n-rocks-from-mars-current-mission-design-cant-deliver-before-2040?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed"> NASA would like to bring some rocks back from Mars to earth (a dubious idea at best). They need another 20 years to do this.

A Microsoft research group in China released a new AI model. It was pulled back in a couple of hours. Not tested.

Google Cloud Platform has a contract with the government of Israel (who doesn't?). Many Google employees don't like that idea.

And Google fires 28 employees for a protest that defaced and destroyed company property and threatened other employees. Peaceable assembly? I guess it wasn't.

This writer attempts to separate a failure from a mistake in computing. I suppose there is a point here, but it is muddy.

Apple promises that the AI feature in iOS 18 will run on the iPhone and not somewhere in the cloud. This is to preserve privacy, something that Apple has done pretty well in the past.

Meanwhile in Germany, researchers have a new method of charging Lithium Ion batteries that will double the service life of the batteries.

I like this piece on the usefulness of these chattering bots like GPT-4. Long quote, "When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can't do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs."

Boston Dynamics appears ready to push into the commercial humanoid robot market (is there such a market?).

Is this the end of the computer programmer? I doubt it, but GitHub's CoPilot has done more programming than I and others anticipated.

Meanwhile at Sandia National Labs, Intel turns on "Hala Point," a super duper computer with 1.15Billion (with a B) neurons.

Apple pours $250Million into its operations in the Singapore area.

The administration has appointed Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI researcher, as head of AI Safety. This is a politically controversial move as Christiano, over qualified technically, has expressed strong political views about Ai and other topics.

In a limited test, GPT-4 does as well as medics in diagnosing ocular problems.

An interntal briefing shows the rapid growth of data centers built by Microsoft. Where did they buy all that hardware? The electric power consumption is huge, alarming to some. Welcome to big computing 2024.

Projections show that data center computing will draw more power than the nation of India by 2030.

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Friday 19 April 2024

I love this post: do things you enjoy. Forget about a brand or style or audience. "The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it"

NASA has plans for a visit to one of Saturn's moons. Four year to launch, ten years to land. Oh well.

Must-see video of Boston Dynamics' new humanoid robot. A change in technology brings much better flexibility.

The transformer architecture has ruled for seven years. Some new variations are coming along.

Moving a little closer to the movies as DARPA has an AI-controlled aircraft in air-to-air combat simulations. It is difficult to tell how much of this was actual and how much was simulated.

Meta announces Llama 3 language model with more billions of parameters. Who has the biggest computer (budget)?

Microsoft's VASA-1: give it a still image of a face and a 15-second voice recording, out pops a video of the face talking and saying whatever you wish. Creepy to some; comforting to some. Super deep fake.

I'm disappointed in this piece about helping university researchers continue to research AI without the super duper computer resources of big tech. Just give them more money is the solution proposed.

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Saturday 20 April 2024

Amazon's not-so-secret-any-longer program to learn how other retailers operate. This is industrial espionage. It is usually legal.

Amazon ends its "Snowmobile" service of transporting a semi-trailer full of data on the road.

Here is a basic technique for bringing about change in an organization.

Meanwhile in China, the governors tell Apple what apps to remove from its store. All in the interest of national security, i.e., the survival of the Communist Party.

Our FAA, for the first time ever, gives Boom (the company name) permission for supersonic flight tests. One day, a long time from now, Boom hopes to have airlines fly really fast.

Amazing, after all these years people still interview Linux Torvalds. Enough already. He hacked a Unix system 30 years ago. He isn't a genius or anything.

Its all on paper, but Nvidia lost $200Billion yesterday.

Yet another experiment in 21st-century journalism finance fails. Keep trying folks.

Meanwhile in China, someone claims that national semiconductor output rose 40% in the last year. This is what usually happens when nations isolate one nation.

The key word in the headline of this article is "dysfunction."

Seth Godin gives some good and practical advice on how to use these AI chattering bot things.

No surprise here as Linux continues to be more efficient than MS Windows.

I love this return to reality. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, "We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion... But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics."

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Sunday 21 April 2024

If you build a tech park, the experts will come...well, maybe not. They didn't in Bangladesh.

Meanwhile in Germany, survey says...the German office workers are not so sure about using AI.

New research shows what should have been known all along: in all these AI chattering bots, using fewer better data (where have I heard that expression before?) chosen for the right context greatly improves efficiency and accuracy.

Only Congress can connect aid to Ukraine to divestiture of TikTok.

Researchers show that give a description of a cyber security problem, GPT-4 will create an attack to exploit the problem.

Meanwhile in New York state, the legislature passes a bill whereby the state will pay half of a journalist's salary. Conflict of interest? The state buys journalists who then give favorable reports on the state's government. Is that how it is supposed to work?

Those companies that make these new AI PCs are hoping to sell big quantities to business and government. Will the customers jump on this new thing?

Yet another attempt to explain how ChatGPT and transformers work.

Strong rumors that Apple is going to reveal a completely new calculator in June. Yes, the calculator. It will work more like an adding machine with a paper printout.

Meanwhile here in Virginia, we have data centers. The data centers want power. A likely source is West Virginia coal. Wait, that was all supposed to go away, huh? It still works.

The Zilog Z80 8-bit CPU was introduced in 1976. It was better than Intel's 8080 CPU. A surprise to me is that Zilog is still producing these Z80 models. Not any longer. Production ends in a couple of months.

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