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: November 27 - December 3, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• AWS has its re:invent conference
• Sports Illustrated magazine caught with fake articles and fake writers
• Henry Kissenger dies at 100

Monday 27 November 2023

Amazon has built its own little thin-client computer called Workspaces. It does almost nothing but connect to virtual computers over a network.

It seems that few countries want to host the Olympics. The event costs too much. Switzerland is trying to host the least expensive Olympics ever (figuring inflation).

American bowling alleys are switching to a technology used in Europe for decades to reset the pins. It uses strings instead. Energy and maintenance costs are much lower.

And now we have "Zombie Studies." No one is studying zombies. These are studies that were retracted because of problems. Other researchers, however, still use the bad results of the zombie studies.

Ahhhh, something to do as a retired "senior," have a freelance writing business.

To folks like me, this is a collection of hilarious instances where the lack of a comma made a huge difference.

Here is an overview of the technical writer living and how to make more money at it.

Thoughts on finding your voice as a writer. Perhaps I've never found mine. Perhaps I've always had it found. I've never understood the topic of voice.

Sometimes a story teller gets all the real-life stuff all wrong, but the story is still great.

Tuesday 28 November 2023

The concepts in this essay are so basic, why do they need to be stated? " A user should be able to perform a clean OS install, download a zip of master, disconnect from the internet, and build. The build process shouldn't require installing any extra tools or content. If it's something the build needs then it belongs in version control."

The acceleration of the invention of new tools has changed much. "Mastery of tools no longer pays dividends for the rest of our lifetime."

Our tax dollars at work or waste. Someone in our Federal government is building a super-duper-large model on a national labs super-duper computer. The trouble is, when the computer finishes crunching, someone will have invented something else that is much better and much less expensive.

Wouldn't it be nice (for some people) if we could swap out and in talented people? Talented people would be just like a gallon of gas bought here, there, or anywhere. They are all the same, right? When it comes to people, it just doesn't work.

SpaceX plans another Starship test launch in December. These tests are EXPENSIVE $$$ and they show how much money is behind SpaceX.

Tesla is using its own employees to test its latest full-self-driving software.

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia doesn't like the quality of articles written by GPT-4.

Amazon (AWS) is having its big re:invent conference this week, so there will be plenty of announcements on new services.

Amazon announces several upgrades to its AI-based services. These are mostly about their voice-to-text services.

After 151 years, Popular Science stops being a magazine. They had switched to online-only recently. Now they will just have articles on their website now and then.

Sports Illustrated, which had been a respected sports magazine for decades, is caught running AI-written articles with phony names of writers. And they thought they could get away with this.

Seth Godin advocates for study groups. I agree with him. It is unfortunate that US colleges have students sign their projects with statements like, "I did all this by myself."

Amazon now delivers more packages than UPS and FedEx. I thought it was a mistake for Amazon to buy its own vans. I was hoping to buy a used van after they quit the idea. I was wrong again.

It appears that there is much fraud in academic research and publishing. Perhaps in "climate change science" as well?

To go along with the Sports Illustrated story, here is an online conference that created fake female speakers.

Wednesday 29 November 2023

Here is a new technique that turns images (photos) into paintings.

Throughout history, tools have shaped the human organizations that used them. AI, a new tool, is not different. We have yet to settle on what may work better with this new tool.

And some of us would like a "better" social network. The word better, of course, is subjective.

Great question, "Why do companies hire people to be idle a lot of the time?" This essay gives a pretty good answer. They are optimizing for something other than the obvious. In this explanation, they have idle resources that can jump on something right now and git'er done right now.

A long essay that espouses an optimistic view of the future with AI.

Amazon joins the market for those chattering bots (chatGPT, Bard, CoPilot, et al) with "Amazon Q." Clever name.

Samsung now has their own Internet browser.

Amazon Web Services ups the performance of its AI processors. They claim 4x on training speeds.

I'll just quote the headline, "Google's new geothermal energy project is up and running"

The year 2024 will set some sort of record for elections. It seems that election cycles worldwide are aligning in 2024. Nothing to see, move on.

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute (someone makes a living doing that?) studied 2million folks using the Internet and discovered pretty much nothing. No harm done by using the Internet.

Meanwhile at Microsoft, the now-traditional ugly retro-computing sweater series this year is the background from Windows XPS.

AWS' Transcribe service (speech-to-text and translation) now has more languages than ever.

Our descendants one day will look back on us and shake their heads. American Airlines is buying carbon offsets in the form of tons of carbon bricks buried in the ground. Let's sing a verse of Ring Around the Rosies.

Thursday 30 November 2023

One student's experience with LaTex and Typst for formatting complex math expressions. The writer likes Typst much better.

One auto enthusiast sees the Tesla cybertruck in person. The photos don't convey the vehicle's appearance.

Here is a summary of the AWS announcements at re:invent.

Meanwhile at our Food and Drug Administration, not having much to do with their taxpayer-funded time, officials approve a drug that claims to extend the life of dogs.

Meanwhile at SpaceX, where they have blown up several Starships, they are designing the Starship version two.

This is a good essay on the economics of creating an AI tool and attempting to profit from it. To date, no one has made any profits. It is time for a plan B.

I guess it's that time of year to do list of ten-best this and that.

The ten best summary generators.

The ten best sites for paraphrasing and rewriting.

The ten best AI text generators. This guy loves Hix.AI.

From UC Berkeley researchers we have Starling-7B that uses Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF). This may be more efficient than using human feedback.

Showing that some folks have little to do with their time, someone studied 285million posts mostly on X (Twitter). They found misinformation on meat and dairy products was frequent. Gosh.

As time goes by, researchers reverse engineer large language models and find ways to reveal the inner workings. The companies that built the models haven't done this. The builders could learn something.

Henry Kissenger dies at 100.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia, predicts artificial general intelligence in five years. Since no one has yet to define that, he can claim victory.

O'Reilly provides its usual excellent comments on generative AI in business.

Meanwhile at OpenAI, Microsoft is one the board, maybe.

In material science, Google's Deepmind is helping create hundreds of new materials.

Meanwhile out at UC Berkeley, smart folks conclude that buying carbon offsets is sort of silly. Plant your own trees and such if you wish. That's good.

Friday 1 December 2023

This is a new and really good chattering bot and search the web thing.

Thoughts on Domain Driven Design.

I love this and doubt that many others will share my enthusiasm. How to write documentation for your house. We do this at work, why not at home?

A look at the past and future of Y Combinator. They invest money and make riches.

Meanwhile in India, the computing industries are reducing hiring. This leaves a large group of recent graduates holding advanced degrees and no paychecks.

Out in Montana, a Federal judge says they cannot ban TikTok. The ban was largely a show, but can the Federal government step into state affairs like this?

So far, Meta has openly shared much of it AI technologies and intends to continue this.

Google claims over 1 billion monthly active users are using RCS in Google Messages.

Some folks will actually drive their Tesla Cybertruck today. Price tag: $61,000.

Meanwhile in America, "everyone" wants to play pickleball, a game invented for cousins to play in the driveway. Local parks don't have the money to build courts.

Hyundai and Kia create a different concept for the wheel and motor of electric vehicles. The concept is much more efficient in power and space. Let's see what happens.

Saturday 2 December 2023

A lok at the future of flying about inside our atmosphere. Supersonic travel is next, but how to do it quietly is the challenge. Vertical take off and landings are not efficient.

Software source code is read more often tan written. If it is any good, it is run much more often than read.

A new company called Anduril has a new aircraft called Roadrunner. Unmanned, autonomous, vertical take off and landing. It flies very fast and intercepts aerial targets. The idea is low cost.

It is that time of year where folks predict next year. Here is an early one with just a few tech predictions.

Bad news for those wanting our current President to be re-elected. Look at the inflated cost of basic grocery items.

How and how much colleges are tracking students. Its all tech tracking and it is done far more than most students understand.

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor dies at 93.

Amazon's new Q, a competitor to Microsoft's CoPilot, has shown major mistakes in its early days.

Now this is just silly and a waste of money. US, UK, Australia to use AI to process sonar data and track the Chinese Navy. Once, a colleague asked, "Are they gonna' ask us how we use spreadsheets?" AI is just another tool like Excel is just another tool. Who cares what tool you use?

Meanwhile at OpenAI, since all the adults were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, they are delaying the opening of the GPT Store.

And back to Amazon, they want to have a constellation of satellites so that we buy more stuff. They are hiring SpaceX et al to launch them. SpaceX has its own constellation of satellites.

The Remington firearms company moves out of Ilion, New York. It has been there since 1816, over 200 years.

Look at this photo carefully. It is one woman and her reflection in two mirrors. Her arms are in three different positions. Smart cameras are sometimes just too smart for their own good.

Perhaps this is important to some persons. Researchers can quantify the electricity used to create a photo or write an essay with software. It isn't much, but it is something.

A new study shows that ChatGPT, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 aren't that good. They aren't much better than ELIZA, which was programmed in the mid-1960s. A 60-year-old program on 60-year-old computers beats today's best.

Okay, this ia bit harsh if not humorous. This writer describes the Tesla Cybertruck buyer as, "the tacti-cool milspec dork, and the showboating rich guy."

Sunday 3 December 2023

Intel basically invented the microprocessor. For decades they had no competition. Now they do. It is a matter numbers and dollars. There are far more people today with the knowledge and access to tools than ever before.

An example of Intel's competition is Apple. Apple was the first to design and build its own processors. Apple is 15 years into this.

Worldwide sales of smartwatches are up. Apple is doing great.

I like this essay on AI and culture. "ChatGPT and Dall-e are functionally parlor tricks." I agree with that. The idea of AI killing mankind is more an attempt to sell newspapers and books than science.

This person created a personal GPT in 15 minutes from ChatGPT. I've tried this a few times and was disappointed with the tools and results.

Have ChatGPT et al write your blog posts. Here are 20 prompts to move it along.