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: 1-7 July, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Billion$ continue to flow to Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Supreme Court grants executive immunity for official acts
• America's Independence Day is this week
• The call for President Biden to step aside continues, but he won't comply

Monday 1 July 2024

Once again, it appears that the idea of panicking and closing all the schools in America was a pretty bad idea.

Whoever wrote Europe's DMA was a genius. It appears to be the perfect instrument to extract mountains of money from successful American companies.

More rumors of Apple building AirPods (those little things people stick in their ears) with infrared cameras.

FreeDOS is still with us. This is one of the great things about today's technology and economy. Someone can gather a few colleagues and build and maintain value for some people.

A group wants to build undersea power cables between Europe and North America. These are POWER cables, not DATA cables. I guess I fail to see the advantage of moving power back and forth instead of locals using local power.

A big asteroid just passed between the earth and the moon. Whoosh, that close. We knew it was coming.

Sometimes rocket engine tests don't go as planned. Watch the videos linked in this article. WOW! Spectacular failures of systems and test designs.

Meanwhile in America, libraries funded by us the public have resources for writers.

Thoughts on being honest with yourself as a writer or any other type of person.

Thoughts on reading what you have written and revising it to make it better according to some perspective or other.

Sometimes we can a bit too much about what other people say and do.

It appears that our current President has weathered the storms and panic of those calling for him to just go home.

Tuesday 2 July 2024

Meanwhile in Japan, they have plans for a 300-mile-long conveyor belt to move goods. They simple don't have the population needed for truck drivers.

Rumors that Apple will team with Google to bring the Gemini AI services to Apple devices.

And at Toyota, there are plans to release an electric vehicle that can drive itself next year. Only in China as the US knows better than to allow such advances.

MIT researchers once again affirm that garbage-in-garbage-out holds. Put better data into AI models and you have better results with much less data.

Yet another Supreme Court ruling---this one on immunity. This AP telling of the story seems to stick to the facts without most of the hyperbole present in the Washington Post. Psst, here's a secret (not): the Washington Post doesn't like Donald Trump.

I read a lot of screaming and screeching about recent Supreme Court rulings. Has it occurred to some persons that many Americans were not happy with a lot of Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s and 1970s. How is it that the court was correct 100% of the time back then?

We have some advances in mind control of prosthetics. I have been reading about these advances for 40 years. It is unfortunate that we still are not there.

Meanwhile in Singapore, laissez faire laws concerning AI research and practice are pulling brain power away from China to this city nation. It appears that Singapore has replaced Hong Kong as the business center of Asia.

Real news that isn't news: in France regulators go after a successful American company to extract money.

And now we have something called "looksmaxxing" in which American male teens are supposed to be "chiseled" and such.

Our current President spreads $504Million around 12 tech hubs to spur something to do with tech as if we don't have enough tech in the US. Of course the money is flowing to places where votes are needed in the upcoming election. I have not doubt that the other candidate would do the same. Expecting object and impartial decisions out of Washington D.C. seems to be naive.

For $4,000 you can buy a mattress cover that is cool in the summer. $4,000? How about a $20 fan?

I have become interested in portable and inexpensive monitors etc. This is a new one from Vaio. Hmmm.

Wednesday 3 July 2024

Costco is well known for the high value of its rotisserie chickens. Now they are messing it up by putting the chicken in a plastic bag.

A researcher is indicted for using false data, i.e., lying to get a taxpayer-funded research grant.

And some people are surprised that people don't trust research scientists. As usual, the despicable acts of a few are ruining things for many.

Meanwhile in Switzerland, FM Radio (FM, not AM) is on the way out.

Thoughts on the Julian Assange case and if he should have ever been charged with a crime in the US.

"Because I need a paycheck," is a legitimate answer to, "Why do you want to work here?" When will some folks grow up?

Blathering on and on about dreams. Good grief. Get a life.

Insomnia reminds me of the old story of the farmer who fed his dogs greens instead of meat. When asked if the dogs liked greens and ate them, the farmer repled, "Well, they didn't for the first three weeks." People who "cannot sleep" either fall asleep or die. The vast majority fall asleep.

The problems caused by the "leap second." And we thought we had this figured out?

So far this year, the majority of us who search for something on Google don't click on any links.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the locals are serious about using drones to kill invaders. What others have considered, the Ukrainians are doing, in mass.

Many teachers are embracing software (AI) that grades essays for them. The feedback to the student comes much faster as the computer can grade all the assignments in the blink of an eye.

Thursday 4 July 2024

Today is the 4th of July or Independence Day in America. Not much news here.

Meanwhile in Greece, they move to a 48-hour-per-week work week. They want more productivity.

The Rubik's Cube turns 50.

High school students are missing the same Java array question year after year. Of course, there is nothing wrong with how teachers are teaching. It is all the fault of the students. Right? Huh? I guess I think differently when it comes to teaching and learning.

One programmer's set of heuristics.

Meta introduces 3D Gen. Yes, it generates "3D" models of things the user describes.

Meanwhile in Japan, there have been no tech layoffs. That is because layoffs are illegal.

SpaceX wants to use the taxpayer-funded launch facilities in Florida---a lot! Other companies want their "fair share." Not sure why companies can use these facilities at all.

Warehouses (we call them shipping distribution centers) are changing rural America. Are you near an Interstate? You can get one, too. A drive across the southeastern US attests to this.

Friday 5 July 2024

This must be important as it is all over the Internet. Amazon made a small patrolling robot for physical security. Not enough businesses bought these to be profitable.

The "Burden of Knowledge." To understand my new and advanced idea you have to first understand the entire text of Wikipedia. In other words, I don't know my new idea well enough to explain it to myself let alone anyone else. The burden is on the explainer, not the listener.

More layoffs at Microsoft.

Taking a trip to China. Want to earn money on the way? Pack your bags full of Nvidia processors. This is probably against some law or other.

The $600Billion (with a B) question? Will AI burst or boom into unimaginable wealth?

Generic versions of these skinny drugs are just around the corner.

Up next for SpaceX: a commercial space walk. Write a big check and be tethered to a space ship in orbit. Cool.

Meta claims to have 175million monthly active users for Threads after only one year.

Meanwhile on the Internet, we now have a social media outfit called noplace. The younger crowd is already there and hoping their parents and grandparents won't go there.

The best value in computing is now even better as Amazon gives 50% off on HD 10 Fire Tablets. Change from a $100 bill provides enough computing to write the next War and Peace or Harry Potter.

The Saudis want to become the world's capital of eSports. They are running a tournament opposite the summer olympics with a $60Million pot of prize money.

Meta puts new language models on Hugging Face that predict several words, not just one word as all current models do. This is a big breakthrough in performance and efficiency.

German researchers attempt to build an AI lie detector. So far, pretty good performance, but it could be much better as they are using the wrong techniques. Oh well, they tried.

Given export restrictions and all the ways to run around the restrictions, Nvidia will legally sell $12Billion of processors to China. That is with a B in Billion.

Don't want big tech to use your content online to train its systems for its profit (and you get nothing)? Cloudflare claims a tool that will stop that.

Just like Nvidia, the money is rolling in at Samsung.

Saturday 6 July 2024

Robotics: see the video of a humanoid robot helping assemble a car. Its just a stunt so far.

Robotics: in Japan, this really big robot helps repair railroad lines. By necessity, the Japanese are going to leap over everyone in robots that actually do useful things.

Folks, if it is accessible from the Internet, someone will hack into it. Sorry, but that's true.

Despite popular beliefs, the learning curve is not a smooth, predictable thing. There are many curves for change.

Here is an optimistic outlook for battery technology. If this future happens, everything will change.

Boca Chica: remember that name of a place in Texas. It may one day replace Cape Canaveral.

Where the money is: Samsung is adding more medical measurement features to its ring.

Rumors about Apple's M5 processors coming real soon now for laptops and datacenter servers.

Where the money is: deepfakes and detecting them and recovering from them is supposed to be $40Billion industry in a couple of years.

Generative AI has changed search. It seems smart that Google et al would give us choices as to what type of search we want.

Why don't Americans trust news reporting? Because it is all about profits, not truth. Print stories that sell papers, not news.

As the moments pass, it appears that our current President will remain "in the race" (why do we call these things races, are we electing representatives?).

Meanwhile in China, the disdain for everything that is not Chinese is strong. That is the way it is in most of the world. In America, we disdain such disdain.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, the stock prices of the big movie studios are declining.

And meanwhile in Germany, the governors want to give movie companies a 30% rebate on all expenses if they film movies in Germany.

This is a good article comparing performance of the new Qualcomm processors on Windows 11 with Intel, AMD, and Apple processors. There is no clear "winner" except us consumers have lots of choices.

Sunday 7 July 2024

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, they expect half the gas stations to close in the next decade as electric vehicles are predicted to take over.

You want to cut carbon? Pay a lot more for an airline ticket. Let's see what gives first.

Meanwhile at one of the more prestigious boarding schools, smartphones will be banned for first year students.

A little of the history of MS-DOS and the personal computer. Gates and Allen (Microsoft) lucked into all of it and stole half of it.

According to researchers and speculators, there is a core ball inside the earth that rotates independently of everything else. It has slowed and reversed. Of course, no one has seen or measured this directly, so we have lots of theory. Theory is good as long as we realize it is theory.

Researchers claim they can convert CO2 into methane, burn the methane for energy, capture the CO2 emitted by the burning, convert it to methane, and around and around. Show me, please.

In general, the eSports industry is struggling. The Saudis may pour in enough money to save it. But, is that worth the price?

AI is booming. This is brining an increase in pay to just about everyone in tech endeavors.

Meanwhile in Cuba, the Chinese intelligence services are welcome guests.

These four persons spent 378 days locked up in a Mars base simulator in a warehouse in Houston. Out they come none worse for the wear.

Researchers test how well ChatGPT writes software. It isn't bad. It isn't an expert, either.

Is it okay for big tech companies to read your web content and use it for supervised learning? Many tech executives say it is.

Meanwhile in America, the electric vehicle charging stations, like much of the EV industry, just hasn't panned out like the experts expected. Therefore, the Federal governors are going to force it with taxpayers' money.