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.
LSU wins the baseball championship of college-related-professional realm.
Oklahoma City wins the NBA championship.
I like this: a man sues Workday to learn why their algorithm for screening resumes and job applications always rejected him. A judge upholds his lawsuit. Let the games begin. Let's fix this mess.
These are pen-and-paper notebooks. They have strange shapes. Maybe this will work?
Protect the truth with a bodyguard of lies. The art of deception.
Bill Gates meets Linus Torvalds for the first time. Historic photo of sorts.
Father's Day gifts for writers. Oh well, too late for me.
I am an aspiring writer. I am an unpublished writer. I am a drop-the-adjective-stuff writer. Do what you can control. Write. A writer cannot control sale$. A writing can control how much they write.
Revise and revise and revise. Enough already. Ship it.
More on show, don't tell. Do this unless it is time to tell and not show.
Some thoughts on narrative writing.
....Samsung shows a new chipset using a 3nm process.
In the UK, Amazon is pouring $40Billion (with a B) into warehouses and such.
If you are pursuing a PhD, don't bet on landing a university job. You will have to look elsewhere.
.....Meanwhile at Microsoft, here come job cuts in the Xbox division.
Anthropic wins in court on a "fair use" case of using copyrighted books to train AI.
HPE has an annual conferences and introduces more offerings in (what else but?) AI.
AI-generated job listings collide with AI-generated resumes and gosh aren't we all having fun now? Nope. Employers created this mess. Now live with it.
AI and other tech come to the home garden.
TP-Link has new 4K outdoor battery-powered security cameras.
Back to the physical keyboard for a smartphone.
Microsoft releases a new version of its old MS-DOS Editor. Ah. Nostalgia.
And new research shows that caffeine is good for us.
.....Maxar adds some type of AI software to help control its imagery satellites.
More layoffs coming to Intel as it shuts down its automotive business.
Several states stop sharing their license plate reading data with others. Privacy is good and obvious. Law enforcement sharing information to catch criminals is good and obvious. Now we argue.
Anthropic improves its code and app building capabilities in its Claude models.
Reddit tries to fight off AI slop from its discussions.
Amazon tries to move into health care in India.
Google brings a command line interface to Gemini.
A little side note from Seth Godin: chat GPT knows a shocking amount about you, while Claude starts over every time. Neither promises airtight security, but then again, neither does American Express, Visa or Google That's right folks. VISA knows much a tries to protect that information.
.....We may have the return of the TV screen. We need something to watch on those 8-foot gadgets.
I wonder how these clothes will look on me? (something I have never asked) Anyways, Google has a new AI app that helps a person see themselves. I guess this solve some problem for some folks. I can think of better things to do with all this technology, but "better" is a subjective term.
Palantir enters the nuclear power market.
Used batteries power a datacenter in Nevada. Good! These batteries are from cars. Stationary batteries work longer than than bouncing down the roads.
We now have couples' retreats where one person is a person and the other person is an AI think. Well, I guess this is important to some folks.
And Anthropic claims that folks feel better after chatting with Claude about emotional issues. There, this is important to some folks.
Meanwhile at Salesforce, the CEO says AI is doing 30% of the work. That work was performed by people. One question is what type of work is this? Why did it take so long for Salesforce to become efficient?
You finished the task (with AI). Did you, however, understand the results? Perhaps not.
End of an era as Microsoft retires the dreaded "blue screen of death."
404 Media reports, "Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using a new mobile phone app that can identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by simply pointing a smartphone camera at them," When did it become bad to put criminals in jail? I am not naive. I know this is political. Let's not forget that facial recognition found the killers in the Boston Marathon murders. No one complained then.
.....I like this response to things and situations I don't like. Foreign governments don't have tariffs, but they tax, regulate, and fine American companies. The result---money transfer---is the same.
Shoplifting. Well, just put enough cameras and AI in the back of the store and catch it all.
OpenAI shifts some of its computational load from Nvidia processors to processors from Google.
Out: Prompt Engineering. In: Context Engineering. In other words, if you write better, you can write better.This is a multi-level joke.
Forget Hollywood's A list. The AI world has The List.
If we send photos to a social media company, they will use them to train AI. Be flattered, I guess.
I love this Seth Godin essay on education and learning. Learning takes time and effort. All the information we may want to learn is right in front of us at no cost.
Meanwhile in America, crash test regulations are pushing car makers to limit the visibility that drivers have. We simply cannot see the road, other cars, and pedestrians. At some point in time, car makers forgot how to make cars.
Neuralink now has brain implants in seven persons. Let's hope good comes from this.
.....There comes a point when people become so sick of the marketing of things that people trash the things. It appears that everything is AI has reached that point. People use it, but hate the marketing.
Apple seems to have a hit movie with Brad Pitt and "F1."
Precision parts are needed. Making them takes skill and experience---things in short supply in America. Yet another AI to the rescue to reduce the labor required.
Is it "cheating" or merely helping or working with you to perform better? Cluely, marketed as cheating, improves its capabilities. We envisioned this type of system some 30 years ago for interviewing suspected ne'er-do-wells. The senior managers didn't like the idea as they saw no use for better performance.
"Real Journalists" move to Substack to journal. Big news, but exaggerated claims of income. The real journalists don't seem to understand that they are the person who killed their own jobs by not practicing basic journalism.
Some of the folks who own Nvidia stock are selling. It does little good to own paper. Sometimes you would like a new car, a bigger house, or simply a new pair of shoes.
AI slop comes to houseplants. Made up plants (deep fake in the garden?) and made up advice are ruining gardening or something. First world problem created by first world technology.
Frustration with the customer service call center. Folks who design such call centers should be ... well, something. Good grief. Of course customers think these actual people are AI as who else would read scripts verbatim and ask such stupid questions. There are better... much better ... ways to do these things.
Ne'er-do-wells hack into law enforcement systems to find informants and then kill them. It is unfortunate, but I have experience in these types of things. Some folks want to believe that they are secure. Believing otherwise would require hard work. Hard work is disdained, so just believe in magic. Tragedy ensues.
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