Showing 1 - 10 of 24
Marketeers have simple choices
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/02/2026
» If you use a mobile phone for playing any games, then typically along with that comes all of the advertisements and marketing presentations. First however, there is the "free download", this means you can download it for free, install and run it. After that, things may not be free at all. This is to be expected as advertising is one of the few ways to make any income from the games being played by millions of people across the planet.
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.
LLMs are left-leaning models
Life, James Hein, Published on 07/05/2025
» A while back I wrote about the political bias in Large Language Models (LLMs). Since then the models have evolved and David Rozado has conducted more recent tests based on four of the popular political orientation tests. Using the Political Compass, Political Spectrum, Political Correctness and Eysenck tests, he worked with xAI Grok 3 beta, Google's Gemini 2.5 pro, Deepseek V3, OpenAI GPT 4.1 and Meta's Llama 4 Maverick. In all but one of the tests Grok 3 was closest to the centre, and on average was the clear leader. All the models were still located in the Left Libertarian quadrant, with Grok just sneaking into a more Conservative area with the Eysenck test. These tests are of course but one way to measure the political leanings of any LLM. Overall however, it does still indicate the left-leaning bias in all models tested so far. If you want to see more details, you can visit David Rozado's substack.
Imagining a world without cash
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/05/2024
» How safe are you in a purely digital economy? If you are carrying cash, someone can of course rob you, or you can lose it or give it to someone. You can also have a stash of it at home for emergencies or for buying something from a garage sale. For the most part, you retain control over any cash you manage. Electronic cash can still be stolen and your ability to spend it can be taken by someone else if your details get into the wrong hands. However, it's convenient, just tap and go, or in some cases, just wave your smartphone over a pad. While you have no idea where your money actually is, a small piece of plastic, your watch or a phone can retrieve it for you for a payment. You can even use it to get cash from a wall.
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 is the new marketing buzzword
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/11/2023
» Some readers will remember back a decade or three when the big term was "turbo". Everything was turbo something. Turbo speed, turbo clearing, turbo graphics and so on. Today, the equivalent term is AI. I saw an advertisement recently for glasses described as AI technology that adapts to your sight. It was a regular lens with some design elements, perhaps from an AI, perhaps not, with claims of predictive focus. Rubbish. There was no inherent active or dynamic AI technology in the lenses to back up this claim and I don't think such a technology at that level is even available at any price in the current time. The same goes for many other claims preceded or appended by the AI moniker. Like turbo, it is the current marketing buzzword and since many don't understand it and what the current engineering and technological limitations are in 2023, it has become part of the mindscape.
Fact checkers get it wrong
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/09/2023
» First off, I have some follow-up news on an earlier story. The Australian fact checking group I mentioned being paid by Meta has been suspended for providing a series of "false" fact checks that turned out to be actually true. As I pointed out, many of the so-called fact checkers don't have any experience in the field they are apparently providing the check for. This will be particularly true in any politically charged area.
The World Wide Web turns 30
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/05/2023
» The public version of the World Wide Web turned 30 recently. Back in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext system called Mesh. The next year he added a hypertext GUI browser and editor and called the result the WorldWideWeb. Inside CERN, people loved it and by January 1993 the world had around 50 HTTP servers. By February, the first graphic browser appeared known as Mosaic and by April of that year, CERN decided the project belonged to humanity and the public domain version of the WWW was born. The rest and billions of web pages later, is history.
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.