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: 25-31 December, 2023

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• The week begins on Christmas Day
• Apple Watch import ban is off and on and ...
• Microsoft releases CoPilot GPT for Android and iOS iPadOS

Monday 25 December 2023

Thoughts on remote work and return to the office building. This essay leans heavily towards remote work.

A contrarian look, born of experience, at microservices and DevOps and DevSecOps. As usual, the idea works with those who created the idea. They have what it takes without recognizing what "what it takes" is. The rest of us? Well, some accidentally have what it takes. Most of us just struggle and wonder why we aren't as good as the hype.

A study shows that being obsessed with health leads to death. There is a link between thinking about dying and dying. Some of that seemed to be in play during the pandemic. People were told they were going to die from COVID-19, so they did. No studies done on that, but it is an area that should be studied (at least I think so).

Someone did enough reverse engineering on ChatGPT to find the email address of some New York Times reporters.

Thoughts on the AI bubble. Of course, government is behind everything trying to regulate ethics of something that will not be here next weekend.

Solid Gold: Stanford uploads a set of lectures from Donald Knuth.

How one writer is "pivoting" or changing with the times. Change occurs daily. Keep up with it.

And observe. This post is about the listening subclass of observing.

This post is about copywriting. This post is really about understanding what you want and working towards that, or not.

Thoughts on a writing workshop.

This post is much better than its title as it provides real-world experience in making a good podcast.

This person has a million views on some of their YouTube videos. Their income from ads was $5,000 for the year. That is all. Again, a tiny few make million$. Everyone else? Just a hobby.

Tuesday 26 December 2023

No Internet viewing today. Today was a travel day with 15 hours on the road. I usually spend half the time online working and such over the connection my vehicle has. Ford and AT&T, however, managed to foul that connection. Six hours on the phone with silly suggestions and misinformation from both companies led to someone who finally admitted that they were have bad network problems in that region of the country.

Wednesday 27 December 2023

This is the week between Christmas and the New Year. In America at least, it is like a week of Mondays with little news online.

All hail YouTube. It is now the fifth major television network or something like that. It is almost 20 years old, but its audience is still growing.

Meanwhile in China, the Communist Party is concerned about "excessive" online gaming and gambling and such.

Meanwhile in the UK, the National Health Service uses kitchen appliances to monitor discharged patients. They claim that fewer persons have to come back to the hospital as doctors know what folks are doing at home.

AI researchers are using the Harry Potter stories to train systems. The language is varied, complex, and "good."

This story is all over the Internet: Amazon Prime will start showing commercials in about a month. A small fee will cause the commercials to disappear.

Musings about opem-source software and systems as compared to proprietary systems. This type of story is what dominates the Internet during this week before the earth resumes spinning on its axis.

Some of us continue to work past age 65. This piece shows the professions for us old folks since the 1960s. Clergy is the biggest group today. What about the scientists and engineers who actually know what not to do?

The concept of finished software. The software does its job. That's it. Update? Why? It does its job.

Thursday 28 December 2023

I'll just quote this summary from the Harvard Business Review. Who can work from home is building a dangerous situation. "There is a large and growing divide in terms of who gets to work from home. Research on job postings found that remote work is far more common for higher paid roles, for roles that require more experience, for full-time work, and for roles that require more education. Managers should be aware of this divide, as it has the potential to create toxic dynamics within teams and to sap morale."

Is generative chattering bots discoveries or inventions? There is a difference.

Meanwhile in Japan, might as well do what the Europeans do. Go after successful American companies for fun and profit. $$$

Some basic economics about high-salary and high-tech jobs in new companies.

And our government is now banning the import of American-designed watches from an American company. Huh?

Apple, reminder as they have more money than anyone, is offering publishers ten$ of million$ for their content to train AI. Google, Meta, et al just grab the content without asking.

xAI's Grok was supposed to be not "woke." Users and tester say it is just as "woke" as ChatGPT. I guess this all matters to some people.

Worried that AI will write the newspapers? It has been doing that for quite a while now.

I'll just quote this as the old newspaper is suing the new news sources, "The New York Times (NYT) is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The NYT claims that millions of its articles have been used without a license to train AI models that now compete with the news agency as a source of reliable information."

Meanwhile in Hollywood, everything is upside down. Netflix is #1. Disney and everyone else is trying to spend billion$ to catch up.

Meanwhile in South Korea, worldwide chip demand is big and product in up.

Gaston Glock dies at 94. His polymer safe-action pistol changed the handgun industry.

And Apple is importing watches again as a ban is paused.

This is an excellent blog post from Seth Godin on writing to hide and writing to tell someone something.

Tom Smothers dies at 86. The Smothers Brothers show changed TV, sometimes for the better.

Friday 29 December 2023

We may be entering a post-open-source era. The GPL copyrights were exploited by companies with more-expensive lawyers. Let's try again.

In medical-technology news, "A new class of antibiotics for drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria which was discovered using more transparent deep learning models." I saw this as one of my brothers-in-law was recently in the hospital ten days with MRSA.

More medical-technology news, "Injection of smart insulin regulates blood glucose levels for one week"

Here is one analysis of the NY Times lawsuit against OpenAI. This piece shows how misguided the lawsuit is.

LG is showing new laptop computers with OLED displays, new AI processors, and they are low in weight. No price$ given yet.

Microsoft teases new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models.

Meanwhile in China, new embargo-compliant GPUs hit the market from Nvidia. While not as good as what is sold elsewhere, these new GPUs are pretty darn good.

Meanwhile in Sweden, they have made a tall windmill out of wood. It has limitations, but much promise over the traditional steel-based windmills.

The Apple computers have never been good for video games. Apple tries to change this.

New regulations from out U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are allowing more immigrants to come here and work high-tech jobs.

Here is something different, take your ultra-wide monitor, rotate it 22 degrees, and you have the best monitor for programming.

Saturday 30 December 2023

Here is a little Twitter (excuse me, X) discussion about computer programmers. They will continue to exist. Low-code and no-code exist as well, but the professional programmer is still needed.

This is a description of a Google Hypercomputer. It is their supercomputer that is built on modules. Once again, the super duper part is the software that sends jobs to the right part of the machine. Yes, they have an operating system written just for the hardware. Someone, some writers have never heard of such.

This is a thoughtful piece on crypto systems and all the uses of crypto that did not involve cryptocurrencies. There was some thoughts behind these systems. Maybe, these thoughts will come around again and work without all the destructive hype.

And at the end of 2023, we have something called "prompts of the year."

Meanwhile at your local Amazon warehouse, they plan to use electricity to create hydrogen to run machines that have fuel cells. Well, it all goes back to electricity from diesel generators, but it is supposed to be better.

In 1998, our government amended the Rehabilitation Act with Section 508. 24 years later, our government agencies still haven't obeyed the law.

AI is now the "muse" for writers. It is simply software that points writers to ideas that were on the Internet all along. Relax.

This week, Microsoft put CoPilot and ChatGPT on apps for Android and all the Apple devices.

The value of tech companies dropped in 2022. They rebounded in 2023 showing huge gains.

Meanwhile on cable news, the Fox News Network has the most viewers in 2023. This makes eight years in a row.

More from Microsoft, "Copilot Chat is available in the sidebar in Microsoft's IDEs, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio."

And now we have the "virtual influencer." A person that exists only as a creation. We used to call these cartoon characters. Remember how Popeye sold spinach and other characters were in ads?

SpaceX had two space launches on Thursday. That brings their total for 2023 to 98 or almost two per week. The future of space travel belongs to the commercial world.

Sunday 31 December 2023

Basic concepts to improve or ruin meetings. You read these tips and say, "But no one would do that..."

Some basic principles of writing computer programs. Perhaps they don't teach basic principles any longer.

This is an instructive piece that demonstrates how to create diagrams using several chattering bots.

Rolling Stone Magazine predicts big changes in the Internet in 2024.

The IEEE takes a look at WiFi-7.

It appears that Amazon is "silent sacking." This is where instead of laying off an employee and having to pay benefits, you put someone in a job they will hate so they resign and get no benefits.

The Effective Altruists come to Washington where a Democratic administration is sympathetic to their views.