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: 26 February - 3 March, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• 29 days in February this year
• Apple cancels its electric car program after ten years of work
• That moon lander (on its side) will cease to operate in a couple of days
• This is a leap year with 29 days in February
• Project Maven makes a comeback, sort of

Monday 26 February 2024

Late last week, there was a judgement in a case in New York wherein the executive director of the National Rifle Association was found guilty of wasting the money of a non-profit organization. That person must now pay the NRA over $6million. This is a great day for the members of the NRA and firearms safety education. In effect, the district attorney was fighting for the NRA against a few corrupt individuals. Funny how some news outlets are reporting otherwise.

Real news that isn't news: at Apple, the engineers consider many ideas that never make it to market. No duh.

The Mobile World Conference is this week. We expect many new product announcements.

Got $500 and no technical expertise? You can buy a robocall using anyone's voice (including the President of the United States).

The hypocrisy of politicians has no bounds. They banned TikTok from government systems but use it to run election ads.

Beating everyone to market, Samsung shows a smart ring.

Nvidia shows new processors that will bring AI-type processing to laptop computers. Buy one real soon now.

Qualcomm shows similar devices that will bring AI-type processing to mobile devices.

This Swiss company seems to have some sense. They build small and inexpensive electric vehicles that anyone can operate. This is practical.

Communication with anyone at Antarctica has always been sparse. Now the Starlink connects the place to the world.

Meanwhile in Texas, a giant solar energy facility starts operating. It was funded by the shell game of big companies buying some type of phony certificates that showed they were good guys. What nonsense.

Where the money is: sell tech to governments so the governors can watch their residents whom they do not trust.

How to improve your writing? Have someone tell you that you have improved.

The value of structure or having a foundation so that you can be creative. Odd that structure enables flexibility. It does (for some of us).

Quote the headline, "The Complete Guide to Amazon KDP." I earn a few dollars on Amazon Direct Publishing (less than $100 a year). It is a place to self publish.

And following on with self publishing, here are some mistakes to avoid.

Before starting a blog, decide what you want to do. Here is a tip from me: start a practice blog. Do it for six months or a year. Apply what you learn to a "real blog" (whatever that is).

I guess you can earn some money on social media. Here are tips.

Tuesday 27 February 2024

More dire predictions of how AI will eat your paycheck. Instead of being more productive, you will do the same in two days instead of five at 40% pay. I doubt it.

A look at BlueSky and the Authenicated Transfer Protocol. This may be the future of social media that is not controlled by one elite college person.

Tesla shows more video of its humanoid robot walking. I guess there is a great fascination with humanoid robots. That is the least-efficient form factor for a machine.

There's no free lunch: Nvidia will show two minutes of commercials before people can play free games.

Does anyone remember Project Maven? Pentagon officials claim its tech was used in recent targeting in the Middle East.

Layoffs at Expedia.

And now we have SubdoMailing. Use abandoned subdomains from real companies as a base for fraud emails.

Our Supreme Court listens to arguments on free speech and the Internet. Is Facebook et al so frequently used that they are today's town square. You can't tell someone in the town square to shut up. But Facebook et al are companies, not the publicly owned town square.

For what it is worth, high-protein meals to keep off the pounds.

Nvidia's CEO says don't learning programming but instead things like biology, education, manufacturing, or farming.

A 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier has donated $1 billion to a Bronx medical school. Free tuition forever at the school. Good.

Overhyping AI, "every PC is going to be an AI PC in the longer term."

I guess there are worse things you can do with your time: someone has Doom running on a lawnmower.

Why go to college? To land a college-level job. Half of American college students are working jobs that need no college.

Wednesday 28 February 2024

The Odysseus moon lander sits on its side up there on the moon. The solar cells aren't receiving enough sunlight and the transmit antenna is at a bad angle for efficient communications. This machine will cease to operate in a couple of days. Unmanned moon landings are quite difficult. Or maybe everyone forgot how to land an unmanned craft. Old science has been lost to the grace.

Google has a new AI model called Genie that can create video games. Surely there is something more important we can do with this technology.

Something different: how Norman Lear's "All in the Family" pushed TV shows from rural to city settings.

Is $1.30 a day too much to pay for a tool that generates source code for a programmer?

How to use advertising tech, social networks, and poorly designed but popular apps to find people. These things have been known for several decades. It wasn't until the last couple of years that the Pentagon et al learned about it.

Google is paying a few publishers to beta test its Generative AI. Let the publishers publish three AI-written stories a day and see what breaks.

And now we have ProofNews dot org. A new non-profit news sources that promises to use some scientific methods. We shall see.

I read one news story. They seemed to have neglected to hire someone who knows grammar and punctuation as well as the concept of brevity. Too bad.

Real news that isn't news: companies that don't charge for the use of their systems are selling user data. Of course they are. How else would they fund their operations?

Our President signs an Executive Order making it illegal to sell data to "countries of concern." I guess the President has law-making ability given by the Constitution. Maybe not.

It appears that Apple worked ten years on building an electric car. For many reasons, Apple's managers are now cancelling the program.

Thursday 29 February 2024

Today is February 29th or leap day or something.

You can build a better mousetrap, but "The market always wins."

Meanwhile at Wendy's, 2025 will bring dynamic food pricing. The price of a chili and Frosty will change during the day depending on demand.

More details on why that moon lander fell over at landing. Systems failed, software was rewritten, no human pilot to adjust. You have to engineer and test for these possibilities. There are almost endless possibilities of what might happen. Test them. Be able to adjust. This is expensive, but what cost failure? And no one can say, "We didn't know about that kind of thing." Everyone knows about risk management.

Meanwhile in Michigan, they held a Democratic Party primary for President. President Biden won with 81%. In second with 13% was "uncommitted."

And now we have the Open Documentation Academy.

Layoffs at EA.

Just as the good guys are using these chattering bots to write more and better, so are the ne'er-do-wells.

More chattering bots that can run on a laptop computer with enough memory and enough GPU power.

Meanwhile in North Korea, the munitions factories are running 24/7 to supply the Russians in Ukraine.

KDE Plasma 6 is released.

The city of San Francisco has spiraled downward into street crime and drugs. The solution? Technology. Here come surveillance cameras, drones and AI-powered facial recognition.

Friday 1 March 2024

Quick answers are rewarded on TV game shows where the stakes are low. Slow, deliberative answers are far more valuable. Some managers, however, think life is a game show. Too bad if you work around one of them.

Adobe shows its Project Music GenAI Control (what a name?!). I is supposed to be the Photoshop of creating music.

Boasts that Tesla's new Roadster will go from 0 to 60 in less than a second. That is dragster performance. We shall see.

Deeper thoughts on how Google really messed up with their Gemini model and its silly outputs. Does anyone at Google know about testing?

Real news that isn't news: government agencies are always asked, "what AI applications do you have?" Some over hype, some under report. GAO audited the DHS answer and predictable results.

Let's go wild with this AI thing. Nvidia is building "AI factories" using a new GPU for them.

How much energy does an AI system use? An AI researcher wants to know, but no one will tell.

Someone hacks OpenAI's system for a court case. oooops, that violates the terms of agreement for use. What a world.

Got a Snapdragon Android device? Qualcomm has an AI model you can run.

In 1974, a bunch of experts predicted 2024. They did okay.

And now we can play Doom on a toothbrush. I suppose there are worse things to do with time.

OpenAI was founded to work toward the benefit of humanity over profits. Elon Musk, an initial founder and invester, sues Sam Altman for not doing that.

All the data center companies pledged to be energy neutral or some such thing. They people wanted them to churn AI butter at high energy. Oh well, just didn't work out.

Microsoft introduces a CoPilot for Finance in Excel and Outlook.

Microsoft has a new API called DirectSR. It is to make Super Resolution easier for game developers to include in games.

All of today's new cars include microphones, cameras, etc. Our Dept of Commerce will investigate if cars from China are used for espionage. Of course they are. Good grief.

Photomath is now available on Google's app store. That a photo of a math problem, it provides a step-by-step solution.

A look at the Dell XPS 16. It is expensive and powerful. It also favors fashion over function. Perfect if you work at a fashion company.

Seth Godin has an excellent suggestion for the suggestion box.

This story is all over the Internet even though it is real news that isn't news: cheap doorbell cameras are easy to hack.

More real news that isn't news: blackhat hackers break into Dept of the Interior data centers.

A case for self-driving cars. They aren't flawless, but they are much safer than us human drivers.

Saturday 2 March 2024

This is a good article on RocketLabs. It builds rockets to space like SpaceX. It is behind by five years, but is progressing.

Musing on AI, money, and markets. Is or when will the bubble burst? Is this real enough to sustain? Time will tell. It isn't certain one way or the other.

Watch this humanoid robot manipulate things with its hands. This is near-human speed. Well, near the speed of an average to below-average human. This is better, but not there yet.

This could be SIGNIFICANT. Astro Mechanica boasts a new type of jet engine with 10x thrust. They talk about putting things in orbit, but fight jets and bombers are obvious applications. If your nation has a 10x jet engine, you have air dominance.

Tesla can haul in $6 to $12Billion a year by letting Ford et al owners (for a small fee) use Tesla's charging stations.

The ne'er-do-wells are busy using these chattering bots ChatGPT et al to create software that uses these chattering bots to poison these chattering bots to chatter silly nonsense and harmful content.

If only I had invested in Super Micro Computer. They have something to do with make Nvidia processors work in data centers. Their stock have rose 20x (20x, not 20%) in two years.

Meanwhile in California, regulators ok Waymo (Google) to run its driverless taxis in LA as well as the San Francisco freeways. SFO is now included.

More Google news with background on Project Maven. Google helped the US Military find targets in imagery. At one time Google employees threatened all sorts of threats. They probably will again. The age-old question for the technologist: should you help the military kill people to save lives?

Microsoft promises to bring CoPilot to OneDrive in late April. Finally, ask questions about my own files I put in OneDrive and receive answers. See the demo in the link.

The world is running out of Helium. Oooops, no we just found a great big source. We know so little about our world.

HP is trying something different with its printers. You rent the printer and how many pages a month you can print. Toner come to you automatically.

Sunday 3 March 2024

A case for Broadcom being the second biggest winner in the everything-is-AI world.

Microsoft researchers propose using the byte instead of the token in transformers.

Apple silicon has a GPU in it. This post shows how to use that like an Nvidia GPU.

Wendy's faces a backlash on dynamic pricing. Many parts of the economy use dynamic pricing. Fast food restaurants use it now. The concept is to use it hour by hour.

All About Roads (AARoads dot com) where former Wikipedia contributors created their own site. Wikipedia wants sources. Sometimes a local is the primary source without a published citation. Wikipedia does not like that. It repeats history. Original work is not welcome. That's too bad.

Some folks at the Wall Street Journal estimate a couple of trillion $$$ in technical debt with software. No estimates yet on technical debt in garages.

And the New York Times proclaims the woes of Hollywood. The PAN(dem)IC of 20-21 still burdens the movie industry. Barbie and Oppie were hits, but everything else in 2023 was bad.

Seth Godin on those ZoomerTeams meetings, "Lazy simulations of in-person meetings are not a worthy substitute."

Microsoft keeps slipping in CoPilot features to Windows 11. Perhaps this is a brilliant strategy my Microsoft. Instead of one big bang, they mimic the sound of popping pop corn.

Western civilization is safe (huh?). We have more Star Wars movies coming.