Serendipity35

I blog here about technology and education, and sometimes about how those two industries cross paths. I'm the blogger. Tim Kellers is on the IT side of this. Though he had done some posts in the past, he is more often updating something or fixing something broken on his server or fixing something in some code. That is not my area of expertise, and I don't really want to know much about it. I just want it to work

In October, it wasn't always working. Posts that I had spent time writing just disappeared. The blog went offline. People told me that they couldn't access it because of security warnings. I stopped posting.

Tim was texting me messages about our .net domain. He created an alternate version at a .icu domain. I had to look up .icu, a top level domain I had never seen before. It means so logically that it is illogical, "I See You."

Tim told me, "That instance runs on different CPU architectures, so I want to do that manual sync first before I move the domain name over." Then he said, "I just synced your post to s35.net," and "I went through an SQL dump of the database and found a whole lot of image files with our very old nji.edu address prefixes. I changed them for a local test, and it looks like a whole lot of broken images are back online.  That string was replaced 554 times according to the log file." 

All of which makes little sense to me. And that's okay with me as long as Tim hangs around.

When I was in Europe in September, I told Tim the site was not working and giving me odd errors. "Just added the Privacy/Cookies/GDPR thing to s35.icu.  Next time you are in Europe, see if the site connects," he texted.

Serendipty35 is back. Tonight is Mischief Night here in Serendipity35land, and I'm hoping no gremlins are out there that will prank Serendipity35.

OpenAI, maker of the world’s most popular chatbot, ChatGPT, launched a web browser, Atlas, this week. Will it make surfing the Internet smarter?

Atlas is available only for computers that run Apple’s MacOS operating system. The company plans to introduce a version for Microsoft Windows and mobile operating systems, including Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

I tried it out on my iPad. It doesn't have a traditional address bar. You type the address into the chat window. That essentially removes competing search engines from the process. Google did something similar more than a decade ago with Chrome by integrating the browser and their search engine.

Atlas is very light on using your device's resources because all the heavy lifting is done in the cloud. 

The biggest criticism, or maybe it's a fear, that I've seen early on is that Atlas allows OpenAI to directly gather all user data that can train their future AI technologies. Microsoft (who clearly have a horse in this race) cautions that in exchange for this AI and lighter load, ChatGPT wants permission to watch and remember everything you do online. They say it "out-surveils even Google Chrome, and that’s saying something."

It not only keeps track of which websites you visit. It also stores “memories” of what you look at and do on those sites. It can even control your mouse and browse for you. It could complete an online order for you. (more on that tomorrow)

It is still early to evaluate whether Atlas’s AI capabilities outweigh its data gathering, but the privacy concerns are real and huge. Does OpenAI offer sufficient controls for managing what Atlas remembers? That's unclear. 

This has been the appeal of other browsers, especially DuckDuckGo, which emphasizes its privacy and is also a lighter browser than Chrome or Opera. (I consider Firefox to be somewhere between.) After all, your default browser is your entry point to almost all of your online surfing. (Yes, apps can bypass it.) But Duck Duck Go has a small percentage of the browser market.

Adding AI to browsers is not a new thing that OpenAI invented. Another lesser-known search engine, Perplexity, makes a browser called Comet. Google has added its Gemini bot to Chrome and will soon add "agent" capabilities that let AI do tasks for you, and Atlas has an“Ask ChatGPT” button that lets you chat with the bot about pages you’re viewing. You can ask it to summarize an article, analyze data, or revise your email draft.

OpenAI's response to concerns about privacy and data collection? So far, just a shrug. 

In 1999, Google's servers were ten CPUs across four servers. 

Google doesn’t publicly disclose the exact number of servers it operates, but estimates suggest it’s in the millions.  A 2011 analysis based on Google’s energy usage suggested around 900,000 servers, but that was over a decade ago. In 2016, Gartner estimated Google had around 2.5 million servers globally. Google has designed systems like Spanner to manage fleets ranging from 1 million to 10 million machines, hinting at massive infrastructure growth. Given the scale of Google’s services—Search, YouTube, Gmail, Cloud, and AI—it’s reasonable to assume the number is well above 2.5 million today, spread across dozens of data centers worldwide.

Other tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft don't publish exact server counts, so these are educated estimations. 

Amazon (AWS) probably has ~4–5 million  as the largest cloud provider globally with a massive scale across 100+ data centers.

Google probably has ~2.5–3 million+ for its heavy investment in AI and search, and is expanding rapidly with Gemini and Cloud.

Microsoft (Azure) is close with ~2–3 million+ but has a strong enterprise presence and is growing with Office 365, Copilot, and Azure AI.

 

There are over 75 options of electric vehicles that were introduced in the past four years. But it is not moving the needle for buyers. According to AAA, only 16% of U.S. adults report being “very likely” or “likely” to purchase a fully electric vehicle as their next car. That is the lowest percentage of EV interest recorded since 2019. The percentage of consumers indicating they would be “unlikely” or “very unlikely” to purchase an EV rose from 51% to 63%, the highest since 2022.

What does this have to do with education? I contend that the general public needs to be educated about electric vehicles, but much of the "content" for that education seems negative. It "seems" negative, but is it accurate?  Let's look at the barriers and motivating factors around EV purchasing.

Adoption of new technologies - cable TV, VCRs, CDs for music, DVDs, and smartphones all had a ramp-up to adoption, but they all found acceptance quickly compared to EVs. Then again, none of those technologies had the same cost as an EV. According to Cox Automotive and and Kelley Blue Book, the average price of an EV is about $55,000, compared to an average of $45,000 for gas powered vehicles. That can buy a lot of iPhones.

Barriers to buying an EV in surveys:

• high battery repair costs (62%)
• purchase price (59%)
• perceived unsuitability of EVs for long-distance travel (57%)
• lack of convenient public charging stations (56%)
• fear of running out of power while driving (55%) 
• safety concerns, including the risk of lithium battery fires (30%) 
• challenges installing home charging stations (27%)
• reduction or elimination of tax credits and rebates (12%)
• EVs had the second highest total ownership costs due to depreciation, purchase prices and finance charges

What are the factors that motivate people to buy EVs?

• gas savings
• environmental concerns
• lower EV maintenance costs as their top motivations to purchase

Are those pluses and minuses accurate or just public perception? Well, AAA's driving cost analysis found that EVs had the lowest fuel cost and lowest maintenance cost of any vehicle type. Studies have shown that EV batteries are safer, longer-lasting and more dependable than people assume. The newest EV models also have better range than ever.

Despite that analysis and advancements in the EV industry and the growing number of models, the percentage of U.S. drivers who believe that most cars will be electric within the next 10 years has significantly declined from 40% in 2022 to 23% this year.