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: 30 October - 5 November, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza war continues
• Apple releases new M3 processor and updated iMac and MacBook Pro
• Our President issues an Executive Order on AI (uses 1950's Defense Powers Act as authority)
• First AI Safety Summit held in the UK
• Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on all charges
• xAI releases Grok (this is all from Elon Musk)

Monday 30 October 2023

Today, our president is issuing a 100+-page executive order regulating AI in government and industry. We shall see what it says.

Fear and loathing about the current practice in building foundation models by "pillaging" the Internet without permission.

Stronger rumors about the new hardware Apple will show tonight (8 p.m. EDT).

Well, this about summarize the pain of seeking a job. This interviewing expert tells of the "mistakes" that applicants make in an interview. Who appoint the guy they judge of everyone else?

Jobs that involve writing. I guess there are jobs that don't involve writing.

Some writers take a prompt and run with it. Others hate the game.

More thoughts on writing a memoir. Perhaps write a memoir about all the reading and experimenting with memoirs.

Bed time stories for adults. Something to calm the mind and help sleep.

A few thoughts on why write.

Writing is one form of art. There are many others. Dabbling in several things at once usually helps the writing.

Tuesday 31 October 2023

The Allen Institute for AI breaks some sort of record by training a large language model on three trillion tokens. The previous record was two trillion.

X (Twitter) moves from cloud computing back to a data center on their premises to save 60% on cost. The tricks in cloud computing are out of the bag. Many companies can use the tools and techniques of cloud computing companies to have all the benefits of cloud AND data centers.

It appears that some folks don't have much to do with their time but chat with ChatGPT.

Google has been doing site reliability engineering for 20 years. Here are ten or so big lessons learned. Take it easy, implement a little at a time, be able to back out of the changes.

Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, has the NASA contract to shuttle people and supplies between the moon and lunar orbit. Here are some pictures of prototypes they are building.

Elon Musk is pushing hard to put all essential bank services inside X (Twitter).

Apple has an event to show new M3 processors and how the go in new MacBook Pro models and an iMac.

New recent shows that these chattering bots can generate phishing messages and flood the world with them. No evidence yet that this is happening, but it is only a matter of time.

Qualcomm shows their new Snapdragon processors running Windows on laptops and beating the best of Intel and AMD. We won't be able to buy these for another 6 to 9 months.

Western Digital is spinning off its flash memory business into a separate company.

Apple's new M3 processor brings a big upgrade to graphics. If you have a MacBook Air with an M1 processor, like me, you want an M3 model. Not yet.

I'll just quote the headline, "Gen Z is lonely. Going back to the office may be the cure for some."

Andrew Ng, an AI expert who knows what he is saying, says all this AI fear and calls for regulation is an effort by the companies that have already "made it" to make it hard for new competitors to compete. That is what usually happens.

Moving closer to real, practical use, ChatGPT Plus folks can now feed their own files into the system and ask questions.

Wednesday 1 November 2023

Recent survey shows that software developers are looking to change jobs now that we have returned to some form of normal.

This article claims to show how to build a LLM application. Not so much in reality.

Researchers at Cambridge have a new technique for 3D printing of metal that allows creating specific structures yielding much better steel at lower costs.

Twitter (X) is now worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it. How to lose $20Billion but still be the richest person on earth?

The appearance of a "conversation" with ChatGPT et al is changing how learning may occur. The problems of black box and hallucinations, however, may hinder all the promise.

This is a good, candid, honest essay about applying for jobs online with a resume. What a terrible mess. How does any find a job?

Here is yet another method of learning from what you read and keeping that information useful. It requires buying the product created by the writer.

Here is a firm grasp of the obvious, but few people seem to have such. Hence, this is important: LLMs mimic, they don't innovate.

THe world of ASCII art or drawing with the printable characters on a computer. I love it.

The folks at Bellingcat provide a lucid explanation of a UFO video released by our Dept of Defense. The explanation given by our DoD is a prime example of incompetence in government.

Again, Bellingcat provides a firm grasp of the obvious when it comes to things claimed by social media. Sad to report that such obvious things are rarely explained.

Microsoft has yet another major Windows 11 update. More of us will see some of CoPilot. Chat is replaced by Teams.

And here we have an electric school bus that carries 90 passengers and has a 300-mile range. Why would a school bus need a 300-mile range. Folly.

Nvidia has a $5Billion chip order in hand from China. Now Nvidia has to wait to see if our current President will allow this to happen.

AMD's financial quarter results were less than forecast (did any forecasters get fired? No?) AMD predicts $2Billion in sales of a new AI-oriented processor in 2024.

There is much commentary all over the Internet concerning yesterday's AI Executive Order from our President. Except for government agencies, which move so slow that the next President can cancel this thing before anything happens, nothing will probably be the result.

Meanwhile in the cyber world, it appears that Iran has increased its ambitions and capabilities in hacking systems in other countries.

Because of or in spite of the new executive order, Microsoft announces new AI offerings for Federal agencies coming real soon now.

Thursday 2 November 2023

This Google blog post is a tutorial on the RISC-V open-source hardware design.

"ROScribe 239 is an open source tool that uses LLM for software generation in robotics within ROS (Robot Operating System) framework."

A group called cOAlition S is pushing for new ways to publish research. The current methods are outdated.

WeWork is filing for bankruptcy next week. The PAN(dem)IC turned the work-away-from-an-office world upside down. WeWork didn't adapt. Will someone else do so?

Funny essay: "AI is great because it allows people who cannot write, cannot draw, cannot do VFX, cannot make music, cannot make movies, cannot shag celebrities etc to do these things. "

Someone gets it in a big way: the established companies welcome the AI Executive Order and regulations. "The point is this: if you accept the premise that regulation locks in incumbents, then it sure is notable that the early AI winners seem the most invested in generating alarm in Washington, D.C. about AI. This despite the fact that their concern is apparently not sufficiently high to, you know, stop their work. No, they are the responsible ones, the ones who care enough to call for regulation; all the better if concerns about imagined harms kneecap inevitable competitors."

Only two days after the AI Executive Order, our current President issues rules on AI use. They had all the regulations written ahead of time.

Meanwhile in the UK, big politicians get international camera time at the first AI Safety Summit. If our "leaders" don't act fast, we are all doomed (not).

Meanwhile in Tokelau, (it's out in the Pacific Ocean somewhere) its 1,400 residents somehow use the .tk Internet domain for 25million sites. The great majority of .tk sites are for cybercrime.

A look at the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry and how to make money causing other people misery.

America is moving to Tennessee. Will we ruin the place?

Vertical farming controlled by a Raspberry Pi. The compute requirements are not high.

Meanwhile off the coast of New Jersey, a big wind farm project is cancelled. These things just don't work well.

Friday 3 November 2023

Early benchmarks show that Apple's new M3 processor is better than the M2 processors.

Microsoft shows image interpretation with its "small" large language model (sllm??). Its Phi 1.5 is 0.1% the size of OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 (OpenAI's is 1,000 times bigger than Microsoft's little one).

Quoting the headline, "Disney is about to own all of Hulu."

AWS has a new cloud service where customers can rent Nvidia GPUs for the short term.

A company called Sierra Space is almost finished building a spaceplane called Dream Chaser. It is an ugly thing that would ferry cargo to space stations.

Where the money is, Apple keeps pushing and pushing itself into the healthcare market.

There must not be much to do these days. The Internet is all abuzz about this list of 20 queries on Google for one week in 2018.

Yet another opinion on the AI Executive Order. This one questions the constitutionality of the EO.

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on all charges of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. Sentencing comes in late March 2024.

Faculty at Arizona State University take credit for Phoenix's emergence as a chip building center.

Arm buys stock in Raspberry Pi. The Pi folks have worked with Arm before they issued the first $25 Raspberry Pi model. Again, the Raspberry Pi is the most successful education project in history. Those folks deserve some honors.

The Beatles release one last new song called "Now and Then."

Apple has a mediocre financial quarter. That is relative. They made about $23Billion profit in 13 weeks. That's about $250million profit a day.

The Brave browser now has its own AI assistant.

Local police departments across the US are jumping on software from a company called Fusus. The software puts camera feeds from various things into one system and searches the videos for cars and other objects of interest.

Saturday 4 November 2023

Considering Apple's M3 processor and the general market for processors for home and business users (not data centers).

One person designs their own keyboard layout and advises that no one else repeat the exercise.

This may prove significant one day: MIT researchers learn how to evaporate water with just light, no heat. Water condensors that provide potable water could benefit.

Here we have the Matic. It vacuums and cleans floors by itself, but it uses cameras instead of other sensors and floor maps. Put it in a room and, without training or prior experience, it can clean the floor.

Studies shows that political reporting int he news is just plain negative. No wonder people flocked to the Hallmark Network during the 2016 election and have stayed there.

xAI is releasing its first AI model. Elon Musk owns this company. As a reminder, Musk founded OpenAi (ChatGPT fame) and moved on from it.

CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE, i.e., the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) have just released the source code for their Linux distribution. This is intended to compete with Red Hat's Enterprise Linux.

Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, is struggling to make electric vehicles. It appears that many, many auto makers jumped into EVs based on hype, not reality. It is a shame sometimes how facts clobber wishes.

A researcher accidentally discovers that a simple little testing device called a Flipper Zero can clobber all smartphones in the room. Accidental discoveries are often the best kind.

There is a debate raging amongst those who care about a few milliseconds here and there. Good old planet earth just won't cooperate.

Predictions of when Apple will sell MacBook Air, Power Mac, and Mac Studio computers with the new M3 processors.

Sunday 5 November 2023

Today is one of the longest days of the year in America. We have 25 hours today as we switched back to Standard Time. Only Congress and other illiterates would call the minor part of the year "Standard."

Oh, I like this. It explains how transformers (the kind used in chattering bots and natural language processing) work.

As time goes by, researchers continue to reverse engineer the chattering bots. Express emotion in your prompts for "better" answers.

Must-see video in this article. An Amazon drone delivers a can of soup. Well, not quite up to expectations, but it is something. Consider, however, if the thing dropped a bottle of life-saving something to people stranded on a mountainside.

And Elon Musk's xAI releases its large language model called Grok.

Should AI companies be allowed to use copyrighted material without paying the copyright holder? The big companies provide reasons for what they do. The big one is that a copyright holder would receive 0.001 pennies. Its just an academic argument.

How to make an incredibly expensive Tesla "pickup truck" even more incredibly expensive.

The Internet provides information. It also provides a single point of failure for information. See, for example, the Gaza Internet blackout.