Category: Tech

There’s No Stopping Progress

Nobel Prize economist Robert Solow has died. Solow was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Obama. It’s an honor that was subsequently tarnished by Trump giving one to Rush Limbaugh.

As [Solow’s] work shows, technological advances, broadly defined, are responsible for the bulk of modern economic growth

https://news.mit.edu/2023/institute-professor-emeritus-robert-solow-dies-1222

Solow’s obituary in The New York Times has this amusing quote about John Kenneth Galbraith.

Mr. Galbraith “mingles with Beautiful People; for all I know, he may actually be a Beautiful Person himself.” But the book, he said, “is for the dinner table, not for the desk.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/business/robert-solow-dead.html

I think Solow’s “beautiful person” crack may have revealed a bit of the old M.I.T. vs. Harvard rivalry. Meeting the very tall Galbraith was a pivotal event for me in deciding to make Economics my college major.

Coincidental with Solow’s passing, last night’s PBS Newshour has this segment on AI’s potential effects on employment. It was mostly recorded at Boston’s Museum of Science (which is actually in Cambridge), where one of my sisters works developing educational materials.

For a deeper dive into the work of Robert Solow, there is this interview from just six months ago. It was conducted by his former student, economist Steven Levitt.

The Little Generator That Could

We’ve had the second storm of the season that, in the past, would have been a blizzard. Instead, it’s 60 degrees with high wind and heavy rain.

The power went out this morning and the utility doesn’t have an estimate when it will be restored. I fired up the portable generator and recharged my phone, which is now running as a Wi-Fi hotspot for the new laptop PC.

Yes, the garage floor needs to be resurfaced. It’s on the list.

Being An Elf to Myself

This is my new Lenovo laptop PC, but with a 14″ screen. Not being an Apple product it can’t be cool, but Lenovo tries.

Buying it required me to abandon my “never spend more than $300 on a laptop” rule. But it was a good deal for a 14-inch laptop with an aluminum case, an Intel i7 CPU and 16 GB memory, with a touch screen and lighted keyboard. USB-C charging was something else I wanted, which HP doesn’t have yet. The 2-in-1 feature, turning it into a tablet, wasn’t of special interest.

I was surprised to see that its dimensions, except for thickness, are almost identical to the old HP ProBook 11 G2 with its 11.6-inch screen. The ProBook has something that, along with optical drives, is extinct in laptop computers. It has a VGA connector. This makes it perfect for the 4:3 projector that I sometimes have set up in the living room. It’s a 2005 model purchased as new-old stock for $65, plus $10 shipping.

Viewsonic PJ656 XGA projector on a 60″ 4:3 screen

The Lenovo’s 2200×1400 IPS LCD screen and out-of-the-box color accuracy are exceptionally good. The sound of the speakers is impressive for a laptop, but audio is directed to the porch’s 10-year-old Sony Bluetooth speaker. It was an early product supporting Qualcomm’s proprietary Bluetooth codec, aptX.

Not too many changes were needed in Windows 11 to make it behave the way I want. Something about Windows 11 I don’t like is that support for aptX, which is found natively in Windows 10, has apparently been dropped.

Be Careful What You Lick or Click

Here is an example of where AI software could be of some direct benefit, but it has yet to be applied. At least I hope not, otherwise we’re already in big AI trouble.

I’ve been looking for something Disney-related on YouTube, and this ad appeared.

Watch the Barbie movie… for free?? Gosh, it must be a Christmas promotion or something! It can’t be a scam, can it? I mean, Google allowed it on YouTube, right? But, just in case, I’d better check the official Barbie movie site.

Hmmm… there’s nothing there at all about watching the movie for free. So where is that YouTube ad coming from?

BULGARIA?? RUN AWAY………… !!!

Facebook AFU

Weirdest damn problem. Facebook is working on my Verizon phone over Verizon FiOS Wi-Fi, but Facebook isn’t working from any browser on three different PC’s, connected over the same router. Extremely strange, and it isn’t a browser vs. app issue, because Facebook’s Windows app is likewise blank. And it isn’t a DNS problem.

C:\Windows\System32>nslookup facebook.com
Server: Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home
Address: 192.168.1.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: facebook.com
Addresses: 2a03:2880:f172:81:face:b00c:0:25de
157.240.245.35

Doesn’t appear to be a routing problem either.

C:\Windows\System32>tracert facebook.com

Tracing route to facebook.com [157.240.245.35]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     6 ms     5 ms     6 ms  Fios_Quantum_Gateway.fios-router.home [192.168.1.1]
  2     8 ms     7 ms    18 ms  lo0-100.bstnma-vfttp-354.verizon-gni.net [96.237.232.1]
  3    13 ms    57 ms    16 ms  b3354.bstnma-lcr-22.verizon-gni.net [100.41.13.102]
  4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  5    15 ms    17 ms     9 ms  65.208.14.250
  6    13 ms    16 ms    15 ms  po101.psw02.bos5.tfbnw.net [129.134.32.39]
  7    10 ms    16 ms    15 ms  173.252.67.53
  8    39 ms    17 ms    18 ms  edge-star-mini-shv-01-bos5.facebook.com [157.240.245.35]

Trace complete.

The outage is widespread, apparently on the east coast, and it’s also on MacOS. Facebook on Google Chrome on my phone is also a no-go. I never received a code for 2-factor authentication. It’s as if Facebook is now restricted to their phone apps.

Update: The service is back. All I did was refresh the Facebook page for the umpteenth time. This time it came up. Whatever was wrong was totally on Facebook’s end.