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: 17-23 March, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• GIMP 3.0 is released (ten years in the making)
• Nvidia holds its GTC and announces new systems
• George Foreman dies at 76
• xxx
• And DOGE continues to uncover waste and folks continue to sue the current administration

Monday 17 March 2025

GSA 18F. Who? That's right. A group who was supposed to improve things across the Federal government. Redundant with a dozen other groups try to do the same thing. Cut the redundancy.

And now we have the coach bot. Well, why not? Calm down. Breathe. Think about this a while before answering. There you have it. Universal advice for trouble folks.

During President Biden's time, we had a $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. They managed to not connect any rural folks to broadband as all the studies and analysis paralysis took hold. Cut. Cut. And cut.

The pendulum swings back to buying your computer instead of renting one from a big tech company. Your mileage varies.

Nvidia's big event conference is this week. Expect big announcements.

Someone finds a way to replace lithium-based batteries with those based on sodium. This would change much as sodium is plentiful, inexpensive, and all around better for folks.

$50million for spilling hot tea in your lap. McDonald's went through this years ago. Really? Again?

Sea levels were higher 31 years ago than they are today!

A high school student reveals that she used AI to do her homework. Why? The assignments were boring. This is a sample of one, but I think more than one teenager learned how to use AI. The kids are learning. The kids don't always learn what the adults think they should learn.

Quoting, "Sudowrite, the leading generative AI platform for creative writing, has launched a new tool called Muse. They're calling it the first AI made for fiction."

Trying to write faster and more? Try tracking word counts.

Afraid of telling someone about your next great idea? Don't worry. Folks won't do the work.

Why write short stories? Why not? Write, write, and write.

Some thoughts on Journaling as a tool to work through mental and creative blocks.

Writing 50 books by age 50? It all depends on how and what you count (books, not years).

One writer's experience from writing everyday for 30 days. I took English composition in the college as a freshman in the summer of 1976. We had a simple assignment: write an essay in our spiral notebook everyday---seven days a week. It was a good assignment for the seven weeks of the summer semester.

Tuesday 18 March 2025

From Will Larson (and I agree): If you are in a role today that's frustrating you, my advice is to try harder than usual to find a way to make it a rewarding experience, even if it's not perfect.

Meanwhile in Europe, "Let's build a European cloud so we can be free from those American cloud companies." Yeah, and let's go to the end of the rainbow to find a pot of gold. That will happen before there is a European cloud.

Roku TV is playing ads before it shows the home screen. Just a test gone awry. Yeah, sure.

It is a stretch to believability, but Departments of our Federal government have to tell employees NOT to install apps on government machines when those apps are controlled by the Communist Party of China. Otherwise the employees do these things.

Zoom (remember those guys from the great COVID panic?) is trying to stay afloat now that Teams own the marketplace. Zoom is pushing "AI features" (you have to call it AI) to entice customers to return.

I like this new term: AI Slop. I don't like what is happening with all this slop barraging the Internet and twisting what is real. The computers have taken the computer network away from people, and people did that.

Those who build apps are always asking for subscriptions. That is the only way they can get enough money to operate. The vast majority of apps don't make any money.

Hundreds of big-name Hollywood creators have submitted comments for the Trump administration's U.S. AI Action Pla. Please don't let AI companies scour copyrighted works. Well, don't put copyrighted works in places where that can happen. There is fair use and their is illegal use. Come on, let's be legal here folks.

I'll quote the headline: Qualcomm debuts new Snapdragon G handheld gaming PC chips to compete with Intel and AMD

From some corners, their is much wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding the shut down of Voice of America. Times change. Those managing VoA didn't change with the times. They mismanaged the system and now many other people are suffering for the errors of a few who never were held accountable.

I continue to search in vain for articles from those in the Federal employment who take responsibility for mismanagement and stupidity that is bringing all these cost cutting and layoffs. No one ever did anything wrong (like buying 30,000 licenses for MS Office when you only had 10,000 employees).

Mistral AI (France) releases new models that perform just a well as other models and run on smaller and less-powerful computers.

Stronger rumors that in 2026 Apple will release iPhones and iPads with foldable screens.

Someone posted on TikTok about "Airport Theory" where you arrive at the airport 15 minutes before the gate closes and you are fine. 400million folks viewed it and believed it. Are you kidding? How gullible are folks?

And in Washington D.C., we have a fuss about Biden pardons being signed with AutoPen. AutoPen is legal for such. The fuss is that Mr. Biden had nothing to do with these things, and that the White House staff did all this on their own and clicked the button without the President's knowledge. Don't leave your password lying around. That is especially important if you are the President of the United States.

A new study shows that we should work 37 hours a week, i.e., take Friday afternoon off.

Yet another new study claims that living in a place where it is hot will age a person just like smoking does.

Google's AI stuff removes watermarks from images. Oops, it wasn't supposed to do that.

GIMP 3.0 is released.

Wednesday 19 March 2025

One week turned into nine months. Well, better late than never I guess. And people wonder if NASA should have budget and jobs cuts.

Thousands more pages on the JFK assassination are released. More confusion. The people who know the truth are long dead. If anything, this will increase the distrust of government-led investigations. These are self-inflicted wounds.

I am still waiting for the essays from laid-off government employees who accept responsibility for the waste that caused the layoffs and cuts.

Fear and loathing from Federal employees on Reddit. No claim of responsibility though.

2024 was a good year for music streaming services and also for the sales of vinyl records.

Meanwhile at our Federal Trade Commission, mountains of posts created during the time of our prior President were removed. Times change.

More evidence that times have changed. Business are operating faster than in the prior four years.

Quoting, "Donald Trump's commerce secretary touted Elon Musk's Starlink to federal officials in charge of a $42bn rural broadband programme." Of course this looks like a conflict of interest. Consider, however, how much waste their is in the programme and how much many has been spent per rural home connected. There are obvious and economical solutions (Starlink being one of them). Let's stop and analysis paralysis and do some good for Americans.

The current President fires two members of our Federal Trade Commission. Herds of lawyers are gathering.

I'll just quote the headline, " Mark Zuckerberg says that Meta's Llama models have hit 1B downloads"

Nvidia began its big GTC yesterday. Here are some stories of WOW technology.

Here is a long piece summarizing much of the opening day.

Must-see video of the Nvidia Blue robot.

Here is a short piece about that robot.

Nvidia brings super duper computing to the desktop. The numbers are mind boggling. One system only costs $3,000. Revolutionary, not just an upgrade.

Nvidia pushes into the AI Agentic marketplace. Why not? No one has a definition for that, so everyone can claim it. I think there was a statement like that in the Adventures of Alice or something.

I'll just quote, "Nvidia announced new chips for building and deploying artificial intelligence models." Many like to claim that Moore's Law doesn't exist any more. Sure seems like the train keeps rolling down the tracks.

Thursday 20 March 2025

I am compelled to quote Blake Dodge of Pirate Wires Daily, "Instead of looking in horror at the human centipede that is teachers using ChatGPT to come up with lesson plans, then students using ChatGPT to skirt around said lesson plans, which finally concludes with teachers using ChatGPT to grade assignments, let's be thankful AI has shown us it's time for change."

Ah, let's run another social experiment on America's kids. Everyone has a laptop computer. Well, we did the experiment. Skills and scores dropped. Let's move off this one and go on to the next.

Oh, so these tariffs accomplish something as Nvidia moves more supply chains into America.

OpenAI releases yet another system. This one performs better AND costs more. That tends to bust a trend.

Doom and gloom predicted for Apple. We shall see.

American-made drones flop in Ukraine. Back to the drawing board.

Now someone is catching on. Disney won't put its scripts out on the Internet. That will keep them from being used as training data. How long did it take to figure out that one?

Here is another AI-related article that we file under "how long did it take smart people to figure out that one?" Uh, if you are submitting papers written by software, you, well, how stupid is that?

Aha, yet more of the "why did it take so long to figure that one out?" If you switch a data center from shore power to generator, you mess up the power grid. Really? No duh!

Companies are using AI to write software. Good. And of course you read the code, edit the code, test the code, etc. Some companies just deploy the code. How stupid can you be?

Telegram now claims a billion (with a B) monthly active users. A Billion is a large number when applied to people. And perhaps a large percentage are bots, not people.

Google announces the Pixel 9A, which is yet another new smartphone.

Video game maker employees form a North American union. Let's hope they are smart enough to avoid the mistakes of labor unions in the past.

Synopsys makes software that helps persons design chips. They are pushing more AI into their software.

Just a few years ago, everyone was a software company. Now, everyone is an AI company. How the marketers change.

Note: vinyl records have outsold compact discs three years in a row. Analog beats Pulse Code Modulation.

Here is a no duh moment. Using international instead of domestic products mean people use fewer domestic products. How long did it take to figure out that one? Where are we?

Fear and loathing in the website world as AI web crawlers crawl about and slow access to sites and networks and all things we cherish.

The GNOME 48 desktop environment has been released.

Vibe coding is multiplying programmer productivity by 10x.

Friday 21 March 2025

Hugging Face contributes a contrarian view to the White House of AI policy.

Anthropic updates its AI search so it can search up-to-the-minute information.

Oh how times change: our new President has people paying attention to the H-1B Visa program and companies that hire foreign tech workers.

There is no telling what consumers will like. At Apple, the MacBook Air has caught up with the performance of the MacBook Pro, but not the sales.

The Apple TV+ premium subscription service is losing more than $1 billion (with a B) per year. At this rate, it will take several hundred years for Apple to go broke. Someone has to decide what to do.

Research from Cambridge et al. shows a weather-prediction system that is far more local and can run on less power. I wrote an article about this approach 30+ years ago. I is about time. Quoting: A single researcher with a desktop computer will be able to deliver accurate weather forecasts using a new AI weather prediction approach that is tens of times faster and uses thousands of times less computing power than conventional systems.

Here is the research paper for the above weather-prediction system.

The smartphone-manufactoring business in India is growing at a healthy rate.

Someone has scammed Google Maps with 10,000 fake listings. Google is now suing.

Library Genesis (LibGen) collects books and papers for AI companies to use. This is all questionably legal.

A question about college basketball (and NBA as well.) When will coaches stop wearing pajamas and start wearing coats and ties again? The pandemic is over.

Goofy report about Nvidia selling scarce GPUs from a food truck at the GTC.

IBM cuts thousands of jobs nationwide.

Saturday 22 March 2025

New legislation is introduced to delete section 230 from the Communications Decency Act. This would completely change the world of society media. Do we want this?

Fear and loathing continues at Intel as the board room shuffles its chairs.

OpenAI and MIT Media Lab try to study the emotional influence ChatGPT has on users. No strong conclusions.

Amazon has been in court with our Consumer Product Safety Commission for four years. Amazon claims that since it doesn't make the products it ships, it is not liable for safety. Well, fact: Amazon doesn't make the products it ships. What's the fuss?

Some folks have a lot of time on their hands. I guess there are worse things you could be doing than testing if a Tesla will stop.

Yahoo still exists and is 30 years old. Its senior managers have big plans for AI.

This is only one story of many about how the NCAA Basketball championships are for sale. Donate $20million to the NIL fund of a school, buy seven All-Americans and a coach. Viola'. There are tens of thousands of Americans who can donate this much money.

Coca-Cola has a power-generating hydrogen-oxygen machine to power its vending machines. Well, I guess this solves some problem for some people in some places.

"Just buy a new computer," says Microsoft as Windows 10 support is about to end.

Meanwhile at Amazon, they are trying to remain lean and efficient as the corporation grows and grows. All startups (literally started in a garage with a two-pizza team) that succeed face this problem. From time to time, attempt a reset by eliminating the dreaded "middle management."

Sunday 23 March 2025

George Foreman died at 76. Growing up, he was the first person I saw win a Gold medal as a heavyweight in the Olympics. He went on to win the heavyweight championship of the world with Howard Cosell screaming, "Joe Frazier is down!" Then there was the George Foreman grill and more and more.

Got $5,000? Get this new camera from Fuji. These things are super computers attached to a lens.

I like this idea, quoting, "Rather than block web scrapers, Cloudflare invites them to trawl a web of useless AI-generated nonsense." Put the web crawler into an endless loop of nonsense.

Increasing reports that the iPhone processors are made with a 2nm process. How tiny can you get? Evidently there is more tiny coming our way. Greater efficiency, more processing power, and I guess we will find someone who can use this stuff.

More news about programming jobs in the US dropping about 25% in the last couple of years.

People who think seriously about AI conclude that industry is wasting most of its AI research money. There is too much effort and too little thinking.

It appears that these newly released JFK files contain information about persons who are still living. Oops.

Ah, computing history. Someone revives a DEC PDP-11.

Meanwhile in Hungary, facial recognition technology is being used to aid the ban on gay pride events.