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: 4-10 November, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Voting season ends in America
• Donald Trump to be our next President of the United States
• Silly hyperventilating ensues
• North Korean soldiers are in combat in Ukraine

Monday 4 November 2024

Given all the mail-in ballots and other folly, it may be a week before the votes are counted. Sorry. The legacy media loves this as ratings and ad revenue will be higher because of the story they manufactured.

Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, is releases an election-tracking site.

And we have the dastardly "school book bans." No one is banning any books. Some members of the public think that public funds should not be spent on some books. Public funds are in short supply. Let's try to spend them wisely.

NBC shows blatant bias by putting Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live.

Bug bounties for AI systems are finding dozens of flaws in open-source tools.

The Communist Party of China can now listen to phone conversations on millions of smartphones. This is not new.

Lo and behold, the oceans absorb more CO2 than previous estimates.

A group in Tulsa offered $10,000 for remote workers to move to Tulsa. Those who did saved money on housing etc. and the Tulsa economy greatly benefited. Is anyone listening?

Statistics for GitHub use and users. It now has 518million projects.

Some thoughts on over writing or including too many needless words and such like some people do sometimes when they are writing and more thoughts come to them that they want to include so others would be sure to understand etc.

"First lines are greatly overrated." I'll go with that.

A few notes on the beginning of the blog about Do It Yourself Masters of Fine Arts. MFA programs have their good points. Being a writer, however, does not require an MFA or many other things. I have written short stories about writers who write with almost no resources.

Brilliant and simple piece of writing advice from Seth Godin, "You can make sentences too long. But it's hard to make them too short."

Here are a few places to market what you have written. Nothing surprising here, just do the work.

Receiving advice on writing? CRAAP: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose.

Some tips on growing social media audience. I find the content much better than the title of this post.

Here is a three-part structure for a memoir. This will work in many cases.

Tuesday 5 November 2024

Just to show that all is not rosy in tech, Nintendo reports a bad financial quarter.

Panlantir reports a good financial quarter.

I'll just quote the headline, "Meta says it's making its Llama models available for US national security applications"

Meanwhile at the New York Times during election week, their tech workers who keep the paper running are on strike.

In response, "The CEO of AI search company Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, has offered to cross picket lines and provide services to mitigate the effect of a strike by New York Times tech workers."

A new era as 75% of major newspapers are not endorsing any of the candidates for President.

OpenAI starts the legal proceedings to change from a not-for-profit research lab to a for-profit company.

Politics and religion. Let the arguments begin.

Hindsight and college debt: one person's experience.

Meanwhile at Boeing, a workers' strike ends.

North Korean soldiers are now in combat in Ukraine.

This is a true story: because someone found a rare species of bee nearby, Meta cannot have nuclear power for a data center.

It is mind numbing that courts are accepting evidence that has no proven basis. See bite marks as an obvious example. Also hair analysis. Folly.

After all these years, Windows 10 usage is still double that of Windows 11. People don't switch.

Wednesday 6 November 2024

Guess what? All this political angst leads to folks spending money on junk. And someone is making a lot of money selling that junk.

Some details on how knowledge graphs and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) work together to make LLMs better. This is a lot of algorithms that require a lot of processing power. One heavy thing resting on another heavy thing. And that requires some heavy lifting by hardware. It's only money, right?

It appears that former President Donald Trump will be our next President. The counting will continue for days, but Mr. Trump has a lead that is almost insurmountable. I find this fascinating as to how this all came about.

Those companies that laid odds on betting on the election were correct while all the traditional experts were wrong.

The stock value of Nvidia is up 850% since 2022. I wrote a technology report back in 2022 about Nvidia. One of my co-workers read my report and bought a bunch of stock. I, however, just wrote a report.

Bitcoin, and other crypto currencies, is up in value. 75% gain in 2024.

A bad day at Mozilla as it lays off 30% of its workforce. This is only a few dozen people, but still quite significant.

Employees at AI companies want whistleblower protection extended to them. They feel they know of bad practices, but fear loss of livelihood if they speak.

Meanwhile in India, courts issue warnings to Wikipedia. Many see Wikipedia as a publisher, and that makes Wikipedia subject to various laws in various countries.

TSMC, I believe it to be the most important company in the world, cannot produce as many processors as Apple and Nvidia want.

"Amazon announced X-Ray Recaps on Prime Video" This is supposed to summarize a show or movie without spoiling the ending.

I'll just quote this headline, "Elon Musk's gamble on Donald Trump paid off." Let's see if Mr. Musk is invited inside to change the Federal bureaucracy towards efficiency.

If you don't write in cursive and never have written in cursive, can you legally sign your name?

Meanwhile in China, they are doing what they have been doing for over a hundred years: copying Western technology. Who remembers the 706 airplane?

Some sort of milestone in the marketplace as AMD now sells more data center processors than Intel.

Another tipping point, this time at California-based Google as the CEO tells the employees to leave their political opinions at home.

Thursday 7 November 2024

The experts, who were wrong in their election predictions, jump into predicting how a second Trump administration will deal with big tech companies. Are poorly predicting persons ever replaced?

More predictions of doom for journalists and legacy media companies. Their self-inflicted wounds far overshadow anything that anyone else could do to them.

Qualcomm reports a good financial quarter.

So does Arm.

And so does Lyft.

Crypto currency fans celebrate as most of the candidates they backed were elected to Congress.

Data centers sprout in Malaysia. They bring tens of thousands of construction jobs and worries about electric power.

It appears that high-end $$$ smartphones are growing in demand much faster than the less-expensive models.

Our current President has the administration rushing to spend CHIPS Act money while they still have that job.

Microsoft rolls out some AI software to basic applications like Notepad and Paint.

Meanwhile in Canada, the governors stop TikTok from operating as a business, but all citizens to use TikTok.

Some doctors are using more software to improve the health of their patients. Such software has been available for four decades. It is about time.

Nintendo's Switch is a successful product with steady growth and sales. Users are happy with it.

Woe to those who wanted more taxpayers' money spent to stop the climate from changing.

AMD continues to produce processors that perform well for gaming (and everything else as well).

Bad financial times at Nissan as sales fall and they cut 9,000 jobs.

OpenAI spends $10million to buy the URL chat.com. Now that was one great investment in URL squatting (I think that is what it is called).

Friday 8 November 2024

As final vote counts arrive, Mr. Trump wins all the states that were slow and close. Mr. Trump even carried Minnesota, home of VP candidate Walz.

AMD is hot. Their market share is growing by double digits.

We're talking Billion$ (with a B): Amazon wants to work with Anthropic, not OpenAI.

Meanwhile in Chia, here come smart glasses from Baidu.

It appears that "a vast network of online influencers" propelled Mr. Trump back to the White House. All these folks clobbered the legacy media. On Monday, I release a post about Society Media. Times change; some people change with them.

An in-depth review of the upgraded Mac Mini. The processing power in the small box is amazing. Still, the reviewers want a lower price.

An in-depth review of the upgraded iMac.

And then Apple puts all that M4 Pro power in a laptop computer.

Elon Musk was ridiculed for his purchase of Twitter. Now that the election is over, perhaps Musk knew something all along.

An unlikely quartet: Anthropic, Palantir, AWS, and the US Dept of Defense.

One of the most famous persons in computing history that no one ever knew: Elwood Edwards dies at 74. He was the AOL voice of "You've Got Mail" in the 1990s.

Intel promises to bring back free coffee in the office. Why would they have ever taken it away?

Instead of searching for a website that will do something, just have AI write an app to do that something for you.

Strong rumors that voters were documented in this week's final voting. Who voted for whom and all that.

And it appears that we have to suffer through three more Star Wars movies.

Saturday 9 November 2024

TSMC stops making advanced AI processor for sales to China.

I'll just quote this, "The Crypto World's Victory Lap Begins, The industry made a $135 million bet on the election. It paid off spectacularly."

Google begins releasing AI videos on Gemini. This is basically text-to-video.

AI startup investors and scientists await with glee the next Trump administration as they foresee far less regulation.

We are seeing the second generation of large datacenters built in rural areas. The rural residents can now visit other rural datacenters and decide based on what they see with their own eyes. Not good for the datacenter builders.

2024 will be the hottest year in the history of our planet. The UN tells us that we are beyond reasonable something-or-other in all this.

Do you exercise to improve health or do you live to exercise? What is health and what is an obsession with a hobby?

There is a growing and loud chorus of Democrats who blame Joe Biden for the election results.

Ne'er-do-wells are sending fake messages to companies impersonating law enforcement so the companies willingly give away information.

It appears that this is a true story. I'll just quote the headline, "Forty-Three Monkeys Escape From US Research Lab" Lab employees claim the monkeys had not yet been used in tests and are not dangerous.

Sunday 10 November 2024

It appears that just about all the votes have been counted. Mr. Trump carries just about all the states that were supposed to decide this election. Protest? Why? Several states could change to Harris and it wouldn't matter. This was a very bad result for Ms. Harris and her supporters. The blame game is ensuing with the leading scapegoat being current President Joe Biden.

Research shows that Americans understand satire.

Peer reviews for peered-reviewed journals are being written by these chattering bots. Well, who is reviewing the peers or something like that?

It appears that OpenAI is entering the flatter part of the S curve as the gains in its next ChatGPT are less than the prior ones.

At the same time, these AI research companies are creating new benchmark tests as they have made the old benchmarks obsolete.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, integrated circuit production this year smashes all prior records.

It seems that TSMC stopped shipping some AI processors to China because it was ordered to do so by our Dept of Commerce.

Meanwhile in America, the construction business is all about building data centers.

About 100,000 people are moving from California to Texas each year. This is a taxpayer drain on California. Will the rest of America bail out California when the inevitable crisis hits?

Note: an unprecedented worldwide change in the political order. "The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records."

The Firefox browser is now 20 years old.