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: 18-24 December, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Google loses another class-action lawsuit
• Colorado court rules that Trump cannot be on primary ballot
• Journalists dying in record numbers in the Israel-Gaza conflict
• Rich Ivy League schools need to decide if they want money or "free (hate) speech"

Monday 18 December 2023

The EU, never missing an opportunity to take cash from a successful American company, is going after X (Twitter).

This is a good article on a company named May Mobility. They are running driverless taxis in closed areas with basic business principles keeping them in good financial stead.

It took nine months, but these guys drove an electric car from the North to the South poles (sort of).

Meanwhile in China, this company pays its employees a bonus if they run two miles a day.

A computer vision system for detecting firearms. Detecting a firearm is not the same as detecting a threat. Detecting a firearm is not the same as detecting a weapon. They need to work on this more.

Meta and Ray Ban have teamed to make a pair of sunglasses that look like good sunglasses and have a camera. So here we go again, is it okay to walk around with a hidden camera?

A freelance writer should have a resume, maybe. A portfolio is different. Certainly have one of those.

Writing and taking a break during the holidays. If you write for a living and make a living writing, take a few days off. That means a few days with no pay. If you write because its like breathing, well, continue breathing and writing.

Writing can help the writer feel better. I guess that is called therapeutic. Whatever it is called, I find it to be true for some of us.

Here are a few types of writing that will pay money in 2024. A good list.

Things to do to become a "successful writer" (definition is subjective). Nothing surprising here, which is why I like this. Sound advice that will help a writer's craft and happiness.

Tuesday 19 December 2023

Thoughts on visionaries, leadership, and how things often go bad.

A good explanation of one of the facets of how the object-oriented paradigm completely flopped. I was in the object-oriented world in the early 1980s. What became of it was something else that didn't work.

The case that these chattering bots are making a change that few appreciate. They do parlor tricks, but subtle use and subtle results can bring something we have not seen before.

Being a one-person consulting company is different from running other businesses. Writers have to understand this. Engineering consultants have to understand this.

For decades, we relied on the Turing Test. Then everybody built things that passed that test. Now we need a new test.

Thoughts on an engineer managing the work of and leading other engineers. This is not for everyone. Assuming it is brings the results often seen with assumptions.

Meta updates the software for their Ray Ban sunglasses. Look at something and asks questions. Answers come to you. Okay, we are moving in a good direction.

It appears that folks are using AI-generated material as their own. New tools. Use the new tools.

Google will pay a $700Million settlement in a class-action suit. Android users, if they spend the hours needed to complete the paperwork, will receive $6 each. Several lawyers are retiring to some luxury island somewhere.

What a mess: a US Court orders a Chinese company to pay $2.7Billion (with a B) to our Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Did anyone out there know that we had a Commodity Futures Trading Commission?

Meanwhile in Iran, hackers shutdown about 70% of the gas stations.

Big news for those who like to preserve old video games. A 1.2TeraByte stash of games was discovered on the Internet Archive.

Meanwhile in Malaysia, Chinese companies find a few to circumvent US trade restrictions on chip manufacturing.

Real news that isn't news, the recent AI Executive Order was largely written by a think tank funded by lobbyist who are friends of our current President.

Wednesday 20 December 2023

Foxconn, which makes most of the iPhones, is considering making electric vehicles.

Here is a long essay on Google and AI and what the future may bring.

If you have enough money and a Tesla, those two things seem to always go together, you can soon build a wireless charging system into your garage floor. Of course you have to disassemble the garage first. Money!

Jeff Bezos announces that he is serious about Blue Origin and rocketry and such. He is far behind SpaceX, but these things can be corrected.

Scientists claim that they have spoken with a whale in whale language. And these folks claim to be scientists.

Apple is involved in a controversy with its watches and intellectual property claims and such. The supply in the stores may shrink.

Stanford researchers, who don't seem to have much to do with their time, looked at a dataset of 5Billion (with a B) images. It contained 1,000 child porno images. They are aghast. That comes out to be about 0.0002% or something akin to being hit by lightning while being bitten by a shark on a mountain top in Alaska.

It appears that AWS has 60,000 sales persons. Wow. They are reorganizing and trying to figure out who is who and what is what.

Researchers at ETH Zurich must not have much to do. They have trained a computer system to move a marble through a maze without falling into the holes. I suppose this could extend to something useful.

And now Microsoft's CoPilot can compose songs. That is words and music.

Perhaps we are wasting brain power and other resources on some of these AI things. Surely there are more important problems to solve.

It appears that WalMart is pushing "buy now, pay later" at 4,500 stores. Someone thinks they can make money on short-term loans. We shall see.

Rite Aid pharmacy must have done something wrong as our FTC has banned them from using facial recognition for the next five years.

More angst with X (Twitter) on misinformation. Folks, Donald Trump cannot bench press 500 pounds. Hillary Clinton did not have an alien baby. Putin is not a nice guy. Businesses make a profit or don't exist. Facts of life. Ignore all the rest.

The robot vacuum business shows that there is room for different ideas.

Meanwhile in Colorado, a court rules that Donald Trump cannot be on the ballot in an upcoming primary. Herds of lawyers are gathering.

Thursday 21 December 2023

Good observations about personal projects, particularly those that are done online or on computer. They don't end. You don't throw them away, you put them away (for now).

How one company moved from cloud computing back to local computing and saved million$ a year. Yes, that works.

A CEO explains how to present material to a CEO. You don't present, you sell.

Thoughts on the concept of "technical debt." It isn't real, unless it is real.

More advances in the area of humanoid or two-legged robots. The balance is much better and they don't fall when shoved.

NASA has big plans for commercial delivery of goods to the moon. Let's see if NASA can send anything to the moon at all first.

MUST SEE VIDEO: Blue Origin has a big success putting 33 objects into space and landing its booster safely for reuse.

Upon further review, it appears that when folks further review a news story by using a search engine, we tend to believe false information more, not less. Further review leads to further mistakes.

Waymo (Google) claims to have 7million miles of driverless driving to show that driverless cars operate more safely than human-driven cars.

It is taken much to long to see this: it is a simple heat exchange system on a large scale where heat from computers is used to warm homes.

"The media loves the drama, but your co-workers and customers don't."---Seth Godin

A politician uses AI chattering bots to answer questions from the media. Why not? The questions are a bunch on drivel.

Friday 22 December 2023

One person's experience on the math team in high school and how it changed his outlook. High school has a way of doing that. That can be good or not so good.

Yet another transportation company with electric-powered vehicles bites the dust.

One person's experience trying to test a new neat thing in Python. Hours of frustration, and nothing works. I have done this as well. This person concludes it was his fault for not focusing. I conclude that the persons creating all this new stuff do a terrible job and are snobs. I have written software tools that other persons could use. I spent hours ensuring the tools worked and were documented. Something must be wrong with me.

Yet another advice-for-new-programmers column that offers no advice. Good quote here, "People don't listen to me because I'm a good programmer, they listen to me because I'm a good writer."

Apple promises their Vision Pro $3,000 gadget in February. We shall see.

Where the money is: supergroup ABBA rakes in $225Million this year. Well, digital avatars or something looking like ABBA did all the shows. I guess this is a bonanza of passive income.

Meanwhile in the UK, two persons who hacked into Grand Theft Auto (video game empire) and Nvidia (GPU making empire) are put in a mental hospital. Both hackers are teenagers. This is hacktivism at its best or worst.

Where the money is: Toshiba seeks to make billion$ by making chips that manage power consumption in everything that uses electricity.

Meanwhile in America, our Dept of Commerce illustrates how far behind government regulators are by starting to think about thinking about supply chain risk in electronics manufacturing.

Journalists are dying in Gaza. Despite assurances that 21st-century wars would be fought by computer viruses, in real life we still have lots of kinetics (heavy and hot metal flying through the air at high speed). The battleground is extremely dangerous.

Yann LeCun adds some common sense to the discussion of, "Will AI take over the world and exterminate us all?"

Must-see Christmas card for those of us lucky folks who live in controlled suburbia.

Big cheers for arXiv dot org as it now has html versions of the papers it publishes.

Is data science dead? No. Is the hoopla that goes with "I'm a data scientist" dead? Probably yes.

Our Vice President commits to landing a non-American on the moon. Perhaps our Vice President should commit to NASA launching any person into earth orbit first.

Saturday 23 December 2023

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., government agencies learn that it is easier to write an Executive Order than it is to hire AI-skilled persons into government jobs.

Here is a look back at five home computers introduced in 2023. None of them were market hits, but they could be pointing to something big in five years.

It is time for the end-of-year reviews. This one is about computer science in 2023.

The curse of being about time find (given hours of searching) the tiniest thing on the side of a mountain of things.

Sam Altman shares some management tips he wished he knew. This is worth reading.

Google is filling some jobs with AI. Why not? The output of some jobs is quite repetitive and can easily be done with software. AI isn't needed, but AI gets the blame.

This is new, but not surprising: at Apple, they have found a way to optimize large language models so that they can run on an iPhone. Good work. Predictable, but still good.

It appears that space junk is littering the upper atmosphere with tiny aluminum particles.

Someone woke up this morning and realized that Meta and Ray-Ban have made a pair of sunglasses that have a well-hidden camera. Yes, a person can walk up to you and take your picture without you knowing it.

Really rich people have given hundred$ of million$ to Ivy League schools. They stopped with all the antisemitism flowing on campus. Most Ivy League schools will never need another penny of donations ever. What will they do? COnform to economic pressure or stand on principle? And what if their principles are just plain disgusting and need a slap in the face?

Drunken holiday office parties are going out of style. At least that is what the media is saying. I have my doubts. In the "good old days," people drank themselves into a stupor for 12 hours and then drove home drunk.

Microsoft plans to invest a Billion $$$ in a data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. The place is called a "village," but the population in over 27,000.

And our current President wants to spend billion$ to boost hydrogen production for energy savings. Of course producing hydrogen consumes more energy than it produces. If it were profitable, people would already be doing it.

Someone runs the numbers and reaches an obvious conclusion: when Microsoft stops supporting WIndows 10, 240million PCs go into landfills. Please Microsoft, save the planet!

Sunday 24 December 2023

There are plenty of mean people in this world. One man's story of being tricked into leaving home only to be put in a concentration camp and forced to work on international online scams.

Those neat photos on Facebook are probably not real. The site is overrun with AI-generated fakes.

And how to folks create these fakes? By using tools like the one used in this article.

Meanwhile in Wisconsin, software was predicting who would drop out of high school. The parents and students didn't know this system existed.

Home security, fear of the police, fear of Ring, and all that angst.

YouTube holds about 13Billion videos. Almost a quarter of those were posted in 2023. Almost 20 years old, YouTube shows no signs of aging.

Meanwhile at your local fast food restaurant, everyone is trying to put more automation in the kitchen. This is simple: inflation and wage pressures mean that to keep a Big Mac Whopper under $5, you must work with far fewer human hands.

Tech gadgets and such are cancelled all the time. This piece notes a few that ended in 2023.

If you connect it to the Internet, someone will break into it. This is especially true if you leave the password set to "1111."

I hope they didn't spend a lot of money of this study that concludes, "students who spend more time staring at their phone do worse in school, distract other students around them, and feel worse about their life."