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: 28 April - 4 May, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• Trump and Zelensky meet at Pope's funeral
• Massive power blackout in Spain, Portugal, and southern France
• Warren Buffet retires at 94

Monday 28 April 2025

Gen Z is the "take it slow" generation.

A nay-sayer says nay to building iPhones in America.

That nay-sayer reminds me of the difficulties in make a pencil from the famous video of Milton Friedman.

Here is Interpol's Innovation Lab in Singapore.

According to this piece, the world secret cabal chats on Signal or something and has manipulated world-wide events for the past five years.

Some AI tools claim to help people like Pierce better understand social situations. I can agree that chatting with a machine helps a person because it isn't another person blaming them. This article, however, pulls in the autism spectrum and such nonsense. Talk to a parent of a person with autism who is destroying the inside of the physical house about the spectrum and such. Some of us struggle with social interactions. There are counselors and books etc. that lend assistance. Some software that mimics conversation and offers advice can also offer assistance and introspection.

Save about $150 on a computer by having Linux installed instead of Windows.

A glimmer of hope with some research into the cause of Alzheimer's.

I get a headache when I read that "professional" what-evers can tell when something was written by a chattering bot. Good grief. If you think so much of yourself, why aren't you teaching people how to write as well as yourself?

Some techniques of writing dialogue. Punctuation is important.

Free (no cost) PDF books on grammar and writing. Many are simply old enough that the copyrights have expired. Still excellent material.

I like this little essay. Trial and error. Work. Improve.

One reason (of many) for writing fiction: it helps preserve your culture, background, family, lives.

One person's guide to earning a living as a freelance writer via LinkedIn. It's simple: make 10,000 followers over time and 1% will hire y

Yet more tips to gain clients as a freelance writer.

Tuesday 29 April 2025

IBM announces $150Billion in investment in the US over five years.

Meanwhile in Washington D.C., the mayor of the district pledges $1Billion for a new NFL stadium. (1) Should taxpayers give a wealthy and profitable company (the NFL) a billion $$$??? (2) Should the District of Columbia, a Federal land holding, have a mayor et al. that waste money?

I'll quote, "In March 2025, senior members of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) living in exile were targeted with a spearphishing campaign aimed at delivering Windows-based malware capable of conducting remote surveillance against its targets. " This is all done by the governors of China. We trade with these guys. Think about it.

Half of Americans polled are worried that AI will be bad for the news we receive. It is difficult for me to imagine the journalism practiced in America to become worse, but I guess it could.

The Take It Down Act is heading to President Donald Trump's desk. I suppose we will soon learn what a nonconsensual intimate image (NCII) is. Will it become no more than, "Something I don't like."

It's a start: Amazon launches a couple dozen Kuiper satellites to take on StarLink. Just 3,000 more to go.

Meanwhile in Spain, Portugal, and southern France, there was a huge power black out yesterday.

It appears that you just don't flip the light switch back to ON.

Real news that isn't news: everyone admits that soldiers from North Korea have been fighting against Ukraine.

It appears that folks are using AI at work and hiding it from their bosses. It appears that most bosses don't know the work and their employees well enough to know what is what.

I am surprised about this one: sales of electric vehicles are up 10% in 2025.

Researchers build a "robot" that is soft, flexible, and grows like a vine to search collapsed buildings for survivors. Great use of technology.

See this video of the vine-growing rescue robot.

Quoting, "The once-celebrated partnership between OpenAI's Sam Altman and Microsoft's Satya Nadella is deteriorating..."

Wednesday 30 April 2025

Waymo signs a deal with Toyota to share self-driving vehicle technology.

Quoting "Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20% to 30% of code inside the company's repositories was ... written by AI."

Have we reached the point in intellectual output that folks put notes on their products like, "100% naturally produced" and "no artificially produced material"?

Tariffs? TSMC beings construction of third plant in Arizona.

Freepik (gotta' visit their site for AI generating images a dn videos) has an new open model.

Worldwide streaming platform popularity: #1 YouTube, #2 TikTok, #3 Twitch.

Quoting, "The number of people with full-time equivalent jobs as digital creators in the U.S. jumped from 200,000 in 2020 to 1.5 million in 2024." I see this as bad news as folks can't get full-time regular paying jobs. Those whose full income comes from creating work VERY HARD and LONG HOURS.

Meta claims that its Llama AI models have been downloaded 1.2B times. That is a large number. The definition of success continues to change.

Meanwhile in France, the governors accuse their counterparts in Russia of attacking them in the cyber world for ten years.

What is attending college supposed to do for a person? If it doesn't train a person for a job, it can be a good experience for a few years. If that, however, is the goal, why should the debt cripple a person for life? Too much administrative costs.

Firefox now has tab groups. I guess this solves a problem for some persons.

Plastics and chemicals are killing several hundred thousand people. The "god news" for Americans is that at least for now the deaths are not in America, i.e., we are not the worst polluters.

Look up (carefully) as a 53-old Soviet spacecraft that never achieved a high-enough orbit is finally falling out of the sky.

Programmers without supervisors...this Disney employee was putting junk on their online restaurant menus.

OpenBSD 7.7 is released.

Thursday 1 May 2025

Claims that AI tools can help folks change careers. I am doubtful.

Some history of research into natural language processing. The transformer (worst name ever as all software transforms one thing to another) changed it all. The attention mechanism (also worst name ever) in BERT was the key.

Microsoft releases yet another smaller large language model.

Microsoft claims there are over 15million users of its Github Copilot.

The folks at Wikipedia announce their AI strategy. AI tools will help, but not replace, human editors.

Microsoft reports a good financial quarter.

Meta also reports a good financial quarter.

Quoting, "Google is close to striking a deal with Apple to integrate Gemini into the iPhone."

Amazon updates its family of AI models.

This goes in a completely different direction. Google, whose tools practically eliminate the need to learn foreign languages, has a tool to help learn foreign languages.

In a similar vein, Duolingo doubles its foreign language learning offerings due to use of AI.

I love this: building LLMs using distributed computing from folks saying, "Yes, use my computer overnight when I not using it."

North Korea's troops are fighting in Ukraine and leaping ahead in their capabilities.

It appears that Mr. Trump knew what he was doing as America now has access to minerals in Ukraine.

This study shows that while people are using AI, the use isn't reducing jobs or improving productivity. People use AI and complete their work faster. Then they sit and do nothing. Managers have yet to find the work to fill the free time.

America has a shortage of electricians. Google tosses in $10million to help train new ones.

Friday 2 May 2025

It appears that our Army likes the intelligence-gathering truck built by Palantir.

Pinterest adds labels to imagery to note those generated by AI systems.

Reddit reports a good financial quarter.

And of course Apple reports a good financial quarter.

Roku reports a good financial quarter. We love our televisions and such.

McDonald's isn't doing well financially with low sales at every restaurant.

Meanwhile in China, well, um, I guess they really need products made in the USA.

Microsoft continues to remove passwords. Funny, they always ask me for my password.

Apple claims that tariffs will add $900Million to cost this quarter. That sounds like a lot, but is about 1% of its revenue.

"Forward motion is an asset, a skill and a job title."---Seth Godin

Who should pay for the electricity a business uses (datacenters)? Well, duh, the business pays. It's a business expense.

Meta's Reality Labs has lost about a Billion $$$ a month since 2020.

Our National Institutes of Health (NIH) implements a rule that all research funded by the public is available to the public at no cost. It seems this is a new rule that should have always been the rule.

Saturday 3 May 2025

Amazon pumps $4Billion into services for rural America.

Apple announces a major shift in its supply chain to US factories. Perhaps Mr. Trump knew what he was doing.

Nvidia is modifying its processors downward so it can still sell them to China.

Meanwhile in the world, American company Uber teams with Chinese company Momenta to bring self-driving cars to Europe.

Self-driving big rigs are making runs between Dallas and Houston. They still have humans on board to monitor safety.

Ne'er-do-wells calling themselves DragonForce take credit for stealing money from British retail stores.

Meanwhile in Ireland, a court fines TikTok $600million for sending users data back to China. What else would TikTok be doing with user data. Of course they send it back to China.

A new executive order stops the funding of news outlets NPR and PBS. Of course this is politically charged, but in America the government isn't supposed to bias the news with money.

Tougher times at the Subway sandwich shop as the number of restaurants drops to a 20-year low.

Apple brings in Anthropic to help it add vibe coding or artificial programming to Apple's Xcode.

We have a little more evidence that perhaps there is a ninth planet in our solar system. If it is there, it is pretty big and a long, long ways away.

Meanwhile in England, by 2027 all new homes built will have solar panels built into them.

Sunday 4 May 2025

Vibe coding, what I call hobby coding, this piece calls personal-scale projects. Pretty much in agreement.

Going from pilot project to real project ... well, that's a long and difficult trip.

AI is taking jobs, now. Face up to it. "Almost every professional artist or illustrator I meet tells me they have lost clients and gigs to firms that have turned to AI instead of paying for human work;"

New threat to the environment: old satellites fall out of orbit and vaporise into metal bits in the atmosphere.

The recent power failure on the Iberian peninsula has brought the cellphone system back up S L O W L ... Y. Sales of Starlink systems rose 35%.

Wear a gadget that records everything heard (said). Feed that into a system that transcribes it all and does the usual text processing. This piece recounts one person's three-month experience. Benefits? Yes. If you can stand yourself.

Our current President proposes a new budget for NASA. Of course this is politically charged and hence usually stops thinking. Move money from what doesn't work to what does work. Who is against that? Foes of Elon Musk are surely against that.

Sometimes we need reminding that movies are just movies with a lot of literary license and stuff that just isn't true. The Star Wars battle scenes were made to mimic the aerial combat of the movies of the 1930s and 1940s, not actual physics. Oh well, they sure are entertaining if completely phony.

When we borrow money, we pay back the loans. That is the harsh economic reality. And sometimes that is really HARSH.

DOGE is removing barriers and combining databases held by the various agencies of our Federal government. This brings efficiency. Efficiency saves money, but is also a tradeoff. The goal is to bring the efficiency without bringing the bad parts of efficiency.

Meanwhile at Peking University, researchers claim to have invented a new type of transistor that breaks all speed records and does not use silicon (sand). Performance is great, but why move away from silicon?

Warren Buffet retires at 94.