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: 11-17 March, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• The public opinion tide seems to be shifting on these wars
• TikTok legislation passes in the House
• Everyone upgrades their LLMs (no news)
• SpaceX has a successful StarShip launch

Monday 11 March 2024

Big Brother is watching you drive your car. Auto makers track their cars and sell the information to insurance companies.

On the other side of the privacy fence, Airbnb is banning security cameras.

I'll just quote the headline, "Elon Musk says xAI will open-source Grok this week"

Meanwhile in Malaysia, chip makers are scrambling to build factories there.

I guess this is important to some: experts say we are still in the Holocene. This is not the Anthropocene.

Our tax dollars at waste: a US government commission says we must act quickly to avert a extinction-level threat to the human species.

Nvidia's CEO boasts that his AI chips are so good that competitors can give away theirs for free and it won't matter.

And we have yet another semi-official explanation of the Roswell UFO incident.

Tuesday 12 March 2024

A look into AWS' Simple Storage System. It stores files in the cloud, but is not a filesystem.

Scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) claim to have an AI processor that uses 625x less electrical power and 25x less space than Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPU.

Google, Apple, and Firefox has a new browser benchmark called Speedometer 3.0.

Fear and loathing with deepfakes, copyrights, and Google search results.

Covariant, a UC Berkeley artificial intelligence spinout, announces Robotics Foundation Model 1. This is sort of LLM for robotics.

Some researchers find more racism in work from other researchers. It seem to me that researchers would understand the nature of research and researchers a bit better than this.

You can't make up this stuff: dishwashing soap used as a lubricant to seal aircraft doors.

Tough talk on China's technology from our Secretary of Commerce.

The University of Texas system joins other colleges in returning to standardized tests.

Wednesday 13 March 2024

If you can't beat them, you take their money. TikTok has some sort of agreement with employees and shareholders whereby the company just takes money away if it wants.

How one company attempts to "act early, act small." This is all quite basic practice, but I guess there are many who have never heard of this.

Coming real soon now Airpod Pro models will have a "hearing aid mode." No details about what that really means.

Also coming real soon now from Apple is a version 2 of the AR device that will have a $2,000 price cut.

This is a long and substantive report on national AI policies from around the world.

How Bellingcat uses open-source code notebooks in research. Thank Knuth for Literate Programming. The source code explains thought to people, not to computers.

A study shows that these AI chattering bots are really bad at providing even basic information about an election, e.g., when the polls open and close.

Software engineering is a smaller component of AI than it is of other type of software systems. Nevertheless, it is essential and neglected.

Data quality is more important than data quantity. This is obvious, but most folks don't seem to understand that.

Our President requests $3Billion for Federal AI in the next budget. I feel that the government does not have the talent to wisely spend a third of this amount.

A review of existing intellectual property laws shows that we already have enough of them.

Meta describes its AI Research SuperCluster (RSC). It uses 24,576-each Nvidia Tensor Core H100 GPUs. That is far beyond what any government agency can buy or build.

BlueSky, a Twitter-like service, releases software so that just about anyone can run their own service. Small businesses and non-profits can use this.

Our Dept of Defense was to spend $2.5Billion (with a B) on Intel. No longer.

A call for someone to regulate AI. Government "failed" to regulate social media, and look what happened (lots of folks made lots of money). Jealousy. Some folks want to dictate to others. If you can't make money, at least let someone make policy and have power.

Some folks have a lot of time to piddle with LLMs and find ways to embarrass them.

Someone claims they have reached the Holy Grail of computer programming. That is a program that writes programs so that programmers are no longer needed.

Thursday 14 March 2024

Our IRS starts direct tax filing from only 12 states. Some 90% of Americans could have their income tax done automatically by the IRS instead of spending time and money doing the job of government employees.

The World Wide Web is now 35 years old. Tim Berners-Lee has some predictions for the future.

Like many creator items, the great majority of subscription apps don't make any money.

It appears the term "AI PC" applies to just about any PC made in 2024.

Here is more information on a system called Devin. The makers claim it is a software engineer.

Meanwhile in America, we have a new drug for frostbite. It may prevent some amputations.

Microsoft settles a patent dispute with CalTech on WIFi technology.

Microsoft is updating Teams so we can switch among personal and professional accounts.

Meanwhile in America, our House of Representatives passes a bill requiring TikTok to become American. TikTok will now blitz the Senate and White House with lobby money.

An alarming call to take smartphones away from kids. There is probably something to this.

Microsoft upgrades Chat-GPT in the free version of CoPilot. This is the norm with newer and better chattering bots being released all the time.

A look at the Micolino electric car made just for the city. At $20,000 it is still too expensive for what it is.

People scream "tax the rich" when Tesla pays no income tax. They made no profits. They paid big salaries to executives. There are no laws against running your company as you see fit.

Friday 15 March 2024

I don't have a Stanley drinking cup and I don't have a Trader Joe's tote bag. What is wrong with me?

If your dad went to Harvard, you're in. That's life. If someone on an admissions panel knows your dad, you're in. That's life.

Legacy Admissions: when I was young, LSU let in everyone. So did Southeastern Louisiana University. Public colleges for the sons and daughters of the residents. I learned enough to have half-a-dozen books published in engineering. Crushing rocks in Louisiana in the summertime taught me much.

In the tech industry, of course employers discriminate against older folks. Of course it is illegal, so what?

Back to legacy admissions at private colleges: Nvidia's CEO tries to dampen the privileged expectations of Stanford students. Years ago, engineers in Silicon Valley told me that they avoided Stanford grads as they lacked practical knowledge.

Newer tech in the office tends to mean lower employee well being.

More fear and loathing for unemployed programmers.

An essay about "design engineers." The term is self-redundant as engineers design things. That is the profession.

Someone thinks they are ready real soon now to mine Helium on the moon. The moon's EPA will have to give permits? Huh?

SpaceX has a Starship launch scheduled for this morning.

Cerebras has just built the world's largest IC. It is for generative AI work. Let's see if it actually works.

In the future, will computer memory be free? Compute and storage are separating, at least in theory.

Guys who have AI girlfriends outnumber girls who have AI boyfriends seven to one. I guess that means something.

Researchers have a method that allows training really big LLMs on a desktop computer with a GPU built for gaming, not training LLMs.

Meanwhile in America, our FCC, not having much else to do with their time, has once again changed the definition of "broadband."

As opposed to the FCC, the American oil industry emphasizes practical use of tech to get results. Hence, they are using AI effectively.

Apple acqui-hires DarwinAI.

TikTok, owned and run by the CCP, pushes hard against Federal legislation.

Sports Illustrated is to cease paper printing of the magazine this year. End of an era.

Our Federal government is to give $6Billion US taxpayer money to South Korean company Samsung.

I'll quote, "Microsoft is expanding its $20 monthly Copilot Pro subscription." Maybe time to switch away from $20 a month to OpenAI. Now Google, Microsoft, and several others have attractive $1-a-day offerings.

Reddit is about to have an IPO. It survives on the work on volunteers. Will people quit?

Saturday 16 March 2024

I've never heard of "Farcaster" but I guess it is big enough to interview the owner.

Leadership of a startup: transparency and pacing.

Job titles and being called a "senior" whatever. You are at the top with no where to go.

This is a good article: Andreesen Horowitz lists several categories of Generative AI. It is a top 100 list of sorts.

The recent Standard-to-Savings time shift reveals that most programmers don't know anything on the subject. You should have been around for Y2K to hear how wrong people were then.

Genetically modifying cows so that their milk will have insulin for humans. I hope these folks know what they are doing.

Any Americans out there want to buy TikTok? And have enough money? Bill Gates? Elon Musk? Jeff Bezos? Anyone? Anyone?

SpaceX has a big success in launching the StarShip on top of its huge launch vehicle.

Meanwhile in the US Senate, the TikTok bill stops for a while as Senate "leaders" ponder. The Senate is a built-in brake on Congress. They are doing their job.

At Disney, acquisitions have worked well with profits being double and triple what investments were.

Speaking of doubling and tripling, leaked specs on the coming PS5 Pro show that much speed up in performance.

If you are trying to use Chrome on a Windows system, you will see lots of annoying pop ups asking you to switch to Bing. It is not an accident.

Tech companies have laid off 50,000 people in the last 2 1/2 months. Bidenomics.

Meanwhile at Walmart, for the first time ever, you can buy an Apple computer.

And here at Starbucks where I sit typing these words, they are ending an NFT rewards program. Didn't know they had one.

A company called Waabi has a system that predicts traffic in the near term using Lidar and generative AI. ChatGPT predicts the next word. This system predicts the next step.

Real news that isn't news: in India, regulators investigate an successful American company seeking money.

I think they call this closing the barn door after the horses have all run away: our FTC is investigating companies for allowing user data to be used in training LLMs.

Evangelicals are using tech to find potential adherents. Companies do this all the time and have done so for decades. Somehow this is wrong when churches do it?

Sunday 17 March 2024

The pandemic (our over-reaction) caused migration out of cities to less-populated areas. That changed the economies in those areas. Sometimes it took several years to show bad results.

Oooops, there are ways to reset the combination on safe locks. What could possible go wrong?

Walmart is experimenting with a new way to make clothing that cuts costs and waste. It also cuts jobs, and that may not be a good thing.

Microsoft, bemoaning to EU regulators, says that Google has access to more data than anyone and that gives Google a big AI advantage.

The risk of efficiently connected systems: an IT outage an McDonald's closed restaurants worldwide.

A windfarm offshore of New York is delivering power to communities. Believe it or not, this is the first time this has occurred. What took so long?

It seems that much of the art sold on Etsy is not hand-crafted in someone's garage but instead is generated by AI.

Researchers at Apple have a new technique of training LLMs et al to excel at tasks like image captioning, visual question answering, and natural language inference.

Meanwhile at LinkedIn, you know the employers of persons and you know how well those persons figure out puzzles. One plus one equals a measure of the brain power of the different employers, maybe.

It appears that UberEats is cheating its drivers out of pay.

It appears that we have an over abundance of wine. Cue all the jokes (people still tell jokes?).

In general, the electric vehicle market is not good. Tesla appears to be the exception.

A sordid history of Chinese-run social media apps.

Someone is suing car makers for collecting and selling data on his automobiles. Good luck with that.