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: 17-23 June, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Willie Mays dies at 93
• Nvidia is now the most valuable company in the world
• We have a "heat dome" in America (coinciding with summer, imagine that)

Monday 17 June 2024

McDonald's worked with IBM on automated order taking in the drive-thru lane for two years. That is done. McDonald's drops that idea for now.

Meanwhile in finance, AI is moving in quickly. Job loss is not predicted, but major job change is.

Meanwhile in copywriting, AI has changed everything. Writers now use AI-generated outlines and fill in a few words here and there. The pay dropped significantly. Note: if you write in government and especially in classified work, your writing job is safe for at least a decade as those sectors are the last to adopt new tools like AI.

Leaders of the Scattered Spider hacking group are arrested. These are stereotypical young single men who work in the basement or garage. The hacktivists are the primary threat to just about any organization in the world.

Minorities are creating cultural nuance in these chattering bots. There is money to be made and some energetic folks are working hard. Good.

Meanwhile in India (the world's most populous country), rich American companies are investing billion$$$ (with a B) in data centers.

Meanwhile in Texas, a Federal jury rules that Amazon must pay AlmondNet $122Million.

Meanwhile in the UK, Amazon's cameras and software have been studying the faces of train passengers. The data can be used to target advertising.

You hand someone something you have written. What do you ask them to do? My first question is, "What does this tell you?" If their answer differs from what I want them to hear, I rewrite it.

Tips on writing legal documents.

The state of the practice. Here is a list of a dozen current AI writing tools and what they can do.

Scams run against writers. Be wary when someone asks you to write them something as a sample that they specify. Also, all money flows to the writer. The writer never invests money.

Getting good photos of yourself to put on your blog or book or whatever. We used to use passport photos. I guess that day has passed.

I like these seven simple steps to writing just a little bit better.

The value of reading in the practice of writing.

Tuesday 18 June 2024

Not much Internet viewing time this morning.

Meanwhile in America, those who have never accomplished anything, i.e., regulators sue those who have succeeded too much. This time the target is Adobe.

The world changes: social media influences, once making big dollars, are now just getting by.

In lesser-known and lesser-financed political campaigns nationwide, some folks "cheat" by using AI to create videos etc. and gain an edge. It is politics, folks. Any surprises here?

The fear and loathing continue at the Washington Post as it brings in a new editor.

I appears that Waymo has mastered the driverless taxi and is making money in a few US cities.

Instead of buying new stuff, let's fix the stuff we have. A call to lower standards of living in defense of the planet or the deep blue sea or something.

Wednesday 19 June 2024

Willie Mays dies at 93. As a kid in San Diego in person I saw Willie Mays throw a strike from centerfield. Bare hand the ball and throw it perfectly in one motion. He could do things like that all the time. I guess they don't make ball players like that any more.

This is a good essay on AI search and how LLMs cannot search and thus cannot perform as well as system that can search and "think about" a situation "for a while."

All these commercial space flights will multiply the number of persons who have gone to space by a 100 or so. Then we might learn about how we don't work well in outer space with current spacecraft technology. It is about the energy required to put livable spacecraft out there.

Good essay on what it means to grow older in your chosen career and become smart enough to stop doing things.

GPT-2 isn't as good as GPT-4. We can, however, build it on today's laptop computers and run it at home.

A company called Boom Supersonic is building their factory where they will build 66 supersonic airliners a year. 2029 is the target date for commercial flights. New York to London in 3.5 hours at an "affordable price."

Real news that isn't news, Sam Altman says OpenAI can change to a for-profit company.

Meanwhile at YouTube, they are creating methods that blocks the blocking of ads. Rats.

TDK, an Apple supplier, claims a breakthrough in solid-state battery technology.

This essay makes the case for serendipity as a lifestyle. "Our careers are defined by the highest moments of its biggest upside swings." So no routines, make serendipity the routine. What?

Remebering the glory days of the CD-ROM. It was a breakthrough to receive quarterly software updates with CD-ROM mailings. And who can forget those America-On Line CD lying all over the place?

Nice suburban home on the outside but a data center on the inside. Just shows how you can hide these things.

Nvidia releases several services to enable better simulations of actual physical systems and sensors.

Yet another text-to-video system. In my experience, the demo videos look great, but the actual products are so good.

Apple puts a couple dozen models up for use on Hugging Face.

Since when are political ads supposed to be truthful? Someone simply doesn't understand what is happening in real life.

Ather Energy is a small and new company in India that makes electric-powered scooters. They look at local markets and design what people want. The Indian scooters will not be like the European models.

Once again, let's define what a data scientist does. All this AI/ML talk misses the point. Use information wisely. That is it and that doesn't often require AI research. It is basic.

California has four cities that are "impossibly unaffordable." Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego. Unless regulations change, if you don't already live there, you will never live there.

This is of great interest to me (once again unemployed as a contract is cancelled). "The economy needs aging Americans to work longer, but many companies simply don't want them." Not hiring because of age is illegal, but no one enforces that law.

Why do these chattering bots et al "hallucinate?" Well, they are probabilistic, i.e., roll the dice and see what comes up next. Sometimes, something silly will come up next as "the answer" to a question where the asker wants real stuff, not silly stuff.

Thursday 20 June 2024

When is the surgeon general going to issue a warning label on sitcoms on TV. That I Love Lucy franchise has the whole country addicted and... Oh, wait, never mind, I think. I guess that is my problem, I think.

HPE announces a new service it calls Private Cloud AI.

Here is a hands-on review of one of the first Qualcomm-powered Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs. The reviewer is impressed. It costs $1,300, so it isn't a great value.

The UK hospital ransom now has a group claiming guilt. They speak Russian, but just about anyone can do that these days. Hacktivists.

As of today, Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world. Its value has risen some 8,000% in a couple of years. They are riding the AI wave. Of course their parts suppliers are riding the same wave.

Here is another laptop computer with a RISC-V processor and motherboard.

The resurgence of the pneumatic tube. The hospital is the primary customer.

Here is a plan for the invasion of Taiwan. It all makes sense, but, as Ukraine shows, sometimes it just doesn't work.

Here is a deep essay on software quality. Something to ponder.

And more deep thoughts to ponder on accidental and essential complexity.

Eighteen years after NumPy 1.0, we now have 2.0.

I like this piece on cognitive load. Simplicity is not the same thing as familiarity. The problem is of different difficulty depending on familiarity. This goes to my Person, Process, Problem way of thinking that I described almost 20 years ago. I know image processing. I don't know word processing. Hence, the word processing problem is much more difficult despite what some' developers believe is simple.

Some review and thought on the performance of self-driving car systems. Dawn, dusk (lesser light), and turns bring great problems to the systems.

Apple has hit a wall with its Vision Pro system. It was a reaction to a little progress by Meta. Meta has since quite the MetaVerse and moved to AI. Apple's device is too big and costly. "Fixing" it seems like an idea Apple has abandoned in favor of some modifications to make it more accesible.

Friday 21 June 2024

We have a new company called Safe Superintelligence Inc. Yes, putting some sort of safety into AI systems.

The American nightmare: start a hot business, get $120million fro investors, lose it all, and hurt all your customers.

I love this phrase, "AI is eating software." In a sense, it is true and accurate. One code base, a different model, and you have a different application. Still, caution with anything related to "AI."

Companies are still making rugged or tough laptop computers. This is a new one from Panasonic.

The story of Nvidia's stock value ups, downs, and up up up. Just one share of Nvidia from 1999. Just one share.

AI stumbles again. Well, it is more accurate to say that the creators and releasers of AI systems at Google et al have stumbled again with awful image search results.

Texas A&M whips MIT. Not in football, but in engineering research dollars.

It appears that the Russians have placed a huge amount of landmines in Ukraine.

Meanwhile in Britain, there is a drop in university enrollment and profits.

We're having a heat wave all over the world. At this rate, well we just won't be blogging and such next month.

The Internet Archive has removed 500,000 books due to publishers' lawsuits.

Meanwhile in Wyoming, Delaware, and Montana, we have more new businesses per capita than any other states.

Two American astronauts are stuck at the space station as the NASA-Boeing Starliner continues to have problems.

Forget AI and white-collar jobs. Robotics are pushing out people in all sort of jobs everywhere. In many sectors, people are just not working after the PAN(dem)IC, so robots are welcomed by employers.

SpaceX shows the Starlink Mini. The antenna etc. can fit in a backpack. The cost is still pretty high.

Saturday 22 June 2024

Apple wasn't first to the AI bandwagon. It may be, however, the smartest.

Why aren't Americans buying more electric cars? They cost too much! How smart do you have to be to figure out this?

Dell wanted employees to return to the office. Half stayed home despite no more promotions.

And now we have a bounty program to find errors in scientific publications. Start with Dr. Fauci's old agency, please.

The new Copilot+ PCs are here, and Microsoft makes Copilot less useful.

A high-performance content creator finds the latest MackBook Pro outperforming a similar-priced Windows machine.

Meanwhile in the state of New York, the government is now protecting teenagers from social media or something that the governors deem protection worthy.

And in America, we try to ban surveillance drones from China. Of course American-made drones get all the law enforcement business.

Meanwhile in the UK, those hackers of the hospital system have released 400GB of private information.

Shocking news (not): at Facebook, they didn't hire more people to read what people where posting because the extra expense cut profits. Imagine that, a company wanting to make money. And some people who consider themselves adults are shocked.

These chattering bots are good at a few jobs. And, to no one's surprise, openings for people to do those jobs is dropping.

Look at this article. Excellent photos show how my neighborhoods in northern Virginia sprouted data centers. One data center pulls the same electricity as 30,000 homes. Software ate the world? Maybe, but without electric power, forget it.

A history of interactive fiction or playing computer games with only text.

It seems more and more that Elon Musk is merely a cad and a boor. Money, power, corruption. Nothing has changed in the last few thousand years.

oooops, if the batteries are dead on a Tesla, you can't open the doors. This is just plain stupid and show a lack of systems engineering (among other things).

Sunday 23 June 2024

To keep users engaged and make more money, the makers of these chattering bots are trying to inject some humor and such. One problem is in the last 20 years humor has been pretty much outlawed.

The phrase "rich and famous" breaks sometimes. Consider Nvidia, the richest company in the world this week that is not very famous. Let's keep it that way.

A little computing history: for a few years actual people would answer questions.

Ah, good old climate change. Now we can blame inflation on it instead of on ourselves for having silly economic policies. Whoever invented this climate change scare did us all a favor by giving us a big universal excuse for everything. Kicked your dog this morning? Blame climate change.

I find this as good news: people are actually embarrassed to ask Siri et al questions in public. I thought embarrassment had become extinct.

If it is on the Internet, people will read it. We like that (I think). Software "reading" what we put on the web? We don't like that. We are an odd lot.

"Nothing to see here, move on," proclaim deep-sea explorers about the Titanic wreck.

Once again I am reading the job listings. And once again, many listed jobs don't really exist.

FreeDOS, a clone of MS-DOS, still exists after 30 years. Yes, there are uses for this.

Meanwhile at Walmart, we now have electronic shelf labels that allow the store to change the prices on items with the push of a button.

It is a start, not great, but a start: this pill you swallow swims through your digestive system with sensors recording what is happening.