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: 28 October - 3 November, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Apple has many updates this week with Apple Intelligence and the M4 processor
• Good quarterly financial reports abound for tech companies
• The Los Angeles Dodgers win the World Series
• Daylight Savings Time finally ends in America for this year

Monday 28 October 2024

Strong rumors on what Apple will introduce this week. The M4 processor is the big news for most of us. Odd how we used to be excited about the new processors and how they would change everything. How much processing power is enough?

Don't click on QR codes. It is best for organizations to not use them. CAUTION.

Influencers are being paid to influence. Some adults find this odd.

More fear and loathing at the Washington Post over not endorsing Kamala Harris.

Meanwhile in Indonesia, governors stop the sale of iPhone 16 models.

There appears to be great excitement over an Apple Smart Home Display thing to be shown this week.

Nvidia surpasses Apple and is not the world's most valuable company.

Angst over the return-to-the-office. Companies are requiring returns but are not enforcing them. Pushing and shoving ensue. If you don't fire people, they will do as they wish. Some companies simply cannot fire people and lose all their expertise. There are remedies that people won't like me describing.

Some notes on book farms and book farm authors. New to me, at least the terms are.

Notes on growing a writer's business. If you want to earn money from writing, you must approach it as a business.

Quoting the question in the tile, "Where Do the Stories Come From?" Answer: everywhere.

Some advantages of working with a small-press publisher, i.e, a company that only publishes two or three books a year.

Tuesday 29 October 2024

Return to the office angst continues: at least in Federal jobs, there is legislation moving about to remove locality pay if you work from home. Finally, some sanity. It is quite simple. If you commute, you are paid more. Do it day by day. This isn't complicated.

Bellingcat shows quite horrible how the Ukrainian town of Vovchansk on the border with Russia was destroyed this year.

Thoughts on using AI or being afraid of it or fearing the loss of jobs and other such vexing questions.

When did 1.6 billion parameters become a smaller model? I guess it is smaller, but I can't call it small.

And several pieces of Apple news this week with some already confirmed and some strong rumors.

Apple updates all its operating systems, and that means some bits and pieces of Apple Intelligence arrive.

Apple updates the 24-inch iMac with the expected M4 processor. Prices remain about the same as last year's M3 processor iMac.

Big leak of information about the upgraded Mac Mini and Mac Studio with M4 processors.

Yet again, Apple changes the type of physical interface on its keyboards, mice, etc.

And the shift of Apple manufacturing from China to India continues with $6Billion of iPhones coming out of India.

Where the money is: publicly funded and government-administered schools. Ransomware attacks are up, up, and still rising. School boards are not competent in cyber security and are using the Internet too much.

This one is about 60 years late, but someone says to watch out for insider threats in this year's election. This means people administering the vote counting might be the ones altering the numbers.

I like this term: AI slop. It appears that various writing platforms are being flooded with such slop.

The Open Source Initiative releases a definition of Open Source AI. They call it OSAID. Clever acronym.

The biggest news of all out of Apple is that they are producing a movie based on the Oregon Trail education game created in 1971 and which ruled the schools in the 1990s.

NASA tells us that NASA is wonderful and that its measly $25Billion budget generated $75Billion in economic goodness for America. We should all be thankful (not).

Back to the stark reality of NASA: they have heat shield problems and a mission to the moon scheduled for 2025 that just won't fly without a heat shield that actually shields passengers from heat.

Wednesday 30 October 2024

Some research into the mistakes made by LLMs indicate that the mistakes can be predicted, found, and corrected before final output.

An academic calls for more money for worldwide academia or sorts. Nothing new here.

Meanwhile at the Washington Post, 10% of subscribers cancel because the Post didn't endorse Kamala Harris. The most liberal newspaper on the east coast didn't endorse the liberal candidate for President. Liberals revolt.

More liberals angry at more liberal media. Liberals are upset with liberal media for not blasting Donald Trump. Conservatives are creating their own media to blast Kamala Harris. More polarization, but the candidates are more polarized. Perhaps in four years some of this will lessen. I hope so.

Sanewashing is the act of minimizing the perceived radical aspects of a person or idea in order to make them appear more acceptable to a wider audience. (Wikipedia)

Here is an example of the polarization and the nonsense it spawns, "A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles"

AMD reports a good financial quarter. Estimators, however, estimated more, so the stock price fell. They should have fired the estimators.

Reddit reports a good financial quarter. Opposite case as the good news was more than estimated, so the stock price rose.

Alphabet also reports a good financial quarter.

Recent survey shows 66% of Americans don't use AI at work, while the few that do use AI at work note huge gains in how much they can accomplish in little time. People can be more productive if they want. It is the desire that is lacking. Also, if I am more productive, where is my more pay?

The rumors proved true as Apple announces major changes to the Mac Mini. Smaller size, more ports, much more processing power. The $599 model is oh-so-tempting. M4 processing ooomph.

GitHub adds more AI to its CoPilot.

US government bureaucrats tried and tried to slow China's high-technology gains, but those efforts have flopped.

Technology espionage fighting continues between China and South Korea.

I'll just quote this headline, "OpenAI builds first chip with Broadcom and TSMC."

Microsoft claims that the Russians are phishing with emails to trick US officials to talk. They are seeing Russians in their soup. That is a very old expression.

Thursday 31 October 2024

The Dodgers win the World Series

Jeff Bezos has a stark reality editorial in his newspaper, The Washington Post. He admits that journalists are now the LEAST TRUSTED source of information in the US. Finally, someone admits this. Bezos is in a good position to shout this as he owns a major newspaper, but has not been in the news media his entire life. Perhaps some good will come from this admission.

I'll just quote this, "Linux creator Linus Torvalds has blasted the AI industry as 90% marketing and 10% reality."

Google has been blocking Russian content from its platforms. To retaliate, a Russian court fines Google $20 Decillion. What is a Decillion other than a really big number?

Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. says he will sue anyone who even tries to mimic him with AI.

Reddit is 20 years old. It had a profitable financial quarter for the first time. I don't understand finance etc. How can you lose money 20 years in a row and still stay open?

The profits keep rolling in as tech companies report good financial quarters.

Meta.

Microsoft.

Samsung.

DoorDash of all people.

Roku.

Not so good news: DropBox lays off 20% of its workforce (528 folks).

Meanwhile in Taiwan, lead by TSMC this is the hottest stock market in the world.

Game developers are leaving the big companies and going to smaller teams. Vastly improved tools enables this. You don't have to be a big company to afford the necessary tools.

AI surge leads to more computers which leads to more trash going into the world's garbage dumps.

Meanwhile in legacy media: fear and loathing of Elon Musk who bought a platform from which to talk.

Meanwhile in legacy media: liberals whine and wail that Jeff Bezos isn't doing what they want him to do. He doesn't recognize them as experts.

Apple shows three new processors: M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max...good, better, best. Another leap in processing power.

And Apple has new laptop computers with these three new processors. They aren't cheap; they are powerful. What do you do with these things, run weather simulations and nuclear testing simulations?

Apple keeps the MacBook Air at the M2 and M3 processors, but updates the RAM to 16GB.

Here is one summary of all the Apple announcements this week.

Why do we have a housing shortage? MIT believes it is lazy house builders who shun productivity increases. That is just plain stupid. If a house builder was more productive, they would be making much more money. Who doesn't want to make more money?

Meanwhile in New York City, an AI-enabled gun detector system on the subways had 118 false positives and no actual detections. FLOP.

Perhaps the polarization of America has been exaggerated by the legacy media to sell papers and ad money.

ooops running up to the election, folks in Colorado post passwords to voting systems online.

Friday 1 November 2024

Gasp (not really)! People are calling automation software "agentic AI" when the software merely does something quite useful and people like it and use it. My gosh!

Another gasp (not really). Some Americans are peaceably assembling on Facebook. Next thing you know this will be a right gauranteed from government interference in the US Constitution. Oh wait, that's already in the First Amendment.

And on Google Search, those big sites who pay money are listed first in search results over those little sites who don't pay. Let's see, greater coverage to people who pay more money. Let's see, Google doesn't charge me any money to use their search. Let see, no one is forcing me to use Google search. Let's see, well, I don't know what else to see here.

Folks in the People's Liberation Army, the Army not of China but of the Communist Party of China, use Meta's open-source AI to develop weapons. This violates terms of service from Meta. I don't think the PLA is worried about Meta's Terms of Service.

More good financial quarters reported.

Amazon.

Apple.

Not Intel.

Those who run Anthropic want government to rush in and regulate AI. This is a northern California company. If we elect a northern California person to be President, these regulations will flow via Executive Order.

OpenAI now releases a Search system. This is supposed to compete with Google. Google welcomes this as it lessens the government's anti-trust lawsuit.

Support for Windows 10 ends in a year. For $30, you can extend that a year.

Ford will take a 7-week hiatus in building its F150 electric truck. Slow sales, nil profits drive the decision.

Intel has its own processors aimed at AI work. Sales, however, are practically nothing.

Less obesity via better chemical drugs is also bringing a drop in the number of weight-loss surgery.

Stark criticism of OpenAI and large language models. I agree with the criticism.

Meanwhile in Canada, it appears that the Communist Party of China has had access to Canadian government systems for five years.

Ghost Jobs (jobs that are advertised but don't exist) are quite prevalent.

Eric Schmidt calls for fewer tanks et al and more AI-powered drones. See, for example, the war in Ukraine. $500 drone destroys $5million tank.

Saturday 2 November 2024

Political polls are a well-known and, until 2016, a well-trusted type of data. The last two Presidential elections showed the polls wrong. This time?

Once again, someone shows that we should not try LLMs to do simple math.

Use of Google's Gemini AI system has grown 14x in the past six months. Not 14%...14x.

Meanwhile in Britain, journalist don't like how the BBC is covering the Israel-Gaza conflict. They feel the BBC is too much in favor of Israel. Changing times in Britain due to changes in demographics via immigration for several generations.

Advertisers love political campaigns. The nuttier the better.

In a risky move, Intel plans to make more of its own processors instead of having TSMC make them.

Pixelmator, with its incredibly popular and powerful Pixelmator Pro and Photomator photo-editing apps, is being bought by Apple.

Meanwhile in Denmark, they have built one of the world's most powerful super-duper computers. Paid for by Nvidia and Novo Nordisk's weight-loss drug Ozempic.

This is an odd story out of Pennsylvania: Our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has denied a request from Amazon to use nuclear power to run an AI data center.

Meanwhile in America, we have something called Incomplete non-grantor trusts (INGs) that allow super-rich business owners to transfer their tax liabilities to no-income-tax states without moving to them. Is this country great or what?

Once again, actions on the ground in Ukraine showed the experts to be wrong. Experts are usually wrong on these things. Will we ever learn that lesson? Probably not.

This story seems to be important as it is in many places on the Internet: Nvidia is replacing Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Where the money is going: Wall Street predicts that $200Billion (with a B) will go towards AI data centers and processing next year.

63% of employees blame their CEOs for lack of automation and AI on the job. They CEOs are called "digital illiterates."

In an election year, our current President is putting $825Million of US taxpayers' money into New York state.

Sunday 3 November 2024

And here in America, we set our clocks back an hour last night to return to standard time. Only Congress and other illiterates would call the lesser of two things "standard."

Medical studies show that standard time is better for health and well being than daylight savings time.

Wendy's is closing 140 restaurants. The old style are more expensive to operate than new models. They claim to have enough new models to balance the closings.

Here in America, we have an election for President in a couple of days. The legacy news media reports the polls are even. This creates the environment for protests of any result. Prepare for cries of, "How could we possibly have lost? The polls showed us slightly ahead!" from either side. Then the legacy news will have lots of readers and watchers of the unfolding crisis. Hmmm, it's almost like the legacy media is setting up all this to drive increased revenue. Naw, couldn't be, could it?

George Will summarizes the election choice for Tuesday. I agree with Mr. Will. Many don't. Perhaps in four years we will become tired of the nonsense and have real candidates from all corners of the country.

Thoughts on Arm processors moving into the data centers.

Meanwhile in America, we have the CHIPS Act. Ten$ of Billion$ for high-tech something-or-other. The something-or-other summarizes it. Everyone is disappointed and it faces repeal. Yet another flop.

In our connected world, it is quite easy to trust foreign news media instead of American. Probably a wise choice as well.

Cloud computing becomes a cash cow with AI cloud services. No one can afford to buy the hardware to run AI, so everyone rents it from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, et al.

Commentary on the use of AI in Hollywood. So far, it is a tool to be used by people instead of a replacement for people. So far.

Benchmark tests on the new Apple M4 Pro and M4 Max (can't they find better names?) show these two are breaking all the performance records. Got two or three thousand $$$? Gotta get these.

A Tulane grad student looks at ten-year-old lidar data and finds a lost Mayan city in the jungle of Mexico. We don't know a lot about our recent past.