Showing 1 - 10 of 28
AI learning versus human creativity is a real battle
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/02/2026
» If you’ve been reading these columns long enough, you’ll probably know that I write music and I’ve written some books. With the advent of artificial intelligence, the concept of copyright and private property has blurred. The standard rule was, what you have worked hard on to create, belongs to you. As musicians and authors, ideally, we create, we write and we invent. In the world of AI, it will draw a picture, write a book and create music for you based on a simple text prompt that itself may have also been written for you by AI.
LLMs are left-leaning models
Life, James Hein, Published on 07/05/2025
» A while back I wrote about the political bias in Large Language Models (LLMs). Since then the models have evolved and David Rozado has conducted more recent tests based on four of the popular political orientation tests. Using the Political Compass, Political Spectrum, Political Correctness and Eysenck tests, he worked with xAI Grok 3 beta, Google's Gemini 2.5 pro, Deepseek V3, OpenAI GPT 4.1 and Meta's Llama 4 Maverick. In all but one of the tests Grok 3 was closest to the centre, and on average was the clear leader. All the models were still located in the Left Libertarian quadrant, with Grok just sneaking into a more Conservative area with the Eysenck test. These tests are of course but one way to measure the political leanings of any LLM. Overall however, it does still indicate the left-leaning bias in all models tested so far. If you want to see more details, you can visit David Rozado's substack.
X remains an influential platform
Life, James Hein, Published on 24/04/2024
» How influential is Twitter/X? Some will remember a while back when Elon Musk gave his opinion on Disney. I won't repeat it here but it was very direct. Up until recently, Disney hadn't posted anything on X but about a week before you read this, they were back with a gold checkmark. These cost about US$10,000 (368,000 baht), which while not expensive for Disney, indicates how they see X as a platform for communicating to all those potentially interested in all things Disney. Elon Musk is still supporting people like Gina Carano in suing Disney for what they did to her and others based allegedly on their political and religious views.
Rabbit R1's AI action intrigues
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/01/2024
» A new device out of CES 2024 in Las Vegas caught my eye. At first glance, the Rabbit R1 doesn't look all that interesting. It's a US$199 (in America), orange, handheld device that looks like an old-style gaming machine of some kind about the size of a stack of Post-It notes. It comes with a 2.88-inch touchscreen, a camera, a voice command button and a 4G LTE SIM card slot for connectivity beyond Wi-Fi. This is not a smartphone and won't replace it as there are no onboard apps, it won't pair with your smartphone and it doesn't talk to application APIs like cloud service gateways.
The World Wide Web turns 30
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/05/2023
» The public version of the World Wide Web turned 30 recently. Back in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext system called Mesh. The next year he added a hypertext GUI browser and editor and called the result the WorldWideWeb. Inside CERN, people loved it and by January 1993 the world had around 50 HTTP servers. By February, the first graphic browser appeared known as Mosaic and by April of that year, CERN decided the project belonged to humanity and the public domain version of the WWW was born. The rest and billions of web pages later, is history.
Samsung's A series phone is a big fat L
Life, James Hein, Published on 26/10/2022
» Nothing at all back from Samsung corporate on the A53-5G, if that changes I'll let you know. The new phone is a brick and after some research it turns out that more often than not Samsung only has a local warranty. I've since spoken to a number of people who've had issues with charging.
Those pesky pixel trackers
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/10/2022
» I've written about the tracking in TikTok. I recently found out you don't need to have the app installed to be providing tracking data to this platform. The term you need to learn today is "tracking pixel".
Colour e-ink phones are here
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/08/2022
» It seems like it has taken forever, but colour e-ink phones are finally starting to arrive. Enter the Hisense A7 CC, with a 6.7-inch screen that can display 4096 colours at 100ppi.
Protect yourself when online
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/08/2022
» A friend of mine, let's call him Dave, wrote to me recently about identity theft. He told me that all of his identifying information like phone numbers, email addresses, old passwords and his usual security questions, were all available on the dark web. He also had a number of notifications of personal information breaches that resulted in fraudulent charges, the need to replace credit cards and attempts to set up fake bank accounts in his name. The latter is used if a hacker is planning to get into your other accounts so they can transfer funds to themselves under your name.
Elon's Twitter bid reopens censorship debate
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/04/2022
» Without a doubt, the biggest news of the last couple of weeks has centred around Elon Musk. It started with a tweet where he asked his followers if they thought that Twitter followed free speech principles. Over 2 million responded, with 70% indicating it didn't, and some asked him to buy Twitter. A week or so later he purchased 9.2% of Twitter. This triggered a swathe of wild speculation. Elon then rejected an offer to sit on the board because this would limit his ability to purchase more stock. A week or so later he offered to buy all of the remaining Twitter shares for US$54.20 (1,840 baht) a share, above the current market price and well above pundits' sell price only a little while earlier. The Left went crazy. The board started talking about introducing a financial "poison pill" share approach to both increase the number of and dilute the value of Twitter shares to make it more difficult for Musk to purchase more than 15% of Twitter.