Showing 1 - 10 of 69
Hacking the future
Life, Thana Boonlert, Published on 14/02/2026
» The West is often upheld as a source of technological progress. Yet, this long-held belief in the origin of innovation is coming under scrutiny. A wide range of recent examples, particularly China's technological rise, shows that rather than introducing technologies, some countries are better at embracing, adapting or hacking them.
How elections amplify our echo chamber
Life, Niki Chatikavanij, Published on 14/02/2026
» This past week, most Bangkokians woke up with a post-election hangover. It's a similar feeling to when you have too many glasses of wine at dinner, or went a bit too heavy for your friend's birthday. This feeling, though, doesn't subside throughout the day with a nice long shower or a glass of water.
The missing agenda
Life, Thana Boonlert, Published on 04/02/2026
» Rights groups have urged political parties to push for gender equality in the upcoming poll on Sunday, calling for enhanced protection against domestic violence and more inclusive policies for the gender-diverse community.
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.
Prime Video drama presents mother versus girlfriend showdown
Life, Tatat Bunnag, Published on 19/09/2025
» The story of a mother-in-law clashing with her son's partner -- and the hapless son stuck in the middle -- feels universal. It's a tale many people can recognise, either from personal experience or from watching families around them unravel in similar ways. Prime Video seems particularly fond of this theme lately, frequently pushing dramas about dysfunctional families. This year alone, they've released titles like Better Sister and We Were Liars. Whether or not you'll enjoy their latest entry, The Girlfriend, depends largely on how much patience you have for this type of conflict-driven domestic drama.
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.
New theatre show explores trauma and trans identity
Life, Published on 13/08/2025
» Miss Theatre presents With Pessimistic And Hateful, an experimental work that explores personal traumas, at the Studio, 4th floor of Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Pathumwan intersection, from Aug 22-24 and Aug 29-31 at 7pm.
Beware the AI bots
Life, James Hein, Published on 04/06/2025
» I recently joined a Facebook group that supposedly represented Kat Timpf, a regular presenter on the Gutfeld! show. I posted a couple of comments and a couple of weeks later, I received a tag in social media purportedly from Dana Perino, a regular on the Fox show The Five. Initially this was a surprise. Why would a famous TV star want to chat with me? After a few chats, it became obvious something was off. The tag name in Messenger was just Dana Perino but the conversation had a few structural errors, not something a former press secretary would make.
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.