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: 24-30 June, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Julian Assange (WikiLeaks) will soon go free
• Boeing's Starliner is stuck at the space station
• The first Presidential debate is just plain awful
• News of Democratic Party panic (give it time to settle)
• European regulators keep hounding successful American companies

Monday 24 June 2024

Real news that isn't news: in Europe, European regulators find a successful American at fault for something that will mean money changes hands.

Oh look, the same story twice in one day with yet another successful American company.

Meanwhile in Qatar, Nvidia helps build data centers. This is the first move by Nvidia into the Middle East.

Qualcomm releases its own AI model to developers. These models are built to run on Qualcomm's processors.

Ah, the license plate reader. The technology held lots of promise. As usual, people couldn't figure out how to use it properly.

Some thoughts on collaborating with one of those chattering bots as a writer.

Never heard of DNF or Did Not Finish book club. I guess I always finish. Must be a birth defect or something.

Thoughts on academic writing and academic editors.

Revisiting Orwell's "Why I Write" in our current day.

Ten ways to beat writer's block. Well, if I ever get writer's block, I'll have to check some of these things.

From Writer's Digest in 1921, the first hundred words. I was in a college library this past week looking at books on writing. Many of the books for 50 years old and older. Funny. They all still apply.

Tuesday 25 June 2024

"I wrote this software. I am sure it works," said no experienced computer programmer ever.

Well, why not? This fellow uses cameras and software and such to drop hats on people's heads from his New York City window. There are worse things to do with the technology.

Freelance careers are pretty much dead for the next generation. These chattering bots do good enough at much lower expense.

The technology of video encoding and compression at Netflix. It is not simple.

Pray for those two persons at the space stations who are depending on NASA-Boeing's Starliner to return them to earth.

GPT-5 will be delivered some time after now. Probably 2025 or so. But, they say, it will be as smart as someone with a PhD. As someone who has a PhD and saw others attain that level of education, please note, not all folks with PhDs are "smart."

One person's data scientist resume that worked for him. Apply culturally appropriate changes.

Another person's story of job hunting. It isn't easy.

It appears that some of these chattering bots are being censored by the faint of heart among us. Good grief. What happened to the adults in the room?

No surprise here: political ads are the most common use of deepfake videos. The best defense against a deepfake video is to say, "You know me. You know I wouldn't do that." The great majority of politicians on a national level cannot say that.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks fame, will soon go free in a multi-way international legal deal.

Life is tough at the top (or so I am told): Nvidia lost half a trillion (with a tr) dollars in the last week.

EU regulators figure out that when successful companies release new products, they have a greater chance of success than non-successful companies. Who'da thunk it?

Protecting the rights of others, that is what the judicial system is supposed to do. Yet another student-loan-foregiveness program is stopped in court. An elected representative does not have the authority to simply declare, "Give my friends some money."

Christmas in July comes on 16th and 17th with Amazon Prime Day.

Wednesday 26 June 2024

Tough times in China's tech sector. "Companies are now seeking younger, cheaper workers and demanding longer hours."

Mars, and the other bodies in our solar system, simply are not like our planet. Sorry folks. The supplies needed to live there must be carried there continuously.

The idea of local-first software. Software runs locally (no Internt) or in the cloud (no Interent, no run). Maybe there is a combination that will work.

The dream of iPhone manufacturing: remove have the human labor.

One programmer's story of, "I had an idea for a simple, little piece of software."

How do you bring entertainment to people willing to pay for it? Netflix has it figured out, at least for this week.

Meanwhile in Singapore, they grow meat in labs. They want to grow most of their meat in labs.

Now to a worthwhile use of all this technology, a boy with untreatable epilepsy benefits greatly from a brain implant. Yes, let's do this.

Where the money is: the big consultant firms are being asked for AI information.

Once again, folks at the New York Times and Stanford University declare that most of America is just plain stupid and gullible. And those folks wonder why they are disliked.

Well, here is some gullibility, corporate CIOs (supposedly really smart folks) are trying Microsoft's Copilot tools and learn that the tools aren't as easy to use as the advertisements show.

If you have ever spent much time on a US Federal government website, first my condolences, you may have noticed that they all sort of look the same. Yes, there is a central control of all of it.

There are annual surveys of job satisfaction. In America, that satisfaction is dropping. Yes, many Americans are bored at work doing meaningless stuff all day.

VW pours $5Billion into Rivian to better build electric vehicles. Rivian makes great electric vehicles. Their price, however, is beyond reach of the great majority of us.

Meanwhile in the richer third of the world, we aren't having babies anymore. Birthrates hit a historic low.

Meanwhile in India, they are about to build canals to connect rivers. If this works, it will be one of those once-in-a-thousand-years projects that will change everything.

The next people to walk on the moon will be from China. They have returned soil from the far side of the moon to earth. Meanwhile in America, two astronauts are stuck on the space station because the NASA spacecraft can't get it right.

Thursday 27 June 2024

I like this piece on long, multiple-conversation job interviews: A lot of companies think that dragging out the interview process helps improve candidate quality, but what they're actually doing is inadvertently selecting for more desperate candidates that have a higher tolerance. I agree with the description. If you are unemployed and desperate for a paycheck, you will do just about anything. The phrase, "No job is worth this," comes from people who want a job, but will not go to extremes for it.

It appears that researchers are letting ChatGPT summarize their papers and using those summaries for abstracts.

Toys R Us uses OpenAI's Sora to make a commercial. I tried Sora, but it produced people with three arms and three knees and such.

If a network has 63,000 members, is it some sort of fringe group or is it expressing a majority or plurality opinion?

Our Dept of Homeland Security has hired ten "AI experts." The Federal government is supposed to hire 500 such AI experts per orders from our current President. Seems to be a bit behind the curve so far.

A few notes on applying LLMs to corporate data. It doesn't seem to be working in a practical setting.

It took Apple a while and it has taken Microsoft a while to have the software catch up with their new Arm processors.

Our Supreme Court disappoints me on this one: they will continue to allow government officials tell news media what is true and what isn't, what is fit to print and what isn't.

Being scammed by a scammer: our FBI had a crook turned inside expert still running scams with one hand while being nice with the other hand.

The reasons for learning a foreign language continue to drop as Google almost doubles the number of languages it can translate.

Meanwhile in China, censorship is alive and well and thriving.

Software is scoring higher on exams than human students. This tells me more about the people who write exams than the performance of software and human students.

"The Great Resignation" continues. We knew what we were doing during the PAN(dem)IC. Right? Huh?

A big hospital corporation chose Microsoft for cyber security. The cyber security failed. Microsoft is blamed. Who picked the wrong company? Why aren't they blamed?

Friday 28 June 2024

Google is testing facial recognition for security at its office campuses.

More information on how being an AI consultant is a big-money job right now.

Brain scientists think they know how the human brain cleans itself. If so, they can help brains rid themselves of the waste that may cause dementia.

And SpaceX wins the billion $$$ contract to pull the space station down to earth for a safe re-entry and destruction in 2030.

OpenAI creates a GPT to check the output of its other GPT.

That GPT checker needs to get to work as more tests show OpenAI's systems are creating URLs that don't exist as answers to questions.

China's tech companies have been wiggling around US trade restrictions, but the extra efforts have taken a toll.

Various civil rights groups have opined that the US government cannot ban TikTok.

Meta releases new LLMs designed to write code, especially new compilers.

Apple finally starts selling the Vision Pro outside the US. The first foreign market is the far east.

European regulators keep hounding Apple. This time, Apple is not going to put new AI tech in Europe. Somehow that is anti-competitive.

More lawsuits against these AI companies whose software reads the Internet for training data.

I didn't watch the "Presidential debate" last night. Reports I read tend to describe it as everything but "Presidential." As one editorialist wrote earlier this week (paraphrase), The good thing about this election is that one of these two won't be elected. Gosh. How did we get here?

Pretty good comment from Jon Stewart.

4 TeraBitsPerSecond---that's what Intel's new optical interconnect chips can do.

Saturday 29 June 2024

I am happy to see this: Lambda Labs, a company I have cheered on for years, is doing well and raising funds to grow.

Our Supreme Court overturns the "Chevron Doctrine." Now Congress must pass and the President must approve laws that say what they mean and don't say, "Let those regulators over there figure it out for us." Opinions differ on this one---greatly.

A look at the MS Surface Laptop, Microsoft's first clamshell laptop with Qualcomm chips inside.

Microsoft's CEO of AI tries to define what can and cannot be copied off the open Internet. Unless explicitly prohibited, so he says, it can be copied and used.

Stability AI released version 3 of its LLM. The images created were just plain bad. Errors. Now what? Just let the market reject bad products.

Per the Presidential debate and our current President's lapses, the editor of the Wall Street Journal was greatly criticized for articles on Mr. Biden's mental decline. Well, she was right or so it appears.

And this article indicates what some are calling a panic in the Democratic party.

Maybe those folks running the Democratic National Committee are geniuses. Keep Mr. Biden in the race until late in the race. Bring in a new candidate very near election day. There won't be enough time to find all the faults in the new candidate. The new candidate is a savior and wins the election easily.

Electric Vehicles run on software; software still has lots of human errors in it. We go back to the software crisis of the 1990s. We've done this before with software quality and lack of quality.

Fujifilm is now making big money with high-end digital cameras.

Of course digital cameras sell big time: Gen Z claims that all of its members are "digital creators." Well, I guess there are worse thing to do with your time.

In praise of Craigslist. Little changed since the 1990s, it still works and works well.

Sunday 30 June 2024

The company that gave the world RStudio, now releases Positron IDE which is supposed to be the data science IDE.

We now have the idea of the popup village. Perhaps Woodstock was an early one. Burning Man is a recent one.

Remember "Big Data?" It is still here and still quite useful. Ask anyone at Walmart.

Spin doctors at work at NASA: the Starliner astronauts are not "stranded" on the space station. They are merely doing more experiments.

One of the inventors of the transformer AI technique is not happy with how big companies have used it. To make these things work, you need enormous processing power (big piles of money). Only the big big $$$ companies can do this.

Flights of fancy into the history of computing and cybernetics in the 1960s. Hindsight is 20/20.

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, they just outlawed Uber and Lyft requiring $32/hour pay and benefits for drivers. The rides will be more expensive than taxis.

And now we have the "shadow stand-in." A regular employee at a traditional company outsources part of their job (pay someone else to do your job). I like it. Steve Jobs had Wozniak do his job for him at night.

The Linux Foundation forms the LF Decentralized Trust for decentralized software and systems. What I find disturbing is the use of a stock photo in their announcement. Really? Decentralized centralized photos?

The Associated Press tries to bolster state and local news reporting.

And we have another story of a NASA flop. They are trying to make new spacesuits, but of their two prime contractors quits. Lack of competence at all levels. NASA is the new postal service.