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: 22-28 April, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Russians label Meta as "extremist"
• The TikTok divestment bill goes through Congress and signed by our President
• FTC declares that noncompete clauses are illegal

Monday 22 April 2024

How several smart journalism organizations are using space-based imagery to investigate stories.

Sometimes Windows 11 can just wear you out.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: quoting one headline, "Gaming giant Embracer Group is splitting into three companies"

Tesla again cuts the price of its software that enables self driving.

Former government official complains about how Microsoft isn't serving the government well enough on contracts. There is no other source for the services the government purchases.

In the past two years, Amazon has built 17,000 charging stations for its delivery vehicles. Lest we forget, the US government's program has built fewer than 7 charging stations. Competence and, uh, er, not so much competence.

I like this post from Seth Godin. Keep blank pieces of paper and pencils lying everywhere (or the equivalent). An idea strikes, record it right then.

Places to look for remote, freelance writing jobs.

Thoughts on setting boundaries in life, i.e., saying "no" to some things, so that we can write instead.

Thought on "time to write." Some writers are quite annoying to others in that the writer is simply "not here." The writer is somewhere else writing. There are no boundaries as the writer simply cannot do anything else but write. It is almost a disease in that the writer must write to breathe. Boundaries are required to allow the writer to do anything else but write.

The world is a mess (nothing new there), write anyway. Hate that politician? Make that politician a character in your novel or short story or poem.

How to write a blog post in ten steps.

Ten general writing tips; some from famous people. Good stuff.

Tuesday 23 April 2024

Many-shot in-context-learning shows that give a LLM a thousand examples in the prompt, and the LLM will perform better. I should hope so.

Startup chip company Groq has a new processing chip that runs LLMs faster than everyone expected.

It appears that folks in North Korea have been working on projects for Prime Video and HBO programs. Front companies and subcontractors can slip in such folks. Congress beware.

The CP/M operating system appeared 50 years ago (I still have a Kaypro machine that runs CP/M). This was great. IBM and Microsoft basically took the design and made MS-DOS and the rest is history. Still, I believe CP/M would be a great basis for voting machines. You can't run hacking software in the background because it only runs a single task at a time.

$250 for a treatment that prevents cavities for life. Well, sort of, maybe, we're not sure.

This is where the Google folks test their cameras. Of course it looks like a movie set.

And what ARE we supposed to do with these chattering bots anyways? To the right person, they are priceless, like Visicalc was. To most others, what's on TV?

Samsung executives want to inject a "sense of crisis." They are mandating six-day work weeks for one another.

Meanwhile in Europe, regulators investigate if using TikTok is addictive. Did anyone every investigate the additive-ness of reading Mark Twain, watching Seinfeld or MASH, or playing Pickleball?

Meanwhile in Russia, the governors designate Meta as an "extremist organization" whose employees are involved in terrorism. Do they have hate crimes in Russia? See where these things can lead?

Speaking of Meta, they releases their Quest Horizon VR operating system for other hardware makers to use.

And in China, they find a way to buy banned Nvidia processors. If you have money, you can find a way around.

Microsoft releases a new line of small large language models. Phi-3 "only" has 3.8billion (with a B) parameters. Once to big to seem possible, it is relatively small.

Meanwhile in mild-weather California, they have too many solar panels on homes. The state buys back too much power. A shame they can't figure out their water problems.

No matter that California bought too many solar panels, our President commits $7Billion to buy more.

Alas, my family name starts with a "P," I'm doomed. A study shows that students with A, B, C receive higher grades than P, Q, R, S as graders simply wear out before they reach us low-letter names.

Wednesday 24 April 2024

Meanwhile in Washington D.C., where commuting traffic is awful and salaries aren't high enough for employees to live closer to work, why return to the office?

And studies show that people aren't returning to the office. The Federal government is paying for empty buildings.

The next big-screen technology appears to be QDEL, short for "quantum dot electroluminescent."

Sam Altman and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz are investing in "clean energy." What's clean about the chemicals in batteries and solar panels? Perhaps I misunderstand or take these folks too literally.

Survey says, more than half of Americans have tried generative AI. Not sure what percentage of Americans can spell "generative" or "AI."

Adobe pours lots more AI into Photoshop.

Saving us all from political campaign ads, Microsoft has many new tools. I guess it would too much just to bad all these ads everywhere. Freedom of speech? I guess that freedom is more important than freedom from being bombarded with ads.

Palantir has a different approach to sales and marketing. They have "boot camps" or sales and demos and parties that they call boot camps.

This is the biggest story of the day that few will notice: our Federal Trade Commission has declared that noncompete clauses in work contracts are illegal. I didn't know that the FTC had law-making authority, but that's how it goes.

Meta and Ray-Ban update their smart glasses with video calls.

Oracle moves its headquarters from Austin to Nashville to be closer to a medical center.

If we still bought records off shelves in stores, Taylor Swift's new album would be "flying off the shelves" as it breaks all records for streaming purchases and such.

Meanwhile in the US Senate, the TikTok divestment bill passes easily. Our President will sign it. The herds of lawyers are gathering.

Thursday 25 April 2024

TSMC was to build a really big factory in Arizona. Well, sometimes things just don't work out.

The story of how Google Search supposedly died. Seems to still be working okay for me.

The California Forever project. Let's build a new city from scratch. Best wishes.

Researchers at the Univ of Maine have a 3D-printed house. Just a stunt or will something come of it?

Thoughts on the RISC-V architecture and instruction set.

Rumors of Apple designing AI processors for servers in data centers.

Tesla shows an app that allows us to summon a self-driving Tesla for a ride. It's all pretty, but nothing is behind it, yet.

Apple releases a set of open-source Efficient Language Models that run on desktop and laptop computers. OpenELM.

Is there enough text on the Internet to train LLMs adequately? Need to scan more old books, millions of them.

Is it possible to show more hypocrisy? Our President signs a bill banning TikTok, but continues to use TikTok in its campaign.

Meta has an excellent financial quarter.

Thorn, a child-protecting nonprofit, organizes big tech companies to build AI systems that don't help child traffickers.

Here comes Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus laptop processor to the laptop computer market.

All the big tech players want to build data centers to run AI. Therefore, everything is in short supply from concrete to electricity to graphics processors.

America's big tech companies are all smiling as our political machines just banned a successful Chinese product (TikTok).

Friday 26 April 2024

MIT researchers confirm that light can cause water to evaporate without heat. Perhaps desalination can benefit to aid in survival as well as California water supplies.

Jensen Huang, Mr. Leather Jacket, uh, er, I mean CEO of Nvidia, personally delivers the first DGX H200 super duper computer box to OpenAI. And yes, he wore a leather jacket.

Meanwhile at Meta, Mr. Zuckerburg says that Metaverse is the future... no wait, AI is the future... no wait.

Tesla vehicles with lower prices are coming, real soon now.

Got $10,000? Get a robot dog with a flame thrower. Every country gentleman needs one.

Oooops. The quarterly economic report for the US is not as good as expected. Presidential campaign. What legal trials?

It's "Logan's Run" in China as tech workers are laid off at age 35.

Fedora Linux 40 is released.

Meanwhile in America, except for celebrity books and the Holy Bible, we aren't buying books.

How General Motors sells our driving data. The other car makers do the same.

The financial reports coming out of big tech show that even after the PAN(dem)IC, they are doing quite well.

Alphabet had a good financial quarter.

Fascinating how China's TikTok is depending on the US Constitution and Bill of Rights to fight the American government. No such rights exist in China. Yes, the communist are attempting to buy the rope from us with which they will hang us.

Microsoft has a good financial quarter.

Intel also has a good financial quarter.

Real news that isn't news: the Biden FCC votes to go back to rules established by the Obama FCC regarding "net neutrality."

Saturday 27 April 2024

Where the money is: apparently the money is in cloud services and AI running on those services.

Meanwhile in our nation's capitol, 12%. That is how many folks showed up in the Federal office buildings in 2023. Ghost town and work from home.

The Saudis set aside $100Billion (with a B) for AI. Money can buy technologists, uh, er, I mean technology. Perhaps technologists is more akin to reality.

There was a time when corporations contributed to open-source software projects. That time seems to have passed.

Mozilla is running a project called Llamafile. Have to look into this as it aims to have LLMs running on local machines.

The folks running the deep space probes at NASA are back in contact with Voyager 1. It takes two days for a signal to reach the probe. See some recent SciFi movies to learn how that isn't significant.

It appears that we are in the second robotics industrial revolution or something. Put a super duper computer on every joint of every robot with cameras and other much-improved sensors. Viola'.

Jeff Bezos on "work-life circle" and not work-life balance. Nothing new here. If you are happy in one place, you tend to be happy in other places as well.

Well, always check to see if your cat (or child) crawled into that box before you tape it shut and ship it.

If you can ban one Chinese company, why not ban a few more?

It appears that Americans work harder and take more risks than their European counterparts. There are many reasons for this (WWI is still one of them). Culture is real.

TSMC shows 1.6 nm process technology.

It is rare that the price of new computer components rise. The push for more data centers hosting more AI is driving up the price of everything.

Microsoft releases the source code to good old DOS 4.0.

Ubuntu 24.04 is officially released.

Ford publicly admits what everyone seems to know about electric vehicles. Americans really don't want to buy them. Ford cuts the price and loses even more money on every one they sell. The experts were wrong once again. The EV technology isn't ready. The vehicles cost too much, don't have practical range, take too long to recharge, and only work in mild climates (California).

Meanwhile in America, fertility rates are the lowest they have been in a century.

Sunday 28 April 2024

Our Dept of Homeland Security forms a Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board. Industry insiders are on the board. Those who have already "made it" will create regulations that prevent those trying to make it to succeed. Nothing new here. Shame on the DHS.

Amazon executives show how to run around government regulations regarding keeping email records for legal proceedings. Use something, anything else, instead of email.

Fear and loathing at the New York Times. They feel entitled to an interview with the President. They weren't granted one. Tantrums followed.

For the first time, Alphabet's stock value tops $2Trillion (with a Tr).

More data centers for Google. $2Billion to be spent in Indiana and another Billion$$$ in Virginia.

Here is a long and deep piece on "red flag laws," if a person is mentally unstable and threatens violence, let's keep the means of death out of reach. Good quote here, "Yet, a lot of people in society remain genuinely afraid, and worse, have no idea what to do, so they want to wish the problem away by simply creating more laws." While we wish otherwise, we cannot know what is deep in the mind of another person.

Let's be a Prompt Engineer. Let's have a major called Prompt Engineering. Well, as long as they take calculus, chemistry, and physics and such, maybe so.

Let's call it "synthetic media" instead of deepfake. I didn't really say that on video, but it sure looks like it. Solutions are readily at hand and cost free.

Somehow this person used nothing but laptop computers for 23 years. They are now happy with a Mac Mini on a desk.

It seems that Tesla's self-driving mode, whatever it actually does, has led humans to stop paying attention. Hundreds of accidents have occurred.

Here is the state-of-the-practice of 2024 with laptop computers with a closer look at the Dell XPS line of really good laptops.

In digitizing movies from film, there is much that happens in a subtle way.

The first race of self-driving cars was not impressive (2 hours to finish 8 laps). Go back 40 years, this is unbelievable science in action.

In the first three months of 2024, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet combined for $32Billion (with a B) on datacenter building. That is a lot of money in a short period of time.

I'll quote the headline, "Mastodon forms new US non-profit"

Our IRS claims it did a wonderful thing in building an income tax filing system. This begs the question, why do Americans have to file? The IRS has all the information to file our taxes for us.

Indonesia is moving its capitol city. This has happened before in the world. This time, however, they can blame the monster in the hallway called "climate."

A story of a young man who travelled coast-to-coast on a penny without "cheating" anyone. Part of the story is he bought a bottle of water for $1 and sold it for $2. I call that cheating someone.

The Chinese release the most-detailed map of the moon.