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: 11-17 November, 2024

Summary of this week:

• Russia is still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Ten days after voting ends, Mr. Trump has announced just about all the major appointments
• The incoming Trump administration is moving quickly

Monday 11 November 2024

Today is Armistice Day or the end of the horrible carnage in Europe in the latter half of the 1910s. America's Congress and such changed the name to Veteran's Day.

Schedule F and giving a President the ability to remove "rogue" bureaucrats. "Rogue" is, of course, an adjective and subjective. As a former Federal employee, Feds wanted to loosen the Hatch Act. It was loosened. They are reaping what they sowed. And, that too, is a subjective statement.

Some experts believe that drug and alcohol use shows up in hair strand tests. Kids are removed from parents based on these tests. The premise of the test, however, is questioned by many experts.

Google researchers show a technique they call ReCapture which allows users to change camera angles in a video after the video has been recorded.

Mr. Musk goes to Washington. It appears that this will happen. The "A Team" will take time off from industry innovation and try to fix the broken system.

Who is "the media?" It must be them because we aren't them (or something like that).

And speaking of media, see my thoughts on Society Media and us.

There are real data and there are synthetic data. This situation has existed for hundreds of years. What's the big fuss about? Lying about data? Oh, that.

The AI virtual power plant idea. Be hyper-efficient at home energy use and save enough power to run 200,000 homes. And the participants review what in return???$$$

The bosses at the Washington Post say, "Everyone back to the office five days a week."

MIT study concludes that these chattering bots are chattering bots and not some all-encompassing brain of the world. I hope they didn't spend much money on that study.

We live life, we write about everything in life. It's all kind of neat that way.

Folks, we don't live in dystopia. We have it so good here and now that even two wild and crazy candidates for President cannot mess it up. Just watch as they try and fail.

A few ideas on editing.

One writer finds a way to claim that artists today are not free to express themselves. I fail to agree.

Notes on finding ways to avoid isolation as a writer.

Places that make sense to market your writing.

A new one for me: Story Quilters. "Story Quilters are writers who divide books into individual scenes that they stitch together later into a cohesive story." Interesting.

Thoughts on releasing books in rapid succession. Just do it. Don't hold back.

Tuesday 12 November 2024

I wake one week after the end of voting season to see no riots in the streets and other such. I am thankful.

How do you shoot down one of those pesky deadly little drones? Connect a machine gun to cameras, other sensors, and computers. Track and kill. Simple.

Investors are betting that a Trump administration will be good for business. The thing about investors is if they are wrong, they lose their money. This is different from political predictors who, if they are wrong, lose nothing.

There is much good that could come of this one day: LG is making flexible displays that stretch, bend, etc.

There is a group called DeFlock is mapping licence plate surveillance cameras. automated license plate readers (ALPRs)

Amazon is building its own AI processors called Trainium chips.

This is a long ways off, but Amazon is trying to build smart glasses that will guide its delivery persons.

Early rumors on Apple efforts include home webcams for security etc.

Meanwhile in Europe, there are a couple of search engine startups. The Europeans are trying to loosen the grip of Google and Microsoft on their search markets. Good for them.

Bluesky is a competitor to X which is owned by Trump booster Elon Musk. Bluesky gained 700,000 new users in the week after the election. This is the marketplace. Mr. Musk knew quite well what he was doing.

Inflation in Russia is crippling. Potato prices rose 64% this year.

ChatGPT is a prime source for homework answers. That has disrupted several older education sites.

The long-awaited GIMP 3.0 version is near as it enters testing.

We may be near to having a practical system that converts CO2 into methane fuel.

Wednesday 13 November 2024

I guess these things aren't official until they are official, but some news organizations are reporting that the Republican party will maintain a majority in the House of Representatives.

An Intel executive tries to educate Federal senior employees about hardware for AI.

I'll quote this as it contains too much jargon and product names for me, "The Gemini-2.0-Pro-Exp-0111 model reportedly appears as an option for paid Google One AI Premium subscribers."

HEY, LOOK AT THIS! Clever use of data and visuals to illustrate the rise and fall of romantic pop songs.

Mr. Trump says Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy will lead his Dept of Government Efficiency which will finish its work on July 4, 2026 (the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence).

With new AI companies arriving on every block, office space rental is rising to highs after the great PAN(dem)IC.

Success leads to success: advertisers had left X. Now that Mr. Musk will be part of the government, advertisers are returning to influence the next President.

Amazon is disbanding freevee and putting all its content on Amazon. Yes, seems strange.

Rivian and Volkswagen are working together on software to the tune of $5.8Billion (with a B).

Nvidia's updated app is now on PC.

We have a new AI benchmark called FrontierMath. All the AI companies have plenty of room for improvement as today, the best AI only solves 2% of the problems.

Turn your smartphone into a wind instrument to play music. I suppose there are worse things to do.

Tips on avoiding surveillance. The reason given in the article is silly, but the techniques shown are sound.

Speak of Elon Musk, which everyone seems to be doing these days, his personal wealth rises above $340Billion (with a B) as Tesla's stock value rises.

The next two stories contradict one another. Seems that if they are both true, someone is spending $$$ on AI datacenters that will never be used. Lots of floor space.

People aren't using AI in the office. We've hit the flat part of the S curve.

Gartner predicts a power shortage for AI datacenters in 2027.

Thursday 14 November 2024

I'll just quote, "Georgia Tech has joined Apple's initiative aimed at preparing students for careers in hardware technology, computer architecture and silicon chip design. "

Nvidia's Blackwell platform performs twice as well as the earlier Hopper platform.

A new survey indicates that people may be using AI more than they admit as they seem to be embarrassed to admit what they do.

Cisco reports a bad financial quarter.

Fitbit announces the Ace LTE. It is a gadget for kids seven and up.

CISA and the FBI confirmed that Chinese hackers compromised the private communications of government officials. Note: this is history, not intelligence.

German company DeepL has a new system that translates among a dozen languages in real time. Their system provides better nuance of language than Google et al.

It appears that Elon Musk is appearing everywhere with Donald Trump these days.

MUST SEE VIDEO: this is making the rounds. Of course its fake and generated by AI and such. It's called HUMOR. Does anyone remember HUMOR?

China has one of the world's largest literate workforces. (I suppose India has passed China in such.) Enter robotics in China's factories.

Coming real soon now from OpenAI is an AI-based agent that is promised to do useful things for people. We shall see how useful.

Bad news if you work at AMD: the managers announce they will lay off 4% of of the workforce.

This paper discusses the lab and a few tools that poison images so that AI systems cannot learn from them.

New term for me: reshore. I guess that means we are bringing something back to our shores that we previously outsourced to another country.

Here is a social commentary piece that highlights the socially acceptable and liked trends of the past couple of years that pointed to the Donald Trump election. The elites, however, didn't want to acknowledge these trends as anything meaningful. Odd how experts just get it wrong over and over again. And the pizza delivery guy has it right all along.

Friday 15 November 2024

Something from Pirate Wires Daily, "There's no more primacy in process. Show me what you got done this week. Or you're fired." This is basic---so basic that I wonder why someone has to write it. It is, however, needed in today's government offices. And it applies to the offices of private industry as well. For example, I am currently writing yet another book. Look at the file today. It is different from yesterday's file. That shows what I accomplished in an hour.

Microsoft puts new tools on its Azure AI catalog to help older industries on the factory floor.

Here is a tool that reduces toxic or dysfunctional voice chat. It has worked in gaming chat rooms. If this type of thing actually works, it can help just about everyone who has almost any type of meeting.

OpenAI is extending its ChatGPT, especially on MacOS, to integrate with other apps. This is much like how Microsoft is integrating CoPilot on Windows 11 machines.

And OpenAI is releasing the app on Windows 11 to everyone, not just special paid subscribers.

Grievous vexation in the writing world with AI doing so much of the writing for so many of the persons who don't want to do so much of the writing.

For those who wish AI would clean the kitchen and do the laundry instead of rewriting emails, there is some hope.

Thomas E. Kurtz dies at 92. He implemented time sharing systems for college students and co-creating the Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code or BASIC. Every amateur programmer learned BASIC in the 1970s and 1980s.

Lenovo reports a good financial quarter.

Real news that isn't news: European regulators fine successful American company about a Billion$$$ (with a B).

Microsoft releases Windows 11 ISOs for Arm64-based PCs.

I'll just quote this one, "18 states have filed suit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and its commissioners, including Chairman Gary Gensler, over its crackdown on the crypto industry." Things are moving quickly.

NASA, unable to put a person in space or do just about anything right, teams with Microsoft to answer questions about planet earth. Odd how a space agency is an expert on the planet but seems to have no competence related to space.

Fake music is flooding Spotify.

Our current President commits $6.6Billion (with a B) to TSMC.

Saturday 16 November 2024

It's all about the money and total cost (cost of living): Hollywood is moving to New Mexico and everywhere else.

Someone has a solution to the "problem" of aircraft condensation trails warming the planet.

Our Secret Service claims it doesn't need a warrant to track us as we agreed to that when we started using any app.

It appears that AI companies have hit the flat part of the S curve when it comes to current LLM concepts. Time for a new concept.

Lest we forget, it has been a year since Mr. Altman was out and back in at OpenAI. The company has done fairly well in that time.

Rumors that Samsung will release smart glasses like the Meta-RayBan model in the second half of 2025.

Palantir's stock value is up up and up.

Also going up up and up are the values of SpaceX and xAI.

The LA Times owner announce a dramatic move to the past as it will clearly separate news fact from opinion. It is about time someone did this.

In comes Mr. Trump. Out goes attempts to regulate AI. Big changes coming to the US AI Safety Institute, which had a questionable purpose from the start. AI is a field of research with many unknowns. How do you regulate such? How do you regulate new ideas? I guess there is a way.

Half Life 2 is now 20 years old. At one time, this was hailed as THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING. Didn't work out that way.

Government contracts: cost-plus and fixed-price. Much has already been written on this topic for decades. Sigh. What is most=often lacking is a sense of urgency to do things well and quickly. Government agencies often make rules that make government agencies inefficient. The persons involved fail to see the stupidity and correct their own actions.

Perhaps the marketing folks at Microsoft leaped too far ahead of the technologists.

A little study on how people react at work shows that the earlier you deliver a product, the less scrutiny it receives.

Expert, legally binding testimony by four persons says that UFOs are real and our government is cooperating in all this. Time will tell.

Sunday 17 November 2024

The day the circus came to town: 60million households watch the Tyson-Paul whatever it was.

Meanwhile out on GitHub, some ne'er-do-wells are impersonating nice people and committing bad software to good repositories.

Some historical notes on "Attention is All You Need" etc.

Some thoughts on Bluesky and its financial viability.

And here come the little drones from America to Ukraine. How to shoot them down? Fill the sky with lead shot (shotguns), but the pellets land somewhere and fill the soil.

Our Dept of Homeland Security issues new guidelines on protect our infrastructure (water and power) against or with AI. Seems odd that these things have to be issued, but I guess someone feels it is a good use of taxpayers' money. Let's see what Uncle Elon thinks of these expenses.

Pending regulatory approvals (not a small task), small nuclear reactors are ready for datacenters.

OpenMP 6.0 is released.

Some academic papers are withdrawn after folks learn that the researchers didn't pay for the software they used. They used pirated copies. Oh well.

Here come the job cuts: AMD lays off 4% of its workforce.

And JPL lays off 5% of its workforce.

The experience of the great PAN(dem)IC caused many Americans to distrust scientists (not science, but the folks practicing science). There has been some recovery of trust.

An in-depth review of the upgraded Mac Mini. It is a powerful computer.