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: 30 December 2024 - 5 January 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Jimmy Carter dies at 100
• And we have a new year based on one arbitrary calendar
• Terrorist drives a truck into a crowd in New Orleans

Monday 30 December 2024

The AI Now Institute is a top-quality publication. Here are a few links to stories.

Great headline: What If Tech Execs Don't Really Need All These Data Centers?

"New findings show how the sources of data are concentrating power in the hands of the most powerful tech companies."

"The Bipartisan House Task Force on AI released a 253-page report gesturing towards the many material harms of rapid AI adoption while providing few meaningful policy recommendations to address it. "

A couple of our US Senators are pushing a bill that will ensure that no one in our Federal government will admit to building any form of AI system. The paperwork for such will be unbearable.

Former President Jimmy Carter died Sunday at 100. He was considered one of the worst Presidents in US history and lost 44 states while seeking re-election. His work with Habitat for Humanity was good. He should have never been President.

The video game industry had several slow years, but experts expect big big things from Grand Theft Auto VI in 2025.

TSMC is building a plant in Arizona. Half of the 2,200 employees are from Taiwan. How will the locals react? Change brings change.

No duh! Experts say that criminals in China are committing crimes.

Folks in Atlanta, like many places in the US, aren't so sure they want more datacenters.

A look back at MS Windows and Arm processors in 2024. Intel and AMD, with the traditional x86 processors, are trying to catch up. What will consumers want? What will Dell want?

World building or creating a setting across the genres.

A year-end look at the business of writing and publishing in 2024.

Okay writers (for pay): you are a one-person business. Take care of your lone employee. Focus on what you do.

Tuesday 31 December 2024

Media big shots talk about what they just got wrong in 2024. They are wrong all the time.

Nvidia buys Run:ai and promises to make the software of that company open source.

First world problem: Those Waymo self-driving taxis won't always stop for pedestrians if the person isn't "far enough" out in the street.

I'll just quote, "a team of Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University researchers has reported a significant advance, training robots with videos to perform surgical tasks with the skill of human doctors."

In America, we have free speech; in Europe, not so much. Social media companies try to operate in both environments. Regulators in Europe like to punish the companie$ for what they do in America.

Samsung invests heavily in a robotics company.

Liberal media bemoans how liberal political parties lost audience on the Internet during this past election year.

And now we have the micro retirement.

Nvidia pushes into the robotics market. They are to release a Jetson Thor product in 2025.

Meanwhile in the worldwide smartphone marketplace, the middle-of-the-road phone is losing share.

Wednesday 1 January 2025

And by some arbitrary reckoning, we are now in a "new year."

Ne'er-do-wells find yet another way to misuse the Internet and prey on the unsuspecting. Ne'er-do-wells seem to have time for this evil.

Meanwhile in China, the governors are pushing industry to make processors for cars locally instead of importing them.

Also in China, Alibaba cuts the prices of using its AI systems. They are not competing on performance, so they try to compete with low prices.

In 2024, Intel had its worst year EVER (since starting in 1971). Meanwhile Broadcom had a great year. America sort of "needs" Intel, but maybe not anymore as other American tech companies now do what Intel always did.

This is a good review of LLMs from 2024. An excellent review.

Here we go again, our Dept of Treasury (how did they become involved in this?) cites Russians and Iranians for interfering with the 2024 elections with deepfakes. Attributing excellence to groups that do not possess it.

Coast-to-coast lawsuits against the New York Times. $250million. And folks thought Mr. Trump's $15million lawsuit against ABC News was big. "The Press" has no one to blame but themselves for this type of trouble.

Meanwhile on GitHub, fake users are promoting bad web sites and causing all sorts of mayhem.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, it is drones and drones everywhere. This is the machine gun of this century.

This is the prime example of Federal Government incompetency: early in his time, Mr. Biden enacted $1.6 thousand billion. Little of that has been actually spent. The Federal bureaucracy has not been competent enough to execute the program.

Kiberphant0m is a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records. Turns out to have been a teenager in the US Army. This is hacktivism. Teenagers who have an agenda, brains, and time. Forget North Korea, Russia, et al.

The race to the bottom continues in commercial air travel. This is really bad. Service? What was that?

Thursday 2 January 2025

The college football playoffs remind me of pro wrestling. Folks are making a lot of money, but this isn't athletic competition.

Some whatever-we-call-them-now drove a truck into a crowd in New Orleans and then started shooting people. Over a dozen dead by now as the toll climbs. Good old Bill Clinton once declared that international terrorism was dead. Well, just another one the many stupid things he said.

Have AI "mine" your online presence to generate really convincing phishing attacks. Good grief.

Here come the AI friends to flood Facebook et al.

The experts predict a new spending spree at DoD for AI, drones, and all these new toys. Some may even work.

New year, many copyrights expire and things enter the public domain.

Great quote from Seth Godin: It's easy to misunderstand the idea of agile and the minimum viable product. We shouldn't forget that the unspoken rule is: Don't ship junk.

Sad prediction that I wish will be wrong: the TSA and FBI will take over the vehicle rental industry.

Guess what? The hallowed halls of learning are run by folks who want money. We are an odd lot.

Our Securities and Exchange Commission finds that people owe fines, but it doesn't collect the money. Taxpayer wa$te.

Researchers solve what has to be the easiest first world problem ever: exercise is good for you. We are so rich that we do nothing, so we have to do something.

Friday 3 January 2025

The college football playoffs stumble along. The place to be was seeds 5, 6, 7, and 8. They were given a home game against weak opponents. Easy win and million$ spent in their home towns. The seeds 1, 2, 3, and 4 became rusty while 5-8 had a nice practice game. The 1-4 vs 5-8 was easy to predict. The 1-4s couldn't play in the first half with some not playing at all. So, pro wrestling. Lots of money flowing, but not athletic competition.

Here is one explanation of the obvious: the "journalists" and "legacy media" are gone. The "influencers" do just what their title implies.

Meanwhile in Texas, the legislature is considering the Responsible AI Governance Act. Good grief. It is easy for a company to say, "but this isn't AI, it is simply some old technique." Liability gone. Replace "AI" with "System."

A Federal appeals court ruled that our Federal Communications Commission didn't have the authority to issue "net neutrality" regulations. The Executive branch of government cannot simply dictate law. For the proper procedure, see the US Constitution.

Regulators, financiers, and engineers in Paris and London compete to be the AI hubs of Europe.

Asus, Samsung, and MSI show new 27-inch gaming monitors with new technology. Now price$ given. They will be available real soon now.

Our Federal government attempts to buy nuclear power before big tech datacenters grab all the supply.

Coming real soon now from Nvidia are the series 50 GPU processors. Be ready to say, "Wow."

Also coming real soon now are mini PCs that qualify as that Microsoft AI PC CoPilot thingy from a variety of sources.

What do you do if you have a few thousand-million $$$? You buy adjoining mansion lots and put up a big fence. Then you visit now and then. Someone is paid to dust the furniture and cut the grass, so it does help the local economy.

Saturday 4 January 2025

We have a few experiments using AI in church services. I believe we have more than a few as the technology removes much clerical work. There were probably some who balked at using Bibles on disks and word processors to, in a similar vein, reduce clerical work. As usual, generate, copy, paste, edit.

Upon further review, Meta decides to pull the synthetic people and profiles from Facebook and Instagram. They have been on line for over a year. No one really noticed them. Fictional people, characters in stories.

Writers and editors disagree sometimes. Some writers of "newspapers" believe they have a higher calling and should be free from such. Sorry. Get a job in the real world. No one on earth is above earth. Sorry.

Where the money is: billion$ flowed into generative AI companies in the last year. Hype or is there a real market for these things?

We now learn that conservatives hate Wikipedia. Join the editors and write it ... or something like that.

Tim Cook donates $1million to the Trump inauguration. These are personal not company funds.

More money: Microsoft says it will spend $80Billion (with a B) on new datacenters this year. That is a lot of concrete, steel, copper, and computers.

Neither Mr. Biden nor Mr. Trump consume alcohol. (Good for them.) New warnings from the Surgeon General about cancer and alcohol are coming. Sorry folks, there are no health benefits to drinking alcohol.

SpaceX moves closers to launching dozens of heavier satellites on its Starship.

I'll quote, "Samsung and Google are introducing Eclipsa Audio, an open-source 3D audio standard set to debut on select YouTube videos and Samsung's 2025 TVs and soundbars. "

The market for streaming services has peaked and is now falling.

Sunday 5 January 2025

Perhaps on Monday the world will resume spinning on its axis.

Then again, here in the Washington D.C. suburbs, we are to have 8 to 10 inches of snow. We shall see.

There was a time when a Presidential Medal of Freedom meant something other than, "It's my last week as Prez, so I'll give this to my buddies and those who paid me for one."

The Consumer Electronics Show is next week. Here are a few expectations for products.

I'm a baby boomer. I own my home. Property taxes are now higher than my mortgage used to be. I may not be able to live in a house that is all mine. Huh?

We enter the age of the privately owned space station. Why not?

SpaceX's Starlink Mini is now available everywhere in the US. It isn't cheap, but it is a portable Internet station. Take it on the Appalachian trail etc.