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: 10-16 February, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Philadelphia Eagles win the Super Bowl and stop Kansas City's run
• Tech companies continue to report good financial quarters
• Valentine's Day in the US
• DOGE continues to cut wasteful Federal spending
• Layoffs in the Federal workforce

Monday 10 February 2025

Looking back a year, I find this story in which an investigator described President Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."\ The investigator was blasted for such a statement. A couple months later, this became obvious to everyone watching a debate. The rest is now history.

Folks give over $250million in GoFundMe campaigns to victims of the Los Angeles Fires.

Meanwhile in Mexico and Taiwan, exports to Mexico jump 500%.

A big waste of money: tests show that those phishing test companies do on employees have no real benefit and just make everyone upset.

Some folks claim their is a big competition to bring satellite connections to smartphones. I would like to see that, but I have my doubts.

It appears that unemployment in the IT section is high.

Meanwhile in the Far East, China can manufacture lower-tech chips cheaply. There is a huge market for these older chips. This is hurting Taiwan's market share. This is known as the long tail, and it is to the mainland's benefit.

People are not watching broadcast TV, unless the National Football League in on.

Rivian (expensive electric vehicles) has sold electric vans to Amazon for several years. Now, if you are a business, you can buy one. No sales to me, yet.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the Russians are reverting to donkeys to carry supplies. Ukrainian drones are blasting expensive Russian vehicles. The Russians are winning the race to the bottom as the donkeys are cheaper than the drones.

Yet more advice for writers trying to compete in a world of AI-written works. Be smart. Typing is the slowest part of all this. How can you put words in the computer faster?

Tips on combining short essays into a nonfiction book. I have done this probably half a dozen times or more.

Thoughts on something called the Wave technique for building a scene in fiction.

I'll just quote this advice of what to do when stuck: Just do something. It can be smart to pick an arbitrary beginning point, just to start writing again somewhere, anywhere.

Some thoughts on and links to the book publishing business.

Reading less? It is probably because I know more and the stuff that is out there is just the same old stuff again.

Tuesday 11 February 2025

Despite being a blowout from the beginning, the recent Super Bowl broke all records for viewers. At parties, the game stayed on the TV while people ignored it to talk about pizza and nachos.

Google expands the audience for its NotebookLM Plus.

We have a growing crowd of doubters to DeepSeek's claims of efficiency and low cost.

A group of investors, including Mr. Musk, bit $97.4Billion for the parent company of OpenAI.

TSMC's leaders move quickly and with intensity to avoid tariffs on their products in the US.

Researchers, one of whom is quite young, reinvent the hash table. That is like reinventing the circle.

Oops, power connectors for the new Nvidia 5090 GPUs are melting. Fingers are already being pointed in all directions.

This piece is quite critical of Mr. Musk and DOGE.

Strong rumors that OpenAI will use a processor of its own design instead of Nvidia's processors.

From Seth Godin, "Part of the art of project management is noticing things more quickly."

It appears that folks in their 20s are using AI much of the time to cut work and be productive. Good. New tools, use them.

It appears that the $5 meal deal at McDonald's is working quite well for them.

I'll need to hold this one as I'll be using Vision in the near future.

Let's all pause on this IT unemployment. It appears that someone in government reclassified jobs as IT.

Times change; smart people adjust. BMW greatly slows its move to electric vehicles given what is happening in the world.

Wednesday 12 February 2025

For those folks who didn't take the offer to resign now comes the reduction in force (The Federal government's term for layoffs). Agencies have 30 days to create plans and layoff employees.

President Trump will soon close the Federal Executive Institute. That is basically a war college for government employees who don't fit anywhere and need some place to go for a year to stay out of the way. Sorry if that sounds cynical, but these places begin with good intentions and grow beyond usefulness. That is the iron law of bureaucracy.

Here is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

That is closely related to the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

It is now the Gulf of America, and if you don't use that name, you are out. Misinformation and disinformation go both ways. Ouch. Why did someone set this precedent? Oh, and it's now Fort Bragg again. Keep the old signs around to reuse them.

And yet another researchers shows how to break yet another one of these chattering bots.

There is a little more panic in legacy media as tech and entertainment leaders start to discuss faith in God.

One of the drivers of this faith-in-God movement is a group called ACTS 17 Collective.

Somewhat related is this piece about Larry Sanger (one of the founders of Wikipeida) and his journey from PhD in Philosophy to a grasp of theology and Christianity.

Google expands the availability of its Whisk tool.

Whisk is at this URL.

DoorDash reports a good financial quarter.

This is a strange story, I don't get it: Anduril Industries Inc., a maker of drones and software to control them, will assume management and eventual manufacturing of the US Army's new infantry goggles from Microsoft Corp.,

I think Meta has done something good. Quoting, "Meta has partnered with the nonprofit organization Childhelp to create a curriculum that will teach middle schoolers how to recognize forms of online exploitation, such as sextortion scams and grooming."

Barnes and Noble continues its post-PAN(dem)IC comeback and will open 60 new stores this year.

Thursday 13 February 2025

If you can't beat 'em, hire criminals. That is what US adversaries are doing.

Meanwhile in my neighborhood, a.k.a., data center alley, power required by datacenters doubled in the last six months of 2024. The lights stayed on at my house.

Meanwhile at OpenAI, folks are regrouping and repackaging all their stuff to change how they release capabilities.

Times change: journalists are now accused of "doxxing." Someone once said something about how small minds discuss people instead of ideas or something like that. Here we are.

X (Twitter) agrees to pay Donald Trump about $10million in damages from a suit filed before Mr. Musk owned Twitter. Mr. Trump wins again.

Times change: the Associated Press is made because the lost their seat at the White House press room. If you lose subscribers, you lose your seat.

Meanwhile in real news, Playstation had its best Christmas ever with 75 million shipments.

Reddit reports many more users, but not as many as predictors. Once again, the incorrect predictors were not punished.

The Chinese find yet another way around restrictions on processors sold to China: rent them in datacenters in other countries. Pretty simple stuff to beat the Biden boys.

Calls for laws blocking AI. This has nothing to do with AI --- it is about people faking photos and videos that show lies. Such has been in practice for a long time before anyone had a computer.

Let's step back a moment and look at the market for refurbished computers. These are often brand new still in the box units that were prepared for shipment and then something happened.

Folks, this is a true story. This is how the Federal government processes retirement papers from Federal employees. They walk around in a mine 230 feet below the surface. Good grief.

Meanwhile in India, studies show that practical arithmetic skills don't transfer to written math tests. I blame those who write the math tests.

A BBC study shows that some AI summarizer systems generate nonsense.

Meanwhile in Australia, government employees tried Microsoft's CoPilot and were disappointed. It didn't do all their jobs for them.

Friday 14 February 2025

This is Valentine's Day in the US.

CoinBase, crypto currency exchange, reports a big big financial quarter.

Meanwhile in the China marketplace, Apple will have its AI, but the outputs will be filtered (a nice way of saying censorship) by a Chinese company.

Roku reports a good financial quarter.

OpenAI removes some content warnings from ChatGPT. Use as you see fit.

Arm announces a new processor aimed at datacenter server use.

Reassured by the current President of no prosecution for violating the TikTok ban law, hey what?, the big online stores once again list the TikTok app.

The CHIPS Act was and still is a big pile of money. The current President announces some renegotiation of what the prior President negotiated.

Blue Origin laid off 10% of its employees.

Only 75,000 Federal employees (3.75%) took the buyout early out offer. The rest are "holding the line." I wish those holding the line know what they are doing.

The number of folks pursuing PhDs is dropping. Many reason$.

Saturday 15 February 2025

Not sure if Elon Musk offered to buy OpenAI, but OpenAI's board says "No" anyways.

Bitmain is a Chinese company that makes machines just for cryptocurrency mining. These trade wars are slowing the delivery of their machines to American miners.

Zelle moved $1Trillion (with a Tr) last year. Bank-to-bank transfers made easier. $omeone is making the money.

I should have bought one of these months ago: two million Meta-RayBan glasses have been sold. Another 10million to be made this year.

Here is one story of a handful of Federal government employees who were laid off this past week. If the claims made by them are true, they will all have top jobs at top companies on Monday. If the claims are not true, they should have taken the early out offered to them. I have empathy for folks who lose their job. Times change. Federal employees were doing too many meaningless jobs.

I like this quote, "Hand wringing about (AI) safety." Good grief folks. Make systems that work and that people use well. No one can build a car that a driver cannot crash into a tree. Same goes for AI systems.

Lyft, DoorDash et al turn profits. The PAN(dem)IC is over.

The world has turned upside down. A company from Taiwan is going to make integrated circuits for Intel at Intel factories.

This is years away, but Meta is investing Billion$ into research on humanoid robots for home use.

Perplexity releases its Deep Research capability. A few free researches a month. Perhaps all these other AI systems are simply overpriced.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has stopped working for state and local election administrators. That might have been food work, but it was not in the stated mission of CISA. That means it was fat and had to be trimmed. This is what DOGE et al are doing. Do your job. Stop doing other things the taxpayers don't need.

I'll just quote: Meta confirms Project Waterworth, a global subsea cable project spanning 50,000 kilometers. Yes, Meta et al has the money to do these side projects. The Federal executive branches don't have that money.

Sunday 16 February 2025

Several restored government agency websites now explicitly reject transgender notices. This is why Mr. Trump was re-elected.

The number$ here show how badly Intel has gone and how well TSMC is doing. I still believe that TSMC is the most important company in the world.

Rural broadband programs flop in India.

Where the money is: romance scams. And it appears that more money will flow with all these chattering bots.

DOGE is also removing DOGE employees, i.e., holdovers from the Obama-created USDS. USDS was once a pretty good idea that grew into the iron law of bureaucracy and become mostly useless.

It appears that Dell will sell $5Billion (with a B) of hardware to xAI for its super duper computer in Memphis.

The folks in Bentonville, Arkansas once again show that they are not country bumpkins. They adapted to the latest technology and social trends to become a strong online competitor with Amazon,

It seems that European regulators and left-leaning American regulators have much in common. Regulate AI!

Apple hasn't given up on its Vision Pro. Perhaps one day something good will come of this.

Yes, AI technologies can replace jobs. AI technologies have been replacing jobs for decades.

New study shows...eating take out food from those plastic containers increases deaths from heart disease.

Our IRS is about to buy some super duper computing from Nvidia. Great quote, "How exactly the IRS will use its SuperPod is unclear. " Let's wish they use it wisely.

Here are numbers on the return-to-the-office movement. Some cities like New York have a high return while San Francisco does not.