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: 12-18 February, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• "Modern" warfare meant conflicts would be short, experts wrong again
• Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl again, B O R I N G
• Nvidia release Chat with RTX, but you need the right GPU to run it
• OpenAI releases a text-to-video system called Sora
• Amazon releases a new text to speech system

Monday 12 February 2024

Samsung's smartwatch will be able to detect sleep apnea real soon now.

Just to show that tech folks have a sense of humor, two guys build an AI chattering bot that refuses to answer any question as the answer could be harmful to someone somewhere.

Our President shows a campaign ad on TikTok. The irony and hypocrisy are overwhelming.

Heat pumps are the darling of the media recently. They don't work in large parts of the US in the winter.

Meanwhile in San Francisco where folks claim to be tolerant and accepting of diversity, a crowd destroys a Waymo driverless car.

How what we call "television" has changed. My wife and I (in our 60s) use our televisor in the evening to view streamed movies. I have no idea what the #1 rated primetime "TV show" is at this time.

Juggling competing tasks. Freelance writers have an uneven workload. These are some good tips.

I disagree with the basic idea that these are soft skills a writer needs. I think these skills will help a writer.

Writers should take a break. That may be a ten-minute walk every few days are a ten-week vacation a few times a year.

I haven't heard this expression, but I like it: Comparison is the thief of joy.

I just don't get it. I reread this essay comparing the movie Fight Club to writing. I just don't get it.

Tuesday 13 February 2024

I agree 100% that RSS is still pretty great.

Some thoughts on tech jobs. The support jobs are the ones being eliminated, so claims this piece.

Believe it or not: much of those videos showing robots doing all sorts of amazing things are patched together and omit hours of robotic failure. Truth in advertising? Well, you know.

A little more information on OpenAI's efforts to move into software agents that perform tasks.

Microsoft moves some of its XBox games onto other platforms.

Meanwhile in the cloud, Microsoft's Azure business is growing and may soon threaten AWS's dominance. Credit goes to MS's relationship with OpenAI.

Nvidia releases a new GPU for the workstation market. It is called the RTX 2000 ADA and only costs $625.

What does the Biden administration have in common with its predecessor? Open radio access networks, or Open RAN. It's called "the Huawei killer."

How to look busy. Play a recording of a ZoomTeams meeting. People think you are working and don't bother you.

Work resurfaces on creating a small Linux distribution. Maybe old computers can run it and be useful instead of going into a landfill in China and polluting well water.

And now that pesky AI is writing and posting obituaries about people who are still alive.

Now we have citation fraud on Google Scholar. The "science of science" is falling apart. COVID? Climate change? People use to wonder about boxing as a real sport.

A blood test for early prediction of dementia is almost here. What is the false positive rate?

Climate change is ruining our air quality. See, however, above link on fraud in science.

Meanwhile in the Faroe Islands, an underwater "kite" is swimming around in the currents and generating electricity. This is real, not an experiment.

Wednesday 14 February 2024

Today is St Valentine's Day

I failed to note earlier that the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl. The NFL should consider rolling back some of the rules they set in place to favor the offense over the defense. In particular, the rules to favor the quarterback most of all. It is as if the best pitcher on a Major League baseball team could start 3/4s of the regular season games and all the playoff and World Series games. One player, by virtue of the position they play, would dominate the sport. Here is wishing, with little anticipation of action.

Rumors of Microsoft upscaling video on Windows 11. This would be similar to what Nvidia does.

The value of ARM rises on rumors of an AI chip design in the works.

Research proposes greatly increasing the power of a LLM by adding more agents.

What is important and scarce, at least according to this piece, is long-term attention. If an idea does not produce quickly, we drop it.

Slack (Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge) is ten years old. The product has succeeded. The concept has succeeded more even if we don't wish to admit it.

I like this: "Early on in my career, I learned a very important lesson about creativity: It can't be saved for later. Creativity is perishable, just like inspiration. It has to be discharged regularly or it will spoil. And if you let enough of it go to waste, eventually your talents will sour and shrivel with it."

Thoughts on effective accelerationism or e/acc - pronounced ee-ack. Let's get off the status quo and the short-term reward and move forward.

Nvidia releases software called Chat with RTX. If you have the right Nvidia GPU on your Windows 11 computer, you can run a language model locally and use your own documents.

Microsoft's gee-whiz AI Copilot for the office costs a dollar a day. Reviewers don't think it is worth it. Only a dollar a day? Of course it has a positive return on investment. Users want more ROI.

Nvidia is now worth more than Amazon.

Andrej Karpathy is leaving OpenAI. He is not a celebrity. He is one of the persons that invented the AI approaches that made OpenAI's systems work.

Layoffs at Paramount.

Jon Stewart returns to the Daily Show; viewers also return to the Daily Show.

It appears that Walmart is in talks to buy smart-TV-maker Vizio.

Thursday 15 February 2024

Layoffs at Instacart.

Microsoft, which has become the world's leading cyber defense group, says that hackers are using LLMs etc. to steal money via all those things cyber thieves do.

Meanwhile in Europe, when did the Russians become the world's leading experts in advertising campaigns?

Meanwhile in New York City, the folks who run the public school system ran a "snow day test." No remote learning occurred. It flopped.

Do your security cameras use WiFi? If so, they can be disabled with simple RF jamming. Quite simple.

Layoffs at Mozilla as they shift towards AI and other new wonderful things.

Layoffs in the video game industry. During the PAN(dem)IC, people goofed off at home and spent money on video games. The managers hired too many people. That was a mistake by the managers. As usual, the managers were not punished. Instead, the managers punished others.

Yan LeCun, not a celebrity but one of the actual smart people at Meta who makes AI work, discusses the future of AI research. And folks, let's not forget that AI is research. Stuff that moves from research to product is no longer AI.

This should be stopped, but it won't be as the intentions sound good: someone is going to dim the sun to save us all from something.

Meanwhile inside Google, their programmers are using something called Goose to help them write code faster.

Someone uses Nvidia's Chat with RTX. I tried yesterday, but my machine wasn't up to the required specs.

People are returning their Apple Vision Pro headsets. I walked past an Apple store yesterday. They had Vision Pro units on display with no one wanting to try them. This is an expensive Beta test.

There is much coming from the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership. OpenAI is using Bing to create an AI-based search engine.

I have to quote this one simple question that summarizes much, "What constitutes 'political' content?" Politics is the accumulation of power or attention. Facebook and all the rest are attention-getting machines. Everyone there political.

Friday 16 February 2024

This must be an important story because it is all over the Internet: Google will use satellites and computers to map methane leaks all over the world.

An independent Texas oil man sells his company for $26Billion (with a B). He is 85 and doesn't know what he will do with the cash.

Lenovo is showing a transparent laptop computer screen.

Amazon shows a bigger and better text-to-speech AI model.

Big layoffs at Cisco.

Per the numbers, the UK is now in a recession.

Want to run Linux on Apple Silicon? The Asahi Linux Project has pushed forward and now offers more graphics support than Apple does in MacOS.

How one person benefited from working in Silicon Valley for a few years.

Thoughts on the "Performance Improvement Plan." Managers failed to lead, so they blamed someone else and wrote a plan how the other person had to improve or be fired. The plan was written in such a way as to draw any conclusion on any day on any topic.

The history of the robots.txt file on a website and how AI learning breaks the social contract.

MUST SEE VIDEOS: OpenAI announces a text-to-video system called Sora. When everyone can use it (real soon now), it will change almost everything.

OpenAI's detailed announcement is here.

OpenAI's technical report is here.

Layoffs at Toast.

Chainalysis reports that money laundering went down in 2023.

OpenAI wanted to trademark "GPT." I am happy to report they were rejected. What next, trademark DIY, GID, AM, PM?

Google claims new AI-based gmail security.

Stronger rumors about generative-AI tools coming from Apple.

Meta claims an AI model that learns by watching video instead of by reading text. Here is the Science Fiction story: feed it video from American television since 1950 and watch with horror.

The trends bode a bad future for farming in America.

Saturday 17 February 2024

Mr. Putin claims that Russian labs have created cancer vaccines and will release them real soon now.

Microsoft says that a "leap in technology" is coming to the XBox. What now, 128-bit graphics or something. Smell-o-vision?

Yet another peer-reviewed scientific journal publishes a silly and ridiculous paper that shows the field of science is becoming silly and ridiculous. And some people wonder why some people wonder about climate change.

Rumors that Reddit will receive $60million from an AI company that wants to use Reddit's content to train one of these chattering bots.

Intel to receive $10Billion (with a B) from the taxpayers and the CHIPS Act. What about AMD? What about Nvidia? Down the line, what about me?

About 20 big tech companies sign up to fight deepfake fakes during this election year. This may remove the candidate's built-in excuse of saying, "I didn't say that. It was a deepfake, not me!"

This is a complicated mess concerning FISA Section 702. American government agencies could buy information with legal warrants. Some see this as a bonanza or intel and law enforcement while others see it as abuse of position. The whole thing may be abolished soon. We shall see the outcome and its consequences.

It's a great time to be really, really rich in America.

Indoor farming: if it works, it brings many benefits including availability of people will to work in farming.

Our FBI says that our FBI saved us all by stopping a Russian cyber attack that would have doomed us all if it wasn't for the diligence of our FBI.

Scientists discover water on an asteroid. Let me know when we are making coffee with it.

I like this essay from Johanna Rothman. If you know someone who struggles with an issue, read this.

Strong rumors about products Apple will show in March. Updated laptop computers and iPads.

Sunday 18 February 2024

If you see false information online, send it to this group. This could take 80 hours a week to do. There is no end to it. Just read, as one example, the Washington Post.

This is an excellent example of a publication that investigates and publishes findings, only to be blocked from the big social media outlets because it is "political content." If politicians dominate the news, then there is no news that isn't political content.

These folks wanted to work in the tech industry. They were tricked into being TikTok moderators. They are on contract and cannot quit.

Read it and weep, "In the current paradigm for large-scale AI research, all roads lead to a small number of the largest technology companies..." The government (US) is too far behind to recover. The political will and goodwill does not exist at this time. The situation is not hopeless, but the current batch of political "leaders" lack the leadership skills.

Some of the techniques Bellingcat uses to find information from open sources.

The latest and greatest large language models will generate bad information about political campaigns. This brings to mind a research paper I read last week: is the objective to mimic human behavior or teach facts? If the system is to mimic humans, now and then it will say the world is flat and the moon landings were faked. Some of us don't like what some of us say and believe. That is the human condition. Is the system supposed to be like us or just some of us?

Meanwhile in Ukraine, swarms of AI-powered drones are arriving from the UK and US.

AI in the real world: these bricklaying robots aren't advertised as AI, but they stand on the shoulders of AI research. This is real-world application of technology.

Meanwhile in Ireland, the economic planners wanted data centers. They have them. Now what? Who keeps the power flowing?

Silicon Valley is turning back to defense and intelligence technology. It quietly never left.

Linked to defense tech, we have Musk, Putin, and who is doing what.

A trackball is better than a mouse. It always has been and always will be.

Live in a little space with three strangers for a year. NASA is taking applications.

Don't believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.

You want to make a big salary and save money for the future: our government hires contractors and puts them in unusual places overseas. It is odd, and it pay$.

A step back preparing for a leap forward: Walmart closed a hundred locations in 2023 and plans to open 150 in 2024.