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: 22-28 July, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• President Biden tweets that he is out of the campaign, later tweets an endorsement for VP Harris
• Dir Secret Service appears before House committee and doesn't answer any questions
• Dir Secret Service resigns the next day
• Kamala Harris secures the nomination of her party without a vote cast

Monday 22 July 2024

President Biden tweets that he is out of the campaign. Several hours later, he tweets an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Is he so ill that he cannot face a camera and microphone?

Per above, the head of the Secret Service is the happiest person on earth. She still may not, however, survive the next 24 hours in her job.

A look at the CMF 1 phone from Nothing. $199 buys a lot of Android phone.

EA Sports scanned images of 11,000 (that a large number) college football players to use their likeness (when did "likeness" become a legal term?) for video games. $$$

Meanwhile in China, the governors had banned Viasat, but now welcomes them back.

Meanwhile in Japan, the governors want AI businesses, so they rearrange copyright law to make it easier for AI companies to operate.

Apple releases a ten-minute video called "OOO (Out of Office)" showing how their products enable productive work from anywhere.

xAI now has a new super-duper-computer. The Memphis Supercluster has 100,000 liquid-cooled H100s. They didn't say what the electric bill is.

Our current Vice President's opening statement is that she will defeat a project that no political candidate has agreed with. Huh? That seems to be an easy-to-keep promise.

NASA finds sulphur on Mars. Well, if we want to build a match factory there...

Here is a list of AI writing tools to try. Someone has tried them.

This piece is about writing styles and how to create one to use in school assignments. I guess this matters to some students.

Yet another piece that says, "throw away grammar rules and just write like you talk (jabber)." Such advice may help some write. Good.

The importance of client relationships with freelance writers.

Giving and getting writing advice on podcasts and forums. It is okay to share freely with large crowds. You will receive back.

On research and writing, "The research is not the thing you are writing about. It is a source of information for that thing."

Here is a twist on the concept of a "platform" for a writer trying to make money.

This is an era of using words to train software systems to generate words. Accept it and move on. This too shall pass.

Tuesday 23 July 2024

AMD claims that its new processors for portable computers are better than those from Intel and Apple. No repeatable experiments yet.

Strong rumors about the next big Google event.

If you don't let software engineers decide, don't blame them when things go wrong. They are merely following directions from above.

Per the non-testimony testimony of Director Secret Service before Congress Monday: this is a battle between Dept of Homeland Security and Dept of Justice. Dept of Homeland Security (Secret Service is here) is telling Congress to seek answers from Dept of Justice (FBI is here). This isn't complicated.

A consequence of the trade wars with China is that the Chinese have gone dark with their supercomputing efforts.

Intel admits there is a problem with its newest processors and has a solution coming.

Those little Chromecast "dongles" are out. In comes a more stylish device that requires space on your TV stand.

Remember the Inflation Reduction Act? Money is still sitting around wasting away. So, our current President gives $4Billion of it to states (where votes are needed this fall).

The thrill of running Windows XP on an iPad. I have to admit that is a pretty good combination.

Meanwhile in California, the infamous "environmental impact study" puts a two-year delay on the California Forever city.

How much strength does it take to rip a $23Billion (with a B) check in two?

No surprise here: Linux is the most-used operating system on Microsoft's cloud systems.

A report on giving people $1,000 a month shows that while it was enjoyable while it lasted, little long-term changes occurred. The money was spent. Gone. No one invested in education and job skills.

A team from the USA won the International Math Olympiad for the first time in a generation.

Here is a long explanation of Windows, operating systems, security, and the recent great big mess.

Yet another fallout of the trade wars with China: Microsoft has AI research offices in China. The local employees can either move to another country to continue this work or quit and stay home. Many are choosing home over career.

Intel makes available its "AI Playground" for developers and researchers.

Wednesday 24 July 2024

In just a matter of hours, our Vice President, without any votes being cast by anyone, is the nominee of her party. Mr. Biden exited too soon. If the election were today, as the big media reports, 98.6% of votes would go to our Vice President. Gambling sites, whose livelihood depends on being correct as opposed to journalists whose livelihood depends on being sensational, show our former President as a prohibitive favorite. It is unfortunate that we live in interesting times.

Speculating on how fast a person can run. Such speculations in the past have all been proven wrong. Sometimes people surprise people.

Some history and a few predictions of nuclear-powered rocket engines for space flight.

Popularity does not always mean profits. See, e.g., Amazon's Alexis. Very popular, not profitable.

Mr. Zuckerburg comments on open- and closed-source AI. Of course, his company is doing it correctly.

Alphabet reports a good financial quarter.

Meanwhile in Ireland, they have a lot of data centers. Electric power is being drained by the data centers. The data centers draw more power than homes.

I like Seth Godin's comments on "momentum activities."

Meanwhile at Yosemite National Park, there is a much-bigger-than-normal eruption. It is amazing that no one was killed.

This 32-year-old man cannot find work. I feel for him, but... He has two degrees in journalism, bad choice. He applies for jobs weekly, should be doing that daily. It is evident that he doesn't know how to write a resume. I guess he doesn't know how to write, something he should have learned with those journalism degrees.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, hacktivists had turned off the heat in a city back during the winter. Don't worry about the Russians, North Koreans, et al. Worry about the hactivists.

Meanwhile in Switzerland, for now on, all government-used software must be open source.

Sunday was the hottest day in the history of our planet. That is amazing. We are so incredible to be able to survive this.

Thursday 25 July 2024

A short piece with deep thoughts on education, learning, and short- and long-term goals.

Commercial space travel does not mean one company gets all the government contracts. That is what we have now with NASA and SpaceX.

I strongly disagree with the sequence of sell, design, then build. This leads to PowerPoint pitches that attempt to predict the future.

It is quite easy for a software engineer to devolve themself into a technician.

Meta releases Llama 3.1. It is supposed to be the best LLM in existence. This is all impractical, and that that a great shame.

Several companies are building delivery bots that use vision instead of lidar. Vision doesn't work in smoke or fog or heavy rain. Well, maybe they still work most of the time.

There is credible evidence that our current President's live speech last night was recorded earlier in the day.

Meanwhile at Apple, their maps was previously available only on iPhone (I didn't realize that). Now it is available on the web.

Microsoft changes its Bing search engine to include AI generative results, whatever that is.

Meanwhile in Russia, since invading Ukraine, the Russians have bought $4Billion (with a B) in computer hardware that they were banned from buying. It's a big world with lots of back alleys.

Mistral releases its latest great big LLM. This comes one day after Meta did the same.

Someone new shows that Garbage In, Garbage Out is still true. I hope they didn't spend much money on that.

Along with "quiet quitting" we have "quiet vacationing." How to cheat at work, but still accomplish all your work. Of course much of this is unethical. Still, how little is expected from a person in a job? We have so many jobs that cannot be justified in any way. How did we get here?

Here is the sad tale of a 68-year-old woman who tries to live on $1,700 in Social Security each month. She owns her home (divorce settlement), so she has "wealth." Perhaps the Harris administration can tax her wealth. No planning, no savings, no life.

Meanwhile in Australia, scientist genetically engineer a fly that will eat more of human trash. This is the opening line of a science fiction horror story, only it is real.

Friday 26 July 2024

Military units are practicing how to navigate without GPS. Cellphone towers are one source of help.

Citing "misuse," Reddit blocks all search engines except that of Google.

The conventional wisdom has been that Steve Ballmer was a bad CEO of Microsoft. Given time and further review, perhaps he was quite good.

Big tech wants LLMs to be given away just like "a free puppy." The total cost of ownership brings the profits elsewhere.

This is still early, but this could be the most significant story of the past month: research at the University of Texas may have a nasal spray the reverses Alzheimer's and similar ailments.

It is official: the International Olympic Committee was approved the first Olympic Esports Games in 2025. Events to be announced later.

The results are in from the annual Stack Overflow survey of programmers.

Meanwhile in Russia, censorship thrives as the governors slow YouTube downloads.

The Washington Post publishes an editorial by OpenAI's Sam Altman calling for the free world to establish AI to be free from totalitarians. Of course all those words are subjective.

Mr. Zuckerburg claims that WhatsApp has 100 monthly active users in the US.

Our Dept of Justice indicts a North Korean for hacking. Of course, the governors of North Korea will never arrest and extradite this person to US courts.

Meanwhile in Memphis, locals are a bit concerned about xAI building the world's most powerful super duper computer there. Reminder, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is in Tennessee, so residents have a taste for such high-performance computing.

And I learn that Kamala Harris IS brat and all that might mean. Basically, this is a mess, so let's party. Well, that qualifies a person to be President (not).

After 50 years of "sit where you can," Southwest sort of switches to assigned seats.

And now we have "copyright traps" that blink red lights when an AI trainer reads your content. The traps are gibberish generated by software or from a speech by either of our Presidential candidates.

And those who supervise the training of AI models need to block their own use of AI-generated content online. They have created a destructive cycle of creating bad answers and then using them a garbage in, which leads to garbage out, which leads to...

I'll just quote this, " A U.S. appeals court has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission's Universal Service Fund, which collects fees on phone bills to support telecom network expansion and affordability programs, is unconstitutional, potentially upending the $8 billion-a-year system. "

Saturday 27 July 2024

The case for employees owning the company for which they work.

Well, this is new: women are yearning for companionship for artificial boyfriends.

A new company called "The Nuclear Company" hopes to build repeatable and reliable nuclear reactors in the US. The first one won't be here until 2035 or so.

Google's DeepMind claims new systems that can solve math problems and create proofs.

OpenAI shows "SearchGPT." Yes, it is an AI search system that is supposed to be better than everything else.

Meanwhile at the Paris Olympics, mass surveillance using AI is the norm. What? Oh, they have no Bill of Rights there.

Meanwhile worldwide, the governors of China use TikTok to surveil everyone's opinions on everything. Oh? They also have no Bill of Rights or any kind of rights there.

What follows are a couple of links to stories about the CHIPS Act ($52Billion with a B), labor unions, and donations to the Harris Presidential campaign. Let's not be naive: the CHIPS Act was a political funding law aimed at bringing donations and votes to the party in power. The law was passed in 2022, but the great majority of the money was withheld by our current President until the election year of 2024. Such is what happens in American politics. "Both sides of the aisle" would have done the same. This is all a great shame on all of us.

Labor unions move into factories funded by CHIPS Act.

Silicon Valley, big beneficiary of CHIPS Act, starts donating big bucks to VP Harris' campaign.

Meanwhile in the video game studios, the actors are going on strike. Similar to the Hollywood strike, they want to keep jobs and not have them go to software.

Meanwhile in Canada, it appears that the national teams of Canada have been using drones to watch other teams practice. Yes, this violates a bunch of rules, a.k.a., cheating.

SpaceX satisfied our FAA and can resume launching Falcon 9 rockets.

And at Intel, a fix for crashing 13th and 14th generation processors won't fix those already in the wild. We can only hope that China and Russia have all the defective parts.

Meanwhile at the International Space Station, yes, those two folks who flew up on the NASA-Boeing Starliner are still stuck there. A one-week trip is almost two months long. Perhaps they can ride home on a SpaceX vehicle.

Not enough "advanced" students in America? Make the test easier.

As opposed to Paris and China mentioned earlier, we have a victory for civil rights and privacy at US borders.

Sunday 28 July 2024

News Flash (not): political campaigns make fun of other candidates. Adults used to know this, but somewhere a majority of adults forgot this.

Warner Brothers Discovery is suing the NBA over what it considers violations of contract regarding new television deals.

Somehow Apple retail employees qualify as machinists. They join a union and get a contract. I am not sure they know what they are doing.

It has been a bad financial year for TV and film writers. Freelance writing is a profession fraught with problems.

Open-source AI (as opposed to closed and proprietary) has benefits. It has very big benefits to China to help them cut decades off the research path.

The French had a drag queen parody of the Last Supper painting at the Olympics opening ceremony. Or maybe it was a depiction of a Greek orgy (the Olympics do have a Greek origin). Regardless, it didn't put the Olympics in a good light. This bodes ill for America this election year. We are an odd lot and we live in interesting times, which is a curse.

Another news flash (not): in the past JD Vance said bad things about Donald Trump. In the past, Kamala Harris said bad things about Joe Biden. The reverse is also true. This is what politicians do. Again, adults used to know this.

Here is yet another young person with a Master's degree in Journalism who cannot find a job and support herself. Someone please show this person how to write a resume and seek jobs that aren't called "journalist."

It appears that fracking can produce geothermal heat. Good.

Meanwhile off the coast of Brazil, sharks are testing positive for cocaine.