Showing 1 - 9 of 9
Robots get smooth moves
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/03/2026
» The subject of the week is robots. The amount of news on these keeps growing and growing. South Korea is first up here with their KAIST Humanoid. In the field test, the robot was shown running across a soccer pitch, jumping, taking shots on goal, and even doing dance moves akin to the Michael Jackson moonwalk. Many robot demonstrations still look a bit stiff but these moves were quite smooth. The robot can run at about 12kph on flat ground with the next goal at 14kph. It can climb a ladder with 40cm steps and the knees can generate 320 Newton metres of peak torque so it can push heavier objects. The current model is based on the lower human half but the goal is for a full humanoid form that can work with people in industrial environments.
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.
Connectivity conundrums
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/06/2025
» I'm travelling as I write this, so I thought it would be a good time to cover things like connectivity and the kind of issues I face even in 2025. Connectivity will typically revolve around your smartphone and I recommend you prepare for this in advance. Option one is a new sim card that you put in when you get to your destination.
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.
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.
Latest AI reveals its bias yet again
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/03/2024
» Google's latest version of AI, once Bard but now called Gemini, is yet another indication of how biased the current batch of AI platforms are. I was going to include a bunch of examples but this has received so much coverage that everyone should have seen it by now. Basically, the product offers anything but a white-skinned person in requested pictures. This gave rise to some short-lived pub games. Many found this amusing but after a while it became obvious that Google has shut Gemini down for re-education.
Rabbit R1's AI action intrigues
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/01/2024
» A new device out of CES 2024 in Las Vegas caught my eye. At first glance, the Rabbit R1 doesn't look all that interesting. It's a US$199 (in America), orange, handheld device that looks like an old-style gaming machine of some kind about the size of a stack of Post-It notes. It comes with a 2.88-inch touchscreen, a camera, a voice command button and a 4G LTE SIM card slot for connectivity beyond Wi-Fi. This is not a smartphone and won't replace it as there are no onboard apps, it won't pair with your smartphone and it doesn't talk to application APIs like cloud service gateways.
Human override here to stay
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/04/2019
» Computers are useful tools and they will emotionlessly churn through thousands of operations in the blink of an eye to produce whatever results they were programmed to do. Most of the time the results are welcomed. When it comes to malware the results generate a different reaction, and then there are those spaces in the middle. The situation surrounding the Boeing 737 Max MCAS aircraft and the recent crash is an excellent example. The latest analysis would seem to indicate that the computer engineers made some choices that have had unintended consequences. In this case overriding the wishes of the pilots by assuming the plane was crashing, when it wasn't, and not allowing the human pilots to correct the computer's decisions.
Privacy an artefact of times past
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/07/2018
» If you have learned nothing else from my many years of writing, it should be that unless extraordinary steps are taken, personal data privacy doesn't exist, except perhaps in the deluded minds of government officials. The only thing privacy laws do these days is stop you from returning someone's lost phone. In just one day in the news, I read reports about Huawei infiltrating Facebook, another Spectre CPU problem, political data harvesting in the UK, insecure military servers in the UK, Chinese hackers interested in Cambodia (and the rest of the world) along with other items about lost or hacked data. Yahoo and Google collect far more than the whole of the US spy agencies combined, though at least the latter doesn't deliberately spread it around or sell it to marketers.