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: 2-8 October, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Google introduces the Chrome Plus cert
• Taylor Swift appears at more NFL games and boosts the ratings
• In America, no Federal government shutdown and the Speaker of the House is removed
• Google has a big event and shows new phones and watches and the like
• Microsoft updates Teams to be more efficient
• Armed conflict breaks out between Israel and Hamas

Monday 2 October 2023

Google and HP are building Chromebooks at a factory in India aimed at products for the growing Indian market.

It appears that Apple has built its own search engine to replace Google.

Our NSA is starting its own AI security center.

Another misguided article on banning books. No one is banning books. Write and publish freely. The question is should taxpayers' dollars be spent on some books. The "no" answer has a long history.

Python 3.12 is released today.

Claims that the number of digital nomads has doubled since the PAN(dem)IC. Now up to 17million.

Write to please yourself. Trying to guess what someone else likes can be frustrating.

Is it worth it to write a memoir that no one will publish? It is always worth it to write something you want to write.

Don't know what to blog about? Here are 52 types (types, not just ideas) of blog posts.

Habits that are sometimes bad habits for writers.

Changes come in life. People leave. A space is left behind, for a while. It will fill.

The use of a pseudonym as a writer. I once wrote a short story about how a writer used many names to gain sales.

Here is that short story.

Tuesday 3 October 2023

On a side note, Taylor Swift is going to Kansas City Chiefs football games. Fans see here at the start of the game and message all their friends. Tens of millions of people switch their viewing to the game to catch glimpses of Ms. Swift boosting the NFL's ratings and earnings. Amazing stuff.

A little more information on the lives of people living at the last place on earth and how this may help an astronaut keep sane one day.

Here is a photo of the Humane Ai Pin. No one knows what it is or does or anything. In my experience, such secrecy means that there is nothing there.

Must-see video of a pendulum robot carrying things (220 lbs) and running about.

Mozilla has lost most of its influence. They need to kick themselves and start anew.

Has AI as it has appeared in the last 12 months been a platform shift? Maybe, depending on your definitions.

It appears that companies from Taiwan are secretly (not a secret any longer) building chip-making factories in China.

Google introduces the Chromebook Plus program. If you see the official label a more-expensive Chromebook, you know it actually is better.

This is American politics: California's governor appoints a Maryland resident to be California's next Senator. The paperwork will all be fixed in time.

Consumer spending is high. We are confident in something or we are buying before prices rise higher.

We are moving to a new generation of satellites that are huge. They will appear bigger than the biggest planets and stars.

Software that is supposed to predict where crimes occur doesn't work well. Long-time residents can.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: someone made a video where it looks like Tom Hanks is promoting a dental program. It's not Tom.

Wednesday 4 October 2023

A strongly worded, yet with a lot of thought, essay against the return-to-work ultimatums.

A notable outcome of some of these US Government versus US successful companies is "well, we thought about this and that."

It is official: Asus now owns the Intel NUC business. Let's home it continues to provide small, low-price computers.

This is a pretty good tutorial on generative AI. "Generative" means it generates or create new material like images, sounds, text, etc. that mimics real-life examples.

Samsung updates its line of Android tablets and phones. High performance at lower prices.

Microsoft shows big changes for OneDrive with more coming real soon now (December).

And Microsoft brings an image maker into Bing Chat. Tell it what you want in a picture and it creates it.

Watermarked images were to prevent fake images. Well, that idea didn't work at all.

Zoom, trying to stay relevant after its celebrity during the PAN(dem)IC, will have document sharing next year. That are assuming they will have a next year.

In American politics, the Speaker of the House is ousted and replaced. And we can do the budget government shutdown thing again in six weeks.

We are having a national emergency test today with the FCC ringing everyone's cell phone.

Meanwhile in a trailer park in Oklahoma, a python is growing and eating all the stray cats and no one knows where it is or what to do.

Generative AI is a text multiplier. "Ask a five-word question" and it creates five pages of text. Pump that text to the Internet and we have loads of stuff out there.

Thursday 5 October 2023

How to change motivated persons into slugs. How many persons can you afford to have who do either zero or less-than zero?

A long attempt to show the differences among data lake, lake house, and all the other buzzwords we create.

"The people who are making the most money with AI are those teaching and talking about AI."

Do what you love or do what will earn a good living? This is a rich person's problem. I know many rich persons.

If you are applying to jobs, my sympathy. This is a good post about doing it all and the mess it is.

Starlink is not putting smaller satellite into orbit capable of optical communication (lasers).

Apple updates iOS to address heating issues with the iPhone 15. Note, this is an excellent example of how software can destroy hardware and hurt persons in the process.

Google has a big event to announce updates to its Pixel phones.

And Google updates their line of watches.

TSMC greatly lowers the expectations for its chip-making plant in Arizona. Labor problems and shortage of skills lead the list of problems.

Forbes releases their list of 400 richest Americans. Once again we are reminded that celebrities and politicians are not on the list.

Intel pushes its FPGA business forward. Intel has always lagged in that field.

I guess this is progress for something. In Germany, a repair shop creates a tool that lets them do repairs that only Apple could do prior to this.

Friday 6 October 2023

Now we have "hyper personalization." That means every experience online is aimed at me and me alone. If you aren't me, you won't "get it."

Got $2.7million? Get one of these machines you sit in and control. Right out of Hollywood. Must-see video.

I love this brief essay. Discover this problem and solve this problem that faces us here and now. The factory that produces machines to solve all classes of similar problems...wait till tomorrow.

How to build the biggest and best mirror ever built in history.

Amazon is far, far behind Starlink, but they are about to launch their first two satellites to provide broadband Internet service.

It appears that Brookhaven National Laboratory (Long Island, NY), part of the Dept of Energy, a.k.a., nuclear stuff has been mishandling deadly stuff.

The concept and practice of turning nurses and other health-care workers into gig workers.

When software produces an incorrect answer, we move on. When software produces an incorrect answer about an upcoming election, we cry DISINFORMATION!!!!

Tricking AI into creating images that many people don't like and then publishing them all over the Internet. Mean liars. We've had them for ... ever.

This story makes no sense, so it must be true. Our Securities and Exchange Commission seeks to force Elon Musk to testify. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution? Did it go away?

Microsoft releases a big update to teams. It runs faster and uses fewer resources.

Our government investigates itself and finds that many government employees are illegally surveilling man of us.

"personal experience and academic research both suggest that when people have more money, they are more likely to lead a pleasant life." I hope that we didn't spend much money to learn this lesson.

One outcome of the fear of school shootings is calls to police about shootings that don't exist. Calls on fake shootings outnumber real events five-to-one.

Saturday 7 October 2023

A small survey shows the best data scientists (1) communicate well, (2) understand requirements, and (3) add value. Same is true for all engineers and scientists.

An in-depth analysis of the compute involved in the current craze of AI.

Some folks seem beffudled about why it is difficult to evaluate AI systems. Simple, most are built without requirements and systems engineering.

This is what we should be doing in tech: a student in India builds an autonomous wheelchair that would take a person from here to there without assist. Great.

How a one-person enterprise functions. There is much freedom and challenges as well.

Excellent article on back-of-the-envelope costs for cloud computing and how to apply them.

MIT researchers build a system that can produce drinking water from sea water using only the sun. Great survival at sea and for those who live close to the ocean.

Strong rumors that Microsoft will show its first data center processing chip next month. This is supposed to make Microsoft less dependent on Nvidia. Hard to see that Microsoft could make something competitive on its first attempt.

MGM Resorts was held for ransom and refused to pay. This breach cost them about $100Million.

New software (AI) is making the task of writing a proposal in response to a Request For Proposal quick and easy. A few hours instead of a few weeks.

Bad news as armed conflict breaks out in Israel.

Sunday 8 October 2023

Thousands of devices known to have backdoor malware were bought by US public schools. It was easy to turn on the cameras without anyone knowing. Easy pickens.

Politics and feuding over the digital divide ... whatever that is.

US science agencies are low on funding (25-year low). There is plenty of distrust all around. "Science" has earned a bad reputation in the past few years. Scientists, the great majority of them, are not the source of the reputation.

It's been 46 years, but Atari is releasing a new game cartridge for the 2600 console.

Lenovo shows a desktop computer with good Intel processors that runs Android.

Real news that isn't news and is not surprise: US nutrition panel members have ties to US food producers.

When technology trade wars are run by lawyers, you have strange ideas for regulations.

Note, don't shoot down drones. They could belong to local law enforcement and you could go to prison.

Google, that search company which started in a garage, shipped 10million phones in the last 12 months.

Some history of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and how it helped shape what we do today. In the early 1990s, I worked in a lab with lots of DEC products. We had some Cray supercomputers and another hundred or so assorted machines and environments. We did some spectacular work for the taxpayers.

Today's large language models, e.g., ChatGPT, are not understood and don't repeat their answers. Why? We don't know the insides and how they work. Some folks are researching this problem. They will find a solution. Will anyone care? Maybe.

Fashion company Prada is helping design the next set of spacesuits for NASA.