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: 20-26 November, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Sam Altman joins Microsoft (many others follow him)
• Let's reverse that as Altman returns to OpenAI as CEO
• Thanksgiving Day in America this week.
• This is a holiday week, with little news (except for OpenAI)

Monday 20 November 2023

Success leads to failure. At OpenAI, they succeeded and believed they had changed the course of mankind. Such grandiose thoughts often lead a person down a hole.

Let's all welcome the newest Microsoft employees: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and their staff.

Rosalynn Carter, wife of former President Jimmy Carter, dies at 96.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, both armies are using ammunition much faster than any experts in the West thought possible. Are they wasteful or is this reality?

Birth rates have fallen in the US. People aren't having kids. Those who do have kids feel isolated.

Here's TIOBE November rankings for top-20 most popular programming languages: Python, C, and Java stay at the top.

Meanwhile in China, the Communist Party has create a huge disinformation program to harass just about anyone it wants. Here come the US elections.

The Linux Foundation is forming the High Performance Software Foundation to create a software system making it easier to do high-performance computing without being a rich company.

Finding and removing redundant words. Those things are everywhere all over the place (hint).

I wish someone would explain what a "hook" is instead of telling me I need one.

I like this essay on writing. Lay all your writings on the floor where you can see them all at once (well, sort of do this). What is there? The answer to that describes you. You are okay. Example, a friend let me read her essay drafts. Almost every essay included something about what she and her father did when she was a little girl. Guess what? She wanted to write about the adventures she had with her father when she was a little girl. When she wrote those things, she wrote great material. That was her. That was okay.

Thoughts on writing a team charter for an engineering team. There are better ways to spend resources.

I like these ten rules for writing fiction. It has a little humor and a lot of practical advice. Two pencils are better than one.

It occurs often that people need permission from someone else to do something all on their own. If you are waiting for someone, I grant the permission. Go forth.

Tuesday 21 November 2023

A thread on X about what a wonderful world we will have once we have some sort of super artificial intelligence.

A software engineer notices how much writing he does in English each day.

This GitHub repository has a new font for programmers.

Here is a new type of robotic hand that has more bone-like structures.

This is a good essay on "data," i.e., all that stuff in all those files on our network. Despite all the hype, the great majority of organizations are not receiving value from any of it.

How do you make a lot of money and work fewer hours? Be a medical doctor.

The OpenAI drama continues with 90% of OpenAI employees signing a letter of resignation.

Amazon offers more no-dollar training classes in AI with a program they call AI Ready.

The best I can tell this morning is the free AI classes are found on this site.

Here is another place to start the new AI classes.

And this place has several more of the new courses.

A Boeing 787 lands on a runway in Antarctica. This is a first for this type of plane, airline, runway, everything.

The mass of people shopping in-real-life at stores on the day after Thanksgiving is gone. It is mostly online. Also, Black Friday Sales go on for weeks.

Wednesday 22 November 2023

Our current President is now 81 years old. This was unthinkable at the founding of America. Is it acceptable today? Is it desirable?

I like this essay posted on GitHub about several different types of graphs and how to do them badly.

While OpenAI gets all the headlines, things are falling apart at Cruise a well.

This is probably more than we want to know about how OpenAI organized itself as a not-for-profit organization.

Details on how to use GPUs in the operation of large language models.

Meanwhile in New York City, here comes a little vegetarian restaurant called Kernel from the founder of Chipotle. The restaurants will only have three persons as employees with the majority of work being done by robots.

Our National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is giving Top Secret clearances to 16-year-old high school interns. The clearance process for everyone else is years behind, so something warrants an explanation.

I'll just quote the headline, "Anthropic seizes the moment, unveiling Claude 2.1 as OpenAI implodes"

More drama from California and OpenAI. Sam Altman is back as CEO with lots of shuffling of everything. This is humorous, all except for the money lost by people who didn't participate in the childish behavior.

Meanwhile at Nvidia, they seem to be printing money there. Revenue triples for the financial quarter. This is at an established and profitable company. Unprecedented.

I guess I should read a bit about effective altruism. It seems that this was adopted in several new and famous companies and found not to work.

The voice interface for ChatGPT is now free for all users to try.

oooops, the Idaho National Laboratory was hacked by a group of hacktivists (independent folks who just do these things). Data stolen looks to be personal information on employees. So far, nuclear secrets seem to be safe.

Anthropic releases Claude 2.1. It is their chattering bot that is greatly improved over its prior version.

FreeBSD 14 has been officially released.

Thursday 23 November 2023

Today is Thanksgiving Day in America.

Lurking behind the OpenAI-Sam Altman feud are the doomers vs. the boomers in the AI world. I guess I am a boomer, but given the flight away from traditional Judeo-Christian ethics, perhaps doomer is more realistic.

This is a good article on engineering of computing systems with some history thrown in for context. Finally, someone speaks English and understands what they are saying.

Here is a practical electric vehicle that will probably never appear in the US due to our "safety regulations."

Perhaps this is effective altruism (I don't know). Anyways, a site that has a curated list of open-source projects that work for good (and "good" is subjective).

New feature for Google Meet: if you actually raise your hand, it will detect that and turn on the hand raised signal.

More rumor and such about the OpenAI circus. It appears that some folks out there simply inflated their accomplishments in their own minds.

Meanwhile in the UK, the governors are pouring more of the taxpayers' money into computers for researchers. This will somehow benefit the taxpayers in the long term (however long is yet to be determined).

And more from Google: Bard now answers more questions about YouTube videos.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the SIGINT wars surge. It is the old tale of electronic measures (drones), counter measures (jam signals so drones crash), counter counter measures, counter counter counter ... I've lost count.

Meanwhile in America, the overdose of opioid crisis is not over, it has merely evolved.

Newspapers contend that they are going bankrupt because Google and Meta steal their products or something like that.

Microsoft brings Windows CoPilot to Windows 10. Well, sort of. You have to be on a special list and all that.

This all seems odd: Kodak will now sell an 8mm film video camera. The price if over $5,000.

A small study shows that "zoom fatigue" is real. Doctors measure physical responses to video teleconferences. We tire quickly from looking at the screen.

Friday 24 November 2023

Google's Bard ups its performance when analyzing YouTube videos. This works pretty well.

Meanwhile at Block, the message is we shall "part ways without delay," a.k.a., fire you quickly if you are not excellent.

Using spreadsheets and the concept of small software.

One person's 18 years at Google. Times change, people come and go, and the culture changes. This happens every day in every place. Some of us are okay with the change while it just hurts too much for some of us.

How to use your email on websites and confuse the marketers and spam folks.

Meanwhile at NASA, high risk and stupidity. They are using the first launch of a new Blue Origin booster to send a few items to Mars.

Tesla releases all the design and operational information for its original Roadster. Those who watch these things believe this is a signal that the second-generation Roadster is about ready.

Well, here we go, Yale has one administrator for every four students. That's the same ratio the government recommends for child care of infants under twelve months. That is why college costs are too high.

Nvidia has some problems and is delaying the release of processors built just for China.

oooops, Healthcare SaaS provider Welltok had a data breach that exposed the personal data of 8.5million people.

Out there at OpenAI, we learn that some employees are paid $800,000 a year. Pretty good pay check.

Anandtech takes its usual in-depth review of AMD's Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX processor.

Saturday 25 November 2023

Microsoft continues to excel at smaller large language models. Good for them. Bigger and bigger and bigger becomes silly after a while.

A few details about the alleged breakthrough in artificial general intelligence at OpenAI and why some believe it is a threat to mankind's existence.

Tests show that the LLMs that process large documents (150,000 words) simply don't work. Text at the start and end of the docs is okay. The great amount of information in the middle is lost to the LLM. Nice try, but not this time.

One data scientist becomes an freelancer. He shares some lessons after six months.

On YouTube, a one-hour Introduction to Large Language Models.

Someone is spending lots of money to bring back extinct species. The Dodo bird is one that seems relatively easy.

Programmers submit a list of software applications they like. Linux is top of the list.

How tech giants find good employees. Meta and Google hire them from other companies while IBM grows its own. Well, who is the more successful $$$?

Nice essay on the OpenAI drama. Good quote, "If this was a battle between capital and (concern for) humanity, capital smothered humanity in its sleep." Wrong conclusion, "That's why we need stronger government regulation and greater enforcement." One trouble with government regulation is that it is based on personal opinion, just like "altruism or profit" is based on personal opinion.

If you take the output of one faulty software system and use it as input to a second faulty software system, you get faulty output again. This seems to surprise some so-called adults, i.e., people who should know better.

The governors of New York City are willing to pay residents to build accessory dwelling units. This means convert your garage or basement into a room and let someone live there.

For the first time ever, Nvidia pushes ahead of Intel and TSMC in several measures of who is the biggest IC producer in the world.

Nvidia's CEO wants folks to accelerate AI work, not slow it.

Not having much else to do, our White House Office of Digital Strategy is terribly concerned with a TikTok video about how much a hamburger costs at McDonald's.

Sunday 26 November 2023

By some measures, we bought more stuff online the day after Thanksgiving than ever before.

Hackers backed by the Communist Party of China break into a Dutch semiconductor company.

The big companies that build these big chattering bots don't want to be sued, so they censor their software. Individual programmers don't have that fear. Here come real chatting bots that act like adults.

Our Dept of Defense tries to quickly shift efforts to UAVs that are small, smart, cheap, and many. Let's see if we can accomplish the "cheap" part as the Dept is oriented towards rewarding those who spend money.

The concept of a balance between work and home is tossed out by many celebrity CEOs. Folks, if you are in a situation where you can choose what you are doing, you are rich. A homestead farm can be a paradise or a prison. The same goes for living in a small town in Alaska or in Tickfaw, Louisiana.

Folks, the maps is not reality. Let's keep our eyes open to what we see in reality.

Passwords, passwords, and bad passwords. Sigh.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a technique using conditional matrix multiplication that greatly speeds large language models. Just multiply the numbers that matter. There you have it, much faster.