Odd Lots
- Creatine not only helps you build muscle—new tests strongly suggest that it can help the body fight cancer cells. The tests are with mice, so there will need to be a lot of further research, but this is great news for anyone (like us) who take creatine on a daily basis.
- Lazarus Version 4.8 is now available. It’s a bugfix release, compiled with FPC 3.2.2. Free and easy to update. Go get it!
- IBM has created a 7 angstrom node for making extremely high-density chips. It’s done by stacking sheets of transistors vertically and bonding the transistors together in a way that makes logic gates etc, with potentially up to 100 billion transistors on a single chip. Screw flying cars. This is the future I had hoped for!
- A guy who’s been blogging now for 25 years lays out a fascinating history of the technology he’s used along that timeline, and how it has evolved. I knew a lot of this (my blog is now 28 years old) but he puts it all in one place in a single well-written article.
- It had to happen. I should have written an SF story about it back in the early ‘80s, but back then I didn’t drink wine. So don’t pop that cork just yet. Claude can act as your AI sommelier.
- Broadcom and OpenAI have announced Jalapeno, a custom chip designed specifically to handle AI inference logic. It’s a sort of AI accelerator, and with any luck at all it will specialize the AI chip market so that the rest of us can afford system memory and SSDs.
- Here’s a slightly weird AI-related site: In The Weights. It’s basically a leaderboard of names present in all the major AIs. I’m #148 on the leaderboard, with a score of 841. It found two hallucinations on me, one claiming that I was an American actor and comedian; the other an electronic/experimental musician. I’m dead certain (but not dead) that I’m the only Jeff Duntemann who has ever lived (yes, I have a third cousin Jeff Dunteman, one n at the end) and I have never done any acting or composing. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
- Venezuela got hit by two violent back-to-back earthquakes, one Richter 7.2 and the second 7.5. Carol and I lived through the October 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which logged at 6.9, and the quake was one major reason we left the Santa Cruz area in 1990 for Arizona shortly thereafter.
Posted in: None Of The Above.
Re In the Weights.
Today’s top 250: religion – 4, other – 8, fictional – 9, sports – 11, music – 12, arts – 13, business – 14, film-tv – 22, media – 22, writing – 22, politics – 24, tech – 39, science – 50. One double entry (Nick and Nikos Drydakis, Professor of Economics at Anglia Ruskin University). “Strength” from 980 to 524. I recognize 8.
All-time top 250: religion – 7, arts – 8, tech – 9, fictional – 13, science – 15, sports – 24, writing – 31, film-tv – 39, music – 44, politics – 54. 10 double entries: Barack (Hussein) Obama (II), Beyoncé Knowles(-Carter), (Queen) Elizabeth II, Hillary (Rodham) Clinton, Jesus Christ/of Nazareth, Joe/Joseph R. Biden (Jr.)
Lionel (Andrés) Messi, Mark Twain/Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mahatma/Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Vladimir (Vladimirovich) Putin. One triple entry: Donald (J./John) Trump. “Strength” from 996 (Paul McCartney) to 988 (Paul the Apostle). I recognize all but 3 (two of which I had heard of).
One gathers that 1,000 is a ceiling approached asymptotically, and that there are a lot of persons just outside the All-time top 250 (Minnie Mouse is in, but not Mickey.) None of Today’s are All-time.
Also: I show up as Richard Rostrom (who writes about the Civil War) and as Rich Rostrom (SF fan), hallucinated as an NFL tight end, MLB relief pitcher, and open-source/anti-war activist.
Oddly, a friend who I would consider a much bigger personality doesn’t show at all.