Showing 1 - 10 of 23
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.
Hey influencers, nobody likes you
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/07/2025
» I was recently at Stonehenge in the United Kingdom. Apart from the historical significance, it is a huge tourist site. As you might expect there are rules, ropes to indicate boundaries and a well-run system. Enter the Influencer. She was the classic example, with friends, attitude and the only one who crossed the ropes to get that special picture.
The entitlement epidemic rages
Life, James Hein, Published on 16/07/2025
» I was recently at Stonehenge in the United Kingdom. Besides the historical significance, it is a huge tourist site. As you might expect, there are rules, ropes to indicate boundaries and a well-run system. Enter the influencer. She was the classic example, with friends, the attitude and the only one who crossed the ropes to get that special picture. The current set of typically self-declared influencers come with a sense of entitlement that is almost scary.
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.
Headlines are disappointing
Life, James Hein, Published on 22/11/2023
» If you have been in any way involved in social media over the past few years, there will be words that immediately have you wondering if the headline is in any way real. My favourite recently was "SpaceX Launched REAL UFO In ISRAEL! HAMAS And Iran Shocked!" on YouTube.
Apple sets sights on VR market
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/06/2023
» The biggest announcement of the past week or two was the Apple Vision Pro VR system. There has been so much on this recently. The quick summary is -- two 4K eyepieces, no controllers required and it can replace your TV and computer monitors. I was more interested in the battery life being two hours, or if you were using them, not enough for the full Apple presentation. The price is also an amazing US$3,500 in America so out of the range of most people. One argument is that by the time you don't need to pay for a TV upgrade or new monitors it is worth the investment. My counter is if you have a four-person household that price becomes $14,000, a lot more than the cost of a new TV. Oh, and you can mostly only use it with Apple kit which really limits options.
AI's promises and problems
Life, James Hein, Published on 29/03/2023
» It's almost impossible to write an article these days and ignore the rapid increase in what are called AI applications. GPT-4 is out, Midjourney 5 has been released, and more new AI applications seem to turn up every day.
Microsoft on the naughty list again
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/03/2023
» Some of you may have already noticed, Microsoft is getting very pushy about installing Windows 11. On one of my machines, it started the process under the guise of a standard update. Softwarekeep.com has an excellent article titled "How to Cancel Windows 11 Update and Stay on Windows 10" that covers many ways to handle this. One option is to revert back to Windows 10 within 10 days of Windows 11 being installed, found here: Start menu > Settings > Windows Update > Advanced options > Recovery > Previous version of Windows. After this arbitrary 10 days, you need to do a clean Windows 10 install. I also recommend the free Windows Update Blocker, currently at version 1.7, as a way to control your Windows updates.
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.