Showing 1 - 10 of 18
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.
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.
Doom, not gloom kicks off my 2025
Life, James Hein, Published on 29/01/2025
» Over the years, the game Doom has been ported onto some amazing platforms including a pregnancy test kit screen. The latest iteration of this practice has turned up in a version that will run in a .PDF file. If you are like me, then this will cause your mental processing to pause for a moment and your next thought may well be: "Wait, what?" The Portable Document Format (PDF) was developed to present documents in a manner that is independent of the software, hardware and operating system showing them. While it does this well, some malware writers have exploited its complexities.
The future of AI is LAM
Life, James Hein, Published on 14/02/2024
» After my earlier article, I realised I was somewhat scant on what a Large Action Model (LAM), also called Large Agentic Models, are. As already mentioned, these have derived from the Large Language Models (LLM), or what people now refer generically as AI, discussed before.
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.
Reddit trumps Google search
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/02/2023
» Since my last column Twitter has had a number of technical issues, but I also found out that many of the problems I wrote about last time stem from the Content Management Head, not from Elon himself. Musk is putting in some very long days to try and get things sorted out at Twitter so it looks like he is nothing like the old boss in that respect. There remain a lot of traps in the code he inherited that will take time to sort out and may need a complete rewrite to address.
Moving images to the next level
Life, James Hein, Published on 16/03/2022
» Let's start this week with a couple of software and technology announcements. The first is from the developer Dominic Szablewski. He has developed a simple, new image format. You will have heard of PNG, JPEG, MPEG, MOV and MP4, which he calls complex. Enter the Quite OK Image Format (QOI). Most of the older formats are closed, need libraries and a lot of computing power to implement and use.
You are being tracked and here's how to avoid it
Life, James Hein, Published on 02/02/2022
» I decided to spend some time this week addressing security and data sharing. This was prompted by me reading Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, watching Dr Robert Epstein on The Joe Rogan Experience, my son enrolling in a cyber security course and my experience over the years.
Tesla Pi gets my motor running
Life, James Hein, Published on 19/01/2022
» I admit it, I'm getting excited about the Tesla Pi phone due out this year. The rumours have been flying fast and furious but there are some seemingly solid predictions. The phone will have a specially designed CPU. It will have a nice screen just under the 7-inch mark, four cameras and be deliberately priced a few hundred dollars under the top-of-the-line Apple phone. There is apparently some bad blood between Elon and Apple so that last one is a deliberate choice. Like the next Samsung range, it may have an under the screen front facing camera. There'll be lots of memory and a bunch of Tesla-like features with apparently a solar charger built into the back so you can always recharge during the day. I'm due for a new phone this year so I'll be holding off on the new Samsung and waiting to see what comes out.
Chip shortage over by 2023... maybe
Life, James Hein, Published on 29/09/2021
» The current chip shortage could should be a thing of the past by 2023... maybe. The current foundries are booked out for the rest of the year and are starting to catch up with current demand. New plants will be coming online by the end of 2022. The maybe part here is the potential shortage of raw materials needed in the fabrication process. This could be a problem by 2023, or perhaps we may have new manufacturing process by then. Fingers crossed that all is good by the end of next year.