitter, which is now called "X."

Researchers find a big flaw in an encryption commonly used in radios (military and police). This is encryption: it works fine until someone cracks the code.

This is a good article on people moving out of the high-cost big tech cities to other places in America. Fact: every person who moves into a town changes the town.

Well, what? The powerful and rich and such help each other all the time in politics and politics and politics. And people wonder why people wonder about politicians.

Researchers at MIT create a method of scrambling an image just enough so that AI software cannot alter the image while the image still "looks right" to the human eye.

This isn't your parents' flip phone, but it is sort of a flip phone.

Grammar: if you are to write, you should write correctly. Show some respect for writing and yourself.

One of those "if you want to, don't do these don'ts" or something like that. Make more money.

Health and writing. Many self-employed persons neglect their health.

Protect your writing life. Be smart and diligent with your computer files. I knew a man whose laptop computer was stolen. Whoosh. Twenty years of writing gone. He had no backup copies of anything.

Reality check on writing goals. Set goals that are completely in your power. I will write one hour each day --- completely in your power. I will earn a million bucks from writing --- not in your power.

Wednesday 26 July 2023

Tech companies and publishing companies are battling over intellectual property rights and AI and all that. Billion$ (with a B) are at stake.

A look at the world of the mainframe computer (we used to call them "big iron"). There are about 10,000 of them still running big busine$$. IBM still makes 99% of them.

Stack Overflow was a website programmers used to go for answers. Now programmers use the chattering sites. Stack Overflow use has fallen to less than half of what it was.

Thoughts about "the makers." These are the folks who create something in a garage. Hewlett and Packard did it. Page and Brin did it. Jobs and Wozniak did it.

Sam Altman muses about AI that will scare us all to death. He claims they made it, but won't release it. I doubt it.

And now we have talk, more than just talk, of using the SpaceX really by rocket Starship as a space station.

TikTok advances backwards as it adds text messages like Twitter had 15 years ago.

Meanwhile in drought-stricken areas, data centers are really using water.

Samsung shows some new phones. Here is one report.

I'll quote this, "In a paper sent to EU policymakers, a group of companies, including GitHub, Hugging Face, Creative Commons, and others, are encouraging more support for the open-source development of different AI models as they consider finalizing the AI Act. "

Amazon pushes further into the lucrative health care market. They are now using AI chatbots.

Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI launch the Frontier Model Forum to research increasingly powerful AI and establish best practices for controlling it.

Thursday 27 July 2023

Meanwhile in Europe, regulators decide to put electric vehicle charing stations every 60km (37mi).

OpenAI had a tool that would detect if something was written by AI. They pulled the tool in an admission that is just didn't work.

Here is a primer on large language models.

I'll just quote this, "A team of researchers at Stanford University has developed a micro-endovascular (MEV) probe that can record deep brain activity without surgery. "

TikTok has its own online store so we can buy things made in China.

Actual warfare is a laboratory that advances war technology. See, for example, Ukraine and drones.

A couple of our Senators in Washington want to create a new regulatory agency (don't we have enough already?) to regulate "big" tech.

Facebook now has three billion active users. That is almost ten times the population of the US.

More research into how to trick these AI chatter things into giving information they are not supposed to give.

Meanwhile in Europe, European regulators don't like it when successful American companies provide too much product to consumers.

A teacher of computer programming in college uses ChatGPT to write a real program, not just hobby programming.

Friday 28 July 2023

Meanwhile in China, they have a 20% unemployment rate for new college graduates.

Sony claims to have sold over 40 million PlayStation 5 consoles.

Meanwhile on America's highways, seven automakers band together to build EV charging stations to compete with Tesla's.

Meta's AR/VR division lost $7.7Billion (with a B) in the last six months.

New companies are hiring remote work only while old companies are demanding workers get back to the office. Hence, the new companies have a huge hiring advantage.

A quick look at the new Wordpress Playground. It allows experimenting with Wordpress in a browser window. No setup. No installs. All that gone.

If you are looking at a map on your phone, it is either from Apple or Google. Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon (yeah, those guys) are teaming up to build a competitor.

A good explanation of large language models with most of the mathematics left off.

Intel's quarterly sales drop, but makes a profit.

Roku has a good financial quarter.

AMD releases new processors for high-end gaming laptops.

WhatsApp adds the ability to send 60-second video messages.

New building designs from Chick-fil-A. The one with four drive-thru lanes will work in many places.

When do you tell an aged elected representative to go home and stay home? Voters keep them in office because they home seniority and bring power back home.

The earth is no longer warming, it is now boiling. So say the experts.

In 2014, Boeing signed a fixed-price contract with NASA to build a spacecraft. They have lost $1Billion on the contract.

Saturday 29 July 2023

Thoughts on really rich people and net-takers and net-givers.

How Amazon built and operated a pretty big storage system called S3.

Meanwhile in Japan, the population continues to drop. What went wrong there. Japan is killing itself.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Stack Overflow, its usage cut in half since the start of these chattering bots, adds AI to its site in an attempt to maintain what is left of it.

Intel CEO promises to build AI into everything. "Intel is about to launch Meteor Lake, its first chip with an onboard neural processor"

One person's experience inside Twitter. She sold her company to Twitter, so she had experiences spanning several layers of management at Twitter.

Good video to watch, inside Walmart's new warehouse than uses machines instead of people to do just about everything.

The sales of smartphones in America continues to drop and drop and drop.

Reversing many prior claims, Facebook admits that the Biden administration told it what to censor and it did. This is a bad precedent for all of us. Our fellow citizens in government have a job to say, "This is what we know. We think that is not true." Telling media companies to censor things is WRONG.

YouTube officially starts Multiview which lets someone watch up to four things at the same time. It guess might be fun.

NASA, unable to do just about anything but sit on the side and cheer on SpaceX and others, now has a NASA+ channel where its funders, i.e., taxpayers, can watch more video.

More studies show that what we see on Facebook really doesn't change our minds.

RV sales have plummeted after the PAN(dem)IC. Winnebago shows a new, low-end, $150,000 RV. That is just plain too expensive, but Winnebago thinks it will save them.

Another rebound after the PAN(dem)IC is that Americans are taking vacations again.

Sunday 30 July 2023

Forty years ago, Miss Karen Bundy married me.

For those of us old enough to have played Doom and known the wonders of Id Software, John Romero has a memoir of the era. I got my first full 32-bit C compiler through all this.

It isn't the big boys yet, but there are smaller companies attempting to have swappable instead of rechargeable batteries for cars.

Barnes & Noble stores have been reinvented. We have a new one in our neighborhood. Love it. Their eBook readers, however, are stuck in the past. Sometimes that, too, is good.

An electric car hits 135 MPH indoor. This is some type of record.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, with everyone on strike, the Emmy awards are being delayed.

The emergence and disappearance of the Internet Cafe. There are a few of them left in the world. Here is a report on those.

Believe it or not, we used to have websites that listed WiFi places. As a traveller, those places were gold. Now, if a place doesn't have WiFi, people wonder about it. But then, who cares, we all have connected phones.

Somewhere in time, advertising during an election became "election interference." Who decided that? And to think that some folks might stretch the truth in election ads. Gosh. Really?

The newest line of super-duper-computers is here.

Good article on Mike Masnick. He is the person who runs Techdirt. Look at Techdirt. It is an open and candid review of tech things in law enforcement, government, and business.

Google merges robotics and large language models. The robots can understand commands. "Pick up the trash."

Meanwhile in earth orbit, Starlink (that satellite Internet service owned by Elon Musk and powered by his SpaceX rockets) dominates. Per this article, that domination has great national security implications.

This site contains all the instructions for all the Lego kits. Thousands of them.