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: 25-31 March, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Key Bridge in Baltimore is collapsed by a ship
• Intel and Microsoft push the AI PC

Monday 25 March 2024

It appears that even companies run by smart people are about to waste money as they are fooled by AI hyperbole.

How to get vouchers for free meals from McDonald's. Let AI write your complaints.

These AI chattering bots simulate conversations (some simulate them quite well). Sometimes for some folks, a conversation is all that is needed.

If the commercial market fails you, run a charity. People are lending one another DVDs of movies. Great idea. Just do it yourself with your own resources.

In the latest salvo of the trade war with China, the Chinese governors block the use of Intel and AMD processors in government-owned computers. Note, this still allows other US-made processors to be used.

For example, the Apple Vision Pro (American processors from Apple), will be sold in China later this year.

Steve Wozniak has a point (not 100 points, but a point) about banning TikTok for tracking while allowing Facebook et al to track us.

There are times when a writer closes the door and writes. There are times when a writer is with friends and family. A healthy balance is important.

Covered everything in your blog? I'm not sure how anyone could do that, but if you have, start another blog on another topic.

Do you as a writer have difficulty scheduling time for writing? Some of us have trouble scheduling time for doing anything else but writing.

This piece lists magazines about senior citizens that pay for pieces.

Tips for writing marketing emails.

Tuesday 26 March 2024

If you are going to use those powerful Nvidia processors, you must use Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). Sigh.

It will take a decade to decipher our Dept of Justice's case against Apple. Waste of taxpayers' dollars.

Mr. Altman goes to Hollywood. OpenAI visits movie producers with its text-to-video system.

A car company called BYD has a $10,000 electric car. Yes, it is real and it really works. No, you can't buy one in America. No, none of the models sold in America could compete with it.

A few folks in the mainstream media realize that Mr. Trump has a good chance of being President again. They are hiring people who Mr. Trump will talk to.

Is it ethical for a celebrity CEO of a company to personally send emails to experts at other companies saying, "Come on over here and work with us."

Our Dept of the Treasury is highlighting the work of hackers employed by the governors of China. And some folks wonder why anyone would want to disparage TikTok.

In nearby Baltimore, a ship hits a bridge, a really big bridge, and collapses the bridge. It will be a year or two before the bridge is replaced. Look for $100Billion Federal dollar$$$ to go to Baltimore.

Good line, "Can a big blue robot make a difference" in building factory-built, less-expensive houses?

Meanwhile at Boeing, heads are rolling at the executive level. I have no doubt that all the outgoing executives have excellent severance packages.

More information on how the other big tech companies are trying to beat Nvidia by replacing CUDA with something much better. I have tried CUDA. To do the simplest image operations is not simple.

I learn a new term: a data center hosts a server farm and farms have barns. Hence, a data center is a "bit barn."

Wednesday 27 March 2024

Federation and social media: is this real or just talk to get headlines?

Examples of using OpenAI's Sora text-to-video system. Impressive. But these are hand-picked examples.

Yet another "things I would have told myself ten years ago" piece. At least this person is learning. That is good.

Exploring the weaknesses of the csv file format. It is quite simple, and sometimes that is a problem. Think when using.

The current state-of-the-practice of AI needs lots of electric power. Hence, people want land next to nuclear power plants, not wind farms or solar farms. Practical.

This project is quite clever as the fellow combines several new Apple products with a remake of an old Mac case. Nice.

Here's a good sales pitch: Microsoft claims that if you use Copilot AI for eleven minutes a day, your productivity will jump.

Apple schedules its WWDC 2024 for June. With these online events, you schedule them at the last minute. Used to schedule them a year in advance to reserve the venue.

NBC was going to hire a Republican. NBC staff complained, so those who run the place didn't hire the Republican. These folks claim to be objective news reporters.

OpenAI's ChatGPT succeeded too much too fast and put "AI" on everyone's lips for 15 minutes. Now governors worldwide see a pot of gold in regulating whatever it is everyone is talking about.

A look back at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Are research labs the glory of the 20th century and the end?

Intel increases its marketing for the AI PC. You gotta have a Copilot key on the keyboard. A few other things as well, but we shall see if this is like the 3D TV.

The sales of both formats are still pretty small, but vinyl records outsell CDs for the second year in a row.

Microsoft again promises to put more AI smarts into Teams meetings. We shall see when these things finally arrive and how helpful they are.

Thursday 28 March 2024

Shareware: can you make some money by writing some software utilities? Probably not. One big reasons is that for-profit companies pay some of their programmers to write those utilities and then put them on the market at no cost to the users. The little guy is competing with the big guys who have endless supplies of money.

Search algorithms are still outperforming probabilistic AI searches.

Thoughts on why Google, where the AI transformer was invented, didn't move into the GPT like OpenAI did. Luck more than anything else. Google didn't apply its hardware resources to the task.

What computers cannot do.

These guys are building a plant to suck CO2 out of the air. Really? Don't they have anything better to do than work on 0.04% of the atmosphere?

The Russian governors use facial recognition and other supervised learning technologies. Gig workers were hired and they unwittingly trained the systems.

According to the users out there, Anthropic's Claude 3 replaces OpenAI's GPT-4 as the best.

And Amazon invests another $2.75B (with a B) in Anthropic.

OpenAI finally comes around to allowing developers to earn money on the GPT-based systems they develop.

Google is becoming well-practiced in the art of censorship.

Google sees a doubling in zero-day exploits with half of them from state-based intel organizations.

More information on the "AI PC" with some actual performance requirements. They want to run Copilot locally instead of in the cloud.

For engineers and scientists, it is a very good time to know AI. Maybe I can...

With pay for AI experts so high, our Federal government thinks it can hire them on government salaries. Folly.

I'll quote the headline, "In-App Browsers: The worst erosion of user choice you haven't heard of"

It seems that the owners of plug-in hybrid cars don't drive them as well as "experts" think they should. Let's put devices in these things that force "correct behavior" (just kidding, but some regulator will try this).

One person's experiments with a text-to-video system. Regular folks can use these for presentations to great effect. Movies? For someone else.

Donald Trump and crew know how to make money.

Friday 29 March 2024

Yet another story about the Dept of Justice of America vs America's love affair with Apple.

How to make a million $$$ or ten in Silicon Valley.

If things line up right, AI could bring 30% growth in the economy. These types of disruptions have occurred before.

Prospects look bad, really bad, for laid off web developers.

Research shows that Americans are getting bigger brains. Those born in the 1970s have bigger brains than those born in the 1930s. There are only a few hundred possible explanations, so we should (NOT) have a conclusion soon.

Despite a rainy year out west, the water levels are still low and so is the hydroelectric power output. The westerners will have to choose between green grass and electricity. They can't have both.

Of course our military is buying surveillance AI. It will save American lives. Let's not misuse these things.

Restless nights make us feel older. Nine hours in bed makes us feel younger. Need we know more?

The call goes out for us all to pitch in and detect deepfakes. Again, the best defense is to live in a way that people know what you would and would not do.

Here comes the robotic seeing eye dog or robot or something. Computer vision and robotics makes it all work.

How Bellingcat located a fugitive from a few frames of video. You can do this stuff. It takes some skill, but it isn't rocket science.

Life at the speed of government: two years later, we have 7 charging stations. Only 499,993 to go.

The ne'er-do-wells are gumming up the works everywhere.

Apple sues a former employee for being an inside threat and telling journalists things that shouldn't be told outside the company.

The hustlers online are "stealing" the faces of women and creating false advertisements for just about everything.

Sam Bankman-Fried has been sentenced to 25 years for stealing billion$ from investors.

Strong rumors about new iPads coming in May. As usual, the display screens are the big news.

Good news at The Atlantic magazine. Almost broke three years ago, it is now profitable. Smart managers make all the difference.

It was a big big year for South Korean semiconductor production.

I'll just quote this as it summarizes what many well-meaning folks are attempting, "Microsoft Corp. is trying to make it harder for people to trick artificial intelligence chatbots into doing weird things. "

Saturday 30 March 2024

Western Digital is shipping 24TeraByte drives for network-attached storage.

More on America's (?) lawsuit against Apple. It is more "we can pressure you into doing what we want you to do" than "you broke the law."

The race to put a trillion transistors on a single chip. Many say that Moore's law no longer holds. Those guys are wrong again.

Challenges for programmers who have extra time on their hands.

Researchers have moved data through fiber optic cables at 301million MegaBitsPerSecond. That is 4.5million times faster than typical consumer speeds today.

There is lots of news around the business and political side of AI.

Demis Hassabis founded DeepMind. He's an AI EXPERT! Google now owns DeepMind. Can Mr. Hassabis continue to show AI expertise or will he be swallowed by great big bureaucratic Google?

We seem to be drowning in an "epidemic of teen mental illness." Social media must be the villain, right? We need something to blame. Good grief.

Strong rumors that Microsoft and OpenAI will build a single AI supercomputer at a cost of $100Billion. Governments can no longer compete with the big tech companies. Even through governments, at least the US, just print money.

AI is "generating" or creating information. AI companies are generating profits. Here come the lawyers.

OpenAI has a new system called the Voice Engine. 15 seconds of a person's voice recording allows the system to say anything in that person's voice. Good can come of this. Really, some good can come.

Speaking of big tech, BIG MONEY, and AI, Amazon is pouring billion$ into the endeavor.

Strong rumors that LinkedIn will allow users to make short videos like TikTok. Remember, keep it professional and job related.

Meanwhile in the US House of Representatives, staff persons are banned from using Microsoft Copilot. The tools helps folks to better and more in less time. Ban it?

Gmail is 20 years old. It works well. Folks today, however, aren't that keen on email of any kind.

Sunday 31 March 2024

After 52 of permitting it, the IEEE no longer allows the use of the Lenna image in papers.

Someone is surprised by landfills and methane. And I am surprised that such adults exist, but that is just me.

The total eclipse of the sun is coming. Folks flock to areas and ruin everything.

AI and such will "ruin" this year's elections. I don't think even AI could make this mess any worse. Shown an ID, count the votes by hand with all parties present, and do all that old stuff. Of course poor people are less like to participate. That is part of being poor. If you want the disenfranchised to vote, franchise them.

Real news that isn't news: The lobbyi$t$ $swarm Congre$$ pre$$ing for more AI $pending for their own companie$$$$$.

A study shows that we are in for a big boost in worker productivity. I am optimistic, but realistic. The biggest single employer in the US is government. No reason for a productivity boost there.

Methane gas from landfills. Burn it for energy. See these crypto miners using gas flares in Argentina as an example.

Microsoft releases Azure AI Studio tools to help folks build AI-based tools.

The governors of New York City jump into AI scanners to detect ne'er-do-wells in the subways. What could possibly go wrong?