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: 6-12 January, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• The CES is this week
• Facebook removes the fact checkers, goes toward free speech
• Nvidia shows a desktop $3,000 super duper computer
• Major fires in Los Angeles

Monday 6 January 2025

The Consumer Electronics Show is this week. Expect many announcements.

And the world resumes spinning on its axis today---except for the Washington D.C. area where it snowed six inches. All those government employees clamoring for telework are supposed to be working today---not shoveling snow.

I like this move: Ring is considering making smoke detectors and other home safety devices. These make it safer for the elderly to stay in their homes.

Disney and Fubo settle their lawsuits by merging some of their services.

TiVo creates an operating system for its TVs. The list of TV OSs is growing. That may not be a good thing.

A company called Avataar released a new tool on Monday called Velocity. It creates product videos directly based on a product link.

Samsung releases Vision AI which will deliver better picture quality, optimized sound, and new experiences that will change how you watch TV.

Meanwhile at the Washington Post, dozens of layoffs are expected this week. The editorial board there was absolutely wrong about the recent election. Sometimes if you are as wrong as this you lose your job.

Samsung upgrades their Frame TV with the Frame Pro.

Tuesday 7 January 2025

Here we go with CES and product announcements.

Microsoft promises to invest $3Billion (with a B) in India with datacenters, AI, and training. The training is to ensure low-cost employees for decades to come.

Nvidia announces Project Digits, a personal AI supercomputer. This is NOT expensive. At $3,000 it is practical. It runs 200Billion-parameter models (with a B).

Dell renames all its PC products. Gone is XPS. It is called something less memorable.

The HDMI Forum releases the spec for HDMI 2.2.

AMD announced its Strix Halo Ryzen AI Max series laptop processors. Surely someone could have created a better name.

Toyota announced that its next-generation vehicles will have automated driving capabilities powered by Nvidia technologies.

Samsung updates its portable computers with the newest Intel processors.

Meanwhile in Europe, where no country has a Bill of Rights, more political leaders criticize Elon Musk for speaking freely. They just don't do that in Europe.

Speaking of free speech, Mr. Zuckerburg announces that Facebook will eliminate its fact checking algorithm that blocks some posts and replace it with some type of community-based censorship. I like this. Facebook is following the lead of X.

As expected, Nvidia announced its 50-series GPUs.

Where the money is: big jump in tech investments in 2024.

Wednesday 8 January 2025

One summary of Nvidia's CES announcements.

A bunch of Meta employees don't like the idea of no-fact-checkers and free speech on Facebook. This is not a surprise. This is what happens when left coast companies run platforms.

And some newspapers, who were part of Facebook's fact checkers, are upset when called biased by Mr. Zuckerburg. Biased? What? Who? Us???

And fear and loathing inside Facebook.

And Mr. Zuckerburg is moving Facebook moderators to Texas from California due to west-coast bias. At least someone has a firm grasp of the obvious.

While investment in tech is up worldwide, it is down in the Middle East. I suppose this says something about politics and culture.

SICKNESS. The ne'er-do-wells "are using the popular AI video generator Runway to make real videos of murder look like they came from one of the animated Minions movies and upload them to social media platforms where they gain thousands of views before the platforms can detect and remove them."

More job cuts in the legacy media world. Wikipedia didn't hurt the market for the traditional encyclopedia as much as it hurt the sales of non-fiction books. Volunteers posted non-fiction information online. Why buy a textbook when everything was explained on Wikipedia. In the same vein, why buy a newspaper when the news and plenty of editorial is posted online by volunteers to read and watch at no cost? AND the content posted by these volunteers is as good as or better than what the profession (paid) journalists produced?

And speaking of Wikipedia, The Heritage Foundation is identifying Wikipedia editors who frequently post anti-semantic content. There is a new sheriff in town.

AWS to pour another $11Billion (with a B) into a datacenter in Georgia. If your state doesn't have a $10Billion datacenter, call your governors and get moving.

Meanwhile in the auto industry, those darn computers in cars run software and that software is written my mistake-plagued people. Many recent (agile, devsecops, etc.) methods promise quick fixes to errors, but don't prevent errors as well as promised.

I'll quote, "Asus' new featherweight laptop is aiming to be the latest Windows rival to the Apple MacBook Air. "

Looking to be the envy of all your colleagues? Get one of these portable eGPU etc. etc. gadgets from Asus.

The folks at MIT try to predict what is coming in AI this year.

BMW shows a system where the entire windshield is a heads-up display. Distracted driving?

Must-see video of this Lenovo laptop with a display that unrolls to a much bigger screen.

Got one of those M4 Mac Mini computers? Get this hub for more disk and ports.

AMD announces its new GPUs.

Intel remains committed to making its own stand-alone graphics processors.

Thursday 9 January 2025

Sci-Hub is "publishing" incorrect and retracted papers. Read with caution.

Meanwhile in America, our elevators are broken and we don't have enough repairmen (or $$$).

Speaking of a lack of skilled persons, John Deere's answer is self-driving tractors.

Rutgers University's Network Contagion Research Institute ran a study---one which I hope they didn't spend much money as the outcome is obvious. They found that TikTok runs a lot of stuff favorable to the Communist Party of China and little negative about that party.

Meanwhile in America, jobs are scarce. "Software development, data science, and marketing roles are 20% below pre-pandemic levels, while healthcare and government sectors account for half of recent job creation." If you want a paycheck, answer the phone at a doctor's office or ignore the ringing phone in a government office.

Fun with self-driving cars as a man is stuck in a Waymo as it circled an airport loop endlessly. I wrote a short story predicting such over ten years ago.

If you have less money for salaries, offer remote work. Folks are taking 15% less in some cases to do farm sourcing, i.e., live in a a lower-cost rural area and work remotely.

More good stuff from Jeff Godin. Begin with this question: What are you hiring yourself to do? Busy is a great place to hide.

Well how about that? Radio Shack returns to the Consumer Electronics Show. Not the same place, but a familiar name.

Use GPS to run farm tractors semi-autonomously. But then a war starts and folks jam GPS and ... nothing works.

The Southland is on fire. Los Angeles homes burn.

More grievous vexation over Meta, Facebook, fact checking, censorship, and the like.

Censors in the EU claim they don't censor Facebook. They just remove "misinformation."

Love this headline: Facebook Is Censoring 404 Media Stories About Facebook's Censorship

General blasting of Zuckerburg from Tech Dirt.

Now this is a neat idea, well, sort of: make a movie about a living person, use an actor, use AI to put the real person's face on the actor.

Friday 10 January 2025

OpenAI has claimed to be a not-for-profit operation. Legal minds disagree that it has operated as such. More arguments to follow.

TSMC reports big financial gains.

And organizing and such surrounding Chromium, the open-source roots of the Chrome browser.

Angst inside Facebook where the new moderators don't like the statements they are supposed to allow. Facebook is a West Coast company with users nationwide. There is a big gulf in opinions at play.

A look at The world's most powerful supercomputer which is inside Lawrence Livermore National Labs.

The Verge shows what it felt was best in show at CES.

Meanwhile in the wildfires of Los Angeles, too many folks are sightseeing with their drones and hindering actual firefighters.

Some history of Microsoft's great CoPilot AI experiment. If they would have just done what the marketing people promised two years ago. Instead, wallowing in the mire.

"After careful analysis and obedience of government mandates, pursuant of law, the court feels the only sentence is an unconditional discharge, which is a lawful and permissible sentence for falsifying business records" The end of the Trump trial for an accounting error

Fear and loathing from dozens of organizations that believe in censorship, i.e., if you say something that I think is incorrect, I should be able to shush you. Folks, the legacy media has been incorrect since it was born. But try to shush them (Remember the Maine!) and oh no, you are crushing the first amendment.

Microsoft lays off another 1% of its workforce.

Meanwhile in Japan, sales of EVs in 2024 dropped 33%.

Saturday 11 January 2025

Mostly business news today as CES is over.

Mr. Zuckerburg admits that the outgoing President and crew told Facebook what to censor. This is America, right?

Mr. Trump is not yet President, but there has been a major shift in corporate behavior and what is on social media. This DEI story is just one of many. Gender issues have also shifted in a major way. And not to mention censorship by social media companies has changed dramatically. Elections matter. Yes, Mr. Trump has major person issues that I wish he would address, but Americans seem to align themselves with a view that differs from what we saw in the last four years.

I wish I could land on this payroll. Please, someone pay me to access and scrape my content. $$$

I recommend this article from The Atlantic, "The Anti-Social Century, Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It's changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality."

It seems that HPE beat Dell et al in a $1Billion deal with X for servers.

Why take your company public when private funding pours in?

More shifting of international manufacturing from China to India. The red star over China may be setting already.

The Washington Post has become a money sink. Those to blame are obvious (the editorial staff).

Sunday 12 January 2025

Here is something to note: in the past two decades successful American companies have paid European regulators $30Billion in fines (fees for permission to operate in Europe).

The pendulum has swung. One party is out; the other party is in. And some bemoan how corporate leaders easily shift from one to the other. This is America. Do you want to tie a person to an ideology their entire life?

Our Dept of Justice indicts more Russians for doing bad things. No one will stand trial. No one will be punished. It is, however, good publicity or something.

Angst continues in the WordPress community. Success often brings angst.

Predictable and predicted: keep high-end hardware away from China. To compensate, those in China think more.

For some reason, we find this quite kind biography of Bill Gates. Gates did many unethical things (like lying to people about what he had in his hand vs what he had in his mind).

Quick! Go to the store and buy a teddy bear before they are all gone!

Let's ban TikTok in America. Uh, er, is that possible? How do you do that?

More hand wringing on Havanna Syndrome. Good grief. What are these folks protecting?

The Mac Mini is now 20 years old. Apple did some pretty inventive things with this idea.