• TECH

  The reality of AI is less scary than the movies

  Life, James Hein, Published on 17/08/2022

  » I was talking to someone at work recently and mentioned the Palm Pilot. He never heard of it. Some of us remember it being released in 1996 before the smartphone and social media, and in the early days of the internet. It drove the creation of the smartphone, though the people at Intel at the time didn't see how a portable, hand-held device like this could become common. One of the founders and inventors was Jeff Hawkins who also founded Handspring and worked on the Treo that evolved into a very early smartphone with a camera, which this brings us to today's topic, artificial intelligence.

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  Even writers need to think before tweeting

  Life, James Hein, Published on 16/08/2017

  » Without the internet, there would only ever be part of a story. Consider the recent example of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. She watched an edited video and then took to the internet using her fame to decry the treatment of a small child by a prominent leader. Her concerns were quickly and widely spread but the unedited footage showed the opposite. Even the mother of the child finally got involved and asked the internet to please tell J.K. Rowling that she was wrong. At the time of writing Rowling had apologised to the mother but not the leader she smeared. In the current fast pace and instant Twitter-response world it is important to take a step back and do some personal investigation before reacting, often incorrectly, to a flash tweet or news story. If you see a clip try and find the full or unedited version, that extra time can save you from future embarrassment, though some personalities seem to be immune to it.

• TECH

  Let it all go with Pokémon

  Life, James Hein, Published on 20/07/2016

  » The Pokémon Go game is taking the smartphone world by storm. Like Ingress before it, it is a real world location based game so you physically have to get out of the house to play it. Unlike Ingress, it has a cartoon character so kids love it but mums and dads don't so much because they have to drive their kids around to out of the way places to get the next Pokémon. This is another game by Niantic, a group within Google and the ones who built Ingress. The game was also quite insecure on iOS phones but that was apparently fixed with a patch. There have been no issues reported by Android phone users.

• OPINION

  There's no such thing as free tech

  Life, James Hein, Published on 21/01/2015

  » Can hackers really ruin your day? Consider the story a friend of mine recently told me. He has been playing the game Stronghold Kingdoms for a couple of years now. Apparently, as a result of hacking, some players gained points and certain advantages and had their accounts spoofed. 

• TECH

  The future of AI is LAM

  Life, James Hein, Published on 14/02/2024

  » After my earlier article, I realised I was somewhat scant on what a Large Action Model (LAM), also called Large Agentic Models, are. As already mentioned, these have derived from the Large Language Models (LLM), or what people now refer generically as AI, discussed before.

• TECH

  Predictions for 2024

  Life, James Hein, Published on 03/01/2024

  » I hope you all had a great holiday break and are ready to dive into whatever 2024 brings us. Once again I will try and guess what we will see this year. The first one is easy, a bigger focus on artificial intelligence and even more marketing using the term AI. I wonder if we will see Turbo-AI appear. There will be more funds diverted to the growth of AI in many of the major manufacturers. I'm not convinced we will reach General AI this year but it is a possibility.

• TECH

  YouTube hypocrisy deserves flagging

  Life, James Hein, Published on 27/09/2023

  » YouTube is behaving badly again. A prominent presenter I occasionally watch, who has millions of subscribers, has been demonetised, for some possible actions 20 years ago. This is not a commentary on potential innocence or guilt, but on YouTube's processes. There are people whose lives are supported by revenue from their presentations on YouTube. This ranges from small fries all the way up to the big fish like the one here. When an individual is demonetised they can lose the ability to support themselves. In this case allegations were made by the media, not the police or authorities, and at the time of writing there have been zero charges made. YouTube is essentially saying, bring us all your viewers so we can hit them with ads and we can make lots of money, but you will be getting nothing for your work.

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  7 levels of AI await humanity

  Life, James Hein, Published on 02/08/2023

  » This week is AI week, both to date and going forward. Some don't understand the difference between AI and AGI, the latter being artificial general intelligence, denoting a system that behaves like a human being in capabilities. So, for your amusement I've put together, with credit to the YouTube channel AI Uncovered, a description of the seven levels of AI.

• TECH

  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.

• TECH

  What would you do without internet?

  Life, James Hein, Published on 12/04/2023

  » India recently blocked all internet, phone and SMS access to the state of Punjab for four to five days as they search for a Sikh separatist. I had a friend who was there at the time and they told me how eerie it was to see no one on a phone for a few days. Someone would occasionally pull out the phone to see if service had returned but apart from that, there were no people talking loudly on phones in restaurants or on public transport. This impacted 27 million people, which is more than the population of Australia.

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