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: 24-30 March, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Shooting resumes in the Israel-Gaza conflict
• 23andMe goes into Chapter 11
• Military plan discussed on Signal (huh?)
• OpenAI has a new image generating system that is "melting our GPUs" it is so popular
• Deadly earthquake in Myanmar and Thailand
• Fear of DOGE "rewriting" all the code at SSA

Monday 24 March 2025

Chasing deepfake porn creators and catching them.

Quoting about this pretty impressive new AI feature from Google, "Google has started rolling out new AI features to Gemini Live that let it see your screen or through your smartphone camera and answer questions about either in real-time"

23andme starts chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, is an AI optimist and is encouraging people to use it (wisely).

Rumors that in a couple years the Apple Watch will have cameras and, of course, AI to interpret what the cameras see.

Disney has a live-action remake of Snow White. It opened this past weekend and did pretty well, but not great, financially.

Lots of angst over the Meta kiss-and-tell book. It appears that the author signed an agreement when departing Meta. Has the agreement been violated? Lawyers and judges gather.

Publishing that book. Yes, it can be done in a week. There are, as always, tradeoffs.

Present yourself online. If you don't, someone else will. Which do you want?

You are a writer, i.e., you have a face for books. Nope. Make videos to promote what you do. It will be fine. Write your script, i.e., you are a writer.

Tips on marketing a self-published book.

Hooray for Seth Godin's short piece. Don't clear your throat or say, "I would like to..." and all those other things people do before standing to talk. Just say it. Just write it.

Quoting the title: Writing As A Tool For Grief And Dealing With Change. Of course this is a good practice. This delves into writing a journal---both private and published online. Talk about the situation with yourself. Often I surprise myself with my insight to my puzzles.

Tuesday 25 March 2025

Here's a prediction with a 98.6% chance of coming true: European regulators to fine a successful American company a Billion$$$ (with a B).

A side note: these European fines on American tech companies are tariffs. We don't call them tariffs, but they are the cost of American companies doing business in Europe. Same thing as a tariff. So the current American President imposes tariffs on European companies. None of those tariffs amount to a Billion$$$. Yet, everyone screams.

I have enjoyed experimenting with MS Word's Copilot drafting mode or whatever they call it. Suggest a paragraph topic, out spits the paragraph. Read, think, write my own, move on or some such thing. Fun.

Here is yet another story on the foolish use of AI. Of course you don't let an AI agent just run without supervision. How stupid is that?

A look at the 25-year-old common vulnerability and exposures framework (CVE) for computer vulnerabilities.

Times change, and we have a different President. Tech companies react with suggestions for fewer regulations on AI technologies.

Wired surveys programmers on the use of AI in programming.

Some advice to help programmers survive now that AI is sort of writing software.

With 23andme going bankrupt, lots of articles on how to remove yourself from their databases. Leaving a sinking ship or something like that.

I am not sure how legal this is, but Wired is teaching people how to enter the US by sort of sneaking around laws.

That blocky, sleepy little Minecraft is getting Vibrant Visuals. It doesn't look the same anymore. How do you combine Lego-like block with advanced lighting and shadows?

And this story is everywhere: members of the current administration discussed a (no longer) secret military operation on Signal.

The continuing relevance of The Internet Archive.

Linux Kernel 6.14 is released.

China shows a new destructive device to cut undersea power and data cables. Is this a blatant threat? Yes, it is. Those Communist Party guys keep at it.

Better late than never, but not much better. After being 780% over budget (how large a number is that???), Our Dept of Defense cancels the contract for the Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System. Gosh.

This report claims that 2 in 5 tech workers quit their jobs last year because they didn't like their jobs. I trust (?) they found new jobs.

How to run one of these large language models on a 20-year-old computer. THINK! CUT FAT! Be patient.

Wednesday 26 March 2025

Given this story of Chinese companies flooding the market with AI models, perhaps the DeepSeek system was only a ploy to push attention to China. It's only marketing hype.

More news from China and tech: companies fell for the AI hype and built far too many datacenters.

OpenAI's newest image generator is gaining attention. This article has examples of finished marketing images.

Here is another article on the update image generator. I tried it; I like it.

Meanwhile in my backyard of Washington D.C., Waymo wants to run self-driving taxis. Lots of political hurdles facing them, but a new President that favors new tech and American industry.

Welcome to the new world: according to the good old Nielson ratings, YouTube, for the second time, is the most watched TV distributor. CBS, NBC, ABC, who?

T AI training crawler are out of hand. Quoting from this piece, "a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks"

We are still wrestling with the H-1B visa mess. Quoting, "U.S. tech firms - Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple - were the top 10 employers of H-1B recipients in 2024." Amazon is at the top of the list with the most visa-holding employees last year. Cheap foreign labor coming into a high-unemployment market.

Some Hollywood and history about RISC architecture, ARM, and the like.

Databricks claims to have a new technique that improves AI model performance.

This story is about the EPA part of the Federal government. It applies to many other agencies. The agencies left their primary missions behind and delved into "nice to have" things for decades. One day you wake up and...it all looks really bad on the front page of the news. "But," come the cries, "our mission is critical." Yes it is, and you should have not abandoned your mission.

Keeping up with everyone else, Microsoft claims to add deep reasoning and research to its Copilot.

This research is early and the conclusions hardly merit the word "conclusion." Nevertheless, there is some indication that the Shingles vaccine may reduce dementia.

From Seth Godin, "Scale is rarely the first signal of important work." There are other signals. Maybe this important work will scale to a billion. Perhaps not. The scale doesn't determine importance.

For old folks like me, this article is about retiring (at 87) and being bored. I know folks who love boredom. They didn't use their mind for the 20 years prior to retirement and haven't used it since retirement. That works for some folks. I don't seem to fit in that group.

You may have to read this twice. I had to read it three or four times. Someone just bought Napster for $207million. This has something to do with using the corporate name and copyrights and stuff. Still, you have to read it a few times.

The fuss continues ad nauseam about secret war plans and Signal and all that. If it did not do serious harm to the security of the United States, it was not SECRET.

Meanwhile in Canada, 46% of folks don't have cable TV any longer. Nice to have a story about Canada that wasn't nasty and related to tariffs.

Hype and some practical good news about running AI: DeepSeek has a model that can run at home, if you buy Apple's most expensive computer.

Thursday 27 March 2025

When success brings legal disaster.

Engadget takes an in-depth look at the 2025 iPad.

Bafoonery concerning sensitive communications and apps like Signal and such. Don't let children play with matches.

Nvidia releases G-Assist. This is one of those chattering bots that runs local and helps tune the performance of the GPU on your PC.

American opinion has shifted on TikTok. It's okay now.

One person experiments with AI search and Google search for a month. The results of the experiments are predictable. A little better here, a littler worse there.

TSMC invests another $100Billion in factories in America. This opens the door for China to invade Taiwan.

Inside arXiv. It really is one of the more important places on the Internet for science. Created by this man at Cornell University.

There are probably others, but I have to put arXiv and Raspberry Pi at the top of the list of significant achievements in science and education in the last 100 years.

Gosh, here comes Avengers 2026 rolling out a bunch of actors that haven't done much in the last 30 years but Avengers.

Senior managers at Boeing finally do a few things well. They won the $20Billion F-47 fighter contract (an early contract).

The fifth generation of cellular phone technology, i.e., 5G, flopped badly. Too many marketers telling everyone about what was coming without any thought or thinking. Another instance of letting children play with matches.

Dell cuts 20% of its employees in two years. Compare to the 50% cuts in Federal employees being sought in two months. Yes, the current President is shocking the system.

Meanwhile at Microsoft, they are cancelling some datacenters. Like China, see yesterday, they were building too many of these places.

The pendulum is swinging back to business education from technology education.

Four million Gen Z-ers are unemployed. Much blame is laid on colleges that award worthless degrees. Learn a useful skill, instead. The pendulum swings again. Art History? Electrician is much better economically.

Here is a good essay on Vibe Coding. I call it Hobby Programming. Several years ago, Gartner et al. called it "Low Code, No Code."

Friday 28 March 2025

More grievous vexation over the use of Signal. A judge orders everyone to keep records. That is a redundant order as all public communications, by law, must be kept.

Sam Altman says that folks are using OpenAI's newest so much it is melting their GPUs. A bit of exaggeration, but you get the point.

More on the too-much-too-soon use of OpenAI's new drawing tools.

Facebook sort of goes back to its roots to have a Friends and Family tab or newsfeed just from your friends.

Google adds vacation-planning tools to Search, Maps, etc.

Here is an explanation of what Signal is. It is good, but you shouldn't install it on all intelligence community systems. People will assume it is better than it is. This is letting children play with matches.

Our new President creates a podcast row and brings new media into the White House.

One person's saga of working two full-time jobs at the same time remotely. There have been Americans who work two 40-hour-per week jobs at the same time for ... ever. And these jobs were in person. Work eight hours here. End the day. Go to the second job. Work eight hours there. Sleep as much as you can. Sleep as much as you can on weekends. Repeat. I knew a person who did this for 30 years. It paid the bills. It was hard.

Tesla's stock price is gaining.

Also gaining quickly is the amount of Tesla's being sold as used cars.

NASA's budget is being cut. China is spending more on space exploration. Let's get practical. NASA's budget is being cut because agency leaders have managed the agency horrible for decades. NASA didn't develop all those rocket booster that land themselves and are reused. Other Americans did. NASA cannot put a person into space. Other Americans can. These budget cuts are a wakeup call to the managers and workers at NASA. Get off the couch and work hard and smart for a change. Look in the mirror for the person to blame.

IBM cut jobs last week. The cuts are deep. The jobs are moving to India.

Notes on the performance of the latest GPUs Nvidia has released just for laptop computers. The performance beats all prior entries. Everyone carries a super duper computer in their backpack.

A Columbia University student was suspended for creating an AI tool that helps job applicants "cheat" on job interviews. I don't feel sad for the student as the system is now pulling in $2 MILLION A MONTH from subscribers. The reward from getting kicked out of school is quit good.

Meanwhile here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, judges can order the installation of speed-limiting devices on cars driven by folks who drive too fast too often.

Saturday 29 March 2025

Some of the folks at DOGE want to rewrite and remove all the COBOL that runs our Social Security Administration. Of course there are risks in doing this. There are also risks in not doing this. And maintaining the COBOL is quite expensive and this should have been done decades ago. Once again, "This is the way we've always done it" attitude among government employees. One day, people wake up and see how the money is spent and it is all quite embarrassing.

xAI merges with X. I guess there is some financial advantage to merging two companies owned by the same person.

These chattering bots are summarizing the web for us. Hence, we don't visit the actual websites. Again, this is letting children play with matches. Ask for a summary AND ask for links to sources. Follow the links to confirm the summaries. I guess this is just too much work or something.

Here is a review of Nvidia's 50-series GPUs for laptops.

Angst at American universities. The mission is education. Stray from the mission because you can afford $$$ to, and it will catch you eventually. This is showing again and again these past few months. If you see something that is nice to have or nice to do, create a different organization that focuses on that as its mission. Don't drag an existing organization with an existing mission into that new thing. Now if this is all your personal money, do whatever you want.

Major earthquake in Myanmar and Thailand. The death toll reaches 1,000.

We seem to have a national shortage of electricians. I don't doubt this claim.

We seem to have yet another national problem: fake movie trailers on YouTube.

Notes on the College Board. This is a non-profit that has a Billion dollar annual income and basically runs higher education in America. Who decided this?

Smart TVs are now Automatic Content Recognition giants. Roku doesn't make money on TVs. It is all about advertising dollars.

Sunday 30 March 2025

American big tech companies are quickly opening offices in India. Big talent pool there and the trade laws are good.

With more tariffs etc., TSMC and Intel are not expanding into Japan and Malaysia as planned.

Probably more detail and history than anyone wants to know about fake movie trailers. The "AI software" does all the tedious find, copy, cut, paste, etc. operations of remixing movie scenes. Clever.

And this AI software is making the job hunting and hiring industry into one great big mess.

The Model Context Protocol and connecting LLMs and domain specific software. We have a new industry niche or something.

There are 500 million Indians currently aged 5-24 will find productive employment as they enter the workforce over the next two decades. Will AI, however, have taken over these jobs?

We have yet another stupid tax on home ownership: the HOA (Home Owner's Association) fees that can run several thousand $$$ a month.

Speaking of stupid taxes, some Americans want to have tiny Japanese trucks. American state and local governments seem to hate this for some reason.

The holy grail of energy production may be closer as some scientists think they can harness the rotation of the earth to produce limitless supplies of electricity. Wishing upon a star.

All things AI: Samsung shows a new line of home appliances with AI everywhere. Gosh, how did we ever make toast in the 20th century?

The rate of change in technology has hit several industries and the folks working in them. Manual photo developer and re-toucher? What, people used to do that for a living? Yes, they did (past tense).

More fear and loathing about DOGE rewriting all the software that runs the Social Security Administration. This fear misses much of the obvious. (1) They won't rewrite the COBOL in Python. They will use large open-source packages for the back end and middle ware. It's just a big database, and those exist. No coding. (2) All Federal government deployments of software require filing out forms, getting accredited, scheduling review board meetings, preparing thousands of PowerPoint slides, etc. and just that overhead requires many months. Well, it used to. The President says skip all that waste and do it now. Done. (3) The SSA does the same type of work as American Express, VISA, Wells Fargo, et al. Just do what they do and you are fine. But what about? Nope, the President says we won't waste resources on that stuff any longer.

Drone journalists in Gaza: they fly drones over combat. The combatants suspect them of working for the other side. The drones are destroyed and mortar fire reigns in on the drone controller. I am sorry for the loss of life, but really folks? You do something foolish, and bad things happen.