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: 19-25 August, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Phil Donahue dies at 88
• Federal judge rules non-compete agreements are back in

Monday 19 August 2024

An in-depth look at how Apple is building its own modem processors. This is akin to its move away from Intel CPUs.

X pulls out of Brazil so its employees won't be arrested for anti-censorship activities.

Here in my neighborhood of Reston, Virgina, some call it data-centre alley, all those nice data centers are using all the water.

Data, data everywhere. Will anyone be able to find or read or use any of it in 50 years? I am currently trying to preserve what I have done. Paper is a good storage medium.

Common errors in college essays. Yes, I have seen these. Yes, I see them at work from people with 10+ years experience. They didn't learn in college.

You are your own editor. What to do now? Here are some ideas.

Tuesday 20 August 2024

Here is The Network School for dark learning or something. Best wishes as we always need actual new ideas in teaching and learning.

Once again someone predicts that Apple is fading as a company. One day, one of these predictions will be correct. I doubt this one is.

You are starting a new endeavor. What should you do with social media? Here are some tips.

I like this post on learning from high school math to what is used in machine learning. Not everything is "correct," but this is good.

Github adds Copilot Autofix, new to the GitHub Advanced Security service. It analyzes vulnerabilities in code and offers code suggestions to help developers fix them.

All this "let's go to Mars" stuff tends to forget one thing: the humans will all either be dead or seriously ill from radiation poisoning when they arrive. No one has yet developed or even proposed a solution.

We have lots of "let's regulate AI" talk, but no one is talking about regulating the technology that is here now that allows designing babies and future people.

Various bureaucracies in our Federal government are "confident" that the Iranians hacked the presidential campaigns.

Donald Trump shows fake campaign images to demonstrate how easy it is to show fake campaign images.

Phil Donahue, who owned the eyes of America's women before Oprah et al, dies at 88.

Our Federal government is stopping companies from building factories funded by our Federal government. You can't make up this stuff. Real news.

I'll quote some of this headline, "The movement to diversify Silicon Valley is crumbling." People are for equal opportunity. This is America, land of what used to be mature adults who understood that equal opportunity did not mean equal results. This is a hard lesson for many. It is also a lesson about how to work for change and manage that change. Bludgeoning people usually doesn't work.

Speaking of equal opportunity and equal results: GM lays off 1,000 software engineers.

This is a joke, right? "But how usable is the Raspberry Pi 5 with just 2GB of RAM?" JUST 2GB of RAM? JUST? Try 64KB of RAM on for size.

Wednesday 21 August 2024

Meanwhile in China, a company called Unitree Robotics has a humanoid robot they claim is ready of mass production at $16,000 a piece.

Perhaps this is pessimistic; perhaps realistic. Once we become good at estimating software development schedule and cost, that software become an off-the-shelf commodity.

AMD buys an AI company for $4.9Billion and attempts to challenge Nvidia in the AI data center world.

Now this is what we should be doing with all this technology: adaptive electrical impulses to help Parkinson's sufferers.

Waymo learns how to be practical in self-driving taxis. More interior space with just-enough technology to make things work well.

Need a job? Tesla is hiring people to wear funny clothes and walk around all day long. This trains humanoid robots.

THIS IS A BIG ONE: Our FTC had ruled that non-compete agreements were illegal and employees could ignore them. A Federal judge in Texas rules that the FTC didn't have the authority to day that. Once again, a court declares that the Executive Branch of our Federal government does not have the power it wishes to have.

If you pay extra $$$, Google's Gemini will help you write emails.

Meanwhile in California, liberal lawmakers are trying to figure out how to get someone else to pay liberal UC Berkeley to oversee liberal local news outlets. Get the gist?

OpenAI now offers "fine tuning" of their GPT-4o model for a small fee.

Microsoft releases new Phi 3.5 models to open source. At some point, our Federal government is going to attempt to outlaw these releases the same way it outlawed encryption technology way back when.

oops, a Microsoft Windows security update breaks dull-boot Linux systems. It was supposed to have been tested and would not break things. Oh well.

This person is running 30-year-old DOS on a 4-year-old PC. There are worse things to do with your spare time.

Where the money is: building data centers. Perhaps one day, we will convert these caverns into shopping malls.

There isn't much profit in making TVs. There is, however, great profit potential in monitoring viewing habits and selling ads.

The US birthrate hits a new low. US temperatures hit a new high. Is there something to this????

Thursday 22 August 2024

Thoughts on finishing things. I've never really dwelled on that question as I just finish everything I do. Perhaps there is something to this.

In praise of the bug squash interview question. Okay, use this. Pay someone to do the exercise. I strongly oppose asking people to do things without paying them.

Watch this machine install shingles on a roof. This isn't perfect, but it is promising.

Even today, boats sink. A superyacht sank of Sicily a few days ago, and several billionaires died.

Neuralink reports that its second brain-implant patient is doing well. This is a good use of all this technology we have.

Chick-Fil-A, yes the chicken sandwich people, is moving to make shows for its own streaming service. The goal is family-oriented programming.

Yes, it is an election year. Yes, lots of folks "see Russians in their soup" (an old expression akin to "the sky is falling").

Meanwhile at the Ford Motor Company, folks come to their senses and accept that Americans are not buying electric vehicles. The hybrid market looks much better.

It all comes down to materials that allow the flow of electrons. Copper is really good. That's where the money is; that's where theft is.

The numbers are still small (4.45%), but more people are using Linux on desktops.

AMD latest Ryzen processors perform better on Linux systems optimized for Intel processors.

Friday 23 August 2024

Remember Windows Recall? It was a brilliant idea until someone thought about it for more than a second. Microsoft is bringing it back for a limited audience.

SpaceX owns the marketplace for heavy lift rockets. Maybe in ten years, some of these other companies will compete.

Thoughts on discernment and how poorly most of us are. Wikipedia solved this, right? Just look up the answer. If it is a fact, we have it.

Thoughts on setting priorities, i.e., major on the majors and minor on the minors.

Yet another prediction that computer programmers will no longer write programs but instead specify them. One of these decades, this prediction will come true. It has been made every decade since the 1950s.

Researchers are finding microplastics in human brains. We are steadily poisoning ourselves. At least some of us are poisoning some of us. Who is unaffected?

Are we in an IT recession?

Forty years and fading: the Windows Control Panel is going away real soon now.

Meanwhile in China, they have discovered yet another way around US technology sanctions. This one uses AWS. These sanctions are really just boastful claims with no substance.

Meanwhile in Washington D.C., our National Labor Relations Board rules that Amazon has employees and not sub-contractors delivering goods. One more power boast for the Executive branch of government.

Meanwhile in California, try to sort this one into sense. Lawmakers were writing a bill requiring big tech to fund news media (huh?). Big tech decides to fund news media without legal requirements (huh?). News media is mad at big tech for giving them money (huh?).

Burning money in political campaigns: this candidate has basically created a mid-sized company to run one small part of a campaign.

This could have been written 20 years ago, but it is true today as well. We have a new age of trick photography. "Anyone who buys a Pixel 9...will have access to the easiest, breeziest user interface for top-tier lies, built right into their mobile device."

Saturday 24 August 2024

Strong rumors about what Apple will show at a big event in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile in China, decades of a one-child-per-family law and they face elderly with no children to care for them. Here come the robots.

Our Dept of Justice sues Georgia Tech for cybersecurity violations on government contracts.

And our Dept of Justice sues a company for software that is supposed to allow rental companies to collude and raise rent on everyone everywhere.

People seem to be making a big deal about how a Kennedy is supporting Trump. No one was voting from this Kennedy. Then again, no one voted for Ms. Harris in any primary, but that doesn't seem to matter to the press.

Speculating about the space domain and the roles of America's and China's unmanned spacecraft.

An AI supercomputer facility consumes significantly more electrical power than your average data center. High-power processors are just that: high power.

Blue Origin is trying to build rockets that will carry us back to the moon. This is quite a difficult task, and they are struggling with failures.

Here is what software engineers are paid at Microsoft. Good work, but these figures don't show where they live and the cost of living in those places.

Let the arguments begins as to how much fluoride should be in the water. Too much and we have trouble. What is too much?

It is Project Maven all over again as Google employees urge the company's managers to cancel contracts with the military.

Meanwhile in China, scientists claim to produce water by processing lunar soil. No facts given about the energy required and such. Wake me when we are making coffee with moon water.

Sunday 25 August 2024

Drones in warfare: here are some thoughts. At this time, those who deploy drones have the edge over those who try to counter them. Times will change this back and forth.

Ronaldo's YouTube channel breaks all sorts of records by gaining 12million followers in 90 minutes.

This could be something big: a company called Sakana AI has a product called AI Scientist that performs a research project and writes a paper afterward.

USAID becomes our first Federal agency to have a contract with OpenAI.

Amazon's CEO claims that their Amazon Q has saved hundreds of million$ in software updates by writing code. Advertising hype or reality?

ChatGPT continues to lead the market in generative AI tools. Others are gaining ground, but are far from the leader.

Grocery chain Lidl built its own off-site computing center, i.e., a cloud computing center. Now it is a cloud service provider for companies who don't want to deal with the big American and Chinese companies.

It is official: those two astronauts stuck in the space station will ride home next year on a SpaceX vehicle as the NASA-Boeing vehicle is officially a great big waste of taxpayers' money.

Gold hits an all-time high for value.

Starting a business that is working? Look to the Walton family of Walmart to see how to do it.