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: 8-14 January, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• CES is this week with lots of product announcements
• We survive the hottest year ever (aren't we magnificent?)

Monday 8 January 2024

CES is this week. Look for many product announcements.

Aghast! It appears that the entire east coast of the United States is sinking.

Microsoft may overtake Apple and regain the title of the world's most valuable company.

Rumors of Apple in 2024 with a new powerhouse processor running in the Mac Studio and not in any laptops.

Elon Musk habitually uses illegal drugs. Still, his companies try to win government contracts. Collision coming.

Here come more augmented reality glasses (not goggles). I have been greatly disappointed at these efforts for almost 40 years.

AI "hallucinations" are simply mistakes. Mistakes have led to breakthroughs in science for thousands of years. Still, they are mistakes.

LG shows a giant transparent TV screen.

Acer shows new portable computers with the newest Intel Core Ultra processors.

Got $2,500? Get this 57" super ultra wide monitor that curves around half the earth (so it seems).

It appears that electric vehicles lose their value faster than all other vehicles. It also appears that government subsidies to buy new EVs are part of the cause of this problem.

Some of us remember the Apollo program and the astronauts. That was back in the day before NASA fell prey to the iron law of bureaucracy.

Tuesday 9 January 2024

The football team associated with the University of Michigan wins the national title of such teams. Little-mentioned in the story is the influence of COVID-19 extra-year-players. The winners have many 24-year-old college students on the team. That is older than many players in the NFL.

During February 2024, the American companies will attempt to land unmanned vehicles on the moon. This will be the first American vehicles on the moon in 50 years.

Rumors of AI tools coming from Apple at WWDC in June. That is a long time from now.

Intel announces new processors, but the names are so confusing no one can tell which is which.

Lenovo shows a portable computer that is both a Windows laptop and an Android tablet in one machine.

Razer updates its Blade line of gaming laptops with newer processors and better displays.

ASUS puts new Intel CPUs and new Nvidia GPUs into a small desktop machine.

CES is this week. Here is one summary of everything announced before CES began.

Here is a "no duh" statement from OpenAI on training LLMs: limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens.

I find this career advice from a Stanford professor fascinating as it echoes what Jerry Weinberg and Satir taught for decades.

And we find microplastics in all those plastic bottles of water. Bring back glass.

Well, the first unmanned mission to the moon seems to have already flopped.

This is hacking at its best: take a receipt printer, program it do print a six-foot-long map of a river. Something that is useful and completely unintended by the manufacturer.

Wednesday 10 January 2024

More information on America's flopped attempt to go to the moon. Well, there are more than one companies attempting this, so somebody might succeed. Horrible excuse for a national space program.

Nvidia stuggles to keep on the curve of more performance at the same price. Some recent revisions improve the situation a bit.

This is a new one for me: a progressive web app (PWA). It is a web page that "looks like an app" on your computer.

This offers a good explanation of how to "attack" a neural network simulation, which is the basis for these LLMs etc. It is the old saying of garbage-in-garbage-out. You toss in some garbage on purpose to produce bad answers and trick users into doing the wrong thing. Bad intentions produce bad results. Nothing new in the concept.

Let's take care where angels trod: researchers have found ways to edit genes and correct genetic defects. In this study, they correct blindness. That is wonderful. Side affects? Let's understand those.

Folks at CES are going nuts over transparent TV displays. Cool, but I don't want to have the blemishes on my living room wall disrupting my movie-watching pleasure.

Meanwhile at Waymo, they take a big leap in driverless cars as they will soon have employees ride on the Arizona freeways with no drivers.

Meanwhile in America's main stream media, pessimism regins they continue to be irrelevant.

A new company called Rabbit has a new product called an R1. They are trying to build the information appliance that visionaries have long wanted. Maybe this one will work.

Intel enters the market for system on a chip for the auto industry. Nvidia and Qualcomm are the dominant players here with years head start in autonomous vehicles.

Meanwhile at Walmart, a long-time leader in data mining and analytics, shows Generative search tools to help consumers buy more.

Meanwhile in China, blocked from buying some Nvidia processors, they are pulling Nvidia chips out of game systems and using them for AI. This is an old practice that is old because it works.

Meanwhile on YouTube and everywhere else, we have deepfake videos of celebrities endorsing Medicare scams. Only belief half of what you see and none of what you hear.

Here is one review of the first day of CES.

Meanwhile at Amazon, big layoffs at Twitch. They have many users but almost no profits.

Asus shows a portable computer, I wouldn't call it a laptop, that has two 14-inch screens.

Meanwhile on earth, we reach the peak of arrogance as we proclaim 2023 the hottest year ever. Only a superior group of folks like us could survive such a thing. Aren't we grand?

Meanwhile in the Dallas-Ft Worth area, Walmart expands its drone delivery services.

Thursday 11 January 2024

Meanwhile at your local college, the best professors are going to commercial companies as they are recognized for their brilliance. Bad news for colleges, students, and paying parents.

The curse of the "For You Page." We don't see things from our friends. The "algorithms" push stuff at us because the algorithms know what we like (sometimes).

A Just In Time compiler comes to Python. Python is easy on the programmer, but bad on the system.

Meanwhile at the office, everyone else's job is easy and they will be replaced by AI. Me? I am complex and smart. My job? Too complex and nuanced for AI.

Magic mushrooms and psychedelic drugs bring relief to brain-damaged people. If the medicine works and the side effects are not awful, let's use these properly. Of course, "properly" is subjective.

This is a good piece, from an excellent source, on plagiarism at Harvard and the use of copyrighted material. I, like the author of the piece, consume and am influenced by copyrighted material. As long as my output is not a direct copy (or a direct copy with credit to the source)... what's the problem here, folks?

The tech job market isn't good right now. American companies send Indian tech workers back to India where there are no jobs.

Coming soon to Microsoft Word are (1) paste and paraphrase and (2) paste and match writing style. Excellent.

Speaking of copying and pasting, we have the plagiarism detectors. One user states, The bots are literally worse than useless. They do harm, and they don't find anything I couldn't find by myself.

File this one under "it sounded good" but didn't work. All these well-being initiatives at work don't work.

There is plenty of kinetic energy on planet earth. One day we may start to use a little of it. See, from this example, water moving through pipes.

Google makes it easier to pair a physical keyboard with an Android device.

Google is laying off hundred of people.

OpenAI now has a subscription service called ChatGPT Team that allows groups of people to collaborate inside ChatGPT (paid subscription).

Where the money is: we streamed music 4 trillion times (with a tr) in 2023.

In the US, folks created the RISC-V architecture and instruction set and made it free to use. In China, the Communist Party is using it. Bad idea?

Moonwalkers: like a moving walkway strapped to your shoes. The first application is workers in warehouses. I see hope for folks we are disabled and struggle to walk on their own.

This device isn't quite there, but heading in the right direction. The Gyroglove steadies hand tremors like those in Parkinson's.

Streaming entertainment and forgetting lessons from the past.

Real news that isn't news: NASA delays plans to send people to the moon. How many of these "delays" are coming from what used to be a functioning agency?

Recent surveys indicate that it is tougher to find a job if you are a software engineer.

Mouthpad: put this in your mouth and scroll your device with your tongue. Cool for most of us and maybe essential for the disabled.

Friday 12 January 2024

A travel day with no Internet viewing. Catching up on last week's notes on writing.

It is the new year. Lots of posts about inspiring writers to really do it this year.

Here is another: be a "masterful" writer this year.

This piece is about understanding the difference between speed and ease in writing. Just because I can write a short story in an hour doesn't mean it was easy. Years of background toil led to that one hour.

Well, this one is different. A man who writes palindromes.

This is a good piece on writing in a journal. It discusses how one persons does this and the benefits. This is one practice I recommend for everyone.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, a pretty god but still not as good as before the panic. Universal goes to #1 ahead of Disney.

Saturday 13 January 2024

So far so good as Rabbit sells out its first run of 10,000 R1 devices. Will this work or burst into flames?

Some of the unusual things at CES.

I hope something comes of this idea of putting tiny machines under the skin to deliver medicine.

One person's path to quitting a paying job to work on an open-source project.

In business, OpenAI is doing well by signing contracts with several hundred businesses to use ChatGPT.

Meanwhile at Meta (Facebook),< Zuckerburg finally figured out how the meta=verse was a mistake and AI was the way to go.

Meanwhile in American Federal Government, our Security and Exchange Commission had bad cyber security all along. This is not the only Federal Agency with such problems.

Meanwhile on GitHub, the easy ability to share software means it is easy for everyone. That includes the purveyors of malware and other ne'er-do-wells.

In a quiet but not quiet-enough move, OpenAI relaxes its prohibition of the use of ChatGPT in warfare (as if anyone paid attention to that).

Engadget lists their Best of CES 2024.

Got $125,000 and want to show off at the RV trailer campground? Here it is folks, a super sleek all-electric trailer.

Engadget lists their best-of laptop computers for CES 2024.

Hertz rent a car is selling electric vehicles and replacing them with gas-powered ones. The rental business just doesn't work with EVs.

Linux kernel 6.7 is released.

Meanwhile at American colleges, say goodbye to the best tech researchers as the billionaire CEOs are pulling them away with, who'd have thunk it?, more pay.

And now that the ChatGPT store is open, guess what the most popular apps are? Yes, AI girlfriends.

Sunday 14 January 2024

Strong rumors that when Apple releases its Vision Pro there won't be many units to buy.

Is this the ultimate survival machine? 400 square feet of living space that you can drive around. It is all powered by the sun. The limiting factors are food and water. No price given for this all electric RV.

SpaceX and Starlink send the first text message from a basic smartphone off a satellite. If practical and practiced, this changes catastrophe responses among other things.

In a "no duh" moment, researchers show that you can train software to give incorrect answers. Of course you can. Everyone has known this forever.

Where the money is: AI is it. Everything at CES this year for AI. Give me one of those AI pencils.

I like this post from Seth Godin about offering instead of asking.

Bill Gates and Sam Altman chat. Get ready for the biggest acceleration in technology ever.

How investors bought newspapers as businesses. They figured out how to close the newspapers at a profit instead of keeping them printing at a loss.

So much for the US Peregrine lunar lander. It flopped so badly that it is now on course to burn up in the earth's atmosphere. In the race to put vehicles on the moon, the US is far behind the likes of India.