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: 25 November - 1 December, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Thanksgiving is this week in the US
• Except for shopping and Wicked the movie, little news
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx

Monday 25 November 2024

AI performance and scaling laws. Well, the laws weren't really laws so much as guesses and marketing material.

Meanwhile in computing, we now have the super clusters. We are now trying to measure compute power by processors per acre of land or something like that.

Datacenters need electrical power. Fossil fuel deliver. Sorry if you thought something else was coming to the rescue.

The government giveth; the government taketh back. Our current President pulls back some CHIPS Act money given to Intel. Must be nice to have that authority.

Chuck Woolery dies at 83. I am old enough to remember him as the original host of Wheel of Fortune.

Raspberry Pi has a new $7 microcontroller board.

It is a bad time to be an entry-level computer programmer.

Meanwhile in California, all that solar power was just a stunt as half of it is not used.

Thoughts on "essay writing online" and "academic (college assignments)" writing.

Some fears deeply held by some writers. I recall something Jerry Weinberg once wrote about fear: Fantasy Experienced As Reality.

I guess I just don't understand mature adults who proclaim, "Shadows loom large over the future. Louder, more aggressive voices threaten to silence our words of hope, courage, defiance, protest." Come on. You're not 18 years old. Have some perspective.

Basic steps to writing the basic research paper. I guess some colleges still make some students do these things.

Writing the synopsis of your novel.

I like this piece. Seventeen tips on Essay Writing. "Essay writing is a crucial academic skill because it develops critical thinking and effective communication." Ah, thinking and communication. Sorely lacking today. The tips are basic things that work, and sometimes we need reminder of basic things that work.

Thoughts on the author's note or preface or something.

To sell a piece of writing, a writer must often describe the audience that would want to pay money for it. Here are some thoughts.

I like this piece. The conclusion: What I've learned is this: If something doesn't value you, quit it. If something is actively harming you, quit it. If you genuinely hate something, quit it. Because despite what you've been told, despite what you've clung to and what people will say, giving up can actually be a very good thing.

Tuesday 26 November 2024

Travel day: Reston to Redding in 15 hours. The airports today are not nearly as crowded as I expected.

Nvidia is busy, busy, busy. Building GPUs for video game players is low on the list of things to do.

Some AI veterans have a firm grasp of the obvious. Many other AI practitioners seem to have lost such.

The smart folks at Harvard sell million$ of carbon credits. Of course this is a scam. The whole idea of carbon credits is a scam. How much $$$ will my back yard bring in carbon credits?

Microsoft setup Copilot to do lots of data collection. Now Microsoft is teaching folks how to turn off these things.

Good headline, "1,000 AI agents can now predict human behavior with 85% accuracy in social experiments"

HP reports a slight uptick in sales this financial quarter.

Dell reports a 10% uptick in sales this financial quarter.

Telgram has a huge first half of 2024 financial year with revenue almost tripling.

The CBS Evening News is changing anchor in January. I guess someone still watches the CSBS Evening News./a>

I'll just quote the headline: Nvidia shows AI model that can modify voices, generate novel sounds

Getting the facts straight on a $7.5Billion Federal program to send money to states to build EV chargers highlights the failure of the program. It has taken years to distribute money and more years will pass before chargers are built. Wasted time; wasted money.

Wednesday 27 November 2024

Finally entering some sort of data processing era a few decades late, US law enforcement is experimenting with using computers to transcribe what is sensed with body cameras.

Meanwhile in the UK, there is a new regulatory body that could simply regulate all American tech companies out of the UK as well as kill all tech innovation in the UK. Some folks want to have power over commerce. Then they awaken one day to find there is no commerce left to lord their powers.

Xai is racing to catch the leaders in commercial AI. They built a magnificent data center in 122 days.

Anthropic updates Claude to have different writing styles.

Speaking of writing styles, over at LinkedIn it seems that half of the longer posts are written by AI, not the person purporting to have written them.

Our FCC grants approval to T-Mobile and SpaceX to provide more broadband services to more rural areas.

Meanwhile in Singapore, they deploying more self-driving buses, freight vehicles, and street sweepers. They don't have enough people to drive these vehicles.

Influencers suing one another about the shade of off white in their backgrounds and all that.

Want a digital camera that just captures images without processing them instantly. It appears that many people do, and those people are going back to older digital cameras. I have one.

Burdened with a lot of common sense and reality, Porsche decides to keep making gasoline-powered cars a while longer.

Microsoft sets the record straight: MS is not taking every document typed on Word and using that to train its AI models.

Thursday 28 November 2024

Today is the Thanksgiving Holiday in the US.

Always negotiating, Mr. Trump talks about big trade tariffs, foreign leaders talk about being sources of illegal immigrants. It is a negotiation. Always a negotiation.

Yet another evolution in the world of writing and publishing: Spines (.com) aims to product 8,000 books a month. Better software will allow them to meet that volume. Critics criticize the use of AI and all that stuff.

Meanwhile in Australia, "enshitification" is the word of the year proclaims one group that announces a word of the year.

Uber explands hiring out drivers to now hiring out computer programmers.

A Stanford study shows that 9.5% of computer programmers do nothing. Given this is Stanford and computer programming, I would think they know not to call this "virtually nothing" as they should know what "virtual" means.

Meanwhile in America, yet another new study shows that three-fourths of adults are obese. I find this to be true. I am overweight by 20 pounds while most people describe me as "skinny."

A Christmas movie that allows you to buy things during the movie. Well, why not?

Want a job at a VERY HIGH SALARY? Move to China. The openings and offers are there.

Not satisfied with a Google antitrust case, the current administration is trying to haul Microsoft into court again. These things will be dismissed in January.

Reddit looks to international markets.

DOGE is attracting a lot of applicants. There are tens of thousands of folks who want to work on reducing the waste in our central government. In one sense, finding and cutting the waste is trivial it is so easy.

Raw administrative power. That is what much of the Executive Branch of our Central government has become.

Coming real soon now, big new important etc. AI model from Amazon itself.

A review of the new Raspberry Pi 5.

Friday 29 November 2024

This is the day after Thanksgiving in the US. The news is sparse.

Meanwhile in Australia, parts of the national legislature pass a bill banning social media to those under 16. This feels good. Enforce it? Oh that. Well, details to not follow.

Meta plans to build a around-the-world undersea fiber optic cable. $10Billion (with a B). Governments cannot do this. Welcome to the era of successful tech companies have more capability than nation states.

The fuss over Spines (.com) continues. I looked at the site. They do charge thousands for basic print-on-demand services. If Spines works, they will make huge profits.

Meanwhile in China, censorship is alive and well as the Communist Party sends a few more journalists to prison.

Real news that isn't news: in Canada, something called the Competition Bureau is suing a successful American company for money (nothing else, just money).

Here is an understatement: NASA's huge lunar rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), might be in trouble. Might be in trouble?

It appears that the demand for film as for cameras as in the old days is up. Kodak is increasing production facilities.

Saturday 30 November 2024

Billion$$ in CHIPS Act money to Intel also comes with strings attached telling Intel how to run its business. That's the regulatory state for you. And this is all from 2020 and the great PAN(dem)IC.

Introduced in 2000, the Playstation 2 has sold 160 million units. That is a lot of video games.

I noted earlier this week that folks are going back to digital cameras that are not their smartphones. Leica had a record year. Leica is 100 years old.

Meanwhile in Denmark, the national government commits to replacing 10% of its food-producing farmland to trees.

Probably an odd story, but professional football players are writing in journals in increasing numbers. Put it on paper. Get it out of your mind. Rest. Best practice.

Sales are up this year for Black Friday shopping season.

Meanwhile in Canada, legacy news media groups sue a successful American company because they can and they want money.

I learn of something called Haul Shopping. "Hauls are the shopping equivalent of a dopamine-chasing overdose. "

MicroStrategy, based around the corner from my at Tysons Corner, Virginia, holds 2% of all BitCoins and its stock value is up 450%.

Bluesky has reached the point in popularity that people are complaining about its algorithms.

Sunday 1 December 2024

Coffee beans hit the highest price in 47 years. We are still in the Biden administration.

meanwhile in the UK, North West England NHS group hit with a successful cybersecurity attack. They are using pen and paper to get by.

We find some million-year-old footprints on a shore in Kenya. I guess folks who find and describe these things think they know what they think.

Coming real soon now is the release of GIMP 3.0.

More guessing about climate change show that hurricanes blow harder now.

Michigan - Ohio State game ends in a riot. Did you watch all the promos leading up to the game. This is just what the media wants and it baited a bunch of 18-22 year olds into it. SHAME SHAME SHAME on the "adults."