Showing 1 - 10 of 15
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.
The hidden dangers of AI
Life, James Hein, Published on 24/09/2025
» There's going to be a lot on artificial intelligence topics this week so let's get started. For the time being, the most common way to leverage an AI product is using a prompt of some kind. To that end, you will see lots of posts on platforms declaring that they have the best god-level prompts for large language models (LLMs). A prompt is something like, "What are the top ten songs from Depeche Mode?", or "Draw me a picture of a frog on a toadstool in the style of Alice In Wonderland with vivid colours". The more detailed and nuanced the prompt, the better the desired outcome tends to be. As with everything in the computer world, there are bad actors looking to take advantage of this.
Android is now the new Apple
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/09/2025
» Some may be wondering why have I used an Android phone up to now compared to, say, Apple iPhone? In the beginning, it was for the following four reasons -- a headphone jack, a removable battery, the ability to insert an SD card for storage and the ability to load a program into the computer. That last part may sound a little strange but a 12GB device with 1TB of storage and a graphics unit built in is a computer now. The "program" loading here means you can put your own operating system on the device and install applications, bypassing the Play Store. So where are we now? No headphone jack, no SSD support, no removable battery and based on a recent announcement, no ability to "side-load" programs any more. In other words, Google phones have now or will soon be turned into iPhones.
Rise of fake AI content
Life, James Hein, Published on 23/04/2025
» We have unofficially entered the time of the fake AI generated content. It's not perfect yet, but it's good enough to fool many people. I use a YouTube alternative, which means I have more time to watch videos across a wide range. In the last few weeks, I've noticed an increase in AI generated product that is fake. One standout is the Got Talent franchise where people have grafted AI generated acts with cuts from responses from the panel. They look great, like a woman transforming into a lion, but it's all fake. Even some of those cute animal videos are now fake. Why? More clicks so more income all based on fabricated videos.
Doom, not gloom kicks off my 2025
Life, James Hein, Published on 29/01/2025
» Over the years, the game Doom has been ported onto some amazing platforms including a pregnancy test kit screen. The latest iteration of this practice has turned up in a version that will run in a .PDF file. If you are like me, then this will cause your mental processing to pause for a moment and your next thought may well be: "Wait, what?" The Portable Document Format (PDF) was developed to present documents in a manner that is independent of the software, hardware and operating system showing them. While it does this well, some malware writers have exploited its complexities.
Popularity of cable news is waning fast
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/11/2024
» The age of the cable news provider is waning. Within 24 hours of the Joe Rogan podcast with former US president Donald Trump, it had over 30 million views on YouTube alone. This is far more than any mainstream news or media outlet gets for any of its shows or presentations.
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.
A new low in online scams
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/07/2024
» According to the Australia's Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), scammers are now targeting scam victims with fake offers to help them recover from scams. The con is to use information from those scammed in the past and approach these people with an offer to recover the funds they have lost for, of course, an up-front fee.
Memory keeps getting cheaper and better
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/07/2023
» I recently picked up a portable 5TB drive for around US$100 (3,516 baht) and it reminded me of the time I got a 500MB internal drive for about the same price, but the difference is a thousand times the storage that can be carried with you for the same amount of money. Yes, the value of money has changed somewhat during that time so the original drive actually cost more but you get the idea, things keep getting better and the prices keep dropping. I sometimes wonder how long this will last, but for a few decades now that has been the story and it looks like it will be that way for the near future at least.
New chatbot can do a lot, but can you trust it?
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/01/2023
» Over the New Year break, I was digging a bit more into artificial intelligence and especially how the ChatGPT can be used and how it could affect society.