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: 17-23 February, 2025

Summary of this week:

• The Russians are still in Ukraine
• DOGE continues to audit and find wasteful spending
• And Federal workers are being laid off. Should have taken the money when it was offered.
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx
• xxx

Monday dd February 2025

Some history on the title of the Gulf of Mexico, uh, er, America.

I like this drawing about how the months of the year seem to pass.

Looking for older versions of government web sites (not sure why, but), see govwayback dot com.

Meanwhile in Bolivia, Internet service is not good. Use a Starlink --- a stolen one --- and don't pay.

In automobile racing, it appears that video games lead to real life for drivers. The simulation is that good at training drivers.

Apple and Meta are to compete in humanoid robots. Let's see.

Meanwhile at the New York Times, they are using internal AI tools to enhance productivity. At one time they wrote pencil on paper. At one time they banged typewriters and shifted manual to electric. Then came the word processor. Times change.

American poet/author Kevin Killian wrote over 2,000 product reviews on Amazon. They are now in a book. They are worth reading.

Excellent quote here: Here's what I've learned --- the marketplace will not set healthy pay boundaries for you. There will always be cheapskates. You have to set the boundaries yourself.

How one writer stays "organized" while writing a novel. There are many methods. Try them. Use what works for you and discard the rest (for a while).

This is a general piece of writing that I like. I covers what one writer considers to be writing success in 2025. It branches out well and covers several topics.

And I like this piece about AI and writing. AI is yet another tool. Use it for what it can do---the end.

Quoting on the usefulness of non-fiction books: While non-fiction books don't have to be related to a business, if you have an existing client base, or speaking platform, or you want to build one, a book can be a great way to build authority, bring in new work, and even generate income.

Use AI and copyrights to your advantage.

Another quote, "So that's my main argument for writing short stories, is that it teaches you how to be a writer." Practice. Improve. Entertain.

Thoughts on setting a daily word goal as a writer.

This piece hits home for me at my age. You look back decades on something you wrote. Then you bring it forward as is or heavily edited.

Thoughts on the "Discovery" method of writing. Writing is thinking; thinking often brings discovery.

Tuesday dd February 2025

We have serious and valid reports of "ghost engineers," i.e., folks earning $300,000 and doing practically nothing. Now, let's talk about ghost government employees. The salaries are in the $100,000 and the results are nothing. My estimate is that half of government employees are ghosts.

xAI releases a new AI model called Grok 3. Of course it requires ten times the processing power to build. All this AI construction is out of reach of researchers and even governments. Only the super rich and super big companies can do these things.

Some notes on the history of how Apple moved away from China, an unreliable business partner, and towards India. A somewhat imperfect democracy, but a democracy nonetheless.

Fear and loathing continue at the Washington Post. I don't like the editorial policies of the Post, but the newspaper is necessary in my opinion. Those who work there and run the place, however, are dooming its future and sort of like the notion of being the last persons to work there.

The use of AI to protect undersea assets.

Quoting the headline, "New Junior Developers Can't Actually Code" Perhaps a bit exaggerated, but it appears that new programmers are gladly using AI to generate basic code.

If all goes well, and there is much that can go not so well, we will soon have a 4G cellular network on the moon.

Of course ending some foreign aid programs will cost some Americans their jobs. Did anyone expect anything else?

For one prediction of such, see my short story from a decade ago.

Southwest Airlines lays off 15% of its employees. It appears that many organizations have realized that they are fat and overgrown.

Our current President sends Mr. Musk and crew to our FAA to figure out how to do things much better. Such tasks are quite simple as the disorganization and disjointed and disgusted work is quite easy to improve. I am reminded on those seminars where a person could double their reading speed in an hour. Such was easy to accomplish as most adults read incredibly slow. It is like showing a person who only crawls how to walk. There is great improvement quickly

Meanwhile in Seattle, there is some hope that when Amazon's employees return to the office that they will drop some of their money along the way and at lunch time.

We are now in a white collar recession. Being a plumber or electrician looks pretty good.

Meanwhile out in that body of water known as a gulf, everyone wants it to be named after them. The solution is quite simple, but doesn't bring bragging rights. There is a Gulf of Mexico and a Gulf of America. Just look at the map and the dictionary. Such fundamentals, however, are lost on people in elected office and such.

Wednesday dd February 2025

I like this: LIMO or Less Is MOre. And choosing training data wisely shows that not nearly as much is needed.

Meanwhile at Intel, things have been bad, but at least the stock price rose recently.

Meta claims that it will stop storing content after 30 days. In my experience, content is always stored much longer.

Fiverr, a site for freelancers, introduces AI tools that are supposed to help gig workers generate content with AI from their content.

The Knight Foundation invests $25million in a project to help local journalism. I am all for journalist who realize they are journalist and act accordingly. I find it unfortunate that several generations of journalism degree holders succumbed to idea that Good Morning America et al was journalism. It never was. It was always giggle fritz entertainment. Journalists in the legacy media are now suffering like Federal employees are. They could have done something and, instead, did almost nothing.

A study by OpenAI shows obvious lack of capability in LLMs and computer programming.

Ars Technica reviews a tablet computer thing from Asus. Integrated graphics processing works pretty well.

Real news that isn't news: India's biggest IT staffing company was working around US immigration laws.

Sales and mergers in the video game industry.

This article is about the US Office of Technology Assessment. Much of the article is about how the polygraph (the lie detector machine) is a bad joke. Still, agencies continue to use it to raise unemployment and keep incompetent employees.

The National Science Foundation fired 168 persons. Sorry folks. Some good employees were fired while some bad employees kept their jobs. Not fair, but welcome to adulthood. The unemployed ranks are growing in the Washington D.C. area. While most of the persons have few job skills, there are some highly qualified in the ranks.

I'll just quote this as it is a brilliant summary: Alex Karp, Palantir's cofounder and CEO, said President Donald Trump doesn't accept paradigms leading to stupid outcomes --- and it's something he does very, very well. My comment: a terrible excuse is, "this is the way we've always done things here. " Come on folks, think, do better.

Hot job: personal protection. I have seen these jobs listed on LinkedIn. Executives and many others want more safety.

Thursday dd February 2025

Coming to the Dept of Defense: 8% budget cuts. If done with just a little competence, no one will notice.

I like this technology: it changes the accent of a speaker in real time. I feel for people trying to do a job, earn a paycheck, and support their family. Nevertheless, I hang up on persons on the phone when I cannot decipher their accent.

Saronic Technologies will build an autonomous shipyard it's calling Port Alpha. To date, the company builds autonomous small ships for our Dept of Defense.

Engadget reviews the Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti GPU. It is unfortunate that market prices for these are already above what Nvidia suggests. Crypto mining and AI are inflating these things.

Nvidia creates a sort of priority customer system so people can actually buy one of their new GPUs.

Volvo's next electric vehicle, the ES90 midsized luxury sedan, will come with several Nvidia GPUs that have the power of supercomputers. Tip: go to a junk yard, dig through late model vehicles, and mine the GPUs still in them.

Job cuts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Yes, some fine employees will be unemployed and flooding the job market.

Apple shows the new iPhone 16E at a lower price of $599. These new iPhones used to stop traffic with lines wrapped around the block. Nice to see they are making something that doesn't cost $1,000.

Microsoft claims a breakthrough in quantum computing.

Working in those factories that made integrated circuits brought a lot of children with birth defects.

Friday dd February 2025

Google releases a tool that uses AI to help the unemployed to find a career.

Google releases a tool to improve scientific research using (what else?) AI.

Someone has a firm grasp on the obvious: the AI tools will not by the meteor that kills the programmer. Instead, new tools, new skills, move on.

Jobs for software developers, engineers, whatever we call 'em today are down.

Foreign interference in US elections? Not to worry. Our current President moves folks at FBI and CISA to other jobs.

A tipping point: for the first time Amazon has more retail sales than Walmart.

BIG NEWS in American Sign Language: Nvidia opens a website to teach ASL.

This is a link to the website for Nvidia's Signs system.

Strong rumors that the next group of iPhones will use RF chips made by Apple.

Major League Baseball and ESPN agree NOT to renew their contract.

OpenAI claims more folks are using its chattering bots with 400million monthly active users.

Quoting, "Microsoft Research introduced Magma, an integrated AI foundation model that combines visual and language processing to control software interfaces and robotic systems."

Folks at Boeing are crediting DOGE and Mr. Musk with helping them speed delivery of the latest 747 Air Force One.

xAI builds a new datacenter in the Atlanta area with $700million worth of GPUs and such.

Lunch at Costco. Why not? Food that isn't costly. It is the person with you.

Meanwhile in China, the hospitals lead the world in retracted research papers. The rate is 50x the average. Wow.

Meanwhile in California, not having much to do in the way of wildfire recovery or education or such, they are considering making Bigfoot the official state cryptid.

Saturday dd February 2025

Times change and we have a new President directing the agencies of the Executive Branch. The new FTC is investigating user bans by social (society) media platforms.

Agents of the North Korean government continue to do what they do best: steal money.

It appears that folks are doubting Microsoft's claims of a quantum computing breakthrough.

Some folks at the Associated Press feel it is a Constitutional Right to be invited into the President's house. Last I checked, no one has burned their means of speaking or printing their thoughts.

Meanwhile in the UK, where there is no Bill of Rights, Apple says it won't build a back door access to user data. The governors there, reserving the ability to search and sieze for the governors, insist on the back door.

The Communist Party of China recognizes no borders in its attempts to find and stop speech they do not like. Chairman Mao taught them well decades ago.

Our current President moves to punish foreign governments who take great liberty at extracting money from successful US tech companies.

Here is an editorial sharply criticizing Mr. Musk and DOGE so far.

GSA to close its EV chargers as not mission critical. This is a key point in all this DOGE etc. Government employees have been spending money on things "nice to have" that are not the critical mission of their agencies. After a few decades of this, you start to run into tens of Billion$. Someone wakes up one day and wonders how we got there.

Sunday dd February 2025