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: 21-27, August 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Ukraine learns that defense is easier than offense as it spring offensive is failing
• Nvidia keeps rolling in the money as AI processor demand is high
• In Russia, Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin dies in a plane crash
• Nvidia has a huge financial quarter with growth over 100%
• India lands an unmanned vehicle on the moon safely and successfully

Monday 21 August 2023

Kids are seeing other kids fake disorders on TikTok and then acting them out as well. We used to call this monkey see monkey do.

Meanwhile in the UK, 100 million pounds is set aside to buy GPUs for national research centers.

Peer reviewers cannot detect papers written by AI helpers. Well, if it is a good paper, it is a good paper.

Many of these large language models were trained with copyrighted books from rich and famous authors.

John Warnock dies at 82. He co founded Adobe.

Meanwhile on the moon, China has a satellite with deep ground penetrating radar, and it is revealing layers of dust, rocks, and history.

News Flash (not): wildfires produce smoke and other stuff we don't like. And adults are surprised?

IBM researchers predict that 40 percent of white collar workers will have to learn new jobs in the next three years because of AI in the office.

The concept of a book family tree.

I'll just quote the title, "Stop Reading. Start Doing. Now!"

25 different "pages" that would or should be on your website.

Are you a successful writer? That all depends, of course, on how you measure "success."

A set of five-minutes lessons for the learning writer.

I read this entire blog post. I never reached the place where the writer told me what the headline said I would read. I don't get it.

Great title, "Is this a good book for me, now?"

Basic tips to writing a research paper or any non-fiction.

Tuesday 22 August 2023

Google plans to delete accounts that have been inactive for two years. People who have inactive accounts do not like this.

Strong rumors that the next AI release from Meta will write better code.

Perhaps humans have not adjusted to all the changes in diet and food that we slammed on ourselves. That is why we are fat and allergic to everything.

Intel shows that new product releases need a year to tune. They change the drivers to year old hardware and see big gains in performance.

Back to the office: Meta threatens to fire folks who will need return.

Back to the office: Amazon employees want data to show that returning to the office is a good idea. Amazon managers just say so.

It appears that the large language models are good enough right out of the box. All the extra work is not necessary.

Meanwhile in the UK, Microsoft changes is Activision purchase to satisfy regulators. Note: this is not to be legal; it is to satisfy a committee that thinks it knows how to run businesses.

Someone asks Google's AI subjective political questions and doesn't like the answers. What an accomplishment. They showed the software has errors. They proved that the commonplace is commonplace.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, the New York Times has three reporters ride in Waymo driver-less taxis.

Meanwhile in China, "Nvidia's processors are weakened for the Chinese market, but are still more powerful than the alternatives."

New technologies have replaced old technologies, but business is still the same. Capture market, then raise prices.

For some people, Microsoft is previewing how to use Python inside Excel. I've been waiting for this for several years.

We progress to the past with wind-assisted cargo ships. Well, we hope those doing this have figured out the return on investment.

Wednesday 23 August 2023

I'll just quote this one, "I'm telling you that the absolute very best time to talk to a recruiter happens when you're not looking for a job."

Here are some practical lessons on infrastructure as code. Write code that sets up everything for you.

Here is a long-term historical perspective on how Satya Nadella has steered Microsoft in the AI realm over several decades.

Here is VisionScript. It is an abstract programming language for doing common computer vision tasks, fast.

I'll just draw my pictures with a text-to-picture AI thingy. Really? Maybe not yet.

We will all use YouTube, Facebook, TikTok et al to start our own entertainment business and make million$. Well, maybe not.

Sony shows a new portable game gadget called the PlayStation Portal.

Qualcomm tries again to build processors for gaming.

There are lots of things to measure on a farm. So far at least, there has been little practical use for all that data.

An international cyber-crime gang responsible for a hacking spree against major tech firms was run by, you guessed it, teenagers just having fun.

I'll just quote this one, "IBM today unveiled Code Assistant for IBM Z, which uses a code-generating AI model to translate COBOL code into Java."

Binance, claiming to be following the laws, is still doing a lot of trading in Russia.

Here is a long view of the last ten years in AI research. The writer claims we hit a discontinuity or revolution (not evolution) of capabilities around 2017.

At this moment, the demand for processors for AI is far higher than the supply. Nvidia is rolling in the money and boosting production.

Great headline, "Sorry, But LinkedIn Is Cool Now" emTwitter is now X. Facebook is ... whatever. TikTok is banned. LinkedIn rolls on.

"Meta has created an AI model, SeamlessM4T, that can translate and transcribe close to 100 languages across text and speech."

Nvidia improves its Deep Learning Super Sampling technology (DLSS) for better visuals in gaming.

Thursday 24 August 2023

Meanwhile here in Fairfax County Virginia, the county governors have so much money to spend that we are giving $750 per month to 180 families for 15 months as an experiment.

As predicted, Nvidia has a huge financial quarter and wins the AI boom with its hardware.

This is not the old days of IBM and corporate America as Amazon employees quite instead of moving to another city.

And now we have free and open source graphics drivers that are conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 implementations for M1- and M2-family graphics hardware

A look into how video games are built. The claim is this is different from other software development.

The promise of text-to-video is now a reality. This is pretty good.

On the AI front, it seems that ChatGPT has a much broader scope of use than anticipated.

A lot of thought is in the essay on the shortage of workers in the US and how new technologies may be able to provide enough automation for the economy to continue to grow.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University are improving the capability of brain implants to help the disabled speak. This is what we should be doing with all this technology we have.

It appears that SpaceX is working with Cloudflare to build more "mini data centers" and improve the reach of the Starlink program.

LG is putting the Amazon Luna cloud-based game streaming service on its smart TVs.

Meanwhile in Russia, Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin dies in a plane crash. Many believe Mr. Putin caused the crash.

More on the battle to stay at home or return to the office. General statements are meaningless. This is a local, not a national, issue.

India has successfully landed an unmanned vehicle on the moon.

VMWare announces they have software tools that allow an organization to build chattering bots in their own data center with just their own data.

IBM is selling its weather businesses. The most famous one is weather dot com.

Friday 25 August 2023

The economics of AI: Nvidia is "making all the money in AI."

The economics of AI: make the money while you can as the use of those chattering things on the Internet is dwindling.

This GitHub repository makes it easier to run vision models and others.

Here come the humanoid robots. At 5'8" and 160 pounds, this guy can do a couple of tasks with a couple hundred more promised by delivery at Christmas 2024.

And we have Project Moohan. Google has to do something to make an AR/VR headset like Apple.

A review of the copy.ai site that "helps" people write all sorts of things.

Gartner places generative AI at the peak of inflated expectations in its recent hype cycle.

You think you know logistics? How about keeping the research station at the South Pole running?

"The Biden administration's cornerstone artificial intelligence policy documents, released in the past year, are inherently contradictory and provide confusing guidance for tech companies..." Oh well, it was a good idea when they started.

Walmart and Alphabet are testing drone delivers of products in the Dallas area. This would be quite costly.

Microsoft points to hackers working from China in hacking attempts against Taiwan.

Dropbox says that "all you can eat" is now 5Terabytes. I am sure they have plans for business users that go beyond that number.

Meanwhile in Germany, the zero this and that targets are not happening.

Our Customs and Border Protection is spending million$ on software to detect sentiment and emotion in "those people's" social media posts. Junk science. Taxpayers' dollars.

Saturday 26 August 2023

Screen apnea: people alter their breathing when focusing on something. Well, yeah, so what?

One man builds computers by hand out of fine wood.

Meanwhile at Zoom, you need to come to the office because Zoom meetings don't work so well.

Yet another attempt to explain transformers and attention from the 2017 paper. I have never seen anything so poorly explained that it spawned an industry to people attempting to explain it.

Shoot a simple video with your iPhone. Luma AI's software turns it into a drone-like fly through. This is aimed at the real estate industry.

A small study shows that ChatGPT can answer a few questions from college courses better than about a third of actual college students.

Stephen King doesn't mind his works being used to train AI systems without being paid. He, however, is rich. Most struggling writers would like some pay.

I'll just quote the headline, "LinkedIn statistics show massive impact of ChatGPT on AI market" LinkedIn is a pretty good source to check for job listings and the industry in general.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, the two biggest movies of the year are Super Mario Brothers and Barbie. Note to all those striking artists: we still like good clean fun entertainment. Sorry if that offends you.

Colleges should have a one-credit-hour course on job searching required 12 months before graduation. Some colleges already do this, but they are few.

I don't understand all the marketing jargon here, but it looks like it is easier to run Windows software on a Chromebook.

Yet another example of if you type something into one website, that information is probably going to many other websites.

AMD announces new graphics processors that are under $500 and complete their 7000-series. Gamers et al have more choices now. Nvidia can sell AI processors while AMD sells fun. And we want fun (see earlier note about the Barbie movie).

This is known as a lagging economic indicator: fewer American students are learning Mandarin Chinese.

Let's not jump too quickly to these new paper straws as nice to the environment. Seems they have toxic chemicals in them.

Meanwhile in Hawaii, the government is suing the power company due to the fires. Note, the government overseas the power company. Who failed?

Some of us take a lot of notes on the computer (see, e.g., this daily viewing of the Internet). Can some of this AI software help us connect the dots on all these notes?

Sunday 27 August 2023

If you can't stop them from cheating, make it not cheating. Schools give it to letting students use ChatGPT.

In the biggest most concentrated search in 50 years, 200 people descend on Loch Ness in Scotland to find the great creature.

Automation comes looking for white-collar jobs.

Synopsis is a lesser-known chip designing company. They have $500million is sales this year for AI processors. That's a lot of money for a lesser-known company.

Looking at the long term, WordPress offers 100-year registrations. Just $38,000.

Meanwhile in New Jersey, CoreWeave rents GPUs in the cloud and is hauling in the AI money. Just goes to show that you can still start something in a saturated marketplace.

Bjarne Stroustrup in 72. He invented C++ (let's forgive him for that). Advice for young programmers he warns against those who, "haven't spent enough time building up friendships and having a life outside computing."