Younee is a Steinway Artist

A few months ago Younee called to tell me that she has been honored as a Steinway Artist, joining the ranks from Lang Lang to Diana Krall to Billy Joel to such legendary Steinway Immortals as Cole PorterSergei Rachmaninoff, and Arthur Rubinstein.

Younee is playing small venues so you have to play close attention to catch her live. You will also find her on streaming platforms or you can buy her latest album.

The Economist: Nvidia is driving the AI boom. Good.

The Economist has an Nvidia-Fanboy article which boils down to two paragraphs:

Yet many also see Mr Huang as a magician in a more worrying sense, fearing that he is an illusionist inflating a dangerous bubble. Through $1trn-worth of deals, Nvidia provides data-centre landlords and ai labs with cash or guarantees so that they can buy its gpus. Some call it the“bank of ai”. At the very least, Nvidia’s critics say, its financial engineering smacks of the “vendor financing” which pumped up the revenues of networking-gear makers like Cisco in the dotcom mania of 2000-01, whose collapse brought about a recession.

Look more closely, however, and the worries are mostly unjustified. If Nvidia’s bets on ai come good, they could accelerate the technology’s adoption, boosting productivity and living standards. If they misfire, the cost will fall chiefly on Nvidia’s shareholders. That is how capitalism is supposed to work.

Sounds good until you realize who the shareholders are. Every single index fund, pensions funds etc. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be carnage.

Lenovo-Ankündigungen – Eine Auswahl

ThinkBook 14 Gen 9

Lenovo kündigt zur IFA wie immer eine ganze Flut von Geräten an. Ich picke mal ganz bewusst ein Gerät raus, was eher Brot & Butter ist. ThinkBook 14 Gen 9 hat einen Snapdragon X2-Prozessor, läuft bis 26 Stunden mit einer Akku-Ladung und hat wie die anderen heute angekündigten Geräte wieder mehr verschiedene Ports. Hier sieht man USB-C (1 & 4), USB-A (3 & 7), HDMI (2), 3.5 mm Audio (5) und Fullsize SD (6). Das ist eine gute Entwicklung.

Project AeroBlade (Bild Lenovo)

Das heißt jedoch keineswegs, dass ultraflache Notebooks nun out sind. Lenovo arbeitet im Project AeroBlade an einer neuen Kühlungstechnik, die leistungsfähige superflache Rechner ermöglichen soll. Noch kein konkretes Produkt, aber das wird kommen.

Yoga Pro 9n (Bild: Lenovo)

Einstweilen sehen viele neue Rechner nach starkem Gebläse aus, insbesondere wenn sie NVidia Spark für hybride KI enthalten. Lenovo trommelt da weiter kräftig, aber ich bin skeptisch.

Und was mittlerweile Tradition ist: Ein schräger ThinkBook-Prototyp mit “anderem” Bildschirm. Dieses Jahr ist das “Project Swan”, dessen Bildschirm von 14″ auf 16″ in die Breite wächst.

Zu guter Letzt ist mir noch ein sehr schickes großes Tablet aufgefallen, mit wunderbarer Tastaturhülle und Stift. Großer Haben-Wollen-Effekt, aber die Erfahrung zeigt, dass ich am Ende doch wieder zum Laptop greife.

Yoga Tab Plus Gen 2 (Bild Lenovo)

Lenovo und Motorola Qira

Qira kann in deutscher Sprache erklären, dass es nur im Englischen antworten kann

Ich probiere immer wieder mal aus, was Lenovo Qira so kann. Das ist eine “hybride” KI und damit meint Lenovo, dass sie sowohl lokal als auch serverbasiert arbeiten kann und dabei über ein Lenovo-Konto und Smartconnect alle Geräte des Anwenders verbindet.

Aktuell habe ich Version 1.4 ausprobiert und die ist immer noch völlig nutzlos für mich. Immerhin lässt sich die umfangreiche Installation ruckzuck wieder entfernen. Das neue McAfee.

What’s new in Sonos 27 this fall

Sonos recently had a big press annoucement. Things I learned:

  • Sonos starts naming their software like Apple does. Sonos 27 is the software that comes out in 26.
  • There will be two features available soon: Portable Surround will let you use the two back-of-the-room speakers either with your TV surround sound or in other places. Plus, Sonos will make it easy to move music between their Ace Ultra headphones and Sonos speakers with a press of a button, “in preview” (read: alpha).
  • There will be a couple of AI and voice features “in preview”, but only in the US.

Up until about ten years ago, I have been very involved with Sonos and their development. Since then I have lost interest and am no longer using Sonos gear. But I remember that I discussed the portable surround feature already ten years ago. It is good to see this finally coming to pass.

Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys

Good story im The Atlantic about the tech billionaires who built our world having taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction.

I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I’d set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or ’80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I’d confiscate all of their science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein—all of it.

As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get—maybe couldn’t get—was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away. These boys just thought the killer robots sounded cool. They grew up to become ruthless entrepreneurs, but their surface enchantment stayed with them. It helped shape their desires.

This tale goes well with my observation that these men are still snickering about the same jokes 13-year-old-boys would.

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