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: 5-11 August, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Ukrainian army pushes into Russia in its own offensive
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• The NASA-Boeing Starliner astronauts are still stuck at the space station
• Federal judge declares Google a monopoly
• The stock market takes a big tumble
• Harris chooses Walz as running mate
• The job market is looking bad

Monday 5 August 2024

OpenAI claims to have a tool that detects text written by OpenAI. One application is catching students who claim to have written something.

Neuralink has implanted its electrodes in the brain of a second patient. This brings mind control of a computer and such to those otherwise unable to communicate.

Despite its stock price dropping significantly, people are still buying Intel processors and it still dominates segments of the computing marketplace.

Roku continues to lead in streaming media players with Amazon in its usual place. These two hold 90% of the market.

This is a book practically about using today's AI offerings. It focuses on using the things that work well instead of trying to break things.

Someone is reporting this: a 100-day campaign for president is a big advantage for Kamala Harris. The voting public won't have time to learn who she is.

The NFL will use facial recognition systems to ease entry for people to restricted areas of stadiums.

Younger generations of Americans are having cancer more than older generations.

Some fond remembrance of MySpace. I never used it. Facebook was originally only for people with dot-edu emails. The old days. I didn't write "good."

This is a good piece on how the finances of publishing work. The vast majority of writers won't make much money if any.

Tuesday 6 August 2024

Elon Musk and his super duper computer called Dojo. Tesla thinks they need this to build the super model to run fully self driving cars.

Those great big software systems are not what the marketing people claim them to be. I know as I have been inside several.

Here is a detailed explanation of the fiasco of US-Russian prisoner swaps.

One thing leads to another and we have the virtual-preaching economy. There is great potential for good here, and for bad as well.

An error in a piece of software produces an incorrect answer. Secretaries of State from five states demand an immediate fix. Folks like me demand these public officials immediately learn the topic they are discussing.

Our Dept of Education gave private information from college students to Facebook. FOIA requests have not been answered in two years. Lawsuits ensue. This is part of the Biden-Harris administration. This is Ms. Harris' legacy of unanswered questions. See also questions about the Trump assassination attempt.

Google is a monopoly says the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. They succeeded too much. That's a laugh and the ruling will be overturned. Our Justice Dept claims a great victory. Well, finally after decades of failing in these cases, they win one until it is appealed.

If this ruling stands, other companies will lose hundreds of million$. Prices will rise everywhere. Thanks Justice Dept. Higher prices.

Does it seem odd to anyone else that all this CHIPS Act money is being finally released the summer of the presidential election?

Nvidia, holding 90% of its market, is prepping for the Dept of Justice's inevitable antitrust investigation. Welcome to the Harris administration, higher prices all around, and inflation.

Kamala Harris is leading in the polls; the stock market has a huge drop. Coincidence?

Several owners of big tech companies loses billion$ in one day. This money is all risked, not guaranteed.

More woes for electric vehicle owners: "charger hogs" insist on using a charger until their batteries are 100% charged. Well, don't you want a full charge?

Windows 11 finally reaches the 20% market share.

And I find myself in the hospital after a ladder tumbled out from underneath me while trimming branches on a tree. I'm not in pain, except when I laugh. They say I have four broken ribs and a partially collapsed lung. Still "working" away here with my computer.

Wednesday 7 August 2024

One programmer's experiences in 2924. Beware of complexity and trying to make something that everyone in the world would use.

Target cancer treatments are no longer coming next year; they are here now.

The search for creating the Fountain of Youth in the lab continues. No breakthroughs, yet.

Soft skills are still the one thing that keeps excellent engineers from becoming excellent leaders of excellent engineers.

It appears that Nvidia has been scraping data from YouTube etc. The employees doing this were told, "It's okay, just do it."

Delta Airlines had a lot of trouble with the Microsoft-CrowdStrike issue. Microsoft simply says that Delta didn't install updates as required---the oldest gag in the book.

Reddit has a big big big financial quarter.

Meanwhile in California, the regulators are going to drive AI work out of the state. Uh, what state produced Kamala Harris?

I'll just quote the headline, "Kamala Harris chooses Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as VP running mate." The games continue.

Google drops the Chromecast after ten years. The device changed much.

Study shows that charging electric vehicles in America just doesn't work.

The jobs market just took a turn for the worse. This bodes ill for the election.

Dell is cutting jobs.

Taco Bell understands what customers want: food, fast, and cheap.

The last MS-DOS version of WordStar has been released. No cost. I wrote my Master's Thesis on WordStar on a KayPro CP/M machine.

Thursday 8 August 2024

TSMC has built a chip manufacturing plant in Arizona. American workers, however, don't work as hard as those in Taiwan.

Microsoft teams with Palantir to bring AI technologies to US agencies that work with Top Secret information. This is a practical combination of companies.

Meanwhile in Russia, the Ukrainian army arrives with an offensive.

Apple stops selling the SuperDive after 16 years. It is an external CD-ROM (remember those) reader. I have one and still use it.

Meanwhile at Apple, this would be years down the road, but Apple may build a Mac in a keyboard. Connect the device to a monitor, use wireless whatever devices you have, and you have a computer. Connect it to the big-screen TV in your motel room

Meanwhile in India, there are big worries that AI will cut deep into the jobs outsourced from India to elsewhere.

Meanwhile in the UK, they are extracting gold from electronics junk. Yes, there is gold in old circuit boards etc.

And finally in China, someone is trying to build a constellation of satellites to rival Starlink.

Friday 9 August 2024

Survey says, the return-to-office mandates (like all work mandates) hurt workers, hurt productivity, cause people to leave, and all the predictable and predicted bad things.

A look at a company called Turing. No one has ever heard of them, but they played a huge role in OpenAI shattering the world with Chat-GPT.

The Google appeal will be interesting as this monopoly helps instead of hurts consumers.

And the Google monopoly ruling will hurt the rest of us as we will pay higher prices for many things for many years.

NASA has a plan to bring the Starliner astronauts home in 2025. That is FIVE MORE MONTHS stuck on the space station.

Don't point your career at AI research. Excellent advice. You need a billion dollars to build the next great thing.

When you put a voice behind your chattering bot (like Siri), should it be a voice that people like, really like, love, hate? Can customers become too emotionally attached to the voice?

Strong rumors that later this year Apple will upgrade all its computers to M4 processors. One big change will be a much smaller Mac Mini. These processor upgrades are SIGNIFICANT.

OpenAI increases the number of free images per day a user can create.

Some detail on how our current President is distributing the billion$ from the CHIPS Act. The article doesn't mention the geographic vote buying involved.

Meanwhile in Europe, X tries to figure out how to train or not train so much on European data. The trouble with the Internet, is that data has no borders. The trouble with regulators is that they don't understand that.

Meanwhile in the UK where they have no Bill of Rights, there are more calls for the government to curb free speech, a.k.a., "disinformation."

Google has built a robot that plays table tennis pretty darn well. It is one thing for software to predict the next probable word. It is something else to combine that software with sensors and actuators. Take care with this technology.

The most advanced computer processors are barred from shipment to China. The less power processors, however, are being shipped to China to operate EVs made there.

Saturday 10 August 2024

What does the President of the United States actually do? Bring like-minded people into the Executive Branch of government. See, e.g., this interview with a Dept of Justice person overjoyed with the Google-monopoly case. No mention of the inflation effects and injury to the general public from greater power given to the Executive Branch of the Federal government.

One of the major problems with the NASA-Boeing partnership is "insufficient aerospace production experience." Well, no duh! Of course there is a lack of experience as there hasn't been in aerospace production in America in the last 20 years. Blue Origin advertises engineering jobs in Reston (my neighborhood). Blue Origin wants engineers with ten years experience in designing moon landers. Such experience does not exist.

The backstory of how the Fitbit was built.

Some folks in private industry want to geo-engineer planet earth. Folly. Pure folly.

More thousands of layoffs in the tech sector.

When did it become "misinformation" for a foreign government to blab about a US election? I think 98% of voting Americans have already decided for whom they will vote.

A look at the new ASUS Zenbook with an AMD processor. $1,700 is a lot of money, but this is a lot of power in a thin package.

Our current President continues to lose in court regarding student loan debt. If you want to remove student loan debt, have Congress pass a law and sign it. If you cannot gain enough votes in Congress, its probably a sign of what Americans want. That's the deal.

There is much much wisdom in this quote, "The Department of Defense would be better off spending half as much money twice as quickly."

Like student discounts? Like them so much you try to use them 10 years after graduating?

The levels of abstraction and creating new products. As usual, there is a balance and nothing works everywhere all the time. THINK.

Sunday 11 August 2024

Nine of the eleven OpenAI founders are no longer with the company. For a successful company, this is odd and begs questions of what happened there.

More on the oddities at OpenAI. It's a circus.

Got $119,990? Get a Tesla Cybertruck. I've seen a couple recently in my neighborhood. It is the DeLorean of the 21st century. You buy one so everyone can see you. No other reason.

As the headline says, Where are my AR glasses? I've been asking this for 40 years and still waiting.

Welcome to today's world where one year of experience makes you a senior person who is an expert and can tell the world how it really works.

The sales of Tesla vehicles has dropped in California. If you can't sell these things in California, you can't sell them anywhere.

OpenStreetMap is 20 years old. Never heard of it? Many haven't, but it is still here after 20 years.

Beware when you hire remote workers: you could be hiring North Korean soldiers whose duty it is to steal money.

Someone has a more clever way to terraform Mars. Again, stop. What are we discussing? Going to a place where we cannot live. Plan B please.

This story is all over the Internet, so I will note it here. Susan Wojcicki was once CEO of YouTube. She died at 56 of cancer. I am not familiar with her or her work, but Silicon Valley seems greatly disturbed at her passing.