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: 2-8 December, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• President Biden pardons his son Hunter
• Intel fires its CEO
• Big political upheaval in South Korea
• UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is shot dead in NYC --- assassination
• Remember Pearl Harbor
• The Assad reign in Syria ends

Monday 2 December 2024

AWS is having its big re:invent conference this week. Expect many announcements to their already huge catalog of services.

Of course their are some new AI offerings from AWS.

Our current President pardons his son Hunter. Why not? Bring the son home for Christmas. Why not?

Want to predict your date of your death? We have an app for that. Gosh. AI.

Elon Musk jumped all in for Donald Trump. That was a huge risk that, so far, paid off. Now the other celebrity tech folks are scared. They should be.

Research shows that ChatGPT Search from OpenAI makes lots of mistakes in attributing content to specific papers and writers. 3/4s of the time it is wrong.

Our current President announces yet more restrictions on computing technology going to China.

Notes on the history and future of Raspberry Pi -- the greatest education project in history. They now sell about 200,000 compute gadgets a week. The original hope was 10,000 total.

This will be reversed, but for the time being, Facebook has suspended the 15-year-old account of Smith & Wesson.

Oh, and today is Cyber Monday. We are supposed to go online and spend money.

It is finally autumn. This gives some writers a long-awaited breath of fresh air.

Some thoughts on memoir in getting your non-fiction points across to the reader.

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.

Tuesday 3 December 2024

The creators of The Oregon Trail game never made a penny. And Apple is gonna make a blockbuster movie $$$.

Here is C, Just In Time. Scripting in C? Worth a little time to research.

This is good, so I'll quote, "Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok? asks the BBC. If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year."

We may have some sort of traffic cop for earth-orbiting stuff.

Meanwhile in Japan, they are pushing flow batteries. Store energy by storing latent heat in tanks of liquid metal.

Another new term for me, subathon: A subathon is a streaming event where each new subscription or donation extends the stream's duration, often leading to marathon sessions.

The United Nations to the rescue (not). A new, highly paid, 40-member body will figure out how to keep data flowing through undersea data cables. Gosh, I feel much safer this morning (not).

The board of directors at Intel forces out the CEO as the great recovery there isn't happening as wished. The CHIPS Act isn't saving them. Depending on the government is fraught with peril.

The Communist Party of China retaliates in the trade war by blocking shipments of some rare metals from the US.

The managers at Google learn that dealing with some foreign governments (and a few domestic ones as well) has its risks. A deal with Israel looks pretty bad at this time.

The drone continues to be the heavy machine gun of this century. A European company Helsing has attack drones that are autonomous, i.e., they don't need remote control to find and kill targets. Take care with these.

AWS reveals new liquid cooling for servers in its datacenters. This is supposed to be something new or something like that.

Here are some leaked photos of Jaguar's new cars.

Wednesday 4 December 2024

THE STORY OF THE MORNING: in South Korea there was an attempted coup and an impeachment and all sorts of turmoil.

Movie theaters and the movie industry are still struggling. The great COVID PAN(dem)IC basically killed most of this industry.

Meanwhile in Mexico, it is a good time to be interested in chemistry as drug cartels are hiring everyone they can to make fentanyl.

Meanwhile in Australia, they have a glut of solar power. Folks bought too many cheap panels from China with some hope of selling excess to utility companies. It isn't working as planned.

And according to the Oxford University Press, the word or term of the year is "brain rot."

Now back to real America on deals that affect real Americans: WalMart concludes its purchase of Vizio. Low-cost TVs.

One person relates how AI has taken over parts of his job. Good. Produce more, ship more, let's stop wasting time on time wasters.

Meta is looking for companies that will build nuclear power plants for it. This will all happen real soon now. Well, maybe not so soon. Wait at least ten years.

An "artist" creates a AI woman. Then creates an avatar of himself to be the boyfriend of the AI woman. Confused yet? Perhaps the artist is as well.

The growth in spending on Cyber Monday slows. Perhaps it is just a slang term and not an event any longer. People buy via the Internet all the time now.

It appears that Amazon Prime Video knew what it was doing by paying the NFL billion$ to stream games. The Friday game's viewership was up 41% from last year.

Amazon AWS boosts the power of its Trainium chips and announces super duper computers using arbitrarily large numbers of these things. Train the next LLM with $uper $tuff.

Meanwhile in Eastern Europe, high tech companies shift towards weapons of war as American cash $$$ floods into the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

Meanwhile in the Windows world, support for Win 10 ends and MS says no lowering of requirements for Win 11. Therefore, either take your chances or buy a new PC.

Oops, "Meta is mistakenly removing too much content across its apps, according to a top executive."

Promised for decades, the middle manager may finally be disappearing.

Yet, we all want new jobs. Some type of survey shows the desire to change jobs is at a ten-year high.

Perhaps Mr. Musk, DOGE, et al will end the annual switch to Daylight Savings Time and back. Please. Good riddance.

Thursday 5 December 2024

I'll just quote the headline, "IBM wins $903M GSA contract to modernize federal travel and expense management "

Cargill cuts 8,000 jobs or 5% of its workforce.

Ne'er-do-wells find yet another way to hack. This one uses MS Word files.

It is that time on the calendar for these Year-End things.

It appears that Russian hackers are smarter than the average ne'er-do-wells. They are hacking into Pakistani hackers' servers to run hacks.

Praise for the brand new LLMs from AWS.

Meanwhile in Memphis, Mr. Musk's xAI is expanding its super duper computer 10 fold to include a million GPUs. Such a facility would also be able to heat a million homes (just kidding on that last part, I think).

Jeff Bezos is warming to Donald Trump and has a tinge of optimism for the second Trump administration and a better business climate.

Once again, the experts were wrong---they usually are, see history books for examples. In this case, all that AI didn't create enough misinformation to overturn elections in 2024.

TSMC is building a plant in Arizona. They are in talks with Nvidia to produce leading-edge GPUs there.

Defense contractor Anduril, which specializes in drones, is bringing in OpenAI's technology.

Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. He seems to have an abundance of common sense, which is lacking at the Post. He is focusing on fixing the Post (again).

Meanwhile in Dubai, crypto scams are becoming a big $$$ industry.

WalMart, Amazon, et al deliver goods the same day they are ordered. That is pretty impressive. DOGE? Government efficiency? Are you kidding?

Big news for Louisiana, Meta is to build a $10Billion (with a B) datacenter in sparsely populated Richland Parish. This will be Meta's biggest datacenter in the world.

The value of BitCoin breaks yet another record at over $100,000.

Friday 6 December 2024

I'm a little late posting this story, but UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead on the sidewalk in NYC. Most news media call this an assassination as a man with a supressor on his pistol walked up to Thompson, cooly shot him, and walked away. The manhunt continues. It was all on video camera. Speculation is the man was angry about denied health insurance coverage. This is all about money and those who control it and run corporations who control it. Since the shooting, some have called for more of this as an act of justice towards the rich from the downtrodden. Murder? Justice? Well, we have many dysfunctional people in America today.

Meanwhile at Gitlab, one of the co-founders steps away as CEO.

New from Google, PaliGemma 2 generates detailed, contextually relevant captions for images. Google also claims something about detecting emotions in faces, and that has some folks worried.

Microsoft releases a similar CoPilot Vision tools that can read images in web pages.

Elon Musk contributed about $275million to candidates in the recent US elections.

OpenAI now has a super duper premier membership for $200 a month. This is simple, if the tools increase productivity by one hour for a $200/hour consultant, the consultant buys it. There are many such people.

Meanwhile at Intel, they design and manufacture chips. Maybe, in the future, they will only design them. CHIPS Act money?

Nvidia is printing money by making AI processors. Everyone else is trying to join that business.

I'll just quote the headline, "Trump Names David Sacks as White House AI and Crypto Czar" This area has been neglected in the past.

Research experiments show that some AI models may be scheming. Other papers question the experiments and conclusions.

Google's OpenMind has a new weather forecasting AI system that appears to work better than everyone else's. Weather forecasting has always been a prime application for neural networks. Work here is far behind what is possible.

Meanwhile at NASA, the bumbling, cost overruns, and schedule slips continue. Hey NASA, ever heard of DOGE? It is coming.

Saturday 7 December 2024

Quality of life for international workers in the US.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, Russian casualties are at all-time high. Experts, who are usually wrong, claim that this is not sustainable. I feel sorry for the kids thrown into the Russian Army and sent to die. They didn't choose this.

The stock market is up. The billion$$$ in value to the richest is going up as well.

Bill Gates seems to be falling further out of touch with reality.

Meanwhile in the Middle East, Israel used F-35 fights to squash Iranian air defense systems. It shows that the F-35 works.

The Internet Archive won't appeal the recent court rulings on trying to be a library that loans books.

Researchers, whose living is tied to talking to mentally disturbed people, claim that leaded gasoline caused all these troubles. All this ADHD etc. in America is due to that one thing. It is real. Not imagined. So say those who profit from all of it. Odd stuff.

Today is Pearl Harbor Day. Fewer and fewer Americans recall this as a day to remember. I was born post WWII, but those older than me by a generation venerated this day. Remember the Maine? I guess that is forgotten as well as In Flanders Fields and Abide with Me. Time moves on. Now we are in Ukraine. We are an odd lot.

I have read much criticism of our current President for pardoning his son. I am surprised by the amount of criticism. Regardless, when it comes to avoiding blame and criticism, live in such a way so that such is not possible. I read that somewhere, see, e.g., the Holy Bible. Back to basics: the President of the United States is the administrator of the Executive Branch of our central government. A large part of that job is to ensure that members of the Executive Branch behave in a way that is beyond criticism. When someone does and says things that may feel good in the short term, but bring criticism in the long term, it is the job of the President as administrator to correct such behavior. Failure to do so, bring reproach. Sorry, but that is just about the way it was all organized in the US Constitution.

A criticism of our next President is that Silicon Valley billionaires are steering appointments. Note the adjective use of "Silicon Valley." These folks are newly minted rich, i.e., they earned their billion$ instead of inheriting the $$$. They are competent and accomplished folks. I kind of like the idea of competent and accomplished individuals having a hand in what they have avoided in recent generations.

MLCommons releases a new benchmark for AI safety. It is one of those tools that generates tens of thousands of prompts to see if an AI system provides incorrect answers. Of course the AI systems provide incorrect answers in such tests. I guess these tools show which systems break first.

Once again, Apple explores the possibility of putting cell phone chips in its laptop and desktop computers. This is something that should have occurred 20 years ago.

The argument that AI is real and dangerous. I agree it is real. Dangerous? I'm not convinced, yet.

Anduril, which just partnered with OpenAI, partners with Palantir on a DoD contract.

In Malawi, they are now using AI-based software in hospitals. Babies are not dying like they used to. Thanks. This technology---put the knowledge of an expert in places where there are no experts---has existed since the 1980s and before. Why so late to be practiced?

Meanwhile in the realm of crypto currencies, it's not just BitCoin that is booming. Almost everything is. Bust coming, again?

Meanwhile in the rest of the world, Uber is running buses.

Microsoft's Recall tries again. This is a good concept that answers the question, "How did I do this yesterday?" The trouble is, "Who keeps the recordings?"

Sunday 8 December 2024

I found this story a few weeks late, but it seems appropriate to mention. Microsoft is trying to put technology and business books (real ones, not just eBooks) out on the shelves much faster. They call this "8080 Books" in honor of the Intel 8080 processors of a bygone era.

Mr. Trump has selected Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman and space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX, to become the next NASA administrator.

Wikipedia's most popular articles in 2024.

Enron is kinda' sorta' back (not really).

The government of Syria falls. The Assad family is out after 50 years. Some type of rebellion (to be for sale real soon now) takes over.

In trade wars, our central government approves the sale of advanced AI processors to the UAE as Microsoft is in the UAE and will use the processors.

It appears that rich folks in Silicon Valley backed Mr. Trump much more than Northern California resident Ms. Harris. Familiarity breeds what? Silicon Valley, which is close to US Berkeley, doesn't trust the Berkeley crowd.

Our U.S. deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, what a job title, tells us about phone hacking from the Communist Party of China.

A look at Chat Area. It is a web site that allows anyone to compare and judge chatbots. Of course, like Amazon et al product reviews, the wisdom of the crowd can be bought and sold.

X adds an image generator.

Wired reviews the Asus Vivobook S 14. At $900, it's a good Chevy.

At long last, really looks like it will happen this time, the International Space Station will go away. Private industry might launch space stations. Given Apple, Google, et al can afford to do this and isn't doing this, perhaps we should learn something. It appears that such isn't worth it despite all the claims of research etc.