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: 1-7 January, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• According to our calendar, we enter the new year of 2024
• Niklaus Wirth dies at 89. A major passing in the computing world.
• Windows PCs now have a CoPilot key

Monday 1 January 2024

It is official: what used to be a grand time of college bowl games is now to be known as The Winter Scrimmages wherein who know who is playing due to opt outs and transfer portals.

Based on one arbitrary calendar or other, we being a new year on this day.

Meanwhile in America, different states take opposite approaches to autonomous vehicles that should receive tickets for infractions.

2023 was a bad year for working in the video game industry as 9,000 jobs were lost.

LG shows a new line of computer monitors that are also smart TVs.

AI chattering bots also write software. Need a computer science degree? Maybe not. With new tools come new job skills such as questioning, creativity skills, and innovation.

"2023 Will Be Remembered as the Year Climate Change Arrived" What happened to newspaper editors? This silly headline is from the Washington Post. Good grief.

Meanwhile in California, highly educated and high-earning folks are leaving while, uh, er, lesser in all that are arriving. This is a reversal of a decades-long trend.

A few comparisons in computing tech: In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million ... The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 ... and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1. I have used both machines and lots of others as well. We do live in an age of amazing computing.

Is it worth the trouble to try to be published by a big publisher or a well-known magazine?

Yet another writer considers the question, "Should I write for free?"

There is a lot of money to be made in ghostwriting. One succe$$ful ghostwriter discusses this.

Write good stories in your blog. The subject of the blog doesn't matter---write a good story.

And then there is the topic of being a technical writer. Be careful with this one.

This is a little different as it is a link to a tumblr post. Good description of 10 different ways to outline a novel without making an outline.

Tuesday 2 January 2024

We continue into one more day of holidays which means that the news on the Internet is sparse.

January 2nd, the earth resumes spinning on its axis.

And more predictions on the workplace in 2024. This piece emphasizes generative AI tools.

There were some bad products in 2023 in tech.

We have a little twist in the revolving door of the defense-industrial complex as former generals and SESs are going to venture capital firms instead of VP jobs.

Apple hauls in $85Billion a year in services. Legal challenges may change that.

January 1 brings a list of works that are now in the public domain. Some early Mickey Mouse finally is public due to decades of Disney legal battles.

Meanwhile in Japan, they are running out of people. Those turning 18 in 2023 was a record low.

Great quotes on the current state of AI in the pop world, " AI can write book reviews no one reads of A.I. novels no one buys, generate playlists no one listens to of A.I. songs no one hears, and create A.I. images no one looks at for websites no one visits. This seems to be the future A.I. promises. Endless content generated by robots, enjoyed by no one, clogging up everything, and wasting everyone's time."

Wednesday 3 January 2024

Thoughts on file compression. I worked on these things a few decades ago. Information theory is fascinating for some of us.

Yet another review of 2023. This one focuses on generative AI and the large language models. Clever stuff, but so what?

This GitHub repository is a course on large language models. This is one of the great benefits of places like GitHub and WordPress et al. People can publish books, courses, and other knowledge sources quickly. There isn't much money in it, but there was never much money in publishing text books for graduate courses and working professionals.

Maybe something good will come of this. Some researchers have found that vibrating molecules can destroy cancer cells. Let's all take care with these things as the potential for damage is immense.

Someone has a firm grasp of the obvious: worried about misinformation. Stop all politicians from talking.

The President of Harvard University resigns. There is some accountability left in the world.

Several states have required age verifications for porn viewing. Pornhub has blocked access for everyone in those states.

After 34 years of everyone trying, someone finally beats Tetris.

Someone finds and uploads an oldest old version of MS-DOS. It goes back to 1980 and a predecessor to QDOS.

Thursday 4 January 2024

This is a good piece about how you can put noise in a photo that confuses AI systems. Humans, however, don't see the noise and are not confused, well not confused much.

Large language models can be quite helpful to those who write computer programs. There are, however, inherent problems. Good use of LLMs requires well-worded questions. Computer programmers are usually deficient in well-worded anything.

This year, at last, we have useful humanoid robots. Two legs, the arms, and a head. We should do better.

SpaceX now has Starlink satellites that allow basic cell phones to communicate via satellite.

The future of entertainment is here now, "Elvis Evolution will use AI and holographic projection, augmented reality and live theatre to recreate events in Presley's life and music."

Intel sends its software AI folks off into an independent company called Articul8 AI (articulate artificial intelligence).

2024 brings a new key on the Windows computer keyboard. It is the CoPilot key. This is the first addition since the Windows key arrived 30 years ago.

Dell updates its XPS line of laptop computers. These are the machines to buy for serious business. We live in the age when no one is fired for buying a Dell computer in the US.

And Dell has a new line of ultra-wide monitors.

Somehow for some people, LinkedIn has become a dating site.

This is a major passing in computing: Niklaus Wirth dies at 89.

New technology for wide-field-of-view or "fish eye" camera lenses.

Prompt engineering or trying to manipulate a LLM is a "bug, not a feature." Someone has a grasp of reality.

Friday 5 January 2024

Return to work and work from anywhere both lose to the compromise of hybrid. Note, this is a compromise and not a consensus or agreement on what is better. Let's just call it a tie and agree to whatever.

Let's have some "news" or just plain marketing information from VR AR xR stuff.

Apple's AR system leaks some videos of really good web browsing. We already do that, huh?

Meta's CTO tells us all that Meta's coming AR glasses are the best thing ever, even better than sliced bread.

Meanwhile in China, Tesla recalls all the cars sold there due to autopilot and crash issues.

Google researchers discuss some methods for combining all these large models with other techniques to build autonomous robotics.

Meanwhile in the Taiwan Straights, a new laptop computer in China uses a Taiwanese processor, not a Chinese processor. It appears the Chinese industry is not as capable as people thought.

A look at the decline of Wired Magazine. It was once the Rolling Stone of the tech world. Alas, success leads to failure (in this case).

Let's move forward to the past as this company makes a case for the iPhone that has a physical keyboard. I like it, but I am old.

Meanwhile in America, Congress and the President changed tax law in just a little bit to kill starup companies and how they report R&D expenses and pay taxes.

In an effort to eliminate fossil fuels, which are plentiful, we try to use rare earth materials, which are rare and expensive. I guess we know what we are doing, right?

Pay TV subscribers, e.g., cable TV are shrinking at an alarming rate. The market is its lowest since 1989.

The numbers for people using Linux on a computer are rising. They count MacOS separate from Linux, but MacOS is yet another xNix version.

Saturday 6 January 2024

Goodbye graphics cards; hello super graphics cards. I don't invent this stuff. The marketers do.

Once again, someone attempts to explain the transformer. I find it odd that the persons who wrote the first paper on transformers succeeded with the awful explanation they gave.

Smooth scrolling text: in 1985 I sat in front of a "dumb terminal" that had smooth scrolling. Now we don't have it. This utility attempts to return it.

In order to build colonies in space, we need to build 300 Starships a year. That is a lot of jobs.

Meanwhile at Google, they are building a Bard version that won't be free. More $$$ going to big tech.

The CES (Consumer Electronic Show) is next week in Las Vegas. Here are some strong rumors about what we will see.

Employment in the US IT sector is flat. It added only 700 jobs (a rounding error) in 2023.

In America, our government is about to file a case against Apple for making a smartphone that we really like to buy.

While in China, their government has unveiled a three-year action plan to use the country's massive troves of information to boost its economy. Hmmm.

Good train of thought from Seth Godin: I did all my homework. Doing all your homework is a measure for industrial bosses. But what, precisely, did your homework ever do for you?

Something different: tracking industrial activities at sea. Much of this has never been followed or measured.

Microsoft is officially removing WordPad from Windows 11 installs. I, a rare person, used WordPad extensively in one recent job. I needed a Windows editor and the compute network was so weak that running Word was a bad idea.

It didn't take long for this to happen: drug runners are using little drones to carry small but valuable $$$ amounts of drugs across borders and policed areas.

And now we have non-fiction writers suing OpenAI and Microsoft for using their works published online as training materials for AI. It isn't "Fair Use." This is a big mess with no end in sight. I doubt writers will receive much money. They lawyers, as usual, will get it.

Sunday 7 January 2024

A research team performed 350,757 tosses (shattering the previous record of 40,000). One side turned up 50.8% of the time. The coin toss is NOT EQUAL.

Researchers at Stanford develop a method of training a robot to cook by mimicking human demonstrations.

Our NIST released a 100-page report on Adversarial Machine Learning.

The NIST report is here.

Well, if everyone can sue OpenAI for using their content, OpenAI can do the same for prompting ChatGPT in ways that violate the Terms of Agreement.

Note this: better mistakes are worse as they take longer to read and discard as mistakes. AI is helping people generate better mistakes.

Meanwhile in China, we see yet another example of the bad part of trade embargoes. Those we wish to punish create their own products and are better off than before we punished them.

And in North Korea, the government hacks the world for money. The tiny country is responsible for a third of all money stolen online.

Meanwhile in America, if you can remove my candidate from your ballot, I can remove your candidate from my ballot. Folks need to understand what setting a precedent means.

MUST SEE VIDEO. This is significant: researchers have made a soft exoskeleton that helps folks with Parkinson's disease walk safely without "freezing." This is what we should be doing with all this technology.

An ACM editor plays Dr. Frankenstein with "what have we done?" All this computing gave us harm online.