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.
Meanwhile in China, censorship remains alive and well.
Copilot and other AI productivity tools are doing what they advertise---doing menial tasks like organizing and cleaning the inbox after you take a week off. Now, if the Federal governments (toss in state and local as well) will adopt these tools...
If you can get it, the Gemini integration in the Chrome browser does a lot for you as well.
Ah, let's have government run the social media sites. Ah, that't not a good idea IHMO.
Changing the norms for programming. Non-programming managers and users have wanted to do this since the day after the first program was written by "one of those people."
Quoting: a James Bond for Dummies movie. The 'Plot is really just an excuse to show us lots of explosions, car/motorcycle/helicoptor chases... Yes, the Mission Impossible movies haven't changed much over the years. And the current one will be lucky to make back its $400million cost to produce. The Minecraft Movie on the other hand, pure gold profit.
FreeBSD is still here, still works, and still has a good license.
Reading like a writer or analyzing what it is we are reading.
If you write, you are criticized. Deal with it.
The writing buddy. This brings some accountability and goal setting and goal meeting. If I don't write this now, my buddy will frown at me and I hate that.
Freelance workers: some tips on maintaining relative calm during stress-filled times. If I ever encounter stress-filled times, I will try to recall these tips.
One writer's process of non-process and the highs and lows brought by it.
I like this post from Seth Godin about writing and speaking to one person...not a crowd.
....Meanwhile in Austin (population growing). Tesla is about to start a driverless taxi service.
Tim Cook did not go with President Trump on the middle east visit. Mistake.
Where the money went: Singapore residents fall victim to scam$.
Good little piece on how to scan documents with the iPhone.
The price of Nikon cameras is about to rise...yes, because of tariffs. Build them here.
Live a long life and you have to watch all your friends die. Dick Van Dyke still going at 99.
I back this idea: our current President mulls taking the $3Billion in frozen Harvard assets and giving that to trade schools. I doubt this will happen, but hey all you billionaire$, give to trade schools, not private, already-rich colleges.
More about programmers doing less programming and more prompting these chattering bots for code.
NLWeb, MCP, etc. and putting a chatbot into every webpage because...well, why not?
.....Note the subtitle of this news story: this issue with foreign students isn't about education or culture. IT IS MONEY. Colleges charge double extra to foreign students who are usually funded by their home governments et al. Restricting foreign students hits colleges where it hurts the most. Of course this is all politics. Let's not be naive. Harvard has for decades been cozy with the Democratic party. Now a Republican is in the White House and Harvard holds out its hands palms up and says, "What, we were just kidding. We're all friends here, right?" A look at the facts and statements and such and gosh it looks bad on the front page of the newspaper. Actions bring consequences...sometimes decades later.
Quoting the headline: TSMC to open chip design centre in Munich, could later support AI development
Apple buys a little video game studio.
Meanwhile in Europe, real news that isn't news as the EU fines Apple half a billion$.
Entry level jobs are pretty mechanical and systematic. AI does those things now. New employees? Who?
Meanwhile in Singapore, the governors try to build some local AI at low cost.
Our Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is losing many of its senior government employees. This would be bad news if the agency was known for excellence and efficiency. Alas, it, like most others, is just another government agency with about 10% of its employees doing 90% of the world and having their best ideas squashed by these senior employees. I am still waiting for government employees to admit that they brought all this DOGE stuff on their own heads by just standing by while stupid things happened.
Nuclear power is the cure for the power ailments brought by AI. Is it?
A new term for me "pro-natalist." It means have more babies. Why not? Because housing costs too much. Why? Because of regulations. Cut regulations and many of the problems of the world dissipate.
Big promises from Opera's new browser. Trouble is, it doesn't exist yet.
The SpaceX Starship had another failure...third in a row.
Play Uno the card game---if you first agree on the rules.
Why the humanoid form of the robot? It doesn't work well.
.....Over at Pirate Wires, J.B. Rango has a simple thing for our Federal government to do with colleges that will drastically cut waste: (1) stop paying tuition through loans as that just raises the prices and waste, and (2) stop funding social science research, just fund STEM research.
And more from Pirate Wires, Riley Nork (is that a real name?) reminds us that we don't want these chattering bots to be candid with us. We want them to tell us that we are good regardless of what we are.
Microsoft updates its Surface Laptop as reviewed here.
Nvidia reports a big, big, big, financial quarter.
Mr. Musk leaves Washington D.C. The mess in Washington was far uglier than he expected. This is probably a good insight into the workings of our Federal government.
Google adds capabilities to its Photos application.
Meanwhile in Taiwan, the chip industry runs on immigrants from the Philippines. No, it isn't pretty.
Calls to reduce facial recognition technology in law enforcement in the UK.
Looking back at the hobby computer culture of the mid-to-late 1970s.
Here is the original story. This is an excellent piece of history reporting. During 1976 to 1980, I was in college. I didn't own a computer. I could barely afford the Texas Instruments calculator I had. It was programmable, and I programmed it as well as run its engineering software packages. I learned computer hardware and programming in college. Around 1979 or 1980 there were a couple of stores near LSU that sold little computers. There seemed to be a divide among tech guys (not many gals :( ) that either you knew programming for real or you had a computer and used software from other folks.
.....We learn that we aren't prepared to deal with minor-on-minor child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Meanwhile in China, "More than a hundred global brands are linked to factories using Uyghur and other ethnic minority workers recruited through a system international authorities call forced labour..." Do we want to keep buying those products from China at any price? They used to call this slavery.
Per Chainalysis, the US government was about $20Billion in crypto current holdings. Good to see the Washington Post going to a reputable source like Chainalysis for analysis.
The leaders at the New York Times sign up with Amazon to allow Amazon to train on NYTimes' content. If you can't beat 'em, at least be paid by 'em.
Meta and Anduril partner to on augmented reality helmets for the US military. In this application area, there is no fear of privacy invasion by wearing sensors (cameras, etc.).
A group of international students is suing our Federal government to prevent them from reading things the students post on social media for the whole world to read. This doesn't make sense to anyone. If you don't want everyone to read your thoughts, don't publish it for everyone to read.
Demand for online US college courses has plummeted this year. Our current President has a beef with Harvard. Extending that to everyone hurts the immigration of top-notch people. These are the people we want to immigrate.
.....The New York Times reports an out-of-control life style for Elon Musk during last year's presidential campaign. Note, the NYTimes doesn't like Mr. Musk.
Meanwhile in Washington D.C., Palantir walks in the door and starts merging data among Federal agencies. Good and bad in this.
TSMC considers building a large chip factory in the UAE. More plants off the island of Formosa increases the danger of an invasion from the mainland.
Our current President moves to close loopholes on sanctions on Chinese companies.
Mr. Musk lobbies hard for deregulation on self-driving vehicles.
Relax folks, DOGE is not leaving Washington D.C. Agencies are being visited by DOGE more not less. More cuts of wasteful spending.
OpenAI has plans and goals to be our super assistant in all places at all times. This is known as vendor lock in and is usually not a good idea.
Industrial-scale pirating of premium television services. There is no end to these things.
.....Google now as an Android phone app called AI Edge Gallery that lets folks run AI models on their phone...no cloud computing involved. Now if they would only have an app that let's me run LLMs on my home computers. I guess the smartphones are more powerful computers than my home computers.
Meta plans to replace more people with more software in its safety monitoring. Facebook started doing this years ago when the managers realized they couldn't hire enough human monitors. Yes, at one time, a person looked at my Facebook post before it went online. It just costs too much to hire people. Bring in the software, algorithms, and automation. Simple.
AI in education: let the fussing continue. There are experts who "know how people learn." Well, I never seemed to learn the way I was supposed to learn. And there are many others who learn differently from how I know they should learn. So, here we are. Again, let the fussing continue.
The "boomerang hire" exists. Laid off from a job, reapply and be re-hired for it later. You fired me? I am mad. I will never come back to you and this dump! Hold your tongue.
Quoting the headline, "Israel becomes the first country to down drones in combat with a laser weapon" The future was last week.
More hype or thoughts on AI and change. In the early fall of 2022, I was studying the strategic implications of AI on the future of government and the military. In October 2022, ChatGPT fell on us. No one predicted that. No one predicted that. The future was last week. This afternoon will be two generations ahead of this morning. Studying AI's future? Why? In one sense, it is all a game of numbers. The number of people with the resources that make computing breakthroughs is in the hundreds of millions. We have built the tools to accelerate and we are now using them.
I guess this is a good place to make some comment about the human condition. The kick boxing robots is an amazing technical feat. And this comes from a country that runs on slave labor and keeps millions of people in concentration camps because they were born to parents who had a certain religion. What is wrong with us? How can we do both of these things?
Testimonials from folks who actually lost their jobs to AI.
Part of that story tells that the arrival of the PC at work only boosted productivity 3%. Really? That's crazy and lazy. If a PC only boosted a person by 3%, that person was lazy and should be fired. The same comes with AI. If you don't use it and perform much better, you will deservedly lose your job. Everyone is a freelance worker. Find ways to add value or be replaced. Everyone is in the same situation.
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