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: 16-22 October, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Big donors are stopping the flow of money to universities that have anti-Israel rallies

Monday 16 October 2023

Follow the money to this Russian company that uses Crypto currency to launder money and fund ne'er-do-wells.

Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time at 300million copies. Grand Theft Auto V is a distant second at 185million copies.

It seems that Taylor Swift is her own economy that sways the economic outlook of nations.

Interesting piece of China's economic downturn. The Communist Party shifted back from money to power.

Meanwhile in California, they are removing dams. Clean energy? Renewable energy? I'm missing something.

There are millions of open-source projects. Only about 11% are actively maintained.

The GNU project is now 40 years old. I remember some of the early years and getting all the source code on a package of CDs.

This has good information on a content writing plan for a much better blog or website.

How to stop reading about writing and instead WRITE!

Another "educated person" who confuses book-banning censorship with an adult discussion about how to spend taxpayers' money.

Some writers are afraid that if they write a lot, they will "burn out." I guess it is possible to be a writer and stop being a writer. Some of us simply cannot stop despite all desires to stop.

Tuesday 17 October 2023

I did something odd to my feedly RSS reader, so things may be sparse for a while.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, the actors remain on strike. They don't like being copied and then faked.

With a few exceptions, software development is slower now than it used to be. Blame it on far greater expectations of the product and far greater complexity.

LinkedIn cuts more jobs.

Intel releases its 14th generation of desktop processors. More and better and better.

Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist billionaire (with a B), publishes "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto." He is quite optimistic about technology and all our futures.

Gen Z, those in their 20s, are spending much less because inflation has cut the value of their money too much.

Many universities are hosting anti-Israel rallies. Big donors are stopping the flow of money to these places. Don't bite the hand that feeds you.

These Senators are trying to completely change Federal employment. It is probably a good idea.

I'll just quote the headling: Working in Silicon Valley used to be fun. Now it's just another miserable corporate gig.

Wednesday 18 October 2023

Our current President visits Israel in the middle of a war.

Estimating work: forget the rest. Just tell me how much time you need and how much it will cost.

Considering how Meta works on AI. Don't mine for gold, sell supplies to the miners, e.g., Levi's clothing. Meta has AI language models but let's other companies run them while paying for cloud computing.

This GitHub repository has software that transcribes hours of audio in minutes.

This article is about Blue Origin's space platform called Blue Ring. It isn't a ship that goes from here to there. It is a base to build things.

This is quite unusual, "The Five Eyes countries' intelligence chiefs came together on Tuesday to accuse China of intellectual property theft and using artificial intelligence for hacking and spying against the nations."

Nvidia and Foxconn partner to build AI factories which are a new class of data centers. One goal of these high-performance centers is to aid in developing autonomous cars.

Coming in a few months, the IRS will offer no-cost online tax filing in a few states for simple tax returns. This is the beginning of the end of TurboTax and the like.

Qualcomm and Google team to bring a RISC-V processor to the Android world.

Our current President makes it tougher for Nvidia and Intel to sell products to China.

It appears that Amazon will buy a million Microsoft 365 licenses for its employees to use at work.

Google adds many features to Pixel cameras to aid the visually impaired.

People, very few people thankfully, are walking around with VR headsets.

Windows 11 adoption has been slow, but is now at 400million devices.

The number of people working remotely is falling and falling and falling. The PAN(dem)IC is over.

Pay to play: X (Twitter) is now charging new users $1 a year to tweet. This has something to do with keeping only people on X instead of software running software.

Thursday 19 October 2023

High-level musings on AI and what is here and what may be next.

SpaceX can build rocket ships faster than our FAA can review applications to launch. As usual, government lags behind the rest of the world.

I like this post on the influence of ChatGPT on learning to write computer programs. The results are mixed with ChatGPT changing some areas significantly and other areas not so much.

How to waste $8Billion (with a B). It is easy when it is someone else's money.

Figure is a relatively new company, but in only 12 months it has a humanoid robot walking around. Their focus is practical tasks in warehouses and homes to help people.

More on Microsoft's efforts to store data on glass disks (readable 10,000 years later).

How one analysts move away from Excel spreadsheets to programming in R. Of course a programming language is superior once it is learned.

Learning how to prompt ChatGPT better.

On second thought, information about the Israel-Gaza conflict on X and other open sites is being questioned. Public opinion expressed as fact. Hmmm, sounds like the main stream media in their hey day.

On second thought, Chainalysis, a trusted expert in all things block chain and crypto, claims that recent stories about crypto currency and terrorist groups are flawed and use bad metrics.

Google updates Chrome browser with helpful features in the search bar. It is all about search. It always has been.

Meanwhile in America, Netflix raises its prices. That's inflation for you.

Meanwhile in India, Google will begin manufacturing its phones here real soon now. This shift from China to India continues.

Meanwhile at Stanford, researchers create a Foundation Model Transparency Index to score the major large language models on transparency or how much researchers know about the inner workings of the models.

Elon Musk firmly believes that working from home is just a silly notion.

Friday 20 October 2023

Amazon will have drone deliveries of prescription medicine nationwide...real soon now. We have been hearing this for many years now.

Returning to the office after COVID? Some companies are trying different smart and caring ways to bring people back in to the office.

This GitHub repository is a nice textbook on current computing systems.

This is a good paper from Adreessen Horowitz on nuclear power. Some countries are going back to nuclear after they learned how much better it is than depending on Russian oil.

Meanwhile in an Amazon warehouse near you, robots continue to roll in. Amazon insists the robots are not replacing humans but merely speeding operations. Of course they are replacing human jobs.

A published writer complains about not receiving money from OpenAI et al. Those companies read his writing without paying him. And, by the way, they are not profiting from this as their models are losing money by the minute.

"The major online platforms are breaking up with news." Google et al are not putting news on their sites and are not linking searches to mainstream media sites. It's just too much trouble. Go to the Hallmark Channel instead and calm.

Alienware updates its M18 gaming laptop computer. It has a RX 7900M GPU from AMD, not from Nvidia.

Follow the money: over the years North Koreans have used fake IDs to get remote work jobs from US companies. All the money went back to North Korea and the Kim Dynasty.

Many seem anxious to see Tesla's "truck." It has been a while since I have seen anything less practical.

AMD is continuing to offer Threadripper CPUs for desktop computers.

Meanwhile in court, Google explains its success with smart employees who innovate, not cheating on contracts. Again, some folks succeed through ability. It is not all cheating.

Code dot org is lobbying in Washington D.C. for a national requirement of computer science for a high school diploma. Silliness.

Earth-based telescopes are blinded by city lights. One proposal has city lights (LEDs) flicker and telescopes only look when the lights flicker off. The speed of flickering is such that people only see light.

Saturday 21 October 2023

This GitHub repository lists no cost$ (of course they cost resources) courses and certifications.

I like this. It is a brief and clear statement of some lessons learned by one person who has worked in software 15 years.

Video of our Marine Corps testing a rocket launcher strapped to a little robot. Of course it works. If we were in a desparate fight, we would be using things all day long.

Researchers find a way to detect type 2 diabetes via simple 10-second voice recording. Outstanding work.

News flash (not): These large language models were not tested on every possible combination of words in the English language. Unusual questions bring unusual answers.

The Ministry of Truth is at work redefining terrorism and terrorist. That is bad for all of us.

If you accuse Israel of war crimes, do so at your own risk. Companies pull out of conference after conference manager does so. In some places on earth, you can speak. Speech comes with consequences. There is not right to agreement to your speech.

Folks in their 20s are really sick of the phrases older folks use at work. "Herding cats" is one of them. I've hated that for the past 30 years. Please folks, let's speak English.

Nvidia's CEO, fabulously wealthy and successful, says if he knew then what he knows now, he wouldn't do it. Starting a business is horribly difficult.

Little by little the auto industry is adopting the Tesla EV charger as a standard.

OpenBSD 7.4 is released.

SpaceX will have 100 launches this year and about 150 next year. Where is all that stuff going in orbit?

Sunday 22 October 2023

I like this tutorial on large language models. It combines equations, diagrams, and basic explanations.

Google loses a gender-bias case in court and pays a former employee $1million in damages.

Nvidia has a new AI agent which autonomously writes reward algorithms. Reward algorithms reward robots for "better" actions. This software teaches robots how to do thing without human intervention.

The Allen Institute for AI is hard at work building open language models that will allow others to benefit for this non-profit work. And, one of the goals, we will understand the answers provided.

It appears that the Russians are the masters of propaganda---even better than the Washington Post and New York Times.

The news media industrial complex isn't sure what to do now that Google, Facebook et al won't help them by directing readers to them.

I love this quote, "Expecting an HR generalist to find information security specialists is a fruitless endeavor at best." Replace "security specialists" with almost anything and you describe today's job market.

Here is one Raspberry Pi project---using a Pi board $10 to collect data.

The DoD's Chief Data and AI Officer warns about using generative AI too soon (now).