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: 14-20 August, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Saudi Arabia and UAE buy thousands of processors from Nvidia
• PC sales continue to be bad
• Smartphone sales continue to be bad
• Angst in San Francisco over self-driving taxis
• And more fussing in Hollywood over strikes and AI and producers
• Russia's lunar vehicle crashes on the moon

Monday 14 August 2023

Apple's Watch is approaching ten years old. Strong rumors of a major change on the anniversary.

Historical warnings about supervised learning (what we call machine learning and AI now). There were very few "women of color" supervising the learning. The results were prototype systems that were pushed to production too soon. I don't think it was racism or whatever. It was simply bad engineering practice.

All this AI chatting stuff has yet to turn a profit $$$. It may never.

A look at the computer network that is built and unbuilt every year at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

A history of Russian-speaking hackers, a.k.a., cyber criminals.

Amazon, playing catchup in generative AI, is designing its own processors that it will build to bypass the shortage of processors from Nvidia.

Write books? Looked at Amazon lately? Are their "dumpster fire books" out there with your name on them?

These are pretty good tips about putting written material on the Internet and using the comments that may return.

When trying to build a writing business (and if money is the objective, it is a business) there are many ways to waste your time.

Thoughts on the emotional aspects of writing for pay or receiving money for writing.

If you want to earn money writing, this is a pretty good guide. Write well, find a subject, find an (paying) audience. The last step isn't always easy.

Here are some questions that someone may ask if you are interviewing for a technical writer job.

This is a good piece on outlining. If you don't outline, that's okay. This then is about writing parts of the story before writing the whole story. This writer uses index cards to write parts of the story and then shuffles them around to help put the whole story together.

Tuesday 15 August 2023

Meanwhile in America, local, state, and Federal governments want to tell social media companies what they can and cannot censor. We are an odd lot. Those are private companies. They are trying to make profits. They allow and block what they think will bring profits. If you want to speak, start your own website and speak. Why are we depending on California companies to provide us speech?

More news from America, we are giving away taxpayer money so some of us can access the Internet at no cost.

Meanwhile in China where everything is regulated by the Communist Party, they are adjusting regulations on AI companies.

The governors of Saudi Arabia and UAE are buying thousands of processors from Nvidia. They want to keep up with everyone else in AI. It is good to be Nvidia.

Threads will be studied for years. It had 100million account creations this year. Only half a million people use it. Whooooosh.

Here is another management study. 80% of bosses regret their early calls of back to the office. They did not understand what people wanted. Stupid reigns supreme.

The health care records of millions of Americans are stolen. Remember that President who brought us national electronic health records. They named health care after him. What was his name?

The history of the corporate PowerPoint presentation.

Andrew Ng, pay attention to what he writes, on large language models and how they work.

Amazon will give us the option to eliminate "extra" packaging. I'm all for that.

The concept of "code locality" or "code that is read together should be written together."

I like this. Good to experiment. Provide an image or a little phrase of text and it expands and describes it.

This idea is different enough to make it intriguing: "We hypothesize that one way for image classifiers to reach high accuracy is to first zoom to the most discriminative region in the image and then extract features from there to predict image labels, discarding the rest of the image."

And I like this idea as well. Follow anything with a minimum of attention. Just do it and the result is pretty good.

The Carrot Problem: Essentially, any time someone achieves success in a way they don't want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse for their abilities. And that means misleading a bunch of people into (potentially) wasting their time, or worse.

What makes working at a "startup intoxicating?"

Amazon wants its employees to return to the office. AMAZON WANTS ITS EMPLOYEES TO RETURN TO THE OFFCE!!! Get it?

Wednesday 16 August 2023

I will just quote this title. It is gold. I heartily agree: Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better.

How one person uses large language models daily. It is mostly about keeping track of everything you learn.

The search for one medicine that cures everything. These are risky approaches. If something goes wrong, everything goes wrong.

NASA is about to launch a six year mission to land on an asteroid that is full of valuable $$$ minerals.

Netflix finally gets around to streaming games.

This is the kind of stuff that is really important to some people: Apple moves their "end call" button a tenth of an inch and makes headlines.

Google adds a few new features to its Search Generative Experience (SGE).

Meanwhile in San Francisco, those driverless taxis aren't doing very well. They are prototypes and ... they are making everyone angry.

Our tax dollars at work, "the Commerce Department has been quietly building a small team of elite Wall Street financiers to help allocate $39 billion in taxpayer-funded manufacturing subsidies and other incentives to hundreds of companies." What could possible go wrong?

Smart construction companies are using AI, drones, robots, and other new gadgets to speed up projects and make more money.

A little side note on the war in Ukraine: Russia is becoming richer while America is going the other direction.

According to Nielson, Americans are watching everything else on our TVs more than we are watching TV on our TVs. Make sense?

Thursday 17 August 2023

A company called Intuitive Machines says its payload is ready to go the moon. There is a launch window in the latter half of November.

Meanwhile for us Microsoft Word users, new defaults and everything are coming in early September.

Hot-wire a car? How 20th century.

OpenAI applies GPT-4 to the problem of "is this material ok to put on the Internet or in the public library or ...."

Technical details on how you run a large language model on just about any hardware. Be smart. Optimize the code for lesser hardware. People have done this for decades. It is just that no one has put much effort into the LLM stuff.

Strong rumors about Google's next big push into AI and chatting.

And we find yet another instance when one of these AI things just plain looks stupid.

This is what we should be doing with the latest technology. Stop that silly stuff. "Mind Over Paralysis: AI Helps Quadriplegic Man Move and Feel Again"

Now it gets real: cyber security experts are being threatened physically IRL.

If you can't beat 'em, ask them to help you. Government and companies ask hackers to hack AI systems. They do; they find lots of problems.

Eric Schmidt is starting a new "non-profit" company to apply AI to science.

Parts of our government has told the rest of it to improve cyber security. They haven't.

Lenovo's poor financial performance shows that PC sales are still down after the pan(dem)ic.

The world's economies are connected --- maybe too much. The bad economy in China is causing a worldwide slump in sales of smartphones.

Friday 18 August 2023

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: Google is working on AI that gives advice on life in general.

Apple continues its move away from China as a business partner and towards India.

This is a deep paper on ten major challenges in large language model research.

Guidance on finding the next job.

Meanwhile in Brazil, cheap online workers try their best to keep everyone else out of their jobs.

Meanwhile in Nigeria, tech workers are moving from the big cities to smaller, less-expensive cities. Wait, that's what we did in America?

Survey says: companies not ready for ChatGPT at work. You need to be able to point it at company data without anyone else seeing the company data. Simple.

Microsoft proposes Azure ChatGPT as an alternative. You go to the web for ChatGPT, but to Microsoft, not to OpenAI. Difference?

The New York Times doesn't like it that OpenAI used the New York Times for a teeny tiny part of its training of ChatGPT. Inflated view of themselves, but that is the old newspaper media.

If you use it just right, GPT-4 breaks some kind of math problem solving record.

We have so many large language models, we now have a toolset to evaluate them all.

Meta is about to release code-generating AI. This will write more software than prior models.

AI is appearing more in "influence campaigns." I guess that means advertising? Again, when did running an ad during a political campaign become some sort of "interference?"

Jeff Bezos owns a lot of houses. Aerial photos show that his security crews don't know what they are doing.

The Debian Linux Release is now 30 years old.

Some people are just learning that computers use electricity and big computers use more electricity. And these folks claim to be adults.

Saturday 19 August 2023

Google loses a few or its more famous researchers to a startup started by a few of its more famous researchers. Got name, will travel, money follows.

NASA is long past its prime (50 years past it). The building are falling down. The administrators flopped one administration after another.

The big tech companies laid off 100,000 persons. They aren't hiring any back.

The woes of writing software to handle email.

We are either pumping carbon into or out of the oceans. What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile in San Francisco, yes, we have yet another self-driving taxi story. The governors of the city and state tell Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM, to reduce its robotaxi fleet by 50%.

A judge rules "no copyright" for AI-produced things. This is in Hollywood where there are labor disputes, so it is far more political than practical. Movie fans have loved all those super hero movies where much of everything was generated by computers and software operated by skilled artists. If a skilled artist manipulates new software (AI) to create entertainment, well, what's the difference?

Here comes the money $$$. In the UK, a camera connected to computers and AI software is spotting people violating driving regulations. The system sends out tickets. This will come to America fast as it brings in the money. Oh, no, there were no accidents. People broke the law but drove safely. No public safety violated. Just a money grab.

The list of silly things to blame for the Hawaii fire is growing. Let's see, Donald Trump and Joe Biden should be somewhere on the list. And, what about that recent President who grew up in Hawaii? He should have done something in his native state, huh?

Meanwhile in China, they are not having children. Short-term gain? Long-term pain is a certainty.

DARPA has paid Georgia Tech researchers to decompile or reverse engineer binaries back to source code. There are some good reasons to do so.

Sunday 20 August 2023

"GSA undertaking study to examine racial bias in facial recognition tech" Simple, the builders used the wrong training data. Testing? They goofed their, too. Sounds like a billion-dollar study.

Just in time to run all these new large language models, Nivida announces the GH200 processor to run everything in half the time.

Thomson Reuters is using AI in the office. The goals is to improve productivity with the same number of employees vice replacing employees.

"Catching up on the weird world of LLMs"

Using the latest software technology to help develop new vaccines.

This story is making the rounds: software has become quite good at those tiresome catpchas where you click on the bicycle or traffic light.

The police in Detroit did something completely stupid. They arrested a woman who was eight months pregnant for car jacking. They put her in jail for a day. Not obvious to them? How stupid can you be? My older brother had a saying, "Were you born that stupid or did you go to a special school to learn how to be that stupid?"

AnonFiles, both famous and infamous, calls it quits.

Favoring reality over idealism, some schools are teaching students what these AI chat things are and how to use them.

There are big companies that were work-from-anywhere the day they were founded. They still flourish.

Using robots to find and fix problems at chemical plants. Shell's Geismar facility, down the river from Baton Rouge, is featured. My father-in-law worked there many years.

Russia flew an unmanned vehicle to the moon, but it crashed upon arrival.