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: 14-20 October, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues to expand
• It's Columbus Day in America (even though we are supposed to despise him now)
• Intel and AMD partner on x86 vs ARM battle
• Big tech is now funding nuclear reactors in reality, no longer just a rumor
• xxx
• xxx

Monday 14 October 2024

Fascinating article on where Democrats and Republicans eat while campaigning. The "I was raised middle class" lady never goes to McDonald's and Chick-Fil-A, but instead goes to a place called Le Pain Quotidien. Middle class?

Good old fashioned scams where you steal everything from a person are going high technology.

Burning coal to generate electricity for data centers. The odd thing here is that the Washington Post sent reporters to a little neighborhood in Nebraska to find a story.

Parts of our Federal government are raking in tens of billion$ in crypto currency in legal cases. Let's see, the government takes a company to a government court and the government employees rule in favor of the government employees. There seems to be a conflict of interest here.

We are now in the era where armies use commercial services (that private individuals also buy) to fight wars. This is a return to the 1800s when armies bought firearms that private individuals were buying first.

The Internet Archive is back online.

SpaceX had another Starship test. What to watch is how the main booster returned to the launch tower and was "caught" by the tower. Amazing.

It appears that just about anyone can crack into a LLM system in less than a minute. I am not sure what these attacks gain other than fun.

A government research report says the government did a great job with subsidies for electric cars (for rich people). Again seems like a conflict of interest.

Thoughts on the concept of shame and how it can influence or even ruin writers and other people.

Here are a few thoughts on branding and marketing. If you wish to write and earn enough money to live, pay attention to marketing.

I love this interview. Several important topics for writers: the hungry writer (persistence and effort), non-fiction, book maps, commercial project$$$, why publishers reject (it's not something we publish$$$), and more.

Want to write and "succeed?" Read this book.

A phrase from the Hungry Authors post is don't call a person a panster if they write without an outline. Call them a discovery writer as they discover the story while writing.

The value of a writer knowing other writers.

I love this post and love the title, "An Idea Is Not a Book." It is unusual, but I will quote three points: (1) I will always have more ideas for books than time to write them. (2) An idea is only an idea-the book doesn't exist until you write it. (3) While idea theft may happen from time to time, it is hardly a rampant issue. My addition: always stay away from people who tell you, "I'll give you my great idea for a book, you write the book, and we'll split the money half and half."

And I love this title: The Book in Your Head vs. the Book You Write.

How do you write a memory when your memory fails you? There are ways to work around.

It appears that in the era of self publishing, the romance novel is a hit.

Tuesday 15 October 2024

The talk is over. Nuclear power is back as Google puts money into seven newer and smaller plants to power its data centers.

Ward Christensen dies at 78. He helped invent the computer bulletin board system which predates all this Internet stuff.

How to turn a Russian Math PhD into a billion-dollar fortune: super-duper computing and algorithmic financial trading.

Microsoft was going to build the HoloLens and goggles for the US Army. Everyone lost billion$$$.

Meanwhile in America, Joe Biden is still President and he and his folks are considering a country-by-country block of shipping advanced AI processors to each one of them. The classic case of the shower adjusters.

Adobe releases its text-to-video system.

Our DoD has spent about $700 million on AI projects since the release of ChatGPT two years ago. This is a pretty small number all things considered.

A report from Deloitte notes that while people are in short supply, the integrated circuit industry continues to grow grow grow.

I have to rant about this one: a blatant attempt to tell people they are sick so they people will give them money for "treatment." Ridiculous.

Wednesday 16 October 2024

The money continues to roll in at Nvidia.

Generative AI moves into the realm of low-code/no-code or hobby programming.

An odd story about whether to ban cell phone use during class at high schools. During class? This was all banned here in the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. until 9/11/2001. Then you better believe that kids brought their phones to school. No using them, unless there was an emergency. Recent school security catastrophe show the value of everyone having comms devices.

Donald Trump promises not to break up Google is he is elected President. The current administration, under the other party, is working to tell Google how to run Google.

Meanwhile in Europe, we have New Palo Alto comprising Glasgow, Eindhoven, Manchester, Amsterdam, Cambridge, Edinburgh, London, Oxford, and Paris.

Meanwhile on YouTube, they feel it necessary to label videos with "captured with a camera" as opposed to generated by software.

Meanwhile in the UK, the National Health Service struggles to go to national electronic health records. Sounds like a broken record from America's Obamacare.

Android 15 rolls out for Pixel devices.

The word comes down from owner Jeff Bezos: Grow the Washington Post. Buy other papers if you have to, but grow it.

Intel and AMD both have much invested in the x86 machine as opposed to the ARM machine. Hence, they partner. They partner? Yes.

Meanwhile at Apple, this is sort of out of cycle, but Apple introduces an updated iPad Mini. Of course it has better hardware and also has some Apple Intelligence.

The title of this little article is meant to be funny, it is a little, and it is significantly true. "Most of the time" means that this is all based on probability and that bell curve.

Roku integrates its home cameras into your Roku TV. So while you are watching a movie on TV, if your toddler moves, the Roku camera will detect the motion, pan towards the child, and interrupt the movie to show it on the TV.

Amazon shows its first color Kindle.

This is an information leak, but it shows a Microsoft Surface laptop with an Intel processor inside instead of an ARM.

Small, private colleges are closing. Forty have since 2020 with twenty closing in the last year. More to close in 2025. Demographics (fewer college-age persons) and economics (they simply cost too much).

Thursday 17 October 2024

Meanwhile in Malaysia, they are welcoming new data centers. Such welcome is dwindling in Europe and the US.

The State of AI Report for 2024 is out.

This is what happens when employees of our Dept of Justice decide they can run Google: change your software this way and that by this date. Not enough time to make the changes correctly. So they rush the changes. Six months later billion$ bilked out of Google App users. Who is to blame? If you haven't personally written a significant piece of software, don't tell other people how to do so. This is common sense, which seems to be greatly lacking in some circles of government.

I'll just quote this, "French AI startup Mistral has released its first generative AI models designed to be run on edge devices, like laptops and phones." Good idea. It's about time.

And now we are arguing about the definition of "open-source AI."

Speaking of open source, the code for good old Winamp was on GitHub...then it wasn't.

In my opinion the most important company in the world, TSMC has a good financial quarter. Most credit the boom in AI processors.

More evidence that the real threat today in cybersecurity are hacktivists. Two men from Sudan, already in custody, are charged with hacking lots of folks all over the world. Why? Simple belief that they were in the right and the victims were in the wrong.

More evidence that the big data center companies, this time Amazon, are financing nuclear power plants.

Our Federal Trade Commission creates a click-to-cancel rule.

Toyota partners with Boston Dynamics on robotics. Hyundai owns Boston Dynamics, so this is a link of Japanese and Korean auto makers.

Catching up with Marissa Mayer. She seems to understand AI: it is a tool that can be quite useful for many folks.

We have a student punished for using AI. Do you use spellcheck and grammar check in MS Word? AI. No one is punished for that. Same thing.

Meta laid off 20,000 people in the last two years. Layoffs are continuing in 2024.

And a new study claims that standing desks are bad for you. Was this funded by the big-chair lobby?

And we have a new company called Reality Defender which claims to detect deepfake videos in real time. It seems that some people are deepfaking their interviews on those ZoomerTeams meetings or something.

Friday 18 October 2024

Microsoft and OpenAI were working together for each other's benefit. Well, sort of. Times change.

X shows yet another reason why companies should not be based on the west coast. Those west coast folks need to decide if they want jobs and a good local economy.

We used to call this extraterritoriality; somehow our Dept of Justice is investigating a company in Taiwan selling goods to companies in China. Huh?

Qualcomm cancels its Snapdragon Dev Kit. This was a mini PC with their own processor. It was to show things to come, but quality problems caused them to pull it.

Donald Trump, Tim Cook, EU regulators, billion$...mix it all up and here we are.

Netflix has a good financial quarter.

Our Dept of Treasury congratulates itself for using AI to recover billion$ in fraud payments. If this Department is so good at AI, they should be giving seminars at AI conferences. Perhaps I have missed news of that.

SpaceX Starlink "has a plan" to increase data rates by 10x.

Sales of good old vinyl records are remaining strong.

Some part of our Dept of Defense are seeing good in deepfaked persons. AI could do this. Fiction writers have been doing this for, well, let's see, since the invention of the story.

Microsoft Excel is 40 years old. A copy of Lotus 1-2-3 which was a copy of VisiCalc, Excel is used as a simple database more than anything else.

Google's NotebookLM is becoming a real product. They dropped the adjective "experimental" and added podcast generation. A good tool?

Executives at Amazon are now saying, "return to the office or quit your job."

Saturday 19 October 2024

OpenAI now has their ChatGPT app for Windows. MacOS has had it for a while.

Yet another way to cause ChatGPT to fail. There seems to be a contest among researchers and just plain folks to find errors in these chattering systems. Does OpenAI et al have a bounty program for these things? If you press Ctrl-Alt-F9 will you have a free Netflix account or something?

One of the predicted and predictable results of blocking sales of goods to a country is that country learns how to excel without the goods. See, e.g., how China is learning how to do AI with less hardware. They are working smarter.

Yes, it appears we will sell the Communists the rope with which they hang us. Chinese government actors sue our government in our courts for our money.

This could be something BIG: Video Scraping...instead of copying and pasting text into an AI system, point your phone at the screen and record video of all that stuff. Viola' in it goes and it works.

I wear hearing aids, this is fascinating. Our FCC is now requiring all hearing aid makers and cell phone makers to have their devices work together.

An appeals court greatly slows the court that wants to run Google.

How, "AI has simmered for years in Microsoft's products"

Meanwhile in Cuba, the lights go out as the central power system fails.

A look at Jackson Hole, Wyoming where the really really rich folks like to buy 10,000 acres and build large homes. The income inequality breaks all records here or something like that.

SpaceX is rolling in new government contracts for launching satellites. Boeing? NASA? Who?

Sunday 20 October 2024

Some ideas on making Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems easier to build.

One person's two-week study plan to learn about LLMs.

There are some new and simpler AI techniques to detect the onset of Alzheimer's disease (AD). No cures or treatments, just detection.

A few of the old boys at MIT show that some basic pattern recognition algorithms from the 1970s still beat LLMs at a few things. Who'da' thunk it?

Nvidia releases a new model named Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct (gotta' work on those names guys). Very quiet release for something that beats everything on the market.

Meanwhile in Congress, members of the China Committee write to Japan's ambassador to the US threatening retaliation if Japan doesn't stop selling chip-making equipment to China.

Consumers speak: we like self-driving taxis...at least in San Francisco we do.

Meanwhile at American colleges, students are being falsely accused and unjustly punished for using AI to write essays. The AI detectors are often mistaken. It is quite easy for a person to write like ChatGPT without knowing it.

Per the above, I have read and graded hundreds of college essays. If all the words are spelled correctly and all the commas are in the right place, the writer used MS Word. Is that cheating? MS Word removed many mistakes. Is that cheating?

Big AI tech is hosting AI film festivals and competitions. What is possible at this time?

We have some evidence that having the flu, and suffering other strong infections, adds to the chance of dementia later in life.

A damning article about NASA and its moon-landing program. $100Billion (with a B) spent, and nothing has even left the ground yet.

Good news from MIT on water desalinization. The variable power source of solar panels has been overcome. The goal is using brackish groundwater to create potable water. This is useful everywhere, not just next to the oceans.