Showing 1 - 10 of 19
How YouTube fails its creators
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/04/2026
» YouTube is failing in customer protection, especially in certain categories. As a case study, consider YouTuber Davie504. Unless you are a bass player or interested in bass lines, you probably haven't heard of him. He spends time practising and demonstrating bass playing in a proficient and sometimes amusing fashion. He is unassuming and obviously works hard to present good content. In general, if you are playing any musical selection in a teaching presentation, particularly if you are playing it yourself, or if the section is short and not the full song, then this should be all covered by "fair use". Enter the music industry. When you think about overbearing corporate control, this is the perfect example. Within this, some artists are worse than others, with the absolute worst being whomever represents The Eagles.
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.
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.
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.
Can you trust search engines?
Life, James Hein, Published on 14/08/2024
» So how do conspiracy theories start and how does the internet and major search engine players contribute to them? As I type this, depending on where you are in the world, if you type "assassination attempt" in your search engine, and in particular one associated with Alphabet, the autofill options will have everything except "Trump" in the result set. You can get Kennedy, Hitler, Putin and George Wallace, but not the most prominent one so far this year that was one of those "where were you when you heard" events that some people saw in real time on their TV. The reason Alphabet offered for not giving the result was something along the lines that their policy is not to show political violence. You can of course find a plethora of political violence videos and examples from their search results, just not for this particular instance. Another example if you type "President Donald", the autofill adds Duck and Reagan but not Trump. Or if you Google Donald Trump you get a bunch of Kamala Harris results.
Bill has ways of forcing updates
Life, James Hein, Published on 22/05/2024
» If you are a Microsoft user, private or business, there is a site you should keep an eye on. Search "Microsoft end of life dates" and then select the result with the heading "Overview – Product End of Support and Retirements", associated with learn.microsoft.com. On the left-hand side there are years. Click on 2025, for example, and you will see that Office 2016 and 2019 products will no longer be supported after Oct 14 of that year. On that same date, Windows 10 will be retired. For both of these there will be no new security updates. For some, this will not be an issue, but organisations will need to take note as it means their security will be potentially compromised after a while. Even with Windows 10 still outselling Windows 11, Microsoft will be pushing people to upgrade over the next 18 months and for many, this will no longer be free. People and organisations tend to stick with what works and Microsoft doesn't like that, so it stops supporting older products. The site will tell you when you will start to be at risk and after that you can decide what to do.
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.
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".
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.
Metals and energy shortage is a looming threat
Life, James Hein, Published on 20/07/2022
» I know the word rare gives it away but the world is facing a rare earth metals shortage. The Chinese are currently the largest producers of this resource and they recently cut their production by half. Turkey is another potential source but that region has been unstable for centuries. Most modern technology cannot expand further without these resources and the whole idea of ramping up renewables requires lots of them. Elon Musk has said we don't have enough in the world for all the plans of our governments and other experts agree.