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 is the equivalent of drones suddenly falling out of the sky and destroying B52s parked at Air Force Global Strike Command fields scattered across America.
I predicted this type of drone use over ten years ago in a short story.
Strong rumors about Apple's big WWDC event.
Music recording companies are signing deals with AI companies to get money.
Yet factory jobs in America sit unfilled. Go to work at something that requires skilled hands.
The "robots" (machines that do useful things) at Amazon.
Blue Origin has its 12th safe human space flight to the "edge of space."
This writer uses AI to advise on marketing. Good choice.
Some tips on having a character show the world instead of the author telling about it.
Some tips on what book publishers like to see in books sent to them.
The "artist date." I guess this is a like a short vacation or something.
....Using new software tools to make DoD purchasing more efficient. This is a "it's about time" move. Really? Come on. Okay, get the documents ready and wait six months for an approval board to meet.
Yoshua Bengio forms a new organization to attempt to make AI safer. The disappointing thing about the article is it credits Bengio as a pioneer of AI. Bengio did great work in the 2000s. The pioneers did great work in the 1950s and 1960s.
Meanwhile at Walmart, more automation and fewer employees.
Our FDA rolls out an AI system to help reviewers and such.
A group of tech companies is compiling a list of state-sponsored hacking groups.
Here is a candid piece about AI and programming. Good points in here. Much of the arguing is people are talking past each other using different vocabularies. Also, the world has changed in the past six months (or weeks or days or hours). The newer tools are newer, really.
More on Ukraine's attack on Russian airfields deep inside Russia. The Ukrainians provided video to the world of their triumph within minutes. This isn't the TV War (Vietnam). This is the Social Media War.
Rumors that Nvidia's Arm-based PC chip could make its debut in Alienware's laptops later this year.
More on the Ukraine drone attacks deep in Russia. Folks, I am not putting ideas into the heads of ne'er-do-wells. Hacktivists will do the next attacks inside any country that has a military base.
.....Teachers react to students using chatbots to write assignments. Teachers mostly hate it.
More on Ukarine's drone attack. Open-source, built in the basement, with Legos, 20-year-old software powered the drones. "ArduPilot is an open source software system that takes its name from the Arduino hardware systems it was originally designed to work with. It began in 2007 when (Chris) Anderson launched the website DIYdrones.com and cobbled together a UAV autopilot system out of a Lego Mindstorms set (Anderson is also the former editor-in-chief of WIRED.)" Folks, watch out.
Our current President posts little thoughts all day, every day. Our prior President? Not so much. And of course someone must ask if Mr. Trump is actually doing this or are aides doing it?
Some researchers believe that DeepSeek is using Google's Gemini to train its AI.
Users of Google's NotebookLM can now share their notebooks with everyone.
Pushing towards innovation and away from regulation. Our current President will reorganize the U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI) into the new Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI). I guess "I-see" becomes "Si-see" or something like that.
About a third of CISA employees are leaving. That's a 33% cut. Should be about 40%. When was the last time you heard someone proclaim, "That CISA does a great job!" Well?
Lawmakers in many states don't like the idea of the Federal government banning state regulation of AI. I favor the states over the Federal in general. Having 50 different states and hundreds of counties regulating AI...messy bordering on the impossible for any company in the US to build AI systems.
Money is flowing to new companies that make software that writes software. No one is profitable, yet. That may end it all. Thought experiment: Write 10 lines of software that can write 100 lines of software that can write 1,000 lines of software that can ... write 10million lines of software that can... Therefore, all you need to do is write ten lines of software, turn it on, and in a few days you have rewritten all the software in the world. Right?
Yet another text-to-video AI service thing.
Quoting, "A consortium of more than 42 organizations, led by Nokia (Finland), opens new tab, will work on an unmanned drone project aimed at protecting and bolstering the resilience of Europe's most critical infrastructures." Given the recent Ukrainian drone attack on Russian airfields, such a defense system is overdue.
Office space seems to be a lagging indicator of something. More is being removed than added.
We have the case of 700 low-paid persons pretending to be AI software.
Gone the way of the dinosaur is the 5-speed manual tranmission car in America.
.....Quoting G.B. Rango of Pirate Wires, "Safety researchers justify their own jobs by designing (and then catching) these self-fulfilling safety violations before tweeting dramatically to generate industry PR and drum up support for AI regulation." And then this justifies CISA and other government jobs. Oh well.
The Washington Post "tests" chatbots for how well they work on different types of documents.
The IRS had written some tax filing software. It is in the public domain. And now private industry must compete with government which is just plain wrong as government can lose money on what it does (quite good at that). Solution? Greatly simplify the tax code ... at least for individuals. But don't hold your breath on that one.
Meanwhile at OpenAI, "ChatGPT is gaining connectors for Dropbox, Box, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Google Drive. This allows ChatGPT to look for information across users' own services to answer their questions. " FINALLY! Point an AI system at my disk drive. Now I can ask questions. Of course I am not a business and no prices given on this.
And another thing from OpenAI, monthly active users is up to 3million from 2million for businesses.
Here is an early look at Meta's next-generation of smart glasses. We are approaching what many of us have wanted for 40 years.
And Silicon Valley returns to its roots: the defense industry.
Long quote here: He is one of a growing number of people who are actively resisting: people who are terrified of the power of generative AI and its potential for harm and don't want to feed the beast; those who have just decided that it's a bit rubbish, and more trouble than it's worth; and those who simply prefer humans to robots. And one day, these folks may be the heroes of the resistance to tyranny. Or maybe one day they will be like the critics of 3D TV (remember that flop?).
Reddit sues Anthropic for continuing to scrape its content after it promised to stop.
And now we have micro schools or the old one-room schoolhouse. If we ever have real school vouchers for parents, one of the better things in the USA is to have a teaching certificate. It would become quite lucrative. Back to the 1800s when the richer folks educated their own kid with a family tutor.
KDE is trying to convince folks that their Windows 10 computer should be switched to Linux.
.....Only in Washington D.C... HHS employees sue because some were laid off in error because of errors in personnel databases. Uh, oh, we were incompetent and didn't manage our databases. You can't fire us for that type of incompetence or any type of incompetence because we incompetently failed to maintain the simplest information. Or something like that.
And we have the AI Bible YouTube channel. Well...I don't know what to say.
Some history of how Nintendo has marketed to the American male.
Microsoft prints its own magazine to set the record straight as far as they see it. It is high-quality printing and long-form stories. Sit on the plane and read it.
And Donald Trump and Elon Musk now disagree strongly about just about everything.
Broadcom reports a good financial quarter. AI is still booming.
Walmart expands its flying drone delivery of packages.
Meanwhile in China, this year's AI boom is around agents (whatever they are).
Return to the office? Not at Dropbox. Like sending people back to the mall and movie theater. Good analogy.
Andrew Ng is bullish on AI-assisted coding. He doesn't like the "vibe coding" name.
Meanwhile in the UK, listings for tech jobs are up. You have to know how to spell AI.
"While we can accept rejection gracefully, we don't have to stay there."---Johanna Rothman
.....Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are arguing. Many others fear the fallout.
While others think this is all a fake with a hidden agenda of some sorts.
And now the ne'er-do-wells have the residential proxy for hiding in plain sight.
New executive orders eliminate cyber policies from the prior President. Rule by Executive Order is not a good thing for anyone.
And DOGE is hiring. I see this as a good idea. Bring in outsiders with skills for a short term. They don't play career games and fall into the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
Google adds more useful features to the paid version of its Gemini. Make useful tools that are effective and recommendable.
A roundup of rumors about next week's Apple WWDC.
Volvo claims a new adaptive seat belt system.
Let the fussing begin. NYPD wants to encrypt its radio communications. The press wants to be able to listen in. Public work by public officials in public. The ne'er-do-wells, however, can listen and then encrypt their own communications to gain a huge advantage and allow themselves to do whatever ne'er-do-wells do. Privacy? Safety? Public information?
See this photo, what's the location? Bellingcat tests the LLMs and finds that ChatGPT does pretty darn well.
.....A bit more angst about Wordpress and where all that is going.
And more angst at Apple over AI and Siri and all such things.
More on the plight of Filipino workers in factories in Taiwan.
One strategy is to spend time finding the one wheel and address it. The better approach is to realize that if there's one wheel that's squeaking, it's likely that all the wheels need lubrication.---Seth Godin I absolutely agree. Let's pay attention. Problems usually have close kin.
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