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: 20-26 May, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Microsoft shows the CoPilot+ PC
• PC makers jump in with Qualcomm processors
• Nvidia has an unbelievably successful financial quarter

Monday 20 May 2024

A short piece on content moderation: people sifting through a small percentage of what is posted to remove objectionable items.

Greewashing: I guess this means financing fossil fuel companies and calling it green energy.

The American Library Association and privacy in how persons use libraries. They have a long history (since 1939) of not keeping records for others to investigate or steal.

Strong rumors about OpenAI being a big player in Apple's coming WWDC event.

Google's own AI generated summaries for websites violates its own Scaled Content policy it places on websites. This is all confusing as everyone is using software to create new content or summarize old content.

Western Digital shows new 6 TB spinning disk drives. These things were supposed to disappear decades ago.

The "brilliant jerk" culture. These are contradictory words. If you are a jerk, you are not brilliant. You just have a basic idea and you are mean enough to make people implement it quickly and at no cost. Then you steal all the profits. Some folks are finally trying to stop these jerks.

Blue Origin sends six paying customers to the edge of space and back safely.

Apple rescues news sites by buying their content. No one else will pay for "journalism" today.

The digital nomad visa. Live here, telecommute to your job in your home country, live here and spend your money here.

Following the money: it is more profitable to make LLMs that run on less-expensive computers. That is where the market is. Hundreds of millions of less-expensive computers bring much more money than a hundred super-duper computers.

In addition to writer's block, we have creative burnout. Sounds like a deep subject to write about. The problem provides its own solution.

I like this piece: 13 excellent writing side hustles you can pursue to make an additional $1,000 to $10,000 per month.

Yet another piece on writing a memoir.

Just so happens, here's another piece today on writing memoirs.

I had to copy and paste this word as I cannot spell it: onomatopoeia. Whack. Ouch. Meow. Words that make a sound.

Tuesday 21 May 2024

Strong rumors that Microsoft is about to tell us all about this thing called the AI PC.

Some folks in tech realize that small groups of persons who talk about basic ideas are pretty good.

Here is a peak at how programmers at Google review code. The tools are not important, it is reading someone else's code and learning with one another.

Lamenting the state of automated system tests. Well, make them better.

Meanwhile in China, researchers claim to have frozen and then thawed human brain tissue without any harm done. Let's hope they know what they are doing.

Microsoft reveals what it calls the CoPilot+ PCs. I guess that's a better name than "AI PC." More AI processing on board instead of some data center somewhere else.

And we have a bunch of PC makers ready with CoPilot+ PCs. Let the fun begin in the marketplace.

Also news is that PC makers are jumping on Qualcomm processors for Windows CoPilot+ PCs. "Wintel" is gone? Here comes QualSoft or MicroComm or something. We shall see how this all works out.

And Microsoft shows Recall: software that runs AI on your PC and recalls just about everything you've done, said, or heard. Lots of transcription for those ZoomerTeams calls and such.

Lots of angst about OpenAI's choice of a woman's voice for its systems.

Intel has not been completely blocked in this CoPilot+ AI venture. Intel processors will be in machines this fall. Qualcomm processors in June.

Here is one summary of the Microsoft announcements from yesterday.

Wednesday 22 May 2024

Here is a list of the Copilot+ PCs available 18 June from several makers.

This reporter has used a new iPar Pro M4 for a week. More rave reviews for the new keyboard.

Thoughts on using a data fabric. Odd, I find myself clicking on this article. In a prior job, this would have been the most important thing I saw in a month. Now (thankfully), whatever.

Mortage brokers are sending customers' data to Facebook. This is so odd, it cannot be true, but it probabaly is.

Here is a closer look at Lenovo's offering in the Copilot+ PC with Qualcomm processor market (that a long list of adjectives).

It didn't take long for this story to become a story: folks are calling Microsoft's new "Recall" spyware. It records everything you do. It is guaranteed secure and private. Well, you know how that goes.

Meanwhile in China, this is a big deal for China as the Chinese traditionally are anti-foreigners coming to their country. They will open AI Academies and specifically recruit foreigners to come attend and stay with perks given only to locals.

Consider the Small(er) Language Model. At "only" 100million parameters, for the vast majority of computing history, these things were only a fantasy as none of the computers on earth could work with them.

All that glitters is gold or copper. Everyone wants a datacenter and those places use a lot of copper wire.

Meanwhile at our Dept of Justice, back-to-the-office requirements are killing morale and hiring of new employees.

Neuralink obtains approval to put a chip in a second person's brain.

I'll just quote this line, " Microsoft is partnering with tutoring organization Khan Academy to provide a generative AI assistant to all teachers in the U.S. for free.

Crime pays and criminals are keen to accomplish more in less time and grab more money. Hence, they are using these generative AI tools more than anyone else.

C. Gordon Bell dies at 89. He designed the DEC line of minicomputers and then laid the foundation for the Internet.

Commenting on the OpenAI and Scarlett Johansson voice issue: this is how it goes. Welcome to the world of supervised learning in AI.

Researchers at Antrhopic are trying to examine the zillions of numbers inside neural networks. They want the black box to become transparent. If they succeed, large portions of the complexity will be removed and the super rich will lose some of their advantages.

What was sort of an old technique became important as vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation become quite important and lucrative in all these chattering bots.

The giant co-work space companies failed. Enter mom and pop shops to replace them.

Thursday 23 May 2024

No surprise here: Federal employees in their 30s are the most unhappy with their jobs. They've been on the job long enough to understand what it is and see the long, long road ahead to a decent salary.

How Sega invested $5million in Nvidia in the 1990s and saved Nvidia. Recall how Microsoft invested in Apple and saved Apple. These things happen sometimes.

It appears that the open-source AI models won't survive economically. See the above story about how sometimes investors keep something going. Perhaps again.

GitHub, owned by Microsoft, ups its Copilot AI with something they call Extensions.

Good news for the paralyzed: some electrical stimulation to the neck improves some mobility. No surgery involved. Simple electrodes on the neck and some stimulation.

We've heard of that new Google AI-powered search. Yes, the advertisements are coming with it.

Starlink demonstrates a video call from two smartphones bouncing their signal off a satellite. Neat stuff, but essential in emergencies.

Connecting all these personal computers into a network sure made sense at one time. Upon further review, perhaps we just recreated the corporate mainframe that is under the control of someone else.

A piece on the ethics of using generative AI. Some of these "ethics" concerns are about money: did someone pay for the information used to build the generative AI tool. It all comes down to money. I own a car. Did everyone who helped build that car receive an "ethical wage?" If not, is it ethical for me to drive a car?

A look at Google LearnLM AI. It is a set of tools that will work wonders in education. Maybe.

It is a small start; something may come of it. This is a bug hunter program for research papers. The money is pretty good (especially for a semi-retired person like me). What is the source of the money?

It seems that these nice, quiet electric vehicles are too quiet. Pedestrians don't hear them coming. EVs are running over pedestrians far more often than those noisy cars with internal combustion engines.

If China invades Taiwan, all those machines on Taiwan that make the world's integrated circuit chips will be disabled.

Someone has a firm grasp of the obvious: these LLMs will never reason like (some) people reason.

AWS plans to build $17Billion (with a B) of datacenters in Spain.

Our House of Representatives passes some type of regulatory bill about crypto assets. It is doubtful that it will become law.

This piece expresses optimism on generative AI as it can use the unstructured data held by organizations.

Nvidia has a too-good-to-be-true financial quarter. They are printing money over there at Nvidia.

Meanwhile at the Washington Post, they lost $77Million last year. They are going to try all sorts of new pay-for-what-you-read plans.

Friday 24 May 2024

Little Internet viewing today.

The tale of our FBI creating a cellphone company to learn how to hack cellphones.

Interested in AI research? Don't bother with these chattering bots. They are clever, but not leading edge.

OpenAI partners with yet another news organization to gain higher-quality content. Government regulators are still learning how to spell "AI."

Research shows that most folks cannot tell the difference between human-created and software-created words and images. Not startling to read this as most folks are just trying to get by day by day.

American combat veterans have fought in Ukraine and tell of how deadly and difficult it is. They don't enjoy the comabat advantages the US Army has. It is trenches, constant artillery, and constant killer UAVs. There is no place to rest or be safe.

Where some of the money is: software engineers on AI projects make $100K than other software engineers.

This is one from the history books: Atari buys Intellivision. I remember the time when these two companies were the top competitors in home video games. I liked Intellivision, but the marketplace liked Atari.

Saturday 25 May 2024

I wish I had saved the link, but I didn't. Someone posted something like, "I want AI to was the dishes and do the laundry so I have time to write. I don't want AI to write my emails so I can wash the dishes and do the laundry." Excellent.

The current White House staff wants companies to pledge that customers will do misuse their products. Interesting concept, but not worthy of calling it a thought.

Nvidia has to cut the prices of the processors it can sell in China.

This story has gone around in circles for a week. OpenAI held resigned employees to "non-disparagement" agreements. Then it didn't, then it didn't, etc. I think they are now at the "we are nice folks" stage.

Tesla needs to sell cars in China. Tesla doesn't want unreliable China suppliers. Good luck with all that.

American opinion has completely swung in favor of NOT going to college. Good luck with all that. Job facts: if you don't have a college degree but are a veteran of a war, you can get a good job. What do you want? College or dodging bullets?

The folks at YouTube change the look of their website. People hate it.

Meanwhile in Germany, government regulations encourage solar power. Now they have too much, i.e., the deal was too good. Now they have to figure out a way out of this mess.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the Russians are employing ever-more sophisticated means to disrupt Ukrainian use of StarLink terminals.

Welcome to the world: publishers sign deals with AI companies that will use their content to create AI models. Good? Bad? No one knows at this point.

ChatGPT et al will write a little software for programmers. Is the software correct? Well, sort of not so correct. Often, however, it is a big help.

Good news of a sort: while America's population continues to grow and preventable deaths (accidents) continues to grow in almost every category, those preventable deaths due to firearm accidents is dropping. This is while gun sales have been hitting record highs.

Two Yale researchers have studied the Russian economy since the invasion of Ukraine. Putin is "burning the living room furniture to keep warm."

Sunday 26 May 2024

I don't know how man 100s of millions of people use Google search these days, but enough of them to see a few silly AI answers.

And Google tries to explain this to everyone...to no avail.

Microsoft had a network outage this past week that took down several major services. This is what you have with efficient systems as one problem affects many things.

Generative AI is not a fundamental tool like a word processor, i.e., if you want to make money in generator AI, you only have a couple more years to do so as it won't be new and shiny after that.

According to some, if you want to recruit cyber security experts to work in Federal service, you need to let them work from home. The rest of the job isn't that good, so working from home is a necessary benefit. I agree with the sentiment.

Everything from everyone is AI and everyone buys their hardware from Nvidia, which is now the cash cow of the world.

Thoughts on the Neural Processing Unit. Let's add one more number cruncher in the computer to aid the already number crunching CPU and GPU. Let's go back to the 8087 math coprocessor chip and the like.

Thoughts on "anthropomorphizing AI," i.e., describing the software system as if it were a person. I agree with the concept of describing the software system as if it were a software system. Describing it as if it were a person is a way of excusing the errors in the system and taking responsibility away from the system builders who made the mistakes.

It is official: Nvidia has 90% of the datacenter GPU market. This is monopoly territory. Nvidia needs to quiet down its success as it is nearing the too-successful territory wherein progression will claim, "Nvidia must be cheating."