Showing 1 - 10 of 17
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.
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.
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.
Is the new Twitter just like the old?
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/02/2023
» The Twitter situation is complex and somewhat confusing. On the one hand, all kinds of people from The Babylon Bee satirical website to former US president Donald Trump have been allowed back on the platform. The stated aim is to allow freedom of speech to be supported by Twitter once again. On the other hand, you can be banned by linking to a public photo of a public person on a public platform. The rule for the latter appears to only be for friends of Elon Musk. A YouTube channel I enjoy watching, The Quartering, did this after someone else had been banned and was also almost instantly banned himself. This is of course wrong in every respect especially given the individual in question, apparently now hypocritically, is always banging on about freedom of speech. Update, the ban is permanent.
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.