Showing 11 - 20 of 134
Graphene semiconductors mark new start
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/01/2024
» We have just started 2024 and there are already exciting announcements. The clever people at Georgia Tech in Atlanta have built the first scalable semiconductor using a graphene base. Graphene, a wonder product, is not a scalable semiconductor on its own, so they bonded silicon carbide, or what we call carborundum, to a layer of graphene creating the necessary bandgap to have a working switch. A switch means binary and from there they can make wafers like those currently used in the chip manufacturing process to make CPUs and other devices.
Predictions for 2024
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/01/2024
» I hope you all had a great holiday break and are ready to dive into whatever 2024 brings us. Once again I will try and guess what we will see this year. The first one is easy, a bigger focus on artificial intelligence and even more marketing using the term AI. I wonder if we will see Turbo-AI appear. There will be more funds diverted to the growth of AI in many of the major manufacturers. I'm not convinced we will reach General AI this year but it is a possibility.
AI is causing concern again
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/12/2023
» There have been two big stories in the IT world over the past couple of weeks. The biggest one concerns OpenAI and its three-day boardroom drama. In a nutshell, the board voted Sam Altman and other members out of the company. The next day, Microsoft picked them up and anyone else who wanted to head over to a new division. That same day, 700-plus employees of OpenAI signed a letter saying they would go if a rogue board member did not quit and bring Sam Altman back. On the third day, Sam was back and three board members were gone.
Headlines are disappointing
Life, James Hein, Published on 22/11/2023
» If you have been in any way involved in social media over the past few years, there will be words that immediately have you wondering if the headline is in any way real. My favourite recently was "SpaceX Launched REAL UFO In ISRAEL! HAMAS And Iran Shocked!" on YouTube.
AI is the new marketing buzzword
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/11/2023
» Some readers will remember back a decade or three when the big term was "turbo". Everything was turbo something. Turbo speed, turbo clearing, turbo graphics and so on. Today, the equivalent term is AI. I saw an advertisement recently for glasses described as AI technology that adapts to your sight. It was a regular lens with some design elements, perhaps from an AI, perhaps not, with claims of predictive focus. Rubbish. There was no inherent active or dynamic AI technology in the lenses to back up this claim and I don't think such a technology at that level is even available at any price in the current time. The same goes for many other claims preceded or appended by the AI moniker. Like turbo, it is the current marketing buzzword and since many don't understand it and what the current engineering and technological limitations are in 2023, it has become part of the mindscape.
Manipulating populations is very easy
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/10/2023
» Have you ever heard of the term SEME, or Search Engine Manipulation Effect? The term was coined back in 2014 by the psychologist Robert Epstein, in his paper "The Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) And Its Possible Impact On The Outcomes Of Elections".
The new normal of AI fakes
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/10/2023
» Following on from my last article, consider the following scenario. You've grabbed enough clear speech of someone to make a good AI model of them. You write up some text, pass it through the model and verify that the result sounds exactly the same as that individual. This is a little different from the previous example because it's a text to speech model, but essentially the same as using one voice to change to another. You now take a speech or interview from that person, change one word that will essentially change the context, and process this.
YouTube hypocrisy deserves flagging
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/09/2023
» YouTube is behaving badly again. A prominent presenter I occasionally watch, who has millions of subscribers, has been demonetised, for some possible actions 20 years ago. This is not a commentary on potential innocence or guilt, but on YouTube's processes. There are people whose lives are supported by revenue from their presentations on YouTube. This ranges from small fries all the way up to the big fish like the one here. When an individual is demonetised they can lose the ability to support themselves. In this case allegations were made by the media, not the police or authorities, and at the time of writing there have been zero charges made. YouTube is essentially saying, bring us all your viewers so we can hit them with ads and we can make lots of money, but you will be getting nothing for your work.
Fact checkers get it wrong
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/09/2023
» First off, I have some follow-up news on an earlier story. The Australian fact checking group I mentioned being paid by Meta has been suspended for providing a series of "false" fact checks that turned out to be actually true. As I pointed out, many of the so-called fact checkers don't have any experience in the field they are apparently providing the check for. This will be particularly true in any politically charged area.
Who checks the fact checkers?
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/08/2023
» The information landscape has changed a great deal over the past five years. Back in the 1990s, information exchange was mostly between academics and IT people. The majority of the information was accurate and typically scientific or technical in nature. The communication was polite and debates were just that, debates. It was an inclusive community, though in some cases you were required to stick to the topic at hand. Then came the social media platforms.