Showing 1 - 10 of 31
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.
Understanding an AI's 'thinking'
Life, James Hein, Published on 22/10/2025
» Over the past couple of weeks, I dived deep into the Alice In Wonderland-like rabbit hole of chatbots and AI systems. This was not your typical "ask a few questions", but more along the lines of jailbreaking the AI to get behind the scenes. You may remember earlier commentary on the code behind the query. This is where the guardrails and biases of the model are coded and why the majority of all AI systems are currently leaning to the Left of the political spectrum.
Q&A, truth, lies, the web and you
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/04/2024
» The online world is changing and not necessarily for the better. I'm old enough to remember what you were looking for came up as the first search result, when there was a search facility, that is. The old Bulletin Boards kept their subject matter to the topic of the board with opinions kept to opinion sites. Sites on science were not one-sided as they presented the facts along with the supporting data for checking and verification. If people disagreed, they also brought their data along to challenge a thesis and a healthy and often robust debate followed. That was then.
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.
The new normal of AI fakes
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/10/2023
» Following on from my last article, consider the following scenario. You've grabbed enough clear speech of someone to make a good AI model of them. You write up some text, pass it through the model and verify that the result sounds exactly the same as that individual. This is a little different from the previous example because it's a text to speech model, but essentially the same as using one voice to change to another. You now take a speech or interview from that person, change one word that will essentially change the context, and process this.
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.
Colour e-ink phones are here
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/08/2022
» It seems like it has taken forever, but colour e-ink phones are finally starting to arrive. Enter the Hisense A7 CC, with a 6.7-inch screen that can display 4096 colours at 100ppi.
Tech giants, gatekeepers of the cloud
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/05/2022
» AWS, Microsoft and Google collectively made up 65% of global spend on cloud computing in Q1 2022, and their share is increasing year-on-year. At least two of these organisations have shut down users and companies they decided did not align with their ideologies. If you put your data on the cloud, it sits somewhere. In many cases, it's on the servers of these three companies who may or may not decide to cut you off without warning sometime in the future. It is also important to remember these three companies have servers across the globe and if a country decides to remove itself from the pack, it could take a peek at what you are storing there.
Elon's Twitter bid reopens censorship debate
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/04/2022
» Without a doubt, the biggest news of the last couple of weeks has centred around Elon Musk. It started with a tweet where he asked his followers if they thought that Twitter followed free speech principles. Over 2 million responded, with 70% indicating it didn't, and some asked him to buy Twitter. A week or so later he purchased 9.2% of Twitter. This triggered a swathe of wild speculation. Elon then rejected an offer to sit on the board because this would limit his ability to purchase more stock. A week or so later he offered to buy all of the remaining Twitter shares for US$54.20 (1,840 baht) a share, above the current market price and well above pundits' sell price only a little while earlier. The Left went crazy. The board started talking about introducing a financial "poison pill" share approach to both increase the number of and dilute the value of Twitter shares to make it more difficult for Musk to purchase more than 15% of Twitter.
Tesla Pi gets my motor running
Life, James Hein, Published on 19/01/2022
» I admit it, I'm getting excited about the Tesla Pi phone due out this year. The rumours have been flying fast and furious but there are some seemingly solid predictions. The phone will have a specially designed CPU. It will have a nice screen just under the 7-inch mark, four cameras and be deliberately priced a few hundred dollars under the top-of-the-line Apple phone. There is apparently some bad blood between Elon and Apple so that last one is a deliberate choice. Like the next Samsung range, it may have an under the screen front facing camera. There'll be lots of memory and a bunch of Tesla-like features with apparently a solar charger built into the back so you can always recharge during the day. I'm due for a new phone this year so I'll be holding off on the new Samsung and waiting to see what comes out.