WorldCAD Access

Revolt at OpenAI: The Fallout

Opinion I think what happened at OpenAI was that the board, which has the responsibility of ensuring AI is developed responsibly (see corporate structure below), became worried about the commercial direction in which ChatGPT seemed to be heading, and so fired the man leading the charge. Microsoft, which hopes that commercializing AI will help them win the race against other mega-tech-giants, naturally wants to hire him. Structure of OpenAI In my opinion, the potential importance of AI is a scam, and Microsoft might end up looking as foolish as following its desperate purchase of Nokia. Opinion-ators on Twitter -- and... Read more →

Humour Leaves OpenAI: The Aftermath

Opinion With the fired OpenAI ceo now an employee of Microsoft, along with about 100 of his mates, I'll be interested to watch how long the serial entrepreneur lasts inside the corporate behemoth. Meanwhile on Twitter, staff and commentators have some bitterness to float: @bradlightcap (COO OpenAI): "OpenAI is nothing without its people." @miramurati (CTO OpenAI): "OpenAI is nothing without its people." @danbarker: "OpenAI's board gave themselves the prime duty to 'protect humanity' from AI, but seem to have ended up inadvertently handing much control of that to Microsoft." @joe_darko: "By the way, [OpenAI ex-ceo] Sam and [OpenAI ex-co-founder] Greg... Read more →

Twitter Outdoes Itself on OpenAI's Uncoup

Opinion The twitteratti had their bags of popcorn out upon the news that the board of OpenAI asked the former ceo to be the reinstated ceo. Here are some of the best ones: "Sam Altman returning to OpenAI after a day is like Steve Jobs returning to Apple after 12 years, but for the TikTok generation." - @mattturck "reinforcement learning from human feedback" - @ryxcommar "'Hey Ilya, it's Satya. If you want those Azure credits to work on Monday, we're going to need Sam back'." - kantrowitz "Anyway, he's gonna be INSUFFERABLE if they bring him back. He already has... Read more →

Best Tweets on OpenAI's Coup

Opinion Following Friday late afternoon's ouster of OpenAI's ceo Sam Altman, followed by co-founder Greg Brockman quitting, the twitterverse offered up its own version of advice: "Quitting as president of a company as massive as OpenAI with a lower-case only email is so insanely based I can hardly believe it's real." - @functi0nzer0 "pretty wild that the first job openai took was sam's" - @blader "BREAKING: Convoy of black vehicles fill SF streets as ousted Open AI leader attempts coup to reseize power." - @antoniogm "If Biden wasn't a million years old, he would issue an executive order to preserve... Read more →

Fixing Uninstall Problems with Revo

Opinion User interface of the free version of Revo Uninstaller One of the weaknesses of Windows is how much debris is left behind following an uninstall. There are registry entries, folders, and files that remain and that will never again be used, cluttering up our storage drives. CCleaner takes care of unused registry entries, but not leftover folders. I finally got really fed up after uninstalling a very recent version of AutoCAD. It left behind a new horror: a bunch of files and folders controlled by SYSTEM, which meant I could not remove them manually. Tech support didn't respond to... Read more →

How I record LP records to my computer

Opinion As a teenager, recording LP (long-play) records onto cassette tape for my portable player was definitely a lo-fi experience. To record, I set up a microphone in front of the our family's record player/radio console (and its lone speaker). Sometimes, house sounds were also recorded. Lo-fi was fine, because my portable cassette player was no different -- and I was desperate to hear music. Where I lived in Northern Canada, decent music was in short supply, whether on the sole radio station or the lone stereo store. Three decades later, technology advanced, and I recorded (almost) all my LPs... Read more →

When HP Said, Get in Line, I said No

Opinion I've always used inkjet printers from HP, but I was getting concerned about the creeping-upward cost of inkjet cartridges. The last time I bought a set (a black one and a tri-color one), it came to just over $100. That was painful. Last week my wife wanted me to print out some photographs, and the usual headache reared its head: the cartridges were partially dry. So I ran the head cleaning exercise several times but to no avail. I had earlier purchased a set of cheaper third-party cartridges and so installed them. The printer refused to recognize them. The... Read more →

MCAD in the Second Cold War

Opinion Abandoned tank in the forests of Ukraine [Image source https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.adi3412/card-type11/_20230421nid_ukraineforest.jpg] Russia’s invasion of the sovereign country of Ukraine is despicable, but the subsequent Western embargoes, designed to hobble the Russian war economy, instead had the unintended side effect of accelerating Russia’s self-sufficiency. Its official "import substitution" (zamena importa) program replaced Western products with homegrown ones, whether no-longer-Mcdonalds hamburgers, IKEA-like furniture, or geometric kernels in CAD software [source]. Even before the embargoes began, Russia already had a strong subset of CAD programs, mostly AutoCAD-workalikes for general CAD and parametric history-based CAD systems for mechanical designs. This is due to the... Read more →

Book Review: Number Go Up

Opinion Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall Book written by Zeke Faux Book reviewed by Ralph Grabowski The tech industry has a fever, and it's one that can only be cured by another iPhone-like hit. As smartphone and computer sales droop, the industry is desperate for a something-anything to explode its sales, revenues, profits. 3D TV flopped. Smartglasses flopped. VR flopped, other than in some games. 3D printing in every child's bedroom flopped. NFTs flopped. AI is flopping for the fourth time since it was conceived in the 1950s. Scooters flopped. Crypto exchanges flopped (except for,... Read more →

Do We Need a New 2D CAD Program?

Opinion During the era of zero-interest rates, investors were desperate for returns. The desperation turned to the ridiculous, such as buying cartoons of anthropomorphized apes and believing in 20% annual returns from crypto-exchanges. Others invested in new companies that promised to deliver on buzzwords like AR, crypto, AI, carbon. The passion to invest in anything-everything has now retreated, what with with banks paying as much as 4% on savings accounts. Nevertheless, Techcrunch* continues to document those who dream of making it big with the Next Big Thing, and one of those is a new online 2D CAD (computer-aided design) program,... Read more →

Update: Getting Eudora to Work with GMail

Opinion One of the most frequent questions I get is how to make Eudora work (again) with GMail. The problem is that Google keeps changing its Web pages with your security information, and then my older instructions no longer work. So, here is the version as of September, 2023. In the Eudora menu bar, choose Special | Forget Password(s) Switch to your Web browser, and then log into your google account: https://myaccount.google.com On the left, choose Security In the center, choose 2-step Verification Scroll all the way down to App passwords, and click it Enter a descriptive name in the... Read more →

Will ChatGPT Replace CAD Programmers?

Opinion by Nikita Vorobyov, LEDAS You must have heard of ChatGPT, that artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. It interacts with humans in a conversational way by supporting queries made in natural languages. (Image at left created by AI.) For developers, ChatGPT’s most attractive feature is its ability to generate code in any programming language. But how useful is AI-generated code? Let's find out by asking ChatGPT to solve some simple tasks that arise in CAD development projects. (We conducted this study some time ago; since then, ChatGPT has perhaps become smarter.) In our experiment, we asked ChatGPT to solve... Read more →

Smart LED Bulbs Are Peak Technology

Opinion I bought a pair of smart light bulbs the other day. The pair was $4 at Home Depot, marked down from $18. The reason: the product was a slow moving product. I've never understood why anyone would want/need smart lightbulbs, but at $2 each the deal was too tempting to ignore an opportunity to try out the technology. Back in the day of tungsten bulbs, we consumers had a single choice: how bright? 150W was bright, 15W was dim, 60W was normal. Sometimes, for fun, we'd buy ones coated with paint, like yellow or red. CFD Bulbs To the... Read more →

A Tiny Case for the Smallest Solid State Drive

Opinion One of the things that happens when you replace the SSD in a computer with another one is that you end up with a collection of SSDs -- solid state drives. These make great monster USB drives, in size and in capacity. The SSD I pulled from my Dell Latitude, however, was the rarely-seen smallest size. M.2 SSDs can be made in one of four official sizes. Most are the largest size, known as 2280, which is short for 22mm wide and 80mm long. The one in my Dell was 2230 -- 22mm wide by 30mm long. Remarkably, the... Read more →

My new favorite laptop isn't new and isn't a laptop

Opinion I have four Windows laptops, which may be no surprise, after I left a laptop behind at Stockholm airport and the airport charged me me $440 to get it back. In retrospect, it would have been cheaper to abandon it, and purchase a reconditioned one for the same or lower price. The one I lost (and recovered) was the 14" HP Spectre X360 (see image at left), their top of the line laptop at the time I bought it in 2015. But it has one glaring flaw: the keytops are silver, which, combined with the built-in backlighting, make the... Read more →

Reliving the Jornada Era

Opinion There was a time when designs of small computer devices were flourishing, a Renaissance period where everything was possible. This, in our era monopolized by slab phones with zero distinguishing features, seems inconceivable. Going back to the mid-1990s, the Palm Computing had ignited the personal device market with the Pilot handheld computer, called a PDA (portable digital assistant) at the time. Other companies, like Radio Shack and Epson, sold slightly bigger models with slim displays and keyboards. The demand was generated by laptops of the time still being heavy. And so there was, in this earlier time, a desire... Read more →

A different kind of earphone

Opinion Just as there are foods that are normal in one part of the world but not in the other, the same goes for earphones. Small earbuds are normal in North America, but in Asia big ones are common. I decided to try out a typical set. I went with a low-priced model from Linsoul-7Hz named "Salnotes Zero" ($27). See image at left. Why is it called the Zero? "By naming it ZERO, we intended to deliver our philosophy of life to every customer." TIP How to tell if a set of ear or headphones will sound pretty good: look... Read more →

Fixing what ails HP's Pro X2 tablet

Opinion The Pro X2 tablet from HP is a remarkable device that gets ignored by the tech media, who instead swoon over Microsoft's Surface tablet, oh, and iPads, as well. Because it is ignored, there is little demand, and so I paid as little as $380 reconditioned on eBay -- including backlit keyboard and stylus -- for a device HP sells new for $2,500 and up. The G2 model (second generation) suffers from two shortcomings: a single USB-C port and a wonkily-designed keyboard. Just Two USB Ports One problem is that the X2 G2 has just two USB ports, one... Read more →

What our future under AI will look like

Opinion Sometimes, I write reviews of products I bought from Amazon for Amazon. All the ones I've written have been accepted, until last week. I had written a review of the new MP3 player I had bought with my usual forthrightness: here's what I liked, here's what didn't work for me. But then Amazon rejected the review but could not say why: We couldn't post your review because it doesn't meet our guidelines for one or more of these reasons: Spam Promotions Reviews given in exchange for cash, discounts Links to other sites Attempts to manipulate helpful votes Plagiarism Infringement... Read more →

My New MP3 Player

Opinion Apple used to dominate the MP3 player market with its iPod line, both in product sales and mindshare. People who don’t use Apple products still refer to iPods and podcasts in everyday speech. Apple no longer makes an iPod, having moved the name to its line of headphones: AirPods. If you want to listen to music on the go in the Apple ecosphere, then you have to buy one of their expensive cellphones. There are alternatives, of course. Used iPods in excellent condition remain available from sellers on eBay. (That’s where, in the past, I got mine.) Other companies... Read more →