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: 28 August - 3 September, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Hurricane Idalia hits the Gulf Coast of Florida
• IBM goes back into the facial recognition practice

Monday 28 August 2023

Strong rumors that Apple will make a major change to its iPad lineup in 2024.

Given the advances in computing and software, intellectual arguments that have raged for hundreds of years are now practical.

A look at how our Air Force is testing drones that use AI to fly themselves. It is basically advanced automation.

Some consumer-tech magazines are offering ChatGPT trained only on their publications to give smart answers to readers.

Programmers continue to adopt the Rust programming language.

Linus 6.5 is released.

Not having much else to do with their time, researchers discover why cats like to eat tuna. Really? Come on folks. Do something real or quit.

Good title; good post: "Albert Camus on Writing and the Importance of Stubbornness in Creative Work"

Trying to find a publisher for a finished novel. Good luck with all that.

Is your name trademarked? Of course not.

Well, here we go, "Is Book Writing Profitable? The Financial Aspect of Writing a Book" J.K. Rowling did okay with book writing. The rest of us? Not so much $$$.

How one writer found himself writing a lot of words, "I developed a practice of writing every morning, of putting out content, of just making it a priority for me to do alongside the rest of my life." As Nike said, "Just Do It"

Here is one method for writing a book. There are about a thousand variations.

Thoughts on writing in the Christian marketplace.

Should you plot or outline or just bang the keyboard and watch the words sprout? Funny analog with a Dr. Suess book.

Tuesday 29 August 2023

WhatsApp supports an amazingly large number of users and messages each day with on 32 engineers. Feature creep is not allowed. They do what they do and nothing else. Focus folks. Focus.

IBM has analog AI processing chips. They are a dozen times more energy efficient than the digital GPUs everyone else uses.

Tesla obtains approval to build an entertainment complex (restaurants, movies, etc.) around a charging station center. While you wait hours to recharge, you spend money on other things.

Another post about how those click all squares with a bicycle things are useless now as AI software can easily beat them.

Meanwhile at Amazon, come to the office three days a week or else. Work from here or there or yonder is a local problem. Amazon executives want their west coast employees in the office.

It appears that the tech world has companies that cannot get GPUs from Nvidia and others that can. There are few in the middle of these two camps. The rich get GPUs, the poor get poorer.

Meanwhile in Poland, the railroad system halted. It is run on radio, like most systems worldwide. Simple hack shut it down.

Meanwhile in the Amazon cloud, no one seems to have Amazon Linux 2023. Even Amazon cannot find it.

Our Dept of Defense is about to have a big push into AI systems.

Intel claims that its new Sierra Forest processor for data centers delivers much more processing power using much less electric power. The number 240% improvement is used.

Much of today's AI is a variation of what we used to call "supervised learning." A person must overcome the "test oracle problem." This article shows the misery, low pay, and sometimes no pay of humans who are the oracles and are training the computers to take their little jobs.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Enterprise for businesses to use their chattering AI system.

All the big tech star CEOs will attend Senator Schumer's Insight Forum. Perhaps they will discuss something of substance, but I doubt it. Included are: Elon Musk (SpaceX and Tesla), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sam Altman(OpenAI), Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Eric Schmidt (Google), and Sundar Pichai (Google).

Wednesday 30 August 2023

Elon Musk claims to show full self-driving. Such claims have been made before, so we are a bit skeptical.

Here's an analysis of Nvidia's market position and financial standing. It is good. Nvidia is indeed on the mountaintop.

This is a good analysis of consumption on the Internet. There will be a few big hits, e.g., Facebook, and millions of places with little or no attention, e.g., me.

SpaceX conducted a second hot fire test of its Super Heavy booster.

Zuckerberg claims he can type fast on a virtual keyboard wearing a goofy headset.

More speculation on drones that accompany manned fighter jets into battle.

We don't seem worried about losing our jobs to ChatGPT. Folks who lose jobs never seem to see it coming. Folks who don't lose their jobs were right not to worry about nothing.

Hurricane Idalia hits the Gulf Coast of Florida.

HP has a bad financial quarter as PC sales continue in the post-pan(dem)ic slump.

While HPE does well financially as data center and accompanying AI work are up.

It appears that OpenAI has found a way to make money with ChatGPT via sales to companies.

Meanwhile in India, the national government has installed surveillance equipment at stations where undersea cables come to land. This allows the governors to watch just about anybody they wish.

Meanwhile in the Sino-Japan sphere, Japan pretty much confirms that their security systems were all hacked by China.

Apple announces their big event coming September 12th. The iPhone 15 will be there. Maybe some other surprises.

Google announces some new AI offerings on from its cloud services.

The New York Times is now some kind of expert in local California real estate and politics.

Not having much to do, "scientist" have studied and conclude that becoming drunk does not make unattractive people appear attractive. These folks need a real job.

I'll just quote the headline, "Apple to Buy TSMC's Entire Supply of 3nm Chips for 2023"

Thursday 31 August 2023

TSMC was going to build a chip-making plant in Arizona. Well, sometimes things just don't work out.

How big tech (you would recognize the names) enable deepfake porn videos.

I love this. AI is artificial---it isn't real. Why do we expect it to be?

A long and detailed consideration of the idea of measuring programmer productivity. One of the concepts is that metrics programs work for a while, then they tend to run amok.

Notice that Microsoft Edge has a briefcase on the icon? Edge for business. Clever?

Bellingcat, open source intelligence experts, launches a new tool to measure the destruction of forests in Ukraine.

Data mesh never took off. Maybe Data Mesh 2.0 has a chance.

Another Senator wants to know if Federal employees are actually working from home or "out playing golf."

Meanwhile in Europe, Microsoft will pull Teams out of Microsoft 365 because ... well because it is a successful American company operating in Europe where regulators want to tell it what to do.

Microsoft is dropping Visual Studio for Mac. Look elsewhere for an IDE.

"Auto workers want 40% pay increases." Well I do too. Who doesn't?

Advanced telescopes, run by government agencies, were shutdown by hackers.

HP releases a new laptop with 16-inch display and new processors from Intel and Nvidia.

LG has a portable 27-inch TV that comes in its own suitcase. I guess someone has a use for such a thing.

Friday 1 September 2023

There is a new standard for a direct power connection to GPU cards in PCs.

Tips for passing a coding test in an interview. Beware of producing things for people in "interviews." That is money you are giving to someone.

This Github repository has code to help create typing shortcuts. Interesting idea.

Some thoughts on how to do something in your job that people notice and appreciate.

This is a good article on how people use ChatGPT. Asking ChatGPT to write software is the #1 use. Education is #2. And use is down down down.

It appears that China is circumventing restrictions on Nvidia processors by buying them from countries in the middle east.

a16z (Andreessen Horowitz venture capital) is funding open-source AI projects.

Researchers build a system that can race first-person view (FPV) drones just as fast as world-class humans. We have reached a point in small computers and telecommunications that make this possible.

Microsoft needs a hit for XBox. Here comes Starfield with 1,000 explorable planets. Will it work?

Dell has a better-than-expected financial quarter.

Meta releases an AI benchmark called FACET (the acronym has something in it about fairness) to judge the fairness of computer vision systems that label things in images.

Shell drops out of buying carbon offsets. $100million per year was going into that. This is yet another blow to the green movement or whatever we are calling it today.

IBM drops out of the "we don't do facial recognition" crowd. It is using its tech for the UK.

Anguilla a tropical British territory. It internet domain suffix is "ai." Well, you can guess the rest of the story as everyone wants the my-company.ai thing,

BMW upgrades its Mini Cooper electric models. These things are neat, but are toys for the rich.

Saturday 2 September 2023

Must see video: this shows how Boston Dynamics and robots has advanced in the past 30 years.

This is a marketing video, but it is neat to see the racks and racks of computing in a Google data center.

Fussing about the stuff that is being published and re-published today.

This paper proposes a method of training these machine learning systems without using low-paid persons. The computer takes over most of that mundane work. They call it ReST for Reinforced Self-Training.

A new Chrome extension enables copying a high-quality frame from a video. It has always perplexed me why this has been so difficult.

Here is an excellent example of speculating about the distant past and calling it actual science. 900,000 thousand years ago we almost went extinct as there were only 1,280 (not 1,290) humans left to keep us going.

OpenAI goes for the education market with plans for helping teachers use ChatGPT to teach everything.

Nice article on tiny houses. They are just too expensive and not practical. Sorry about that.

Ah, the "red team." Those dastardly folks who break systems. Companies need them. The red teams are now smashing these chattering Ai software things. Good.

Arm is about to go public. The big tech companies are pouring millions into the stock.

Finally, the industry is agreeing on how to control appliances made by all the companies. The smart refrigerator may become, well, not practical, but usable.

Samsung shows DDR5 DRAM. What? Memory chips that are better in every way. It's a great place to be a consumer. Products are better and cheaper.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, there is no end in sight for the entertainment strikes. Hate to write it, but there are many more people wanting to be in show biz than there are jobs. I would love to have one of my short stories made into a gazzilion $$$ movie.

Sunday 3 September 2023

Everyone seems to want to run AI this or that. Dell and Samsung are benefiting.

CalTech is accepting Khan Academy courses to determine entrance. It is simply that many high schools don't teach calculus and the necessary sciences.

Goggles and other things don't have enough sensors. So Microsoft patents a backpack full of sensors and computers to let you know where you are and what is ahead.

Meanwhile in New York, the police are using drone this weekend to monitor outdoor parties.

Some innovation on laptop computers from Lenovo. This laptop has two full screens plus an optional keyboard.

Back to the office. This is a local issue. And this is one of actual productivity, not some fanciful notion of something. And let's face it. Lots of folks just don't care about being productive. The minimum is acceptable.

Meanwhile in Europe, we learn that the Russians are better at advertising than Hollywood and Madison Ave. Somes governments exaggerate these things.

Angst about social media sites being dominated by professionals. The YouTube videos are all professional. No more, "Hey look at me belly flop."

Microsoft is removing WordPad from future Windows editions. It arrived in 1995 as a simpler alternative to full-powered word processors. Bye bye.

More on pushing people back to the office. People have not been taught how to work remotely. Any wonder that something is lost?

Excellent thoughts on Scrum and Agile development. Best quote, "Scrum can't fail because Scrum is whatever you want Scrum to be." Once again, something was a good idea, but then time passed and we sort of got lost and so on.

The Titan disaster (that sub that killed everyone while visiting the Titanic) was predictable and predicted. Sometimes you have to listen.