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: 2-8 September, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Not much happening this week that is noteworthy
• The Presidential campaign continues on its most un-Presidential path
• The football season in America begins

Monday 2 September 2024

I note that once again LSU, instead of playing a warmup game to begin the football season, travels across country to an NFL stadium, plays a real team, and loses. Five years in a row in a hole at 0 and 1.

The world has turned upside down. Two generations ago, Japan was an economic power while China was crawling out several hundred years of poverty. Now China tells Japan "or else."

There is a small trend for people to move away from big social media, e.g., Facebook and towards niche social media.

Climate goals and buying carbon credits to achieve something or other. Big tech and its celebrity billionaire founders are playing around with all this. Someone out there is making a fortune selling nothing to well-intentioned rich people.

Strong rumors about the next-generation Apple Mac Mini. It will be much smaller and still fit a bunch of ports on it. Ethernet and HDMI are pretty big.

Current American presidential politics: how did we ever sink this low? I am too old for this.

Call my cynical, people often have when I have pointed to the emperor with no clothes, but here is a tale of Y2K fake jobs where folks were paid piles of money to do nothing. Still happens today. See, e.g., the current AI craze.

Real news that isn't news: we run elections on computers which means we run elections on software. Gosh, we don't test the software enough. Gosh, there are too few companies writing that software for adequate competition. Gosh, this is really a simple technical problem. Gosh.

I like this piece. There are things that you just shouldn't write because you will deleted them. Well, sometimes. Sometimes write them anyway as you never know what will turn up.

I you write for money and need the income, take care of yourself. If you are sick, there is no income.

Need an image for the cover of your latest story? AI to the rescue or something.

I read this entire piece waiting for the punchline. There was none. I like that. A writer writing about writing and some days writing about nothing. I liked it.

Tuesday 3 September 2024

Meanderings on drug discovery. At least they are doing science, i.e., observing what is in front of them. Climatologist could learn something here.

OpenAI was never supposed to make profits, just do research. ChatGPT changed all that, or at least started a change.

Meanwhile in America's prisons, convicts use tablet computers for everything. Prison systems charge high fees. Judges seek to reduce them.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. intends to pursue $4Billion in damages from the estate of the late Mike Lynch. Mr. Lynch and daughter died recently in the superyacth sinking.

Meanwhile in China, we learn that it is more than hardware power that runs software. More knowledgeable programmers make software run faster.

"AI's impact on elections is being overblown" At least someone has a grasp of reality.

Serena Williams returns to the US Open, not to watch tennis but to be seen and to sell stuff. I was never a fan of hers.

I hope they didn't spend too much money on this study: why aren't Americans buying as many EVs as predicted? The EVs still cost too much.

Got a few spare minutes and need another headache? Read this about pennies in America.

All those claims about productivity from AI may be hyperbole. Really? Of course. Do you believe every ad that says if you eat more you will lose weight?

Meanwhile in Europe, folks are taking the train instead of flying in some effort to save the planet from something.

Wednesday 4 September 2024

Meanwhile in Brazil, we see what happens when a country does not have a Bill of Rights.

Meanwhile on Wall Street, investors have second thoughts about all this AI and sell off their Nvidia stock.

Here is a thoughtful piece about Intel and making integrate circuits in America. This industry is critical to national security. So, the government should nationalize it????

Our Dept of Justice has decided that Nvidia has succeeded too much and needs to give them trouble and take some money.

It seems that the new AI PCs from Microsoft and Qualcomm can't play video games.

And coming real soon now (November) are some AI PCs that have Intel and AMD processors.

Volkswagen puts the ChatGPT voice chatting in some new cars. While driving, you can now settle arguments are just about anything.

Elon Must flips the On switch on his super duper computer called Colossus (what else would you call it?).

Thursday 5 September 2024

This is an unusual link for me, but one I really like: how to make a cake mix much better. Add better and more extras.

This story snuck up on me as I never would have thought it were possible: NaNoWirMo is okay with folks having AI write their novels during the month.

I'll quote this, "The Biden-Harris administration's big bet on Intel to lead a US chipmaking renaissance is in grave trouble as a result of the company's mounting financial struggles..." Oh what a tangled web government employees weave when they act like they know what they are doing.

And another oops for the Biden-Harris administration: job opening are the lowest in three years.

Intel releases new Lunar Lake processors. They also claim the best power efficiency etc. etc. ever.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, faith-based, Bible-based, and Christian movies are doing what Hollywood craves: making money. Church attendance is down and down further. Wake up everyone. Christians are still here and want something that speaks to them.

To save money in the short term, Intel will have TSMC manufacture much of the pieces of its next processors for consumer computers.

HPE reports a good financial quarter with data center servers leading the way. Once again, it falls below estimators estimations, so HPE suffers. The estimators who were wrong? Well, nothing happens to them.

Our Dept of Justice claims to have busted a bunch of Russian web sites that were influencing the US elections. Will they do the same to US web sites that are influencing the elections?

A Federal appeals court rules against the Internet Archive in a book publishing and book lending case.

I once wrote a short story about this: these technicians in a control center help self-driving taxis operate. My short story is here: https://www.amazon.com/Car-Hackers-Dwayne-Phillips-ebook/dp/B00LZ4D58Y/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ZWAAV5NHCVEN&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.EefusnEvho2lmU4AnFqTWtJ9e78SBk1TkOmvtOR_ZP8.Z5ACP_4bxFOzqkdtziD3aKC1Z6pxwCr0dcvR_7OFK3I&dib_tag=se&keywords=car+hackers+dwayne+phillips&qid=1725531153&sprefix=car+hackers+dwayne+phillips%2Caps%2C105&sr=8-1

Acer shows a new 14-inch laptop and claims 24-hour battery life.

Asus shows a small-footprint PC with an Copilot button on its small front panel.

Upon further review, moving to the cloud hasn't brought all the cost savings and such the marketing people promised. Oh well.

Panasonic returns to the US TV marketplace.

Friday 6 September 2024

Meanwhile in France, they arrested the founder of Telegram a month ago. The Russian billionaire calls its all misguided. Why do I sense he is right given that he is a Russian billionaire and that adjective-noun pair is in disfavor today?

Meanwhile in New York City, they passed a law against short-term rentals. Rents have gone up while available housing is down. The results of the governor's actions is predictable and was predicted.

I note that Silicon Valley executives are not whole-heartedly behind Ms. Harris' run for President. While she is from northern California, her policies are not favorable to Silicon Valley business.

Google begins the rollout of its Ask Photos feature. Describe a photo and Google will find something like it.

Broadcom had a good financial quarter.

OpenAI claims it has over a million business users of ChatGPT.

Meanwhile in America, deepfake porn laws are slowly being written. Of course you have to define pornography and then you have to show that someone deliberately copied someone else's face. See, e.g., the famous TV Guide cover of Oprah Winfrey face on Ann Margaret's body.

A man figured out how to earn million$ on music streaming services with fake bands, fake songs, and fake listeners. He outsmarted everyone. Somehow being this smart is illegal as he has been arrested. I have to wonder why law enforcement persons spent all this time on him instead of following people who threaten to kill kids in schools, but that is just me.

Our Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency claims that Russia's GRU is behind groups of hackers.

The Washington Post hints quite strongly that if re-elected, Donald Trump will slowly but surely dismantle the free press in America. The Post, however, fails to mention how the Biden-Harris administration told Facebook et al what to report and what to block as information vs. misinformation.

This is COOL! Lenovo has a laptop-tablet convertible with a motor that opens and turns the display. It can point the screen and camera at you as you walk around the room. This is a demonstration machine, but it would be nice to have.

Saturday 7 September 2024

It must be nice to have a job where you tell billionaires and government regulators that you'll get back to them in a year.

HyperWrite is a new writing assistant that uses AI techniques to improve research and writing. It boasts a new language model that beats, so its founder claims, OpenAI's best.

What do you make of this? Many relatives of Tim Walz are supporting Donald Trump for President, not their close relative.

If you want to rent Nvidia processors in the cloud, go to China as it is cheaper there. This make no sense, but it is reality.

Google is about to go on trial again for anti-trust practice. Just goes to show that it's okay to succeed in America as long as you don't succeed too much. There comes a point where you spend so much money on charity that even regulators are ashamed to sue you.

The Boeing Starliner returns to earth empty and ready for extensive and expensive study by government regulators. Sigh. Scrap it and back to the drawing board.

Strong rumors that the next iPhone is actually a high-grade movie camera with a telephone attached to it. Why don't these companies sell high-grade cameras and then sell telephones separately?

Regardless of political views, I like this idea: have Elon Musk, or name some other fella, audit the entire Federal government.

We have just removed four electricity generating dams (renewable energy they call it). Somehow this is a good thing. We are an odd lot.

It seems America's youngsters are using computing devices, but they cannot type using the basic QWERTY keyboard.

It appears that there is a large marketplace $$$ in blackmarket AI chattering bots that do all sorts of things for ne'er-do-wells.

We have reached the point in American colleges where grades mean nothing, so let's just drop them altogether.

Finally, something that may be significant...it appears that role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons may be good simulations (that is what all games are) for helping autistic persons.

Sunday 8 September 2024

The New York Times analyzes the Telegram app and finds lots of criminal activity. When will they analyze telephone use to learn if criminals use the telephone?

"Tyler Tech dominates America's software industry managing parks, courts, municipal offices and prison networks." The quality of the software is abysmal. State and local governments copy each other regardless.

Not all earth-orbiting satellites are equal, but SpaceX controls over 60% of them. SpaceX rules the heavens.

Strong rumors about tomorrow's big event from Apply. New phones, new watches, new intelligence.

Here is a review of the recent court ruling against the Internet Archive's Open Library. The members of the court seem to think that all lending libraries, those have existed forever, are bad and should be closed. And these judges are adults?

Some folks argue about the use of computers and software in college classes. Other point to low- or no-effort in response to busy work from professors. Oh, both parties are held accountable. New concept (not).

Meanwhile in earth orbit, the European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully 3D printed the first metal part. This is a fundamental capability needed for any longer-term space travel. You cannot carry all the parts you need, so you carry metal and a machine that can make any part you need.