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: 11-17 December, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine (still hoping to drop this one day)
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues (also hoping to drop this one day)
• Google loses in big anti-trust suit, Google will appeal
• Google drops its ability to satisfy geofencing warrants
• An advertiser shows how it hears what folks say while watching TV

Monday 11 December 2023

A recent Forrester study shows that, despite all the hype, the great majority of organizations are clueless when it comes to their data and the idea of a "data-driven culture."

Nvidia Corp.'s Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang looks to Vietnam as a "second home" for Nvidia or another company he would form.

The race is on to reach the 2nm chip fabrication. Intel has a slim chance to catch up with TSMC and others.

This is a bad joke and shows how poorly government performs. The first $35million (with an m) of the $52Billion (with a B) of the CHIPS Act is going to BAE systems. That is less than 0.1% after many months of delays.

The video game Doom is now 30 years old. It created the first-person-shooter industry. What I liked is that id Software had a full 32-bit C compiler that I could and did use before Doom was released.

And more history for us old guys: Turbo Pascal is 40 years old. I wrote a couple of grad school projects using Turbo Pascal on my 8-bit CP/M Kaypro II computer.

Our Space Force will team with SpaceX on the next X-37B launch.

Here is a look at Lunchbreak AI. This software tool (drop the AI junk) helps write research papers.

This post is about journaling and dreaming in journals. There are bad parts to this practice, but the good far outweighs the bad (in my opinion).

Closely related to the journal is the paper-and-pen-based notebook. And what do you do with them when finished. Put them away, don't throw them away.

Serendipity: I was playing with this last night. Use an AI picture drawing tool. Describe something. The software draws it. Observe, think, describe again. Repeat the process. It learn a lot by doing this that helps me write.

The vast majority of writers work alone. There is no one to take care of you. You have to be observant enough to take care of yourself.

One essay encouraging "writers who operate," i.e., have a full-time job and write "on the side" to continue doing so. Having two jobs helps a person do both.

Tuesday 12 December 2023

Must-see video provided by SpaceX of their second test launch of the Starship. Spectacular with great explosions.

Someone has a complex instruction to feed into GPT-4 to make it work better and more logically.

It appears to some people are leaving Austin, Texas in the tech world. This is the first murmurs of exits.

The race is on to make wood transparent.

Epic Games wins an antitrust suit against Google. Google, of course, will appeal. There is hundreds of billion$ riding on this.

The city of Abu Dhabi is quickly becoming the welcome place for crypto companies as the rest of the world piles on regulations.

We have yet another center of power in Washington D.C. Our Dept of Commerce will pour out billion$ in 2024 in CHIPS Act money.

Survey of American teenagers shows YouTube dominates their attention. Following down the line are TikTok, SnapChat, Instagram, and then Facebook. Facebook is inhabited by us grandparents.

In an effort to be ahead of the lawsuits and strikes, Microsoft starts working with labor unions on AI.

Commercial real estate companies are defaulting on loans. That is bad for the economy. Time will settle these things, but many will be crushed in the settling.

This must be a big deal as it is all over the Internet: Apple's new iOS has a Journal app.

I have to ask, "Why?" Researchers at MIT release a bunch of white papers to help regulators in Washington D.C. regulate AI.

Wednesday 13 December 2023

I see that the IEEE has given Dan Bricklin an award of some type. Bricklin wrote VisiCalc, which created the term "spreadsheet." People saw VisiCalc in stores and said, "I want it." The guy in the store replied, "Well, you have to buy this computer do use VisiCalc." The computer was an Apple II. The rest is history.

Coming real soon now is WiFi 7. Just like coming real soon now is real 5G cell phone service.

Need a lesson in the history of the last 25 years? This is a good place to start as Google shares what everyone searched.

Despite recent claims, starting a business has always been difficult. 90% fail the first year. Some linger for a few more years of 24-hour-a-day labor before failing. The exceptions live on without really thriving.

GM hopes to put its hydrogen fuel cells into construction equipment. One day, maybe, they will actually work.

Elon Musk's companies are not doing well with the American regulators.

The FCC denies Starlink's request for $885million in funds from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tells Tesla to recall 2million cars due to something about the attention required of the driver.

Meanwhile in Europe where it seems to task of regulators is to eliminate jobs, companies are told to classify their gig drivers as full-time employees.

"The Electronic Entertainment Expo, which was once the gaming industry's biggest convention and media platform, is officially dead."

Microsoft releases a smaller large language model called Phi-2. They claim it performs quite well. Better return on investment.

Younger people are leaving California for a lower cost of living. California will soon be populated by the rich and the poor with no one in the middle. Disaster looms.

Meanwhile in America, law enforcement is able to obtain medical records of citizens without getting warrants by going to pharmacies.

It appears that there will be at least one Chuck E Cheese in America that will keep the animatronic entertainment.

This could be the ultimate test for generative AI: fill out all the necessary forms to obtain permission to build a nuclear power plant.

Thursday 14 December 2023

I love this essay about bureaucracies. These don't just exist in government. They are everywhere. The key is accountability (something completely absent in government).

Here is one review of 2023 and predictions for 2024.

From Apple, lists of the most-downloaded apps and games and such for 2023.

Sometimes the speculation and "research" goes a bit too far. ChatGPT has become "lazy." Is that mimicking what people do at the onset of winter?

Meanwhile in Poland, we have a case of repairing something yourself, the manufacturer retaliating, and lots of fear and loathing. This is on a big scale: passenger trains.

Who are the best-managed companies? Microsoft is #1 for the fourth year in a row. Apple and Nvidia are also in the top five.

Meanwhile at GM's Cruise, nine executives are fired after a safety investigation.

Lo and behold, all those fears of kids using ChatGPT to cheat were fantasy experienced as reality. Just didn't happen.

I guess I missed how and when this happened, but Microsoft is now an agent of US law enforcement regarding cybercrime and cybercriminals.

A type of self-supervised learning enables robots to "learn" new household tasks in less than half an hour.

There is some indications that low-frequency infrasound is produced by tornados. This may greatly improve tornado warnings.

Friday 15 December 2023

Yet another essay on the death of "agile." And, of course, proponents claim, "It was bad because you weren't doing it right."

Must-see video from Tesla showing their latest human-like robot. Creepy, but improving.

Elon Musk will open a private school for K-12 and one day a college. It is based on STEM. This is probably a way to attract top rocket scientists to his Texas facilities.

America is a rich place with rich people. One in six Americans has a net worth of $1 million. One is six are millionaires. The noun has lost its luster. And the great majority of millionaires are old folks. Time to save and pay off that house.

Big data is passe. We now live in the era of big compute. This piece describes how AWS and Nvidia are trying to meet the demand.

Real news that isn't news: smart TVs know what we are watching. See my short story on this almost ten years ago.

Here is the link to my nine-year-old short story on smart TVs knowing what we watch.

"Google has launched MedLM, a set of specialized generative AI models for the healthcare sector."

A review of the top papers from the recent Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

On the heels of Sports Illustrated's embarrassing goof, several more major publishers sort of admit their stupidity.

Silliness: a recent study confirms garbage in - garbage out. Even for AI systems. Wow.

The Vector Institute looks forward to AI in 2024. Nothing surprising here.

And now we come to the artificial intelligence toy that has conversations with kids. What could possibly go wrong?

If you are really rich, like Mr. Zuckerburg, you can buy a thousand acres in Hawaii and build a mansion above ground and another mansion below ground.

Google stops storing users' location history. They can no longer provide geofence information per law enforcement warrants.

All the conspiracy theories are true: companies can listen to our conversations via our TVs, computers, phones, etc. Someone finally admits it.

Andreessen Horowitz enters the realm of political endorsements, "We are non-partisan, one issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them."

Here is more information on Microsoft's Digital Crime Unit and how they work with and without American law enforcement. Many members are motivated to protect victims.

The world of Internet search is changing. The search engines will soon point to This instead of That. Those on the That side don't like it.

A look at some of Intel's latest big-performance processors. Intel is slowing regaining the prominence it held for decades but lost.

Saturday 16 December 2023

Cutting the Internet viewing a little short today.

In what appears to be an obvious, i.e., why did someone have to go to court on this, case, if arrested, an American is not required to give passwords and passcodes to law enforcement.

Our FCC grants Starlink permission to test data communications from satellite to unmodified cell phones.

Microdisplay manufacturer KOPIN teams with MIT researchers to develop an eye-tracking display for AR/VR systems.

GM's Cruise cuts a quarter of its workforce.

Not much to this research: put screenshots in documentation only if you do it correctly. That's like, "Cross the street only when it is safe." Duh.

Amazon's Project Kuiper, satellite broadband, intends to use laser communications among satellites. A recent test shows that Amazon's engineers believe they can do it.

Meanwhile in China, the communist party extends bans on folks bringing their iPhones into the office.

And we have yet another case of a foreign government running ad campaigns in America. This is all evil misinformation these days. It used to be basic propoganda that no one believed.

Yet another tech celebrity has yet another plan to fight election misinformation. Here is election misinformation: I like candidate A, not candidate B. If you do not expose every misdeed of candidate B, you are spreading misinformation. The vast majority of political ads from the beginning of time till now are misinformation.

Sunday 17 December 2023

"Friendly doesn't mean saying yes all the time, or changing every policy, or giving up our principles. Friendly is how it feels, not what it does."---Seth Godin

On second thought, let's not plant so many trees. It seems that the situation is a bit more complex than on first thought.

Meanwhile at IARPA, researchers are studying how to identify a programmer by the code written. Writing computer programs has a style like writing fiction. We try to beat this out of kids in school, but they get through.

More angst about election misinformation. This story concerns second-generation Americans. The third generation seems to think their parents are dimwits.

OpenAI provides ideas on how to use ChatGPT.

Our national Congress and our state legislatures are not passing laws about AI and deepfakes and political ads. Good news, I think. These politicians don't want to go to jail. Recall when Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for President way back the first time. She wanted a look of, "I'm sitting at home on my couch in the den talking to my friends." It took about five seconds for folks to note how it was all fake because the flowers blooming outside her "den window" don't bloom that time of year. Fake. Fake. Fake. She would have been guilty of any misinformation or fake law anyone passed.

Look at this cartoon. How long does it take to realize that the map is wrong?