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: 7-13 August, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Indiana tries to build a tech hub
• Nvidia announces even more AI processors and tools
• We don't have a room-temperature superconductor after all
• Self-driving taxis are approved for San Francisco
• Fires in Maui Hawaii kill dozens of people

Monday 7 August 2023

Meanwhile in Congress, with all good intentions but clumsy words and cloudy thinking we have some bills that aim to protect children but may remove privacy from adults.

Meanwhile in Indiana, governors have converted 10,000 acres of farmland into what they hope will be a hub for the latest technology companies.

Amazon's books has been "flooded" with travel guides written by travel writers who ... well, they are con artists. The little books were written mostly by software that does this sort of thing with dubious quality.

Was it too good to be true? Maybe so. ChatGPT has become worse at math. Old age I guess.

Someone is listening: the different keys on a computer keyboard make slightly different sounds. Software and clever algorithms can tell the difference and reproduce they text.

Where to writers go on vacation? In a big sense, writers are never on vacation. Everywhere they are is a pile of ideas to save for future typing of words.

Organizing ideas as a writer: this spreadsheet looks fancy. It's just a computer version of a pile of 3x5 cards or things jotted on the back of a grocery store receipt.

This is a good piece that includes basic information about writing for pay in 2023.

For some writers, their family members (close, distant, or both) roll their eyes and shake their heads when someone says the writer "is a writer." This piece has some advice for the writer.

Memoir ideas: where are you in time when you are writing?

Read, read, and read as you write, write, and write. Keep up with the times.

"You can make anything by writing."---C.S. Lewis

Tuesday 8 August 2023

SpaceX on Sunday performed a static fire test of test fired a new Super Heavy booster. Most of the engines fired. The test stand was not destroyed.

We are closer to making blood vessels that can be used to replace faulty ones. Today, we pull a vessel from here and put it there. Sometimes those replacement vessels are not available.

Alibaba launched an open source AI model to rival that of Meta. The new model is called Tongyi Qianwen. That does not translate well to English. It is something about asking.

Qualcomm and others are working on the RISC V architecture in a challenge to ARM.

This is a good essay about remote work. It candidly looks at different types of people (high performers and goof offs) and different types of companies and draw a few useful conclusions.

And now we have Jupyter AI. I will have to look at this one for a while.

The grievous vexation around this superconductor at room temperature continues. Someone learns that the materials needed to make LK 99 have become rare and expensive.

Zoom updates its terms of service. It will use some user data to train its AI models.

OpenAI now has something called GPTBot that crawls the web to improve its large language models.

It appears possible to judges all these chattering software things as which is more like this or like that. Relative rankings may be interesting, but have little science behind them.

Strong rumors about the new Apple processor called M3 Max going into a new MacBook Pro in 2024.

TSMC makes all the chips for Apple's iPhones. They have a new contract that will save Apple Billion$.

It appears that the governors of China succeed in hacking into Japan's defense network a couple of years ago.

Zoom, which enabled so many people to work from home, is requiring its employees to come into the office.

We find a 300,000-year-old skull in China that breaks all the existing theories of human evolution. There is so much garbage in this story it is hard to know where to start.

Wednesday 9 August 2023

New from Google search: Type a sentence and receive a grammar checks or check or something.

Here is a stinging critique of Google Maps. I have to agree with it.

India's unmanned mission to the moon is now in lunar orbit and sending back photos of the moon's surface.

You have to love this story: after 27 years, a Burger King employee was rewarded with a little bag of goodies. Folks online then donated $400,000 to him. Burger King must be taking lessons from our Federal government whose longevity rewards are even worse.

"There's no easy way to fight Big Tech because it doesn't exist."

A few comments on some notable failures into businesses that had no hope, but faked a lot of hope.

Reflections on Edsger Dijkstra's One-Day Workweek.

Meanwhile in China where the governors are the Communist Party of China, the governors require all mobile app developers to work with the governors.

Nvidia announces an AI Workbench to help developers test AI models on ordinary PCs before scaling them for the world.

Nvidia announces the Grace Hopper Superchip---an advance on their earlier versions of the processor. The Superchip will serve as the heart of a new server computer design that can handle a greater amount of information and access it more quickly.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the governors of India created the Indian Institute of Technology in half-a-dozen locations. That investment spawned the booming high-tech businesses we see today.

I'll just quote the headline, "Google launches Project IDX, a new AI-enabled browser-based development environment"

Meanwhile in America, our Federal government is accumulating $5Billion a day...in debt.

Thursday 10 August 2023

It appears that WeWork will fail and fall into bankruptcy.

It appears that this LK-99 is not a room-temperature superconductor after all.

Arm is about to have an IPO. It seems that Amazon will be the biggest investor.

Amazon runs half the Arm servers in the world. They are the leading manufacturer of Arm systems in the world.

Reports that Stack Overflow lost half its users are false. Someone was comparing apples to rocks or something silly.

I'll just quote the headline, "Stability AI launches StableCode, an LLM for code generation"

Sometimes hindsight makes you look better than you were. Nvidia claims that it was a stroke of genius that positioned them for the AI boom and all that $$$.

Disney looks into cutting cost (jobs) via the use of AI.

Law enforcement organizations claim they are geniuses in the use of technology as they have eliminated the serial killer. We shall see.

Our President bans investments in Chinese tech companies. I guess he has that authority.

The EU does not follow the President's ban.

Disney raises the prices on all the streaming services it owns. That is a large number of well-known services.

Excellent advice in this short Seth Godin post, "When in doubt, look for the fear"

A new study shows... (ready for this one?) reducing air pollution from ships is heating the planet.

Meanwhile in China, a study shows that the Chinese universities are not turning research into profitable businesses as they are supposed to do.

It appears that Intel, AMD, and Nvidia collect data from the users of their processors.

Friday 11 August 2023

Here is a tutorial on "drift" in machine learning systems.

AI seems to be helping in the drug discovery industry. Perhaps medicine costs will fall?

There is hope for bad PowerPoint presentations. Well, some hope.

Here are a few tips on trying to learn about someone via online searches.

Home security or surveillance of domestic help (who are much poorer than the persons using the tech).

Considering options in lithium mining for all those electric vehicles. What is funny about this article is that folks think all this effort is going to influence the climate.

Here comes Task Force Lima. DoD creates a group to look at generative AI. "Lima?" Really?

According to some new benchmarks and tests, GPT-4 is the best of something or other.

Here is a novel idea. Feed a user manual into a large language model. Ask for instructions. Simple.

And now we have the Open Enterprise Linux Association. Oracle and others form this because of Red Hat's decision to sort of hide source code.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, Waymo and Cruise were approved to operate their robotaxi services 24/7.

Amazon reduces its "in-store" brands. The lawsuits were piling up.

The billion$ keep flowing to Ukraine to fight the Russians. In some sense, this is pennies on the dollar we would have spent otherwise, but it is a pretty big pile of pennies.

Meanwhile at college, the news is bad for all of us. State universities have spent wildly and passed on the costs to students. These were supposed to be the place the middle class and poor sent their kids. Terrible administrators ruined them.

Restricted to buy the less-capable processors, China still orders $5Billion (with a B) in chips from Nvidia.

Antropic updates its Claude large language model.

Saturday 12 August 2023

How do you make virtual reality experiences seem more like actual reality? Shake the headset.

The Russians attempt to land something softly on the moon for the first time since 1976.

Meanwhile at the edge of space, Virgin Galactic sends a few tourists there for a few minutes. $450,000 per ticket is a bit steep.

A look at the newest Bose QuietComfort Ultra headphones.

I'll just quote the headline, "Sam Bankman-Fried sent to jail for witness tampering"

Are Internet Archives preserving history or stealing copyrighted material today?

A historical marker for this summer: there has been nonsensical talk of an actual physical brawl match between Zuckerburg and Musk.

The writers and actors remain on strike. This causes many others to lose their jobs.

Stanford teaches AI to congressional staffers. A good deed or just another form of lobbying. There are differing opinions among research and practitioners. Politics is involved.

Some people have a firm grasp of the obvious: when you crash a spacecraft into an asteroid you have bits and pieces flying all over the place. NASA seemed unaware of this.

Sunday 13 August 2023

AI at its finest (?). Pay $1.40, feed it some driver's license photos and get back a glamour shot (remember those?).

The Markup shares some spreadsheets that help with investigations.

The top science publishers are S L O W L Y moving into AI-enable search and summarization.

A review of a few open-source large language models.

ChatGPT extends its Custom Instruction to everyone at no charge.

Sports betting is booming in America. And so is addiction to gambling.

Meanwhile is Sweden, they have a Psychological Defense Agency that is fighting online misinformation coming from foreign sources. If the Soviets blocked Voice of America, that was censorship. Today we call it something else.

Meanwhile in China, the economy is bad and becoming worse. COVID started there. China is an unreliable business partner.

A discussion of "why don't we have a standard Linux?" Well, we do, sort of, but...