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: 27 January - 2 February, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues - with a cease fire
• DeepSeek upends the AI world at three cents on the dollar
• And evidence that DeepSeek is lying
• Potential shake up in the Federal workforce
• "I really don't care, Margaret" enters the vocabulary
• Tariff wars begin
• Army helicopter collides with American Airlines over the Potomac River

Monday 27 January 2025

The week begins with much news about DeepSeek and their AI models. OpenAI, and many others, have been grossly inefficient in their operations and in how they approached the problem of supervised learning. Many old folks, like myself, saw these problems immediately, but since we are old folks, no one listened. Oh well.

This is a good commentary on the DeepSeek situation. Stop spending money. Breathe. Think. Be more efficient.

DeepSeek is the new star on the iPhone. Big $ale$.

DeepSeek only spent 3 cents for every dollar spent by OpenAI with similar results. Think. Be efficient. Brute force and ignorance (BFI) usually loses.

Here is a technical paper on how DeepSeek did what they did.

And more from China: mix entertainment with marketing.

Super high-tech (and super high costs) to secure the southern border.

I highly recommend this interview with Kevin J. Anderson. He has been earning a living writing for 40 years. Great practical tips.

Thoughts on finding your little card table in a great big convention center.

AI software can do a lot of writing. People, however, can do the best writing when it matters. AI software is a tool that amplifies human effort in some way. All good software does that same thing. Don't worry if you are a writer.

Given the fires in the Los Angeles area, this is appropriate. What would you save in a disaster or some other type of evacuation? Some of us, given our profession and work locations, have answered these questions for years.

With a new President and the swinging of the pendulum, the other side of the arc is now crying in despair. Please folks, let's be adults.

General thoughts on being a writer. Some days it flows easier than others. Still, pump out the words.

If you want to earn a living as a writer, you will be running a business. Here are tips. Note, you can always pay someone else to run your business, but you better be making lots of money as a writer to do that.

Here is one procedure for writing a novel.

How about writing a cookbook?

Free writing etc. has its place. Then there is deliberate practice. That is the sort of thing those English teachers made us do. Perhaps there was some merit in that.

Tuesday 28 January 2025

A big part of DeepSeek's success came without using top-of-the-line Nvidia processors (thank you Mr. Biden). This news causes a tumble in Nvidia's stock price.

And the DeepSeek systems send all the data and interactions to China and do it obviously.

Mulling over the new world of AI with DeepSeek's offerings.

DeepSeek stops new client registration because, it claims, malicious attacks on its servers. That would probably be tests that testers run. So annoying.

Here is Stratechery's analysis on all this DeepSeek news. It is not the event; it is the reaction.

The folks running Nvidia put a positive spin on the loss of $600Billion in stock value in a day. They will be fine. They will still sell large piles of GPUs.

And DeepSeek releases new vision models.

Thoughts on why the DeepSeek blip will actually increase the sales from Nvidia et al.

One of the obvious reasons for the recent election results is that inflation hurts the poor more than the rich. Such reasoning was lost on the legacy media (a bunch of rich folks talking rich talk to each other).

Bill Gates writes about his childhood as (what we call today) autistic and neurodivergent. We are (NOT) so smart today that we keep kids from being kids. We talk diversity, but only for skin tone and not the important types of diversity.

Cory Doctorow argues for more regulation of ... well, just about everything. We need to outlaw ne'er-do-wells and all the things they do before they do them. Good luck with that idea.

In case you missed it, December marked the Microsoft Excel World Championship in Las Vegas.

In more mundane news, the folks running Google Maps will change the name of that body of water to the Gulf of America as soon as some actual regulations pass.

Apple updates it line of operating systems and turns on Apple Intelligence by default.

One college professor laments the use of these chattering bots by students. The professor also admits that the bots are now performing PhD-level analysis. A good quote from the piece, "LLMs, which are exquisitely well-tuned machines for finding the median viewpoint on a given issue, are surely contributing to it." I love the phrase "median viewpoint."

Wednesday 29 January 2025

We now have a generation raised on smartphones, no attention span, and the anxious generation. And these folks want paychecks.

We have more news and semi-news on DeepSeek. Today we have reports that perhaps DeepSeek didn't do and cannot do all they claim. Their announcements, however, affected the American stock market in a major way. Perhaps this was all a test by the Communist Party of China to influence the American economy. There are lessons learned by the perpetrators of such as well as the victims. We shall see what happens next time someone shouts "wolf."

Now let's take the analysis deeper: There are folks at Nvidia who want their stock price to fall. Then they can buy more of the stock at a lower price knowing it will rise again. Buy low, sell high. How do you make the price go low? Well, see the news of this last week. Diabolical? Perhaps. Legal. Also, perhaps. This isn't rocket science.

Testing of DeepSeek's system shows at least 1,000 prompts for which there are no answers. And then there are methods of bypassing the bias of the system.

Further study shows that DeepSeek perhaps used some outputs from OpenAI's system in contradiction of their description of their breakthroughs.

More commentary on DeepSeek et al.

It appears the DeepSeek spent more than $500million on Nvidia processors.

Some Brouhaha in the first Presidential press briefing. One note is that the legacy media will not be the only ones with seats in the room. Times change. And given the legacy media's failed predictions about the last election... Well, times change.

Colleagues of Mr. Musk are now running the Office of Personnel Management, the HR department of the Federal government. There will be changes. Again, times change. I was a Federal employee in 1980. Federal employees pushed for changes in what politics were allowed in and out of the offices. They sowed the wind; now they are reaping the whirlwind.

This is an odd story in a time of odd stories: Feds can quit now and be paid through September. If you were going to retire this year, you cannot pass on this. If you are afraid for your job, likewise.

I'll quote the email sent to all Federal employees: The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work. Well, that is radical talk in Federal jobs. It is normal expectation in other jobs. Excellence! I was a Federal employee for 28 years. The word "excellence" was not used often.

Korean display makers are trying to catch up with competitors in China.

Apple and StarLink are working to bring satellite phone service to the iPhone.

Here is a welcome first: a civil aircraft breaks the sound barrier.

Bellingcat investigates deepfake websites.

Thursday 30 January 2025

Here near Washington, D.C., last night a passenger plane collided with an Army helicopter near Reagan National Airport. We will know more when the sun rises, but it is a tragedy.

Microsoft reports a good financial quarter. I hadn't noticed before, but they are making over a Billion $$$ profit each week.

Meta reports a good financial quarter.

I'm not sure if this is ingenious or devious, but folks are playing a game and training someone's AI system at the same time.

Meta settles out of court with Donald Trump on a 2021 lawsuit regarding Meta cancelling his Facebook account. $25million being paid to Mr. Trump with most of it going to his presidential library.

The New York Times tries to summarize Mr. Musk's first couple of weeks in Washington D.C. Prediction (predictable): folks in Washington will keep their heads down and allow the storm to pass over. They will wait out everything. That has always worked in the past, but... maybe not this time.

Mistral AI is not in the headlines this week. Does that mean it has been surpassed? Folks, the AI world turns upside down seemingly every week. Pause to breathe, or is that an outdate idea?

Further testing of the wunderkid DeepSeek shows that it doesn't work much at all.

I find this to be an excellent piece on DeepSeek and the economic$ of AI. And folks, you can't talk AI without talking economic$.

Microsoft quickly puts DeepSeek's systems on GitHub and Azure.

TEXT

Google adds more AI to its Workspace via its Gemini.

Waymo greatly expands its testing of autonomous vehicles to new cities.

I'll just quote, "Vodafone has made what it calls the world's first satellite video call using a standard smartphone, in a test"

"Follow the science!" Uh, which science. It seems several hundred thousand fake studies have been published in the last 20 years. SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND.

Yet another new AI model comes out of China with yet another set of claims of great performance at a low cost.

Friday 31 January 2025

Apple reports a record good financial quarter. Apple's weekly profit is approaching $3Billion (with a B). If I have my decimal points correct, that is about $39Million profit every day.

Samsung reports a good financial quarter.

Intel reports a bad financial year. It is a great shame to see a once great American tech leader fall so hard.

Intel tries to shift its AI data center processor strategy to cut its losses.

I like this phrase: intense year. That is Meta in 2025. When was the last time Federal employees had an intense year. There is a big difference here. Many Federal employees are vowing to "hold the line" on Trump and Musk. Remember Ronald Reagan and the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981. It can happen again.

Meta claims it sold more than a million RayBan smart glasses in 2024.

Trying to close the barn door after all the horse are out... Our Federal government demonstrates once again how it is behind the times and is trying to figure out how DeepSeek got all those advanced Nvidia processors.

Microsoft adds more AI capability to the free tier of CoPilot.

The Allen Institute for AI releases a new model with claims that it is better in every respect than DeepSeek.

Our Dept of Justice wants to block HPE's purchase of Juniper Networks. We shall see if such actions continue under the new administration.

Google offers an early exit to some employees. Oh, like the Federal government, huh?

Nvidia updates its DLSS technology for its new 50 series GPUs.

No one can find any Nvidia RTX 5090 GPUs. It seems that there never have been any except for those sent to folks who write reviews.

More technical and economic analysis of DeepSeek.

Lawmakers continue to try to require AM radios in vehicles. The move towards IP everything is a silly one.

Saturday 1 February 2025

Is the quest for the autonomous automobile over, kaput?

I ask the same question about the Virtual Reality goggles and such.

Amazon will build two datacenters in Mississippi with total cost of $16Billion (with a B). Louisiana will have a $10Billion datacenter from Meta this year.

President Trump's FCC asks for complete video and transcripts from 60 Minutes interview with then presidential candidate Kamala Harris. There is something to be said about revenge. Then there is something to be said about moving on stopping all the fighting.

Meanwhile at Forbes, there are layoffs. Legacy media is failing to adapt to changing times.

Meta is incorporated in Delaware (how did that happen? isn't that the long-forgotten home state of the prior president?) Anyways, Meta is considering changing to Texas.

More testing of DeepSeek's system shows more and more failures.

Despite the faults shown in testing, DeepSeek's system is the #1 on the charts and rising.

Meanwhile in Texas, the Governor bans Chinese apps from state computing systems. Good, but why did it take so long for such an obvious move? Does any government body in the US allow North Korean software?

ChatGPT claims triple the subscribers in 2024 over 2023 and all usage measure up as well.

LinkedIn claims its short video capability is working with many videos on the site.

OpenAI launched a new AI reasoning model called o3-mini. It is supposed to be better in every way than its predecessor. I've seen several comparison videos this morning and the videos show wonder and amazement.

There was a time in America when advances in radar and nuclear physics were hushed and labeled as SECRET. Should this be happening with AI advances?

MLCommons teams with Hugging Face to release one of the world's largest collections of public domain voice recordings for AI research.

No surprises here, just fulfilling campaign promises: the Trump administration works to scrap anything that has to do with climate change, racial equity, or gender identity.

Sunday 2 February 2025

And we have a new phrase in our world: I really don't care, Margaret.

And the trade wars zoom onwards with everyone announcing tariffs and counter tariffs and such. Times change.

Some of us remember the fish tank screen saver.

Failed solar power experiments that were, unfortunately, paid for by taxpayers.

The BlueSky app claims 30million users.

If you want a Microsoft laptop with an Intel not Qualcomm processor, put up $400 more.

Dell joins the list of tech companies telling employees to return to the office.

Israel quickly adapts to the changing nature of warfare. Half of all contracts let to fight drones went to start up companies.

Japan hops into the trade wars by limiting export of machinery to China.

In an opposite move, India removes all import restrictions on parts used to build phones for Apple and Xiaomi.

Times change: our National Transportation Safety Board no longer emails updates to legacy media. Check the X (Twitter) account for news.

Google finds that ne'er-do-wells are using Gemini to do what they do.

And this story is also about APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats.) I hate the practice of people inventing vocabulary because they are too lazy to say what they mean and mean what they say. I believe Mr. Orwell warned of the government employees and their laziness many years ago. And Federal employees wonder why someone wants to reduce their numbers.

Several government websites go dark this weekend. These are practical steps: we aren't going to spend taxpayer dollars on such stuff any more. Times change.