Showing 1 - 10 of 36
Marketeers have simple choices
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/02/2026
» If you use a mobile phone for playing any games, then typically along with that comes all of the advertisements and marketing presentations. First however, there is the "free download", this means you can download it for free, install and run it. After that, things may not be free at all. This is to be expected as advertising is one of the few ways to make any income from the games being played by millions of people across the planet.
What to expect in the year ahead
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/12/2025
» The coming year will be full of artificial intelligence, robots and a Starlink communications experience that will have many moving from their current providers. Let's dig in with my predictions for 2026.
We know they know we know about privacy
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/12/2025
» Strap in, because today I'm covering what is going to be happening over the next few months to get even more data about you and what you are doing on the internet. Let's start with the recent exposure of around 3.5 billion phone numbers from WhatsApp, the private platform.
Sabine has the science you're after
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/10/2025
» Sabine Hossenfelder is one of the people I regularly watch on the YouTube platform. She is a physicist but also veers into other areas such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. For her latest video -- In Which I Lose Faith In Quantum Computing -- she makes a number of interesting observations. In short, apart from some very specific applications, quantum computing, even if it is scalable from current technology, has limited application. It also has the potential of bringing down a number of current companies highly focused on this technology, or at least some of their divisions. Artificial intelligence takes up a lot of the space that quantum computing could do well in, but for the present at least, AI does it better. The next 10 years, or less, will be important to see how both of these directions develop, or not. If you are interested at all in physics, maths and occasionally quantum computing, then Sabine Hossenfelder provides some interesting perspectives.
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.
Do you really own your devices?
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/09/2024
» Do you own the hardware and software you purchased? Yes, no and possibly, so let's dive into an example. A man buys a second-hand Microsoft Surface from the Internet. It is one of a batch. He uses it for a few years until one day a massage pops up on the screen advising that Mastercard has locked the device and it should be returned to Mastercard. The man does some research and finds out that Microsoft has embedded some software in the firmware and BIOS that has enabled this to occur. It also turns out that this software can be found in other Microsoft and Apple devices, is very difficult to detect and requires a high skill level to remove, or you can just install Linux.
Microsoft gets more invasive
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/06/2024
» Microsoft Windows has added a new feature that will record everything you have ever done on your computer. It does this through a new AI feature called Recall for Copilot+ that allows Windows 11 to take screen snapshots every few seconds. Allegedly these are encrypted and saved to your hard drive (filling it up?). No, this is not a new episode of Black Mirror, but a disturbing change in Microsoft's attempt to track everything you do and fill up your hard drives. It may do this for your Zoom calls and meetings (it will record other people on the other end of a call without their permission). This may also include capturing the data you enter into secure forms, including passwords.
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.
Scams on the rise as inflation bites
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/07/2022
» We start this week with a webserver with extras in a single file that runs on any x86-64 operation system. Enter redbean 2.0. Created by Justine Tunney, it uses the "Actually Portable Executable" that you can read about here, justine.lol/ape.html. When you compile a program to its native binary, in this case x86-64 code, and don't call any external code, then the only difference between a Windows and a Linux would be the file format. If you can solve this, then it could run on any platform. To do that you need Cosmopoliton libc because any real program needs to make some calls, in this case the standard C ones. So, with Cosmo and the APE format, you can write a C program and compile it to a single file that will load and run on six very different operating systems and the same binary can also be booted directly from the PC BIOS. It's not perfect, but any programmer would be scratching their heads by now. Pause for techie amazement.
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.