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: 7-13 October, 2024

Summary of this week:

• These wars continue far beyond expecations
• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues and hits a one-year mark
• North Carolina communities still flooded
• Hurricane Milton crunches its way across Florida west to east
• The Presidential election campaign is now just plain boring

Monday 7 October 2024

We continue to have two internationally famous conflicts. The Russians and still in Ukraine and what started in Gaza as a conflict with Israel continues far beyond those borders. The experts were all wrong about both of these things. The Russians were supposed to "win" in a month. The Gaza conflict was never supposed to happen. Hmmm, experts wrong. Experts are wrong far more often than right. That goes for wars, politics, disease, climate, and the list is longer than we can record.

Sanity returns as big tech looks to smart nuclear energy to power massive data centers. Put small, modular reactors in data center alley.

The call for AM radios in cars as well as the good old days of heavy regulation on broadcasters. The era of lying about everything all the time has caught up with us. Free speech works better when people act like adults. We have little of that these days.

Strong rumors about the next set of product updates from Apple.

Facial recognition can be an excellent tool for law enforcement. Then morons take over and misuse things and we have a mess.

In Ukraine, drones have changed warfare. Let's use these advances in drones to find people stranded by floods. Come on, FEMA, are you listening?

The President of Taiwan states basic facts about which government is older, that of Nationalist China or the PRC. The Nationalist are older.

I rarely list badly written articles. This one is an exception. Horrible. They fail to mention, as one of many mistakes, that Mississippi probably has half a dozen authors with more accomplisment and fame than most of the US.

Running MS-DOS on year another "modern" computer.

Three simple suggestions for someone who wants to be "a writer."

Lessons from the old novel Sense and Sensibility.

Here are some thoughts on writing comedy or trying to get a chuckle or laugh.

"Sometimes life gets in the way." So true.

Caution with what contracts you sign as a writer. There is Work For Hire and there are many complicated legal aspect of that.

Here is a new and short commentary on the Gospel of John.

I saw this little movie this past week about a writers group. The movie is a comedy and has lots of silliness in it. Still, there is some real life to it as well.

Tuesday 8 October 2024

Let's see, this is in America. You open a store to sell products you want to sell. One day a Judge tells you that you have to sell products the Judge wants you to sell. Perhaps I don't understand this.

Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, became law in 1994. The American telecommunications providers had to have a backdoor into their systems for law enforcement use. It would be locked tight, and no one would ever break in unwelcome. And politicians would always tell the truth, and... Of course, the Communist Part of China broke in.

The brain drain continues at OpenAI.

Foxconn announces it will build a factory in Mexico.

News Flash (not): there is a lot of junk on Facebook. Much of it is fake and created by software. Know your sources.

Some Russians leaked video of the next update to an Apple computer. It looks like an Apple computer.

Samsung Electronics had a huge quarterly profit. But some estimators mistakenly estimated it to be higher, so everyone was disappointed. Why don't they fire the estimator?

Google is now rolling out tabs in GDocs. I checked and don't have it yet.

Once again, amateur radio works when cell phones fail. The hurricanes show that lesson again and again. It is too bad that government officials at all levels believe that inexpensive Internet-based solutions will serve them.

The war in Ukraine drags on with the emphasis on "drag." Neither side can mount an effective offensive, so they push hard on each other daily. The Russians will probably have 1,000 casualties a day. Just kids pushed into a grinder.

I believe this is unfortunate: the hyperlink takes you to a source of a story. No link? It is probably a fake story.

Wednesday 9 October 2024

I like the fundamental premise of this piece: AI deployment is far ahead of AI competence. Love it.

I love this article on the Zilog Z80 microprocessor.

Folks at our Dept of Justice, who have never run a business in their lives let alone a high-technology huge-data business, feel qualified to tell Google how to run its business.

At one time in America, over-bearing Little League baseball coaches hurt the mental health of minors. Now it is TikTok. Times change...I guess.

Hopfield and Hinton are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for work in machine learning. That seems a stretch and an insult to physicists, but whatever.

Meanwhile in Ireland, a favorite spot for data centers in Europe, they are running out of electrical power.

Podcasters have replaced the big media companies as the place to give political candidate interviews. This is largely the fault of the big media companies for being ignorant and obnoxious.

MediaTek shows its Dimensity 9400 chip. This is a system-on-a-chip that breaks barriers with 3nm manufacturing. Much higher compute power at lower power consumption. It will drive the super-duper computer performance in mobile devices.

Research claims to show that X is more concerned with copyright violation than non-consensual nudity.

It appears that a big part of the recent dockworkers' strike involved the growing automation at docks. This is not new as each decade brings more efficiency and fewer human jobs.

Our FEMA has a new tactic to deal with criticism of inefficiency: label it all as misinformation and ask the White House for more money to fight misinformation instead of doing its assigned mission.

Real news that isn't news: when a weather disaster happens, gasoline is in short(er) supply. Really? No kidding? This is news to some adults.

I'll quote this. It doesn't make any sense, so I'll quote this: "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave SpaceX and T-Mobile temporary approval for the direct-to-cell service for areas impacted by Hurricane Helene earlier this week," The government regulators had to give approval for this? Are you kidding? This is so basic that it should not require anyone's approval.

Political polls, once accepted as truth, are now just another pile of misinformation, i.e., wrong.

Thursday 10 October 2024

News flash (not): ne'er-do-wells use tools to do bad things. OpenAI is a tool. Next.

$4.4Billion in BitCoin is now owned by the US Treasury. Please, earmark it for something obvious like road repairs at all National Parks. Something concrete so the money just doesn't disappear into a spreadsheet.

For now and the next five years, OpenAI is losing a billion dollar$ a month. It'll turn around one day.

Writer dot com is an AI startup company. They trained their LLM using synthetic data and spent only $700K to do so. That is really inexpensive in this game.

I'll just quote, "Internet Archive's The Wayback Machine has suffered a data breach. "

Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper from Google DeepMind are given half the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Again, that was a computer science achievement.

Meanwhile at Wimbledon, people will no longer call the ball in or out on lines. They move to the camera system used at the US Open.

News flash (not): to live longer, eat less food. This applies to the vast majority of Americans.

OpenBSD 7.6 is released.

It appears that life expectancy has topped off or something. Quite fuzzy.

Dire predictions that AI will replace computer programmers.

Friday 11 October 2024

Tesla shows the CyberCab. Less than $30,000, it will drive itself for you, and it is coming real soon now.

AMD launches the Instinct MI325X processor to rival new AI processors from Nvidia.

LinkedIn says that 10 million people have created pages on their Services Marketplace. This means the rest of us are too late to join and be noticed.

AI agents are autonomous programs that perform tasks...pretty complicated tasks. AI companies are hoping that this is where the money is.

Intel releases Arrow Lake, their new desktop platform.

And Tesla shows a Robovan for carrying 20 persons or cargo. It looks like a fancy train engine from the art deco era.

FEMA continues to cry that misinformation is yet another emergency that they have to mange.

A recent study claims that piracy is costing video game companies 19%.

A pro-Palestinian hacktivist group called SN_BLACKMETA claims credit for taking down the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive.

Ubuntu's October release 24.10 makes 20 years of this Linux distribution.

Saturday 12 October 2024

Is the AI boom coming to an end? Perhaps. Just too much hype. A few advances that make a splash, and people are predicting something unrealistic by Christmas. It doesn't happen (no surprise), so everyone quits. Just be realistic and honest. Use the advances smartly. Gee whiz folks.

MITRE's Federal AI Sandbox promises all sorts of things. It is a tool. Use it appropriately.

Considering predictive AI as opposed to generative AI.

College sports is big money (it should be broken away from colleges). Someone tries to apply big data and analytics.

I'll just quote, "In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like-what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right."

Doom and gloom from The Atlantic. Americans just won't believe what that writer has to write. They believe other people instead. How awful? The National Enquirer used to sell lots of copies. Just because folks watch a video doesn't mean they believe it.

Let's not confuse what people watch and hear with what people believe. Let's not confuse coffee house chatter with deeply held beliefs. It seems that adults would know these things.

Elon Musk really wants Donald Trump to be elected President. It is rare that a business owner, who sells to all people, endorses one party over the over with such exuberance.

This is one of several stories I have seen recently indicating that publications are returning to physical print on paper. Online only showed many problems. Experiment complete; move on.

Apple opens a very big research lab in China next to Hong Kong.

Now this is AI in action (sort of). Casio is making a little furry cuddly robot for hugs and such.

Boeing lays off 10% of its workforce.

Strong rumors about updated hardware coming from Apple this month. The M4 processor seems to be the star with performance worthy of the title "star."

Sunday 13 October 2024

New research touts improvements to the RAG retrieving the right documents.

Intel releases its Core Ultra 200S series processors for the AI PCs that we are all supposed to use real soon now.

Most AI systems today cannot count the number of the letter r in strawberry. Will anyone really care? In the 1960s, Minsky et al killed early AI work by showing the simple problems that the AI systems of the day could not solve. Would anyone care enough to walk away from ChatGPT et al?

The idea of the "TV show" has changed completely. Instead of an episode each week, producers release what is basically a ten-hour movie every 18 or 24 months.

Someone has a firm grasp of the obvious. "Yann LeCun helped give birth to today's artificial intelligence boom." Today's AI models are "dumber than a cat." They don't think or reason. ChaptGPT does useful things, but let's calm down.

And researchers at Apple demonstrate pretty much the same conclusion. Per the question I asked yesterday, will these results bring another AI winter or will people just shrug and keep pouring in the money?

It appears that many of these images of the northern lights this week aren't real, just good fakes. Only believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.

Gambling has always been based on data. Data is driving companies that claim to beat the odds and win on sports betting.

If it is connected to the Internet, someone will hack into it. I don't know how many times you have to say that before anyone pays attention. See, e.g., hacking those little vacuum cleaners.

The manufacture high-purity quartz used for making semiconductors is slowing resuming in western North Carolina.

Those magical AI PC boxes were supposed to ignite growth in the PC market. Nope, hasn't happened.

It appears that the Apple SuperDrive, a CD/DVD reader with USB cable, is gone gone and gone.