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: 9-15 October, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel is at war in the Gaza Strip
• Columbus Day/IP Day in America

Monday 9 October 2023

Yet another explanation of the NLP transformers. The original paper was so bad that everyone has to explain it.

It is Columbus Day in America. It is also Indigenous Peoples Day. Or is it one or the other? Perhaps both. What will future generations think of this one?

Meanwhile in China, the governors have big plans for super duper computing and fiber optic networks.

The customer service industry may soon be run completely by AI software. The software expresses empathy well. Can I just speak to a real person who is competent? I guess that costs too much.

A small but growing number of states are putting computer science course in K-12. Now all they have to do is find persons who can teach the classes. Oh, that.

OpenAI is progressing towards a simpler interface to the Python programming language.

California's population is shrinking. Birth and death rates have a role, but simply people are moving away because housing is too expensive.

Stuck in your writing. Push the computer away, grab a pencil and some paper, and write by hand. I almost always sketch an idea with pencil and paper before writing. Well, it works better that way for me. Some days I am lazy and try to bang it out on the keyboard first.

This writer makes $1million a year. Much bigger earnings than me. Here are some ideas.

I like this article on dictation. The software is much better these days. It may be slower than typing, but it fits some writers much better.

A reminder of print-on-demand services. These work well. Write your philosophy of whatever it is you do. Print a 50-page booklet. Hand it out instead of business cards.

This is about that "Aha" moment when someone clicks or falls into place. Good stuff. Great feeling.

Tuesday 10 October 2023

Microsoft adds more features to OneDrive. I am tired of these "this great thing will be here in two months."

According to LinkedIn, America's Help Wanted ad, everyone wants AI people.

And LinkedIn itself is putting AI tools to work.

We have all the heuristics we need. We just can't remember them at the right time. Will ChatGPT et al do this for us?

The math is simple. Optimize routine and oft-performed tasks and save days every year. But what will you do then?

How fast can a "sailboat" go? 90 mph if it is completely impractical.

X (Twitter) lets all opinions be heard. No, wait, that is misinformation. And who decides what is misinformation? The censors do. And who are they? What happened?

The decline of PCs continues for yet another quarter. HP had a small increase in sales.

During the pandemic, schools and government spent huge number$ on computers. Students learned much less.

All these AI chattering bots that help people do more are not profitable. Even they ones people pay $10 or $20 per month to use are losing money. The computing to run these things co$t$ BIG $$$.

Going around in circles on the topic of AI causing job losses.

The current conflict in Israel has brought the hacktivists to the forefront. Much that happened in Ukraine has now multiplied. The next war will see even more.

A small power company in Vermont proposes installing large battery banks in homes to ensure folks have electricity.

Meanwhile in Europe, the next super duper computer will run on ARM processors instead of the X86 line from Intel and AMD.

People are not moving from Window 10 to 11. I have a computer running 11. It is just fine and improving.

Wednesday 11 October 2023

A review of the capabilities of ChatGPT Vision.

Google, in an attempt to give users AI without bankrupting itself, now has a "lite" version. As noted elsewhere, these things require too much compute power and $$$.

One programmer's style for writing in C.

This is a good article on different ways to work documentation into a development organization.

How one programmer has evolved his physical layout of screen, keyboard, mouse, desk, etc.

Good videos to watch of a four-legged robot trying to jump obstacles.

I learn a new term, Resume-Driven Development or "Specific technologies over working solutions, hiring buzzwords over proven track records, creative job titles over technical experience, and reacting to trends over more pragmatic options."

Meanwhile in Europe, where governors are more practiced in the art of censorship, X (Twitter) is probably in trouble for allowing speech about the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Sony shows a new PS5 game console.

Microsoft shows new AI-enhanced software products for healthcare.

What it is like to drive a $400,000 Rolls Royce.

The PC industry is trying to find something akin to AI that the PC can do to boost sales.

Adobe updates its image-generation capabilities.

A German company attempts a new concept (sort of new) with a personal cloud computer.

Thursday 12 October 2023

A bit of a biased "study," but GitHub claims that using its CoPilot improves the quality of software source code.

And now we have the "Digital-Afterlife Industry." For some, it is a blessing to hear the voice and see the face of a deceased person. For others, it is horror.

SpaceX is the only heavy-lift option for NASA. NASA painted itself into a corner through decades of mismanagement.

The Starlink satellite Internet service is here for airplanes. It isn't cheap, but if you can afford your own personal jet, you can afford it.

Google takes a big step towards passkeys and away from passwords. Will it take hold in the marketplace?

This is a radical concept for many, but meetings are part of work, not a distraction. Most meetings are horribly organized and conducted. We can do much better.

Are you a programmer? There are new tools (they claim AI, so what?) to boost productivity. Time is money.

Our IRS wants Microsoft to pay $29Billion (with a B) in back taxes. Instead of paying a fine, I wish they would have Microsoft pay for a $29B public project and put up a sign saying so.

WordPress now has a plugin that allows WordPress blogs to be seen across several federated social media platforms --- 13Million new people can see them.

YouTube edges up past Netflix as the service most watched by American teens.

VBScript has been on Microsoft products for 30 years. It is going away.

The AI industry consumes large amounts of electric power. It is estimated to soon consume as much power as the Netherlands. Some optimization is in order.

The most-liked and least-liked CEOs in America.

A do-it-yourself practical use of AI and computer vision as a man built a system to keep badgers and foxes out of his garden.

Microsoft releases a tutorial on how to install Linux on a PC.

PlayStation 5 cloud streaming starts this month.

Stronger rumors that Qualcomm is about to announce PCs that runs its own Arm processors.

Chinese hackers, they work for the governors of China, break into Atlassian Confluence software used worldwide.

A trial of gene therapy to treat deafness begins.

After over 80 years, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) will stop broadcasting the National Research Council (NRC) time signal.

Friday 13 October 2023

Deep thoughts on machine learning, Impostor Syndrome, and the Great LARP (Live Action Role Playing).

I would like to do this, but lack resources (knowledge). Turn 15 years of blogging into a chatbot.

A report from the AI Engineer Summit.

Strong rumors that OpenAI will show more tools and such for programmers next month.

This is big: in 2024, you can text message others via satellite with a basic LTE cellphone. This will be a Starlink service.

Over confidence among computer programmers. They are usually young adults. Those folks are typically over confident. It's simple.

Meanwhile in China, the governors grant permission for a two-passenger, pilotless aircraft to operate. Fly without a pilot?

Google adds text-to-image creation in its Search Generative Experience. As usual, this is rolling out and I will see it some time after now.

Qualcomm is cutting jobs in California. The numbers are small, but indicates troubles in the job market.

Meanwhile in Israel, a lot of folks are on military reserve duty and being called up for this conflict. This is depleting small start-up tech companies.

Folks, we have to stop using these plastic bottles. They are not being recycled despite what companies and governments claim.

Microsoft again reverses its policy on the storage of photos on OneDrive.

Long degraded as poor quality, schools run by our Dept of Defense are now scoring higher than public schools everywhere.

ACT (American College Testing) scores hit a 30-year low. The experts were wrong for closing American schools in the pandemic. Let's remember this as yet another example of the experts being wrong most of the time.

Yet another recycling belief is wrong as we send 20Billion (with a B) pounds of electronic waste to landfills every year.

This is what we need to be doing with all this technology: a woman in Sweden has benefited from a big advance in an artificial hand.

Comcast will soon be sending 2 giga-bits-per-second data over all coaxial cables. Good news for consumers. Not-so-good news for those who sell new cables.

Saturday 14 October 2023

The State of AI Report for 2023 is now available.

Everyone wants to hire AI researchers or folks something like that.

A new approach to training a language model: use children's stories as the only input. Train a tiny model. Don't kill the planet with the electric power needed.

Here is a link to the original research paper.

An easier-to-read format of the paper.

Thoughts on video understand software and tasks.

Stop waiting for Artificial General Intelligence as it is here, now.

Across America, companies are opening crypto mines. These are odd looking buildings with nothing but computers churning away. These companies are linked to the Chinese Communist Party. They are great spying locations.

A student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln created a technique to read some words from a charred scroll from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which had been unreadable since a volcanic eruption in ad 79. Perhaps some good will come from these things.

Nvidia raises the prices of its GeForce Now cloud gaming service.

Great three-sentence post from Seth Godin. That's all you need---three gems. It's about pizza. We know how to make great pizza. Efforts to make it cheaper ruin it.

It took 21 months in court for one company to buy another company. Am I the only person who thinks this odd?

I used this software. National Labs released LabView in 1986. The first platform was the Mac. They have released the last Mac version and are phasing it out. Windows and Linux will continue.

If you carry a concealed firearm, avoid stupid places. If you avoid stupid places, you probably don't need to carry a firearm. Right?

Sunday 15 October 2023

Here is McKinsey's annual survey on AI.

A look at Obsidian. It is a note-taking app that does everything the marketing people say you shouldn't do. Yet, it has a million users.

Someone has a system of recharging devices without wires 30 feet away.

Follow the money. A foundation called Open Philanthropy is funding positions in Congress and government agencies to help with AI. This is nothing more than putting a lobbyist in your Senator's office. It is all political corruption at its finest.

New software (AI) that is supposed to label images as real or fake is mislabelling images from the Israeli conflict.

The Washington Post cries about false information spreading on the Israeli conflict. Let us remember that the Washington Post published fiction as fact and accepted a Pulitzer for the deception.

Elsewhere in the world, Disney's Hotstar reclaimed the global on-demand video streaming record on Saturday, drawing 35 million concurrent viewers to the India-Pakistan (or Pakistan-India) cricket match.

The latest TIOBE's Programming Community Index. The good old C Programming Language is still up there near the top.

Magnetic storage of data has been the norm for the past 80 years. Is the future storage on glass? There are good arguments for that.

Yes, AI reduces the world to stereotypes. Stereotypes are simple. That is where AI is now, at the simple level.

The financial outlook for AI tools is not good. This new technology costs big $$$ to run. There aren't enough paying customers yet.

Thoughts on AI and the most recent trends in knowledge management.