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: 4-10 December, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• AMD has new GPUs
• Google has new TPUs
• Google releases its new Gemini AI model
• Google releases NotebookLM, I'm not sure what it does
• The EU passes world's biggest AI regulation, again, I'm not sure what it does

Monday 4 December 2023

As if the OpenAI mess isn't a big enough mess, it appears that Sam Altman was often having one of his companies buy exclusively from another of his companies. Nothing wrong with good business, but the appearance of ethical problems abounds.

Background material, probably too much, on the founding of several of the famous AI companies. They all wanted to be paid lots of money while giving the appearance of altruism.

Background material, probably too much, on the founding of several of the famous AI companies. They all wanted to be paid lots of money while giving the appearance of altruism.

Don't look now, but the "value" of BitCoin is back up again.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet (huh?): Kiss "I want to rock n roll all night and ..." is now digital avatars and will live forever or something.

Further research shows that plants soak up much more CO2 than previously and incorrectly believed. So the silly notion that vegans are destroying the climate by eating more plants has some sense of silly truth.

The Advent of Code has become a major event this year with several hundred thousand people participating.

NotePad++ hits its 20th anniversary and is still going strong.

A clever acronym for writing an essay: VODKA. I've Verified the assignment, Overcome inertia, Drawn connections between my ideas, Krafted an interesting essay, and tailored it to my Audience.

Tips for fiction and characters: they should be haunted by something, need ethical dilemmas, and need hidden and not so hidden vulnerabilities.

One writer asks that folks study the humanities. Good point. If you can afford college and have no employable skills, good for you. If, like I was, you needed a college education to get a job and earn your keep, well, study something that has a job looming on the horizon.

Twelve practical skills for a freelance writer. You should know business and marketing. No paying clients, no writing. Unless, of course, you don't need money. See above link and comment.

I whole-heartedly agree with this advice from a writing class, "a teacher's most important role is to encourage. It doesn't matter the skill level of the student. If they receive encouragement something quite magical happens. They believe they can achieve something. They take themselves seriously. Then it's up to them to keep raising the bar to do better."

This is an old quote attributed to Mark Twain. It is still good and is about the word "very."

Rewriting. This is not editing, this is writing the piece again.

I love this quote on "writer's block." I don't seem to have that thing, ever. Must be something wrong with me.

Tuesday 5 December 2023

Eric Raymond reminds programmers of things that all hackers (the good kind of hacker that added value by doing things you weren't supposed to do) once knew.

And some more of doing things as a programmer that should not work, but do.

Home-row modifications.

For everyone learning how to program computers, here is a list of the higher-paying companies. I am amazed at how many pay more than $200K a year. The list does not include cost-of-living.

Meanwhile in Japan, they are turning on the world's largest experimental fusion reactor. Just another lab.

Here come the smaller large language models. The return on investment is much higher. What, however, do we call them? SerLLM (Smaller LLM), SLLM, SLM, NLLM (not LLM)?

ooops, 23andMe reports being hacked and losing personal data for 6.9million customers who trusted them to keep the information private.

A good essay from Schneier on how the conversational nature of these chattering bots soothes anxiety and brings trust. And then some folks learn that they have been conned.

Meanwhile in America's schools, there are filters on Internet access. Good intentions with bad results. And, because of lack of expertise, most schools use the same few companies that tell the kids only what a few want the kids to know.

Meta and IBM are among the 40 companies forming the AI Alliance The alliance hopes to focus on the responsible development of AI technology, including safety and security tools.

Google updates the spam filter on Gmail with something called Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer.

Nvidia shows its plans to build processors in Japan.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI is out. If you understand that last phrase, you've already seen the video. If this is all new to you, you aren't missing much.

Meanwhile off the coast of China, a really really big data center is being submerged. The ocean will cool the computers and save a gazillion bucks in electricity. Is warming the ocean a good idea?

Wednesday 6 December 2023

I like this essay about space exploration. The writer argues well that the problem is biology, not rocketry.

I recommend this site for its images and video of how a large language model works.

I am all for this technique of putting medicine into the body with ultrasounds instead of a hypodermic needle.

This is a list of 300 real-world machine learning projects from 80 different companies with links to details on the projects.

This is a look at Google's own code-review tool, how it works, and how Google programmers happily use it.

We were promised all these 18-wheel trucks running up and down the highways with no drivers. What happened?

Swiss researchers reduce the time a large language models needs to less than a tenth of a percent of what was the case. This also means less than 1% of the electric power.

Microsoft updates its Copilot.

Meanwhile in China, researcher release a paper describing how to deepfake TikTok videos etc. Thousands immediately implement the concept and the rest is history. Fakes everywhere. Consider the deeper implications. This is acceleration in new technology adoption and implementation. There are thousands of times (not thousands more, but thousands of times more) more persons with the knowledge and resources to implement state-of-the-art research. What used to take years now takes days. It is a simple matter of numbers. People have the knowledge and access to the needed hardware and software.

Meanwhile at the General Motors' Cruise autonomous vehicle unit, uh, well, this self-driving car idea seems tougher than people thought.

Worldwide, governments want to "regulate" (codeword for tax tax and tax some more) this new-fangled AI thing. The government employees lack the knowledge of AI and basic office competence to do the job.

Schneier has a good essay on how AI software makes surveillance (spying) so much easier. Schneier has a firm grasp of the obvious and the ability to explain. One thing he does not consider is from the preceding story: spy agencies generally lack people with necessary skills to do the job.

Microsoft adds three more years of security updates to Windows 10. Like XP and 7, Win 10 is so popular that it won't go away like the marketers hoped.

India has successfully sent an unmanned vehicle to the moon and returned it to earth orbit.

The math scores of American students have dropped again. Perhaps closing every school in America for two years was a BAD IDEA in the PAN(dem)IC.

In 2021, our Congress allocated $7.5Billion (with a B) to thousands of charging stations across our country for a few electric vehicles. Today, we don't have a single one installed. See prior links and comments regarding competence in government.

Thursday 7 December 2023

This is an excellent article. The writer wanted to create a "meetup" of people interested in the same things. He provides 12 lessons from years of practice.

AWS sends a gazillion dollars a year to Nvidia for processors. Surely, AWS can build its own, right?

Some thoughts on where the Internet has been and where it is going. It can be fun. Just use the fun stuff and ignore the rest.

For those who cannot get enough of Ben and Jen or Microsoft and OpenAI, here goes.

It becomes easier to put someone's face on someone else's body doing something that neither would ever do.

Here come the two-legged robots. Agility Robotics is opening a factory that will build 10,000 of them a year.

This is one instance of this story that is in many places. The headline, "Apple launches MLX machine-learning framework for Apple Silicon"

Google updates its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). Google claims the latest will train large language models 2.8x faster.

And the big announcement from Google is its new AI model called Gemini. Of course it is better than GPT-4 (claimed) and is now running on Bard and Pixel phones.

Rumors of new iPads coming next year from Apple.

AMD has a new GPU and a new processor for data centers. They claim to take the performance lead over Nvidia.

We have rumors of a "major Windows update" in 2024. Of course there will be more AI in it. You can't spell money without AI.

The Washington Post feels that it is a scandal that if you contribute money to a college you gain a say as to what happens there.

And these Apple rumors include putting an M3 processor in a MacBook Air.

Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft say they will use the new AMD GPUs instead of the Nvidia products.

Finally, a study shows that wasabi, the real stuff, not what we have in America, improves memory.

Friday 8 December 2023

Our tax dollars at work (waste), "The most talked about Government Accountability Office report confirmed what a lot of people suspected: Federal offices are largely unoccupied." We are paying rent on empty buildings.

It appears that "governments," i.e., some persons who are publicly employed, are spying on the rest of us who use Google and Apple products. That's a lot of the rest of us.

Here is a long report from Andreessen Horowitz with predictions for 2024.

It is quite cold in deep space. How can we bring some of that cold down to earth and put it to good use?

We see advances in planes that are flown remotely, i.e., the pilot sits in an office building. This won't work for passenger aircraft, but can bring big savings for cargo flights.

Google's Gemini model has only been released one day and folks are already picking it apart.

For some Twitter (X) users, the Grok chattering bot thing is now available.

One possible future of medicine is the micro robot that swims through the human body and maintains everything ahead of trouble.

Bill Gates discusses what he though the Internet would be and would cause. Turns out that folks like Gates just aren't connected to reality.

The fifth generation 5G of cell phone tech is here. Is it? This isn't what was promised.

Apple has big plans for manufacturing iPhones in India.

Saturday 9 December 2023

At least someone has a firm grasp on reality. The recent Executive Order on AI assumes a knowledgable workforce. Our central government does not have such and has no plans that will bring it such.

This website contains an evolving book on Data Engineering Design Patterns.

I guess we will learn one day if this works. Someone has created a bacteria that wallops all the other bacteria in the mouth. The result is one treatment and no cavities for the rest of your life. And dentists are allowing this to come on the market?

The Google NotebookLM is now available. See notebooklm dot google dot com.

Meanwhile in Europe where they are believing the AI hype, European Union policymakers pass law regulating AI. How much money do they intend to grab in taxes.

Whereas in Malaysia, the future is welcomed and the governors are building a super duper computer with Nvidia to do AI.

Speaking of Nvidia, it has the best-performing stock value of any company in a decade.

Insurance companies exist on old tables of data. New insurance companies are using new data and data processing to make money in areas that older companies cannot.

More kiss-and-tell from OpenAI. It seems that Sam Altman isn't a nice fellow.

And now we hear that some of these chattering bots are lazy. What's next? They don't make up their beds?

Sunday 10 December 2023

I have experienced some knee problems this week and have lacked the energy for Internet reading.

This study shows that AI software can label text data 20x faster and at 1/7th the cost of humans. If this works as advertised, it is a breakthrough in advancing natural language processing,

Yet another report showing that these ChatGPT et al are not profitable. As usual, the companies that sell stuff to OpenAI et al are the ones making the profits. See, e.g., Levi Strauss and the California gold rush.

And now we have "nudifying" websites that undress people, sort of.

Efforts to build bike lanes in America. My community in Virginia has recently narrowed roads to accomodate bike lanes. No one seems to ride in the bike lanes.

Meanwhile in rural Minnesota, mail carriers are over burdened delivering Amazon packages. The carriers were told officially, "Don't say the word Amazon." Silliness in government.

This man bought a PDP-11 out of a barn. He has been working for almost a year to get it running. Bless his efforts.

IBM believes it can create an AI system that will translate 60-year-old COBOL code into some that folks use today. Others doubt the claim.

Researchers at Meta and Stanford develop what they call CHOIS (Controllable Human-Object Interaction Synthesis). It is all a simulation at this time, but the system responds to text commands like, "Move the lamp closer to the TV."

And now we have "news mirages." It looks like news, but it isn't. Perhaps what we have is larger part of the population that is gullible. We used to have skeptics, but they seem to have disappeared.

Reframing AI hallucinations. If you can't fix the bug, call it a feature and sell it as such.