Showing 1 - 10 of 19
Online Safety Act is a bad joke
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/08/2025
» The UK now has their Online Safety Act (OSA) and Australia is blindly following in their footsteps. In the UK it didn't take very long for the tech aware under-18s to bypass all the rules and regain access to adult content. Think about it, if China can't completely block everything do you think the UK had any chance? There were some creative solutions but the most common was a simple Virtual Private Network (VPN). In related news, some VPN companies reported a 1,400% increase in sign-ups since the OSA came into force.
Microsoft's quantum conundrum
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/03/2025
» If you've been keeping up with quantum computer news, you will have seen the Microsoft Marketing announcement on topological q-bits and a potential quantum computer in a few years. I was planning to write about this in some detail, but it turns out the reality may not meet the marketing. Surprising, I know, but the announcement implying Microsoft has q-bit technology ready to go and scale is speculative. They don't have any physical models, just some tests and a theory that has already been challenged by the physics community. It will take a while to go through all the published data, but the Microsoft quantum computer could be decades, not years, in the future, if ever.
AI, LLMs still got those data blues
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/02/2025
» The past weeks have been very heavily tilted towards artificial intelligence (AI) news. Before I cover some of it, a reminder that generative AI (gAI) is not the same as General AI (G-AI). The former is where the model can make some inferences, the latter is an AI system that can perform just like a human across multiple subject areas.
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.
Advertising ruins everything
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/02/2024
» Remember this day because I have a prediction. Recently, for the first time, I had two ads appear when watching a Rumble video. Rumble is a YouTube alternative that until now had been ad free. The platform allows those banned by YouTube for political reasons to make their presentations, along with anyone else who wants to post videos. My prediction is that the current ads, currently 30 second ones you can skip after a few seconds that appear at the start of your video, will gradually become more prevalent and longer, without being able to skip, and eventually will become as annoying as Facebook.
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.
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.
Waste no time, delete your TikTok
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/09/2022
» Most people know that social media platforms collect their personal information. Location, ordering patterns, browsing history and more are passed into Google, Meta, Amazon, Twitter and others' analytics. The newest and potentially scariest of these is TikTok.
When AI is not smart enough for the job
Life, James Hein, Published on 14/09/2022
» I was wondering what to write about this week and then I saw the Japanese Amazon story and how it relates to artificial intelligence. Labour unions in Japan have been a thing since World War II, but delivery drivers for Amazon Japan were not unionised, until recently.
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.