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: 15-21 July, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Stories run wild after the failed assassination of Donald Trump
• JD Vance of Ohio joins the Republican ticket
• Bob Newhart dies at 94
• The great CrowdStrike MS Windows worldwide fiasco brings the blue screen of death
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Monday 15 July 2024

Owners of Apple computers are keeping them longer. There is less need to upgrade, fewer new features, and the darn things cost so much.

Apple touts Apple Intelligence in iPhones. Those making Android phones are trying to catch up.

Some research into using AI to scan resumes. Of course it brings biases, but the great majority of companies don't have anyone reading resumes. It is all software scanning for keywords.

Someone finally gets a grip on reality. These LLMs don't reason much. They merely repeat what they have "read." It is memorization, not reasoning.

Upon further review, given that President Biden openly said, "put a bullseye on Trump," I put it 3 in 5 chances that he will be impeached for conspiracy to commit murder. Poorly chosen words in an otherwise poor episode in American history.

Meanwhile in India, sales of Apple products rise 33%.

Also in India, the great majority of cellphone users own $20 phones instead of thousand-dollar smartphones.

Here is a piece about Long Lead: a news site that doesn't make money but does make in-depth news stories.

The programming language Rust continues to climb the charts of languages used.

Predictions of how AI will take away everyone's jobs.

Linux kernel 6.10 is released.

A couple days later, lots of talk about the failed assassination of Donald Trump. The bigest questions point to the Secret Service and how they allowed a sniper to sit on a roof in easy shooting distance. There is also lots of talking about Mr. Trump wanting his shoes. That is a typical reaction in such a situation as people focus on little discomforts and attempt to ensure their car keys are in the right pocket.

Tuesday 16 July 2024

It seems we are in the age where the previously respected big builders are flopping. Boeing and now Intel are struggling to make basic products.

There was a time when project managers and engineers were required to keep work journals. I guess we forgot the practice and why we practiced it. Silly.

It appears that Amazon forgot what AWS was all about. They are now racing to AI at their peril.

It appears that X (Twitter is leaving San Francisco.

These things seemed like good ideas at the time.

Valve only has a few hundred employees. Its profit per employee is greater than everyone else's.

It appears that ChatGPT cannot do the basic things that the average data scientist is asked to do. There are simply too many variables for the data scientist.

Donald Trump selects Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate for this presidential election.

And some people wonder why some people wonder about the mainstream media.

MSNBC did not broadcast its Morning Joe program Monday out of fear of what some guests might say about the assassination attempt.

Complaints flood media outlets over the lack of coverage of the mental acuity and physical fitness of our current President.

Elon Musk is leading the praises of Donald Trump.

If we think the news is gone bonkers after Mr. Trump survived, what would it be like if he were killed Saturday?

The astronauts are still stuck on the space station due to problems with the NASA/Boeing Starliner. Gosh.

Meanwhile in China, the governors want their AI to be correct. Their regulations, however, may kill AI research. This all shows the underlying problem with supervised learning (the predominant AI approach these days): you "have to" spend more time testing than you do building. So where is the gain?

Coming next month from HP is a new laptop using AMD processors with all this PC AI abilities.

A hacktivist group grabs a terabyte of data from Disney. If you are a large and monied organization, guard against the hacktivists. All governments are poor amateurs in comparison.

X (Twitter) claims new high in use by everyone.

Wednesday 17 July 2024

Content on the web has changed (for the worse). Changing (for the worse) is how Google searches things. Too bad.

This is a long piece on immunotherapy and treating cancer. As with all new medical techniques, I trust they know what they are doing and this is not the stuff of science fiction horror shows.

There is a cybersecurity company called Wiz that has been in the news a lot the past week. It is being bought for $23Billion (with a B) only four years after it was founded.

I can't help myself. There is an "underground cave" on the moon. Does that publication have editors? Of course it is underground. Ever see an above-ground cave?

Our Air Force is trying to build a less-expensive fighter. $300million per plane is silly. Have they never heard of a hierarchy of performance and cost?

And people wonder why people wonder about law enforcement in America. Have all law enforcement officers lost their minds?

How do you "swipe" a video from YouTube? Perhaps there is much here that I do not understand.

Researchers claim to have "amazing new technologies" that will detect alien life out there. I guess that these new technologies will detect things that are not possible to replicate unless you buy these new technologies and produce irreproducible results.

Amazon corporate offices move to eliminate "coffee badging," i.e., checking in at the office and leaving before you finish your cup of coffee.

Elon Musk moves his companies out of California. Thank you legislators and governor for costing the state jobs.

Taking a look at Samsung's image generating feature on its smartphones. The images are quite good.

Mistral releases new and better code-generating LLMs.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, the worldwide AI boom is filling wallets with money everywhere.

Given all the media storm after the failed assassination attempt, we are still left with the Biden-Trump choice for President. I wish no ill for either man. I wish they would both drop out of the race.

Thursday 18 July 2024

Someone tries to explain why their hopes for VR were too high.

Thoughts on private browsing of the web.

One programmer considers 35 years of programming. The soft skills were more important than the technical ones.

And now we have stratospheric balloon tourism. Write a big check and rise 100,000 feet into the air.

Remember mile-a-minute Murphy (if not look him up)? This "air shield" helps runner experience running faster by breaking the wind for them. Clever.

I'll just quote this, "Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, an AI native education platform."

Meanwhile in North Korea, the business of government is stealing money, and business is good.

This is a new one: a tech company says they don't use the LLM they spent million$$$ developing.

The WNBA, whose product is quite poor, gets a bonanza with its televised right$ quadrupling.

This is a new one: tech venture capitalists openly endorse Donald Trump. President Biden's recent tax proposals hurt tech investment.

Someone leaked some documents from Cellbrite that shows that they cannot unlock recent iPhones while still being able to unlock all the Android phones.

Our current President has moved to regulate AI research. Mr. J.D. Vance, see Donald Trump vice-president nominee, has always been in favor of no regulation. The result is easy to predict.

This is different, but not surprising. Stores are now trying to ban rather than require masks. Those wearing masks easily steal things and are not caught as they cannot be identified.

OpenAI uses game playing to cause LLMs to explain their answers a little.

The Secret Service not the only Executive agency in the news this week for stumbling and bumbling. NASA is back on the list with a failed moon rover, yet they keep the company on contract for yet another moon rover.

Friday 19 July 2024

Bob Newhart dies at 94.

The pandemic changed attitudes about going to tech conferences. The Biden economy brought more changes. Now, "you want to go to a conference? Get a real job."

I am unemployed again, and I really like the piece about the job market and the dismal interviews that companies insist on using.

A somewhat interesting idea: before you take a math class, study and master the material before the class starts. Then you can get an easy A and impress everyone, or something like that.

Researchers have found the fountain of youth drug. It seems to work on lab rats. I trust they know what they are doing before attempting such on people. Hint: do this on a remote island so containment of mistakes is easier.

Between jobs, I am spending more time watching various news programs. Many Democrats wanted Mr. Biden to remove himself from the current election. Mr. Biden loudly said, "No." The calls to step aside continue. Does "No" mean "maybe?"

The world had a big Microsoft Windows crash overnight. Airlines were affected the most. My kitchen Windows 10 machine is fine. Not to mention my Linux machine and Apple machines are also fine.

Amazon's Prime Day, i.e., Christmas in July, was a big success with sales up 11%.

Nvidia and Mistral release new LLMs with better performance. The real difference is the efficiency so that these run on the higher-power desktop computers.

Big tech gets together and forms the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI).

Everyday we have more news about the failed Trump assassination: now we learn that the FBI couldn't open the shooter's Samsung phone without unreleased features from Cellbrite.

Netflix has a better-than-expected financial year with subscriptions up 34%.

I love this little bit from Seth Godin today, "Show your work and ask for receipts."

Yet another Federal court blocks yet another attempt by President Biden to erase student loans. There is a way to spend money in government. For instructions, see the US Constitution. Trying to invent new ways is, uh, er, sort of wrong.

Saturday 20 July 2024

Thoughts on being critical of your own work without destroying yourself. This is similar to my thoughts on the healthy skeptic which I wrote years ago.

And being a healthy skeptic of tech everywhere all the time as your raise children.

Meanwhile at Meta, remember the metaverse? The division that still piddles with that failed idea is burning too much money.

Meanwhile at OpenAI, we now have GPT-4o mini. They need to work on their product names.

Everyone wants an AI safety bill. Per the last 48 hours, how about bills that outlaw mistakes that ground planes and affect millions of travellers. Oh, that is a law banning mistakes. Oh.

Meanwhile in Russia, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is convicted of espionage. Observers believe a prisoner exchange is imminent. The Russians have a nice game here. Every time one of their diplomats is arrested for spying, they grab anyone, convict the person of anything, and exchange "prisoners."

Meanwhile in the UK, police arrest a 17-year-old charged with the MGM ransomware attack. A teenager operating from his parents' basement. These are the hactivists. They will take down anyone.

The calls for Mr. Biden to leave the campaign continue. My impression, taken from years of experience with family members and others close to me, is that Mr. Biden has experienced a series of mild strokes that continue. Now and then, he blacks out for a few seconds. Then there are occasions when his balance is lost and he struggles to walk. It is a great shame that he is in a public position at this time of his life while having these ailments. It is also a great shame that most of the time, he can function well, but President of the United States and campaigning for such is not a "most of the time" occupation.

Researchers at MIT show that data providers on the Internet are blocking data harvesters. Those who wish all the data for supervised learning are left wanting.

The CrowdStrike and MS Windows goof shows how efficiency increases risk. This is a systems engineering fundamental that someone forgot.

I hate Seth Godin's blog post. I hate it because it is true. We don't have any center of culture. That is a shame.

This is new to me: pathological demand avoidance, a nervous system disability that presents as a pattern of behavior in which kids go to extremes to ignore or avoid following ordinary rules. Perhaps there is something to this. Perhaps this is a great excuse for doing whatever it is that I want to do at all times. Perhaps I just don't understand these things.

Meanwhile in Africa, they are learning from the Europeans as regulators fine a successful American company several hundred million dollars.

Researchers claim to have a "smart soil" that grows more crops with fewer resources.

Google Docs now works with Markdown formatted text. Mine has been updated. Now when will Latex work?

The PAN(dem)IC boosted programmer jobs and salaries. That was then, this is now.

Sunday 21 July 2024

As the days pass, we have more outsiders and non-FBI analyzing the Trump shooting. It is a matter of numbers and technology. Millions of people have access to the audio-video of the event. All those people have access to computers. Hundreds of thousands have access to computing and software tools for analysis. Tens of thousands are interested enough to spend time analyzing.

Governments are worried that governments are using too many Microsoft systems. Well, uh, perhaps governments should use fewer Microsoft systems. Huh? Is it more complicated than that?

President Biden has proposed a 25% tax on "unrealized capital gains." And people are surprised that investors are backing Mr. Trump.

Governments in Africa don't like StarLink and other companies that bring Internet to subjects outside of their control. No surprise here.

Microsoft claims that the CrowdStrike mess affected less than 1% of its customers. That is probably correct.

There is a wind farm off the coast of New England. One of these big blades broke with debris floating ashore and closing touri$t beache$. Reminds me of oil leaks off the coast of California in the 1960s and how that killed oil exploration there.

Meanwhile in the Linux industry, SUSE is moving up while Red Hat is stumbling a bit.

Google looks to RayBan to help build "smart glasses."

Microsoft shows SpreadsheetLLM that uses AI techniques to help understand the data in large spreadsheets.

Researchers find yet another mistake in these chattering bots where simple questions reveal answers that are not supposed to be revealed.

I'll just quote this, "great executive leadership only exists when individuals can combine the abstract mist of grand strategy with the refined nuance of how things truly work."