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: 16-22 December, 2024

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• The Israel-Gaza conflict continues
• Folks are seeing drones in New Jersey and up and down the east coast
• Congress is stopped before it can pass a bloated continuing resolution
• Congress still managers to pass a funding bill just under the deadline---self-created drama queens
• College football tries a 12-team playoff, first games are boring as home crowds dominate

Monday 16 December 2024

Recruiters can tell when job seekers are using AI. Recruiters are deleting these applications.

Real news that isn't news: our DHS and FBI want more authority. The latest excuse is all these drones that people are reporting on the east coast. In the mid-1970s, everyone on the Gulf Coast saw flying saucers. I guess each generation or two has its thing to see in the sky or swamp.

Meanwhile in the American workplace, people are using AI. Bosses are far behind the timeline.

And in some big tech companies, smart people are use AI agents to greatly speed slow work.

Quoting, "The total developers working in crypto worldwide was basically flat, declining a statistically insignificant 7% from a year earlier."

Meanwhile in American schools, "Fight! Fight!" was the cry for generations. Now its on live video online and stuff like that. Kids still want to fight one another and other kids still want to watch.

In disaster areas, communication is crucial. People are using WhatsApp. At one time, Twitter was used as such.

Early rumors about Apple making a foldable iPad that would unfold into a really big screen.

Something about writing well: others can read what you wrote and improve their own writing. You benefit others by doing your craft well.

Writers: beware of scams. There are many ways folks try to get money for nothing from you.

This is a deeper-thought post on writing fiction as a narrative or sequence and the idea of human events.

The business prospects of writing and publishing and selling novellas or short novels.

Showing your work at an industry trade show. TRY TRY TRY for all money flowing to the writer, not to someone else. Advertising is funny that way.

A call for correct and proper grammar. I guess someone needs to write pieces like this as most folks toss out grammar as something unnecessary or something.

Tuesday 17 December 2024

Personal goals and accomplishments from one freelancer. There is some benefit to this type of thing.

Our Intelligence Community has a new standard related to open-source intelligence.

The current paradigm in AI is to train large models on everything that has ever been written by anyone. Then create synthetic data to pile on top. Well, this isn't working anymore.

In praise of the "new" AI agents. Nothing new here. The current group is better than past ones.

Do your light dim now and then? You may be living near a datacenter. Power, power, and more power are needed to keep this going.

Folks are trying to figure out how OpenAI will change itself to a for-profit company.

Grammarly acquires Coda and brings in its CEO.

Our Federal Trade Commission passes a new regulation requiring hotels to divulge the final price not the initial price that will then be augmented with lots of other prices.

Our next President is suing the Des Moines Register and its main pollster. They published that Ms. Harris was ahead by three points. Mr. Trump carried the state by 13 points. A little mistake or an attempt to sway voters?

There is some inkling among tech business leaders that Mr. Trump will ease restrictions on bringing in high tech talent via visas.

Zuckerburg claims that Threads has over 100million daily active users and 300million monthly active users.

Google announces Whisk. It is an image generator that uses other images as inputs.

Wednesday 18 December 2024

There are lots of smart folks in China. Many of them have AI expertise. Who loses if the US government doesn't allow them in the US to work for American companies?

Nvidia releases an upgrade to the Jetson Orin Nano Super. At $249, this is a super duper computer in a little single-board package. Run real AI applications at budget prices.

The numbers here are amazing. Microsoft bought half a million Nvidia processors. Not half a million $$$$ worth, but half a million processors.

Quote the headline, "Intel announces Arrow Lake performance fix is now available - another update coming next month"

Amazon shows new packaging for all their little hardware gadgets. Less plastic, more paper, etc.

TP-Link is a Chinese company that makes a router that dominates the American marketplace. US government officials, ten years behind the times, show a little concern about this.

Our Supreme Court will hear a case on the coming TikTok ban.

GitHub now has a no-cost version of CoPilot.

And now we can use ChatGPT by calling on the phone and talking to it.

Amazon was requiring workers to return to the office. Now they count heads and chairs and back off that requirement.

The current paradigm in AI is basic supervised learning from worldwide data sets. News flash (not): the big rich tech companies control that data. Many others are worried.

Oops. Major math error in study that called for everyone to throw away their black plastic kitchen utensils.

Intel finally has a winner with a new GPU card.

Fear and loathing in drone land.

I love this quote, "Turns out that drones in the night sky are about as hard to photograph as Sasquatch."

Thursday 19 December 2024

We are approaching Christmas day. News is slowing. Fewer entries herein.

Congress was trying to pass a continuing resolution to keep the Federal employees employed. A few members, however, inserted a few hundred Billion$ (with a B). Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump, and many members of Congress say "NO" to the extras. Perhaps Congress will return to the Constituional idea of one budget bill per year. Perhaps that concept is just to archaic or something. Basically, Mr. Biden has four weeks left as President. This was an opportunity to spend money that Mr. Biden would approve and Mr. Trump would veto. It didn't work this time.

India has its own SIlicon Valley with the accompanying problems. Too many people arrive too soon and housing prices rise too high.

The market for wrist-worn computers seems to have reached its peak.

Musk is hiring people to hire people for DOGE. Many of these top positions come with no pay. Let's hear it for rich people volunteering. Good.

I see that mathematical models can now "pretend." Perhaps we are attributing a bit too much to a large matrix of floating point numbers.

Why waste time on self-driving trucks. Use the tech to make video games instead. More fun. Less risk.

Some folks make a big deal out of San Disk changing the font on its logo.

Friday 20 December 2024

Recent testing shows that many adults can't read well or at all. No one has forgotten how to read; they never learned. Literacy rates are inflated and social promotion continues despite more testing in schools.

The European Union wants to build its own constellation of internet satellites to compete with Starlink. Good luck with that. A government organization doing this?

Keeping up with OpenAI, Google updates their video-generating tool Veo 2.

A market survey shows that Internet use rose 17.4% this past year. The Internet is not dead.

Oops. Hackers break into a Rhode Island state benefits system.

The neon sign is slowly being replaced by look-a-like LED signs. Shame.

Seagate's 32 TeraByte disk drives are here. Experts predict the disappearance of the spinning drive decades ago. Wrong again.

An American company is buying an Israeli company. The European Commission has jurisdiction on this business move. Someone explain how that works as I don't understand.

Here is a new AI model that allows robots to virtually practice tasks instead of actually practicing. The practicing occurs 430,000 times faster. How did they measure that?

Meanwhile in Malaysia, regulators list the companies that will have to pay them money to have a license to operate. I understand how this work$.

Quoting, "Google has released what it's calling a new reasoning AI model."

Perhaps real soon now we will build neural networks in hardware instead of simulating them in software. I heard that 40+ years ago, Perhaps now?

Weight-loss drugs are hot. They are now 5% of all drug prescriptions in the US.

Microsoft previews live language translation for audio on the more powerful PCs and Windows 11.

Some US Senators blast the automakers for collecting lots of information on how we drive cars we buy from automakers. Odd, those lawmakers don't fuss much when law enforcement organizations subpoena that data to solve crimes.

Saturday 21 December 2024

Folks are fussing at Elon Musk for speaking his mind on the last-minute funding bills. Mr. Musk is not a member of Congress. Mr. Musk does not have a vote. Those members of Congress vote as they see fit.

A "government shutdown" is averted. The Federal government would not have ceased to operate. That phrase is something the press uses to sell ads.

Our current President somehow provides $4.28 billion in student-debt cancellation. Someone explain how this works as I don't understand.

Meanwhile in America, basic reading skills have dropped. Closing schools for COVID was a terrible idea. Read this article about how kids don't realize that a book is upside down.

"America is one big casino now" I think this is terrible. It is also a sign of the wealth of every American.

Meanwhile on planet earth, we are burning more coal than ever. Clean energy is coming real soon now.

Meanwhile in China, people are no longer learning English. If needed, they use audio language translation software.

Lost in space: those two folks on the space station whose 8-day journey turned into 6+ months are up their even longer. NASA (here comes Mr. Musk and DOGE) has yet another schedule problem and delays their return trip.

Waymo's driverless cars have significantly fewer accidents than human-driven cars.

It appears that we have reached the flat part of the S curve in the upper right. The easy stuff has been completed already.

The sales of these goofy VR goggles continues to rise. Meta owns the market.

Oops. Personal data of 5.6 million hospital patients stolen. Ah, national electronic health records.

Google offers its own suggestions in the anti-trust case. I predict that with the incoming President, the outcome will be closer to what Google proposes than what Government lawyers want.

Anthropic writes software that breaks Ai software written by Anthropic and others. This is a failure of not applying systems engineering appropriately.

News Flash (not): Keep a person watching the output of AI systems improves everything. Competent people are still worth the money.

Sunday 22 December 2024

College football has its first 12-team playoff this year with the first four games being home games. It was a bust as none of the games were worth watch past halftime (two not worth watching after the first quarter). The MONEY FLOWED $$$. Therefore, we'll be stuck with this junk for a few more years.

And the last few big chunk$ of ca$h flow out of the CHIPS Act. The best of intentions foiled by work at the speed of government. Perhaps something good will come of this.

How the folks behind the Encyclopedia Britannica adapted to Web 2.0 and Wikipedia and became profitable and worth more $$$ than ever.

Oh, by the way, the value of Tesla's stock has risen 73% since that election.

The currently prevailing AI paradigm, super-duper-large language models, hits several walls. It is still quite useful, but won't do everything everyone wants.

ASUS announces one of those small-form-factor mini PCs that qualifies as a CoPilot Plus PC.

A study of PhD abstracts written from 1812 to 2023 show that the writing has become awful, almost incomprehensible. Oh well.

Writing about writing, these new AI writing tools do a good but not great job. As usual, use the tool and edit. Good grief.

SIGNIFICANT: Researchers in the UK put a gram of Carbon-14 radioactive isotopes in a case made of synthetic diamonds. Whereas a AA battery runs dead in 24 hours of continuous use, this radioactive diamond battery will last for, oh, about 6,000 to 10,000 years.