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: 4-10 September, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Labor Day holiday in the US
• Everyone wants our Feds to regulate AI in America
• European regulators are regulating more American companies
• In China, no American phones in government offices

Monday 4 September 2023

This is the Labor Day holiday in the US. It doesn't have much to do with labor but marks the unofficial end of summer. And I suppose labor and success created the wealth that gave us the idea of "summer."

Thinking about how to use a large language model that is trained on your own data.

Our Dept of Defense launches a new UFO website called aaro.mil.

How to hack the chatter bots and have them answer questions they are not supposed to answer, e.g., how do you make a bomb?

Meanwhile in South Africa, the chat bots are designing web sites. Salaries for people who used to do so have dropped.

The Java programming language. Its history follows that of most programming languages. Funny how the C language is an outlier in that people still use it. The same with Fortran.

Some questions about what became of the object-oriented paradigm. It was bogged down by trying to make it a user interface machine. The concepts of inheritance were lost.

A look at OptimaEd: this is traditional education in a non-traditional manner.

Countercloud: this is a disinformation built to show how easy and inexpensive it is to pump out nonsense 24 hours a day. $400 a month to run. Classic problem solving. It is quite easy to fool the media.

Time and the writer. Wasting time is one thing. Procrastination, according to this writer, is another. We can learning while wasting time.

A writer should read much of the time. What, however, do you read? Some tips in this post.

This writer has been self-publishing books for 23 years. This post has some lessons.

This is a pretty good essay on short stories.

Is writing hard? "Sitting in a chair for an hour or so a day, making up stuff, is not hard work. It's just not." Good post about writing and pain and fun.

Some pretty good ideas on finding freelance writing jobs. LinkedIn is on everyone's list of places to look.

Tuesday 5 September 2023

With Monday being a US holiday, we have two Mondays this week with little to nothing on the Internet.

Meanwhile at Yale (where is that?), they aren't banning ChatGPT but trying to work with it (whatever that means). This too shall pass.

And we learn more about electric vehicles and their batteries: the salt water brought in by hurricane caused the batteries to burst into flames.

We have conflicting reports from San Francisco about self-driving taxis blocking an ambulance and causing deaths.

Meanwhile on the moon, India's little rover vehicle is completing its tasks. This is a major moment of pride in India.

Meanwhile in Boston, autonomous vehicles are not seen much. The governors did not allow much in the way of experiments. Let the other cities suffer the learning curve.

Yet another story on trying to have people go back to the office. One size does not fit all.

Maybe, "AI and biotechnology will soon enable small groups to cause harm on previously unimaginable scales."

Let's consider the long term, "Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent."

Thoughts on ambition, success, failure, other persons' expectations, and all those things mixed together.

Driver-less cars may be safer than human drivers. Please note, we don't always equate "safe driving" with "good driving."

The debates rage about using copyrighted materials to train these large language models. Once again, if the practice is stopped now, the big tech companies will benefit because they have already used the copyrighted materials. A ruling would keep all the startups from competing.

Sometimes it is good to be not-quite-so successful. America's big tech argues that their products aren't too successful so they can avoid European regulators.

According to an official survey, " the DoD came dead last in user satisfaction for IT support, equipment, function, and communication/collaboration. "

Wednesday 6 September 2023

I'll just quote the headline, "How Google Stores 10,000 Petabytes of Data Efficiently"

Sometimes having a one-person company is just what one person wants. We saw this back in the first days of open-source software. Many of the earlier stars knew Bill Gates. Gates wanted a big company, others wanted a one-person company.

Some of the lesser-known features of GitHub.

It appears that LG is helping Meta with the hardware needed for their next-generation VR headset.

It is early and these rumors are faint, but Apple may be planning to sell a low-cost portable computer in the second half of 2024.

Google changes the logo for Android. I guess that is important.

Mozilla runs some basic cyber security tests on cars from 22 makers. They all flunk. What were they thinking?

Real news that isn't news: European regulators decide they have the authority to regulate just about all the successful American companies that operate in Europe.

Meanwhile in China, the governors declare that government workers cannot bring American cell phones into the office.

There is a brain drain in Pakistan as educated and skilled tech workers seek employment elsewhere.

One person moves from California to Texas and gets taken. When lots of out-of-towners arrive at the same time, so do the con artists. Move to a place that isn't being flooded with other movers.

Our Customs and Border Protection has a goal of using computers to scan the faces of 75% of people boarding planes leaving the US. If you are searching for fugitives, have a person stand at the plane door and "stare them in the eye."

As if our Federal government isn't big enough already, "experts" want a new Department of AI to regulate all things called AI.

And the Attorneys General of all 50 states wah their hands and want Congress to do their jobs regarding AI.

Thursday 7 September 2023

Everyone (almost) is bought and sold via a subscription. Can this last?

The case for do-it-yourself instead of spending lot$$$ at Databricks and Snowflake.

A long time ago a wise man told me, "The people who know how work for the people who know why." True in writing for a living and programming and just about every job.

Once again showing how politicians are always behind the curve, California's governor signs an order about AI in state government.

Showing that it is now famous, OpenAI will hold its first developer conference in November.

Apple is throwing money at AI. And Apple has a lot of money available.

I'll just quote the headline, "Nintendo demoed Switch 2 to developers at Gamescom"

How hackers went around in a big circle to eventually sneak into government networks.

All this fuss about driverless cars is "sensationalism." (is that a word?) Anyways, the claim is correct. The newspapers gotta do something to make money.

WeWork has financial problems. Commercial real estate has financial problems.

"US gas prices soar to their highest seasonal level in a decade even as the summer driving season comes to a close" High gas prices mean low consumer confidence. Gas prices are placed on large signs everywhere. People see the inflation.

Friday 8 September 2023

SpaceX has put its Starship atop a big booster and is working through FAA-required fixes before a second launch.

Making time for work-related learning "after work hours."

The CEO of Intel discusses their open-source strategy.

Does the Internet run on PHP? Some folks think so.

"Let's dig a tunnel," says just about everybody everywhere today.

Apple updated all its operating systems to address two zero-day vulnerabilities.

OpenAI changed everything with ChatGPT, but users are over it and leaving.

Our FBI links North Korea to the theft of $41Million. The North Korean cyber army is interested in one thing: money for the Kim dynasty.

Predictable and predicted: all these trade restrictions with China has helped make China technologically independent.

Google and others is trying to use large language models to summarize lengthy notes and reports.

Real news that isn't news: some reviewers are taking payments to give positive reviews.

Microsoft includes a major feature in little old MS Paint: one click removes the background of an image.

Just like government pays farmers to not farm, they are paying electric consumers to not consume. A crypto mining company in Texas rakes in $31.7Million for doing nothing.

Saturday 9 September 2023

Startup companies fail. Exceptional ones have five exceptional characteristics.

And despite all the changes in software development and devops and all that stuff...most software projects still fail.

Inside the math, Nvidia has succeeded because they use FEWER bits in calculations, not MORE.

Google releases a new Chrome browser that makes it easier for advertisers to track users.

Cruise (a GM company building driveless cars) is about to receive approval for mass producing cars with no steering wheel.

And the Chrome browser turns 15 years old.

Amazon will now require some authors of eBooks to disclose if they used AI software in writing. What's next? Disclose if you used Microsoft Word which now contains AI software?

Strong rumors that contradict earlier rumors: Apple will (maybe) not release any laptop computers with M3 processors this year.

Cyber security researchers beware as North Koreans know you are lurking and they are targeting you.

Here is a victory for civil rights as a Federal appeals court rules that members of the current administration stomped on the First Amendment in dealing with social media and speech the administration did not like. At one time the Democratic Party was all for civil rights. Right? Or is my memory failing me?

The New York City Police Dept spent million$ of taxpayers' money trying to fight crime in the city. Laudable efforts or just another abuse of rights and waste of money?

This is good news as Microsoft teams with pathology research company Paige to build the world's best AI model to find cancer.

The art of maintaining old computer games.

It is somewhat official as OpenAI admits that software that claims to detect AI-written material just doesn't work.

Sunday 10 September 2023

Meanwhile in Iowa, Microsoft and OpenAI are wasting a lot of water cooling their computers. Water to cool computers is 100% reusable. Water flows over the hot component, around in a pipe, and back again. If anything goes down the drain, that is criminal.

Google and Meta were leaders in facial recognition technology, but they didn't release it on the world. After a little while, other companies learned how to do the same and they released it on the world. I guess there is a lesson to be learned here.

Ooooops, for a while owners of Wyze cameras could see video from other persons' cameras. Small glitch. It was probably entertaining to some and terrifying to others.

Some insight into why college costs so much. They over price everything and then give discounts (scholarships) to make folks feel like they are getting a bargain. And, oh, the admin staffs are bloated with folks who do nothing but satisfy government regulations.

And here is someone who teachers others how to micro dose with psychedelics to improve their outlook on life. What a shame. What a waste of humanity.

New Mexico's governor declares an emergency and removes the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. Why not? During COVID governors everywhere declared emergencies and removed the First Amendment.

Since when did "it rained on the day we had a picnic" become "climate change disaster?" It rained this year at the Burning Man event.

Speaking of education, UNESCO reports that closing schools during the pandemic was a bad thing to do.

News Flash (not): NASA's Space Launch System has been a colossal waste of money.

At lower levels of professional tennis, where the prize money may be $1,000 for winning a tournament, fixing matches to win bets is rampant. Predictable and predicted. College sports are prime for this.

Here is a specific example of how using ChatGPT accelerates research. Simple. It works. Be more productive.

Thoughts on unsupervised learning.