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: 9-15 December, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Someone is arrested related to the CEO shooting
• The CHIPS Act sort of sounded like a good idea way back when
• GM quits self-driving endeavor with Cruise
• NLRB says reality show participants are employees
• ABC News apologizes to Trump, pays him $15million

Monday 9 December 2024

A side story to this is that Apple has only sold half a million Vision Pro devices. The definition of success has changed.

Better tools bring better outcomes for research scientist in materials. Imagine that.

Better tools bring better outcomes in detecting breast cancer. Imagine that.

Better tools brings this reporter huge boosts in productivity. Yes, imagine that. Folks, OpenAI has a $200/month service. It is worth the price. Why buy a screwdriver? Because it boosts the ability to install and use screws. Simple.

Meet FRED. The online Federal Reserve Economic Data site. It is 33 years old. It is now quite popular.

COVID-19 showed that China was an unreliable business partner. Staunch Communist Party rule was the last blow. Vietnam et al are profiting.

Great title for a post about how the browser changes its role again.

Meet Marvell Technology. They make integrated circuits and are now more valuable than Intel.

Meanwhile in the music industry, AI is predicted to replace a lot of jobs.

Meanwhile in Cuba, the power grid has failed. It is noteworthy when folks have power.

Mercedes appears to be developing a "paint" that is a solar battery.

Good stuff here. How to answer those questions from relatives during the holidays about writing.

Here is something for freelance writers: write vision and mission statements. The exercise will help the brain and it is yet more writing practice. State something with clarity and brevity.

Hey writers, "I love you, you're perfect, now change."

Artists often sketch before they paint. Many writers do the equivalent, but try to sell the sketch as a painting. Tips on fixing this.

Thoughts on the Masters of Fine Arts programs for writers.

Some of the best writer-to-writer advice of the year.

Recent business news for writers who attempt to earn money from their writings.

Tuesday 10 December 2024

Meanwhile in the North Atlantic, NATO considers a fleet of unmanned underwater vessels to patrol and protect undersea data cables.

Use basic tech to protect and secure your home. A drone flies out an shines a flashlight on folks in your yard at night. Deer? People? Whatever.

Thoughts on the use of synthetic data at Databricks to test their systems.

A new deal: Adobe plus

Perhaps the biggest "who are you, Einstein's brother" moment comes as school administrators admit there are unintended consequences to software that monitors students. Someone wanted to prevent bad things happening. Let's watch the students. After all, parents and the rest of the neighborhood doesn't watch them as well as we --- the government's employees --- think they should. Good grief.

Here is an in-depth review of the Raspberry Pi 500 Review. The keyboard is the computer, again. I had the predecessor of this device. It works. It is a computer in a keyboard for $120.

I'll just quote this, "Secret to AI Profitability Is Hiring a Lot More Doctorates From spotting weeds in cotton fields to scanning the bush for signs of poachers, AI startups are recruiting scores of experts for highly specialized tasks."

One their way out the door of the White House, the current administrators of the taxpayers' money spit out billion$ in the CHIPS Act flail.

OpenAI releases Sora: text-to-video generation.

More information about OpenAI's Sora tool.

Google introduces a new quantum computing processor.

Microsoft introduces a datacenter design that runs the cooling water through a loop instead of pouring it down the drain. This seems to be an obvious thing to do. I wonder why it wasn't standard practice from the beginning for all these high-tech, progressive companies filled with progressive employees. Really?

An article on Anduril and how this drone-anti-drone maker is working with out Dept of Defense and OpenAI.

Wednesday 11 December 2024

Meanwhile in Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky, still in power after three years of war, doesn't want to draft 18-year-olds. The financiers from the West say, "Do it."

Can we finally rid our business lives of the "slide deck?"

Did anyone notice that Russia was so involved in Ukraine that it didn't have the resources to keep the Assad family in power in Syria? Perhaps someone has commented on this, and I have failed to see it.

Predictions that web browsers and search will give way to conversational AI. The AI will be doing in the searching behind the scenes, so this is just a user interface change.

Another case of "why did it take you ten years to figure out his one?" A court declares that US companies favored H-1B visa holders over US citizens. No duh. And it did take ten years to figure this one in court.

Ne'er-do-wells find a new way to goad people into committing suicide.

Meanwhile in the UK, there are big $$$ talent wars between Microsoft and Google.

It is all about connecting with and communicating with other people. WhatsApp is eating the world.

Strong rumors that real soon now Apple Watches will bounce text messages off satellites. Great use of communication in natural disasters.

YouTube expands the availability of its auto-dubbing feature. Create a video, push a button, it is now in a dozen languages.

Fear continues to spread in Washington D.C. as Mr. Trump announces who he wants to head our FTC.

Legal angst continues around WordPress.

THIS ONE IS BIG: GM quits the idea that Cruise will be a robotaxi.

OpenAI continues its announcements of expanded offerings of AI systems. Today it is Canvas.

Thursday 12 December 2024

Luigi Mangione has become Robin Hood. He is more famous that everyone and, in some circles, more loved than everyone.

Google Docs adds 40 new templates.

Google promises to put solar and wind farms next to its new datacenters.

I'll just quote the headline, "Solos challenges Meta's Ray-Bans with $299 ChatGPT smart glasses: The AirGo Vision is available now, featuring visual recognition powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o AI."

Someone at the Washington Post is silly enough to ask if Syrian rebels can rebuild a country. If someone paid Halliburton a couple of hundred billion$, maybe. Maybe.

The numbers from YouTube continue to be astronomical. A billion hours of video watched every day.

THIS COULD BE A BIG DEAL: our National Labor Relations Board labels people on a reality show as employees, not guests or whatever.

I'll quote the headline, "Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Donates $1 Million to Trump's Inaugural Fund"

Harvard creates an AI training dataset from a million public doman books.

Our FCC issues new rules to expand very-low-power device operations across all 1,200 megahertz of the 6-GHz band.

The CHIPS Act: the Democratic Congress and President devoted $50Billion (with a B) in taxpayers' dollars to building chip-making factories for profitable companies. Then there was an election. Now what?

Strong rumors that Apple shifted engineering resources to an AI server processor instead of a better desktop and laptop processor.

The New York Times Tech Guild (whatever that is) reached an agreement with management (whoever that is) to keep the legacy media company running.

Google releases a new tool called Deep Research. This plans a research project then executes it.

This is an in-depth report on AI scaling laws.

Google updates Gemini to version 2.0.

Meanwhile in Australia, governors try to extract more money from successful American tech companies with a "news tax." They will probably succeed.

Friday 13 December 2024

By one count, Elon Musk is worth $447Billion. How much is that?

Some person programmer software to write bug reports that are wasting the time of other persons who write programs. Hmmm. Seems someone is just plain mean.

Linux Mint becomes the most-distributed Linux distribution.

Meanwhile at Amazon Web Services, they say that programmers only spend one hour a day programming.

It appears we are approaching a shortage of certified public accountants.

Some history and predictions of the future of Intel. IBM created the PC and the Wintel world. Well, that was history.

Microsoft's screen Recall software is out again. Yet another review shows how it still captures yet more sensitive information by mistake. Back to the drawing board.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, " The Writers Guild of America is forcefully calling on Hollywood's major studios to take a stand on the purported use of their members' works as AI training data."

Microsoft shows a smaller LLM called Phi-4 that is supposed to outperform larger LLMs. At "only" 1.4Billion (with a B) parameters, it is supposed to be small and efficient.

Apple is ready to use its own communications processors in some of its lesser-known devices real soon now. The big devices will come in a year or so.

Meanwhile in Texas, the state's Attorney General is investigating how the tech companies will protect minors.

It appears the AI industry comes down to some sort of battle between Antrhopic and OpenAI.

A look at Google's Android XR platform---an OS for real-time goggles and the like.

Broadcom reports a good financial quarter with big gains in AI.

OpenAI updates ChatGPT for everyone so that it understands real-time video.

Meanwhile in America, 90% of our teenagers are on YouTube daily.

Here is a different perspective on the trade war with China. American companies lobbied our outgoing President to allow them to make Billion$ selling processors to Chinese customers.

Saturday 14 December 2024

Folks listen to podcasts. Companies want folks to listen to what they have to say. Yes, the logical conclusion is happening with company podcasts.

Nvidia brings back the in-person, bring your own super powered gaming rig, LAN party.

Elon Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI. Time passed. Lawyers were called. Now we have lawsuits and all that stuff.

The Verge reviews the 2024 edition of Apple's Macbook Pro. Some of these machines run up close to $4,000. These are, however, cost effective for many people whose time is worth hundreds $$$ per hour.

And Mr. Altman of OpenAI will personally donate a million$ to Mr. Trump's inaugural fund. This is opposed to the company doing it. I guess this will be a big party as Presidents try to outdo one another in these parties. No word if Bernie Sanders will sit on stage alone with a mask in the cold like he did for Mr. Biden's ceremony.

It would have been good to buy Broadcom stock a week ago and sell it on Monday.

Before leaving office, our current President seeks to stop the around-the-block flow of high-tech processors to China.

A little insight into the battle between OpenAI and Anthropic in AI tech.

OpenAI adds a Projects feature to ChatGPT in an effort to help folks organize disorganized files.

Our Dept of Justice indicts 14 North Koreans for stealing money via employment scams. Little actual action will happen, but folks feel better---I guess.

Meanwhile in China's Xinjiang region, a Chinese company stops working for the Communist Party to avoid commercial sanctions from our next President. There is much that is fishy about this story.

The story of how Michael Dell transformed his dorm-room company from standard PCs to AI datacenters. We live in the age where no one in government is ever fired for buying a Dell.

Meanwhile in California, for-profit companies don't want OpenAI to join them in pursuit of profits. No surprise.

Sunday 15 December 2024

Someone proposes replacing the form or questionnaire with a thinking and chatting bot. I am not sure which is worse as I dislike both.

I find this blog post from Seth Godin to be brilliant. These are leading, and sometimes lagging, indicators that an organization is declining rapidly and fatally. See DOGE and the US central government.

After the Assad family was deposed from Syria, the Israelis destroyed military assets that were still standing so that no one else will use them.

Meanwhile in Montana, there is a labor shortage in the construction industry. Companies are recruiting Gen Z with paid training and high-paid jobs.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, money is tight and the government will no longer fund social sciences and humanities research. Is DOGE listening???

Meanwhile in Silicon Valley, if you aren't making your company (CEO) rich in AI, you have no more fringe benefits.

I'll just quote the headline, "Intel Arc B580 Battlemage Tested: $250 Graphics Cards Are Worthy Once Again" Hooray for emphasizing brains and efficiency.

Meanwhile in India, Apple will begin making AirPods there for the first time early next year.

Quoting the headline, "ABC agrees to give $15 million to Donald Trump's presidential library to settle defamation lawsuit" Oops, watch your tongue. There are still courts of law in America.

Now that the PAN(dem)IC is over, education is returning to in person. DuoLingo, however, continues to do well with distance learning.

Qualcomm says that while some people are returning their Snapdragon-powered PCs due to problems, that the return rates are normal.

The New York Times laments how Silicon Valley executives are trying to be friends with Donald Trump. I guess there is no such move from the journalism community---what little there is left of it. Self-imposed flops in journalism hurt. Maybe, one day, journalism will get a dose of ethics and return to prominence.

Real news that isn't news: the coming Trump administration will ease regulations on self-driving car developments.