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: 3-9 February, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• While not over, the Israel-Gaza conflict has a cease fire and hostage return
• Our President proposes Ukraine send minerals back in exchange for Billion$ in military aid
• Washington insiders react with horror at what Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are doing
• DOGE shows all the wasteful spending at USAID; who is next?
• Companies proclaim more advances in AI, just pay $$$ and you can see

Monday 3 February 2025

All private sector jobs are temporary. I may work at Starbucks 25 years or 2.5 days. There are many persons from the private sector now in Washington, D.C. working for the new President. They don't see Federal jobs as being any different from private sector jobs. This is quite a shock to many persons who are otherwise adults. Everyone wants to know, "but what about my case where I ..." The new invaders of the Federal workforce don't care about any of that. You may be laid off this year. Do you want paychecks through September guaranteed or not? You are an adult. Decide, now. This is a shock to many persons. Times change.

OpenAI shows a Deep Research tool for those paying $200 per month. That $200 may be well worth the expense.

It appears that USAID is doomed. "aid for AID" has been a long stated phrase for those who are familiar with how the State Dept operates overseas. While delivering goods bought by US taxpayers, USAID always had the luxurious offices and housing in other countries.

In smart moves, US companies discover that Elon Musk is influential in many circles.

All this AI is causing money to move about, but productivity gains are not generally apparent.

Musk's DOGE team is working long, hard, and smart hours. The Federal bureaucracy isn't. If you are a Federal employee and want to keep your job, work longer, harder, AND SMARTER. This isn't rocket science.

Nice thoughts on clutter in our lives and writing.

Some thoughts on how to show and not tell, unless telling and not showing works better.

Thoughts on finding a niche and connecting with readers who like to read that stuff.

How to write books that are better than those pumped out of AI? Write better books.

There is some merit is being positive, very positive, when talking to people about hiring you.

The Author's Guild is starting to certify and label books when they are written by humans.

Thoughts on having a writing community. I tried, but the large amount of writing I produce overwhelms folks.

We have age discrimination in the writing and publishing industry. Of course this is illegal. Of course it happens daily.

I will write this thing tomorrow or next week, maybe. There are plenty of excuses to use.

If the first five pages (paragraphs, sentences, etc.) are written poorly, the rest will be as well.

Tuesday 4 February 2025

Smart cryptominers are finding ways to sell their computing time as AI datacenters.

Here is a thoughtful and excellent review of OpenAI's Deep Research and other systems.

America's publicly funded K-12 schools are being hacked. School administrators, however, are not telling parents what information on their children is being stolen.

Wired tells us that the sky is falling, the sky is falling.

More doom and gloom and the sky is falling from Verge.

And a "Musk person" at the GSA tells employees "AI first." Not sure what that means, but few at GSA can spell AI.

Not all tech financial news is rosy. Nintendo is having a bad time.

Palantir, however, reports a good financial quarter.

I like this idea. The US has given Ukraine Billion$ in military aid. How about shipping some minerals back?

Out of politics (sort of), quoting, "Nicolas Cage, 61, is rallying his fellow actors against the use of artificial intelligence in the filmmaking industry."

On the other hand, AI helped the Beatles (remember them) win a Grammy.

Inside joke that I understand, but few others will: the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) paid Ask Sage $100K (lunch money) for something and won't tell anyone else why.

The Executive Branch of our Federal government is investigating the Executive Branch of our Federal government on the use of facial recognition at airports. Lots of privacy issues here.

Salesforce cuts 1,000 jobs (73,000 total jobs in the company).

Coming soon to some Windows 11 users, good old MS Paint gets some CoPilot AI generative features.

Wednesday 5 February 2025

There is much ado about Mr. Musk "closing USAID." Mr. Musk walks in with half-a-dozen smart and capable people. There are not 51st percentile smart and capable, but 99th percentile smart and capable. They install some software that reads the network, finds expenditures, reads the Internet to find out who is receiving the money, and telling everyone what they learn. This shows how our taxes are being spent. The reports aren't pretty as they show lots of waste and lots more waste. It is odd that journalists are upset about this as these smart and capable people are doing what journalists used to do. Same message: don't shoot the messenger if you don't like the message.

One thing to remember with all these happenings in the Federal workforce and Washington D.C. There was an election. The other political party nominated a person who repelled voters. No one forced them to do that.

Alphabet (Google) reports a good financial quarter. They are making $2Billion a week profit.

AMD reports a good financial quarter.

Underlying all these tech companies are semiconductors. Production and sales are up.

OpenAI has a new logo and font. This is a big deal in some circles.

At the highest levels of management and engineering, Microsoft steals a few folks from DeepMind.

Let's put all that AI computing power to practical use: Apple has a new app that plans kids' birthday parties etc.

Our current President moves to make all Federal agency CIOs appointed officials. Easier to pick, watch, move, etc. And allow more access to agency networks for audits. See little essay at the top of today's notes.

I'll just quote the headline: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

Federal employees are "reeling." This is Mr. Trump's second visit to Washington D.C. He learned a lot during his first visit. Note: Federal employees working national defense are not in this malestorm.

The top people at Starbucks learned that mobile order drove a wedge between their customers and them. Might as well buy coffee at the grocery store.

Amazon is closing some of its physical stores. Amazon, however, is making money selling its store technology to hundreds of other stores.

Red Hat adds some AI to its Linux distribution. The main additions are in developer tools.

ChatGPT Edu partners with the California State University (CSU) system.

Thursday 6 February 2025

Much is being made of these unelected persons working with DOGE and such. If a reporter from the Washington Post investigated spending at USAID (the fall guy of the week) and wrote a series of articles on it, they would win a Pulitzer for investigative reporting. If you don't think so, recall the investigative reports in 2014 about veterans dying while waiting for treatment. So Mr. Musk and folks are auditing some Federal agencies (executive branch auditing the executive branch, a reasonable action) and reporting what they find. This is a pretty simple task. What they find cannot be defended to American taxpayers. The Washington Post reporters are jealous because they didn't do this and win the Pulitzer. Some members of Congress are mad because their subcommittee didn't do this and win votes for finding waste.

The Speaker of the House points out the obvious: cutting government spending is not a power grab. Taking over a government agency and spending more is a power grab. Some folks don't seem to understand the obvious.

Someone at Google remembers that they are a for-profit business, not a charity or a government agency. They need to hire folks who produce profits.

A similar move is happening at Amazon.

Researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington claim to have distilled an AI system from something else and spending only $50 in compute power.

Here is the research paper about the above.

I'll just quote the headline, "AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter for the first time in Q4 2024"

Arm reports a good financial quarter, and their stock price fails.

Qualcomm reports a good financial quarter.

There are some reports that DOGE is moving away from chat systems that are subject to FOIA requirements to more private systems.

One of these chattering bots explained how to commit suicide. This is seen as some sort of international travesty by some folks who are otherwise seen as adults.

Hysteria inside the beltway as an Executive Branch employee (named Musk or something) is auditing agencies of the Executive Branch and telling folks what he has found.

Someone figures out why government officials allow illegal immigration. Duh.

A cable adapter from Apple has a processor in it. Someone found a way to run Doom on that processor. Someone has too much time on their hands. Then again, someone shows that there are processors everywhere doing nothing. Surely, someone could use them for good.

Someone creates a chattering bot that wastes the time of those irritating phone scammers.

Disney+ lost 700,000 subscribers in three months. Still, it is profitable.

Friday 7 February 2025

Let's run through the jargon and come to something that might make sense. There was the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and the Minimum Viable Experience (MVE.) Now we have the Minimum Automated Concept (MAC).

Notes on recommender systems. These are the things that tell you, "Hey, other people who liked this movie also like these other movies." AI is supposed to be making these better.

Google is testing a further development in AI search. Google already expands its search using AI and has free Gemini AI.

GitHub increases the capabilities of its CoPilot AI. Vision creates code given an image.

The return of the tablet: after three years of falling sales, tablet sales rise again in 2024.

Internal emails indicated that Meta uses a massive amount of copyrighted books illegally to train Ai models.

Finally someone is doing this: DOGE is creating a generative tools called GSAi for use in bringing some government employees into this century.

A Federal judges pauses the government employee buyout program. It has not been declared illegal, but paused for further review. About 50,000 Federal employees signed up for this. That is a small number and probably is just folks who were retiring this year anyways.

Pinterest reports a good financial quarter.

Cloudflare reports a good financial quarter.

Amazon reports a good financial quarter. Amazon is not as profitable as Apple and Google. It isn't quite at the place of a Billion $$$ profit a week, but it is approaching that mark.

Here is a commentary asking that DOGE slow down. There is some experience talking here. Also, what is advocated in the piece has been advocated many times over many years and not heeded. Sometimes you just knock over everything and start anew. Some people will be hurt without cause. Others will escape their just punishment.

Acer releases new laptop computers with the latests Nvidia 50-series GPUs with 16- and 18-inch displays. Powerful gaming systems as well as powerful AI programming.

The Enshittification Hall of Shame

Saturday 8 February 2025

And yet another lawsuit involving the "mistreatment" of Donald Trump is settle out of court with no details leaked.

Shooting the messenger: folks cannot refute the embarrassing spending being uncovered by DOGE, so they try to embarrass those finding the spending.

"It is possible to develop a model with the best intentions, and for that model to be misused later on" I hope the folks at Stanford didn't spend a lot of money figuring out that one. Try this, "It is possible to develop a CAR with the best intentions, and for that CAR to be misused later on" Substitute ketchup or just about any noun as well.

Advertising via algorithms is pretty stupid, but big tech does this. Then they put ads on the wrong websites. Again, just plain stupid. And sometimes being stupid hurts other people in tragic ways.

Folks at Hugging Face demonstrate how to use open-source tools and do bit AI quickly and inexpensively.

Meanwhile at the Pentagon, folks are booting out legacy media companies and bringing in different ones. Times change.

A little cubesat takes best image of earth yet.

Questionable government spending: a $5Billion (with a B) program to build charging stations for rich people with luxury electric vehicles is paused.

Folks are suing the Executive Branch of the Federal government for have employees of the Executive Branch of the government accessing information held by the Executive Branch of the government. Did anyone besides me take Civics in high school?

Recent research shows that people feel better in the morning. This is the kind of research funded by taxpayers that cause all research funded by taxpayers to be cancelled.

Employers test their employees by sending them phony phishing emails. Of course, this is all stupid and it only brings anger from employees.

Many of the folks, like me, who "create" content are angry about not being paid by the AI companies. Gosh, if they are using my content to train AI, watch out. I wouldn't use that AI.

Sunday 9 February 2025

It appears that Starlink now has over 6,000 satellites in orbit. It is difficult for a new company to compete in that climate.

More companies are buying BitCoin et al instead of holding money. Such investments will help stabilize the value of cryptocurrencies. So it may do some good.

Meanwhile in China, its appears that the AI industry has reached a level of maturity wherein Chinese companies are hiring Chinese-educated persons who have not ventured off to Silicon Valley first.

Meta has a system that reads brain waves so a person doesn't have to type. The trouble is, it weighs a half a ton and costs $2 million.

Meanwhile in India, Google Maps is struggling to find which fork in the road to take.

I'll just quote the headline, "Federal judge blocks DOGE from accessing sensitive Treasury records"

Someone has a small grasp of the obvious: return to work orders are just a way to have people resign. That cuts costs, and resignations are much cheaper than layoffs.

Times change, so "the end of whatever as we know it" is always correct.

Bellingcat has some pretty good before and after satellite images of destruction in Gaza.

Here is a long piece on deepfakes and abuse.